December 18, 1979
Page 36738
SENATOR MUSKIE POSES CHALLENGE TO ARMS CONTROL ADVOCATES
Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. President, at a recent conference in Maine on arms limitation, Senator Muskie posed a series of challenges to arms control advocates. He urged that the supporters of arms control become more effective in the national security debate by addressing issues of nuclear doctrine and force levels as well as continuing to raise the problems of nuclear overkill.
The Senator from Maine sees a real danger, as I do. in the development of war fighting doctrines and technology in American and Soviet forces. A war could start if each side fears the other side has the capacity to launch a disarming first strike. Senator MUSKIE finds that arms controllers must participate more in the theoretical and practical dimensions of policy formulation. I commend our colleague from Maine for raising this challenge. His speech to the Arms Limitation Conference in Bangor, Maine, will serve as an important reference for the forthcoming SALT debate.
Mr. President, I ask that the text of Senator MUSKIE's remarks be printed in the RECORD.
The text follows:
REMARKS OF SENATOR EDMUND S. MUSKIE
The national debate on the SALT II treaty has raised the consciousness of many Americans on strategic questions. The historic debate in the Senate has led many Senators to new ways of thinking about the arms race and about relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Unfortunately, from the arms controller's point of view, the debate has been going in the wrong direction. The President recently decided to build the biggest, most threatening possible MX missile and even Senators who support the concept of arms control that is represented in the SALT II treaty have supported increases in defense spending beyond those recommended by the President.
These recent events are indications to me that arms control advocates have not been as effective as they should or could be. Arms control advocates such as those represented in this conference have done a good job of making arms control a national issue. They have not done a good job of making their point of view a basis for decision making.
In making this statement, I mean to say that arms control advocates have been successful in having arms control considerations discussed when defense decisions are made. But, because these issues have been raised in such a way that they have been irrelevant to the principal criteria on which force decisions are actually made, arms control issues have not been important to the eventual decision.
If arms control arguments are to be successful in affecting the size and structure of our nuclear forces, advocates of arms control must participate more effectively in the debate. In order to do this, you and your fellow arms control advocates must lead the debate out of the technological arena where the questions focus on the capabilities of opposing forces and into the political arena where the focus of the debate is on the needs and uses for these forces in peacetime, crisis and wartime.
If arms control advocates can change the terms of the debate in this way, I believe you have a chance of making a serious impact on this country's nuclear doctrine and on the size and structure of our forces.
If you are to change the debate, there are a number of things you must do.
First, you must recognize and accept the fact that the United States is in a serious competition with the Soviet Union, that the major part of this competition is in military strength, and that this competition is not likely to go away in the foreseeable future. If you accept these points, then you must accept the need to be tough with the Soviets and the need to continue to modernize our nuclear forces.
Once you have accepted the continuing competition in nuclear arms you must begin to change the terms of your arguments and in so doing so change the basis on which decisions about nuclear weapons are made. Arms controllers have talked too much about the horrors of nuclear war and have argued too much that both sides have more than enough weapons. These arguments have not been and will not be successful in reducing arms.
Success in having major impact on the final decisions about the size and structure of our forces has consistently gone to the advocates of the "strategic" argument. The most successful strategic argument has been that the United States must have a flexible response capability after a Soviet surprise attack on our nuclear forces. Unfortunately, even though this is basically a war fighting and not a deterrence argument, arms control advocates have not challenged it because strategy is apparently seen as something that military professionals and hard liners are uniquely capable of understanding.
This is a serious mistake. Military people and hard liners have no more experience in nuclear war than anyone else. Indeed, since the political factor is so important in nuclear war and since the military factors are so uncertain, political rather than military considerations should dominate the discussion of nuclear strategy and of the need for particular kinds of forces.
In order to change the terms of the argument in this way you must become participants in the development of nuclear strategy. Further, you must expand the strategy to include the most important political considerations and to include the full spectrum of nuclear war.
Let me explain what I mean by the terms "nuclear strategy", "political considerations" and the "full spectrum of nuclear war."
Nuclear strategy is the way we plan on using our nuclear forces in neace and war to protect U.S. interests. The strategy includes both political and military uses.
"Political considerations" are faced by political leaders on both sides as they contemplated the risks of nuclear war. As McGeorge Bundy said ten years ago:
"In the real world of real political leaders — whether here or in the Soviet Union — a decision that would bring even one hydrogen bomb on one city of one's own country would be recognized in advance as a catastrophic blunder; ten bombs on ten cities would be a disaster beyond history: and 100 bombs on 100 cities are unthinkable." (Foreign Affairs, Oct. 1969)
This is the nut of a political leader's concern. While his technical and military advisers, confident of the untested capabilities of their forces and practiced in the mad calculus of flexible response, limited nuclear exchange, and megadeaths, may advise the use of these forces, the political leader, recognizing the uncertainties inherent in human responses even if he does not recognize the technological uncertainties, must concern himself with the possible loss of his entire country.
Regardless of the views of his hard line advisers, no political leader on either side can easily contemplate the certain loss of millions of citizens in a war of attrition nor can he easily contemplate the high probability that mistakes will lead to attacks on cities and the destruction of the entire nation. These are the political considerations that are not incorporated into our nuclear forces today.
The full spectrum of nuclear war extends from peacetime deterrence, through crisis deterrence, to war fighting, and to war termination. In other words, the spectrum extends from today when we are at peace through a political or military crisis that threatens nuclear war, to the war itself, and finally to the way the war ends.
In order to properly protect U.S. interests there must be a strategy that covers this full spectrum.
At the present time we have no such strategy. Arms control advocates and most political leaders have spent their time developing the theory of peacetime deterrence. This is a civilian theory that is good only in peacetime. Civilians in general and our political leaders in particular have not developed a theory for deterrence in a crisis when the fear of surprise attack makes war more likely. Nor have they developed a theory for fighting a war or for ending it.
Our military leaders, on the other hand, are responsible for fighting wars and they have developed plans for fighting nuclear wars. In doing so they are meeting their responsibilities and I can find no fault in their performance of their duty. Unfortunately their plans are strictly military plans. They are not coordinated with the political leadership and there is no systematic procedure for civilian review.
This, then, is the problem with our nuclear forces today. Arms controllers and civilians generally have focused on peacetime deterrence and have ignored the other aspects of nuclear strategy. The military has concentrated on plans for fighting a war. No one has addressed the other aspects of the strategy much less put it together in a comprehensive whole.
Perhaps the best example of this disconnect is our failure to develop a credible civil defense capability. Years ago civil defense was made a civilian responsibility but the civilians ignored it because it was seen as enhancing our war fighting capability and weakening peacetime deterrence. The military, concerned about war fighting and limiting damage in the U.S., had no responsibility for civil defense and turned instead to weapons that could limit damage by destroying Soviet weapons. Thus, civil defense, perhaps the most common sense way of defending the people of this country has been ignored.
The larger result of this disconnect has been a peace time Mutual Assured Destruction theory that is inadequate for making force decisions and a war fighting strategy that does not involve political considerations but is the basis for our existing forces.
In other words, although the United States argues that its strategic nuclear forces are structured for deterrence, the real basis on which our forces are built is the military's war fighting strategy.
By leaving the development of war fighting strategy to the military, we have allowed the military to develop strategic nuclear forces that are designed to meet their war fighting objectives without regard for political objectives. This is exactly how we got MIRVs and how we are getting an ever increasing capability to destroy Soviet Strategic Nuclear Forces in a U.S. first strike.
Let me quote the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Jones, in his SALT II testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in July of this year. (Vol. I, P. 381) In referring to the U.S. theory of deterrence through mutual assured destruction, General Jones said:
"I would agree that an assured destruction capability is an important part of our strategic force, but if we only had that, I believe we would have a very dangerous situation in the world ...
"I think that it would be a very inadequate force, and it would be very dangerous. We never had that strategy in all the time that I have been associated with the strategic forces."
In other words, General Jones is saying very explicitly that our forces are not designed for mutual assured destruction. There is no question that our forces are designed for fighting a war more than for deterring that war.
How does this differ from what the Soviets do? You are all familiar with the argument that we design our forces for deterrence while the Soviets design their forces for war fighting. That argument is obviously only half right. In the same way as in the United States, the Russians have allowed their military to develop forces to meet war fighting criteria. Unlike the United States, Soviet political leaders have not even made a pretense of developing a peacetime deterrence theory. In other words, the development of Soviet nuclear strategy and force structure has been left to the military who are concerned exclusively with fighting and winning the war they think is likely.
Fortunately for us and for the world, political leaders in both the United States and the Soviet Union have retained absolute control on the authority to use nuclear weapons. And fortunately, for one reason or another, we have not gone to war with the Russians.
But what frightens me and what should frighten you is that the nuclear forces on both sides have been designed to meet military war fighting criteria. The failure to include political criteria means that we have forces designed for the military concept of war fighting that fail to meet the political criteria for both deterrence and war fighting. We have been lucky so far. But I am concerned for the future as both sides' war fighting capabilities improve geometrically while our understanding of the political factors increases little or not at all.
I believe the real danger to the United States is the failure to develop a comprehensive nuclear strategy that covers the spectrum from peacetime deterrence through crisis deterrence, war fighting and war termination and the failure to develop a force structure appropriate to that strategy.
The failure to include political factors in the development of strategy and forces means that when either side looks at the opponent, regardless of that opponent's public doctrine, the other side sees a war fighting, indeed, a first strike capability.
While I do not believe that the United States would ever strike first, I believe that the current situation could lead to a Soviet first strike. Such a first strike would not be the bolt out of the blue attack that worries so many of my Senate colleagues. That attack is inconceivable because there is no way the Soviets can be confident of destroying enough of our retaliatory capability to insure that they could escape a retaliatory attack. Testimony during the SALT II hearings (Vol. II page 427) has shown that today after a Soviet surprise attack and a U.S. retaliation against Soviet strategic forces, the United States retains the capability to destroy over 50 percent of Soviet industrial capacity and over 50 percent of Soviet non-silo military targets. By 1985, before the MX is operational, that capacity will have expanded by about 25 percent.
Given this U.S. capability, it is inconceivable that Soviet political leaders, remembering the devastation of World War II, would risk such a loss when the two countries were relatively at peace as they are today.
The danger arises during a major political crisis such as a war in the Middle East when important U.S. and Soviet interests are threatened. The danger arises because:
First, the Soviets fear a U.S. first strike just as we fear a Soviet first strike.
Second, the Soviets do not believe in our definition of deterrence, instead they look at our nuclear forces and see a first strike capability.
Third, the Soviets are determined to never again allow an enemy to gain a first strike advantage as Hitler did in 1941.
And finally, in expectation of a U.S. first strike, Soviet political leaders will have no option but to turn to the military whose war fighting strategy clearly requires a Soviet preemptive attack on U.S. nuclear forces.
In other words, the danger is that, in a crisis, the Soviets will perceive a U.S. intent to strike first and in order to reduce the risk to the Soviet Union will strike first themselves.
If we are to change this highly dangerous situation we must participate more effectively in the development of nuclear strategy and of nuclear forces. We must focus our efforts on finding ways to reduce the possibility that a crisis could lead to a nuclear war.
Let me repeat the steps that you as advocates of arms control need to take if you are to contribute effectively to the decision making process that, in the final analysis, determines the strategic forces the United States will deploy.
First, you must accept the existence and continuation of the U.S./Soviet competition and the need for the modernization of our nuclear forces.
Second, you must enter the strategic debate and break new ground in the development of a strategy that covers the entire spectrum of nuclear war from peacetime deterrence to war termination.
Third, as part of your participation in this debate you must develop realistic solutions to the strategy and equipment problems that face the United States. You must find ways to modernize our forces so that they become appropriate to our political needs. In particular you must find ways to eliminate the real possibility that deterrence will break down in a crisis. The only way I can see to do this is to find ways to insure that the forces retain their retaliation capability but lose their first strike capability.
While I don't profess to be an expert in the development of strategic nuclear forces or of nuclear strategy. I think there are a few options that deserve consideration.
One step would be to buy MX but buy less than would be necessary for a credible U.S. first strike on Soviet strategic forces. Alternatively, we could gradually shift most of our retaliatory capability to submarine launched missiles and cruise missiles that have a secure retaliatory capability but not a first strike capability. Both of these steps would help to reduce Soviet fears of a U.S. first strike.
Another step would be to improve our damage limitation capability through increased civil defense measures rather than through developing forces that have the capability of destroying Soviet forces. The effect of this option would be to reduce the U.S. first strike capability while enhancing U.S. survivability.
A third step would be to improve command and control, intelligence and warning, and endurance capabilities of our forces so that the Soviets will be more certain of our ability to retaliate to a first strike even if our total forces are reduced.
There are bound to be many other ways to enhance our security while reducing the risk of war and I challenge you to work at finding them.
So far in this discussion I have not mentioned SALT II and the SALT process. Although the issues that I have raised today are not addressed in SALT, both the treaty and the process are important in the development of a more rational nuclear strategy and force structure.
The SALT process itself means that both U.S. and Soviet civilian leaders are becoming more involved in the development of strategy and force structure. It also means that both sides are becoming more aware of the concerns and fears of the other. Arms control advocates must take advantage of this new sensitivity to increase the awareness and participation of political leaders in the development of the full spectrum of nuclear strategy.
The SALT II treaty also makes a number of important first steps. The treaty provides agreed limits that, in the Soviet case, are less than they might otherwise have had at current building rates. The treaty also provides limits on concealment that will make both sides more confident of their security and their protection from surprise attack. Finally, the treaty establishes weapons categories that can be used as the basis for further reductions.
Unfortunately, neither the treaty nor the process reflect an understanding of the issues that I am raising today. And, while both are helpful to a limited degree in eliminating some of the most dangerous aspects of the current situation, until these issues are faced head on, there is little chance of solving the major problems. Forcing these issues to the forefront of the debate would be the greatest contribution you could make to enhancing the security of the United States.