Arms control: the untold story.

ARMS CONTROL: THE UNTOLD STORY

A CHILL WIND was blowing as half a dozen women, middle-class gypsies of the British peace movement, sat around the campfire. One duffel-coated figure was slicing mushrooms (toadstools?) into a much-used frying pan. Nearby stood a beat-up, Sixties-style Volkswagen bus. Behind us stretched the chain-link fence of the U.S. Air Force base at Greenham Common. Some times after midnight, one of the peace women told me, 16 cruise missiles would be driven out of the base gate--the "Woad Gate," the women called it--and down the winding roads of Berksshire on a "disperal exercise."

The Americans acquired the Greenham base after World War II, and for years the U.S. Air Force used the long runway for training missions. Then the local residents of Newbury (Dick Francis Country) began to complain about the noise of the warplanes. So the bombers were moved elsewhere, or phased out altogether, and were replaced in 1983 by 96 cruise missiles--flying torpedoes with nuclear warheads, mounted on trucks. They can fly at hedge-hopping heights (evading radar), and strike within a few feet of their target. This means cruise missiles don't even have to be nuclear (the amount of explosive force needed being inversely proportional to accuracy). Conventionally armed cruise missiles, it is now believed, could have been used instead of F-111 bombers in the 1986 bombing raid on Libya, perhaps striking Qaddafi's tent directly.

The local residents don't object to the cruise missiles because they don't make any noise. Not one cruise missile has been so much as test-fired from British (or European) soil. But they can be driven about on their trucks within a hundred-mile radius of the base. They are "road-mobile," in the arms-control jargon. And their strategic value was thought to derive from this mobility. It's not so easy to target a missile that has moved a hundred miles overnight.

But, thought the locals were happy, the peace movement was not, and so the women of Greenham Common began their prolonged encampment outside the chain-link fence. Whenever the missiles are driven outside the gates, the peace-lovers, gathered into an organization called Cruise Watch, board their jalopies and follow the military convoy down the winding roads. When they reach the "dispersal point" the peace eople ring up all their friends and press contacts to announce the missiles' location. The London Guardian, a part of this network, has been known to publish the information.

All Political Views

THE CAMPERS told me that, when the missiles left that night, they would be on their way to a particular spot on Salisbury Plain. I asked them how they could know this, even before the exercise had begun. "How we know is three years' watching it," said one woman, surly and noncommittal, barely civil to this male interloper. (Men aren't allowed in the Greenham Common encampments at all after dark, i was told, and in fact many of the women refuse to talk to men at any time. A "high proportion" are lesbians, I was told a couple of days later by my sister, who joins Cruise Watch from time to time.)

"That land in there is common land," said another woman. "it belongs to the people of Newbury and Britain." I asked them if they weren't worried about helping the Soviets by publicizing the whereabouts of cruise missiles at all times.

They gave me a dark look--suggesting that they had heard this sort of thing before from notepad-carrying emissaries of Patriarchy and Hierarchy, but were willing to be patient and long-suffering one more time. Eventually I was instructed: "American paranoia about Russia being the enemy is ritually and greatly exaggerated."

I ritually noted that in my notepad and then asked about the Gulag.

Another look. This time I worried that one of them might inquire if I were by any chance an acquaintance of the dreaded Richard Perle.

"Don't how about that," was all they would say.

"I've got a Russian peace badge," one woman offered. I looked at her. Impossible to say whether she was naive or deceptive.

Might as well go for broke, I thought. "Is there any Communist Party involvement in all this?"

They reacted quite calmly. "That's entirely up to individual women," I was told. Interesting, because when I had asked for their names, they refused to give them, saying that they should be regarded and described in the collective. But individuality was acceptable, evidently, for those whose "preference" was Communism.

"There's no official Communist Party backing," another said, not at all reassuringly.

"There are people here of all political views."

"We've even got a milkman." (Still hope for the proletariat, perhaps?)

"Any Thatcher supporters?" I asked.

Eyes rolled. Clearly I had gone too far and I would have to watch my tongue if I were to avoid being sent to Coventry.

They were hard at work preparing little clear-plastic bags of "gloop" (flour, water, and food-coloring) to throw at the convoy when it emerged from Woad Gate in the dead of night. Sometimes, they boasted, they stop the convoy completely by lying down in the trucks' path.

"Once one of us shoved a potato down an exhaust pipe," said a leathercapped specimen.

I asked them about the INF treaty, not at that time signed, but pending.

"The ground-launched cruise is useless," said one of the harridans, sounding surprisingly technical and up-to-the-minute in matters strategic. "The whole point is that they are supposed to be dispersed in secret."

"They've had about forty exercises so far and not one has been successful," said another. What she meant was that all the convoys had been successfully shadowed by Cruise Watch.

"Which quite possibly is why the Yanks are not hearbroken about dumping them," said the first.

She was right about that. What she was saying was that the Greenham women had won.

The Peace Brigades

THE FORCES that shaped the INF treaty were complex--constituting what in Washington is called an "interagency process." Obviously, the Pentagon could at some stage have stymied the agreement, but it did not. One reason, as the Greenham ladies suggested, is that land-based mobile missiles are politicially unsustainable in Western democracies as currently constituted. As far back as 1979, when the decision was made by the Carter Administration to deploy intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF)--Chancellor Helmut schmidt had threatened to withhold support for the ratification of the SALT II treaty if the U.S. weapons were not installed--Richard Perle opposed the move because he believed that the political cost would exceed the military benefit of Pershing and cruise missiles.

Recently I spoke to Perle's assistant, Frank J. Gaffney Jr., who quit his job in the Pentagon when the new Secretary of Defense, Frank Carlucci, did not promote him to the Assistant Secretary position vacated last spring by Perle. (Both Perle and Gaffney are now at the American Enterprise Institute.) I asked him if the effective immobilization of our European missiles had influenced American's willingness to sign an INF treaty.

"It was certainly a consideration for some who felt, as Richard [Perle] does, that these systems are not terribly meaningful militarily if they are not mobile," Gaffney said, adding that this view was not "universally shared." Others still feel that, despite the Greenham Common women's best efforts, the weapons do have military value. Others I spoke to, including Angelo Codevilla of the Hoover Institution, pointed out that the civil liberties of the peace brigades will get short shrift in wartime. But by then--by the time we know that we are in wartime and not peacetime--it could be too late. The not-so-mobile missiles could have already been obliterated.

A similar problem has arisen in West Germany. The Bonn Government has "insisted on stringent restrictions upon off-base movements" of our Pershing II missiles, Gaffney said. Richard Perle earlier told me that it was impossible to drive the Pershings so much as a few kilometers down the Autobahn without stirring up numberless West Germans who fear the missiles that defend them more than the missiles aimed at them. Such People, and there are literally millions like them in the West, clearly view the Soviet rulers as Moloch: to be appeased with periodic sacrificial offerings of arms.

I am suggesting that in the INF treaty the U.S. gave up weapons that were in practice of little military value. For their part the Soviets will give up their SS-20 missiles, or at least those of them that they declared. (It is possible, Gaffney said, that the Soviets may have not declared as many as two hundred SS-20s.) But the SS-20 has now been superseded by the SS-25, another mobile missile, and one just as capable of hitting Western European targets as the SS-20. (The difference is that it is more modern and can also hit the United States.)

Stationing U.S. observers outside Soviet factory gates to make sure that SS-25s and not SS-20s emerge is therefore somewhat absurd. It's as if in 1964 General Motors had posted observers outside Ford Motor Co. factory gates, to double-check that only Mustangs, not Edsels, came driving out into the showrooms. I made this point to Arms Control Director Ken Adelman shortly before Mikhail Gorbachev arrived in Washington. (Adelman, too, has now retired to private life.) Adelman replied that Soviet arms-control negotiator Viktor Karpov had told him the same thing, and he didn't expect me and Viktor Karpov to be in agreement. To which I say: It is not safe to assume thta the truth is always the opposite of what the Soviets say.

In any event, for the sake of protocol the Summit was decorous, played according to the unwritten rules of the arms-control game: a whole class of weapons abolished; actual reductions, not merely limits on buildup; we all sign on the dotted line; trust but verify; clink of champagne glasses; adieu from the tarmac.

"Yes, reason triumphed," said Pravda, "and while it is not yet the biggest victory, it has major significance both in political and in psychological terms." After seventy years, the major problem that still besets the Soviet rulers is the problem of legitimacy. For them, then, the Summit and the treaty signing were of real importance. Honor guards and honored status! Partners in the search for peace! The pre-eminent threats to peace were thereby transmutted into the co-guarntors of it, much as if Mafia bosses were invited to don black robes and join the judges on the bench. Major significance in psychological terms indeed!

The Arms-Control Game

THE ARMS-CONTROL game is played as though it were a contest between two sides ("the two superpowers") whose forms of government are irrelevnt to the threat that the missiles accumulated by one side pose to the other. This fiction is tenaciously observed--if it were not, the Soviets wouldn't play; they wouldn't "come to the table," as arms-controllers say. It is the first rule of arms control. There are several other, subordinate laws, or premises. From the first rule, by inexorable logic, the conclusion is derived that the "nuclear threat" resides in the technology itself. Thus the second rule: Nuclear Missiles Pose a Nuclear Threat. And from this emerges yet another axiom that arms-controllers live by: If nuclear weapons are threatening, then the more of them there are, the greater the threat. The third rule therefore reads: The Nuclear Threat Is Proportional to the Number of Nukes. (This would be perfectly true, of course, if nuclear missiles were unstable objects, periodically launching themselves out of their silos without human intervention.)

There are other key axioms: that It Is Threatening to the Other Side to Protect Your Own Side, for example. This axiom is accepted only by the Americans, incidentally. To his credit President Reagan has refused to accept this rule, at least in principle. (In practice he has abided by it.) Strategic Defense challenges the axiom, and that is why so many of our arms-control enthusiasts in the media refer to SDI as "Reagan's Star Wars"--implying only a temporary and idiosyncratic suspension of the rule, which will be restored in full after Reagan has gone.

Another and very important rule is that the Strategic Balance Must Be Stable. This works as follows: It is argued that each of the two (symmetrical, remember) sides does at all times rationally entertain the military objective of knocking out the other side's missiles. If accomplished, that is the equivalent of taking the other side's Queen, compelling surrender. Therefore, the incentive to launch such a first strike must be eliminated. One way of doing so is for both sides to have mobile missiles. They cannot be reliably targeted and are therefore said to be "stabilizing." This, then, is the fifth rule of arms control: Mobile Missiles Contribute to Strategic Stability. (This is one of those key points where the board game diverges from the real world, which turns out to include Greenham women, batty bishops, pro-Soviet college professors, and the like.)

At this stage the game gets a little more complicated, but not much. There are ironclad assumptions about missile accuracy, which lead to further conclusions about stability. The Accuracy Assumption is this: Two warheads are needed to knock out one fixed missile (or silo). Therefore, Single-Warhead Missiles Are Stabilizing (the sixth rule). If both sides had only single-warhead missiles, both sides had the same number of missiles, and one side then launched all its missiles at the other's, half of those targeted missiles would survive, and the side that fired first would lose: its Queen would be undefended, exposed to a missile force still formidable at half strength.

Liberals Love It

BY THE SAME token, multiple-warhead, or "MIRVed," missiles are said to be destabilizing. (Among these are the Soviets' SS-18 and our MX, both with ten warheads perched on top of one missile.) The theory here is that such bunched warheads constitute an inviting target. Assume now that both sides have the same number of ten-warhead missiles. Remember, the warheads from a missile that is fired will spread out and "independently target" ten enemy missiles. Five will hit their targets, on average, and each one that does so will knock out all then warheads on that missile. Therefore, the side that launches a first strike in much a "MIRVed World," as the arms-control players say, can achieve victory, knocking out all the other's missiles by firing only 20 per cent of its missiles. Multiple-Warhead Missiles Are Destabilizing is, therefore, the seventh rule.

Given the foregoing rules then, single-warhead mobile missiles are doubly desirable, in the abstract board-game world of arms control.

Enter the Midgetman, a U.S. missile that is still on the drawing boards. On paper, and on the board game, it looks good--high-tech and up-to-date. The Washington Post loves it:

"The mobile single-warhead landbased Midgetman is meant to replace the obsolete, vulnerable, silo-based Minuteman and perhaps to complement the new multi-warhead MX," the paper editorialized on December 8, when Mr. Gorbachev and entourage were in town. "Small and hard to target, Midgetman could be expected to survive a first strike. Confident that it was available for use later, the American command would not have to fire it off 'on warning'--before it knew what was going on. Hence it fits well a strategy based on deterring nuclear war, and it is a good weapon to firm up strategic stability as arms control takes the raw numbers down.

"The Reagan Administration, however, has equivocated on Midgetman. Under congressional pressure it has been developing this missile . . ."

What's this? A new missile that Congress wants, the Democrats (it turns out) want, the Washington Post wants; but not the Reagan Administration, not the Joint Chiefs, not the Pentagon? Unusual correlation of forces! And what does the Washington Post have to say about our domestic version of the Greenham women? Nothing at all. But imagine the uproar if the Pentagon tried to drive these Midgetmen through small-town America--the demands for environmental-impact statements and so forth. Missiles cruising down Main Street would activate peace groups more than they would scare the Russians.

"The basic premise," Gaffney told me, "is that you can put Midgetmen on military reservations in isolated spaces of the Far West and thereby avoid the problems of Greenham ladies and the like." But this would no doubt be insufficient protection. "If people wish to make things difficult for you," he went on, "they may be willing to go to the inconvenience of hanging out in the desert." Believe me, these people are willing to go to considerable inconvenience--jail, for example--to serve what they call the cause of peace. Military reservations can be patrolled, but they can't be completely isolated.

Firing on 'Star Wars'

IN THE END the Midgetman would almost certinly be confined to fixed installations, and the taxpayers would end up paying enormous sums to achieve a mobility that peace activists would probably thwart. In December the Air Force asked Frank Carlucci to end the $45-billon program, but the Los Angeles Times reported, "Powerful Democrats are mounting an effort to restore the money for the Midgetman in next year's budget, at the expense of . . . the controversial 'Star Wars' missile-defense system." Midgetman is also supported by Harold Brown, Jimmy Carter's Secretary of Defense, by former National Security Advisors Brent Scowcroft and Robert McFarlane, by New York Times columnist Tom Wicker, by Congressman Les Aspin, and by various Democratic defense strategists.

It's difficult to avoid the suspicion that Midgetman is supported by those who relish the prospect that it will gobble up a big slice of the defense budget, leaving only crumbs for SDI. The Administration has in turn argued that mobile missiles should be bargained away at the strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) at Geneva. Our negotiators have used the interesting argument that mobile missiles present "both sides" with verification problems. (The alert reader may have noticed that surrounding mobile missiles there is a still unresolved conflict in the rules of the arms-control game. On the one hand "mobiles" are good, because stabilizing; on the other hand they are bad, because in order to play the arms-control game properly it is necessary to verify that both sides really do have the number of missiles they say they have. And the very feature that makes mobile missiles "stable" also tends to make them invisible, i.e., "unverifiable.")

Hard to See

THE SOVIETS have already deployed two sorts of mobile missiles--the ten-warhead SS-24, which is mounted on a railroad flatcar and can be shunted around the complex maze of the Soviet railroad system, and of course hidden in tunnels; and the aforementioned SS-25, of which about 120 have already been deployed. Manfred Eimer, Assistant Director of Verification and Intelligence at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, told me that the SS-24 mounted on a railroad flatcar is particularly difficult to detect because from satellite photography it is nearly indistinguishable from an ordinary train car.

Frank Gaffney concluded that the "uncertainties about our ability to verify Soviet mobile weapons," and the "problematic quality" of a deployed Midgetman, "argue powerfully for prohibiting the damn things." This has been the Administration's position in START. The Soviets, of course, will be most unlikely to agree to ban a weapon that suits them so nicely, and which they (but not we) have already deployed. This means that there will soon be great pressure on the Administration to bring its negotiating position into line with the Soviets'. This will be phrased: Be good arms-controllers and accept mobiles.

The Administration has been hoping to complete a START agreement in time for President Reagan's visit to Moscow this summer. Ken Adelman believes that the treaty won't be completed in time. "There is so much that is undecided that we're not going to be able to do it in a few months' time," he said. What worries Adelman is that we will instead sign a "framework agreement" in Moscow. (President Ford signed such a document in Vladivostok.) A framework agreement leaves out the details, merely asserting both sides' willingness to accept "in principle" a reduction of (say) 50 per cent in missile forces. From the Soviets' point of view, Adelman explained, such an agreement would be better than a treaty: "We would have to abide by it, because of Congress, but the Soviets wouldn't."

The U.S. has submitted a strategic-arms-reduction proposal at Geneva. Its details are still secret, but it would reduce our strategic forces by about 40 per cent. It is possible that up to half of U.S. nuclear submarines could be dismantled by this radical proposal. Quite a number of people, Democrats included, are counting on there being insufficient time left to complete the agreement during Reagan's term.

But there is one way in which such a treaty could indeed be agreed to and signed. The Soviet side could simply accept the U.S. proposal in toto, no matter what verification provisions it contains, but without the slightest intention of abiding by it. Senator Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming pointed to this possibility when he wrote recently, a propos of the INF treaty: "Ironically, the Soviets' acceptance of more intrusive verification measures may be a direct result of the Reagan Administration's failure to hold them to their existing commitments. If violations go unpunished, there is little reason to fret over accepting stricter verification."

Wallop said that he had asked Administration officials how they intended to confront existing violations. "Their response continues to be that the U.S. will never sign an agreement that is not thoroughly verifiable," Wallop said, pointing out that this is like saying AIDS testing is the solution to the AIDS epidemic. We have already verified that the Soviets have already violated every arms-control treaty they have ever signed, and yet we persist in offering them new ones to sign. On past performance, they could, therefore, sign the new treaty without so much as changing a comma in it. Congress would then enact it (on us), the Democrats would enforce it (on us), the media would play watchdog (on us). And the Soviets could completely ignore those parts of the treaty they didn't like. (If we then cried "Violation!" the Soviets would deny it and the New York Times would, if the past is any guide, report an "alleged violation," and so on.)

In the Winter 1988 Policy Review Ken Adelman wrote that his "greatest disappointment" while in office was: "We didn't do anything, really, about Soviet cheating. . . . We never really found anything much to do about Soviet cheating. That's the sad truth. Those outside government may well wonder why, year after year, we reported a pattern of Soviet violations and did nothing about it. We hit the Soviets with prospects of new agreements, and that's about all. That's not how normal folks act when cheated by a merchant, for instance; thenm we sue, get the Better Business Bureau stirred up . . . We tried--oh how we tried--to come up with effective counter-measures, but there didn't seem to be any."

It's high time that the U.S. withdrew from the arms-control ritual and returned to the real world--beginning with early deployment of those parts of Strategic Defense that are currently feasible. The board game has gone on for long enough.