Desmond Ball Interview: Conversation with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Gene Rochlin: It seems to me that you're raising the question of whether the U.S. strategic doctrine, in fact, makes sense, given their command and control problems. The bombers take a long time to get there, and presumably are under some form of command and control. The submarines are supposed to be the invulnerable part of our deterrent, yet they would have to be communicated with, presumably, in order to release them. And if the command and control systems are destroyed from the onset of war, does that not make the U.S. strategy of holding back, and the invulnerable slow-response deterrents, not as credible as it might be?
Yes, that's particularly stark in the case of the submarine systems. The submarine systems, at the moment, carry a little bit less than two-thirds of the U.S. warheads. But in the event of a Soviet attack -- and most of the scenarios involve the Soviets taking the initiative in the first major counter-force exchange -- more than 80 percent of the surviving warheads are on the submarines. But there is no way that those submarines can engage in controlled escalation scenarios. They can't be used in limited contingencies. For one thing, each submarine, in the case of the Poseidons, carry about 160 warheads, and they can't be used singly because that will expose the boat. You've got navigation problems with the submarines, which means they can't be used as precisely as you might want, and you would have to use them precisely if you were still trying to control escalation. Most importantly, you've got all the communications problems with the submarines. So that means that your major force cannot be deployed in the ways which guidance requires them to be deployed, in the ways that the U.S. policy would want them to be. The basic contradiction is that the only part of your force which you can use in precise and controlled ways is the Minuteman force, which is probably not going to be there for you to use in those ways.
Rochlin: Well does that, in itself, constitute a justification for what some people have criticized in administration policy of trying to get the land-based missiles strengthened and defended, rather than abandoning them?
I think that you can go two ways. One obvious way of solving that problem is, indeed, to get rid of the land-based forces altogether by putting them to sea or just by compensating for those qualities the land-based forces have by giving those qualities to the other elements of the force, giving Cruise Missiles high accuracy, giving the Trident II submarine-launched missiles counter-force capabilities. But for various reasons, I don't think that's practical. One overriding reason is that the U.S. Air Force would never allow that to happen at all. Most of the shape and characteristics of the forces are determined by bureaucratic reasons, and one has to accept that's the way things are. So, for that reason alone, a land-based missile component is always going to be here. But I think that you can go further than that and say that there are some technical reasons for keeping the land-based component if you can find a survival-basing mode for it. One of the problems that the U.S. has now is that for the new missiles, the MX, they haven't been able to come up with a survival-basing mode.
Are those reasons primarily political, bureaucratic, or technical? In other words, why are we having so much trouble basing the MX? This administration has a mandate to close the "window of vulnerability."
I think there are two main reasons for this basing problem. One is the sort of missile that one wants to base. The U.S. Air Force has been quite consistent now for over a decade that it be a big missile, and the parameters of the missile have now been set for some time. The MX is going to be 160,000 lbs. and carry ten warheads. The size of that missile means that the number of basing options is very constrained. The second reason is that the Pentagon is trying to come up with a single basing solution which will solve all the various problems of survivability and endurance and still retain the capabilities of the MX, and that's probably not possible.
One way out would be to forget about just having a single missile and a single basing mode and, perhaps deploy, say, only fifty missiles as big as the MX and put them in some sort of random shelter system, such as the Carter administration had decided back in 1979, but to supplement that with larger numbers of very small missiles, only about 40,000 lbs. (that's about two-thirds the size of the original Minuteman missile). With such a small missile you can base it in many, many different basing modes. The combination of basing modes would add to survivability in the same way that the overall triad today of submarines missiles and ICBMs and bombers guarantee survivability at least of some components.
And there is not movement in this direction because of the bureaucratic politics of who controls which weapons and whether one service can control a mix, is that what you're suggesting?
There's no movement in this direction at the moment, I think, for two reasons. One is bureaucratic politics in the Pentagon. The Air Force just is not interested in any small missile whatsoever, and certainly not any single-warhead missile. The only debate within the Air Force is about whether the missiles should be 170,000 lbs. or 180,000 lbs. -- both extremely large missiles.
The second reason is the fact that the debate on the size and character of the U.S. strategic forces has taken place in the last decade within the context of the SALT framework. The SALT I put the constraints on launchers, but not on the number of warheads that those launchers could carry, and that meant that there was no point in thinking too much about single-warhead missiles. Both sides could take maximum advantage of that SALT framework by deploying larger numbers of warheads on each missile, and hence the incentives were to try and get bigger missiles.
Rochlin: The SALT I was also attacked by many people as conceding to the Soviets a throw-weight advantage, that is, a larger number of so-called heavy missiles. I wonder to what extent the pressure for the MX program is also due to the U.S. desire to redress that balance by having a heavy missile of its own?
That's partly true. Though it's hard to see exactly what the logic of that is when you look at it more closely. The Soviet missiles, by and large, are much larger than their U.S. counterparts. The total megatonage in the two forces today is about 2 to 1 in favor of the Soviet Union. They have about 7,000 megatons, the U.S. has about 3,500 megatons. They have 308 of their SS-18 ICBMs, and partly what the Air Force wanted was a missile which could, in a sense, give them heavy-missile parity. But why do they really want that, unless they're interested in attacking those missiles first? That first-strike posture is disavowed, at least in public U.S. declaratory policy.
Rochlin: I think that's been a major concern of people who have been following the MX program, that the combination of very heavy missiles with the U.S. high accuracy, plus the prospect of a new and more accurate re-entry vehicle, means that the MX will, in fact, present the Soviets at least with the prospect of a U.S. first strike that looks credible to them. I'm wondering, first of all, about your opinion on that. And secondly, what a likely response would be from the Soviet Union if, in fact, they believed that.
I think that's undoubtedly true. The MX is going to have an undeniable counterforce capability, a capability which is about as good as one can imagine. Each warhead, given its yield and given its accuracy, will have a kill probability against a Soviet silo, no matter how hard, greater than 99.9 percent -- for all intents and purposes, an absolute capability against every Soviet silo. The question is how many MXs are going to be deployed. If they're going to deploy 200, which was the figure of the Carter administration, then that gives them 2,000, each of these high-kill probabilities. Now that would enable them to take out the whole of the Soviet ICBM force, which at the moment consists of 1,398 missiles, and still have some 600 left over for missile failures and for allocation to other hard targets. So that means that by the time the MX is deployed, the Soviets, who have invested the rest of their strategic budget into their strategic rocket forces, are going to find their missile force vulnerable. They're also going to find their SLBM forces vulnerable by the end of the 1980s. And the Cruise missile deployment of the U.S. is going to render impotent that enormous investment which the Soviets have made in their defense over the past couple of decades. So, from the Soviet point of view, things are going to look very desperate by the end of the decade. If this administration talks about a "window of vulnerability" facing the U.S., the Soviets are going to face a yawning chasm of vulnerability by the end of the eighties. And the big question is, is it really in U.S. interest to force the Soviet Union into that position of desperate vulnerability? Because the Soviet responses are, themselves, going to have to be fairly desperate. They're going to have to go for systems like "launch on warning" as the only way of ensuring the survivability or the usability of their ICBM forces. They're going to have to be in the situation, in most crises, of seriously considering using their forces first, use them or lose them.
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