Naval Arms Control for the Bush Era

NAVAL ARMS CONTROL. FOR THE BUSH ERA Edward Rhodes Re /ecent improvements in East-West relations, pressure from Western allies, dramatic political change in Eastern Europe, and the foreign policy agenda of the perestroika-pressed Gorbachev regime have combined to push arms control toward center stage, quite despite the native caution of the Bush administration. In confronting today's pressures and opportunities for arms control, the Bush administration faces both bad and good news. The bad news is that over the last two decades the arms control process has gone astray. With the progression from SALT I (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) to SALT II, from SALT II to START (Strategic Arms Reduction Talks), and from START to the INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) treaty, it has become increasingly unclear what goals the United States hopes to accomplish through arms control. In its approach to arms control, the United States has not simply suffered a failure of imagination. It has lost sight of arms control's ultimate objectives. Treating particular proposals and agreements as ends in themselves instead ofmeans to an end, the United States has become fixated on giant steps that promise only small rewards, overlooking modest steps with far more substantial benefits. Edward Rhodes is assistant professor of international relations at Rutgers University and visiting scholar at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. He is the author of Power and MADness: The Logic ofNuclear Coercion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). 211 212 SAISREVIEW Yet arms control is valuable only to the extent it enhances national security. It can do so in three ways. First, it can reduce the likelihood of war. Second, it can reduce the political and economic costs of peacetime defense efforts. And third, it can reduce the destructiveness of war, should it occur. The good news for the Bush administration is that there is no inherent reason why arms control efforts must continue to be unrelated to these fundamental objectives. As the recent interest in conventional arms control has revealed, there are useful and achievable measures open to the superpowers. To avoid misdirection of effort, however, it is imperative first to think through what it is the United States is ultimately trying to achieve. Only after this has been done is it possible to explore intelligently arms control options and opportunities. If this logical sequence is adhered to by the Bush administration, and not—as became the standard practice of recent administrations—reversed, a number of steps that benefit both the United States and the Soviet Union can be identified. Indeed, despite the United States' long-standing opposition to naval arms control, if the Bush administration focuses on ultimate objectives, it is likely to discover a variety of useful and achievable measures in this sphere. A careful examination of the present threats to international security suggests two modest but valuable naval arms control steps that would reduce the risk of war, the cost of defense, and the potential destructiveness of conflict: (1) limit each superpower's submarine forces, other than submarines carrying strategic ballistic missiles, to twenty-five; and (2) ban the deployment of nuclear weapons, other than strategic ballistic missiles, at sea. The U.S. Submarine Threat to Peace Consider for a moment the first traditional objective of arms control: reducing the likelihood of war. Assuming there is even a grain of truth in the arguments ofthe postwar generation of deterrence theorists, ifthe United States is serious about preventing war with the Soviet Union, it should maintain a situation of mutual assured destruction (MAD). The inescapable shared vulnerability of MAD minimizes mutual fears of preemptive nuclear attack, thereby reducing crisis instability and incentives to strike first in times of heightened tension. The key to the maintenance of MAD lies at sea. Over the past two decades bombers and land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) have become increasingly vulnerable, at least theoretically, to a first strike. With current or currently conceivable technology, bombers face a NAVALARMSCONTROL 213 triple threat: their bases could be attacked with little warning, escape routes could be barraged, and surviving bombers, together with the cruise missiles they carry, could face heavily upgraded continental air defenses...