Cover Stories: Toward a Safer World

By Strobe Talbott

It was a solid Bush-plus performance. In his televised address to the nation from the Oval Office on Friday evening, the President was proposing nothing less than a new set of guidelines for nuclear peace in the post-cold war world. He was, for once, ahead of the curve, demonstrating real leadership in his capacity as Commander in Chief of the doomsday arsenal.

Yet this was no nuclear abolitionist, no Jimmy Carter daring to dream about the "elimination of all nuclear weapons from this earth." Nor was it Ronald Reagan, putting his faith in a pure defense that would render nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete." Instead, it was classic George Bush, a traditionalist and pragmatist, striving for boldness without undermining a quality he values even more: prudence.

Bush did his best -- which was very good indeed -- to make his initiative seem visionary, equitable, even magnanimous. For a sweetener, he announced several unilateral steps, such as removing all nuclear-tipped cruise missiles from U.S. surface ships and attack submarines. But these are for the most part minor gestures that will leave intact the main concepts and structures of American defense. In some cases, Bush was doing little more than accepting recommendations that experts have long been making for strictly military reasons. For example, a number of prominent specialists on naval warfare have argued for years that sea-launched nuclear cruise missiles are a bad idea in their own right.

The implications of Bush's proposals are far more onerous for the U.S.S.R. In his own polite and statesmanlike way, he was all but dictating to the Kremlin how it should restructure its nuclear forces so as to diminish even further the threat they pose to the rest of the world.

Bush's essential purpose is to accelerate the retirement of some of the Soviet Union's most advanced military programs while protecting key elements of the U.S.'s "strategic modernization": the B-2 Stealth bomber, the Trident II submarine missile, and a scaled-back version of the Star Wars antimissile defense.

Arms-control proposals, like the arms themselves, have targets. Bush's plan is aimed squarely at two categories of nuclear weaponry: 1) intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) with multiple warheads, known as independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs), and 2) short-range missiles and other so-called tactical weapons. Not coincidentally, those are the Soviet systems that most worry the U.S.

MIRVed ICBMs have long been the principal villains in American strategists' scenarios for a "bolt from the blue" Soviet attack. Because the U.S.S.R. is a land power with a historical preference for heavy artillery, it has more of these hydra-headed monsters than the U.S.

Until last Friday it was U.S. policy to redress this imbalance in two ways: through negotiations, like the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START), that whittled away the Soviet advantage; and by developing America's own large, heavily MIRVed land-based missile, the 10-warhead MX. Bush said in effect, Let's go straight to the bottom line, which is zero; let's agree to eliminate MIRVed ICBMs altogether.

That is a fairly easy sacrifice for the U.S. The MX is highly controversial in Congress, and only 50 have been deployed. The U.S. has 300 other, older MIRVed ICBMs. For their part, the Soviets would have to give up 763 such weapons.

In targeting tactical nukes, Bush was addressing what has been a growing Western concern about the disintegration of the Soviet Union. For months, an interagency committee of the U.S. government has been quietly studying the danger that rebel or dissident groups might seize weapons and use them for intimidation or worse.

"We've got the makings of one hell of a Tom Clancy novel here," said an Administration official during a White House meeting in January. The issue is not entirely hypothetical. There was at least one incident, in Azerbaijan, in which a band of rebels briefly broke into an installation at which nukes were stored. The U.S. committee concluded that the greatest risk was that tactical nuclear weapons, such as artillery shells, might fall into the wrong hands.

Bush calculates, no doubt correctly, that Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin are every bit as frightened of that prospect as he is, especially in the wake of the aborted coup in August.

The central feature of last week's initiative -- the elimination of MIRVed ICBMs -- is recycled from a proposal that Bush first thought about putting to Gorbachev two years ago. In November 1989, when Bush was preparing for his first meeting as President with Gorbachev at Malta, the State Department floated the idea that the U.S. should seek a ban on mobile MIRVed ICBMs. The department tried to promote the plan at the White House as a way of giving a "Bush stamp" to a START treaty that was otherwise largely the inherited handiwork of the Reagan Administration.

National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, who had been pushing "de- MIRVing" for years, persuaded Bush to go the State Department one better and propose a ban on all MIRVed ICBMs, stationary as well as mobile. Scowcroft sold Bush on the idea, but Defense Secretary Dick Cheney objected so strenuously that the plan was dropped.

Now that it has been revived, the objections may come from the Defense Ministry in Moscow. Since the Soviets have many more MIRVed ICBMs than does the U.S., Gorbachev's military advisers are likely to tell him that a prohibition on such weapons is a net disadvantage to them. Therefore, instead of merely accepting the U.S. proposal, the Soviets may carry the logic of Scowcroft's position a step further; they may say, If we're going to be truly serious about de-MIRVing, why stop at the water's edge? Why not ban MIRVs on submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) as well?

In the mind game of deterrence, MIRVed submarine missiles are the trump card in the American deck: even if American ICBMs were destroyed in their silos and American bombers vaporized on their runways or shot down trying to penetrate Soviet airspace, U.S. submarines would still be at the bottom of the ocean, running silent and running deep, invulnerable to pre-emption and bristling with missiles, each capable of exacting terrible revenge on the U.S.S.R. Older U.S. boats are equipped with missiles that carry as many as 14 warheads each, while the newer ones have missiles with eight to 12 warheads. The notion of limiting them to one each is almost unthinkable, particularly to the U.S. Navy.

Beyond fine-tuning the balance of terror, Bush's proposal was intended to help him get a grip on a more general political problem: the difficulty that statesmen have in keeping up with events, particularly in a period of seismic changes in the geopolitical landscape. Bush opened his speech with the image of the world facing a "fresh page of history before yesterday's ink has even dried." He might have been speaking about the ink on two documents in particular.

Last November the leaders of 22 nations met in Paris to sign a treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) that had been under negotiation for nearly 17 years. In July, during their summit meeting in Moscow, Bush and Gorbachev signed another pact capping a decade of START talks.

By any reasonable standard, both treaties were estimable accomplishments. CFE blunted the threat of a Soviet-led blitzkrieg by the Warsaw Pact against Western Europe; START brought about a substantial reduction in MIRVed ICBMs, particularly Soviet ones, the potential instruments of a nuclear-age Pearl Harbor. However, by the time CFE was signed, the Warsaw Pact was nearly defunct, and one of its member states, East Germany, had ceased to exist -- or more to the point, had defected to NATO. Soviet divisions were pulling out of Eastern Europe for reasons that had nothing to do with CFE and everything to do with the anticommunist revolution that had swept the region. START too needs to be updated before it is even submitted to the Supreme Soviet and the U.S. Senate for ratification.

Gorbachev had trouble getting his marshals, generals and admirals to accept numerous concessions in the negotiations. Granted, that was before the coup, and the military was still throwing its weight around. Now many of the more obstreperous senior officers have been summarily retired. Still, there are plenty of people in Moscow -- not all of them in uniform -- who are desperate to cling to Soviet strategic nuclear strength as the last symbol of their country's superpower status. For that reason alone they will resist further cuts.

Yet the U.S.S.R. itself is shrinking. Ukraine is not only asserting its independence but, almost incidentally, moving to make itself a nuclear-free zone. There has been a similar reaction against the Soviet nuclear-weapons program in the Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan. Thus many if not all of the Soviet nukes in those two republics will be pulled out. Either they can be removed to new sites in the Russian Federation, or they can be taken out of commission altogether and destroyed.

From the U.S. point of view, the fewer Soviet (or Russian) nukes the better. Moreover, it would be easier to verify the dismantling and destruction of weapons than keep track of them as they're redeployed.

In planning what he would say Friday, Bush calculated that the Soviet leader will have an easier time persuading his military to swallow these additional cuts if they're part of a bilateral deal with the U.S.

In that sense too, the initiative was classic Bush. Once again, part of his strategy is to help his pal Gorbachev. That's only prudent. But in this case, it's also plenty bold.