#9
Senate Dems attack Bush nuclear plan
By Pamela Hess
Pentagon correspondent

WASHINGTON, Feb. 14 (UPI) -- Senate Democrats Thursday said the Bush administration's plan to remove nearly two-thirds of the nuclear warheads from U.S. bombers, submarines and missiles is a thinly veiled attempt to hang on to as many warheads as possible.

"That's your purpose," said Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich. "You want that flexibility. Why hide it?"

Douglas Feith, under secretary of defense for policy, testified to the committee on the "nuclear posture review" plan to remove more than 3,700 nuclear warheads from submarines, bombers and long-range missiles over the next 10 years.

The plan would bring the current force of 6,000 warheads down to between 1,700 and 2,300 in accordance with an informal agreement reached last year with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Many of the warheads would be kept in reserve -- "a responsive force" -- for reloading onto weapons if a war occurs.

Dismantling nuclear warheads "is a brand new notion that was never applied over the decade of the Cold War when arms-control agreements were praised not withstanding their complete failure to address the destruction of warheads," Feith protested. "The last administration talked about making reductions and hedging by putting weapons into storage just as we are suggesting."

Feith said one of the reasons the Pentagon must keep weapons in reserve instead of destroying them is because the United States does not have the ability to produce nuclear warheads anymore. Russia, which is dismantling warheads with financial help from the United States, still produces new weapons.

"The United States hasn't produced a new nuke in a decade and it would take nearly a decade and a large investment of money before it would even be in a position to produce a new nuclear weapon," Feith said.

The proposal to mothball but not destroy the weapons is not a novel one. The United States has between 2,000 and 4,000 nuclear warheads already on active reserve, according to Stephen Young, a senior analyst with the Washington-based Union of Concerned Scientists.

The pace of U.S. reductions would be slow: The first major milestone, cutting the arsenal from 6,000 to 3,800, won't be reached until 2007, two years after President Bush's first term.

That target would be reached by taking warheads off submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles; deactivating four Trident nuclear subs and refitting them with conventional cruise missiles; and retiring all 50 Peacekeeper missiles.

For the past 50 years, the U.S. nuclear arsenal has been keyed to the size of the Soviet Union's. The United States wanted to be able to destroy every single Soviet missile on the launch pad and vice versa, leading to a five-decade arms race that resulted in a stability theory known as "mutually assured destruction," which said because each side could destroy the other in a war, neither would resort to open conflict.

Feith said this new nuclear force posture has nothing to do with Russia's arsenal, which is being drawn down to about 1,500 strategic warheads.

"We want a force posture that is not premised on the incineration of Russia," he said. "That's not the way we are thinking about strategic stability, that's not the way we are thinking about Russia."

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