Suicide Pact Is Obsolete, So Why Keep the Weapons? : Nuclear Arms: Washington and Moscow will not reduce to zero. But they should make prodigious cuts.

Since the atomic fireball engulfed Hiroshima 45 years ago, the world has lived with the specter of nuclear annihilation. Now, with the end of the Cold War, the risks of cataclysm have diminished markedly. But thousands of weapons remain in the superpowers’ arsenals, along with decades-old doctrines for determining whether, and if so how, they would be used. The time has come to end this anachronism.

The most obvious candidate for decisive change is the U.S. nuclear posture in Europe. The Western alliance first formally accepted that a European conventional war would likely “go nuclear” when it became clear that none of the allies would spend the money for a non-nuclear defense of the continent against superior communist forces. Reliance on the possible use of nuclear weapons was reinforced by West German unwillingness to contemplate a so-called conventional war like World War II: It was worth risking nuclear destruction to decrease the chances of war.

The deployment of U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe also became important to demonstrate that the United States was prepared to risk its own security on behalf of its allies. NATO doctrine, in effect, has been a suicide pact, and many a transatlantic crisis has centered on the impossible task of trying to prove that the pact would, indeed, be honored.

With the Soviet strategic retreat from Eastern Europe, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the prospective withdrawal of the remaining Soviet forces, none of these reasons remains valid. The superiority of communist conventional forces is gone, no one contemplates circumstances that would produce a European war, and the United States no longer has to prove its nuclear commitment. Nor can it continue to base claims of diplomatic primacy in the alliance on its role as custodian of the West’s principal nuclear arsenal and manager of East-West nuclear relations.

In short, when the Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe is complete, there will be nothing to stop NATO from declaring “no first use” of nuclear weapons or from removing the remaining arsenal from European soil. This would also be politically wise. Nuclear artillery, with warheads that can only detonate on German territory, is no longer acceptable. To its credit, the Bush Administration now recognizes that the same political argument applies to the Lance, a short-range U.S. missile that was to remain in Germany after the 1988 treaty on intermediate-range nuclear forces is fully implemented. Last week, the Administration scotched Pentagon efforts to modernize the Lance.

Old habits die hard, however, and many argue that some form of U.S. nuclear guarantee will still be needed, even if the Soviets withdraw fully behind their frontiers, reduce the size of their military forces and accept arrangements for European security that would make a renewed Soviet threat to Europe unlikely. Other observers argue that such a guarantee will also be needed to keep united Germany from seeking to develop nuclear weapons.

Both arguments yield to the same answers. First, more important than a nuclear guarantee, the United States should continue to act as a European power, able to return forces to the continent if necessary. Second, U.S. nuclear weapons based in the continental United States and at sea, even in a vastly reduced arsenal, would continue to provide an “existential deterrent”--a commitment of last resort.

In the broader perspective of U.S.-Soviet nuclear relations, there is also no longer any reason to adhere to today’s pattern of massive deployments. For the United States, a large arsenal is not needed to offset Soviet superiority in conventional forces, and the Soviets’ huge weapons stockpile no longer buys them political leverage without being backed up by a decent economy and a cohesive polity. In addition, it is now hard to conceive that either superpower would use nuclear weapons against the other except to deter direct attack on its own homeland.

Nuclear weapons cannot be uninvented; they still confer some special quality on their possessors, and they might have some utility in dissuading rash actions by incipient Third-World nuclear states. Thus the United States and the Soviet Union will not reduce to zero. But there is nothing in their bilateral relationship that argues against their making prodigious cuts, with all remaining forces configured to promote stability--that is, to prevent war.

Contrary to the abstruse propositions put forward by the nuclear priesthood, defining “stability” in the U.S.-Soviet nuclear balance is relatively easy. Neither side requires much imagination to understand which of its weapons should be eliminated or avoided: These include large intercontinental-range missiles on the Soviet side, “Star Wars” on ours and multiple warheads on both. The biggest need is willingness by the international nuclear fraternity to recognize how fundamentally the world has changed--plus the kind of political courage shown by the Administration in killing the Lance’s successor.