Bush s Proposed Unilateral Nuclear Disarmament Measures Will Increase Chances of Nuclear War

November 20, 2001 | David T. Pyne, Esq.

[rightwing2]

Bush’s Proposed Unilateral Nuclear Disarmament Measures Will Increase Not Decrease the Prospects of Future Nuclear Conflict

David T. Pyne
November 20, 2001

Just last week, President Bush and Russian President Putin of Russia concluded their summit in Crawford, Texas with much fanfare. While Bush and Putin showcased their warm relationship, they failed to come to an agreement on the future of the ABM Treaty or to sign an agreement for a bilateral reduction of US and Russian nuclear weapons. Bush has repeatedly stated that he prefers unilateral nuclear disarmament to a bilateral accord in which the Russians also promised to greatly reduce the level of their own strategic nuclear deterrent.

Back in February, Bush ordered a Nuclear Posture Review to determine what the minimal size of the US nuclear deterrent could be and still successfully deter a nuclear attack from Russia and/or any other nuclear powers. This Nuclear Posture Review was completed but never disclosed to the public reportedly because it advocated that the absolute minimum number of strategic nuclear weapons necessary to constitute an effective deterrent was 2300-2500 and that Bush rejected its conclusions preferring to disarm to considerably lower levels.

At the onset of the Bush-Putin summit, President Bush announced his plan to go against the recommendation of his Secretary of Defense and top generals who know better and begin unilaterally disarming the US strategic nuclear deterrent from the current 7200 warheads to 1700-2200 weapons—up to a 75% reduction. The reason for this proposed range of weapons was an attempt to placate his generals, however the Administration has clearly indicated that Bush would prefer to disarm to the low-end level of 1700 warheads.

At the summit, President Bush reiterated his past promise to unilaterally disarm to this minimal level “regardless of what Russia does.” In making these very considerable unilateral concessions at the onset of the summit, Bush failed the test of negotiating strategy by throwing away any incentive the Russians had to make their own concessions since we had no more concessions left to make. Therefore, it was not surprising that the only “positive” result of the summit was a vague, unspecific and unenforceable Russian promise to disarm from 6,000 strategic nuclear warheads to 2,000—a number which President Putin appeared to pull out of a hat after his statements that Russia would merely “try” to match the Bush unilateral nuclear reductions were poorly received.

While Bush's unilateral disarmament measures certainly do not guarantee a future nuclear war with Russia, they go far to make one more likely. History has proved the veracity of the fundamental assertion that unilateral disarmament increases the risks and the prospects for war. I cannot think of a single conflict or international dispute in the history of the world won by unilateral disarmament. You see, unilateral disarmament often creates dangerous imbalances when one country disarms but another does not which in turn have the effect of inciting wars begun by aggressor nations rather than averting them. Would the world have been safer or more peaceful if the nations of Western Europe had unilaterally disarmed in 1939 in the face of a credible military threat from Nazi Germany?

Critics of such a view respond that the world has permanently changed, that we have entered a New World Order in which major wars have been rendered obsolete, that Russia is our new strategic ally in the war against terrorism, and that besides the Russians are too broke and their military too broken down to pose a credible threat to the United States. They are wrong. War is not obsolete and never will be as history has proven until the Lord himself returns to bring peace to the world’s nations. If history is to be our guide, there will be a major war within the next fifty years and nuclear weapons may be employed in war once again. Russia is not our ally and cannot be until she is truly democratized and cleansed of KGB/Communist influence. The Russian strategic nuclear force is fully funded and is maintained at a relatively high state of readiness with frequent nuclear war exercises conducted by them against the United States.

In examining the threat of nuclear attack from Russia, one must look to capabilities and intentions. The 1995 US Nuclear Posture Review warned of the possibility of a quick shift in the intentions of the top Russian leadership stating, “A significant shift in the Russian government into the hands of arch-conservatives could restore the strategic nuclear threat to the United States literally overnight.” President Putin, a former director of the renamed KGB widely considered by Russia experts to be a Russian hard-liner, became Acting President in December 1999 and subsequently President of the Russian Federation “restoring” the Russian strategic nuclear threat to the United States.

Even if Putin’s intentions were favorable to the United States, the Russian capability to stage a successful nuclear first strike against the United States which would destroy the bulk of our strategic nuclear deterrent and gravely weaken our capability to retaliate remains unchanged and will be greatly increased by Bush’s proposed unilateral nuclear disarmament measures if they are in fact implemented. Bush has declared his intention to rely not upon nuclear weapons to deter war and keep the nuclear peace as past US Presidents have done during the past 56 years, but rather upon the good graces of the President of the Russian Federation to follow his lead and match his unilateral nuclear disarmament measures. How soon the Bush Administration has forgotten President Reagan’s time-honored slogan of “peace through strength!”

The most likely scenario for a hypothetical nuclear war is a targeted counterforce Attack or preemptive nuclear ‘first strike’ by the Russian Strategic Rocket Force on the US strategic arsenal which if small-scale enough could be disguised as a terrorist strike. Such a feigned terrorist attack would be facilitated if done using non-Russian flagged ships in our ballistic missile submarine bases at King’s Bay in Georgia and at Bangor, Washington and at Norfolk for example where at least 2 aircraft carriers and scores of warships are routinely holed up at any give time. The terrorist attack of September 11th has highlighted the vulnerability of our ports to terrorist attack particularly if they were to utilize weapons of mass destruction. More likely than a Russian nuclear attack against a unilaterally disarmed United States in possession of as few as 25% as many strategic warheads many of which would be on platforms—missiles and bombers which have been dealerted, is the Russian use of nuclear blackmail to goad us into caving into their foreign policy demands. US acquiescence to such demands would of course spell not only the end of the vaunted US global hegemony, but it would signal the beginning of a new Russian and Russian-allied global hegemony and replace the era of Pax Americana with the era of Pax Sovietica.

Russia has changed so much less than we are led to believe. While their country has been reduced in size by 23% and their population by 45% since the fall of the Soviet empire, they retain the same nuclear arsenal, which has been only slightly reduced from Soviet times, an improved national strategic defense system, and an authoritarian President and former KGB director whose main foreign policy goal is to restore the glory and power of the old Soviet empire. Russia signed a formal alliance with Communist China in July which has not been negated by recent US-Russian cooperative efforts against terrorism. Russia is pursuing an old tactic which Clinton used called triangulation which enables it to get what it wants from the US and from Communist China at more or less the same time.

Putin intends to reconstitute the member states of the old USSR into a new federation led by Moscow. He intends to penetrate Western political and military groupings and either neutralize them or co-opt them into unwittingly furthering Russian foreign policy objectives. He intends to disarm the West of its military and especially nuclear potential while retaining the bulk of Russia's own arsenal to so alter the correlation of forces as to make the Russian Federation the world's dominant military strategic power. Western analysts lamely believe that Russia cannot afford to maintain its nuclear weapons at current levels, but in fact recent indications as well as an increasingly robust Russian economic recovery suggest that they can, at least for the foreseeable future.

The proposed level of 1,700 warheads is well below even the `minimal deterrence level of 2,000 warheads advocated by the radical anti-nuke crowd and unilateral disarmers for decades. It is insufficient to deter nuclear attack from Russia because it makes it much easier for the Russians to destroy our nuclear deterrent before we have a chance to use it. The massive Russian national ABM system reported by William T. Lee in his authoritative work, The ABM Treaty Charade : A Study in Elite Illusion and Delusion and confirmed in the leftwing Center for Defense Information’s Russian Federation Nuclear Arsenal chart consisting of 1750 neutron warhead armed S-300 SAM/ABMs could presumably shoot down whatever part of our strategic nuclear deterrent would survive a hypothetical Russian nuclear first strike. Many pundits discount the increasingly well-documented Russian capability to shoot down US strategic missiles, but why else would the Russians put small-yield nuclear warheads atop their “air defense” missiles—to shoot down obsolescent US strategic bombers?

Concerned Americans need to launch a Congressionally led effort to convince Bush not to unilaterally disarm the country of its nuclear deterrent, which he has said he would do over a period of ten years leaving us with a grand total of 1700 strategic nukes in 2011 rather than the 7200 we have today and the 6000 we will have on December 31, 2001 when the START I Treaty enters into full force. The never-ratified START 2 Treaty already requires the US to deactivate and remove from their launchers all but 3500 warheads by the end of 2003. Bush plans to first remove the warheads and dealert our missiles, which will effectively disarm us in the short terms since these dealerted weapons will not be ready to defend the country against nuclear attack, and then destroy the warheads over the next decade.

We need to enlist every ally we can imagine in Congress to sign a letter to the President asking that Bush reverse course here. We need to bombard our representatives with calls, letters, and E-mails to urge President Bush to halt his unilateral nuclear disarmament plans and retain our nuclear deterrent at a much higher and more credible level than what he has proposed. The future independence and perhaps even the very existence of the United States as a country may well depend on it.

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David T. Pyne is a national security expert who works as a defense professional with responsibility for the countries of the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, and North and South America among others. Mr. Pyne is also a licensed attorney, former Army Reserve Officer and member of the Center for Emerging National Security Affairs. He is presently serving as Executive Vice President of the Virginia Republican Assembly.

[WALLACE212]

Don't be to harsh man. Man has never failed to use ON A MASSIVE SCALE, any weapon he possesses. It is a question of when and who, not if. Thats a historic fact, not a politicaly generated opinion. Eventually somebody is going to push the Big Red Button.

[WALLACE212]

Shi'ite! Your right, thats the one that they moded out of the water into a land based weapons system because their subs are, um, JUNK. The boys can at Pearl can name the boat when it leaves the harbor in China...

[Poohbah]

Yeah, I have often wondered that about a lot of the older birds.

And newer ones, too. Reliability issues are part of the reason we're getting rid of Peacekeeper--the airframe (spaceframe?) is just not holding up as well as we hoped it would.

An ICBM's a rather complicated bugger, given the miniscule BS that will ground a shuttle, you do have to wonder what all those rockets would do if TSHTF.

Remember that you can't predict failures in any sort of deterministic fashion, too. You could allocate a bunch of missiles to the one "we absolutely gotta kill this target or we're hosed" DGZ, and ALL of them could malf...

Maybe we should have kept SAC around... planes dropping iron may be the only survivable delivery system after all.

Aside from the issue of killing really deep targets, maybe CONVENTIONAL iron bombs (with sophisticated guidance) are the best strategic weapons...

One thought: the best way to kill a given deep bunker is with a monster earthquake that collpases the cavern. Some folks say that one of HAARP's jobs is causing big earthquakes around the world.

Nah...too tinfoil :o)

[Poohbah]

Supposedly, the only danger involved in having a US sub trailing a Chinese boat is that the sonar tech's might go deaf :o)

[Rule of Law]

I completely disagree with Bush's planned unilateral nuclear disarmament plan.

Reminds me of how we were going to ensure peace through disarming in the 20's and early 30's.

Worked real good then. Probably have the same effect now.

Why, oh why, won't these bozos learn from history?

[rightwing2]

Gee,I wonder why Russia is considere to be the most "capable" of doing this? Would it be becasue they are practically the only ones with the CAPABILITY to do so? "Capability" does not speak to "intent". As for the rest of it,my best suggestion to you is thearapy to learn how to deal with unreasonable fears. Or suicide. Your pick.

You obviously do not understand the least little bit about military intel analysis. In the intelligence world, "Threat" is determined not merely from intent, but from a combination of capability and intent, properly weighted according to the impact of guessing hostile intent incorrectly. In regards to nuclear weapons, threat projections are regularly issued by CIA/DIA based primarily upon capability and in this area the Russian Federation outdoes all of our other potential enemies by a factor of hundred or more. As further evidence of these facts, recently compromised top-secret US contingency nuclearwarfighting plans, revealed that Russia and China were among those nations which would be targeted by US nuclear weapons in the event of a crisis. To ignore this reality and put your head in the sand is the very height of stupidity, no where better demonstrated than by your comments here, which go far beyond the realm of geopolitical ignorance.

[WALLACE212]

Yeah, I know of the reliability questions with the MX... my objection to their retirement is not that they are the Almighty Sword of God or anything, its that we aren't replacing it with anything better. We are taking a compromised warhead system (thanks Clinton) on a 60's launch paltform and calling that progress. Its Bullsnot!

A real readiness exercise would be nice, never happen but I can dream. Call the list of people who have reciprocal Big Red Buttons, warn them first, and then pick up the red phone and scare the crap out of a couple of Air Force officers... ya know, this is not a drill code of the day is.... blah blah- cold testing. Launch a few Minuteman 3's and Peacemakers (dummy warheads of course), totally cold. No maintenance or prepping beyond normal...

This of course will never happen because it would reveal any shortcomings in the system, for the whole world to see.

[Poohbah]

Don't forget that the act of mounting dummy warheads might tend to alert the launch and maintenance crews that something is up.

Notice that no one else is going to do this, either--for exactly the same reasons.

[rightwing2]

Add me to your ping list, please. To much disinformation on this topic for me to ignore.

I have added you to my ping list as you requested. Your informed and enlightened input on this topic is much appreciated.

[WALLACE212]

Bingo.

[WALLACE212]

Thank you sir, I try.

[rightwing2]

A few reminders for all the "Yawn, Russia is our friend now" drones.-

1) The subs are a paper unit- little warheads- no independent launch capabilty- Clinton removed the PAL codes. They now rely on the ELF signal for a warning/ launch order. If you simultaneously squish Washington (or wherever the Prez is at the time) LOOKING GLASS, and the two TACAMO planes- guess what? No PAL codes, no launch, first strike wipes us UNOPPOSED.

4) The US has 500 ICBM's. A lot you say? consider this- Russia currently has over 700 SS-18 Mod-3's (14 550 kiloton warheads) & 5's (1 20 megaton bunker buster) deployed. And that is ONE type of missile. They could squish every silo, launch command center, military base, airfield, and a decent chunk of our largest cities with the SS18's alone.

Great post here. The Clinton elimination of our nuclear missile subs capability for independent launch (circa 1995) is extremely disturbing. Bush is merely continuing and accelerating the previous Clinton initiated unilateral US nuclear disarmament suicidal death march. A word on Russian MIRV's. Over the last several years, I have done some very diligent research into US and Russian nuclear missile capabilities and found out some very interesting info. One book I purchased was an anti-nuke work entitled "The Myth of Soviet Military Supremacy" revealed some of the most interesting tidbits one of which was the fact that all of the MIRV’d warhead limits are entirely artificial creations. For example, the SS-18 is artificially limited by the SALT II Treaty as having only 10 warheads, even though it was never ratified.. However, according to this anti-nuke book and another book entitled “How to make Nuclear Weapons Obselete”, the Russians had the technology as far back as 1983 to pack THIRTY warheads onto an SS-18 Mod 1-4 ICBM.

Doing the math, you can figure about FOURTEEN warheads would fit on a never ratified START II Treaty permitted SS-19 ICBM even though only SIX of those warheads are counted by the START II Treaty. Our Trident I SLBMs had the same payload capacity and were downloaded to eight warheads following the signature of the treaty. The Russian SS-27 mobile ICBM is supposed to be a single warhead missile even though it can carry a greater payload than the missile from which it was derived the THREE warhead, the SS-20 IRBM. In fact, Russian sources have stated that the SS-27 can be uploaded to SEVEN to TEN modern Russian nuclear warheads which also means that the payload of every existing Russian ICBM and SLBM can be determined by multiplying their SALT II Treaty payload by two to three times. Furthermore, the Russians produce “thousands” of new miniaturized nuclear warheads each year according to sworn Congressional testimony by former Secretary of Defense, Secretary of Energy and Director of the CIA, James Schlesinger, (Rummy’s predecessor as SECDEF during his original tour of duty at the Pentagon) given in late 1997.

All of the above combined with the fact that the Russians have FOUR TIMES AS MANY NUKES AS THE US (40,000 to 9800) and that smaller lower yield tacnukes can be “packed” into strategic missiles (using the Russian “barrage” tactic) means that the Russian strategic nuclear potential is being grossly estimated. A CIA report issued around 1993 stated as much when it estimated that Soviet STRATEGIC nukes had likely been underestimated by as many as 4,000 warheads! Furthermore, Russian refire and non-deployed missiles and warheads are not even counted in our estimates of their strategic nuclear arsenal or for arms control treaty purposes. The bottom line is that THE US HAS ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA HOW LARGE THE RUSSIAN STRATEGIC NUCLEAR ARSENAL REALLY IS. The only thing we do know is that it is a lot larger than we think it is which makes these types of draconian Bush unilateral nuclear disarmament measures and unverifiable nuclear arms control treaties WITH A NATION THAT HAS SERIALLY VIOLATED EVERY ARMS CONTROL TREATY THAT IT HAS EVER SIGNED all the more dangerous. The problem is that the US will invariably adhere to its treaties by disarming our ICBMs to one warhead a piece and our SLBMs to four, while the Russians can be counted to keep their missiles uploaded to maximum payload even as they retire older missiles and launchers. That is why the Russian nuclear superiority over the US will only continue to increase with the Bush unilateral nuclear disarmament plan even if Russia disarms to what the US considers to be an arsenal capable of launching only 2000 SALT II limited strategic warheads. If anyone here thinks that it costs the Russians red cent to upload their missiles to TWO to THREE times SALT II capacity, they are completely delusional.

[WALLACE212]

"The bottom line is that THE US HAS ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA HOW LARGE THE RUSSIAN STRATEGIC NUCLEAR ARSENAL REALLY IS..."

The FAS website hasn't had any "estimated current deployed forces" numbers for Mother Russia for a while now... that has always bugged me. They got a bunch of warheads and delivery systems, and they ain't tellin...

"Trust but Verify..." to which I will add "You lower your gun, I'll lower mine Vladmir"

[sneakypete]

You obviously do not understand the least little bit about military intel analysis. In the intelligence world,

Yeah,I do. I also understand these people are in business to find threats,and they WILL find them. I have no doubt they have also researched and graded the chances of our being invaded by Finland,too.

I repeat,Russia is the most likely nuke aggressor merely because they are the only ones with that number of nukes.

[Poohbah]

Actually, if you look at the FAS site, it hasn't a LOT of the material (including OUR stuff) updated since 1998 or so. Updating that big a static content is very painful.

They need a database and ColdFusion or Apache Tomcat and XML processing to make that site a wee bit more cutting edge.

[Paul Ross]

Really, Neville Chamberlain implied much the same dose of medicine to the 'alarmists' of his day, Winston Churchill. You cannot deny capability bespeaks intention. The unreconstructed communist hardliners in their Strategic Rocket corps. is telling. If Boris had been SERIOUS about disarmament instead of looting, he would have made it clear to the Rocket Corps. that a loyalty oath REPUDIATING all communism should be required. Didn't happen. He was way too willing to just let the military have its way, the communist imperialism's way, to risk his own power.

[WALLACE212]

We have a winner!

The fact that there are not THOUSANDS of ex-Spetsnaz and Strategic Forces guys looking for a job is a REAL big indicator that the Russkies don't quite have their heart in the disarmement thing.

[Poohbah]

You've obviously never heard of "featherbedding."

[sneakypete]

Really, Neville Chamberlain implied much the same dose of medicine to the 'alarmists' of his day, Winston Churchill.

Yeah,that's me all-over. A pacifist. How did you ever guess?

You cannot deny capability bespeaks intention.

Of course I can,and I DO. The US seems to have a lot of nukes,including ones on the new Sea Wolf sub. I suppose you must take this to mean the US fully intends to attack Russia,China,and Cuba with nukes,right? Do you have any guns? Does this mean you intend to rob the local 7-11? Shoot your neighbors?

The unreconstructed communist hardliners in their Strategic Rocket corps. is telling.

Paranoria is not always your friend.

[GOP_1900AD]

What is the source of the figure "20?" Curious... that has been the "official figure" for quite a while (years).