Essay: A New Approach to Arms Control

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To halt the strategic arms race, the former Secretary of State recommends a dramatic new approach. His plan would scrap all MIR Vs starting in, say, 1990 and rely instead on a mix of mobile, single-warhead missiles. The U.S. would implement this plan even if the Soviets refused to go along

The nomination of a new director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency has prompted a major Senate debate over whether the Administration is seriously committed to arms control. The controversy misses the real question: To what kind of arms control should the Administration commit itself?

So far, the controversy has focused on negotiations over deployment of medium-range missiles in Europe. But even a success in these negotiations—likely now that the German elections are over—will make only a marginal contribution to the stability of the U.S.-Soviet strategic nuclear relationship. And here we are trapped in a conceptual crisis. For too long arms control and strategy have been proceeding on separate, increasingly incompatible tracks. Technology has driven weapons procurement at the same time that it has made irrelevant the traditional doctrines of arms control. Weapons systems and arms control schemes developed in isolation from each other had to be squeezed into a more or less arbitrary framework.

This article seeks to sketch an approach by which strategy and arms control can be reconciled and strategic stability achieved by ending the disproportion between warheads and launchers that is at the heart of the current strategic instability.

THE ORIGINS OF ARMS CONTROL

The concept of arms control evolved when a growing Soviet nuclear arsenal suddenly threw into doubt the comfortable premises of the decade after World War II. It had been complacently assumed that by means of the "balance of terror," technology supplied a shortcut to security. Even after we had lost our atomic monopoly, our superiority was so crushing that in 1954 Secretary of State John Foster Dulles could still declare a policy of massive retaliation, countering Soviet aggression anywhere by the threat to devastate the Soviet Union. There was little incentive to decide a question that seemed then only esoteric: What were rational targets for the apocalyptic arsenal we were assembling?

Soviet hydrogen weapons and Sputnik foreshadowed a kind of stalemate. Once general nuclear war threatened both sides with tens of millions of casualties, the very existence of nuclear arsenals came to be perceived by many as a menace. Traditional wars had been sustained by the conviction that the consequences of defeat or surrender were worse than the costs of resistance. The nuclear specter banished that conviction. Fewer and fewer objectives seemed worth the cost or the risk.