The Vulnerability Factor

By Strobe Talbott

Perception and reality in the debate over whether U.S. missiles are in danger

The debate over where to base the MX missile system has consumed such vast amounts of presidential attention and public print that citizens can be forgiven for some confusion over why President Reagan--and Jimmy Carter before him--decided that the U.S. needs an MX system in the first place. There is a one-word answer: vulnerability. In the opinion of many U.S. arms experts, Minuteman, the principal American intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) since the mid-1960s, has become an exposed target--and therefore conceivably a temptation--for a pre-emptive Soviet attack. And if the 1,000 Minuteman missiles are no longer safe, the nation may not be either. In the jargon of nuclear deterrence, Minuteman is believed to have lost the vital requirement of survivability, meaning the ability to survive, and retaliate against, a Soviet first strike. Instead, Minuteman has acquired, in the eyes of its proprietors, a reputation for vulnerability.

Many military and political experts, including all those in key posts in the Reagan Administration, have come to accept vulnerability as an unhappy fact of life, fully justifying MX's price tag of as much as $100 billion. Also, concern over the Minuteman's jeopardy is at the core of a much more general anxiety: that U.S. defenses across the board have become vulnerable.

Yet just how vulnerable is Minuteman? Vulnerability has not been established by experience. If it had been, the U.S. would now largely be a radioactive wasteland or a Soviet colony or both. Rather, vulnerability is a hypothetical condition. It arises in worst-case scenarios about what might happen--in the guidance systems of rockets, in outer space over the North Pole, in underground silos beneath the incinerated landscapes of the American Northwest and in the minds of men in Washington and Moscow--during the first half-hour of World War III. While highly conjectural, the problem of determining vulnerability must still be taken very seriously: avoiding World War III depends on the superpowers feeling secure, or at least feeling equally insecure, in the face of each other's nuclear arsenals. The U.S. now feels insecure--more insecure than it feels the Soviets feel.

The main reason for that shift in the balance of insecurity is that Soviet rockets are becoming larger and more numerous, and the warheads they carry are growing in number, destructive power and accuracy. Since 1975, when the U.S. began its last major effort to protect the Minuteman missiles by "hardening" their silos with reinforced concrete, the Soviets have deployed 750 new ICBMS. In many cases, older, single-warhead rockets were replaced with the latest multiple-warhead versions, or MIRVs (Multiple Independently Targetable Re-Entry Vehicles). As a result, the Soviets have 1,398 ICBMs, of which 820 have multiple warheads. These MIRVed missiles are considerably larger and more powerful than those of the U.S. and thus can carry more MIRVS (ten on the biggest Soviet rocket, vs. three on Minuteman). Altogether, the Soviet Union now has deployed nearly 5,000 warheads on its ICBMS and is expected to have at least 6,000 within five years. By comparison, 550 of the 1,000 Minutemen are MIRVed, for a total of 2,100 warheads. (The U.S. also has 52 older, single-warhead Titan rockets.)

The Soviets generally build more "yield," or destructive power, into their warheads (the equivalent of 800,000 tons of TNT, vs. 300,000 tons per American MIRV). Also, the most modern Soviet ICBMs have been more frequently tested than Minuteman (20 to 25 tests a year, vs. fewer than ten). Thus, the U.S.S.R. has come from behind in the accuracy race and has now matched the U.S. Air Force analysts say that the Soviets could drop a warhead into the five-acre courtyard in the center of the Pentagon--or close enough to a hardened Minuteman silo to destroy it.

The combination of high yield and high accuracy makes a warhead a "silo buster" or "hard target killer." Pentagon analysts and advocates of a U.S. defense buildup have for years been making a distressing point: the Soviets are very close to having enough hard target killers not only to destroy 90% to 100% of American ICBMS but also to keep sufficient additional warheads in reserve to discourage the U.S. from retaliating with its bombers and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). "The Soviets have had as their goal to put our Minuteman at risk by the early '80s," says Air Force Brigadier General James P. McCarthy, a top officer for the MX program. "A two-on-one attack [two Soviet warheads aimed at every Minuteman silo] would drop our ICBMs' survival rate to a very small portion, certainly less than 10%. There's no question in our minds about their capability to do this."

There is, however, considerable question among many scientists and defense experts about whether Soviet missiles are as accurate and reliable (and whether, therefore, Minuteman is as vulnerable) as the Pentagon claims. Critics such as M.I.T. Professor Kosta Tsipis and former CIA Official Herbert Scoville Jr. have argued a version of Murphy's Law that was propounded by the great Prussian general and military theoretician Karl von Clausewitz more than 150 years ago: the differences between a firing range and a battlefield make it inevitable that there will be failures on the part of both men and machines in combat. "The frictions of war," Clausewitz called them.

Soviet ICBMs are tested from west to east. They are fired from launchers at Plesetsk near the White Sea and Tyuratam near the Aral Sea at targets in the north Pacific and on the Kamchatka peninsula in Siberia. In a war, however, the missiles would follow a very different trajectory, over the North Pole, and would therefore be subject to different geodetic, gravitational and meteorological forces, known as bias, from those that prevail on the test range. The result, say the critics, would be bias errors in the accuracy of warheads fired against the U.S.

The Air Force replies that both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. have virtually eliminated the problem of bias. Among other things, the Soviets can launch satellites over the pole into orbit, measure the geodetic forces, and program their missiles accordingly. That is exactly what the U.S. does to complement its own east-to-west ICBM test shots from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California to Kwajalein atoll in the Marshall Islands. Furthermore, says Harold Brown, Defense Secretary in the Carter Administration and now visiting professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington: "Since Soviet warheads are considerably more destructive than ours, they are less sensitive to bias. They can withstand a bigger error in accuracy."

Will some future Soviet Politburo be as confident about the potency of its strategic rocket forces as the American worst-case planners are? If so, and if those leaders decided to play what Brown has called "the cosmic roll of the dice" by attempting a pre-emptive strike, they would be mounting far and away the most massive and complicated technical operation in history without benefit of a dry run. Even if everything went according to plan, how could the gamblers in the Kremlin be sure the U.S. would not "launch on warning," meaning fire a retaliatory strike as soon as U.S. radar saw the attack coming? The short answer, on which most experts agree, is that the Soviets could not be certain. That would be part of their gamble. The President would have only about 20 minutes to make the awful decision to launch on warning. He would have to rely on the absolute fidelity of U.S. warning devices and the instant wisdom of his advisers. Concludes Brown: "Launch on warning is a dangerous policy because it means going to war on the basis of a computer."

Yet the land-based Minuteman force constitutes only one leg of the nation's so-called strategic triad. In addition, there are fleets of nuclear-armed bombers and submarines that, between them, carry more than 8,000 warheads, vs. only 1,600 for Soviet bombers and submarines. So why not plan on absorbing a Soviet first strike against Minuteman and hitting back with the two other legs of the triad? Brown thinks that would be a mistake too: "If we abandon the first leg of our triad as soon as it gets into trouble, we'd be encouraging the Soviets to go to work on making the second leg vulnerable, and then the third."

James Schlesinger, Defense Secretary in the Nixon Administration and now a senior adviser to the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown University, argues that a survivable land-based missile force is essential if the U.S. is going to deter a Soviet attack against Western Europe. Until Schlesinger came to the Pentagon, American strategic doctrine rested on mutual assured destruction, a concept with the deliberately ironic acronym MAD; the Soviets knew that no matter how swift and successful their strike against the U.S., it would provoke devastating retribution. The superpowers, in short, had an implicit suicide pact in the event that either attacked the other. But as Schlesinger explains, World War III is not likely to begin with a "nuclear Pearl Harbor," a Soviet surprise attack directly against the U.S. The far greater danger is "miscalculation and escalation in Western Europe."

For decades, the U.S. has pledged that it would respond to aggression against its NATO allies as firmly as it would defend the North American continent. But for that doctrine of "extended deterrence" to work, both the Soviets and the American allies must believe the U.S. would use its strategic nuclear weapons to punish the Soviets for a blitzkrieg they might carry out in Europe using widely acknowledged Soviet superiority in conventional forces. The most important American weapons in such a contingency would be ICBMs, since they alone have what Schlesinger calls "the necessary accuracy, selectivity, control and quick response" to strike against Soviet military targets, particularly Soviet missile silos. Extended deterrence breaks down if American ICBMS are even hypothetically vulnerable to a pre-emptive Soviet strike. The U.S. would then be reduced to defending Europe by threatening to attack Soviet cities with its surviving bombers and submarines, thus provoking a Soviet attack against American cities. That threat is not credible, says Schlesinger, for neither the Soviets nor the Western Europeans are likely to believe that the U.S. would sacrifice its civilian population for the sake of Europe.

These scenarios have practical political significance even if, as everyone hopes, they are never enacted. "Nuclear forces are a backdrop against which other forces and diplomacy operate," says Schlesinger. "If other countries, particularly our allies, see the Soviets having the probable capacity to inflict damage on our ICBM fields--and we lack the capacity to do the same to them--then perceptions will have been altered in such a way that the political will of both the U.S. and our allies may be less firm. We may be more willing to yield to pressure."

Ironically, however, American experts have contributed to the alarm, both at home and abroad, over the ICBM imbalance by loudly advertising Minuteman vulnerability. As Schlesinger concedes, "To an extent, this is a self-inflicted wound. It would be better to go quietly about the business of fixing the trouble. But one of the penalties of a democracy is that we have to call public attention to the problem in order to get the necessary remedies."

The Soviet perception of the Minuteman debate, at least as expressed by official spokesmen in a series of interviews in Moscow, is a mixture of righteous indignation, countercharges and carefully reasoned assurances. "These wild scenarios by American armchair strategists breed suspicion and paranoia and serve to justify the arms race," says Georgi Arbatov, the director of the Institute for the Study of the U.S.A. and Canada and a member of the Communist Party Central Committee.

A retired general on the staff of Arbatov's institute, Mikhail Milshtein, rejects the very concepts of a first strike and a limited nuclear war: "It is inconceivable to me that any government would wait to see if the incoming warheads were only aimed at silos or were part of an all-out attack. Our government could never exclude the possibility of launch on warning. Besides, the notion of a surgical strike against land-based missiles is a fantasy. One of the more popular scenarios in the U.S. stipulates that to knock out Minuteman, we would have to use 2,000 megatons [the equivalent of 2 billion tons of TNT]. That's about ten tons for every inhabitant of the U.S. That would not be a 'surgical strike' at all. It would be all-out war."

Adds another retired general, Svyatoslav Kozlov: "In a nuclear war, there can't be a gentlemen's agreement whereby one side says to the other, 'O.K., you hit only our rockets, and we won't touch anything but military targets on your side.' When the war actually starts, it will proceed by its own momentum. If one side is attacked, it'll hit back with everything it has." In effect, these Soviet spokesmen are re-endorsing the concept of mutual assured destruction that Schlesinger, Brown and others have abandoned.

The Soviets angrily deny the accusation of American hard-liners that the U.S.S.R. has its own doctrine of "fightable and winnable" nuclear war. Says Alexander Bovin, an Izvestia commentator and party official: "When a general talks to his troops, he tells them, 'We can win!' That is natural and unavoidable. But when civilian political figures talk about being able to fight and win a nuclear war, that's when we should all worry. Our politicians don't. Yours do."

Asked whom he had in mind, Bovin pulled from a pile of papers on his desk the summer 1980 issue of Foreign Policy magazine. He pointed to an article co-authored by Colin Gray titled, straightforwardly, "Victory Is Possible." Gray, a conservative nuclear strategist from the Hudson Institute, is now a consultant to the State Department. In the article he theorizes that, with greatly increased offensive and defensive programs, the U.S. could hold casualties in a war to 20 million--"a level compatible with national survival and recovery."

Arbatov tries to turn the tables on the U.S. in the debate about vulnerability: "If we're going to talk about that whole issue, then you should recognize our problem as well. We're under a greater threat because a larger part of our strategic arsenal is land-based than yours."

In fact, however, the Soviet Union's high-yield, high-accuracy, land-based multiple warheads outnumber those of the U.S. by a ratio of more than 3 to 1. But the U.S. does indeed have more strategic weapons of all kinds than the Soviets, including more of the less accurate submarine-based missiles and more of the slower airborne variety. Also, the U.S. is on its way, as it should be, to matching the Soviets' capability of hitting military targets quickly. Whatever the outcome of the Administration's current dithering over where and how to base the MX, the U.S. is committed to building a more powerful successor to the Minuteman and to developing the Trident submarine program into a hard target killer as well.

Retired Lieut. General Edward Rowny, who was sworn in two weeks ago as President Reagan's chief negotiator for arms control, thinks that Soviet public statements disavowing limited nuclear war disguise secret preparations to wage one if, in the Kremlin's view, a crisis requires it. "The Soviets have sufficient forces to attack and destroy our ICBMs," says Rowny. "I have no doubt that we could still launch a second strike with our other missiles and wreak untold damage on the Soviet Union, causing more than 100 million casualties. But the fundamental problem is that the Soviets don't believe that. They believe nuclear weapons are there to be used. They believe their civil defense system would allow them to get away with 'only' about 13 million casualties--5% of their population--fewer than they suffered in World War II. So we must think about nuclear exchanges not because they will ever occur necessarily but because as long as the Soviets believe they're possible, they will have the power of blackmail over us."

Even some fellow hard-liners regard Rowny's view as excessively demonological. But the fact remains that the Soviets have been building up their ICBMs beyond any reasonable requirement for an exclusively defensive force. Thus the Soviets have made it more difficult for the U.S. to deal with the most vexing conundrum of the nuclear age: preserving the delicate balance of uncertainty and confidence on which deterrence depends. Each side must be uncertain about its ability to get away with a first strike yet confident of its ability to launch a retaliatory strike.

The Soviets have also disturbed the complicated mixture of objective and subjective factors that make up strategic stability. The objective factors are totals of launchers and warheads, plus estimates of accuracy and equivalent megatonnage. The subjective factors are the doomsday speculations about what might actually happen in a nuclear war, plus perceptions and self-perceptions of vulnerability. The subjective factors depend in large measure on the objective ones. As General McCarthy says, "In my job, I can't judge motivations and intentions on the other side. I can only judge capability. Anyway, motivations and intentions can change rapidly, while capabilities change slowly and painfully."

Generals McCarthy and Rowny are less likely to be reassured by Generals Milshtein and Kozlov these days because the Soviets have skewed the arithmetic of deterrence by dint of the sheer, simple and very large numbers on their side. In so doing, the U.S.S.R. has left the U.S. with no choice but to balance the strategic equation by making additions to its own arsenal. --By Strobe Talbott

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.