Arms Control: Toward a Safer World

It was a solid Bush-plus performance. In his televised address to the nation from the Oval Office on Friday evening, the President was proposing nothing less than a new set of guidelines for nuclear peace in the post-cold war world. He was, for once, ahead of the curve, demonstrating real leadership in his capacity as Commander in Chief of the doomsday arsenal.

Yet this was no nuclear abolitionist, no Jimmy Carter daring to dream about the "elimination of all nuclear weapons from this earth." Nor was it Ronald Reagan, putting his faith in a pure defense that would render nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete." Instead, it was classic George Bush, a traditionalist and pragmatist, striving for boldness without undermining a quality he values even more: prudence.

Bush did his best -- which was very good indeed -- to make his initiative seem visionary, equitable, even magnanimous. For a sweetener, he announced several unilateral steps, such as removing all nuclear-tipped cruise missiles from U.S. surface ships and attack submarines. But these are for the most part minor gestures that will leave intact the main concepts and structures of American defense. In some cases, Bush was doing little more than accepting recommendations that experts have long been making for strictly military reasons. For example, a number of prominent specialists on naval warfare have argued for years that sea-launched nuclear cruise missiles are a bad idea in their own right.

The implications of Bush's proposals are far more onerous for the U.S.S.R. In his own polite and statesmanlike way, he was all but dictating to the Kremlin how it should restructure its nuclear forces so as to diminish even further the threat they pose to the rest of the world.

Bush's essential purpose is to accelerate the retirement of some of the Soviet Union's most advanced military programs while protecting key elements of the U.S.'s "strategic modernization": the B-2 Stealth bomber, the Trident II submarine missile, and a scaled-back version of the Star Wars antimissile defense.

Arms-control proposals, like the arms themselves, have targets. Bush's plan is aimed squarely at two categories of nuclear weaponry: 1) intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) with multiple warheads, known as independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs), and 2) short-range missiles and other so-called tactical weapons. Not coincidentally, those are the Soviet systems that most worry the U.S.

MIRVed ICBMs have long been the principal villains in American strategists' scenarios for a "bolt from the blue" Soviet attack. Because the U.S.S.R. is a land power with a historical preference for heavy artillery, it has more of these hydra-headed monsters than the U.S.

Until last Friday it was U.S. policy to redress this imbalance in two ways: through negotiations, like the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START), that whittled away the Soviet advantage; and by developing America's own large, heavily MIRVed land-based missile, the 10-warhead MX. Bush said in effect, Let's go straight to the bottom line, which is zero; let's agree to eliminate MIRVed ICBMs altogether.

That is a fairly easy sacrifice for the U.S. The MX is highly controversial in Congress, and only 50 have been deployed. The U.S. has 300 other, older MIRVed ICBMs. For their part, the Soviets would have to give up 763 such weapons.