Why Arms Control Is Obsolete

By Charles Krauthammer

Remember the Freeze? Ground Zero Week? The Day After? Remember when psychiatrists were blaming the Bomb for everything from violence to video games? It was barely a decade ago that America was in the grip of nuclear hysteria. Yet when, in London, Presidents Gorbachev and Bush dramatically announced the conclusion of START, the most substantial arms treaty in history, they were met with yawns.

Why? Because in the interim, it has become clear to even the woolliest that nuclear weapons are not the threat. The threat is the intent to use them.

That is why even the worst nuclear hysterics never got terribly worked up about the British and the French arsenals, both of which were quite capable of laying waste to a very large part of the U.S. No one worried about them because the French and the British are friends. The problem with the Soviets was not that they had thousands of nuclear weapons, but that they had thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at the U.S. And since no arms-control regime ever seriously proposed reducing nuclear weapons below the level needed to wipe out American society at least once, no arms-control regime could ever, even in principle, cure our nuclear nightmare.

Arms control was always something between a sham and a sideshow. The end of the cold war has proved it. The U.S.S.R. today has thousands more nuclear warheads than it did 10 years ago. Yet we feel far more secure today. Why? Because security never depended on numbers. It depended on intentions. Soviet intentions have changed, and the change had nothing at all to do with arms control.

Which is what makes START so irrelevant. Arms control is what you talk about when you have nothing to talk about. In the midst of the deepest cold war, the only thing we could possibly talk to the Soviets about was nuclear weapons: abstractions, tokens, numbers, weapons whose use was inconceivable. Arms control offered a kind of shadow substance when there was no real substance to discuss.

Now we have real substance -- the terms of Soviet entry into the community of the West. That substance was symbolized in one picture: Gorbachev in London, smiling, surrounded by the seven Western summiteers. That picture mocked the Bolshevik dream of overthrowing Western capitalism. It illustrated the Soviets' desperate desire to join the West. And it made START obsolete because, at the end of the day, a democratic Russia integrated into the West becomes no more a nuclear threat to us than Britain or France.

But the end of the Soviet threat does not mean the end of nuclear danger. The real danger is proliferation, and proliferation has just begun. Within a decade, according to Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, 15 countries will acquire ballistic missiles. About half will have nuclear weapons on top of them. Moreover, Soviet leaders have been rational and thus deterrable. We went to the brink during the Cuban missile crisis but did not go over. Both sides understood and would not bear the cost of nuclear war. We cannot be so sure that will be true of Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya, the nuclear powers of the future.

That is why the signing of START comes just in time. With luck, START marks the end of that most sterile of exercises, superpower arms control. It may finally free our attention for the real threat: the ballistic missile brandished by the smaller, newer, angrier powers of the very near future.

What to do about the threat? First, pre-empt. The model is Iraq. Says British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd: "One way or another we are going to prevent Iraq becoming a nuclear power." Hurd is refreshingly unconcerned about the legalities or political niceties of a great power with nuclear weapons dictating to a smaller power without them that it must remain without. The danger is too great. Iraq is a proven aggressor with a record of using every weapon it ever laid its hands on. The U.S., Britain and France, at least, aim to see that it does not lay its hands on nukes, even if that means military attack.

But pre-emption is not enough. There will always be countries with programs clandestine enough to escape detection. One day our children will wake up to some crazy state's nuclear arsenal. Let us hope that we will have provided for them.

How? With a defense. Hence the second requirement for the post-Soviet nuclear environment: the Strategic Defense Initiative. SDI, like arms control, was distorted and diverted by the Soviet threat. SDI never was and never will be an adequate response to a full Soviet attack. Ronald Reagan's pretense that it was did SDI great damage. Yet SDI remains vital. It is our only potential protection from nuclear attack by small countries or unauthorized launch from large ones (by a renegade Soviet general, for example).

These are undeterrable threats. And the primitive Scuds of the gulf war have given us a taste of how terrible they will be. Yet the Congress is locked in an archaic cold war debate over SDI's architecture. On the one side are those who insist on ground-based systems only. On the other are those who demand an additional layer of defense based in space.

It is hard to understand the theological objection to space-based defenses. The matter should be purely technical. If we can engineer an effective first line of defenses in space, why not the extra protection? A few decades from now many nations will be in space, using it for defensive and perhaps even offensive purposes. Why forfeit the opportunity to be the first into an absolutely critical area of strategic power when the road is open and the need is great?

Nations are rarely given the opportunity to prepare in tranquillity for a looming threat. We must not sacrifice that opportunity to the theologies of arms control and cold war thinking. START is already obsolete. The cold war is quite dead. The danger is the proliferating ballistic missile. The answer is bold new thinking -- and strategic defense.