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OCR for page 13
2
Introductory Remarks: From I N
New Agreements
Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky
to
National security has many aspects,
of which military preparedness is only one. In previous seminars we
emphasized this diversity by including such topics as offensive versus
defensive strategic armaments, the management of international crises, as
wed as specific discussion of anns control issues.
Since our last seminar two years ago, the world has changed drastically
in respect to national security affairs. The INF Treaty has been signed and
ratified. What we can the mandate conference determining the charge for
the Conventional Forces in Europe talks has been concluded. The Strate-
gic Arms Reduction Talks (START) have progressed, but concluding that
treaty has eluded the Reagan Administration.
Above all, there has been a drastic change in the climate in which
future arms control will operate. There has been an increased weariness
in pursuing war as a means of resolving conflicts. The Iran-Iraq war has
been terminated by an uneasy truce. Soviet troops have left Afghanistan.
The Vietnamese are leaving Cambodia, and Cubans are leaving Angola.
The Contras are no longer a significant force in Nicaragua. The two
Koreas are exploring contacts leading to communication and, maybe, a
long time hence, unification. A China-Soviet summit is in view, after a
13
OCR for page 14
14
CHALLENGES FOR THE 1990s
30-year lapse. Above an, the Soviets have announced unilateral moves,
particularly with respect to Europe, which promise to lessen greatly the
asymmetry with respect to both conventional and nuclear weapons in that
most heavily armed region of the world.
AU these factors signal moves away from conflict. But there are other,
less favorable trends. Religious fundamentalism is on the increase. Ter-
rorism and the drug traffic remain elusive of increased control measures.
Security of the world can no longer be described as a bipolar issue as
it has been simplistically by some that is, dominated by the United
States versus Soviet confrontation. National security no longer rests
exclusively, or even primarily, on military might. In fact, during the last
years it has become increasingly clear that the vastly excessive military
weaponry of the United States and the Soviet Union is to some extent a
burden rather than an asset. Economic strength and societal vitality may
be more determinative to real security than military power.
The military losers of World War IT have become the economic leaders
of today. In this respect the growing strength of the Asiatic nations, in
particular Japan, makes it clear Mat the age of world dominance by the
United States and the Soviet Union is fading. The nations of the world are
aD struggling intemally, by a variety of means and to varying degrees, to
achieve an acceptable balance among social equity, productivity, and
preservation of the earths resources.
All this has, happily, tended to submerge the strictly military aspects of
security. Yet military forces, in particular the nuclear deterrent, can be
given at least some of the credit for having prevented all-out conflict for
four decades. The maintenance of a stable, peaceful relationship among
several nations intertwines military and political factors.
It is against this context that we would like to examine today, in this
seminar, what should follow the INF Treaty in aiding the true national
security of the United States, by reducing the dangers and burdens of arms
and enhancing stability among the nations of the world.
The new Administration, similar to many previous ones, wild have to
make many decisions in the national security area which are a balance of
risks. Neither increased arms nor increased arms control will ever be
without perceived benefits or without costs and risks. We are hearing
many voices today urging the Bush Administration to go slowly on arms
control, because, indeed, wrong moves can be made in the name of
reducing arms. But wrong moves can also be made, and frequently have
OCR for page 15
15
FROM INF TO NEW AGREEMENTS
TABLE 1 The Number of Launchers and Bombers in the U.S. and
Soviet Strategic Forces
Present Inventories
U.S. USSR
TSTART Proposed
Total delivery vehicles 2,002 2,503
Heavy bombers 362 175
BM total
ICBM
SLBM
Total Brow weight of BMs
1,600
1,640 2,328
At.
1,000 1,386 (308 heavy) (154 heavy)
640 942
<50% of Soviet level
"at reference fume"
been made, in increasing arms. I would reject firmly the assumption
underlying much of the go-sIow counsel that risks in arms control are
unacceptable, while risks in increased armaments are to be expected and
condoned.
It is in this spirit that I would like to address the different moves which
I envisage for the years to come.
First, there is START. The basic outline of that treaty is in place.
Contrary to its public image, START will neither cut the total number of
nuclear strategic delivery vehicles in half nor win it reduce the number of
nuclear weapons of intercontinental range by that amount. The START
draft treaty, as it stood by the end of last year, fans significantly short of
that goal.
I will present two tables that will give an overview of the current inven-
to~y. Table ~ indicates the number of launchers—ICBMs and SLBMs
and bombers of the United States and the Soviet Union. The proposed
START agreement is that the total number of delivery vehicles shall be
reduced to 1,600, not by a factor of two. In addition to that, the total throw
weight of ballistic missiles that means the total amount of weight which
can be thrown from one nation to the other is to be reduced by a factor
OCR for page 16
16
CHAlLENGES FOR THE 1990s
TABLE 2 The Number of Warheads in the U.S. and Soviet
Strategic Forces
Present ~ventories-
U.S. USSR
SALT START SALT START
Counting Counting Counting Counting
Type Rules Rules Rules Rules
START Proposed
Total warheads 14,637 99789al 11,694 lO,S95a/ 5 oooc
1 0,585b 1 0,4556
Heavy bombers 5,608 1~784a/ 1,620 805a/ l,loob
2,580b 665b
BM total 9,029 8,005 10,074 9,790 4,900
ICBM 2,373 2,373 6,412 6,4i2 3,000 3,300a
SLBM 6,656 5,632 3,662 3,378 3,3005
SLCM 400 Nuclearb
600 Nonnuclearb
NOTE: Numbers of warheads are agreed upon values unless otherwise noted.
aU.S. counting rules or U.S. position.
bSoviet counting rules or Soviet position.
CUnder START counting rules actual warhead counts would be 20 to 30 percent larger.
Of two at reference time. There is still disagreement on what that refer-
ence time is to be. There is a separate agreement that the 308 very heavy
ballistic missiles, the SS-~8s, that the Soviets have are to be reduced by
half.
Table 2 displays a much more complex situation—namely, the number
of warheads. As far as the number of warheads is concemed, it depends
on how you count them. There are what we call the SALT counting rules
and new counting rules at START. Under the new counting rules at
OCR for page 17
17
FROM INF TO NEW AGREEMENTS
START, the same inventory counts at considerably lower numbers than it
did under SALT. I will not go into detail here, only to point out that there
are still some residual disagreements about how the load of warheads
carried by heavy bombers is supposed to be counted. Note a in Table 2
indicates the U.S. positions and note b indicates the Soviet positions at the
end of 1988. You will notice, in general, that the U.S. position tends to
give a lower count of warheads.
The agreement is to reduce the total number of warheads to 6,000,
however, using the START counting rules. Therefore, the actual ratio of
reductions being proposed is something like a 40 percent reduction, not a
50 percent reduction.
In addition to these differences, there are disagreements about what we
call sublimits. There is an agreement for the total number of ballistic
missiles. The United States wishes to put a sublimit on the ICBMs, but
none on the SLBMs, and since the Soviets have more ICBMs than
SLBMs, naturally that is not something which the Soviets would accept.
The Soviets are taking the "both or neither" position- namely, either to
have a sublimit on SLBMs (on which we have more warheads than the
Soviets) or none at all. So that is still a disagreed item, even though the
bottom line of the number of ballistic missiles is agreed to.
To summarize, we have agreed on two warhead totals, with some
disagreement on counting rules and on sublimits.
In addition to that, however, there are three major disagreements be-
tween the United States and the Soviet Union: the matters of mobile
strategic ballistic missiles, sea-launched cruise missiles (SLCMs), and the
linkage of START to constraints on the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).
Let me briefly comment on each of these.
The current U.S. position is to prohibit mobile ballistic missiles unless
verification problems can be resolved. That is the official phraseology.
The Soviet position is to permit limited numbers of such missiles. Note
that currently the Soviet Union has deployed the mobile SS-25 and SS-24,
while the United States has not fielded any mobile ICBMs. A mobile
version of the small Midgetman missile is being designed, but its approval
for final development remains in doubt. The Air Force is proposing a
mobile version of the MX; again, its final approval is at present in the
political process.
In brief, the arguments against mobile missiles are: (1) their numbers
cannot be verified with the same degree of precision as those of fixed
OCR for page 18
18
CHAllENGES FOR THE 1990s
land-based missiles and (2) the deployment of mobile ICBMs gives the
Soviet Union a strategic advantage, since that country has a larger land
area in which such missiles can operate. In contrast, public opinion would
restrict the operation of mobile ICBMs in the United States to federally
owned land.
An argument for mobile missiles is that they are more survivable
against preemptive attack than are fixed land-based missiles, and they are
therefore more suitable to serve as a deterrent, i.e., as second-strike
weapons. Stability is enhanced if the survivability of the strategic forces
of both nations is improved. So long as the Soviet Union continues to
deploy a much smaller fraction of its strategic forces in submarines and
strategic bombers, overall strategic stability would be enhanced if land-
based mobile missiles were permitted.
The issue could easily be resolved at START by permitting the Soviets
and the United States to retain limited numbers of mobile missiles. Since
the number is small, the verification issue is minimal. The United States
can then unilaterally decide whether deployment of such systems is worth
the cost.
The second open issue is the matter of sea-launched cruise missiles.
Here, in the 1987 Washington summit, Gorbachev and Reagan jointly
declared that these missiles should be brought under a separate limit, but
subsequent negotiations failed to reach agreement on just what is to be
controlled and how such control is to be verified.
The Soviet position is that there shall be 400 nuclear SLCMs and 600
nonnuclear SLCMs. The U.S. position is that, for the time being, there
shall be no numerical limit at all, but that there simply shall be a unilateral
declaration of intent, stating the level of SLCM deployment that is sup-
posed to go forward, but without any specific means of verification.
This matter has been studied extensively. Time does not permit me to
discuss the technical nature of this complex issue. Sea-launched cruise
missiles can be deployed with either conventional or lighter nuclear
warheads and guidance packages of diverse weight. Their range is largely
dependent on how their payload is divided among fuel, guidance, and
weapons. Thus, controls on nuclear strategic SLCMs are inexorably
linked with controls on conventionally armed shorter-range systems. Once
the control regime has been decided upon, there are substantial verifica-
tion issues to ensure compliance.
I would maintain that verification, although difficult and intrusive, can
.
OCR for page 19
19
FROM INF TO NEW AGREEMENTS
be achieved to meet reasonable standards for any of the regimes for
limiting either nuclear or conventionally armed SLCMs.
Verification is, in fact, not the real issue. In actuality internal disagree-
ments within the United States, and possibly also within the Soviet Union,
as to the desired reach of control are impeding agreement. The dominant
issue is the value that each navy places on retaining conventionally armed
long-range SLCMs. The United States has a greater dependence on naval
forces to maintain its supply lines to Europe and other national security
objectives. This mission is greatly assisted by short-range conventional
SLCMs, but long-range SLCMs are less relevant. Again, these matters
should be resolvable.
Once such agreement is reached, the verification issues are, I believe,
tractable, considering the willingness demonstrated in INF to accept in-
tn~sive inspection, about which we will hear more later in this program.
The U.S. position, the 1987 summit declaration notwithstanding, in es-
sence removes consideration of any SLCM limits from the current START
framework. This deferral may be convenient but in my view is very
undesirable. While the number of nuclear-armed SLCMs that would
evolve during the next years is relatively small compared with the total
number of strategic weapons now deployed, the lack of any nuclear
SLCM limit would further compromise the definite ceiling on strategic
delivery systems imposed by START. While the long flight times of
SLCMs make them relatively unsuitable as first-strike weapons (and
therefore the limited deployment would not be very destabilizing to the
strategic balance in itself), they can contribute to the counterforce poten-
tial in connection with other systems.
Moreover, I consider He evolution of nuclear SLCMs to be highly
undesirable, in the long run, both to the interests of arms control and to the
security interests of the United States. The Soviet Union has a much
smaller concentration of important military and industrial facilities near
its coast. Therefore, the U.S. installations, in particular command and
control centers, are much more vulnerable to SLCM attack than those of
the Soviet Union. Therefore, if the SLCM dilemma is not resolved, in the
long run, the United States wild be the loser.
If the SLCM dilemma is not going to destroy the START agreement
entirely, it must either be resolved at START or deferred. I would very
much prefer the former, but I do not minimize the difficulties involved.
That leaves us with the linkage of START to SDI. The Soviet position
OCR for page 20
20
CHAlLENGES FOR THE 1990s
is that the United States should obligate itself to abide by the 1972 ABM
Treaty, "as signed," for a period of 10 years and as a precondition to
Soviet willingness to go forward with the START treaty. After those 10
years, the ABM Treaty should remain in force for an unlimited duration.
The United States has been unwilling, under the Reagan Administration,
to accept the "as signed" formulation, since it would generally be inter-
preted to contradict the legal position promoted by the Reagan Admini-
stration in support of the so-calRed broad Interpretation of the ABM
Treaty, which permits unfettered development and testing of space weap-
ons.
In my view the Soviet position is reasonable and acceptable, and recent
events have reinforced that conclusion. Over the next 10 years, consider-
ing both technical practicalities and the realities of the budget, a sensibly
managed U.S. research and development program on ballistic missile de-
fense can well be carried out within the traditional interpretation of the
ABM Treaty. Moreover, He Congress has been unwilling, and is ex-
pected to remain unwilling, to authorize test programs that would contra-
dict the narrow interpretation.
Most important, the U.S. position, in its raw foam, establishes a basic
violation of the ABM Treaty, which is the only treaty now in force in the
field of strategic arms, as a precondition for agreeing to the START
treaty. This I consider to be patently unreasonable.
Purely arguing as a technician, one can maintain that linkage between
constraints on ballistic missile defense and Me strictures of START is not
required. One can argue and, for instance, Academician Sakharov has
done so on earlier occasions—that the promise of SDI activities beyond
the strictures of the ABM Treaty is so limited and the reductions proposed
for START so moderate that for the next decade any feasible ABM
deployment would make little difference strategically.
While I tend to agree with this conclusion, I would maintain that the
sanctity of a treaty like the ABM Treaty, which has been agreed to by its
signatories to be valid for an unlimited period, should be an overriding
issue, unless there is a truly supreme national security interest.
Even within the traditional interpretation, Mere are many gray areas of
conduct that could give rise to friction and mistrust in the future, unless
the already established consultative mechanisms which provide a forum
to clarify areas where one side questions the conduct of the other are used
OCR for page 21
21
FROM INF TO NEW AGREEMENTS
more effectively. Groups of technically competent delegates from the
two sides should arrive at guidelines for accepted and forbidden conduct
under the ABM Treaty.
In the spirit of glasnost, space activities coming close to the boundaries
defined by the ABM Treaty should be disclosed to a consultative body, in
which the legality of proposed missions can be discussed. While such a
body cannot veto activities in the gray area of conduct, discussions of the
purported space missions can go a long way to preventing future disputes.
While START will be an extraordinarily important agreement, no one
can justly claim that START win substantially, let alone drastically,
change the relationship between the superpowers in itself. The enactment
of START will in no way require a revision of the strategic doctrine now
established by either government, although the target lists will have to be
moderately shortened.
But one should legitimately ask: How deep can reductions in strategic
armaments of the superpowers be before the basic relationship between
the superpowers and the doctrinal base of acquiring and deploying strate-
gic nuclear weapons must be altered? This is an important question.
A partial answer is provided by a recent study carried out at the
incentive of our committee. This study makes it clear that under reduc-
tions by a factor of two these relationships will hardly change at all, and
that, in fact, this conclusion is rather insensitive to the detailed mixture of
forces remaining after the reductions are accomplished. Even reductions
by a factor of four need not change the relationships, although some care
in how to achieve such reductions should be exercised for this conclusion
to remain valid.
Thus, the more moderate reductions contemplated for START win
have little impact, other than in the purely political and symbolic sense.
Financial savings may or may not accrue, depending on separate unilat-
eral decisions on modernization of the strategic forces.
But this remark does in no way make START less important. START
will materially expedite the many adjustments that are evolving between
the superpowers, and it can save money and reduce the demand for
resources, in particular those for nuclear materials.
The unequivocal conclusion of these studies is that there is no technical
need for linkage between pushing for speedy completion of START and
other negotiations that are aimed at alleviating some of the problems
OCR for page 22
22
CHAllENGES FOR THE 1990s
which beset the relationship between the superpowers, particularly those
relating to Westem Europe. In other words, one cannot argue that one
should go slow at START until other negotiations have run their course.
In view of the above, the remaining obstacles to START should be
resolvable in the first, or at most the second, year of the Bush Administra-
tion. While it is understandable that the new national security team of the
Bush Administration wishes to review these issues on its own, there are
those who are promoting a deliberate go-siow attitude. The reasons
expressed for caution generally fan under some combination of four
arguments: (~) the credibility of the nuclear deterrent for the defense of
Europe should not be further undermined, beyond what the INF Treaty
has already done; (2) the current categorization of different reductions
proposed at START does not maximize stability and does not eliminate
the perceived vulnerability of the land-based ICBM force in the United
States; (3) SDI flexibility should not be limited in any way, notwithstand-
ing the ABM Treaty or the limited technical or budgetary expectations for
SDI; or (4) verification measures for START are either inadequate, too
expensive, or both. Let me separately address these four possible objec-
tions to going forward speedily now with START.
Currently, the United States' protection of Western Europe rests on the
doctrine of what is known as extended deterrence. This doctrine is based
on the presumption that the Warsaw Pact nations are superior in conven-
tional arms over NATO and that the extent of that superiority is sufficient
to permit a sudden attack by the Warsaw Pact against NATO by concen-
trating forces on selected points on the European frontier.
It is argued that the credibility of having the nuclear forces controlled
by the United States come to the aid of Europe in case of a threatened
defeat of NATO forces would be undermined by START. Critics claim
that the impact of the INF Treaty and the rhetoric on the total elimination
of nuclear weapons at Reykjavik have already diminished European faith
in the United States' nuclear commitment.
The basic question of redressing the conventional balance will be the
task of the forthcoming Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) talks and
has already been addressed in part by Gorbachev's unilateral move to
withdraw 50,000 Soviet troops from the territory of the Warsaw Pact
allies and to reduce military forces by 500,000 worldwide. Moreover,
Shevardnadze has promised that the Soviet Union will remove additional
nuclear weapons from Europe.
OCR for page 23
23
FROM INF TO NEW AGREEMENTS
However, even the most optimistic arms controlUers would agree that,
due to its fundamental complexity, an acceptable settlement of the Euro-
pean military balance from its current risk of sudden attack to a purely
defensive posture wild take several years to achieve. Paul Doty will
address this matter later in this seminar. Thus, making a settlement of the
European balance a precondition to START would doom this next step in
strategic nuclear force reduction for a long time.
There is no technical or military necessity for holding rapid action on
nuclear strategic force reductions hostage to a settlement of the conven-
tional balance in Europe. The types of calculations such as the ones
referred to above make it clear that the proposed START reductions
should not affect a presidential decision on whether or not to come to the
aid of Europe in case of threatened conventional defeat.
However, the problem remains that the credibility as to whether a
president would or would not make such a fateful decision is not based on
technical or military factors alone, and therefore this argument will not
subside under technical analysis. An irrational fear that any decrease in
nuclear weapons within the homelands of the United States and the Soviet
Union or on European soil would signal a decreased commitment to
extended deterrence applied to Europe should not be permitted to detract
from the urgency of lowering the total worldwide nuclear deployments
from the insanely high levels we have today. In fact, almost all European
leaders have urged the early enactment of a START treaty.
There can be, and always will be, debate about the optimal mixture of
systems to be reduced by each side under an agreement such as START.
Negotiable formulas will always be asymmetrical, because the point of
departure from which the reductions are to be achieved and He geographi-
cal conditions are not symmetrical.
The START proposal on the table in Geneva has many laudable fea-
tures—for instance, the special provision that reduces the large heavy
missiles of the Soviet Union by half. However, as critics are prone to
point out, neither START nor the now-lapsed SALT Treaty remedies the
vulnerability of U.S. land-based ICBMs to presumed preemptive Soviet
attack, nor were START or SALT ever designed to do that.
However, as many analyses, including that of the Scowcroft Commis-
sion on Strategic Forces, have conclusively pointed out, this vulnerability
of He land-based forces cannot be exploited by the Soviet Union, since
neither the U.S. nor the Soviet deterrent rests on the capability of the land-
OCR for page 24
24
CHALI~NGES FOR TlIE 1990s
based forces alone. In fact, only roughly a quarter of U.S. strategic
warheads are carried by its land-based ICBMs. These analyses have
pointed out that the timing sequence that is involved in any preemptive
attack against the strategic forces would make it impossible to attack the
U.S. land-based forces without the attack against either element of strate-
gic forces giving advance warning. In other words, the different legs of
the strategic retaliatory forces are mutually reinforcing, so that an isolated
attack against one of them is not a possibility. The so-called window of
vulnerability is therefore a fiction.
A certain prescription for sabotaging the prospects of any strategic
arms reduction agreement in the near future is to demand that it remedy
the vulnerability of the land-based ICBM forces. This cannot be done by
mutual agreement alone, but only in conjunction with redesigning the
basing of such forces in such a way that a successful attack on these forces
would exhaust a substantial fraction of the forces available to the attacker.
The next argument against proceeding now with START is promoted
by SDI enthusiasts, who, notwithstanding the pessimistic prognostication
for the ballistic missile defense systems deployable in the near future,
insist that the United States should shed its obligations under the ABM
Treaty. Such voices are, however, decreasing in numbers, when faced by
the realities of technology and cost.
Then there is the problem of verification. The INF Treaty has broken
new ground in reaching agreement between the United States and the
Soviet Union, initiating highly intrusive verification measures by which
compliance with the INF Treaty can be policed. We will hear details of
the initial success of implementing the INF agreement in this respect from
General Lajoie. Clearly, the START agreement will build on this impor-
tant precedent.
While disagreements remain, most analysts would agree that verifica-
tion provisions now on the table in Geneva are "adequate" in that they
would reveal violations that have significant military importance. If vio-
lations were discovered, lead time would be available sufficient to re-
spond effectively to such violations.
However, it is generally agreed that a START treaty wild be more
complex to verify than the zero-zero solution of the INF Treaty. It is
clearly less difficult to verify elimination of a whole class of weapons, as
the INF Treaty does, than to count and measure the numbers and perform-
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25
FROM INF TO NEW AGREEM~S
ance of permitted strategic delivery systems under constraints negotiated
under START.
Much has been made of the verification issue in the past, and such
debates win continue. Actually, the record of compliance of nations with
past arms control agreements has been excellent. Interestingly enough,
the record is persuasive that even those treaties such as SALT I, SALT Il.
the Threshold Test Ban Treaty Qimiting the size of nuclear test explo-
sions), and the ABM Treaty have all, in fact, been obeyed throughout by
all parties, with only minor exceptions which have no significant military
importance. This is particularly noteworthy since among those treaties
just cited only the ABM Treaty is actually in force, while the other treaties
have been signed but not ratified. SALT I has lapsed in time, and SALT II
has been officially abrogated by the U.S. Administration. Thus, signed
treaties have in fact been a very powerful force in limiting the conduct of
nations, and each party has elected in its own enlightened self-interest to
comply in all essential respects. Such treaties have limited the more
extreme "worst case projections" that intelUigence analysts can introduce.
Thus, I would conclude, although the matter of verification and pro-
moting compliance is a highly important matter, that those who object to
the enactment of proposed treaties on grounds of inadequate verification
measures are, in fact, generally objecting to the provisions of the treaty
itself, using alleged inadequacy of verification as a cover.
To summarize, with mutual goodwill between the Bush Administration
and the Soviets, a clear path exists to negotiating the remaining obstacles
to START, and I see no validity to any of the go-sIow arguments counsel-
ing against speedy conclusion of that treaty.
It is clear that START is not the end of the road as far as desirable
strategic arms reductions are concerned. Further reductions by at least
another factor of two could be pursued bilaterally win the Soviet Union.
Further reductions beyond that would require involvement with the other
nuclear nations, in particular China, France, and Great Britain. Thus,
concurrent with completing START and completing one further step in
the reduction of strategic arms, arms control should focus on other agenda,
most of which can only be negotiated in a multilateral, rather than a
bilateral, forum.
Enactment of START can and should proceed rapidly. However, the
above discussion makes it clear that truly major reductions of strategic
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26
CHALLENGES FOR THE 1990s
nuclear weapons could not be accomplished unless and until the United
States would find it possible to modify its current doctrine of extended
deterrence. Under that doctrine, U.S. strategic nuclear weapons are to
deter not only aggression with nuclear weapons but also the initiation of
conventional attack, in particular in Westem Europe. If extended deter-
rence is interpreted under current doctrine, this requires that a surviving
retaliatory force should be able to destroy the war-making potential of the
aggressor.
Although there is increasing doubt concerning the credibility of the
United States' nuclear umbrella, it is clear that a conservative interpreta-
tion of U.S. national security interests would not permit shifting from the
current extended deterrence doctrine until threats to European security
from Soviet attack by conventional forces are no longer considered fea-
sible.
Although I agree that, particularly with the recent shift in Soviet
attitudes, the possibility of such aggression is indeed extremely remote, it
remains a technical possibility unless the perceived inferiority of NATO
in conventional awns is redressed. Thus, the ongoing and forthcoming
negotiations aimed at enhancing stability in Europe are of overnding
importance.
The multinational negotiations designed to limit the spread of chemical
weapons will hopefully soon be brought to successful conclusion. The
threat of chemical warfare has recently become a great public concern as a
result of the use of such weapons by Iraq. These talks in the Donation
Conference on Disarmament go beyond the Geneva Convention prohibi-
tion against use of chemical weapons in their aim to prohibit manufacture
and stockpiling as weld. These talks have made enormous progress. In
fact, the Soviets and the United States have provisionally accepted inspec-
tion provisions that would have been unimaginable a few years ago.
The principal threat here is not the use of chemical weapons in a U.S.-
Soviet conflict but the increasing worldwide proliferation of such weap-
ons. Professor Meselson will discuss this matter in detail later.
Similarly, a new focus has been placed on clarifying He situation in
regard to biological weapons. Here the existing Biological Weapons
Convention prohibits the manufacture of such weapons but permits defen-
sive measures and unlimited research. There are no commonly accepted
verification provisions, and the quantities of biological agents that can be
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27
FROM INF TO NEW AGREEMENTS
justified for conducting research or to exercise defensive measures are not
restricted.
While the technology of chemical weapons has not advanced substan-
tially since World War II, biotechnology of possible relevance to biologi-
cal warfare is a very dynamic field, and therefore there is an urgent need
to tighten restrictions in that area. A subcommittee of our group has been
active in this matter.
The issue of nonproliferation of nuclear weapons win again be in
critics focus due to the impending review conference in 1990 and the
definitive review conference in 1995. The threat of the threshold coun-
tries joining the nuclear club is very real. Moreover, nuclear weapons raw
materials have themselves become threats to the environment, indicating
that the real cost of such materials is much higher than has been pre-
sumed. These issues must be faced now. Mr. Keeny will discuss this
later.
The afternoon session of this seminar will be devoted to those forth-
coming arms control moves, other than those dedicated to the central
problem of controlling strategic arms, which I have outlined. In rum,
should those additional arms control moves prove fruitful, then modifying
current strategic doctrine to reduce the role of strategic nuclear weapons
solely to deter a nuclear attack, not nuclear and conventional attacks,
should become feasible. In turn, this reduced role requires a much smaller
number of nuclear weapons.
Thus, while total elimination of nuclear weapons does not appear to be
a feasible goal in Me present international order, we can look forward in
the future to a world win hundreds rather than tens of thousands of
nuclear weapons.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
arms control
