Salt II: Truth or Consequences

...They constitute positive steps in maintaining peace and opportunities for building mutual confidence...

...Such doubts—after almost a decade when there were none, thanks to the U.S...

...This should be part of any new salt agreement, for it is highly likely that direct physical inspection on a random sample basis is the only way to find out what is actually inside a missile or a submarine...

...First, we must insist that the Soviets give us the same information about their strategic forces that we give them about ours in the context of the salt talks...

...had 450 ICBMs and the Soviet Union had 100—we have passed through several stages, making arms control more difficult yet more necessary than ever: the production of thousands of ICBMs...

...Arms Control and Disarmament Agency Director Paul Warnke, and on the agenda of the scheduled meeting in New York at the end of September between Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance...

...should formulate a proposal for joint inspection of Soviet and American strategic forces on the ground, including surprise visits...

...Amrom Katz, formerly in charge of U.S...

...A high ranking United States official with direct responsibility for monitoring Soviet military activities told me after viewing it: "We have never been able to find that missile site, if it is real...

...Instead, the Kremlin has stretched every ambiguity in the 1972 treaty to the limit...

...The salt agreement permits each side 1,300 missiles capable of carrying multiple, independently-targeted nuclear bombs...

...Eventually, too, reliable strategic arms control agreements would permit significant and welcome reductions in present nuclear arsenals...

...Moreover, there has been clear evidence of deliberate Soviet attempts to violate the treaty provision prohibiting each side from interfering with the other's "national means of verification...

...the perfection of the easily concealed and disguised cruise missile...

...It is also time for the U.S...

...Now the tasks are far more complicated, and the Soviet Union has matched us in all forms of observation...

...Most Americans probably assume that the two sides begin negotiations by exchanging data on the weapons to be limited...

...The film was impressive, because the concealment was brilliant and thorough...

...Leaving aside the important question of good faith raised by the Soviet silence, mutual disclosure would help assure stable arms control by providing each side with a test of its intelligence system...

...Some experts feel we have institutionalized an exaggerated sense of self-confidence, due to our once enormous superiority in surveillance methods and our success at the far simpler tasks of the '60s, when all we had to do was keep track of the total number of Soviet ICBMs...

...has been betting its security on verification methods that provide little more than composite pictures of the outside of Soviet strategic missiles...

...If lives were at stake, you would surely want to know as much as possible about the changes made under the hoods...

...This has included using secret codes to prevent the electronic tracking of new nuclear weapons being tested, and filling the fuel tanks of a new missile with a heavy load of ballast to make it appear of medium range and therefore not subject to salt...

...Although this may have been adequate before the Soviet Union mastered all the new technologies, now our approach to verification must catch up with the military realities...

...This requires taking at least three steps during the current negotiations...

...to seriously test the reliability of its present techniques of verification...

...Snow covered the gently rolling hills, empty except for a little farm cabin with smoke coming out of the chimney and a supply of firewood by the door...

...the little cabin split in half and swung to the far sides of a deep opening in the ground, out of which rose a huge intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) ready for action...

...But accurate projections can only be made if we know what the capabilities of the Soviet missile forces really are...

...Today, there is an urgent need to improve our ability to monitor Soviet military strength because, as a result of advances in technology, the balance of power will be substantially determined by what is done to the inside of the ICBMs...

...No one questions the critical importance of the U.S.-Soviet talks...

...Given the fact that strategic weapons, like moon shots, obey the laws of physics, it is possible to calculate the military effects of a hypothetical Soviet attack against our missiles on land and at sea, and to determine whether the surviving American forces would be adequate to deter a rational Kremlin leadership...

...Unfortunately, several disturbing trends have emerged since the start of the salt negotiations in 1968...

...Indeed, according to a historical analysis done by Harvard's Samuel P. Huntington before he became a member of National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski's White House staff, the temptation to strike while ahead has been typical of past qualitative arms races...

...Suddenly, the earth moved...

...Only if the U.S...

...As we have already seen in the case of the cruise missile, the employment of deceptive techniques to circumvent salt poses a serious threat...

...then had an overall strategic advantage, with 1,710 ICBMs to roughly 600 for the USSR...

...As matters stand, by not only telling the Soviets everything relevant about our forces to show our good intentions and because we worry that they might catch us if we did not, but also revealing all we know about their strategic weapons, we enable them to learn a great deal about the strong and weak points of both our intelligence and their own surveillance efforts...

...Further, as a closed society the Soviet Union has a large built-in advantage in maintaining secrecy about the interiors of its missiles...

...While the United States has kept the number of its missiles constant, the Soviet Union attained equality in 1970 and has gone right on stockpiling, until it now has a lead of more than 600 operational ICBMs for a total of 2,340...

...Another small group would have the job of discerning whether our intelligence and analysis methods would have uncovered these actions...

...characteristics of those weaDons of theirs that would be limited, they refuse to confirm or deny the data—even though the data form a critical part of the agreement being negotiated...

...The step would form the basis, too, for the kind of direct verification that will be essential in any future agreements designed to reduce existing missile forces by significant numbers...

...arms control verification, has proposed that we set up a small "Red team" which would use all available information and practical ingenuity to design hypothetical Soviet actions intended to mislead our verification efforts...

...This was a domestic Soviet film intended to show the citizenry how well the Armed Forces were protecting the nation...

...In fact, according to Fred Ikle, a participant in the negotiations as director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under Presidents Nixon and Ford: "After we tell the Russians the...

...For the last 10 years, we have reported on our missiles as well as our best estimates of Soviet forces without receiving any information in return...

...Second, the U.S...

...We should build on this precedent...

...Third, the U.S...

...assessments, partly due to our being gulled by systematic Soviet deception geared to the political situation...

...lead in spy planes and satellites —have left many analysts who strongly support arms control wondering how much we really know about Soviet strategic power...

...should demand that the USSR stop interfering with verification procedures...

...This is not the case...

...the enormous growth in Soviet strategic power...

...And Russia has been particularly effective in concealprepared for and carried out without Western intelligence sounding any advance alert...

...Several years ago, at Columbia, Brzezinski himself produced a study of postwar estimates of Soviet military strength that revealed huge errors in U.S...

...Incredibly, the U.S...

...The U.S...

...They are also at the core of the controversy over the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (salt) negotiations, reportedly moved closer to completion during the two-day visit to the Kremlin early this month by U.S...

...The Soviet Union, after resisting territorial inspection for years, recently permitted very limited direct monitoring of some underground nuclear testing...

...This type of careful self-examination can tell us where our existing methods are adequate and where we need to develop new approaches...

...ing its strength: despite two years of close military and economic collaboration and a large Nazi intelligence effort, Hitler discovered that instead of 200 divisions, Stalin had 340 and thousands more tanks than estimated...

...acts decisively to ascertain the full truth about Soviet strategic forces will the world avoid the tragic consequences of escalating military competition...

...Neither the 1972 salt treaty nor the understanding reached at Vladivostok in 1974 has slowed the strong pace of Soviet military and civil defense efforts, intended to make their missiles more powerful and their homeland more secure...

...Nor do we know whether those are special effects...

...But these desirable objectives depend on the ability of both sides to feel completely confident that the whole process is not being used as a means for one country to gain military advantage over the other...

...In addition, the Soviets have caught up with us in missile accuracy, and have 200 attack submarines to hunt down the 25 or so Polaris submarines that constitute our (theoretically) invulnerable deterrent...

...One way of visualizing the verification issue is to ask yourself whether you would bet the life of your family on the outcome of a race between two cars that looked the same from the outside, yet were worked on every night before the contest to improve their engines, modify the transmissions, and develop new fuels and steering mechanisms...

...There would still be uncertainties involving the workings of the new components during the race, different driving strategies and luck, but at least you would not find yourself having gone with a souped up Volkswagen against a miniaturized Rolls Royce engine...

...the invention of multiple warheads and their deployment with super-accurate guidance systems...

...This would include ending the use of coded electronic signals to prevent the tracking of new nuclear weapons, and other actions we have implicitly accepted to date...

...In the case of the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by more than half a million Soviet bloc troops, we now know it was The danger, of course, is that if some subterfuge went undetected for long, in the 1980s a Kremlin hardliner might be able to make a rational case for the use of Soviet military superiority, and this would create, in Defense Secretary Harold Brown's words, "a temptation" to strive for political gains before a belated American response overcame the advantage...

...But the actual number of these warheads on an ICBM is limited only by its size, so that the treaty notwithstanding, the threat posed by one side to the other may vary by thousands of bombs —and Soviet ICBMs are generally larger than ours...

...Since 1963—when the U.S...