#10
www.thenation.com
June 4, 2002
Let's Finish the Job
By Matt Bivens

When Presidents George Bush and Vladimir Putin met at the ranch in Texas, they declared that keeping weapons of mass destruction out of terrorist hands would be "our highest priority."

That priority seemed to have lost its edge, though, by the recent summit in Moscow. Bush and Putin agreed to collectively take about 7,000 nuclear warheads off of ballistic missiles. That still leaves Russia and America with up to 4,400 nuclear missiles aimed at each other, many hundreds on high-alert status. Should early-warning systems report an incoming rocket, the American government allows itself twenty-two minutes to decide whether to order a return strike. The Russian government allows itself just six minutes. (Check out "Back from the Brink," a campaign to remove nuclear weapons from hairtrigger status, for a breakdown of the decision-to-launch timeline. Note that the Russians only allow six minutes to act because US rockets come in so rapidly.)

But whatever else one can say about keeping thousands of nuclear weapons on ballistic missiles, at least they remain inaccessible to terrorists.

The same cannot be said of nuclear weapons removed and put into stockpile storage or kept around for portable battlefield use-so-called tactical nukes. The Administration congratulated itself after the summit on agreeing with the Russians to reduce existing missile-mounted nukes to about 2,200 on each side. But that's still enough hairtrigger muscle to erase America. And shockingly, this treaty says nothing of an additional 23,000 non-missile-based nukes-17,000 in Russia and 6,000 here. (In fact, it only says it may add to those stocks by storing some of the nukes it removes from missiles.) These thousands of unconsidered nukes could be politely described as "of proliferation concern," which means they could be stolen-in fact, there have been compelling assertions they've already been stolen-and someday floated up the Potomac River or into the Marina del Rey.

Given that our highest priority is stalemating nuclear-hungry terrorists, why this odd silence on the thousands of the most portable, and hence most frightening, nuclear weapons?

The distinction between missile and nonmissile nukes has always been an artificial construct: We needed a way to start counting and reducing weapons during the secretive and mistrustful cold war, and it was expedient to count missiles, whose existence can be verified by satellites. One side-benefit of this is that, thanks to reporting requirements in the international architecture of treaties, each side has published information about the "strategic" (or missile-based) weapons. There has never been any such requirement to report on tactical weapons. Therefore the alarming truth is, no one knows how many nuclear weapons Russia and America actually possess.

They could have cut to the chase in Moscow and put our collective arsenals on the table. That would probably come to 33,500 total nuclear weapons-11,000 on the American side and in the ballpark of about 22,500 on the Russian, according to the Washington-based Arms Control Association. (For perspective, China, the third major nuclear power, has about 400 nuclear weapons, 250 of them on missiles, according to the Center for Defense Information.) And we could start arguing for deep cuts, or at least more transparency about who has what, and how well it's guarded.

After all, the proliferation of nuclear weapons-and particularly of tactical nukes-is emphatically not in US military interest. We first pursued battlefield nukes in the cold war and spread hundreds of them across Western Europe, as a way of deterring a hypothetical invasion by the enormous Red Army.

Today, however, we are the ones with the overwhelming conventional military superiority, and we don't need battlefields gummed up with radiation; while the Russians, by contrast, have an ever-weaker conventional military, and so have embraced tactical nukes as critical to their national defense. Modern Russian military strategy even has a word for using a tactical nuclear weapon that belongs in the Evil Euphemism Hall of Fame: "de-escalation." This refers to detonating a small nuclear explosion amid a conflict that seems to be spiraling out of control, and by so doing demonstrating you have the cojones to do it again. The theory is that this will give pause to even a militarily superior enemy. (Much the same "de-escalation" theory could be applied by, say, Pakistan, should its troops find themselves in danger of being overrun by a far larger Indian military.)

A better approach to de-escalating would be to disarm. The United States still maintains about 180 tactical nukes in seven European nations, according to Alistair Millar, an arms control expert with the Fourth Freedom Forum, which works for nonviolent conflict resolution.

Writing in Arms Control Today, Millar argues these 180-odd weapons serve no real military purpose, and suggests that an offer to withdraw them-or at least, to disclose their exact number and location-could jump-start negotiations with the Russians about accounting for and reducing their own arsenal. "If Washington is serious about working with the Russians to prevent nuclear terrorism, it could put the issue of reducing tactical nuclear arsenals back on the table at the Moscow summit," Millar writes.

Doing this would continue the work of the first President Bush. When the Soviet Union disintegrated eleven years ago, Washington was rightly concerned about portable and terrorist-friendly tactical nukes. President George Bush announced a unilateral reduction of US tactical nuclear arsenals, and invited the Russians to reciprocate. Mikhail Gorbachev and then Boris Yeltsin both pledged to do so, and in 1997 Presidents Bill Clinton and Yeltsin reaffirmed that commitment to negotiate on tactical nukes. Yet suddenly, in the wake of September 11, this is no longer important?

Madmen seeking weapons of mass destruction threaten the existence of the United States. The first President Bush got a good start on this, but didn't go far enough. Now it's time for his son to go back in and finish the job. One of the best ways to wage the war on terrorism would be to put the US tactical nuclear arsenal on the table-and invite the Russians to follow suit.

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