New Path to Nuclear Policy

Since he began his 2000 campaign, President Bush has sought to win recognition as the leader who cut the American and Russian nuclear arsenal by two-thirds, to “leave the Cold War behind.”

Yet in the first year of his term, the Bush administration has overhauled the nation’s nuclear arms policy in ways that reach far beyond the count of offensive warheads.

The Bush team has effectively set aside a 30-year-old tradition of arms control and asserted the need for a “flexibility” that will allow the United States to rebuild its arsenal on short notice. It has ordered construction of long-prohibited defensive weapons and is even considering new nuclear arms, which could mean resuming nuclear testing that has been halted for a decade.

The approach aims to reduce the number of deployed nuclear weapons, yet it leaves the nuclear arsenal as the core ingredient of U.S. security. Its framework was sketched out a year ago in a report by an obscure Virginia think tank, the National Institute for Public Policy, that amounted to a blueprint for the administration’s nuclear arms policy.

“What we’re seeing is the steady implementation of a new conservative strategic vision,” said Joseph Cirincione, an arms expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a nonprofit group aimed at fostering world peace. “There’s no question about it: There’s been a plan to do this, and we’re seeing it laid out, step by step.”

In the last year, the administration has again and again demonstrated its willingness to shake up the status quo: It has announced a withdrawal from the landmark Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, distanced itself from a handful of other arms treaties and asserted its prerogatives to rebuild the nuclear arsenal at any time.

Administration officials believe that radical changes in the nature of the threat to the United States make it necessary to adopt a new approach to national security.

Threats Arising From Many Nations

For half a century, the greatest threat came from the Soviet Union, an adversary with well-known capabilities. Now, with the Soviet empire crumbled, threats are emerging from the dozens of countries that are trying to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

Since it’s not clear which of these countries may pose the greatest danger and how soon their capabilities will develop, the United States needs a flexibility that isn’t possible under restrictive treaties, officials believe.

Iran, Iraq and North Korea--Bush’s “axis of evil”--pose the most obvious threats. But officials worry about others as well and say they can’t exclude the possibility that Russia and China could be led by hostile regimes.

Advocates of the new approach, including administration officials who helped write the think tank paper, contend that the United States must break free of the arduous Cold War arms negotiations that sought ceilings on arsenals. Such negotiations were not the path to peace but “just a tool to manage enmity,” said former ambassador David Smith, who was chief arms control negotiator during the administration of Bush’s father.

Now the U.S. and Russia need to build a friendly relationship based on openness and consultation, not on binding treaties, advocates say.

Critics of the approach contend that abandoning the treaties and insisting on U.S. “flexibility” will encourage other countries to maintain or increase their nuclear arsenals. They charge that the administration’s moves are a sign of its “unilateralist” outlook and contend that nuclear arms remain as important as ever, and perhaps even more so, given the declining role of treaties.

“Nuclear weapons remain a core of our security strategy,” said Ivo H. Daalder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington. “The message to other countries is: If you want to be truly secure, having nuclear weapons, and maintaining them in large numbers, is a good idea.”

Treaties Are Seen as Obstacles to U.S.

The administration’s view, say analysts, grows from a belief that arms control treaties have often held back the United States from safeguarding its interests while giving less scrupulous nations an opportunity to cheat.

This wariness was apparent last year as the White House backed away from a proposed treaty to curb illegal small-arms traffic and from a proposal to create an enforcement mechanism for the 30-year-old Biological Weapons Convention. Administration officials have signaled that they will oppose the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and will not press ahead with the 1993 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty II with Russia, which never fully took effect.

“Arms control treaties are not for friends,” Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld declared last year.

The administration’s most momentous departure from the old order came Dec. 13, when Bush announced that the United States would withdraw in six months from the 1972 ABM Treaty with Russia.

The ABM Treaty was drawn to avoid a spiraling arms race that the governments feared would ensue as the two countries built more and more missiles to try to overwhelm the other’s antimissile defenses. But the Bush administration believed that the treaty kept the United States from developing a system to protect the entire country from ballistic missiles.

Last month, the administration further fleshed out its view with the release of a major report on the role of nuclear weapons.

A publicly released summary of the classified report quoted Rumsfeld as saying that the administration wanted to “put Cold War practices behind us.” It intended to reduce reliance on offensive nuclear arms by increasing reliance on defensive hardware, such as the proposed national missile defense system, and, for some missions, nonnuclear weapons.

The biggest change described in the report was in the nuclear arms cuts, already announced by Bush, that would slice the offensive arsenal from what is now 7,000 deployed warheads to as few as 1,700. Bush’s unilateral proposal gave new life to stalled arms-reduction talks, and, by raising hopes that so many weapons could no longer be fired in minutes, won praise for the administration.

Even so, the document clearly embodied a conservative approach to nuclear issues.

The decommissioned warheads would not all be destroyed, officials said. Some would remain in the stockpile, ready to be redeployed, a step that could be accomplished in weeks or months if circumstances required, officials said.

The nuclear cuts would take place over 10 years, longer than some had hoped. Because of a change in the way warheads are counted, the reductions were really no greater than those envisioned by the Clinton administration, some analysts argued.

Officials also stressed that the cuts would take place only if no new threat materialized. While the administration hopes world events will permit continuing reductions, “we may decide that we have to increase our forces,” J. D. Crouch, an assistant Defense secretary, acknowledged at a briefing.

Crouch stressed that the United States intended to keep the arsenal big enough that no other country would be tempted to challenge it. “We will maintain sufficient forces to put us beyond their reach . . . as a peer competitor,” he said.

The administration said that, while it has no plans to take the controversial step of developing new nuclear weapons, as some aides have hinted, it wants to be ready to resume testing relatively quickly if such a decision is made. A resumption of testing, which was suspended by Bush’s father in 1992, would likely be met with strong opposition abroad.

Administration officials say their policy has begun a move away from “mutually assured destruction,” the Cold War doctrine that sought to guarantee nuclear stability by ensuring that both countries would be destroyed if one attacked. They hope that in the future, improved antimissile defenses will make nuclear forces less and less important.

Yet administration officials acknowledge that they will have a large nuclear deterrent force for the indefinite future and intend that the U.S. will be fully prepared if an unfriendly regime emerges in Russia, China or any other nuclear power.

Nuclear arms are “still the ultimate insurance policy,” said Tom Z. Collina of the pro-arms control Union of Concerned Scientists.

A key question now is whether the Russians will further reduce their arsenal when the Bush administration is keeping a large stockpile and trying to avoid signing an agreement that would limit U.S. options. Russian officials, worried that the Americans are trying to widen their arms advantage, complain that the U.S. plan to stockpile, rather than destroy, warheads undermines the current round of negotiations.

U.S. officials would like to have an informal agreement to set out the two countries’ unilateral arms reductions for Bush and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin to sign when Bush visits Russia this summer.

And U.S. officials have reason to feel they have the upper hand, given the unexpected ease with which they carried out the sweeping policy shifts of the last year, analysts say.

Their bold moves to abrogate the ABM Treaty and other agreements have brought only muted reaction from the Russians and Chinese, who are determined to maintain good relations with the American superpower. Likewise at home, few politicians in Congress or elsewhere have challenged the new approach, given Bush’s soaring popularity and his standing as the leader of the war effort.

“My guess is [administration officials] will go on their way, doing what they want to do,” said Collina. “And if the Russians don’t like it, that’s their problem.”