The Rising East
New nuclear threat
emerges from the East
as Cold War fears fadeThirty-five years ago, the United States had accumulated an arsenal of 32,000 nuclear warheads. Today, that arsenal has been shrunk to 6,000. By 2015, if new plans go well, the United States will have deployed between 2,200 and 1,700 warheads, with a warfighting doctrine to match. The Russians are making similar cuts.
In contrast, India and Pakistan, which tested nuclear devices five years ago, are in a confrontation that could escalate into a nuclear exchange, more likely by rash judgment, accident, or inadvertence than by deliberate decision. Secretary of State Colin Powell spent last week in Islamabad and New Delhi seeking to prevent nuclear hostilities.
Elsewhere, China and North Korea are expanding their nuclear forces with greater numbers and greater ranges in ballistic missiles. By 2015, the Chinese will be able to detonate nuclear warheads over American cities from Honolulu to New York while the North Koreans will be able to hit cities from Honolulu to Denver.
Said a fresh study by the National Intelligence Council in Washington: "The probability that a missile with a weapon of mass destruction will be used against U.S. forces or interests is higher today than during most of the Cold War, and it will continue to grow as the capabilities of potential adversaries mature."
In sum, the threat of nuclear war is still alive today despite the focus on terror, insurgencies, separatist struggles, ethnic conflict and piracy. The threat to the United States, however, is coming from a different direction.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in response to a mandate from Congress, 10 days ago published a review of U.S. nuclear posture in which he said only 1,700-2,200 warheads would provide "a credible deterrent at the lowest level of nuclear weapons consistent with U.S. and allied security."
Known among strategists as minimal deterrence, or just enough to scare off a potential aggressor, that doctrine stands in stark contrast to the doctrine of protracted nuclear warfare embraced by the Reagan administration 20 years ago. It required thousands of warheads in missiles, bombers and submarines linked by robust communications in a complex that could withstand a nuclear barrage and respond in kind, several times over.
To nudge along the process of mutual reductions, a senior Russian officer, General-Colonel Y.N. Baluyevskiy, was in Washington last week to meet with Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. Baluyevskiy told Pentagon reporters that Russia was for transparency, predictability, and "for irreversibility of the reduction of the nuclear forces."
In his public utterances in South Asia, Secretary Powell urged caution and said all the right diplomatic things. Left unsaid, at least in public, was the American concern that, in blunt terms, Indians and Pakistanis do not really understand just how devastating nuclear weapons can be. After a nuclear exchange, former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown once wrote, "the living would envy the dead."
The Cold War clash between Russia and America had two constraints: They were separated by two oceans and the competition was political and ideological. India and Pakistan bump up against one another and their differences are deeply emotional and nationalistic.
Moreover, Pakistan and India have not forged the elaborate controls over nuclear weapons evolved by the Americans and Russians over several decades. Not many years ago, U.S. missileers jokingly doubted they could remove all the locks on their weapons to fire them on time. Presumably, the Russians had similar restraints.
The intelligence estimate just released said China's long- range nuclear force would expand from 20 stationary missiles propelled by liquid-fuel that is volatile to possibly 100 mobile missiles with stable solid propellants. China is also adding 50 medium-range missiles a year to the 500 in place that could be fired at U.S. forces in Japan, Korea and at sea in the Pacific. North Korea will have fewer and less capable missiles but enough to endanger the western United States.
In this instance, the danger is in the potential for Chinese or North Korean miscalculation. Chinese officials, scholars and journalists have asserted that Americans would back down if their cities were threatened with nuclear attack. North Korea has warned that the United States would perish in a "sea of fire."
That was before U.S. B-1 and B-52 bombers appeared over Afghanistan. Those operations, say intelligence analysts, have given Chinese and North Korean military leaders pause.
Richard Halloran is editorial director of the Star-Bulletin.
He can be reached by e-mail at rhalloran@starbulletin.com