The Magic Kingdom
Calculated Risks: A Century of Arms Control, Why It Has Failed, and How It Can Be Made to Work.
by Bruce Berkowitz.
Simon & Schuster. 221 pp. $18.95.
The Arms Control Delusion.
by Malcolm Wallop and Angelo M. Codevilla.
1CS Press. 220 pp. $16.95.
Neither Bruce Berkowitz nor Malcolm Wallop and Angelo Codevilla tolerate gladly those who would center America’s national-security policy in the magic kingdom of arms control. While Berkowitz highlights a number of real-world complexities that restrict the contribution arms control can make to desirable policy outcomes, he nonetheless finds, within those limits, a useful role for it. Wallop-Codevilla, by contrast, attack the very foundations on which the arms-control process rests, and condemn support for it as detrimental to the achievement of our most basic national interests. Let us evaluate Berkowitz’s guerrilla harassment of the kingdom before we turn to Wallop-Code villa’s frontal assault upon it.
Berkowitz’s first contention is that, judged by its results, arms control has been a failure: over the past two decades it has generally limited neither arms nor military technology nor defense spending. In quest of an explanation for its ineffectiveness he cites the familliar parallel with the ineffectiveness of price controls, i.e., it is simply impossible to regulate the multiple factors that shape prices. As long as the demand for weapons persists, arms control merely alters the means through which nations obtain them. Indeed, it may make things worse, by jogging sluggish bureaucracies to get around the constraints through the development of new, and more dangerous, weapons.
Recognition of the inadequacy of such “quantitative” restraints as those of the Washington Naval Treaty (an outgrowth of the Washington Conference, which met from November 12, 1921 to February 6, 1922) or SALT I spurred efforts at “qualitative” limitations through the control of technology. These efforts often run aground, however, on the “self-extinguishing process”: while controllers usually begin by regulation of that which is technically feasible and politically acceptable, they are soon frustrated by arms that are neither. The fact that, in 1972, launchers were a relatively accurate measure of strategic forces was reflected in the rather simple terms of SALT I. The fact that, by the end of the decade, this was no longer the case was reflected in the complexities and inadequacy of SALT II. If launchers can no longer serve as the unit of account, can one(s) of comparable effectiveness be found?
The growth in complexity of the unit of account further compounds problems of verification—for example, of cruise missiles and mobile ones. While “the technological advantage between hunting and hiding weapons has swung back and forth,” certain political problems have persisted. Democracies, by their continuing inability to act on the evidence of violations, still fail to answer Fred Iklé’s elemental question of over a quarter-of-a-century ago, “After detection, what?” Those who imagine that a military build-up constitutes such a response should be sobered by the awareness that, as defense spending goes up, so does opposition to it, and that, historically, all our defense build-ups have tapered off after some five or six years. Recognition of the many problems in the verification of modern weapons brings Berkowitz back to another facet of his concern with “qualitative” control: why wasn’t the technology banned?
He finds two main reasons and devotes a chapter to each. The essence of the first derives from the inability of states to agree on “who stops first?” Perhaps the clearest instance of this was the shift in the Soviet position from unwavering opposition to a test ban to advocacy of a total ban—in May 1955, just as the Soviets were completing decisive advances in their own weapons systems. In Berkowitz’s words: “The Soviets wanted first to prove their Teller-Ulam device, and then shut the door on any other countries hoping to build a similar weapon.” The partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 had little effect on the development of nuclear weapons, in accordance with Berkowitz’s generalization that most arms-control treaties have scrapped old weapons, capped current ones, and left research and development uncontrolled.
The essence of the second is “the technological web,” whose strands closely bind military to civilian developments. At the 1921-22 Washington Conference, the U.S. abandoned the effort to ban strategic bombers, because of their close intertwining with advances in civilian aviation, which themselves promised a “boon to civilization.” A contemporary parallel would be the futility of seeking to ban anti-satellite weapons without simultaneously banning another “boon to civilization”—space shuttles. No foolproof barrier can block the adaptation of the technology of plowshares to that of swords. Nor is fixed discrimination possible within military technology itself, e.g., between tactical and strategic missiles, or between air- and missile-defense systems.
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Why, then, do people believe in arms control? Beyond the familiar popular justification one finds “the elegant argument,” derived from game theory, which views arms control as a means to coordinate “the policies of the United States and the Soviet Union so that the stalemate of deterrence” holds. But in their assumption that states enter negotiations to head off an arms race, these abstract models misread those motivations. While Japan, on the eve of the Washington Conference, was committed to an arms race, neither the United States nor Britain was. Nor is it accurate to say that SALT I averted an ABM race, since the United States had no intention of entering one. Both agreements simply “allowed the countries that were determined to arm to go ahead and arm, and permitted the countries that were unwilling to arm to fool themselves into thinking that they had reduced the threat presented by their opponent.”
Although Berkowitz has, to this point, directed his fire at both the practical record and the theoretical justification for arms control, he still contends it “can reduce the probability and costs of war” and “play an important role in American foreign policy.” He seeks to make his case, first, through a chapter devoted to “Arms Control That Works”: the agreements on Incidents at Sea and on the Hot Line. These were successful because they cost no faction in either government much, verification was simple, and they dealt with “practical issues on a day-to-day basis.” Even such successful accords should not be burdened with exaggerated expectations, however. The Hot Line merely guarantees that messages will get through, not that they will be truthful. It may, indeed, reveal “just how narrow the range of clearly defined mutual interests” between the United States and the Soviet Union is.
The second way Berkowitz seeks to make his positive case is by demonstrating that many of the goals sought through arms-control accords may be achieved by unilateral measures like improving command and control, or emphasizing mobile ICBMs. Such considerations show clearly that arms control makes sense only when related to overall American national-security policy. These insights are pulled together, with others, in six concluding guidelines: arms control is not an end in itself; bad arms control is worse than none; technology cannot be retarded; success does not lead to success; unilateral policies that accomplish arms-control goals are to be preferred; negotiations should be done quietly and by small delegations.
Through his clear account of the failure of arms control to live up to the claims of its proponents, and of some of the factors contributing to that failure, Berkowitz helps counter the persistent tendency of many in our culture to exaggerate childishly what arms control can accomplish. But the subtitle of his book promises far more than it delivers. The “Century of Arms Control” to which it refers omits the massive formal efforts made under the auspices of the League of Nations, as well as such informal understandings as those worked out between the United States and Great Britain. Occasional factual inaccuracies also mar his account: the Baruch Plan was presented to the UN in 1946, not 1947; SALT I limited ICBM silos and ballistic-missile submarines, but not bombers. And, despite his insights, Berkowitz evades the primal problems which must be addressed as the precondition to any serious effort to shape a national strategy, most specifically a clear assessment of the Soviet threat. His glib agnosticism on this issue clouds his insight into the central antinomy in American policy: that between efforts to further security through negotiated accords and efforts to further security through unilateral action. Exploration of this antinomy is the principal concern of Malcolm Wallop (senior U.S. Senator from Wyoming) and Angelo M. Codevilla (senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution).
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At the center of Wallop and Codevilla’s analysis stands this grim irony: “During the quarter century during which arms control has been in the forefront of our national agenda, a massive change in the balance of power between the U.S. and Soviet arsenals has taken place in favor of the Soviet Union, and . . . the danger of war is greater now than when the arms-control process began.” In former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger’s words, America’s military predicament in the 1980’s is the very one we had hoped to avoid by entering into the arms-control process in the first place. While Berkowitz’s analysis points to a pragmatic use of negotiated accords when they serve our interest, and unilateral measures when they do, Wallop-Codevilla contend that the delusion of arms control has obscured the necessity for choosing vigorous unilateral measures essential to protect national survival.
The interwar period had taught the fateful lesson that the Axis military build-up had taken place under the cover of arms control. But this insight was obscured after World War II by the notion that nuclear weapons had “forever made major war an unpaying proposition.” In our original arms-control proposals, the means were at least proportionate to the control sought. By the 1960’s, however, in light of the refusal of the Soviets to put any part of their military establishment under international inspection, and our exaggerated confidence in what we could learn through intelligence satellites, we had begun to transform emphasis on the ability to achieve compliance into the ability to observe and listen to the Soviet Union. Confidence that missiles had taken pretty much their ultimate form was another foundation on which the arms-control delusion was built.
Unable to deal with the world as it was, the foreign-policy establishment of the 1960’s and 1970’s fashioned a pleasing substitute by a triple abstraction from reality—political, military, and technological. Politically it saw arms control as a means to shape Soviet intentions into accord with our own preferences—overlooking the prospect that Soviet leaders might make “common cause with American arms controllers to restrain the U.S. military without any intention of restraining their own.” Evading the question of whether the Soviets were developing the nuclear forces to win wars, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara refused to deal with an open-ended Soviet military challenge on its own terms, and sought instead means to assure peace, at relatively low cost, whatever the Soviets did. Once the U.S. gave up its insistence on cooperative verification, it would have “to worry about the relationship of what it knew to what it did not know.” But the arms controllers assumed that our intelligence sees all there is to see in the Soviet Union, and the strategic forces controlled in treaties stand for all Soviet strategic forces.
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The authors then demonstrate, in some detail, how this threefold substitution for reality has shaped the terms of SALT I, SALT II, and other accords. “The moral of the story is that the U.S. negotiators define the parameters of arms-control agreements less for their military significance than to conform them to the ability of U.S. intelligence to gather information.” While the arms controllers seek to focus America’s vision on sterile debates within a solipsistic world, the larger reality of the mounting Soviet military threat is pushed out of sight. We expected these agreements “to ratify a convergence of political objectives” between us and the Soviet Union; Moscow instead (and largely within the terms of the treaties) built the very forces it had been the hope of our negotiators to head off.
Our negotiators of SALT I felt they had brought the Soviets to reject a war-winning (or “counter-force”) strategy and join us in accepting the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). Yet the “mere possibility,” in 1972, that Moscow might acquire a war-winning force had become, in 1979, “the near certainty that such a force was in the final stage of construction.” Under these straitened circumstances, our premise in SALT II was that “our purpose could be accomplished only if we succeeded in persuading the Soviets not to seriously pursue their own.”
Largely through the initiative of Jimmy Carter, the election of 1980 was framed as “a choice between a negotiated solution to America’s security problems and a unilateral military one. Having no alternative, Reagan accepted this formulation of the issue, and won the election.” Reagan’s orientation did not survive to his inauguration, however. By then the bureaucracies in the State and Defense Departments had supplanted it with a “two-track” policy which saw arms control as essential political cover for Reagan’s military build-up.
A fateful consequence has been to “make each step of a U.S. weapons program dependent on the arms-control process,” with the contortions through which the MX-missile or antisatellite (ASAT) programs have been put as painful illustrations. And although the Reagan administration has given more saliency to Soviet violations than its predecessors did, it has more evidence of violations than it has publicized and it has often reduced “compliance” with treaties to our unilateral “interim” observation of them. The most detrimental instance of the latter is Secretary of State George P. Shultz’s declaration that, although the “permissive interpretation [of the ABM treaty] is legally correct,” we will follow the “restrictive interpretation.” This has helped transform Reagan’s commitment to build antimissile defenses into a deferral of whether to build them into the 1990’s.
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While Reagan did not “go all the way” with Gorbachev at Reykjavik, he was maneuvered into a trap where he had either to reject arms control or agree to implement the Soviet proposals by stages. His effort to evade this choice has led to a new version of arms control, not through agreements with Moscow but through “American military policies derived from American bureaucratic preferences and domestic politics and shaped to a great but undefinable extent in the name of future agreements with the Soviet Union.” This attempted evasion not only removes “arms control entirely from the constitutional and legal framework,” but blinds us to the urgent necessity to develop a superior counterforce capability coupled with “a substantial antimissile shield.”
By the resolute decisiveness with which they argue their case, Wallop-Codevilla make two major contributions to our understanding of security policy: they compel us to come to terms with the implications of the relentless Soviet drive for counterforce superiority, and they compel us to ponder the heavy toll faith in negotiated accords with Moscow has exacted upon our will to meet our own needs with our own deeds. One might, however, question their argument at a number of points. Thus, while an analysis that concentrates on the vulnerability of the land-based leg of the triad is understandable, it is incomplete; and their conviction that “the strength of democracies lies in unambiguous policies that inspire moral commitment” is surely an oversimplification. Nevertheless, by their insistence that we grapple with fundamental issues, they place all who are concerned with America’s security policy in their debt. Their thesis constitutes a brilliant challenge, vigorously developed, to the complacent premises which have commonly governed arms-control policy.
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Achievement of a sense of proportion is the indispensable prerequisite to the forging of a responsible foreign policy. Since the birth of the Republic, Americans have been afflicted by recurrent bouts with the debility of disproportion. Its most widespread manifestation in our time has been an exaggeration of the contribution any given arms-control agreement can make to the control of arms, and of the contribution the control of arms as such can make to our nation’s broader goals. Specificity in analysis provides at least partial immunity to the virus. For once the debate is framed as one between upholders of peace and law as against pushers of war and guns, the infection will have its way. Both of these books, the one more effectively than the other, carry healthy antibodies.
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