(5 of 8)
The Eureka proposal would also establish limits of 2,500 to 3,000 sea-based warheads. This would force a reduction of our submarine force from the 42 permitted under SALT to 15 or fewer (depending on the type). We could keep at most ten vessels at sea at one time, vs. the current 25 to 30. If there are any advances in antisubmarine warfare technology, as is probable, arms control will have increased the vulnerability of both our underwater and our land-based strategic forces—the supreme irony. The Soviet proposal of a flat 25% reduction in launchers, while simpler, suffers from the identical disability.
In short, a negotiation begun more than a decade ago to enhance stability and reduce vulnerability is in danger of achieving the opposite. Arms control is heading for an intellectual dead end.
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
We face two related tasks. First, arms control requires not so much a new proposal as a fresh concept. Second, it must become an organic part of defense policy. This requires that we return to first principles. The principal cause of instability with current weapons systems is the disproportion between warheads and launchers. All the remedies that have been tried are vulnerable to technology: hardening to accuracy, sea-based systems to advances in antisubmarine technology. There is no effective or intellectually adequate solution to this problem except to seek to eliminate multiple warheads within a fixed time, say ten years.
Fortunately technology, which creates the problem, can offer a solution. According to published literature, it is possible to develop a mobile missile that could be protected in a heavily armored canister. Its mobility alone could complicate the task of the attacker. Moreover, the new missile could—and should—be equipped with a single warhead. With strategic forces of such design, numerical limits would be both simple to establish and far more significant than under SALT n or START.
Once we decided on such an approach, we could proceed with it either as part of an arms control agreement or unilaterally as part of our defense policy. For example, we could propose to reduce and transform the strategic arsenals of both sides to a low number of single-warhead missiles over a ten-year period. The totals should be set at the lowest number that could be monitored; that is, at a level where a violation significant enough to overturn it could not be hidden. The permitted number of missiles may be as low as 500; at any rate, the number of warheads in this scheme would be only a small fraction of current totals, probably 20% or less of the Eureka scheme. Each side would be free to choose whether the permitted missiles would be mobile or in silos. Mobility would reduce the incentive of surprise attack, but equivalence at low numbers of single-warhead missiles would, in any event, assure considerable stability.