The End of Arms Control

By Charles Krauthammer

There have been two revolutions in nuclear theology since the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction became dominant four decades ago. The first came in 1983. President Reagan proposed that defensive weapons take precedence over offensive weapons. The second happened last week. It came from George W. Bush and was almost universally misunderstood. Bush was said to have proposed the primacy of defensive weapons over offensive weapons. That is old news. In fact, he did something far more important: he proposed the end of arms control.

This seems strange to us. For more than a generation we have been living in a world in which arms control is the norm. But for all of history before that, it was not: if you needed a weapon to defend yourself and had the technology to build it, you did not go to your enemy to get his agreement to let you do so.

When the world was dominated by two bitterly antagonistic superpowers, arms control made sense. Barely. The world was made marginally safer by the U.S. and the Soviet Union having a fairly good idea of, and a fairly good lid on, the nuclear weapons in each other's hands.

For the U.S. it was important because of a rather arcane doctrine called extended deterrence: we pledged to defend Western Europe not by matching the huge Warsaw Pact tank forces (which would have been outrageously costly) but by threatening nuclear retaliation against any conventional invasion.

Not a very credible threat to begin with. And as the Soviets overcame the American nuclear monopoly, it became less credible by the year. We needed arms control to ensure that there would be enough American nuclear firepower (relative to Moscow's) to make our security guarantee to Europe at least plausible.

As I said, arcane. But then again, the whole arms race with the Soviets had a distinctly academic, almost unworldly quality. It was really a form of bean counting. Like money to billionaires, it had little intrinsic meaning: it was just a way of keeping score.

Perhaps most important, arms control gave the Soviets and us something to talk about at a time when there was very little else to talk about. We were fighting over every inch of the globe, from Berlin to Saigon. So, every few years, we would trade beans in Geneva, shake hands for the cameras and thus reassure the world that we were not going to blow it up.

But now? That late-20th century world of superpowers and bipolarity and arms control is dead. There is no Warsaw Pact. There is no Soviet Union. What is the logic of tailoring our weapons development against various threats around the world to suit the wishes of a country--Russia--that is no longer either an enemy or a superpower?

Yet that is exactly what President Clinton has been intent on doing in Moscow this week. He is deeply enmeshed in arms-control negotiations 1) to revise the treaty that radically restricts America's ability to defend itself from missile attack (the ABM treaty) and 2) to set new numbers for American and Russian offensive missiles (a START III treaty).

The parts of this prospective deal that are not anachronistic are, in fact, detrimental to American security. One of the reasons the development of an effective missile defense has been so slow and costly is that the ABM treaty prevents us from testing the most promising technologies, such as sea-based and space-based weapons. Even today, we cannot test a high-speed interceptor against any incoming missile traveling faster than 5 km per SEC. because the Russians are afraid it might be effective against their ICBMs. This is quite crazy. It means that because of a cold war relic, the U.S. has to forgo building the most effective defense it can against nuclear attack by a rogue state such as North Korea.

But Bush's idea is significant because it goes beyond questioning why we should be tailoring our defensive weapons to Russian wishes. He asks, Why should we be tailoring offensive weapons--indeed, any American military needs--to Russian wishes?

He proposes to reduce the American nuclear arsenal unilaterally. The Clinton idea--the idea that has dominated American thinking for a generation--is to hang on to superfluous nukes as bargaining chips to get the Russians to reduce theirs.

Why? Let the Soviets keep, indeed build what they want. If they want to bankrupt themselves building an arsenal they will never use--and that lacks even the psychologically intimidating effects it had during the cold war--let them.

We don't need new agreements; we only need new thinking. If we want to cut our nuclear arsenal, why wait on the Russians? If we want to build a defensive shield, why ask the Russians? The new idea--extraordinarily simple and extraordinarily obvious--is that we build to order. Our order.

Read my lips. No new treaties.