Arms Control

...Nonetheless, a high ceiling is better than no ceiling, so the Carter administration is preparing to nail down SALT 11 as soon as possible and to try to negotiate real arms reductions in SALT 11I...

...I in both categories...

...At some stage he will also have to deal with Professor Pipes's notion that strategic superiority has political uses...

...If they want to put that as a proviso in the agreement...

...If that cautious approach is "unilateral disarmament," then John Kennedy was a member of the War Resisters League...

...Strategic superiority, one must bear in mind," he wrote, "has many uses besides its application in nuclear war: It can be used to shield a conventional war, to extract political or economic concessions, to intimidate, to compel acquiescence...

...Why not hit first and leave them empty holes to shoot at...

...In his first contacts with the press, the new President asserted that he: (1) is prepared to bypass the dispute over the U.S...

...Anything less than a truly comprehensive ban leaves a hornet's nest of problems...

...Vice-President Mondale's first trip to Europe was marked by pressure on France and West Germany to curb nuclear exports...

...With most of SALT II already agreed before the 1976 presidential campaign, Gerald Ford faltered under Reaganite pressure and failed to make the decisions required to seal final agreement...

...0 126...

...If the Soviet Union responds by some significant slowing of its own strategic arms buildup, we can at the end of the first six months announce additional moves...

...The Soviets are interested in using nuclear explosives to divert the course of a river in northern Russia...

...The basis for this charge was a 1975 article in which Warnke urged U.S...

...He can count on sustained stonewalling by the Four Cs: the Committee on the Present Danger, the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, Commentart' Magazine, and the Complex (militaryindustrial)— plus their friends in Congress...

...A SALT 11 treaty that implements the ceilings agreed upon at Vladivostok in 1974 would permit extraordinarily high levels of destructive power...

...The Backfire is reported unable to make a round trip 123 from the Soviet Union to the United States and back home...

...Yet the Soviet state shares with our own some basic common interests: the avoidance of nuclear war, reduction of the economic burdens generated by arms races, the need to cooperate in meeting certain problems that don't stop at national borders...

...We should, instead, try a policy of restraint, while calling for matching restraint from the Soviet Union...

...On February 8, President Carter declared: I have called on the Soviet Union to join us in a comprehensive test ban to stop all nuclear testing for at least an extended period of time, two years, three years, four years...

...The second was the campaign to block the nomination of Paul Warnke for director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency...

...Arms races undermine common interest...

...The threat of this kind of holocaust is what makes it important that we do keep an adequate deterrent capability, and it also is crucial for all of us to remember that it is necessary to have drastic reduction in dependence on atomic weapons...

...The well-publicized hardline Team B, headed by Professor Richard Pipes, succeeded in nudging the Ford administration's last National Intelligence Estimate toward the conclusion that the Soviets are pursuing strategic superiority...

...The opposition to Paul Warnke reflects how far the Administration must lead the country before a redefinition of national security can take hold...

...Each warhead can destroy a city...

...In leaving a loophole for the Soviets to use PNEs for earthmoving, however, the President risks a dangerous precedent...

...Carter thus bypassed the difficult problem of whether to seek ratification of two defective treaties inherited from his predecessor...

...ONE OF the Administration's earliest challenges in the arms field will come on the question of underground nuclear tests, which were permitted under the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963...

...Yet another test of the Carter administration will be its willingness to exercise leadership in setting a more restrained example in the export of nuclear technology and conventional arms, then seeking agreements with other exporters to reduce the traffic worldwide...

...I don't think they need to test any more...

...It will take all of Jimmy Carter's persuasive talents to mobilize public support for strategic deescalation...

...Each side would be allowed 2,400 missiles and bombers, of which 1,320 could carry multiple nuclear warheads...

...Accuracy makes the opponent nervous about losing his land-based deterrent, and it encourages a first strike at times of crisis...

...I think that would be something we could negotiate and let us have observers there to learn from them and vice versa...

...Assuming a war in which onehalf of all the nuclear weapons in the world's arsenals were used, the report concludes that the earth's ozone layer would be seriously depleted...

...As a result, the question of whether to include the Backfire bomber and the cruise missile within the ceiling of 2,400 launchers remains unsolved...

...While some of these warnings implied that the U.S.S.R...

...As a result, there could be as many as 35 nuclear-weapon states within a decade unless the trend is reversed...

...2) wants a rapid halt to underground nuclear tests and advance notice of missile tests...

...The cruise missile, on the other hand, is a small, pilotless, accurate drone that is currently under development by the United States to carry an Hbomb 2,000 miles after launch from an airplane...

...Unless the Vladivostok ceilings are lowered, in SALT 11 and/or SALT Ill,thesearmscontrol agreements will serve to institutionalize the steady upward mobility of the nuclear arms race...

...The first is the continuing campaign to persuade the American public and the government that the Soviet Union is seeking military superiority...

...If not, then we should all read the National Academy of Sciences report, "The Long-Term Worldwide Effects of Multiple Detonations of Nuclear Weapons...

...It will be interesting to see how the ex-nuclear engineer deals on the one hand with the Russians, who became enthusiastic about PNEs after the Americans soured on them, and on the other hand with the hawks, who will probably oppose any treaty...

...The United States is clearly No...

...Critics have attacked the threshold treaty for permitting continued development of smaller nuclear weapons...

...Citing the presence of Anthony Lake and Leslie Gelb at the State Department and David Aaron at the National Security Council, the Journal complained that "it's difficult to avoid the 124 impression that on foreign and defense matters we are getting a McGovernite administration...

...cruise missile and the Soviet Backfire bomber in order to obtain quick consummation of a SALT II treaty...

...These political and journalistic efforts to preserve an armed status quo are pressed by individuals whose worldview is dominated by deep suspicion of the Soviet Union...

...He wrote...

...These twin treaties are awaiting ratification...

...The Carter administration, however, is changing the climate in which decisions about arms are made...

...While it is too early for anything to have changed in a substantive way, hope is beginning to return to the arms-control and disarmament community...

...Among them are Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, Iran, Israel (if it doesn't already have an untested stock of bombs), Pakistan, South Africa, South Korea, and Taiwan...

...The bulk of these arms sales go to the oil-producing countries in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, and to Israel...

...They have criticized the PNE treaty for the encouragement it offers to nonnuclear states to follow the PNE route to the development of atomic bombs...

...There is, of course, a chance that the Soviet response may be lacking or inadequate...

...We have more [warheads], a much higher degree of accuracy, and also, we have three different mechanisms, which are each independently adequate to deliver atomic weapons: airplanes, submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles...

...Predictions of nuclear war in this century have multiplied, particularly since India showed that a Third World country could develop a nuclear"device" from atoms supposedly designed for peaceful purposes...

...All three have been flourishing, at a worldwide cost of over $300 billion a year...

...But our present lead in technology and warheads makes it possible for us to take this initiative safely...

...other industrial countries have also entered the nuclear-export business...

...Another litmus-paper test of the Carter administration will be its stance toward new weapons systems that provide for greater accuracy against Soviet missiles...

...3) personally intends to review all arms sales...

...Carter has even ordered the Pentagon to study how many missiles would be needed for "minimum deterrence...

...Because of its tiny size it could easily be hidden, thus rendering inspection by spy satellites extremely difficult...

...Since spy satellites constitute the main form of inspection of arms control agreements— the "national means of inspection" of treaty language—the cruise missile poses a problem of watershed proportions...

...Using an anonymous memo prepared by the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, Senate cold warriors attempted to prove that the former Pentagon Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs favors "unilateral disarmament...

...The long list is not reassuring...

...This arms traffic has tended to stimulate regional arms races, a particularly appalling trend 125 in the Third World where military budgets are rising proportionally even faster than in the superpower competition...

...And Mr...

...exports of conventional arms have soared from SI billion in 1970 to $13 billion worth in 1976...

...By way of introducing new perspectives, the President might ask what use can be made of military power, nuclear or conventional, in countering such other threats to our security as the spread of nuclear weapons, worldwide shortages of energy and food, and pollution of the oceans...

...The spent fuel from these reactors can be reprocessed into weapons-grade plutonium unless safeguards prevent this diversion...

...Until recently, these interlocked arms races have cast a deepening sense of despair among the specialists who monitor them...

...U.S...

...initiatives to reverse the arms race...

...If the Administration is willing to face the fury of the hawks by restraining development of the cruise missile, the MX mobile missile, and the Mark 12A warhead, it can ease the way to meaningful negotiated reductions...

...These ceilings and the technology of multiple warheads (MIRVs) would enable the United States to deploy about 13,000 strategic warheads (almost doubling the 1974 level) by 1985, the expected terminal date of the treaty, while the U.S.S.R...

...Certainly, the Soviet government is not run by benign libertarians...

...Over the next four or eight years, the Carter administration could make the essential difference...

...Even a small cut now in delivery systems would be read as a superpower gesture toward serious cuts later...

...Aside from its effect on Soviet citizens and subsequently others, once the radioactivity crosses a border it constitutes a technical violation of the 1963 Test Ban Treaty...

...One, the threshold test ban, would permit continued underground tests below 150 kilotons (the level of 10 Hiroshimas...

...The editorial was entitled "Jimmy McGovern...

...President Carter told his first press conference, At the present time, my judgment is that we have superior nuclear capability...

...If Mr...

...It's futile to buy things we don't need in the hope that this will make the Soviet Union more amenable...

...Either the Soviet Union or we could destroy a major part of the other nation if a major attack was made—with losses in the neighborhood of 50 to 100 million people...

...The Atoms for Peace Program has spread nuclear electric power reactors around the world...

...The Soviets are far more apt to emulate than to capitulate...

...Simultaneously, the Committee on the Present Danger and other private groups issued dire warnings about the "Soviet threat...

...TWO FRANTIC EFFORTS by the hardliners to preclude alternatives to the nuclear arms race are bound to influence the politics of SALT...

...On another front, the Administration is reviewing the policy of exporting nuclear technology and conventional arms...

...The other would permit "peaceful nuclear explosions" (PNEs) below the same level...

...Carter hopes to succeed in reducing this dependence, he will have to repeat his public lessons on the ABCs of the nuclear age...

...is preparing for a surprise nuclear attack, the more sophisticated analysis of Professor Pipes stressed other dangers...

...The fact that it is cheap and relatively simple adds to the urgency of the problem...

...In 1974, the Nixon administration—then under fire because of Watergate—signed two cosmetic treaties with the Soviet Union...

...Arms sales to other areas of the Third World have increased 500 percent in the last five years...

...In his inaugural address, Jimmy Carter reiterated a campaign theme when he said: "We will move this year a step toward our ultimate goal— the elimination of all nuclear weapons from this earth...

...The Soviet Union has more throw weight, larger missiles, larger warheads...

...The Wall Street Journal put its anxieties in more political terms...

...could deploy about 8,000 (more than tripling the 1974 level...

...With proper leadership at home and on the world scene, this first American president to come to office with a technical knowledge of nuclear weapons could help significantly to reverse the three arms races...

...What was that they were saying about "military superiority...

...The result (quite in addition to the effects of blast, fire, and radiation): crop failure by direct damage to plants and by major alterations of climate, intense sunburn in a few minutes for exposed humans, and marked increase in skin cancers...

...the Soviets may thus have a defensible position when they say it is not a strategic bomber...

...In its various projected versions, the cruise missile could be fired from submarines or flatbed trucks...

...Any use of nuclear explosives to divert the course of a river will inevitably lead to the release of radioactive debris into the air...