AMERICA’S CHANGING NUCLEAR STRATEGY : U.S. Shifts Nuclear Response Strategy : New Formula Designed to Eliminate Soviet Leadership Early in Conflict

Quietly and without any public debate, the Bush Administration is preparing drastic changes in the basic U.S. strategy for fighting a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, including the creation of new weapons so devastating that they could penetrate the deepest underground bunkers and “decapitate” the entire Soviet leadership.

The new strategy, designed to permit the United States to paralyze the Soviets’ war-making capacity in the opening hours of a conflict, also calls for advanced new stealth reconnaissance planes capable of flying over four times the speed of sound to ferret out critical Soviet targets, including mobile missiles.

Remote sensing devices that could detect mobile missiles and command posts would be hidden inside the Soviet Union itself in an unprecedented penetration of Soviet territory. And the Administration hopes to build spy satellites so powerful that they could detect objects on Earth as small as three inches across.

Costly New Strategy

The new strategy, to be embodied in a revised version of a document called the Strategic Integrated Operations Plan, or SIOP, is now being developed at the Strategic Air Command headquarters in Omaha. It represents a radical and costly departure from past strategy.

Yet, awesome as the new weapons would be, many authorities are already condemning the new battle plan as likely to increase the risk of a nuclear holocaust.

The new weapons never will live up to their proponents’ hopes, these critics say, but an avowed capacity to blitz Soviet leaders at the outset of hostilities--even if technically ineffective--could destabilize the present deterrent balance and impel the Kremlin to put dangerous hair-triggers on its own nuclear weapons.

Most experts believe that, even under the most optimistic scenarios, no more than 10%--or at best 20%--of the Soviets’ mobile missiles can be successfully attacked. As for wiping out the Soviet leadership, Desmond Ball, one of the foremost experts on nuclear targeting issues, says that adopting such a strategy would upset the fragile balance of terror between the two superpowers.

“The new SIOP will increase the risk that the Soviets will go first in a crisis,” according to Ball, who is director of defense studies at Australian National University.

Soviet leaders, already recognizing the U.S. threat, are digging deeper bunkers and proliferating their command posts, he has written in an article that has not yet been published. Operating under such siege conditions, he suggested, Kremlin rulers would get less information in a crisis and would have less control over Soviet nuclear weapons.

Moreover, to frustrate the U.S. plan, they might authorize more fingers on the nuclear triggers, giving lower-level officials the authority to launch such weapons in a crisis.

All this also would increase the chances that the Soviets would launch their nuclear missiles inadvertently, Ball said.

If the United States wiped out the key Soviet political leaders early in a nuclear exchange, which will be more likely under the new war plan, then there might be no one left to halt the hostilities short of Armageddon, critics contend.

Beyond the specific arguments, the debate over the new SIOP has opened a small window on one of the most sensitive and closely guarded subjects in the whole realm of national security: the issue of targeting--the complex question of what kinds of targets American nuclear weapons should be aimed at and thus how many weapons the nation needs.

The judgments on targeting, however they are made, add up to decisions on the nation’s basic strategy for using nuclear weapons--how best to deter attack and how best to prosecute a nuclear war.

The new war plan, tentatively designated SIOP-7, has been in preparation for about a year. The guidance for developing SIOP-7 came initially from the Ronald Reagan Administration, and it will take President Bush’s direct orders to reconsider its course.

Thus far, the Bush Administration is pressing ahead with SIOP-7 despite the relaxation of tensions between the two superpowers as a result of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s arms control initiatives and his program of domestic economic and political reforms.

Leon Sloss, a veteran targeting expert who headed President Jimmy Carter’s nuclear review and is now a defense consultant, said that a possibly temporary thaw in relations must not lull the United States into complacency. And until a new arms reduction treaty takes hold, the United States will continue to have more than 12,000 weapons that must be aimed at something, Sloss said.

Will Deal With Anti-Missile Defenses

The new war plan will depart from SIOP-6 by developing blueprints for dealing with at least one new kind of weapon: anti-missile defenses.

Although both sides are working on such systems, the Pentagon in the past has done no serious planning on how to cope with the possibility of a nationwide Soviet missile defense network. It has assumed that this country’s massive array of nuclear missiles, each equipped with a variety of penetration aids and decoys, could overwhelm the kind of rudimentary defenses that the Soviets have deployed around Moscow.

The prospect that limited but effective missile defenses might be available within the next decade has increased significantly as a result of the spur given to research in both countries by Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, often called “Star Wars.”

And such defenses could take on new significance because, under a treaty reached at the on-going Strategic Arms Reduction Talks in Geneva, they would be required to cope with only half the present offensive arsenals.

Critics of the new SIOP contend that, while anti-missile defenses can never be effective enough to protect the nation, the uncertainties created by their mere existence will destabilize the present deterrent balance between Washington and Moscow.

Reflecting just one of the concerns introduced into defense planning by anti-missile defenses, Strategic Air Command targeters have been warned to make sure that future U.S. defenses, in their zeal to kill incoming Soviet weapons, do not instead knock down outgoing U.S. missiles.

Targeters also have been directed to study the possibility of creating an “elite force” of offensive weapons in the new plan. The “elite force” would be a specially designated portion of the regular strategic nuclear forces, but these weapons would not be committed in advance to a particular mission.

Instead, they would be a kind of contingency force available to the President for potential use in unforeseen circumstances.

The “elite” missiles, not aimed at particular Soviet targets, would give the President unprecedented flexibility in a crisis to tailor the precise size, scope and duration of a limited nuclear strike, either against the Soviets or another antagonist.

In such a situation, the President could turn to the “elite” weapons without disrupting the targeting plans of the rest of the strategic force.

Previous SIOPs have contained a “reserve force” to be held back until the final stages of war between the two superpowers to ensure destruction of the Soviet leadership at the end.

“You can’t change the SIOP radically from year to year because capabilities change slowly,” said one veteran targeting expert, commenting on the development of the new plan. “The SIOP people focus on weapons and systems they know will be available in the next 12 or 18 months, while the presidential guidance reflects anticipated future developments. But the new emphasis on these three pots (categories of targets)--leadership, mobiles and defense--will radically change the SIOP over time.”

Combination of Factors

The new--some say revolutionary--changes in the war plan stem from a combination of technological advances and political forces.

Among the political factors:

-- The START treaty now being negotiated by the United States and the Soviet Union promises to reduce offensive nuclear weapons by about half.

-- The U.S. defense budget will be severely constrained by the national deficit.

-- Gorbachev has drastically revised Soviet foreign and domestic policies, changing political equations both inside the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United States.

And just as the overall U.S.-Soviet relationship is in flux, so ideas about what best deters Soviet aggression are being re-examined--setting the stage for far-reaching decisions on the nation’s basic plan for fighting nuclear war.

Final decisions on these issues, such as whether to threaten the Soviet leadership with extinction in a crisis, are likely to be made by the President as part of his ongoing strategic review.

Such decisions can appropriately be made only by the commander in chief. In the words of one military commander who asked not to be identified: “What could be more fundamental for the President to decide in his targeting guidance than: Do you execute the opposing commanders?”

The leadership of the Soviet Union has been on the target list for U.S. nuclear forces ever since the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower adopted the first Strategic Integrated Operations Plan in 1960. Targeting the Soviet leadership received increased emphasis under President Carter.

But never has the Soviet leadership been scheduled for attack so early in a war, nor pursued with such determined design and costly effort, as it would be under SIOP-7.

In recent years, a combination of vastly improved spy satellites and a steady stream of emigrating Soviet citizens has provided information that enabled SAC targeters to identify more Soviet leadership installations. Two years ago the Pentagon reported that about 1,500 hardened shelters for more than 175,000 members of the Soviet elite had been identified.

Former Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci last year approved the release of detailed drawings of super-hardened quarters hundreds of yards underground near Moscow. A Pentagon booklet containing the drawings, “Soviet Military Power,” said that the deep-shelter program included a maze of bunkers, tunnels and secret subway lines running as much as 17 miles from the Kremlin to Vnukovo airfield.

Billions of Rubles

Other key Soviet cities have comparable facilities, the Pentagon said, and several hundred smaller cities have relocation facilities for their cadres of party leaders, industry officials and other elite. The cost of the program, it said, is comparable to the tens of billions of rubles spent annually on offensive nuclear weapons.

The detailed data, which previously had been kept highly classified, was a signal to the Soviet leadership that “we know where you are and we’ll be coming after you,” as one Pentagon official acknowledged.

More than that, it represented an effort to win public and congressional support for costly new weapons to make good on the threat.

Now being developed:

-- New warheads that penetrate deep into the Earth before exploding. One concept is a high-strength metal shell, shaped like a bullet, that would dive 600 feet below the surface. Detonated there, it would be 40 times more effective against underground targets than if it were exploded on the surface.

-- Maneuverable re-entry vehicles that would dodge interceptor missiles, slow down to minimize impact stress and then position their warheads to hit the ground at the optimum angle for penetration.

-- Warheads with vastly higher yields and enhanced effects. Old nine-megaton bombs, six times bigger than anything today, are being reactivated, and consideration is being given to building a 22-megaton weapon, according to one source. (One megaton is the explosive power of 1 million tons of TNT.)

Some strategists applaud the new policy of targeting the Soviet leadership. “I personally think it is a singularly effective way to deter war,” said Sloss, the former Carter Administration official.

But other experts say that such targeting involves substantial risks to the United States.

Kremlin May Fear Surprise Attack

It is quite likely, one strategist said, that the Kremlin views the U.S. effort less as an attempt to deter a Soviet strike on the United States than as preparation for a “decapitating” surprise attack on the Soviet Union. Whether intimidated or not, the Soviets are certain to respond by proliferating their shelters and digging deeper.

In fact, Soviet underground shelter work--under way intermittently for 40 years--had fallen off in the late 1970s. But “another round of construction of these complexes began in the early 1980s,” according to the Pentagon, after the Reagan Administration began asking Congress for money to implement the counter-leadership strategy.

Nor is it clear that the strategy would have its intended effect. It assumes that Gorbachev would be deterred by the same threats to the Communist Party power structure that frightened former Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev. So far as is known, this question has not been reviewed by U.S. agencies.

“It may be that we should target Soviet leadership discreetly,” said a senior Administration official, “separating the political from the military leadership.” Destroying the Soviet military leadership would disrupt Soviet war plans, he said, but wiping out the political leadership might leave no one behind to halt the conflict.

The new emphasis on going after the Soviet leadership can be traced to the Carter Administration. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, and Brig. Gen. William E. Odom, Brzezinski’s military assistant, insisted that the best way to deter Soviet leaders from starting a war would be to assure them that “their power structure will not survive,” as it was later put by Harold Brown, Carter’s defense secretary.

“They were hot not only to target leadership but to fragment the Soviet Union, exacerbate nationality problems, threaten the Soviet control apparatus itself,” said one participant in the targeting deliberations. “Brzezinski would ask questions like: ‘Where are the plans to kill Russians? ‘ “

In the final year of the Carter Administration, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Brown announced the new emphasis on hitting the Soviet leadership. He told Congress that the Kremlin held the Communist Party and its power structure more valuable than the lives of 50 million Soviet citizens. The Soviets had built fortified command posts near Moscow for 100,000 elite people, he said, including 63,000 party and government officials and tens of thousands of industrial managers.

Early Information Shortage

At that time the U.S. threat seemed hollow, however. Brown said that “relatively few leadership shelters” had been identified. Sources said that the number was about 20, more than the “small handful” known five years earlier but not enough to provide targets for many of the 10,000 long-range nuclear warheads and bombs in the U.S. arsenal in 1980.

Moreover, few of the known bunkers were targeted because they were too well fortified for U.S. weapons. “We probably could not have dug them out,” said one former targeter, “but I was surprised that even a few years ago, we weren’t planning to lay down a few (weapons) on them just to ring their bells.”

The Reagan Administration grafted onto the Carter-Brzezinski plan an extensive program to find more of the Soviet leadership targets, as part of its philosophy of “prevailing” in the event of a nuclear war.

As early as 1982, as part of the intensive effort to target Soviet leadership and study mobile weapon deployments, the Defense Intelligence Agency minutely examined the Odessa Military District--one of 16 spread across the Soviet Union--as a microcosm of how the Soviets would hide and maneuver. The Times has learned that the study found many buried bunkers, including one hidden beneath the Soviet equivalent of a Cub Scout camp.

It also yielded valuable data on Soviet nuclear and conventional force movements.

The DIA report was highly controversial, however, because it identified so many targets that it provided justification for a threefold increase in U.S. missile warheads. Critics said that the DIA inflated the target list to rationalize demands for more weapons.

Although many of the study’s conclusions were rejected by then-Undersecretary of Defense Fred C. Ikle, it produced by 1984 a considerably larger number of targets, including the offices of all Communist Party bureaucracies down to the town level.

“Some of those buildings look like outhouses,” said one targeter.

All KGB and Interior Ministry facilities were to be struck, as were all 47 regional councils that once planned the Soviet economy.

In 1987 and again last year, in little-noticed statements to Congress, Reagan publicly disclosed for the first time the two broad aims that had guided his targeting policy from the start. U.S. policy, he declared:

-- “Denies the Soviets the ability to achieve essential military objectives by holding at risk Soviet war-making capabilities, including both the full range of Soviet military forces and the war-supporting industry which provides the foundation for Soviet military power and supports its capability to conduct a protracted conflict; and

-- “Places at risk those political entities the Soviet leadership values most: the mechanisms for ensuring survival of the Communist Party and its leadership cadres, and for retention of the party’s control over the Soviet and Soviet Bloc peoples.”

SIOP-6, the current U.S. war plan, took effect Oct. 1, 1983, when the Soviets had few mobile weapons systems. Most so-called relocatable targets were command and communication facilities rather than missiles that could be moved from place to place.

But then the Soviets began a serious effort to make their missiles mobile. SS-24 missiles were mounted on railroad cars that now travel along much of the nation’s 78,000 miles of track. SS-25 missiles were mounted on truck-like wheeled vehicles that ply the fields and back roads of the Soviet Union.

4,000 Targets Identified

In 1984, the number of relocatable targets identified by U.S. analysts had climbed to more than 4,000, or about one-fourth of the total on SAC’s national strategic target list. By the mid-1990s, according to Air Force intelligence, about half of all Soviet targets will be mobile, including two-thirds of the Soviet missile force.

Much as technical advances are permitting the Soviets to make their weapons mobile, so is new technology holding out the potential to find them and kill them. But locating and destroying these Soviet missiles still presents enormous challenges to U.S. war planners.

Before leaving office last January, Carlucci set up a coordinated Pentagon program to develop new sensors, weapons and command networks to gather and integrate the myriad data being developed to counter relocatable targets. Some examples:

-- For manned aerial reconnaissance, a successor to the vaunted SR-71 Blackbird, under a project once called Aurora, will incorporate stealth technology and be capable of speeds up to Mach 5 (3,800 miles per hour).

With the Mach-3 Blackbird, one military officer reportedly boasted, “They can find us but they can’t reach us.” With Aurora, he claimed, “They won’t know we’re there.”

-- Unmanned remote sensing devices are being developed for clandestine placement in Soviet territory. When activated, they would report the movement of mobile targets and direct U.S. weapons to them.

-- Several multibillion-dollar satellite intelligence collection programs are well under way.

One is the Magnum series of electronic eavesdropping spacecraft, costing about $1 billion each. A successor, called Mentor, is also being developed.

Second is the KH-12 Ikon series of photographic satellites, called the “ultimate imaging platform.” It can take and send back TV-like pictures of objects as small as three inches. The craft will be refueled in orbit by a space shuttle crew. Four KH-12s, each costing $300 million, are planned; they promise to deliver a picture of any spot on Earth within 20 minutes.

A third system consists of the Lacrosse all-weather radar imaging satellites, costing about $500 million each, which can see through clouds, darkness and even some foliage. The first Lacrosse was launched on the December space shuttle.

Finally, the intelligence community wants a large new satellite system, reportedly costing $12 billion and taking six years to develop, to verify compliance with an eventual START treaty.

-- Artificial intelligence techniques, previously used only for anti-submarine warfare and the collection of electronic signals from the Soviet Union, now are being applied to process the mass of data designed to locate, find and destroy relocatable targets.

What all this new intelligence capability will mean is that the United States will be able to pinpoint targets once too obscure or mobile to aim at and that SAC targeters can revise and shuffle their total targeting strategies far faster than once was possible.

“As we enter the 1990s, the time required to build the SIOP can be expected to be reduced from months to weeks or even days,” according to Maj. Gen. Richard B. Goetze Jr., SAC deputy chief of staff. “The time required to re-target sorties in a conflict will be reduced from a few days to a few hours and, in some cases, to a few minutes.”

Outside the Pentagon, not all authorities are so confident that the United States will ever develop the means to find mobile Soviet missiles.

“No one said, ‘If you can track only 10% of the missiles out of garrison, forget it,’ ” said one private expert who asked not to be identified. “If they can’t do better, which will very likely be the case, then it’s very likely you’ll spend a great deal of money for nothing.”

And even if the United States can develop the capability of finding mobile Soviet weapons, it will still need the means of destroying them.

The Pentagon’s near-term weapon of choice for attacking relocatable targets is the B-2 bomber, which would penetrate Soviet airspace and then search out and destroy the mobile rockets. It wants 132 planes, at $530 million each.

One former Air Force officer contends that the Air Force built the B-2 first and then, looking for a mission to justify the plane’s existence, hit upon the need to attack mobile targets.

“When the idea was first put forward in earnest about 1982,” he said, “it was put in the safe out at JSTPS (the targeting staff at Omaha). Nothing was done except around the edges for three years, until someone on the Air Force staff realized that relocatable targets were a good mission for manned bombers and they needed a mission for the manned bombers.”

Satellites or other remote sensors would direct the B-2 to its quarry. If they failed, the bomber could rely on its own infrared and optical sensors and high-resolution radar to find its targets, the Air Force says.

The B-1 bomber, which is already flying, would hunt for mobile targets before the B-2 becomes operational in the 1990s. These aircraft are equipped with forward-looking infared and millimeter-wave radar. An extended-range attack missile--a “smart” nuclearweapon that can be directed to its target--is being developed for the bomber.

Various novel concepts that would increase the blast, heat and electromagnetic radiation of nuclear weapons are also being studied for use against relocatable targets as well as leadership targets. These have been called “the third generation” of nuclear weapons, after atomic and hydrogen bombs.

Some of these nuclear devices seem right out of science fiction. A blast-focusing weapon might devastate the Kremlin without harming surrounding areas; a microwave-enhanced weapon might short-circuit command and control facilities and “fry” the electronic components in missiles over a broad area.

In addition, a non-nuclear “soft-kill” device is being examined to jam or burn out semiconductors in communications, missiles and warheads without leaving overt signs that they have been damaged.

All of this is expensive and won’t work any time soon, most experts say. Indeed, much of it will never work, some say.

A U.S. intelligence community task force reported three years ago that the United States did not even understand “the concept of operations for mobile missile units.” It warned that the ability to locate, identify and track mobile missiles would be gained only slowly.

Even if super-reconnaissance planes or devices could locate them, the targets might move before a weapon could be delivered to destroy them.

“For the past few years, we’ve put in a tremendous effort to understand how the Soviets move around,” said targeting expert Sloss, who has directed key U.S. nuclear reviews, “and we’ve achieved a certain success in improving target acquisition and response time. But in my view it will prove impossible to keep surveillance and targeting united at all times.”

“We are a long way from having decided that we know how to handle the task” of locating mobile missiles, admitted Gen. Larry D. Welch, the Air Force chief of staff. As for killing mobile targets with ICBM warheads, he said: “We have nothing that comes close to a good solution.”

Moreover, the SAC criterion for “killing nukes,” as one expert put it, remains almost impossibly high. Targeters are told that they must have 90% certainty that every Soviet arms system will be damaged.

“There is no distinction in the damage expectancy level between Soviet nuclear missiles that are fixed and those that are mobile, or between nuclear weapons that should be hit in a first (preemptive) strike and those that are to be hit in a second (retaliatory) strike when the missiles are likely to have left the silos,” this highly regarded civilian expert said.

“You don’t need prompt hard-target-kill warheads for second strike after a silo is empty but may be reloadable,” he continued. “The original rationale, that we could catch lots of Soviet missiles on the ground because they took hours to fuel up and prepare for launch, no longer applies. But our guidance hasn’t changed. All require the same high damage expectancy, so SAC is chasing after mobile missiles with the same 90% kill requirement. It’s complete lunacy.”

As for manned bombers, the B-1’s ability to penetrate Soviet air defenses is already in doubt and the B-2 is beset by a host of problems, including congressional resistance because of its cost.

Some strategists believe that the B-2’s chances are vanishingly small of flying around inside the Soviet Union while nuclear weapons are going off, rising to high altitudes in search of targets after links with satellites are broken and escaping to refuel at an unscathed airfield or surviving tanker.

“My feeling is that we will be able to attack Soviet mobile missiles only if the Russians use dumb deployment patterns, like driving them around in small circles in the snow,” said one targeting authority. In fact, the Soviet SS-25 road-mobile missiles have ranged as far as 100 miles out of their home garrison during maneuvers, creating an almost infinite number of locations from which they might theoretically fire.

“I would predict,” this specialist continued, “that we could destroy maybe 10% of them, which is not much above the number whose carriers failed to start on a cold morning or had other breakdowns. And that is far too little return for the huge amount of money going toward the job.”

Finally, the targeting of mobile missiles and mobile command facilities contradicts the goal of nuclear balance. Mobile missiles are likely to serve as the secure reserve force that would give each side an assured retaliatory capability.

“To target them,” the strategist said, “puts them on more of a hair trigger . . . with less central control, where fear of failure to go first creates greater risk of war.”

THREE ASPECTS OF S I O P - 7 DEFENSE Negotiation of a treaty that would reduce nuclear arsenals could lead to the United States having fewer attacking weapons and make the prospect of limited but effective missile defenses like SDI more attractive. The destabilizing impact of introducing defenses into strategies based exclusively on offensive power is taken into account.

MOBILE WEAPONS Soviet SS-24 missiles are mounted on railroad cars that travel along much of the nation’s 78,000 miles of tracks. SS-25 missiles are carried on truck-like wheeled vehicles that ply the fields and backroads of Soviet territory.

The Pentagon’s near-term weapon of choice for attacking relocatable targets is the B-2 Stealth bomber, which would penetrate into Soviet airspace and then search out and destroy. Satellites or other remote sensors would direct the B-2 to its targets. If they failed, the bomber could rely on its own advanced infrared and optical sensors and high-resolution radar.

TARGETING THE LEADERSHIP The Soviet underground shelter system includes a maze of hardened bunkers hundreds of yards underground, tunnels and secret subway lines for the relocation of the Soviet elite. Built intermittently over 40 years, the deep-shelter program may have seen accelerated activity in the 1980s.

Emphasis on targeting Soviet leaders in their protected environment requires the development of new weapons with either increased explosive power, maneuverable delivery vehicles for greater accuracy or earth-penetrating capability.

Source: Soviet Military Power , US Department of Defense