Neocons Love Nukes
By Steve Hynd
President Obama has won some praise from most arms control experts for his tentative deal with Russia's President Medvedev to replace the expiring Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with a new treaty that could see both nations' nuclear arsenals cut by about 500 warheads each. It's something that should have been done earlier, but the Bush administration - with it's neocon hatred of anything called a "treaty" - had dragged its feet and refused to talk.
The treaty that this deal replaces reduced US and Russian arsenals by 80%. The proposed next reduction represents about 25% of Russia and America's remaining stockpiles of nuclear warheads, which together still amount for 95% of all the nuclear weapons on the planet. The inescapable logic is that it's always going to be difficult-to-impossible to ask small nations to give up their own weapons, or even civilian programs, while the two nuclear superpowers have such vast stockpiles themselves. Not to mention that reductions make it significantly harder for humanity to be wiped from the face of the earth.
But that's not something the neocons are interested in. Witness Keith B. Payne in the pages of the WSJ today.
In the first place, locking in specific reductions for U.S. forces prior to the conclusion of the ongoing Nuclear Posture Review is putting the cart before the horse. The Obama administration's team at the Pentagon is currently examining U.S. strategic force requirements. Before specific limits are set on U.S. forces, it should complete the review. Strategic requirements should drive force numbers; arms-control numbers should not dictate strategy.
Second, the new agreement not only calls for reductions in the number of nuclear warheads (to between 1,500 and 1,675), but for cuts in the number of strategic force launchers. Under the 1991 START I Treaty, each side was limited to 1,600 launchers. Yesterday's agreement calls for each side to be limited to between 500 and 1,100 launchers each.
According to open Russian sources, it was Russia that pushed for the lower limit of 500 launchers in negotiations. In the weeks leading up to this summit, it also has been openly stated that Moscow would like the number of deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched missiles (SLBMS), and strategic bombers to be reduced "several times" below the current limit of 1,600. Moving toward very low numbers of launchers is a smart position for Russia, but not for the U.S.
Why? Because the number of deployed Russian strategic ICBMs, SLBMs, and bombers will drop dramatically simply as a result of their aging. In other words, a large number of Russian launchers will be removed from service with or without a new arms-control agreement.
I'd think that if the strategy is to avoid worldwide nuclear holocaust then arms control numbers are a perfect metric to use to drive that strategy. Payne obviously doesn't care about sane strategy so much as that the U.S. shouldn't give something away for nothing. It's a ridiculous posture to take. So what if the Russians end up with a treaty to do what they were going to have to do anyway? We all end up safer by both sides' reductions and their agreement that such reductions are a good thing.
But Payne, the leader of the neoconservative National Institute for Public Policy which has been a staunch cheerleader for Bush's missile defense plans and replacement warhead program, is more interested in might makes right than in the safety of humanity. He argued in 1980 that the "United States must possess the ability to wage nuclear war rationally" and that "the West needs to devise ways in which it can employ strategic nuclear forces coercively, while minimizing the potentially paralyzing impact of self-deterrence." Payne also served on Donald Rumsfield's notorious Missile Commission which in 1998 said Iran was only five years away from a nuclear missile - the same gap as many analysts believe still exists today.
For the neocons, exemplified by Payne and heartily endorsed by his fellow neocons at the Heritage Foundation, the notion that America must stay militarily supreme in order to be a Hegemony still rules supreme. Nukes enable that and so neocons love nukes. But the rest of us should be aware of their underlying motive in their professed skepticism about Obama's nuclear treaty.






















