NUCLEAR DETERRENCE : Why separate rules for the U.S.?

India has officially published its nuclear strategy, which it describes as that of minimum credible deterrence. This, in theory, is a reasonable policy, if any nuclear-weapons doctrine can be said to be reasonable. However, the details of the Indian policy, as set forth by India's National Security Council last August 17, merit the opposition Congress party's criticism that India is inviting escalation of the nuclear arms race with Pakistan.

Neither country can afford this, and neither needs it. The communal and territorial quarrels between them are unworthy of two intelligent nations. With respect to its Chinese neighbor, whose future is distinctly unpredictable, India has a more plausible rationale for a nuclear deterrent.

India's nuclear force will consist of submarine-launched missiles; air- launched missiles from low-level penetration aircraft; and mobile ground- launched ballistic missiles. Its employment will be governed by an "evolving concept tied to the strategic environment" and to technological developments. The prime minister "or his designated successor" will control it. (How the successor is to be designated is a security secret.)

Such a force sets India's threshold of "minimum credible" deterrence pretty high. This sea-land-air deterrent sounds like a miniature-or not-so miniature-nuclear triad resembling that of the United States. America's nuclear force, however, was not developed for minimum deterrence, but for second-strike deterrence, a vastly different thing. ("We can strike you, but you will be afraid to strike back at us because of the further horrors we can commit against you.")

India's program was made public in response to a request from the U.S. government, which for years has tried to prevent nuclear proliferation. The problem has been that the United States exempts itself from the nonproliferation it presses upon others. As the New York Times Magazine reported in March 1998, the United States continues to modernize its own nuclear forces, as permitted under existing strategic arms-reduction treaties with Russia. Last year the Clinton administration programmed more money for modernization and simulated testing than, on annual average, the United States spent during the cold war to create America's nuclear force.

Today, at any given moment, the United States has on alert some 2,300 warheads, with explosive power equivalent to 44,000 Hiroshimas. In these circumstances, U.S. pressure on newly nuclear nations to give up their weapons has neither a generally accepted rationale nor logical weight. The U.S. position is that the United States is entitled to possess and continually improve nuclear forces beyond all rational connection to existing or foreseeable threats. But others should not have them at all. Grudging exception has been made for countries that are already nuclear powers, since there is nothing to be done about them: Britain, France, Russia, China, and (unofficially) Israel. Until recent months, India and Pakistan officially possessed only nuclear "devices," not weapons. Everyone else is expected to renounce nuclear weapons.

So long as the post-cold war world seemed reasonably risk-free, and the United States seemed a law-abiding status quo power, this case could be made with some success, whatever the grumbling in other capitals. This is no longer true. NATO's intervention in Yugoslavia undermined the U.S. position. The demonstration made there of the sophistication (if not always the performance) of advanced U.S. weapons, and of the unparalleled overall capability of American forces, made a great impression on both allies and others.

The NATO intervention ignored UN authority, since the NATO allies presumed they would not get Security Council support, and Russian and Chinese objections were overridden. That rather frightened countries that still think of the UN as a shield against arbitrary actions by the great powers. The affair provided a lesson in the utility of nuclear deterrence. Had Slobodan Milosevic possessed a nuclear deterrent, NATO would not have bombed his country. Deterrence-that of the irrational threat-would have functioned.

There will be no general halt to nuclear proliferation until the United States and the other great nuclear powers take the lead in cutting their armaments toward at least the level of minimum credible deterrence, and then open the debate on eventually going beyond that.

A second debate worth opening concerns multilateral deterrence of "first use"-an agreement among existing nuclear powers that any first use of nuclear weapons would bring multilateral retaliation-which would not have to be, but could be, nuclear. That would provide a much more convincing rebuttal to nuclear proliferation than Washington's calls for the disarmament of everyone except the United States (and its friends). Without radical rethinking of the nuclear problem, the post-Kosovo world is on its way toward proliferation on a scale not yet seen.

Dwight Eisenhower ended his presidential term in 1960 with a warning to Americans about the danger that exists in the alliance between industry and a military establishment whose professional inclination is toward paranoia. Ronald Reagan ended his term of office at Reykjavik as a nuclear disarmer. What if Bill Clinton were to end his term with a decisive cut in America's nuclear array?

(c) 1999, Los Angeles Times Syndicate