An Invisible 500-pound Gorilla Haunts The Missile-defense Debate.
By Alexander Zaitchik
The end of the Cold War has spawned a lot of surprises that no one could have imagined, one of those being the mass nuclear-amnesia that has afflicted most of the civilized world. This has become painfully obvious in the recent debate over U.S. missile-defense installations in Eastern Europe.
Consider last week's Economist editorial "Vlad and MAD," the magazine's latest in a string of "get tough with Russia" articles. The editors point to Putin's pre-G8 summit statement that Russia would respond to the stationing of ABM systems in Poland and the Czech Republic by targeting Eastern Europe with nuclear rockets as a sign that, "The era of mutual assured destruction (or MAD) which supposedly ended when the red flag came down, could return."
That the MAD "era" ended in 1991 would be news to U.S. and Russian nuclear launch commanders. Since the end of the Cold War, neither side has even for a moment removed its missiles from their pre-'91 hair-trigger footings. MAD did not end with the Cold War because MAD was not an "era," a state of mind, a policy, or even a doctrine. MAD is a fact, one that exists when two mature nuclear powers face each other across oceans armed with a triad of nuclear missiles, bombers, and submarines. MAD simply means that if one side surprise attacks, the other side can mount a devastating second-strike in response. Not so long ago, every schoolboy and girl understood this. Now, apparently, even Economist editors can't keep their Armageddon acronyms straight.
The magazine is right about one thing. There is indeed a quiet revolution in MAD afoot; it's just not the one evoked in "Vlad and MAD." Quite the opposite. The biggest news concerning MAD since the fall of the Iron Curtain is not its sudden revival under Vladimir Putin, but its systematic burial under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
While burying MAD is a worthy and necessary goal, there is a right way to do it, and the American way.
When the Bush Administration announced its decision to scrap the 1972 ABM Treaty in 2001, Moscow squealed. But, as with the current flap over missile defense installations in Eastern Europe, the Russian response was only partially about the nascent missile defense system. There was also a 500-pound MAD gorilla in the room. Russia's initial and ongoing opposition to missile defense should be considered within the larger context of NATO expansion into former Warsaw Pact countries and Soviet republics, the modernization of U.S. conventional and nuclear forces, and the deterioration of the same in Russia.
What this amounts to has been termed, "the rise of U.S. nuclear primacy."
If this phrase rings a bell, it's because of the small firestorm created last year when two American academics, Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press, published "The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy" in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs. The authors argued that the United States is consciously refining its nuclear forces so as to be able to knock out Russia's rump arsenal and command and control system, thereby achieving first-strike capability, or "primacy," for the first time since the early 1960s. They do not argue or imply that such an attack is in the offing, but merely state that the looming fact of U.S. nuclear primacy is potentially destabilizing and is essential to keep in mind when framing flashpoints in the U.S.-Russian security dialogue - flashpoints like missile defense. Since this larger context has gone missing lately, with U.S. officials and editorialists haughtily dismissing Russian concerns as "ridiculous" and "anachronistic," it seems like a good time to revisit their article.
Lieber and Press marshal publicly known information about U.S. and Russian nuclear forces to make their case. Against a post-Cold War background of a shrinking and rusting Russian nuclear triad,
The U.S. nuclear arsenal has significantly improved. The United States has replaced the ballistic missiles on its submarines with the substantially more accurate Trident II D-5 missiles, many of which carry new, larger-yield warheads. The U.S. Navy has shifted a greater proportion of its [nuclear subs] to the Pacific so that they can patrol near the Chinese coast or in the blind spot of Russia's early warning radar network...
The authors continue in this vein with a long and wonky litany detailing improvements in systems ranging from the B-2 bomber to ICBMs. They conclude, "[T]hese steps look like a coordinated set of programs to enhance the United States' nuclear first-strike capabilities. The current and future U.S. nuclear force...seems designed to carry out a preemptive disarming strike against Russia or China."
Let me repeat that: The current and future U.S. nuclear force...seems designed to carry out a preemptive disarming strike against Russia or China.
That's what two serious American academics said in Foreign Affairs last year. And yet when Putin objects to the ABM system, his fears are dismissed as "ridiculous" by the West's political and editorial elite, who react like impatient parents whose child claims there is a monster under the bed.
One of the criticisms of the article was that it overplayed the extent to which these improvements are consciously intended to develop first-strike capability. But since there is no way of knowing exactly what the intentions are, all we can judge is the consequence of this buildup: Greatly increased Russian vulnerability, and insecurity.
As for the limited missile defense system Russia is told on a daily basis it has no need to fear, Lieber and Press disagree. "Missile defenses that the United States might plausibly deploy," they write,
would be valuable primarily in an offensive context, not a defensive one - as an adjunct to a U.S. first-strike capability, not as a standalone shield. If the United States launched a nuclear attack against Russia (or China), the targeted country would be left with a tiny surviving arsenal - if any at all. At that point, even a relatively modest or inefficient missile-defense system might well be enough to protect against any retaliatory strikes, because the devastated enemy would have so few warheads and decoys left.
The Russian response to this last year was predictably intense. It sent an already nervous General Staff into a tizzy, and the article's thesis was splashed all over Russian media as if it represented the voice of a unified American establishment "sending a message" that it now controlled the world. The Russian response demonstrated a failure to understand the role of think tanks in American society, but it's hard to blame the Russians for being startled. As soon as the issue of Foreign Affairs hit the stands, the ticker tape in Moscow went wild with details of the new American plot. It played directly into the worst nightmares and paranoid fantasies of Western encirclement and the subsequent obliteration of Russia. In the U.S., on the other hand, the article went largely unnoticed beyond the academic and national security circles who read Foreign Affairs, although the New York Times did republish the full article on its website.
The Defense Department wasn't happy with the article either, and reacted as if Lieber and Press, not its own nuclear upgrades, were to blame for Russia's anxiety over the rapidly tipping balance of nuclear terror. In the August/September issue of Foreign Affairs, Assistant Secretary of Defense Peter C. W. Flory attacked the authors for misunderstanding or misrepresenting the various refinements underway in America's nuclear arsenal. After arguing that the technical evolution of U.S. forces does not reflect a quest for primacy, Flory cites as proof a cliche-ridden May 2001 speech made by President Bush declaring his commitment to reducing nuclear dangers. Flory was joined in his attack by a former deputy assistant secretary in Rumsfeld's Pentagon, Keith Payne, who accused Lieber and Press of "a gross distortion of U.S. policy...that...is destabilizing U.S.-Russian relations."
Without going into the technical details of the charges of their critics and their response, it's enough to say that Lieber and Press emerged from the exchange with their reputations intact. (The original article and the subsequent roundtable is at foreignaffairs.org.)
Today Lieber and Press remain convinced that an examination of U.S. nuclear policy reveals a quest for nuclear primacy.
"None of our critics have successfully challenged our model," Lieber told the eXile in a recent phone interview.
Again, Lieber and Press do not argue that the United States is planning on knocking out Russia in an insane mixed conventional/nuclear first-strike (thereby triggering a suicidal global nuclear winter, among other things.) But as defense planners around the world will tell you, when it comes to hypothetical questions of national survival, intentions don't matter; capabilities do.
"One needs to look at the bigger picture of the strategic nuclear balance to appreciate Russian concerns," said Lieber. "The broader picture of rising U.S. nuclear primacy makes it easier to understand Russia's reaction to missile defense."
One thing it doesn't make it easier to understand is why the U.S. is still shadow arms racing in the first place, however quietly, in the process straining relations with Russia and bogging the world down in idiotic debates over MAD and missile defenses, while the arms control process is stuck in the mud. There is indeed a sane way to make MAD as anachronistic as the Economist thinks it already is. But it's a path that in no way resembles the one we're on.
No comments:
Post a Comment