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Harold A. Feiveson and Frank N. von Beyond START I How to Make Much Deeper Cuts I Hippel I E v e n after the strategic nuclear arsenals of the United States and Soviet Union are reduced to the levels envisioned for the StrategicArms ReductionsTreaty (START),each will contain over 6,000 warheads with a total destructive power equivalent to over 50,000 Hiroshima bombs. The use of only a few percent of these weapons could destroy either country as a modern state. The equivalent of 50 one-megaton warheads exploded over the urban areas of either country could destroy its infrastructure and kill 25-50 million people by direct effects alone.’ The recent extraordinary changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, which have transformed the Soviet threat to the United States and its allies, give hope that these over-sized arsenals can be substantiallyreduced in postSTART negotiations. Prior to the events of 1989, it was still possible to point to the Warsaw Pact forces in Eastern Europe as a major potential threat to Western Europe. NATO planners, uncertain-and at times downright pessimistic-about NATO’s ability to withstand an all-out attack by the Warsaw Pact forces, insisted on a credible threat of U.S. nuclear use if necessary to stop the invasion. Credibility was thought to require the ability to target, with ”counterforce ” nuclear weapons, many thousands of Soviet nuclear and other military facilities. Today, the non-nuclear threat from the Warsaw Pact is rapidly disappearing . The Soviet Union is unilaterally reducing its military personnel and ~~ ~ We would like to thank the Camegie Corporation, the W. Alton Jones Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund for supporting our research. Harold A. Feiveson is a Senior Research Policy Scientist and Frank N. von Hippel is a Professor of Public and lnternational Affairs at Princeton University. Their research is conducted under the joint auspices of Princeton‘s Center for Energy and Environmental Studies and Center of lnternational Studies. 1. See William H. Daugherty, Barbara G. Levi and Frank von Hippel, ”The Consequences of ’Limited Nuclear Attacks on the United States,” lnternational Security, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Spring 1986), p. 3; and Barbara G. Levi, Frank von Hippel, and William H. Daugherty, ”Civilian Casualties from ’Limited’ Nuclear Attacks on the Soviet Union,” lnternational Security, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Winter 1987/88), p. 168. International Security, Summer 1990(Vol. 15, No. 1) 0 1990by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 154 Beyond START I 155 withdrawing about one half of its forces from its former Eastern European satellites and, in the negotiations on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE), has agreed to negotiate further substantial asymmetric reductions. Still more important, the dramatic political changes in East Europe are effectively dissolving the Warsaw Pact as a real military alliance and are likely to result in the withdrawal of virtually all Soviet military forces from the former "satellite '' nations of Eastern Europe. Partly in response to the changed situation in Europe, there are great pressures in the United States to cut the military budget in order to free resources to deal with urgent national problems. Under these circumstances, it seems reasonable to suggest that whatever small increment of deterrence (if any) that has been achieved with the huge U.S. nuclear counterforce arsenal can be foregone, and that the United States and the Soviet Union can agree to reduce to less excessiveand costly strategic forces. Indeed such reductions would not be inconsistent with the requirements laid out for the strategic forces in NATO's May 1989 statement on its "comprehensive concept": Strategic nuclear forces . . .must be capable of inflicting unacceptable damage on an aggressor state even after it has carried out a first strike. Their number, range, survivability and penetration capability need to ensure that a potential aggressor cannot count on limiting the conflict or regarding his own territory as a sanctuary.2 As we will show, much smaller strategic forces could have all of these capabilities. In this paper, we consider, as a next step beyond START, the feasibility of reducing the U.S. and Soviet strategic...

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