Military

Our TRIDENT submarines, like USS Pennsylvania (SSBN-735) pictured here, are the most survivable of the strategic nuclear forces.

With planned and unplanned maintenance, qualification, underway preparations, retention, promotion, watchstanding, future assignments, and all the other concerns facing undersea professionals, why should submariners - or anyone else - spend time worrying about an arcane subject like arms control? After all, large complex treaties might have been important in the 1980s, but the Soviet Union is gone. Isn't arms control a Cold War topic of no particular relevance to today's fleet? 
Not exactly. In important ways, the current strategic submarine force is shaped by the arms control decisions of the past and will be shaped further by arms control decisions made over the coming years. For reasons almost entirely unrelated to submarines, it is especially difficult to foresee those future decisions today. Thus there is likely to remain considerable uncertainty about the future constraints under which the Submarine Force must operate.

How did we get here? 
Arms control is not an end in itself, but a tool to be used in the pursuit of national security. Like any tool, arms control can be misused, but if used correctly, it can make a significant contribution. Since strategic arms control began in earnest in November 1969, with the opening of the SALT I negotiations, a variety of justifications have been offered for pursuing negotiated arms reductions, first with the Soviet Union and now with Russia. At various times people have viewed strategic arms control as a way to save money, to reduce the risk of war, to constrain particular capabilities that the United States preferred not to match, to ensure perceived equality between the two Cold War superpowers, to provide a mechanism for Cold War dialogue, and to place limits on nuclear weapons because they were viewed as too destructive to have any legitimate moral purpose. The most valid and enduring reasons for pursuing arms control, however, have been to enhance stability in a crisis by restructuring strategic forces, and to provide predictability - and thus stability - over the long term by allowing each side to know the strategic forces it will face in the future. 

Predictability is a familiar term; crisis stability is not. Simply put, stability in a crisis requires that neither side has any incentive to initiate a nuclear attack even in time of great tension. From this perspective, "good" or stabilizing systems are those that can survive an attack; "bad" or destabilizing systems are those whose vulnerability invites attack. Guided by this logic, the United States has not sought reductions in strategic nuclear forces for the sake of the reductions themselves, but rather has sought to reduce the risk of nuclear exchange by negotiating preferential reductions in the most destabilizing systems. 

Because submarines are survivable, arms control has tended to favor them; thus, over the years, arms control treaties and the policy that guides them have caused us to shift more and more of the strategic nuclear deterrent to sea. In contrast, ICBMs, especially those silo-based ICBMs with multiple warheads, have often been regarded as destabilizing. Given current ballistic missile accuracies and yields, it is assumed that no silo-based ICBM can survive a nuclear strike. Thus there is an incentive to use them before they are destroyed. This incentive is even greater for ICBMs with multiple warheads, since if they are allowed to survive and to launch, they are highly effective weapons. 

A crucial aspect of the U.S. arms control approach is to insist on effective verification. Arms control treaties lose their value if we cannot be certain they are being adhered to. This doesn't mean we require perfection, but we must be able to detect any militarily significant cheating in time to react before the strategic balance can be altered. Verification of nuclear arms control treaties is based on three components: our own ability to use satellites and other methods to monitor the treaty, detailed inspections, and a large scale data exchange, updated with various formal notifications. 

Two U.S. Air Force officers man  the launch console in an underground Minuteman ICBM silo.

Guided by these broad principles of stability and verification, the United States signed the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) in July 1991. Among many other provisions, the massive treaty imposed a total limit of 4,900 ballistic missile warheads, limited Trident SLBMs to no more than eight warheads, and created an extensive inspection and data exchange regime. Six months after START I was signed, the Soviet Union collapsed, to be replaced by 15 separate new states. In this new world, the START I warhead levels - which only a year before had been seen as representing deep reductions - now seemed excessive. In the post-Cold War euphoria, START II was quickly negotiated. Signed in January 1993, it called for cutting total warheads to 3,500, eliminating ICBMs with multiple warheads, and imposing a sub-limit of 1,750 SLBM warheads. These restrictions on SLBM warhead levels were not something the United States wanted, but were part of the price we had to pay to gain Russian agreement to eliminate all ICBMs with multiple warheads. The sub-limit was designed to allow the United States to keep 18 Trident SSBNs, each with missiles carrying a reduced payload of four warheads apiece, for a total of 1,680 SLBM warheads. In 1994, however, the Department of Defense Nuclear Posture Review decided, largely for budgetary reasons, to reduce the number of strategic submarines to 14, split between two oceans and all carrying the Trident II (D-5) missile. This remains the plan today. 

Where are we now? 
Signing treaties is not enough; they must be ratified. Ratification requires approval by the U.S. Senate and the Russian Duma (parliament). START I was ratified and has been in force for several years. For several years after START II's signing, however, Russia was not able to gain the required approval from the Duma for its ratification. Most of the issues preventing ratification were not related to arms control; instead they were either general East-West issues (NATO expansion, Bosnia) or internal Russian political problems having to do with relations between then-President Boris Yeltsin and his legislature. 

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(far left) The C4 Trident I and D5 Trident II missiles are the mainstay of seaborne nuclear strike capability. (left) The 1993 START II negotiations allowed the United States to keep 18 TRIDENT SSBNs, with 4 nuclear warheads on each missile. The 1994 DoD Nuclear Posture Review called for the number to be lowered to 14, which remains the plan today.

In addition to these domestic political issues, however, START II also became embroiled in a Russian desire to be given more time to implement the required reductions and negotiate still lower levels as it became clear the Russian Federation could not afford to maintain the forces allowed it under the original START II Treaty. In 1997, in Helsinki, Finland, President Clinton sought to meet this Russian concern by agreeing to delay the date for completing the reductions required by START II and to negotiate a future START III treaty once START II took effect. This future treaty (never actually negotiated) would have reduced warheads still further, to between 2,000 and 2,500 total strategic warheads on each side. Even these levels are more than Russia can afford; they now call for reductions to between 1,000 and 1,500 warheads. 

While they sparred over further reductions, both the United States and Russia based their long-term planning on the presumption that START II would ultimately take effect, although Congressional restrictions prevented the United States from reducing below START I levels while START II remained unratified. In recent years, that presumption has increasingly been drawn into question by a new factor: national missile defense. There is a growing political consensus in the United States to deploy a nation-wide defense against ballistic missiles launched from states like North Korea or Iran. Unfortunately, the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, signed with the Soviet Union, bans such national defenses. Russia is unwilling to allow START II to take effect unless the United States promises to continue to abide by the ABM Treaty, thus foregoing missile defenses. The United States is equally insistent that the ABM Treaty must be modified before it will agree to further reductions and has suggested that if Russia fails to agree to such modifications, we will exercise our right to withdraw from the treaty. 

Our newest intercontinental bomber, the stealthy and highly survivable B-2 Spirit, can deliver both conventional and nuclear ordnance with unprecedented precision.

The Clinton administration sought to break the impasse by seeking modest changes in the ABM Treaty (to allow deployment of a quite limited national missile defense system) in return for agreeing to reductions well below the START II level, although not as low as Russia sought. Spurred by concerns from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, especially, the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Strategic Command, that levels of strategic warheads below those agreed to at Helsinki would require a detailed review of U.S. targeting strategy, President Clinton rejected Russian calls for still deeper reductions. Despite significant efforts and an almost unending series of meetings, no progress has been made. The new administration is now considering how to proceed. Because President Bush is on record as calling for more extensive national missile defenses than his predecessor, a quick negotiated resolution may be difficult. 

A further complication has been the growing interest in converting the four SSBNs planned for removal from strategic service into cruise missile submarines (SSGNs), each carrying six or seven conventional Tomahawk missiles inside 22 of the 24 tubes (the remaining two tubes would be used to support SEALS). The ships have considerable operating life left, and the value of Tomahawk in both small contingency strikes and large-scale campaigns is widely accepted. But if arms control is to deliver the predictability it promises, both sides must be certain that ships removed from accountability under START cannot be easily restored to strategic service. As a result, the START Treaty requires that the four potential SSGNs continue to count against strategic arms totals unless all existing launch tubes are removed. Such removal would double the cost of the SSGN conversion at a time when the Navy has had difficulty identifying funding for any form of conversion. 

It might be militarily acceptable to proceed with the SSGN conversion and simply continue to count these ships against the strategic arms totals allowed under START I, in effect pretending they still carried SLBMs. Because START I allows significantly more warheads than our current operational plans require, this so-called "phantom warhead" approach would have no significant military impact. Counting the SSGNs against the lower levels of START II or a hypothetical START III, however, would almost certainly be militarily unacceptable. The United States could, of course, seek to negotiate an arrangement with Russia to put these four ships in a special category. There is precedent for this: the conventionally-armed B-1 bomber force does not count against START II totals. It would be relatively simple to devise a verification regime that used a combination of satellite observation and on site inspection to assure Russia that the SSGNs carried Tomahawks, rather than SLBMs. But there won't be any negotiations on these kinds of details until Russia and the United States reach some form of agreement on national missile defense.

What about the future? 
Today the leaders of the Submarine Force face a dilemma. They don't know if they will reduce warheads to comply with START II (or an even lower level) or remain at current levels. They don't know what arms control regime will govern a possible future SSGN. Indeed, they don't know what approach the new administration will take to strategic arms control. Some have argued that arms control is a Cold War relic that should be replaced by more informal mechanisms. Several things must happen before the situation clarifies:

The administration has to decide its overall attitude toward strategic arms control. Because arms control is a means to advance national security, and not an end in itself, it is important to consider how it should be applied in the new, post-Cold War world. In particular, the administration has to decide whether to continue to seek to negotiate changes to the ABM Treaty or act unilaterally.

The venerable B-52 Stratofortress intercontinental bomber was first delivered in 1955, but the B-52H version is still flying as a significant element of our manned nuclear deterrent.   An important element of the U.S. strategic deterrent is a fleet of continually airborne command centers, one of which is shown here during aerial refueling from an Air Force tanker.

If formal arms control negotiations are to resume, the administration will need to decide what its objectives are. Even if the issues surrounding national missile defense could be resolved, there are many other issues standing between the United States and a new START III. New provisions to allow an SSGN will be part of a long list of arms control objectives. Among the goals suggested for future arms reduction negotiations are new bomber counting rules, rejection of all Russian attempts to limit conventional forces (including conventional Tomahawks), constraints on Russian non-strategic nuclear weapons, improved transparency and warhead destruction, and simplification of verification in order to save money. Gaining agreement to all of these will be time-consuming, if it is possible at all. 

Whether or not arms control resumes, the president has called for a detailed review of all elements of strategic deterrence, including U.S. targeting strategy. Separately, Congress has mandated a formal Nuclear Posture Review, due in December 2001, to address overall nuclear force structure. The results could affect the strategic Submarine Force significantly, although it is difficult to predict exactly how. 

These various reviews can combine in several ways. The United States could decide to eschew additional formal strategic arms negotiations, and simply set its strategic force levels based on military requirements. Since this would leave START I as the only relevant limitation, there would be plenty of room to deploy SSGNs using the lower-cost phantom warhead approach described above. Alternatively, a new negotiating approach or (more probably) a new attitude in Russia, could lead to quick agreement on a package combining ABM Treaty changes with some form of START III. In such a package, it might well be possible to negotiate a special exemption allowing SSGNs to be converted in the most cost-effective manner, without removing the existing launch tubes.

On the other hand, it is possible, though less likely, that the United States could find itself engaged in prolonged negotiations, forcing decisions on the SSGN to be made without knowing whether or not existing launch tubes must be removed. Because the difference between conversion with and without removing SLBM launchers is a half billion dollars per ship, this would place the Navy in an intolerable position. 

Those ships that will remain in strategic service also face uncertainty, although the consequences are less dramatic. Will we continue to maintain 14 SSBNs in two oceans? Will those ships be downloaded (that is, have the number of warheads per missile reduced to meet START II arms limits)? Or will there be more drastic reductions, either unilaterally or as part of a revitalized negotiating process? Any of these outcomes is possible. The Submarine Force is legendary for its flexibility in adapting to changing circumstances. It is likely to need that flexibility in the coming months.

Conclusion 
The complexities of arms control clearly complicate submarine planning. It may well seem that treaties are more trouble than they are worth. The administration review may come to that conclusion. But it is important to remember that the battle for democracy in Russia has not yet been won. While the United States wants to move away from Cold War confrontation, the transparency and predictability that arms control provides may continue to be important. In this time of uncertainty two things are clear. The Submarine Force will continue to be the dominant leg of U.S. strategic forces, providing the survivable retaliatory capability that is the foundation of nuclear deterrence. And the credibility of that deterrent will not rest on numbers or on targeting strategy alone, but on the continuation of the forty-year record of reliable, professional, undetected patrols that is one of the Silent Service's enduring contributions to our nation's security.

Ambassador Brooks was the negotiator of the START I Treaty of 1991. A former Commanding Officer of USS Whale (SSN-638), he is now a vice president at the Center for Naval Analyses.