All Hail the New World Nuclear Order : Bush’s extraordinary cuts are a contribution to peace

Mutual Assured Destruction--MAD--it was first called in the 1960s. That appropriately chilling acronym referred to the ability of the United States and the Soviet Union to obliterate each other with nuclear weapons, even if much of their nuclear forces was lost to a first strike from the other side.

Maintaining MAD has siphoned off hundreds of billions of dollars from the economies of the two countries, for warheads and their delivery systems, for hardened missile silos on land and silent submarines running under the seas, for keeping strategic bombers aloft 24 hours a day. It may also have been instrumental in preventing the kind of unthinkable miscalculation that could have reduced two great countries to lifeless cinders.

But the MAD era is mercifully ending. “The long, drawn-out dread is over,” as President Bush put it in his State of the Union address. Bush now proposes a new strategic nuclear order, one that would bring about a startling reduction in the level of threat even as it continues to provide a more than adequate shield of nuclear security.

Much of what Bush envisages can be accomplished immediately. For openers, he has canceled further work on the Midgetman intercontinental missile now in development. Planned purchases of the enormously costly B-2 Stealth bomber would be scaled back even more, to a maximum of 20. At least some of these planes, designed with the object of penetrating Soviet air defenses in the event of nuclear war, will be reconfigured to carry conventional weapons. At the same time the order for bomber-carried nuclear-armed Stealth cruise missiles will be cut from 1,000 to 640.

Beyond these already announced steps, Bush proposes sweeping cuts in other land-based strategic systems, notably by eliminating all 50 of the 10-warhead MX Peacekeeper ICBMs and reducing the warheads carried by each of 500 Minuteman III long-range missiles from three to one. Besides eliminating these 1,500 warheads, Bush would also cut warheads on sea-based missiles by one-third.

These last proposals were made contingent on reciprocity from the former Soviet Union, specifically the elimination of the 154 multi-warhead SS-18 and 92 mobile SS-24 long-range missiles that Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan retain under the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

There have been positive signs from Russia’s President Boris N. Yeltsin. He proposes that Russia and the United States reduce their strategic arsenals by 80%. Yeltsin has a scheduled weekend meeting with Bush at Camp David.

Certainly the world would be a more secure place if the arsenal of the former Soviet Union were cut as Bush proposes. But the proffered U.S. cutbacks need not be held hostage to agreement from the nuclear members of the Commonwealth of Independent States. If all the warheads that Bush talks about eliminating were cut, the United States would still have about 4,500 long-range nuclear weapons, more than enough to maintain the deterrence that has protected the nation from nuclear war for decades.

Bush has taken a major step into a new era of nuclear disarmament. Partisans can contend over the details of his domestic agenda. But the cuts in nuclear forces that the President has ordered and proposes deserve applause from all sides.