Ending the Nuclear Threat: Buy Your Enemies’ Bombs

As Russia moves toward a fascist or semi-fascist state, signaled by the popularity of ultra-nationalist Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky and the recent resignations of the country’s top economic reformers, how can the United States immediately move to reduce the nuclear threat raised by this turn of events?

The starting point is to recognize what some of America’s hardest-line defense intellectuals have begun to stress: In the post-Cold War era, U.S. security can only be achieved if there is a radical reduction of nuclear weapons.

Indeed, Paul H. Nitze, one of the toughest Cold Warriors, recently contended in a piece that, “We might reasonably contemplate making nuclear weapons largely obsolete for the most practical and fundamental strategic missions.”

Former Secretary of Defense Robert S. MacNamara has stressed a related point: “It can be confidently predicted that the combination of human fallibility and nuclear arms will inevitably lead to nuclear destruction. Therefore, insofar as it is achievable, we should seek a return to a non-nuclear world.” To MacNamara, a reasonable interim goal would leave “at most 100 to 200 warheads” in the hands of one nation or an international enforcement organization.

And former Secretary of Defense Les Aspin put it this way in June, 1992: “There is no longer any need for the United States to have nuclear weapons as an equalizer against other powers. A world without nuclear weapons would not be disadvantageous to the United States. In fact, a world without nuclear weapons would be better. Nuclear weapons are still the big equalizer but now the U.S. is not the equalizer but the equalizee.”

The primary danger, many specialists note, is not nuclear attack by some small nation using intercontinental ballistic missiles. It may be something as simple--and as hard to detect--as shipping a nuclear “device” into New York Harbor on a freighter, a task not much more difficult than driving a load of bombs into the World Trade Center.

Nitze and McNamara are clearly not “peaceniks.” They assert the cold logic of the situation: U.S. security would increase if we could move radically toward nuclear disarmament.

Toward this end, we should build on our current arms-control strategy. In our new agreement with Ukraine, we have promised the government more than $1 billion in aid in exchange for giving up 1,684 nuclear weapons. Suppose we expanded on this principle:

In 1991, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the United States could save $261 billion over the next 15 years if the country reduced its long-range nuclear arsenal to 1,000 missiles, far more than is needed in the post-Cold War world. That translates to $17 billion a year that could not only be saved, but could also be used to form a kitty large enough to buy out the nuclear opposition.

This reduction in our nuclear arsenal combined with an expansion of current arms-control policy could provide enormous leverage: Far larger sums of money than are now being contemplated could be offered to Russia and Ukraine as incentives to radically reduce, or actually eliminate, their nuclear arsenals. Simultaneously, the prospect of a reduced U.S. threat would help ease Russia’s fears.

If we are really interested in our security, $17 billion is no magic number. We are now paying $276 billion a year to maintain our defense. If it is true security we want, rather than knee-jerk funding of obsolete military programs, and if we could increase our security by buying out the nuclear opposition--then we could up the ante and double the amount and still be well ahead of the game.

In a little-noticed comment during the press conference announcing his decision to withdraw his nomination as secretary of defense, Adm. Bobby Ray Inman suggested the possibility of a annual $50-billion cut in the Pentagon’s budget even without using the savings to reduce nuclear weapons elsewhere.

Over a 10-year period, this would add up to $500 billion--a hefty “wallet,” as President George Bush used to say, if we wanted to get serious about buying out the nuclear threat.

Brookings defense expert, William W. Kaufmann, has gone farther. He estimates that U.S. post-Cold War defense needs could be satisfied even if the current Pentagon budget were cut by roughly 50%. By 1997, Kaufmann calculates, a restructured U.S. military could be spending no more than $135 billion (1993 dollars) and still provide effective security (that is, able to counter attacks on allies in Europe, the Middle East, or on South Korea, with minimal American casualties). Under a more limited scenario, he estimates a savings of $152 billion in the next three years, or nearly $584 billion in the next eight years.

We do not know whether Russia’s movement toward fascism can be halted. What counts is removing the beast’s nuclear fangs. Nonetheless, paying significant sums of money to buy out Russia’s nuclear capability might well be the way to give Russia the monetary support it needs to slow, even reverse, its move toward extremist politics.

Clearly, any serious attempt to achieve a major shift in the nuclear threat would require a global “build-down” process and would have to involve many other nations, especially China. It would require rehabilitation of the limping United Nations peacekeeping capacity. Powerful new inspection systems and other safeguards would be essential.

Any bold approach, of course, would also require major presidential leadership--the kind Bush demonstrated, for other purposes, when he mobilized world opinion during the Gulf War. One thing is clear: Of the many things that have traditionally stood in the way of truly significant arms control, peacekeeping, and inspection efforts, lack of money need not stand in Clinton’s way.

With the Cold War over and the Soviet Union no more, the rationale for nuclear arsenals is fast disappearing before our eyes, as men like Nitze, MacNamara and Kaufmann are beginning to suggest. The trouble is that we are so used to thinking in narrow terms about small policy steps that it is a jolt to imagine the use of significant national-security funds to buy real national security.