Civilian Peril Seen in U.S. Nuclear Cuts

The United States could wind up aiming its nuclear weapons at huge civilian populations instead of military installations if the nation continues to cut its strategic nuclear force, a chief steward of the U.S. stockpile warned Thursday.

With a large nuclear force, the United States in the past has been confident that it could deter aggression by aiming its thousands of warheads at noncivilian targets, such as bases, missile silos and military headquarters, said C. Paul Robinson, president of the Sandia National Laboratories, which are responsible for maintaining the U.S. arsenal.

But if its strategic nuclear arsenal shrinks much further, the nation may begin to take the view of nations with smaller arsenals--that threatening civilian targets is a surer way to frighten an opponent out of attacking, he said. In this way, a smaller nuclear force might paradoxically set the stage for a nuclear war with greater loss of human life.

“To move lower would cause, first of all, a major change in your overall nuclear policy,” Robinson told reporters in a breakfast meeting. “I think it is a big step to say we’re going to target cities and population. . . . It’s not something I believe most Americans would be comfortable with.”

Robinson’s comments brought quick rejoinder from some disarmament advocates, who disputed his conclusions and said that his comments about threatening civilians could hurt the progress of disarmament when it is gaining momentum.

“This is a climate where we’ve just had two presidents negotiate to [nuclear arms] levels that are very, very low,” said Gary Webb, a senior arms control specialist at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington think tank. “So speaking in public about targeting Russian cities isn’t very constructive.”

He argued that the United States had a much smaller strategic nuclear force in the early 1960s, yet was not tempted to target cities.

The American stockpile of nuclear weapons, which peaked at more than 12,000 nuclear warheads, will fall to fewer than 3,500 under the second Strategic Arms Reduction treaty, which has been negotiated and ratified by the U.S. Senate but not by the Russian parliament. President Clinton and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin agreed at their Helsinki summit in Finland last week to further cut the ceiling to 2,500 in an updated pact, which has not yet been formally negotiated.

Robinson said it is his “gut feel” that the U.S. strategic nuclear force should not be allowed to fall below 2,000 warheads.

In recent years, with ratification of a nuclear test-ban treaty and the breakup of the Soviet Union, the American labs have laid off hundreds of employees and shifted their role more toward peacetime functions. They have recently begun a program of helping the Russian government improve the often-poor security of the old Soviet nuclear arsenal, for example.

Yet officials of the labs--which are owned by the government but operated by Lockheed Martin Corp.--have continued to argue that conditions are not right for a much deeper cuts.

Since the United States first developed a unified offensive strategic plan in the final days of the Eisenhower administration, it has targeted military and industrial sites and, as policy, has sought to avoid sites that would engender huge “collateral” civilian casualties.

Even so, a nuclear exchange aimed at military targets still undoubtedly would inflict huge civilian casualties because many military targets--such as the Kremlin, in the heart of Moscow--are in the middle of huge metropolitan areas.

Officially, U.S. and Russian missiles are no longer aimed at their longtime adversaries. But they could be reprogrammed within minutes or even seconds to do so, according to some experts.

Robinson, who earlier in his career was chief U.S. negotiator in nuclear testing talks, also argued that much deeper arms cuts could set back the cause of nuclear nonproliferation.

U.S. allies rely on the American nuclear umbrella for protection, he said. And if the numbers were to fall too low, “a number of them might take a go-it-alone attitude” for their own security, he said.

Sandia has facilities at Livermore, Calif., and in New Mexico.