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Destabilizing Missiles?
By William Arkin
02/04/06 "Washington
Post"
-- -- Tony Capaccio of
Bloomberg News
has another scoop that probably portends the most important
strategic military development of our generation.?
Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld has given the Navy go ahead to develop a
conventionally armed Trident missile.?Two dozen existing
nuclear-armed submarine-launched missiles will be converted to carry
conventional warheads.?The missiles will then be assigned "global
strike"
missions to allow quicker preemptive attacks.?
For the first time since intercontinental ballistic missiles were
"captured" in arms control treaties 40 years ago as unique and
potentially destabilizing weapons, the United States will muddy the
waters by modifying an existing nuclear weapon for use in day-to-day
warfare.?
The conversion of Trident missiles abandons the strict segregation
of nuclear from conventional weapons.?
Were the United States ever to use its new conventional Tridents,
the firing would also flirt with accidental nuclear war.?Ballistic
missiles aimed at targets in North Korea, for example, might falsely
signal to China or Russia that the United States was attacking
them.?
The arms
control and strategic stability issues associated with this decision
are momentous.?But here is the tragic reality of opening this door:
The United States just doesn't need the capability.
The fiscal
year 2007-2011 Department of Defense budget plan calls for building
96 conventional warheads for 24 Navy Trident II missiles, according
to a Dec. 20 memo signed by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England,
Bloomberg reported. ?Each missile would carry up to four warheads.
U.S.
Strategic Command (STRATCOM), which is the sponsor of the global
strike program, says that the conventionally armed missiles will add
to the ability "for delivering prompt, precise strike globally.''
"Increased
precision may allow targets currently held at risk with nuclear
weapons to be targeted with conventional weapons, providing options
other than nuclear weapons for prompt global strike," STRATCOM says.
In English,
STRATCOM is not only looking to improve its ability to attack deeply
buried enemy command centers, but also to decrease its reliance on
nuclear weapons.
On the
surface, the impulse to find conventional alternatives to nuclear
missions is laudable.?Of course, we are hostage to accepting
STRATCOM's calculations as to the need for nuclear weapons in the
first place.?These are purely physics calculations: We need so much
tonnage and overpressure to penetrate this or that underground
facility.?Since we are required to provide a 90 percent probability
of kill against these types of facilities, STRATCOM targeters and
weaponeers argue, we need to develop other capabilities to reach
those levels of guarantee.?This same argument has been used to
justify new nuclear-armed bunker buster weapons, but STRATCOM is not
just pursuing one approach; conventionally armed Trident IIs is
another approach to achieving the same goal.
Of course it
isn't STRATCOM's task, nor the Navy's, to wrestle with the arms
control and political implications of developing a conventionally
armed ballistic missile.?And the lack of foresight or restraint on
such technological determinism has also stood in the way of
investigating other less provocative methods.
For years,
STRATCOM and the Air Force have been developing concepts to
"functionally" defeat hard-to-get-to targets.?Say there is a deeply
underground facility that is deemed impervious to conventional
attack: The concept of functional defeat investigates other methods,
cyber warfare, special operations, a combination of conventional
attack on access points and electrical power production that would
disable or isolate the facility even if the bunker itself survived.
This is the
cutting edge of the military's new "effects based" operations. ?For
a set of difficult targets in countries like Iran and North Korea,
functional defeat specialists are today looking at the overall
construction and support network to figure out innovative attack
methods, ones that not only would obviate the need for nuclear
weapons, but would also break with the old-fashioned view that a
military mission isn't completed until things are destroyed in a
conventional sense.
So isn't it
ironic that Donald Rumsfeld, the prophet of military transformation
and the booster of an effects based approach is releasing a half a
billion dollars to develop a provocative weapon that falls back on
the old paradigm?
The reason is
that Donald Rumsfeld is a weakling.?For all his huffing and puffing,
he can't say no to either the military or the defense contractors.
And Congress
can't motivate itself to see that there are dozens of half a billion
dollar programs like conventional Trident that add boutique weapons
that constitute only the slightest increment of additional
capabilities but with enormous potential implications.
Copyright
Washington Post.
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