In Pursuit of START, We’re Committing Familiar Sins

The treaty on intermediate-range nuclear forces signed last week in Washington and hyped with an unusually comprehensive array of bad arguments is but the latest product of a so-called arms-control process that unerringly generates trivial or dangerous agreements.

In this new era of good will, it seems churlish to make the point that virtually every argument that has been advanced in praise of the INF treaty, in praise of the idea of a downstream strategic-arms-reduction treaty and generally in admiration of arms control is simply wrong. Moreover, the popular arguments about arms control are demonstrably wrong according to the evidence of history and the logic of world politics.

The arms control that is important is the measure of control secured over the Soviets’ use of their arms by the U.S. and allied defense effort. Every major arms-control agreement negotiated between democratic and totalitarian states in the 20th Century to date has been either trivial or dangerous in its consequences for international security. To this list the INF treaty now removes an important part of the North Atlantic alliance’s solution to the more general problem posed by military imbalance (strategic nuclear parity and conventional inferiority), again in the absence of any theory of how the problem can be solved.

From the perspective of strategic common sense, the INF treaty probably is a lost cause. However, a bruising fight over INF ratification could dampen official enthusiasm for a START treaty. The problem with a START treaty, as with the INF treaty, really is external to the legal documents concerned. The INF agreement is harmful to Western security not because its terms, narrowly viewed, are unfavorable to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In fact, they are not; a one-for-four ratio of weapon reductions cannot be all bad. The treaty harms our security because it removes a critical link for deterrence between a European battlefield and U.S. central strategic forces. In this context NATO has no plausible theory for the provision of more effective non-nuclear defenses, and there is no political enthusiasm for the idea of trying to regain some leverage with a strategic nuclear advantage. To the contrary, the START agreement most likely will reduce still further the relevance of strategic forces for regional security.

The Reagan Administration, despite the fact that many senior officials certainly know better, is committing many familiar sins in the elusive name of peace and the much-abused name of arms control. For example: A treaty has been negotiated for its own sake (there is no security rationale for eliminating INF); weapon reductions are being praised in their own right (even though there is no known relationship between levels of armament and the risks of war); radically intrusive verification procedures are being overtouted (but a real U.S. sanctions policy for response to the certainty of Soviet cheating is nowhere in sight--verification is not identical to compliance); the INF treaty is another case of arms control by promissory note (this treaty allegedly is a modest but essential step toward the treaty that we really want on START--even though a worthy START treaty may not be negotiable).

An Administration willing to sign a new treaty while it rhetorically condemns its treaty partner for violating old agreements is scarcely to be trusted to be serious about treaty compliance. If our wondrous new verification procedures should spotlight probable villainy, what would we do about it? On the evidence to date, nothing. Similarly, an Administration that hails arms reductions and the elimination of whole classes of weapons as significant achievements, without providing strategic argument for improved Western security, merits careful watching.

To the general public the prospect of a 50% cut in strategic arsenals seems dazzling and by definition desirable. Unfortunately, a 50% cut in strategic offensive forces is almost certain to be damaging to our security unless it is accompanied by a decision to deploy strategic missile defenses. Because the superpowers, particularly the United States, have crammed so many nuclear weapons onto individual carrier vehicles, a radical scale of cuts in force levels is much more likely to increase the vulnerability than to decrease it. Such a reduction could leave too few missile-carrying submarines facing too large an anti-submarine-warfare menace, too few aircraft and cruise missiles facing too large an air defense system, and too few intercontinental ballistic missiles facing too many ICBM warheads.

Thus the START treaty that may be on the horizon bids fair to undo much of what should have been the Ronald Reagan legacy in a responsible strategic policy.