Life After START

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney’s public scolding of a four-star Air Force general for dickering with Congress on the next generation of nuclear weapons made heads duck all over the Pentagon.

Cheney’s dressing-down of Gen. Larry D. Welch, Air Force chief of staff, was a useful reminder that American law puts civilians in charge of military policy, but it did not move the Bush Administration an inch closer to a decision on future weapons systems, and the President is running out of time.

In less than five weeks, he will be asked to agree to a date for resuming negotiations on a START arms control treaty that could cut the arsenal of American and Soviet nuclear missiles by half. Bargaining away missiles without knowing what would take their place under what new strategy would be awkward and dangerous.

American nuclear forces are divided into three categories, largely as a result of uncontrolled service rivalries in the 1950s and partly to avoid putting all of the country’s nuclear eggs in one basket, as the Soviet Union did with its concentration on heavy, land-based missiles.

The submarine segment of the triad is well along on modernization. If the recent failure of the first test at sea of a Trident II missile was indeed a fluke, Bush can assume his seagoing nuclear force is in good shape. The Air Force’s B-1B bomber is not the pure delight the Pentagon hoped for, but with luck it will be no worse than the B-52.

The real quandary involves America’s land-based missiles. The Air Force wants to build 50 more MX missiles, each seven stories tall and topped with 10 warheads, take the 50 it already has in silos and put the whole force on railroad flatcars. If trouble seemed imminent, all 100 missiles would be flushed out of garrisons onto America’s 200,000-mile network of railroad track where the Soviets presumably could not find them.

Even though Democrat Jimmy Carter ordered the MX into production, the missile is now the favorite of the Republican Party. What the Air Force wants, the Republicans want, too.

A smaller, single-warhead missile, known as Midgetman, has become the favorite of the Democrats, even though it got its biggest boost from retired Gen. Brent Scowcroft, now President Bush’s national security adviser. Scowcroft and the Democrats have logic on their side.

The essence of nuclear theory is that the worst threat is a sudden surprise attack that would cripple a nation’s nuclear forces and leave it helpless to retaliate. The essence of nuclear strategy is searching for ways to prevent that from ever happening, to shield enough missiles capable of retaliating so that an aggressor would always fear that he had nothing to gain with a surprise attack and everything to lose. Big missiles with as many as 10 accurate warheads are more threatening because they can destroy large numbers of missile silos at a stroke. Midgetman would be less threatening, because it would take so many to be certain of doing extensive damage to an enemy’s missile fields and because it is designed to be mobile and thus easier to hide.

Politics has a bigger following than logic in Washington these days. Republicans dare not move too far away from their far-right base of contributors who prefer heavy hitters like the MX. Democrats will not give up Midgetman. And that rigidity led Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wisc.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, to declare recently that the only way to break the deadlock is to buy both.

The idea is less outrageous than it seems at first reading. Aspin is talking only about putting the 50 MXs that are already in silos in Wyoming on rail cars, not about building 50 more. He also would build fewer Midgetmen than the 500 that the Democrats originally wanted.

Arguing for the compromise, Aspin also notes that giving the MX missile mobility would make it a match for the Soviet Union’s SS-24 missile and make both types of missiles candidates for dismantling in some future arms control treaty.

Cheney was absolutely right to pounce on Welch for what he called “free-lancing” on Capitol Hill. It is the sort of thing a defense secretary should do more often. Of course the deal the general was working on probably is the one Aspin is talking about and may be the only plan for new weapons that a partisan Congress would accept.

Cheney thus would have hit two birds with his very first stone, winding up with chastened brass at the Pentagon and with the next generation of nuclear weapons firmly in mind when negotiations resumed on the START treaty.