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The controversy over whether arms control was a boon or a trap—and some ill-considered comments on the feasibility of nuclear war—left defense policy increasingly at the mercy of the exploding public concern about the dangers of nuclear war. No democratic leader can govern any longer without demonstrating his devotion to peace. The Reagan Administration soon learned that the assault on what it called the "fatally flawed" SALT II treaty made for better campaign rhetoric than foreign policy. It compromised on the strange course of observing but not ratifying SALT II. The Administration has proclaimed its devotion to arms control, and I accept its sincerity. The challenge it faces is to resolve, finally, the intellectual problem of how to ensure strategic stability amid the revolution wrought by thousands of warheads on only hundreds of launchers.
The Present Dilemma There is a "flaw" in SALT II, though not the one usually discussed. It is that SALT limitations were expressed in terms of numbers of delivery vehicles at the precise moment when the increase in the accuracy and number of warheads caused numerical "equivalence" to be more and more beside the point. With each side possessing the capability (the Soviets' actual, ours latent) of making its opponent vulnerable, arms control after a decade of negotiations had returned to its starting point.
This problem cannot be solved simply by deep reductions in delivery vehicles. Given the disproportion between warheads and launchers, reductions either are irrelevant to the danger of surprise attack or, perversely, increase it. With present weapons, the greater the reductions, the fewer would be the targets for a first strike and the greater would be its calculability.
This is well illustrated by President Reagan's Eureka College speech of May 9, 1982, which contains the basic American proposal for the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START). It was an advance over an uncontrolled arms race because it set a ceiling. It was an advance over SALT in relating the ceiling to warheads rather than launchers. And it stressed significant mutual reductions of strategic forces. It was a brave first attempt that unfortunately did not solve the root issue of multiple warheads. Even were the Soviets to accept our proposal, the Eureka scheme would-at best maintain the existing balance; it would almost surely worsen rather than ease our dangers. A quick glance at the numbers involved illustrates the problem.
Under SALT n about 5,000 Soviet land-based warheads would be aimed at 1,054 American launchers—a ratio of less than 5 to 1. The Eureka proposal would reduce the permitted warheads to 2,500 on at most 400 launchers. Even were it technically feasible to distribute warheads in this manner (and the Soviets would have to redesign their entire strategic force to do so), this would give the side striking first an advantage in warheads to targets of better than 6 to 1. And at these lower numbers of launchers an attack would be far more calculable.