Bush States His Doctrine by Omission : Diplomacy: The President offered no overarching theme in his speech on nuclear policy. But much could be inferred from the weapons he cut out.

George Bush, the instinctual conservative with a natural aversion to grandiose ideas, has run roughshod over four decades of encrusted nuclear doctrine. A President who has difficulty with “the vision thing” has set in motion significant changes in the U.S. approach to nuclear weapons, arms-control negotiations and relations with the former Soviet Union. A new Bush Doctrine is emerging from recent decisions, but it’s a doctrine by inference rather than by command--and it’s one the President may not feel entirely comfortable with over time.

Once again, Bush has acted decisively in a realm he feels comfortable in. Once again, decision-making was compressed, secretive and somewhat ad hoc. The President’s Oval Office address Sept. 27 affects one-fifth of the U.S. nuclear stockpile. His decisions to stand down some strategic weapons from alert status, turn the U.S. Army into a non-nuclear service and remove modern nuclear weapons from naval warships constitute stunning schisms in nuclear theology. The unintended consequences of these decisions could be as important as the decisions themselves, but much depends on the willingness and ability of Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Boris N. Yeltsin to follow Bush’s lead.

The President has certainly not shaped the remarkable events of the past two years, but he has now clearly decided to move beyond the role of passive observer. Bush is improvising boldly--but without clearly defined objectives. With conflict breaking out in Yugoslavia and Georgia, the “new world order” theme won’t wash, and Bush was wise enough not to bring it up in his celebrated speech. Nor is the President likely to be so foolish as to declare the advent of another “American Century”--Henry R. Luce’s lasted less than nine months before being interrupted by the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Bush’s initiatives, if lacking an overarching theme, lead firmly away from nuclear doctrines and truisms of the past. They do, however, build on actions taken to devalue nuclear weapons in the Reagan Adminsitration. But, unlike other presidential doctrines, Bush’s is defined by discarded items, not by stirring goals.

For a consummately conservative man, Bush has thrown some important items on the ash heap of history--a 700-page nuclear-arms treaty, for a start. That old adage repeated endlessly by Paul H. Nitze--”the devil is in the details”--has been thrown onto the pile as well. Bush has effectively declared that entire categories of nuclear weapons are no longer worth deploying or keeping--the details don’t matter.

The Bush Doctrine leaves broken crockery littering the halls of the Pentagon and nuclear-weapons laboratories. New warhead designs with specialized nuclear effects have become a relic of the Cold War. The 1947 Key West Agreement, establishing roles and missions among the armed services, has been breached. The Navy will no longer have separate nuclear forces--allowing for deeper cuts in strategic weapons while making U.S. warships more welcome abroad. The Army will no longer have to safeguard battlefield nuclear weapons.

Traditional arguments about the need for flexible nuclear options and runs in the escalation ladder were jettisoned in the new Bush Doctrine. The least-secure nuclear weapons are going first, with no assurance of comparable Soviet restraint. Four decades of careful rationalization were battered in one presidential address.

A central tenet of the Bush Doctrine, which for reasons of modesty or embarrassment will probably be left unsaid, is that U.S. officials vastly overstated the value of nuclear weapons. The Kremlin has gone even farther overboard. These weapons were built in numbers and for reasons that defy common sense. Bush seized on the breakup of the Soviet empires, external and internal, to do something about the U.S. problem. He can only hope Gorbachev and Yeltsin have enough support in the republics and in the armed forces to follow suit.

The Bush Doctrine also does serious damage to the notion of a bolt-out-of-the-blue attack. Even before the Soviet Union began deploying intercontinental ballistic missiles in 1960, this fear generated plans for redundant nuclear forces, which were realized, as well as efforts to build extensive strategic defenses, which were blocked. Every President since Dwight D. Eisenhower has faced this intense heat.

The issue repeatedly crystallized over the vulnerability of U.S. silo-based missiles--a ritual characterized by McGeorge Bundy as an “inventive nightmare . . . fit only for zealots in search of office.” Whenever the Soviets misbehaved, these fears helped derail strategic-arms negotiations--including the ballyhooed “window of vulnerability” during debate over the second strategic-arms limitation treaty.

The United States has carried seven insurance policies to deter a nuclear attack: maintaining a triad of strategic bombers; land and sea-based ballistic missiles; keeping a portion of each leg of this triad on alert, and placing additional nuclear attack capability on war ships. Bush has now stopped payments on two of these premiums.

The fear of surprise attack led U.S. Presidents to sanction round-the-clock flights of strategic bombers armed with nuclear weapons. One crashed off the coast of Spain, another in Greenland, which prompted Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara to end this practice in 1968. Other bombers were placed on “strip alert” at Strategic Air Command bases. This, too, has now been abandoned by Bush. For the moment, the window of vulnerability has been officially closed. How long it remains so depends on future developments in Moscow.

Despite assertions to the contrary, the Bush Doctrine suggests a rocky road ahead for the Strategic Defense Initiative. The current, scaled-down plan calls for perhaps six missile bases in the United States and another 1,000 missiles in space. Plans for a “spaceborne” alert appear incongruous beside decisions to end airborne and strip alerts for strategic bombers. A far more modest program, perhaps conforming with the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, should provide an adequate insurance policy. A more relaxed view about the Soviet threat also spells trouble for the B-2 bomber.

The Bush Doctrine heralds the end of a negotiating style that produced enormously complex agreements after years of painstaking effort. Few mourn the passing of that era. Conventional and strategic-arms reduction treaties produced with the thawing of the Cold War can be adapted to reflect changes of the past two years and then used as a framework for subsequent arms-reduction measures. Formal negotiations of much smaller scope will take place alongside parallel or independent initiatives. The fine print that filed hundreds of pages of treaty text matters little in either a cooperative or chaotic U.S. relationship with the key Soviet republics.

The emerging Bush Doctrine is much clearer about what no longer has meaning than about where this country is headed. How low can we go in nuclear forces? How should U.S. conventional forces be structured? How should the other pillars on which U.S. national security have rested be shored up in future?

The answers to these and other questions will come from extended political debate, economic imperatives and foreign events that can be surmised but not controlled by Washington. Bush and his advisers have their hands full responding appropriately to the chaotic and hopeful developments in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The President doesn’t need to articulate grand strategy now. His initiatives were a fitting response to a historic moment filled with uncertainty and promise.