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What does START II signify?
© 2000 WorldNetDaily.com
JR Nyquist 4-17-00
On Friday the Russian State Duma ratified the START II treaty by a vote of 288-131. The treaty will now pass to Russia's upper house, the Federal Council, where approval is almost certain. Implementation of START II means that U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals will be reduced to half their present size -- to roughly 3,500 warheads on each side.
Given the radical reductions proposed by START II, a brief overview of the START process and its implications is in order.
The Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) were first suggested by President Ronald Reagan in May 1982. During a speech at Eureka College, Reagan proposed the reduction of superpower arsenals to 5,000 nuclear warheads and 850 missiles. START was initially opposed by leaders in Reagan's own party. As Senator Malcolm Wallop (R-Wy.) wrote in 1987: "Reagan's proposal made sense on the surface, but only on the surface."
Wallop co-authored a book with Angelo Codevilla in 1987 entitled, "The Arms Control Delusion," in which he noted that a typical U.S. warhead in the mid-1980s was only 40 kilotons, which "yields only about one-twentieth the explosive power of the most typical warhead in the Soviet arsenal. ..."
Reagan's START proposal, based on straight numbers, would fix America into a position of permanent strategic inferiority. START was therefore denounced by Leslie Gelb, President Carter's Director of Political-Military Affairs. START was also criticized by the president of the left-of-center Arms Control Association, Herbert Scoville. But Reagan's thinking was ahead of its time: If the United States developed ballistic missile defenses under the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the reduced number of warheads would then be to America's net advantage. A subtle thought, indeed, and a nice twist to the olive branch Reagan was extending toward Moscow. Unfortunately, Reagan's SDI program -- ridiculed as "star wars" -- died in its crib. The United States never developed a national ballistic missile defense. Instead, it was Russia that developed an SDI program, and this has been documented by William T. Lee in a book entitled, "The ABM Treaty Charade."
If we look at the wider strategic context, Reagan's START proposal was only sensible if America went ahead with a massive missile defense program. The weakened and watered-down SDI research efforts that followed, however, with tiny and wavering budgetary commitments, could achieve very little. Given the huge size, delivery capacity and tremendous speed of Russian rockets, only the most robust Strategic Defense Initiative would make a START treaty advantageous for the American side. Because Reagan's SDI never got anywhere, the START process gave the advantage to Russia. As Senator Wallop predicted in 1987, the proposed START reductions would leave the United States unable "to carry out an attempt at Assured Destruction (in a war with Russia), much less any rational military strategy."
Peter Vincent Pry, a leading CIA analyst at the time, also warned against the proposed START reductions in his 1990 book, "Nuclear Wars: Exchanges and Outcomes." Pry wrote that even if START was coupled with SDI, the START I treaty would leave America with a limited retaliatory capability after a Russian first strike. Pry's 1990 study, painstakingly researched and ignored by the public, showed that after a Russian first strike under the START I treaty the U.S. "would be able to attack only about 30 percent of Soviet military targets, falling to 5 percent of Soviet military targets when further reductions required by START II are completed at the close of the century."
Pry's groundbreaking 1990 analysis showed that deep reductions in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, like those envisioned by the START I and START II treaties, "would cut U.S. weaponry to such low levels that the United States would not be able to meet basic targeting requirements for achieving warfighting objectives and for enforcing deterrence."
William T. Lee, yet another distinguished former analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA, stated in 1997 that the START II treaty would make Russia "potentially the world's preeminent nuclear superpower with its combination of strategic offensive and defensive forces. ..."
According to Lee, "the START II Treaty limit of some 3,500 strategic warheads is below the safety threshold."
So why did America's leaders negotiate such an idiotic treaty? And why did the U.S. Senate ratify an earlier version of this treaty?
American politicians and negotiators have foolishly extended a kind of trust to Russia's leaders, imagining that these leaders are no longer "communists." But the new leaders in Russia are the same old apparatchiks painted over in nationalist colors. It does not matter what they call themselves. The chief Kremlin players today are interchangeable with the players of yesterday.
Today Russia possesses the world's best and also the world's largest strategic rockets. Russia has the world's only national anti-ballistic missile defense system. The Kremlin has already broken the ABM treaty, the chemical and biological weapons treaties, and its leaders cannot be trusted to keep the START II treaty. To repeat the point made above: Reagan's strategic plan has been turned on its head. Instead of the U.S. possessing an advantage from the START process, it is Russia that gains the advantage -- because Russia has Reagan's SDI and the United States has nothing but President Clinton's ongoing obstruction of SDI.
There is also another interesting fact to consider. The former Soviet Union gained a great deal from its reputed implosion. Not only did the USSR breakup lead the United States to trust the Kremlin as never before, but many republics of the former Soviet Union were converted into nuclear free zones -- areas that will not come under attack during a future war. Consequently, the air and missile defense problem of the former Soviet Union has been simplified.
To show how cynical the breakup of the Soviet military system was, the former Soviet military districts largely remain intact. Not only this, but the former Soviet Republics have recently engaged in numerous joint military exercises, some of which emphasize air and missile defense. A good example was provided by the Comradeship-in-Arms '99 exercise of last Aug. 24, in which former Soviet republics jointly defended against mock U.S. warplane and cruise missile attacks. The commander of the exercise was none other than Anatoly Kornukov, chairman of the coordinating committee of the united air defense system of the CIS countries and commander in chief of the Russian air force.
On the same day as the Duma elections last December, a special meeting was scheduled in Moscow of the Council of Defense Ministers of the CIS. These defense ministers had previously met in August, to discuss the coordination of former Soviet Union air defenses. Do you really think the old Soviet military structures have evaporated?
We have to face the truth. START II is a threat to America's national security. Not only does it give a tremendous advantage to Russia, but the treaty says nothing about the size of China's nuclear arsenal.
In closing, we should consider what Pavel Felgenhauer wrote in the Moscow Times of April 13. According to Felgenhauer, Russia's Duma was urged by the Kremlin to ratify START II as a propaganda ploy "to expose the evil Americans." One Kremlin official, said Felgenhauer, fully acknowledged that the provisions of START II would never be implemented by Russia.
The U.S. Senate will probably reject the revised START II treaty ratified by the Russian Duma. But Clinton will enforce this treaty despite the Senate's rejection. And so will Al Gore -- if he should become our next, and perhaps last, president.
BUMP!
BUMP!
i think that article is a bit misleading. I've read several places where we have enough nuke's to put the entire world under a mushroom and so does Russia. The bombs like we dropped on japan pale in comparison to some of the ones today and multiply that by what 2500....insane amounts of damage even if 1/2 are shot down. While i agree we shouldn't enter into a missle treaty with russia, we do not need 10,000 nukes.
Well, I have to disagree. Besides the scenario of the all-out exchange there's also the possibility of an incremental nuclear war, one which could last 20-30 yr.s. Nuclear weapons plants would be among the first targets in such a war so a large prewar nuclear aresenal would be required. In such a war it would be a matter of attritting the enemy's military and economic resources while leaving population centers relatively alone due to MAD. In this scenario the first to run out of nuclear warheads loses.
Except that there is no way a nuclear war would last 20-30 years after the plants are destroyed--the nuclear warheads would degrade beyond usability in far less time without refurbishing at the PANTEX facility.
JR "I Really, Really, REALLY Miss the Cold War" Nyquist.
Says it all right there.
One more time:
Anyone willing to take a bet on ICBM reliability does NOT have history on their side.
Anyone projecting an amazing 8500 or so ABM system is forgetting one small detail--missiles are the LEAST difficult part of such a system. Bell Laboratories was the Nike-Zeus, Nike-X, Sentinel, and Safeguard prime contractor for a damn good reason--communications and battle management are EVERYTHING in such a system.
Turning those SAMs into even marginally effective ABM systems requires a LOT of space-based assets that Ivan either (a) doesn't have in place anymore or (b) are not being replaced at the same rate as they are dying of old age.
You need to start an extensive study of how the systems are used. In all war games everything is deployed in stages. WWII was a four-year war but war in days now. Modern war has many new changes. Thanking just numbers is too much over simplification. We live in days that assets can go away in matter of minutes.
"...the nuclear warheads would degrade beyond usability in far less time without refurbishing at the PANTEX facility."
As refurbishing is easier than manufacturing plutonium and warheads I'm assuming refurbishing would continue at additional plants (existing or constructed).
I've read several places where we have enough nuke's to put the entire world under a mushroom and so does Russia. The bombs like we dropped on japan pale in comparison to some of the ones today and multiply that by what 2500....insane amounts of damage even if 1/2 are shot down. While i agree we shouldn't enter into a missle treaty with russia, we do not need 10,000 nukes.
Interesting comments with which I nevertheless must strongly disagree. While a countervalue exchange would essentially destroy our two countries, a counterforce exchange even with thousands of nukes would leave our two countries largely "intact" though without a working government since DC will be the first to go in any large-scale exchange scenario.
Many Americans seem to have bought into the anti-nuke crowd/Russian strategic disinformation campaign of the early 1980s and before that even a limited nuclear exchange could destroy our "fragile" ecosystem and cause the human race to go the way of the dinosaurs due to non-existent nuclear 'overkill'. This is not even close to being true. The myth of nuclear overkill says that we can destroy the earth 50 times over. It uses completely bogus Hiroshima statistics estimating what would happened if all six billion people on earth were focused in one small part of the world and every nuclear weapon in the world was exploded directly over their heads. It assumes that they all lived in circa 1945 Hiroshima-style non-concrete reinforced wooden houses and buildings.
Even the use of all of the nuclear weapons on the planet at the height of the Cold War would not succeed in destroying the human race or blowing up the planet. They would effect only 1% of the earth's surface. The impact of their direct effects would be limited to the Northern Hemisphere and specifically those regions/countries where nuclear weapons impacted. Most of the human race would inevitably survive even with secondary effects like economic collapse, disease, insect multiplication, starvation, food shortages, and secondary conflicts, etc. Lastly, there is no such thing as nuclear winter, which is a concept derived from KGB scientists from the Soviet Union to decieve the West into thinking that since a nuclear war would "destroy the world" then it logically followed that "resistance to Communism was futile" because it risked nuclear war and global extermination. If you want to beef up on Nuclear War outcomes, go read "Nuclear War Survival Skills" by Cresson Kearney. I would be happy to send you an E-copy. BTW, we don't have 10,000 strategic nukes. We have 6,000 and dropping.
The tritium would need replacement, and that means a tritium production reactor, and said reactor would be a prime target, and any attempt to rebuild said reactor would get zapped, too. Next time, please apply logic BEFORE posting.
...that even a limited nuclear exchange...
As one familiar with both Russian as American temper, I do not foresee a limited nuclear exchange between the two. Or there will be peace (even very hot one like 'Cold War') or it all goes to the H-place.
Taking 6 steps backwards into simple terms eradicating half of your armoured and tank divisions THEN developing the worlds best anti-tank/armour device afterwards doesn't make much sense,thats whats being proposed here but at a lot more serious level
As one familiar with both Russian as American temper, I do not foresee a limited nuclear exchange between the two. Or there will be peace (even very hot one like 'Cold War') or it all goes to the H-place.
After long believing that any nuclear war would be an all-out exchange, after further study I have determined that any nuclear war including one with Russia would more than likely be a limited one--tit for tat. For example, Russia takes out our nuclear missiles sub bases; We attempt to nuke theirs. Or China nukes our 7th Fleet carriers; We take out a couple of their staging ports in Fujan province or their amphib invasion fleet.
ing 6 steps backwards into simple terms eradicating half of your armoured and tank divisions THEN developing the worlds best anti-tank/armour device afterwards doesn't make much sense,thats whats being proposed here but at a lot more serious level.
Good analogy. Actually, we are doing that as well. Under the Shinseki Transformation Plan, the US will eliminate nearly half of its heavy (tank and mechanized) divisions by 2010 and replace them with 50 cal armed light armored car brigades with very little combat capability to speak of. Unfortunately, our unilateral disarmament of half of our main battle tanks will is not believed to be accompanied by any revolutionary anti-armor weapon to compensate for the lost combat power.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
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