NEWS ANALYSIS : Global Nuclear Threat Eased, Hardly Ended

President Bush’s nuclear arms proposals move the world a step back from the threat of nuclear incineration. They are, as advertised, a series of bold moves unmatched in the long, costly and terrifying nuclear competition with the Soviet Union.

And yet, even if every move is carried out, both superpowers will continue to command nuclear arsenals capable of unthinkable destruction. The thermonuclear weapons carried aboard a single U.S. Trident ballistic missile submarine--a class of weapons untouched by the Bush proposal--could still obliterate the Soviet Union’s 50 largest cities within 30 minutes of launch.

Immediately following the unsuccessful Moscow coup in August, Bush began discussing with National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft how the United States could capitalize on a Soviet Union so beset by internal problems that it no longer posed an immediate threat to the United States or any of its neighbors.

Bush resolved to take the chastened Soviet and Russian leaders at their word when they offered to discuss massive reductions in the superpower arsenals. And with an eye toward potential instability in the restive republics straining to escape Moscow’s domination, Bush sought rapid action on the weapons thought to pose the greatest risk--the thousands of short-range systems such as artillery shells and battlefield rockets that could be used as weapons of terror.

The President wanted, as a senior official said Friday, “to take advantage of a historic opportunity to dramatically reduce the number of nuclear weapons, enhance stability and reduce the risk of war.” Bush also hoped to use U.S. action to prompt the Soviets to redirect much of the huge economic effort required to develop, build and maintain their nuclear stockpile.

Upon returning to Washington following the Labor Day holiday, Bush instructed Defense Secretary Dick Cheney to come up with a plan to reduce the American nuclear arsenal in ways that the Soviet Union could quickly match. After extensive consultations with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his senior civilian advisers, Cheney presented a plan to the President that would, in essence, denuclearize the surface fleet of the U.S. Navy. He proposed to remove all nuclear-tipped bombs and missiles carried aboard aircraft carriers, battleships and cruisers.

Bush rejected the initial Cheney plan, asking for a broader initiative, one that encompassed all so-called tactical nuclear weapons--the portable, concealable and widely deployed weapons that were developed chiefly to deter a Soviet attack on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization alliance.

Bush, advisers said, wanted something dramatic, something that signaled that he was not trailing the disarmament parade but leading it.

On Sept. 16, Cheney returned to the White House with the sweeping proposals presented Friday night. Three weeks of intensive study in the Pentagon yielded the initiatives, which are at once much more than anyone expected of this cautious Administration and much less than its critics had hoped for.

Since the collapse of the Warsaw Pact in late 1989, nuclear strategists outside the Administration had questioned the need not only for the tactical weapons now eliminated by the Bush plan but also for the large numbers of long-range weapons that would remain even after the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) is ratified and implemented.

The old question--”How much is enough?”--re-emerged in urgent voice after it became clear that the Soviet Union is in no position to launch an attack on Europe or to credibly threaten the United States with global war.

Nuclear experts, among them former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, revived the concept of “minimal deterrence,” the retention of a few hundred nuclear warheads atop accurate, single-warhead missiles as sufficient to deter war.

Meanwhile, Administration critics argued that America’s domestic problems are far more pressing than the expensive drive to continue developing new generations of increasingly deadly and accurate nuclear warheads.

These critics will not be satisfied with Bush’s proposals for several reasons: The President still wants to build the Midgetman missile and the B-2 bomber and still intends to push the Strategic Defense Initiative conceived during the Ronald Reagan Administration.

But the initial overall reaction was positive.

Les Aspin, the Wisconsin Democrat who heads the House Armed Services Committee, applauded Bush for seizing the ripe political moment for cutting nuclear weaponry. Aspin noted that the short-range systems at the heart of Bush’s proposal are obsolete in the post-Cold War world, saying that the Persian Gulf War proved that the United States has enough non-nuclear firepower to exert its will anywhere in the world.

“Now, the United States has the edge in conventional military forces, and we’re concerned with such things as terrorist use of nuclear weapons and unauthorized or accidental use,” Aspin said Friday night. “So, the fewer nuclear weapons there are, the better off we are.”

The Bush plan will be welcomed not only in Moscow and the capitals of Europe but throughout the world, where nuclear weapons aboard U.S. warships were a source of strain.

New Zealand barred U.S. Navy port visits because the Navy refused to confirm or deny the presence of nuclear weapons aboard ships. The Japanese officially demanded that the U.S. Navy not sail into its harbors carrying nukes. Hundreds of nuclear-equipped U.S. warships docked over the last decades in Japan, where it has been a polite public fiction that they were not carrying nuclear weapons.

When the Bush plan is complete, Navy commanders will be able to say truthfully that their ships are nuclear-free.

But, as a senior official pointedly noted Friday night: “We are not getting rid of all nuclear weapons. We are significantly reducing the numbers on both sides.”

A thousand nuclear-tipped missiles will remain in silos across the United States, 40 ballistic missile submarines will still carry 6,000 nuclear warheads and thousands of bombs and missiles will be stored at Strategic Air Command bases, ready to fly on B-52 and B-1 bombers. Hundreds more nuclear bombs will remain in depots in Europe for potential use on shorter-range bombers like the F-111.

But by taking all the strategic bombers off “strip alert”--armed, fueled and ready to fly at a moment’s notice--and by removing all nuclear weapons from ships at sea, the United States has considerably lengthened the time it would take to launch a full-blown nuclear assault. Defense officials said rearming the bombers would take at least several hours, while bringing the surface fleet home to be outfitted with nuclear weapons might take as long as three weeks.

Also, the officials cautioned, it will take “several years” to dismantle all the weapons Bush promised to remove from service. Meantime, they will remain in bunkers in Europe and South Korea, aboard ships now deployed at sea and in their secure storage sites in the United States.

In addition, one official warned, the public should not look for any immediate savings from the plan. In fact, transporting and decommissioning weapons and canceling contracts for such systems as the rail-based MX missile will actually incur short-term costs before yielding any reductions in the Pentagon budget.