DEFENSE: Arming to Disarm in the Age of Detente

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warheads deliverable. Russia has not only more launchers than the U.S. (see chart page 18), but bigger missiles—with up to 120% more throw weight. The U.S., however, has almost twice as many warheads on its missiles. Thus, as Harvard Professor Paul Doty puts it, "If you are a [U.S.] hawk, you argue throw weight, and if you are a dove, you argue warheads."

U.S. Advantage. Even if the numbers game was not contradictory, it would not give an accurate picture of both countries' relative nuclear strength. On one level, each superpower has more than enough warheads to destroy civilization; the surplus, as Winston Churchill once said, serves only to "make the rubble bounce." In anything other than an all-out nuclear war, however, accuracy of missiles becomes the critical factor. Here the U.S. has a substantial technological advantage. It requires three of Russia's burly S59 missiles—each with a 25-megaton yield—to hit the same targets as one U.S. Minuteman III with its three warheads and total yield of 600 kilotons.

The better American guidance systems enable the U.S. warheads to strike within a quarter of a mile of the target. The Pentagon believes that Soviet missiles can do no better than hit one-half mile from the target. The Soviets depend on size to compensate for their missiles' inferior electronic brainpower.

Because of that technological advantage—and the U.S. lead in long-range bombers—Nixon agreed to grant the Russians numerical superiority in launchers in the SALT I agreements. At the time, the U.S. wrongly believed that the agreement might break the Soviet momentum in missile advances by setting a five-year ceiling on the number of offensive missiles each side can have. The U.S. was limited to 1,054 land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMS), 44 missile-launching submarines and 710 submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). The Soviets were permitted 1,618 ICBMs—91 more than they now have—62 missile-launching submarines and 950 SLBMS. The agreement set no restrictions on the number of warheads that could be placed on each rocket. Nor did it limit bombers, short-and medium-range missiles and tactical nuclear weapons that can be used on the battlefield.

Thus when the SALT I agreement was signed May 26, 1972, Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, felt that there was "relative strategic [nuclear] parity" between the two countries. By 1975 half of the U.S. land-based missiles would be MIRVS (multiple independent re-entry vehicles): each launcher tipped with a package of three independently targeted warheads that can hit widely separated, preplotted targets. Some Soviet missiles in operation then also had multiple warheads, but they were not independently targeted. When fired, they sprayed from the missile launcher along a straight line like pellets from a shotgun. In addition, though the Soviets had more missile-firing submarines, U.S. subs were quieter, making them harder to detect, and many of the American SLBMS carried from ten to 14 warheads each. As a further deterrent, the U.S. maintained three times as many long-range bombers as Russia.

The rough balance of nuclear forces —and the equanimity of Pentagon planners—was unexpectedly upset last summer when the Russians conducted those earlier tests of