Nuclear Arms: Who Leads?

Was Ronald Reagan right in asserting that the Soviets now enjoy nuclear "superiority" over the U.S.? The debate over who is ahead in the arms race has been raging for years in Washington, and surely in Moscow as well, and by its nature seems endless. Key questions, like the American capacity to retaliate against a massive Soviet missile strike, could be answered definitively only by a war that might destroy the world. But if it cannot be settled, the argument cannot be stilled either, and the President's statement last week raised the issue to a new pitch.

Senator Edward Kennedy, a leading advocate of an immediate nuclear freeze, took particular issue with Reagan's assertion that the Soviets could "absorb" a U.S. retaliatory blow "and hit us again." Said Kennedy: "In the event of a Soviet first strike, the U.S. would still have at least 3,500 warheads to retaliate, enough to make Soviet rubble bounce from Moscow to Vladivostok." President Carter's National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, voiced a common view: "The strategic balance between the U.S. and the Soviet Union is one of ambiguous equivalence--in some respects we are ahead and in some respects they are."

The numbers are indeed ambiguous. The Soviets unquestionably are ahead by some measures. Their strategic nuclear weapons have a total explosive power of 7,868 megatons (one megaton equals 1 million tons of TNT), vs. 3,505 megatons for the U.S.; and the Soviets have 2,537 delivery vehicles (missiles, bombers, launching tubes on submarines) to rain those megatons on an enemy, to America's 1,944. But the U.S. still has a clear, though rapidly shrinking, lead in nuclear warheads: 9,480 to 8,040.

Numbers, however, do not tell the whole story. The U.S. warheads are much more widely dispersed than those of the U.S.S.R., almost 70% of which are housed in land silos that would be prime targets in a nuclear war. Some 5,000 of the U.S. warheads are aboard missile-firing submarines, which the Soviets have never been able to track (the relatively noisy Soviet missile subs, by contrast, are far easier to find). The U.S. has 347 intercontinental bombers to the U.S.S.R.'s 150.

Some American B-52s presumably could scramble into the air during a Soviet attack and heap destruction on the U.S.S.R. Nuclear planners until now have generally concluded that the two nations are in rough parity--meaning, essentially, that each could destroy the other. As the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff put it in a "military posture" statement for the current fiscal year: "A major attack on the United States or its allies would result unquestionably in catastrophic retaliatory damage to the Soviet Union."

Why, then, should the U.S. feel it needs or even wants more nuclear weapons, whoever might be said to have that elusive lead? Because Reagan apparently has in mind a ghastly scenario that is now possible, at least in theory. It goes this way: improvements in missile accuracy now make it conceivable that the U.S.S.R., by launching a mere 200 of its multiple-warhead missiles, could destroy nearly all the 1,052 U.S. land-based missiles in their silos. The U.S. would then not be able to take out the remaining Soviet missiles, especially since submarine-launched missiles are not as accurate as those fired from land. The U.S. could still incinerate the U.S.S.R. from end to end, but the Soviets could and doubtless would do the same to America. So an American President would be left only with the choices of unleashing an unimaginable slaughter or knuckling under to Soviet demands.

Critics retort that this script is, in the words of Paul Warnke, a leading U.S. negotiator for the unratified SALT II treaty, "inherently implausible." Kremlin leaders, they insist, would not launch the first strike, because they could never be sure that they really would destroy most of the land-based American missiles. Even if they did, they dare not run the risk that the U.S. would hit back with a catastrophic strike on Soviet cities in return. Reaganites reply that worry about the Soviets' capacity for nuclear blackmail is in itself a force in world politics, frightening both the Western allies and the leaders of Third World nations. Critics answer back that Reagan only increases those fears by talking openly about Soviet nuclear superiority.

Round and round the arguments go. There is only one certainty: the nuclear arms race has reached a point that no one could have really wanted.

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