Missiles Off-Line Not An Argument for START

This week, fifty of our nuclear armed Minuteman missiles in Wyoming momentarily lost connectivity to one of the many command capsules at the F.E. Warren USAF base. The 1960’s computers in question got out of time-sharing sequence as they routinely determine that the silos and their missiles were are all in order. No change occurred to any of the US nuclear forces. We simply reset the computer system. No rockets were in danger of being launched accidentally. If needed, and if the President had ordered them to be launched, that could have been done just as the system is designed to do.

Unfortunately, this has set off renewed calls for ratification of the new START treaty, now pending before the US Senate. The treaty would primarily reduce deployed US and Russian nuclear weapons from 2200 to 1550. For example, in Politico, the head of the Ploughshares Fund, Joe Cirincione, is extensively quoted, arguing that Russian missiles could likewise be going off line.

This supposedly could be remedied if the US quickly ratified the new START treaty. As things now stand, he argues, we have nothing in place in Russia to inspect their missiles and find out if similar problems have occurred there. But if we ratified START, presto! Inspectors could show up and we would no longer be in the arms control dark.

Baloney. His assertion is utterly without foundation. The problem is, whatever verification measures are part of the new treaty, and even those that were part of the now expired START I treaty, could not in any way reveal whether or not the Russian command capsule computers were or were not in sync in measuring the status of their missiles.

But this attitude is a common fault made by the self-appointed arms control crowd, of which Ploughshares chief Cirincione is a card-carrying charter member. If anything is a problem in the nuclear weapons area, immediately they run the tattered flag of “arms control” up the flag pole and demand that everyone salute. Well, not today Comrade!

Ratification of the new START treaty may be useful, but it solves none of the most serious nuclear weapons proliferation problems we face. First, while the Russians and the United States could announce further reductions in deployed weapons under the new treaty, the numbers are but 20% of the warhead reductions achieved by the 2002 Moscow treaty which is described by many of its critics as exemplary of a “lost decade” of arms control.

Second, the new treaty will not address either the proliferation of nuclear weapons in North Korea–with an arsenal of some 4-6 weapons–or the emerging nuclear weapons program in Iran. Although the latter supposedly sufficient nuclear material capable of producing a very small number of nuclear weapons, perhaps no more than one, at best we hope that is the status of their program, for we cannot be sure.