In 1972 the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, also known as the ABM Treaty. Under the terms of the Treaty neither country could build a defense against enemy missiles to defend the entire territory of their country. Defenses were allowed for Washington, D.C. and Moscow, and a single ICBM site within each country. The Soviet Union built a system to the terms of the treaty and beyond. The United States never did. Today, because of this treaty, it is against U.S. law to build a missile defense for the Untied States.
In this section we discuss the legal status of the treaty, the obstacles it presents to the building of a national missile defense, and why the treaty must either be withdrawn from or not recognized, if the United States is to defend itself from enemy missile attack.
Understanding the Policy Issues
In the aftermath of the unanimous report of the bi-partisan Rumsfeld Commission (The Report of the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, United States House of Representatives, Donald Rumsfeld, Chairman, July 15, 1998), and with growing public awareness of the nuclear threat to the United States, Defense Secretary William Cohen announced in January 1999 that the Clinton Administration was changing its policy on missile defense. Cohen acknowledged the growing ballistic missile threat to the United States and said the White House would ask Congress for $6.6 billion toward the deployment of a limited defense by 2005. Most important, the administration also stated its willingness to alter its policy, even if that meant changing the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972.
That the United States should have a missile defense in the face of a growing Chinese and North Korean arms build-up is obvious. In the event of a crisis, even if Chinese or North Korean missiles were not launched against targets on U.S. soil, American troops in Asia and our allies in the Pacific—Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea—need protection, too. A change in policy on the ABM Treaty, long-considered sacrosanct among arms-controllers in the United States, is perfectly sensible and long overdue by the Clinton Administration.
In an effort to prod the Clinton Administration along on missile defense, Congress proposed the National Defense Act of 1999. The law says that it is the policy of the United States government that a missile defense will be deployed as soon as it is “technologically feasible.” The bill passed in June 1999 with overwhelming bipartisan support. President Clinton signed it into law in July.
Alas, that was not the end of the story. The evidence so far suggests that the Clinton administration is not committed to the new policy, but remains enthralled with the old one embodied in the ABM Treaty. In fact, during the hearings on the National Defense Act, the State Department issued advisories to American diplomatic missions abroad to assure them that the Act does not mean the United States will ever deploy a missile defense, despite the clear language in the law. Presumably, this was to assure our allies that America will remain vulnerable in the wake of Chinese and Russian protests of our new pro-missile defense policy. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and National Security Advisor Sandy Berger testified before Congress that the Administration believes the ABM Treaty is “still the cornerstone of our strategic relationship with Russia.” This is the line they deliver to the press to this day. But the fact remains that no national missile defense can be deployed as long as the United States recognizes the ABM Treaty. It is worth understanding what the ABM Treaty is all about.
Understanding the ABM Treaty
The ABM Treaty’s language is very clear in its prohibition against building a national missile defense. This is encapsulated in Article I, Section 2:
Each Party undertakes not to deploy ABM systems for a defense of the territory of its country and not to provide a base for such a defense, and not to deploy ABM systems for defense of an individual region except as provided for in Article III of this Treaty.
The treaty allows each side to build a defense for an individual region that contains an offensive nuclear force. That guarantees each country could destroy the other in the event of nuclear conflict—-the principle of mutually assured destruction (MAD) rears its head yet again. In other words, instead of defending the citizens of the United States, we would defend missiles that could destroy the Soviet Union. The United States abandoned such a defense in the 1970s.
The premise of a national security strategy based on mutually assured destruction is that nuclear war cannot be won and therefore should not be fought. President Kennedy’s Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, explained that America’s security comes from a willingness to “destroy the attacker as a 20th Century nation,” no matter what the cost to the United States, and not from any “ability to partially limit damage to ourselves.” (1) For most of the nuclear age, this way of thinking has guided U.S. policymakers.
When the Nixon Administration negotiated the ABM Treaty, it did so based on the logic that since a nuclear war could not be won, the greatest security would come from a ban on any defense that would make nuclear war even possible. If one country could develop a defense to thwart enough incoming missiles, nuclear war would become an option in the event of confrontation. This would lead to an arms race to build a nuclear arsenal that could overwhelm the other side, and a race to come up with ever more advanced anti-missile systems. At some point, one side would believe that a preemptive nuclear attack would be the only option, lest the other side develop a decisive advantage. Better to simply ban anti-missile systems and work toward arms reductions that limited the potential, but mutually assured, destruction. Or so the thinking went.
Although this position made some sense-it would be difficult to see how the United States or the Soviet Union could have survived a massive nuclear exchange in 1972-it fails to take into account several obvious facts. The first is that nuclear war, like any war, would be fought in a rational way with strategic objectives that each country would try to meet. McNamara’s pronouncement notwithstanding, it seems likely that the first priority of a U.S. president would be the safety of the American people. Although movies and books have depicted a nuclear exchange with thousands of ballistic missiles passing one another in the sky, it is highly unlikely that such an exchange would ever occur.
The Illogic of Mutually Assured Destruction and the ABM Treaty
Although nuclear war is unthinkable, it is worth considering how nuclear war would be fought.
The United States, like the Soviet Union, has three components in its nuclear arsenal:
- Land-based Forces: Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles and Ground-launched Cruise Missiles from bases in the United States, etc.
- Sea-based Forces: Sea-launched Ballistic Missiles and Sea-launched Cruise Missiles from submarines and missile cruisers.
- Air-Based: Air-launched Cruise Missiles from bombers.
The details of where these missiles are based and where they would go in the event of war is, of course, classified. In general, it is thought that the first component-the U.S. land-based nuclear force-targets four types of Soviet, now Russian targets: the strategic nuclear force, military forces, political and military leadership, and economic and industrial centers. (2) The second and third components-the nuclear submarines and bombers-are to be held, in the event of a preemptive Russian attack upon our ICBM force, to launch a devastating nuclear counterattack upon Russian population centers. In other words, in order to ensure mutually assured destruction, it is not necessary to launch the massive U.S. ICBM force. But this begs the question of whether the United States would “launch on warning” of a Russian attack, or would it absorb the nuclear strike and then determine its response?
Launching America’s ICBM force on warning of a Russian attack is illogical, in a way. If the U.S. is targeting Russia’s nuclear force, it would most likely hit empty silos. In the event of war, Russia’s political and military leadership would most likely have been moved to safety so as to avoid loss of command and control. Striking at Russia’s economic and industrial centers would have a limited deterrent effect, as we learned from NATO’s engagement in Yugoslavia. And Russian submarines, like U.S. submarines, could still launch their nuclear payloads to counterattack our counterattack. Here is a more plausible scenario, absent a national missile defense. The United States would “absorb” the nuclear strike. Afterwards, the president (or surviving political leadership) would ascertain what command-and-control capabilities the U.S. retained, what kind of losses were taken by our nuclear and conventional forces, as well as civilian populations, and what could be reasonably done to deter further attack. It is possible that the U.S. would use its submarine and bomber force to launch a counterattack. This would fulfill the premise of mutually assured destruction. It would almost certainly guarantee additional and lethal Russian attacks.
But what if a president, in order to avoid the complete annihilation of the United States and her people from a second or third strike, came to terms with the Russian leader who launched the attack? What rational leader wouldn’t consider such an option, given that the full extent of such a horror has never been witnessed in history? The greatest loss America has ever suffered was during the Civil War, where both sides suffered some 600,000 casualties. But in a nuclear war, the president would face the deaths of millions of U.S. citizens. Is such an option out of the question, given the value placed on human life in, and relatively bloodless military engagements of, America today?
Hopefully, a United States president will never face such a decision. Sentiment notwithstanding, a U.S. nuclear war fighting strategy requires an affirmative decision to fight back. There is no “trip wire” that will automatically cause a U.S. president to launch our nuclear arsenal. A rational assessment will be made as to how best to respond. For nuclear strategists, that is the greatest weakness in America’s war-fighting preparation. Another flaw in the MAD mentality is that even though the United States may have believed nuclear war to be unwinnable, the Soviet Union seems to have taken the opposite view. The Soviets engaged in diplomacy-via the ABM Treaty and other means-in order to gain a strategic advantage.(3) While the United States stayed true to the spirit and letter of the ABM Treaty, there is ample evidence, much of it new, that the Soviets did not.
A recent body of literature suggests that the Soviet Union actively engaged in ABM research and deployment in violation of the ABM Treaty. As retired CIA analyst William Lee points out, even when the ABM Treaty was signed, National Intelligence Estimates from the 1960s showed that Soviet “Hen House” radars were capable of battle management. That meant they gave the Soviet SA-5 surface-to-air missile the ability to track incoming American missiles and predict where they would go—giving them anti-ballistic missile capability.(4) After the ABM Treaty was signed, the Soviets enhanced this system by building their large phased-array radars (LPARs). The Russians claimed this was simply a defense for their 100 ICBMs based in and around Moscow, hence allowable under the ABM Treaty’s 1974 Protocol. But it was more than that. LPARs are a national, if limited, missile defense system built in violation of the treaty.(5)
Other evidence suggests that the Soviets went beyond building an ABM system. In his 1976 study of Soviet civil defense, Leon Goure described a Soviet strategic view that stands in stark contrast to the spirit of the ABM Treaty and the MAD doctrine. Evidently, the Soviets believed that nuclear war was possible—and winnable. It organized its military and civil administration to maximize its chances of winning, should war ever occur. To that end, the Soviets built massive underground facilities, inherited by Russians today, where military leaders and political elites could survive nuclear attack. They made extensive plans to evacuate civilians, and stockpiled strategic foodstuffs. Goure concluded that the Soviets rejected the idea of mutually assured destruction as inherently unstable. Instead, they worked toward strategic superiority.(6)
Throughout the 1970s the Soviet Union, more extensively than the U.S., engaged in advanced research on anti-ballistic missile systems, especially space-based systems. By 1976 the Soviets had an extensive effort underway at OKB Kometa, the industrial design facility that produced the first Russian anti-satellite system back in the 1960s.(7) After condemning President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983, Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov stepped up work on the Soviet space-based ABM program, at the same time initiating a diplomatic mission to ban such weapons and announcing a unilateral moratorium on orbiting any type of anti-satellite interceptor.(8)
The casual observer might dismiss such Cold War Soviet behavior as unrepresentative of the new Russia. Yet despite a faltering economy and ostensible efforts to liberalize politically, Russia possesses and continues to modernize a massive arsenal of ICBMs, sea-launched ballistic missiles, and sea-launched cruise missiles. And on a number of occasions, the Russian military establishment has boasted publicly of its ability to beat any U.S. missile defense.
Looking at Russia today, William Lee points out, “The Russians realize strategic nuclear forces are the only military counter to the U.S. that they can afford. Like the Soviets, the Russians understand that the side with both strategic offensive and defensive forces has a great advantage over the side relying solely on offensive weapons. They also understand that advantage multiplies as offensive arsenals are reduced by START agreements. That’s why the Soviets built strategic defenses to the limits of the ABM Treaty and beyond.”
What is unclear for today is whether at the end of the Cold War the Russians abandoned the earlier Soviet strategy of nuclear superiority or whether they adopted the same policy of mutually assured destruction held by the United States. The Russians continue to build huge, deep underground nuclear command and control facilities near the Ural mountains, suggesting continuity with Soviet doctrine. In any case, such uncertainty calls into question a U.S. nuclear deterrence strategy based on mutually assured destruction. MAD’s shortcomings are even more obvious with regard to China, North Korea, and the rogue states.
References
- Quoted in Angelo Codevilla, While Others Build: A Commonsense Approach to the Strategic Defense Initiative, (New York: The Free Press), 1988, p. 27.
- See also Lynn Eden, and Steven Miller, Nuclear Arguments: Understanding the Strategic Nuclear Arms and Arms Control Debates, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 1989.
- For a discussion of such thinking see Paul Seabury, and Angelo Codevilla, War: Ends and Means, (New York: Basic Books), 1989, pp. 186-189.
- William Lee, The ABM Treaty Charade: A Study in Elite Illusion and Delusion, (Washington, D.C.: Council for Social and Economic Studies), 1997.
- See also Jeanette Voas, “Soviet Attitudes towards Ballistic Missile Defence and the ABM Treaty,” Adelphi Papers 255, Winter 1990, The International Institute for Strategic Studies, London.
- Leon Goure, War Survival in Soviet Strategy: USSR Civil Defense, (Miami: Center for Advanced International Studies), 1976.
- Steven J. Zaloga, “Red Star Wars,” Janes Intelligence Review, May 1997, p. 206.
- Ibid.
