The years 1967–1992 were the apogee of arms control. Arms-control primacy in Western countries elevated it to an exalted place, supreme above all other competing security priorities, as the path to escape nuclear nightmares. Formalist objections to particular provisions in SALT I were put aside, in pursuit of ending “the arms race”; not until several years later did it become clear that America’s freeze of its arsenal did not encourage the Soviets to freeze its arsenal. Jimmy Carter’s own defense secretary, Harold Brown, conceded that the Soviets built even while we were cutting.
Ironically, New START reflected the Obama administration’s Cold War mindset: a treaty between superpowers. Yet Russia is no longer a true superpower, although it is still able to cause lots of trouble around the world. It makes no sense to place current-day Russia’s concerns at a level higher than those of all other nations. In terms of arms control and deterrence, Barack Obama has traveled in time back to 1967, to the days of mutual assured destruction, placing superpower arms concord above deploying full-scale missile defense as insurance against future “clandestine cache” strategic surprise. To put that in perspective, imagine that President Johnson in 1967 had based American policy on how things looked in 1922. That was the year the Washington Naval Treaty put limits on ships and their armaments. Leaders of the great democracies thought these limits would prevent a second world war. Tyrants in Germany and Japan ended that fantasy.
The Cold War turned out better, but arms accords did not bring about the collapse of the evil empire, nor can it be proven that they alone prevented a nuclear war. All that can be known are two truths: The accords, whether wise or not, did not realize the worst fears of their critics. Equally, it can be said, they did not realize the high hopes of their ardent supporters. They were politically salient, bringing a measure of political peace in Western countries, but ultimately of marginal impact on strategic affairs save for missile defense. Missile defense research lagged and was skewed by arms-control priorities. We are thus more vulnerable to small-power strikes than likely we would be had our research and development on missile defense proceeded without impediments arising out of the prevailing U.S. interpretation of Cold War arms agreements.
President Obama’s “open mic” exchange with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev at the March 2012 Nuclear Summit exemplified his preoccupation with arms control over missile defense, an attitude that animated the now-defunct ABM Treaty.16 The president noted that missile defense is a “particular” concern, thus indicating an intention to move towards Moscow’s position after the U.S. 2012 election. Indeed, the White House has sought to share sensitive missile defense data with Moscow, a move strongly opposed by many members of Congress.
Arms control is an essential tool, not a talisman. Agreements with adversaries are possible, but only when interests in fact coincide, as they do with efforts to avoid accidental war, and with several later arms treaties. It is dangerous for America to assume that an enemy’s strategic interests are the same as its own—as Jimmy Carter learned when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and George W. Bush learned when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia. Commonality of strategic goals was, in those cases, simply absent. With Russia, President Reagan put it best by often citing a Russian proverb: “Trust, but verify.”
Soviet leaders were hardly immune to mirror-imaging fallacies—that is, the assumption that one’s opponent behaves like oneself. Riding in Los Angeles during his 1959 visit to America, Khrushchev spotted a sign held up by a woman protesting the Hungarian revolt, brutally suppressed by the Soviets in 1956. The sign read: “Death to Khrushchev, the Butcher of Hungary.” Khrushchev angrily turned to American UN Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge: “Well, if Eisenhower wanted to have me insulted, why did he invite me to come to the United States?” Lodge was incredulous at this question, but Khrushchev persisted: “In the Soviet Union, she wouldn’t be there unless I had given the order.” This was no idle boast. Dean Rusk, secretary of state during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, recounted how during a demonstration in front of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, a staffer asked a Russian soldier how long it would last. The Russian glanced at his watch and replied: “Sixteen minutes.”
It would take the end of the Cold War to relieve much public anxiety about nuclear arms races that had in fact long since ended. What is remarkable to anyone who lived through the height of the Cold War was how little a splash the New START strategic arms treaty of 2010 made in the public imagination. There were, by then, even scarier prospects than that of superpower nuclear war.
The question pending after the ratification of New START is not one of war between Russia and America. Russia never did want a direct shooting war with America, and throughout the Cold War fought hot wars by proxy only. Dangers elsewhere—proliferation in North Korea, Iran’s nuclear quest, a potential Islamist takeover in nuclear-armed Pakistan—are unaffected by New START. History simply fails to support the hope expressed by President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that we are furthering nuclear arms control elsewhere by setting an example with our own reductions. With America’s huge arsenal dramatically shrunk and its needed modernization stalled, other powers large (Russia, China) and small (Pakistan, North Korea, Iran) cheerfully ignore us.
__________________
6. The Nazi ships posed a fearsome maritime threat, but they were defeated by British air power: Bismarck, named for Germany’s unifier and “Iron Chancellor” Otto von Bismarck, sank Britain’s battle cruiser HMS Hood, on May 24, 1941. After an epic chase the British sank it three days later. Tirpitz, named after the World War I admiral who built up Germany’s navy, shelled the island of Spitsbergen in January 1943; she was sunk in her pen November 12, 1944, by British bombers.
As for the Japanese titans, both saw action in the landmark Battle of Leyte Gulf, from October 23 to October 26, 1944; the Japanese threw all their naval assets into the battle in a desperate attempt to prevent General MacArthur from fulfilling his wartime pledge to return to the Philippines. Musashi was sunk by American planes and submarines in the opening engagement. Yamato retreated ignominiously after surviving a torpedo charge by American destroyers on Leyte’s final day, before she could shell troops landing on the beach; the reason for her retreat remains unclear to the present day. She was sunk by American carrier planes in April 1945 off Okinawa, where she had been sent as a last-ditch decoy.
7. Factors include how much of the attacking force reaches the target, how well sheltered targets are, whether there is sufficient warning, whether bombs burst in the air or on the ground, how hard and which way the winds blow, how well protected targets are. Calculations of the destructive effects of large-scale nuclear attacks are dizzyingly complex and, under the best of circumstances, highly subjective, with huge margins of error. Serious strategists understood these limitations and used calculations to help frame problems in broad brush strokes so as to better address them.
8. Military surveillance satellites, in contrast to the communications satellites we use every day, usually make a highly elliptical orbit of Earth—for example, 700 miles perigee (lowest point) and 12,000 miles apogee (highest point). At low altitude over their photo reconnaissance target, they can photograph objects as small as a tennis ball and clearly display license plate numbers. But weather over the target area can complicate observation, and—as its orbital path is a matter of the laws of physics—the people whose assets are under surveillance can enhance concealment every 90 minutes when the satellite passes overhead.
9. Counting rules were complex. Rules had to be devised not only for missiles based on land, but also for those carried deep underwater by missile submarines. Rules for the latter were devised by counting launching tubes, with estimates of possible extra missiles based upon the size of the submarine and the types of missiles it carried. Counting warheads on bombers also proved very hard: rules had to be devised for bomb bay sizes and the size of bombs carried externally—under wings or under the fuselage.
10. Appendix
4 discusses SALT trade-offs and judgments balancing MIRV and ABM.
11. President Reagan put the B-1 back in production in 1981. It remains part of America’s bomber force.
12. In order to boost support for the SALT II treaty, Carter committed to developing the Trident submarine-launched missile, and deployed it in 1979. Its intercontinental range and MIRV warhead payload greatly enhanced the sea leg of the U.S. triad.
13. Presidential Directive 58 (PD-58), issued June 30, 1980, established a program to protect the president and top U.S. leaders in event of nuclear attack. PD-59, issued July 25, 1980, called for targeting Soviet leadership cadres in event of nuclear war between the superpowers. The latter directive ran flatly counter to the precepts of MAD, which called for targeting deliberately unprotected civilians, while leaving alone offensive military assets (missile defense was banned). By inescapable implication, the Soviet leadership would not be targeted under MAD, so it could survive to order retaliation after an American attack.
14. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, between the U.S., UK, and USSR, barred offensive weapons and weapons of mass destruction in space.
15. The INF Treaty has not worked perfectly. Reportedly Russia shipped two rocket motor models—the RD-214 and RD-216 motors, stripped from scrapped INF Treaty–covered missiles (SS-4 and SS-5) and sent them to Iran for testing.
16. OBAMA: “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this can be solved but it’s important for [incoming president Vladimir Putin] to give me space.”
MEDVEDEV: “Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you.”
OBAMA: “This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.”
MEDVEDEV: “I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.”
5.
IRAN AND THE MIDEAST: SLIDING TOWARDS NUCLEAR WAR
Our dear Imam [Khomeini] ordered that the occupying regime in Al-Qods [Jerusalem] be wiped off the face of the earth. This was a very wise statement. The issue of Palestine is not one on which we could make a piecemeal compromise…. This would mean our defeat. [Anyone who recognizes Israel] has put his signature under the defeat of the Islamic world.
IRANIAN PRESIDENT MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD,
“WORLD WITHOUT ZIONISM” CONFERENCE, 2005
IRAN’S QUEST FOR NUCLEAR WEAPONS IS WIDELY ACKNOWLEDGED throughout the West, after disclosure in late 2011 that Iran has pursued components of advanced nuclear weapons and has gotten the help of a renegade Russian weapons designer. A February 2012 inspection report compiled by the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency found that Iran had conducted high explosive and detonator tests for a nuclear warhead, as well as computer modeling of a nuclear warhead core, in a facility whose suspect activities were detected by satellite surveillance. In February 2012 Iran installed higher-speed centrifuges at its Fordo facility in order to more rapidly enrich uranium that could fuel an atom bomb; the facility is buried more than 200 feet in solid rock, and may be impregnable to attack from the air using presently available conventional munitions—even by the United States.
This march towards nuclear weapons status—the most dangerous proliferation development in the post–Cold War era—highlights the importance of a Third Lesson of nuclear-age history: REVOLUTIONARY POWERS CANNOT BE CONTAINED; THEY MUST BE DEFEATED.
Iran’s Nuclear Quest
SITUATED ON the eastern side of the volatile Mideast, Iran menaces traffic passing through the Strait of Hormuz, 34 miles long and at its narrowest (“choke-point”) 21 miles wide, yet deep enough to handle super-tankers. Through its waters pass 15.5 million barrels of crude oil daily, about one-sixth of global daily oil consumption. Iran has threatened to close off the waterway, which could plunge the global economy into a deep recession. Were Iran a nuclear power, military options against it would virtually vanish.
The shah of Iran pursued a commercial nuclear power program in the 1950s, under President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace plan. But few doubted that the shah desired a nuclear weapons capability; the program was suspended when the shah’s regime fell in early 1979. Iran began a clandestine nuclear program in 1984. The Nonproliferation Treaty allows peaceful nuclear activity—commercial power and research, provided the country accepts safeguards and monitoring. A clandestine program makes sense only if its objective is to develop nuclear weapons.
According to investigative reporter Kenneth Timmerman, by 1991 nuclear-club member China was aiding Pakistan, North Korea, and Iran. One Iranian official publicly stated that Iran “was keeping its options open.” The feckless efforts to confront Iran over its nuclear program were perhaps best summed up that year by a comment from a German foreign ministry official. He responded to the Iranian official’s comment: “If you are a piano player, keeping your options open means you are practicing.”
The apparently successful 2010 Stuxnet worm—a malicious self-replicating program that spreads itself, computer to computer, throughout a network—inflicted considerable mechanical damage at key Iranian nuclear facilities. It cost Iran’s uranium enrichment program an estimated year. This cyber-sabotage was presumably the work of either Israel or the U.S. (or both).
But Iran is closing in on nuclear weapons capability. Specific and reliable intelligence as to when it will be ready to cross the nuclear threshold is nearly impossible to acquire. Those whose job it is to determine this have revised, even reversed, their assessments. The historical record shows that more often than not intelligence fails to predict when closed societies will acquire nuclear capability or test a nuclear device, the task being an exceedingly difficult one under the best of circumstances (see chapter 9).
Historical Parallels
IRAN’S DETERMINATION to develop nuclear weapons is the most dangerous proliferation development in the post–Cold War era (Pakistan’s ascendancy to nuclear membership was all but complete by 1984). Complicating efforts to confront the threat posed by a nuclear Iran are two factors:
1. Lack of a fully effective missile defense screen for Western nations within the potential reach of an Iranian arsenal.
2. Lack of confidence that Iran’s leaders will be as effectively deterred from starting a nuclear war as was the Soviet Union during the Cold War (and as are Russia and China today).
The U.S. failure to deploy an effective missile defense against a small-power attack is a product of superpower arms control. Arms-control constraints began with offensive missile systems. That approach changed in 1972, when the Antiballistic Missile Treaty severely limited missile defense design and deployment in the United States. Defensive system design since then has aimed not for the best products that technology and innovation can produce. Rather, system design has been governed by the maximum technological result deemed permissible under strategic arms-control principles as they have been narrowly interpreted since 1972. The result has been systems of perilously stunted capability.
The risks of a nuclear Iran getting into a war can be illustrated by historic examples: the two world wars and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. World War I shows how great powers can be drawn into utterly unanticipated suicidal carnage for failure to understand the real risks of a major conflict. World War II is an example of a war started in part because of efforts to appease rather than confront tyrants with Napoleon’s ambition for conquest, though far more brutal than Napoleon. The Cuban episode shows how a great-power gamble can lead to the brink of total catastrophe. All these elements can be in play if Iran goes nuclear.
The Two World Wars
Asked once how a world war would start, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who united Germany during his long late nineteenth-century tenure, is reputed to have quipped: “some damn fool thing in the Balkans.” On June 28, 1914, the assassination of the Austrian archduke Francis Ferdinand by Bosnian Serb ultranationalist Gavrilo Princip set in motion a series of events that in five weeks triggered the Great War.
First, in Germany, France, and Russia, poisonous ultrana
tionalist sentiments incited popular support for a war expected to last at most a few weeks. The same sentiments drove the conflict even after the calamtous carnage of the opening months alerted leaders to the monstrous destructive power at their command.
Second, individual leaders—Winston Churchill notably excepted17—lacked meaningful understanding of the destructive power of emerging military technologies, especially the artillery barrage and machine-gun fire. The resulting futile sanguinary conflict was prolonged by the public’s desire to see revenge exacted from the enemy for inflicting mass casualties. Commanders shockingly indifferent to the fate of their subordinates sent them in endless charges across no-man’s-land moonscapes, unable to imagine anything beyond premodern notions of martial spirit to counter massive firepower.
Third, and perhaps most significant of all, technologies of destruction had simply outrun technologies of command, communications, and control. Once troop trains left their home depots, those authorizing departure could not reverse their passage. Between the trenches messengers sprinted on foot or rode on horseback, as had been done for thousands of years. There were limited telegraph lines suitable for fixed installation for intermittent communications with battlefield commanders, and virtually no radio communications to allow true real-time communication.
Sleepwalking With the Bomb Page 8