Desmond Ball Interview: Conversation with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Page 3 of 4
Rochlin: I wonder if you could just spend another minute talking about the Soviet SLBM vulnerability, because there has been some talk in this country of, as it were, pushing the Soviets out to sea to decrease our own vulnerability, encouraging them to go for more submarines, and have a force structured more like the United States'. And yet, you said they would be facing a possible vulnerability.
The idea of forcing the Soviets out to sea has a large number of holes in it. The Soviets don't like putting many of their missiles out to sea. Historically, less than 10 percent of their force has been at sea. At the moment it's up around 15 percent. The reasons for that are several-fold. The reactors which they have in their submarines are nowhere near as reliable as the reactors in the U.S. submarines. In fact, most of the accidents which the Soviets have had with their submarines evidently have involved reactor problems. They also have major communication problems.
They also don't have enough crews. They don't have the double crews that the U.S. has, the Blue and Gold crews, to keep them at sea for any lengthy period. There are probably questions about the reliability of their crews. The last thing that they'd want to see is one of their submarines turning up in San Diego harbor. I think that's a real problem for them.
There are other basing problems also. There are other technical problems, like the Soviet chemical industry still has yet to come up with good solid propellants, good solid fuels, which they need in their SLBMs. I think that means that they can't send many submarines to sea at any one time, and the ones that they send there, [with] their reactor problems and fuel problems, are just technically not very good.
But compounding all that is the problem of anti-submarine warfare. The Soviets have deployed their ASW capabilities, their anti-submarine capabilities, essentially around the Soviet Union. So their submarines can operate around the Soviet Union but not further afield. Whereas U.S. ASW capabilities are worldwide -- satellites, underwater sonars, other sensor systems, the P-3 Orion aircraft, and a whole lot of other systems which the U.S. deploys.
So for that reason, in addition to the other ones, the Soviets are not going to accept an option of putting most of their forces out to sea. What they're going to do is continue to rely on ICBMs, and those ICBMs probably can't be made mobile, or very easily mobile, again because of the solid fuel problem. Their experience with solid fuel missiles, the SS-13 and now the SS-16, which really, in the words of one Air Force officer, "was a dog," it never worked, the propellant cracked, it'd come away from the casing, the accuracy was poor, it's launch reliability was very weak -- it means that, if they'd have to go mobile, they'd have to deploy an enormous large number of these things to ensure that some small number of them would work. And the verification problems of that, as well as the U.S. problems of how to counter those, would be immense. So, it won't be a matter of forcing them to sea, it'll be a matter of forcing them to deploy even more land-based systems which will be unreliable and will probably have to go to launch on warning.
Rochlin: That raises another interesting question about the numbers, which maybe we can pursue for another minute. In the recent discussion about changing the U.S. strategic posture, what have been compared, especially in the popular magazines, have been the absolute numbers of launchers and warheads possessed by both sides, which include showing a Russian SLBM force which is, in fact, larger than that of the United States on paper, that is to say, there are more warheads, more subs than we have (the numbers allowed by SALT are slightly greater), as well as counting all of the Soviet solid fuel rockets, and the SS-20s, which are also solid fueled. It seems to me that what you're saying is that we should have a way of applying to those numbers an effectiveness criteria that enables a more realistic evaluation of strategic balance. I wonder if there is any place that people could go to try to get guidance on that subject, to form a better, more informed judgment as to what the balance really is?
Yes. That's a major problem. All of the current means for assessment are basically quantitative, though there are some formulas which do allow you to feed in some qualitative parameters. On the quantitative side, then the situation is basically one of parity. The Soviets have more delivery vehicles, so that at the moment they have about 2,500, as compared to the U.S. having about 1,950. The U.S. has more warheads, in general, on each of its delivery vehicles, particularly the bombers and the Poseidon submarines. So that, in terms of warheads, the Soviets only have about 70 percent of the U.S. figure. They have a bit over 7,000 and the U.S. has about 11,000.
But the really interesting ways of assessing the balance is when you look at how these are going to be employed against the respective target sets in the Soviet Union and the United States, in the context of an ongoing nuclear exchange. And there, because of the flexibility of the U.S. systems, because of the real-time intelligence capabilities and the ability to re-target missiles, and the better reliability of the U.S. systems, the U.S. comes out much better. If you want to get some public feel for these numbers, then, in terms of reliability of systems, one place to look is the satellite launchers of each side and just see what the success rate is. In the U.S. today, it's over 80 percent. The Soviet figure would be less than that, perhaps about 2/3, 66 percent.
But the real difference is going to be in command and control, intelligence, and re-targeting capability. If you're looking at the capacity of the Soviets, what they can do with their, say, 1,398 ICBMs, given that they can't have complete, comprehensive, and real-time coverage of the United States, as compared to what the U.S. can do with its ICBMs when it does have that capability. It can determine which Soviet missiles have failed, and hence are still in their silos, perhaps being repaired or fixed for re-launch, which Soviet silos are empty, and can re-target a Minuteman against the silos which still have either reserve ICBMs or ICBMs which are being repaired for a second launch rather than having to do just a blanket second wave of attacks against all the Soviet silos, which the Soviets would have to do if they wanted to get the ones that they had missed in the first wave. And, if you look at various operational problems in a nuclear exchange, then the U.S. can do a lot more with its forces, in terms of overall effectiveness against the Soviet target base, than the Soviets can do with their forces against the U.S. target base.
Next page: Stopping the Arms Race
© Copyright 2001, Regents of the University of California