When President Clinton announced in 1994 that Russian and U.S. missiles were no longer aimed at our children, he seriously misrepresented the effect of his so-called de-targeting pact with then President Yeltsin. This pact did not add a single second to the time needed to fire missiles at each other's country.

The missiles retained their wartime targets in computer memory, which can be activated in seconds by a few computer keystrokes. If either country's leader ordered a launch, the message would flow in seconds to launch crews. The land-based missile crews would take a few seconds to decode and validate the order, a few more to transmit a target plan to the missiles (thereby overriding the Clinton-Yeltsin pact), a few more to enable the missiles to receive a launch signal, and a few more to turn keys to fire them. Within a couple of minutes, missiles would be leaving their silos en masse. Submarine crews would take about ten minutes longer to process the launch order.

How many Russian and U.S. missiles remain on hair-trigger alert, poised for immediate firing? If the launch order were transmitted right now, more than 2,000 strategic warheads on each side (the equivalent of about 100,000 Hiroshima bombs in total) could be promptly unleashed and delivered to targets around the world in 30 minutes.

Deterring a cold-blooded deliberate Russian or U.S. nuclear attack is not that hard. Deterrence can be satisfied by far smaller arsenals on far lower levels of alert than is presently the situation. The hair-trigger alert practices carried over from the Cold War need to be ended if we are really serious about reducing tensions, reducing risks of mistaken or unauthorized launch, and strengthening our diplomacy in the area of non-proliferation.

By beginning to stand down nuclear arsenals and taking all forces off alert – ideally by removing the warheads from missiles so that none could be fired on a moment's notice – the United States and Russia would send a strong and welcome message to the rest of the world. These dealerting actions would downgrade the importance of nuclear weapons, demonstrating with deeds the commitments made in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to their further reduction and eventual elimination. Such actions would not be lost on reviewers of the NPT who have been scouring the record of the past five years looking for signs that the nuclear pacesetters intend to meets their obligations under Article VI.

To show good faith and initiate the dealerting process, President Clinton could issue a unilateral proclamation that henceforth all U.S. ballistic missile submarines would assume a low level of alert. The four boats currently carrying a total of 480 warheads on 15-minute notice-to-fire (two in the Atlantic and two in the Pacific) would adopt the same "modified" alert stance as the other eight boats that the U.S. routinely keeps at sea. This change would not diminish the invulnerability of the sea-based U.S. forces.

In embarking on a course leading to the full dealerting of their arsenals, the United States and Russia would not only assume higher moral ground in their efforts to inhibit proliferation, they also would create a norm of operational safety that prohibits any country from placing or maintaining their nuclear forces in a launch-ready configuration.

Our leadership, for example, could well encourage South Asian nuclear states to refrain from crossing the next critical threshold of danger: the arming of missiles and bombers in the field. In accordance with this new international norm of safety set by the U.S. and Russia, countries such as India and Pakistan would keep their nuclear bombs in storage indefinitely. This configuration of South Asian arsenals would help defuse the nuclear confrontation there and buy a large margin of safety for scenarios involving a failure in their command and control. The dangerous alternative – that these regional adversaries mate warheads to high alert missiles under deficient control, thereby creating a higher risk of sparking a war through miscalculation or unauthorized use – should not be casually accepted by the world community.

The founding members of the nuclear club – United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France – subscribed to the principle of equity in advancing the NPT with an article calling for total nuclear elimination. Their past nuclear indulgences – 2,000 test explosions (400 in the open air) and 125,000 nuclear bombs fielded during the Cold War, among others – and double standards must be replaced by higher standards of restraint and fairness. The big five should recognize the paramount importance of standing down the world’s arsenals and extending the principle equally to all nuclear states – including themselves. Developing and putting into practice a new global consensus on dealerting would go far to induce other nations to cooperate on the host of other vexing proliferation and safety hazards that still beset the nuclear universe.

For more details and analysis, visit our Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction  page.
 

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