Desmond Ball Interview: Conversation with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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A lot of people are asking, "How do you stop the momentum of the arms race?" In the last few minutes we've talked about the problem of technical advantage on one side or the other; which one side can't match the other side and therefore is forced into more systems; the fear of what one side sees as defensive moves, [which] can in fact be offensive from the perspective of the other side; the issue that you've just touched on in terms of domestic politics, namely, the public's knowledge of the meaning of technical data; and so on. How does this all fit together for those people who are trying to say, "What can we do to get both sides to stop, to slow down the arms race?"
That's, of course, the most difficult question in all of this. Let me just address two possible ways of going about it. One is that there needs to be far more public information available on what the numbers are and what the capabilities of the systems are. And there needs to be developed better means of assessing the balance. If we had better means of assessing the overall strategic relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union, which could feed into those qualitative factors, then it would not be possible for the current administration to talk about "windows of vulnerability" and other completely nonsensical concepts. There is no window of vulnerability in an operational sense. And the current programs for closing that window are really doing nothing more than exacerbating the problems a decade hence. If there were better indices available which had these qualitative factors, then the public would not be concerned about the fact that the Soviet Union had twice as much megatonage and had an extra 500 delivery vehicles, if they're aware that these two factors in operational scenarios were less meaningful than a whole lot of other factors. So the first point is to give the public more information and a more meaningful way of evaluating that information.
The second problem then is, once you've got the information at your fingertips and know what the situation is in the United States and the Soviet Union, how do you go about coming up with a framework which would institutionalize some sort of parity but, at the same time, allow each side to exercise their own foibles (the Soviet Union wanting to put most of its resources into ICBMs, for example, for various bureaucratic and technical and geographical reasons)? You want a framework which is relatively simple but allows each side to have equivalencies, in a way, so there is something equivalent to the large Soviet SS-18, while on the other hand, the Soviets can have equivalencies to the Poseidon, with all its weapons, or a B-52 or a B-1 carrying large numbers of Cruise missiles, and which allows each side to make a mix that they want. I think that there are frameworks, which are now being developed, which do allow this. One by Sydney Drell at Stanford which has been circulated within Congress and within the U.S. at large over the past six months talks about a common ceiling on each side, of launchers and warheads, but allows each side to make the mix that they want and, in so doing, offers incentives to move away from MIRVs, multiple warheads, the more destabilizing technologies, back toward single warhead systems. And it could well be worthwhile putting more consideration into that sort of possibility for slowing things down. I don't think there is much value in pursuing SALT any further than what was reached at the SALT II agreement.
When you place these technical discussions in context, the political relations between the two powers [seem to be] a key issue. That the incapacity of the superpowers to understand each other's intentions is the fuel for the technical fixes. How do you see getting around that? The technical information would be nice, and that would be an important step, but one always sees on the horizon a presidential campaign in which there will still be a concerted effort to distort the information that is available.
Yes. The situation really is one of an incredibly complex intermingling of these technical and political factors. They feed on each other. A lot of the political problems come from the different ways that the technical capabilities on each side can be manipulated and distorted and misrepresented. The fact is that since 1979, at the political level, neither the U.S. nor the Soviet political leaderships have seen any value in continuing the dialogue of the sort that happened in the early seventies. Détente was never supposed to mean the end of confrontation, and indeed, détente came about at a time when the U.S. was still involved in Vietnam. SALT I was signed soon after the heaviest bombing in Vietnam, Christmas of '72. In 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, there was a potential for superpower conflict, but at the same time they continued the dialogue. That hasn't happened. I know less about the Soviet side than I do on the U.S. side, but it is possible to find, on the U.S. side, some quite deliberate and flagrant examples of political uses of misrepresentation at the time of the SALT II debate. Soviet compliance with SALT really has been [high], with one or two exceptions which, when brought to the Soviet's notice, have been corrected; they have complied with SALT. But there has been a big campaign in this country to say that the Soviets have not complied with SALT, and that was a major issue in the election in 1980. I don't know how you get around that, if people want to misrepresent these issues for political purposes, other than just trying to keep putting on the public record as much as you can so that people can debate and point out these misrepresentation. The whole issue of the "window of vulnerability" is another [misrepresentation], like the [misrepresentation] of Soviet violation of the two SALT accords. If the opposition in the United States, at the political levels, had been more technically informed, they could have laid these myths to rest.
Looking at the Soviet side as a technical expert, what do you see have been their great failures as a participant in this movement toward arms control? The catalog of American errors, mistakes, and intentional acts is clear. What about the Soviet side? Are there things that come to your mind that you would like to see changed?
On the Soviet side, it's more difficult to fault them, in a sense, because for most of the history of the arms race it has been the U.S. which has taken the lead. Most of the things which have been most inimical to the strategic relations people, "destabilizing," to use the jargon, have been the fault of the United States, like MIRVing, for example, putting large numbers of warheads on each delivery vehicle. The Soviet process has really been one of trying to catch up, trying to match.
That having been said though, the areas that are most disturbing on the Soviet side, which they could do something about if they wanted, would be, firstly, their heavy missiles, what used to be the SS-9 and now have been replaced by the SS-18, which in its most common variant carries ten warheads, each very, very large, about 2/3 of a megaton, 600 or so kilotons each. And they have 308 of those missiles, which means 3,080 warheads, just on the SS-18 force. And that gives them a capability which has to be worrying, and which they have to realize is worrying, and any overall agreement is not going to succeed until they do something about watering down that heavy missile force.
The second area which I think is worrying is their anti-satellite capability. It's going to be very hard to get any arms control regime in space, and that's going to be a critical area in the 1980s and '90s, if both sides persist in going ahead with anti-satellite capabilities. And at the moment, it is the Soviets who are leading in the field, in the ASAT area.
The third area where I think they have to come to the party is the intermediate range missiles, the SS-20. One of the problems with coming up with any sort of agreement at the moment is that the boundaries between battlefield nuclear weapons and theater nuclear weapons and strategic nuclear weapons are all being blurred. That means that the approach which was being adopted in SALT I, which was to identify a particular area of weapons -- the strategic nuclear area, which was a pretty clearly identifiable set -- and to negotiate, can no longer be done because of these other blurring systems. Besides the fact that the SS-20 raises such concern as it does in Europe, there is this other concern in the blurring, or gray-area role. So that would be the three areas that I think the Soviets unilaterally could do more about, the SS-18, the anti-satellite capabilities, and their SS-20 force.
Rochlin: With regard to this blurring, in SALT I the French and British forces were, of course, left out. The U.S. insisted on not discussing them. I believe the Soviets issued a unilateral interpretation of their own, as a protocol, but with the modernization that's coming with the British and French forces and this blurring, doesn't that imply that the next round of strategic arms talks should start to bring them in in some fashion? Or do you just see that as not probable?
I don't think that is probable. There may be informal ways of bringing the British into negotiations but there is just no way that the French are going to participate. In SALT I, while the U.S. was adamant in refusing that the British and French capabilities would not be factored into the balance, it was the case that the Soviets were allowed to have more missile carrying submarines [because of] a decision on Kissinger's part that that could outweigh the submarines which are on the French and the British forces. There were two reasons that he did that. One was the basing structure of the Soviet submarines and the fact that they did have less at sea, that this could compensate for their geographical disadvantage. But it was also to compensate for the French and British systems.
The French and British systems are really not trivial. In the case of Britain, for example, they have now announced that they are going ahead with the acquisition of five Trident submarines. Each of those submarines will be carrying sixteen missiles with eight to ten warheads per missile, perhaps 160 warheads each. Five of those, that's about 800 warheads just on the British SLBMs. Add to that what is available for them to put on their bombers, on their Jaguars and on their Tornadoes when they get them, most of which are supposed to be for long-range battlefield interdiction but, indeed, many of them will be out of reach of the Soviet Union, and you have over 1,000 strategic weapons. Now, the French figure consists of what they have on their submarines, what they have on their intermediate-range missiles, and what they have on their Mirages, and could also come up to about 1,000. So, just those forces alone account for 2,000 warheads, which the Soviets have to worry about because those 2,000 warheads can make quite a mess of the Soviet Union. Particularly the western part of the Soviet Union.
One of the issues that seems to be emerging more and more is the arms control process, or the substitute for the arms control process, including an effort to set up communications between the superpowers about their strategies, their doctrines, an expanded hotline, and other kinds of communication networks. Do you see any movement in that direction? Are we going to run into problems here with the Soviet system, or even with our system? Because although we can allege that we are interested in such moves, we may, in fact, not be interested.
There is a lot of scope there. Probably the most successful part of the SALT process was not the ceilings that were put on the weapons systems, because those ceilings really just institutionalized what were there as a matter of fact anyway, no one got stopped doing anything that they wanted to do; but it was the setting up of the Standing Consultative Commission, which allowed the U.S. and the Soviet Union to talk about what was going on with their strategic forces. If the Soviets were doing things, such as testing their SA-5 anti-aircraft system and associated radars in a way that the U.S. was worried about, then the U.S. took that issue to the SCC and was able to resolve that issue. And that happened on, oh, at least a couple of dozen instances. Now, that forum has proved quite successful. It's a pity it isn't used more generally.
The improvements to the hotline are also worth while pursuing. It isn't the case that it's the Soviets alone who aren't interested in pursuing it, to some extent it has been the U.S. The hotline, at the moment, depends on a very insecure, and very vulnerable, use of commercial Intel satellites. Now, the Soviet Union has proposed, on a couple of occasions, that they use the U.S. defense satellite communication system, a far more capable and more secure satellite. The Pentagon won't allow that, they don't want the Soviets to use one of their systems, even though there are no real genuine reasons why they shouldn't. But, in the end, no matter how good your technical systems for dialogue are, it comes back to the willingness of the political leaderships to utilize those systems. The SCC is already there and the hotline is already there, and other means of communication are there. One interesting proposal which General David Jones put forward is that the military and political leaderships of the Soviet Union just should meet annually to talk over their problems. Now, a lot of that is going to be propaganda and a lot of it's going to be meaningless, but it's hard to see that the exercise would be totally useless. I'm sure that General Jones only put it forward knowing that there would be something which he would get out of talking to his four-star counterpart, and vice versa. And you could extend the same argument to the political leaderships.
One final question. As somebody who has covered this field from the technical side primarily, what is your evaluation of this, what seems to be really a drastic change in the environment of arms control and weapons procurement? What I have in mind is the development of the peace movement. Do you see this contributing to a policy outcome, especially on our side, that will help to dampen this momentum that we've been talking about?
Yes, I think that the contribution of the peace movement in this area will be positive. There has been some concern expressed, including by the chief negotiator for the START talks, that the peace movement is undercutting him in Geneva. I don't believe that's so. For one thing, the premise on which he's based his whole position is that the U.S. is inferior and that he needs every ace that he's got in that bargaining. Well, that's not true because, by most meaningful indices of strategic balance, the U.S. is superior, so he doesn't have to worry on that score. Hence, the proposals which are coming from the peace movement aren't going to damage the U.S. position that much. They're not going to institutionalize, or set the U.S. into a position of inferiority in concrete. Their positive contribution is coming from the fact that they're forcing the administration to engage in serious arms control talks, which I doubt that this administration would be doing if the peace movement wasn't as vociferous as it is at the moment.
Dr. Ball, thank you very much for joining us today. Gene, thank you very much. And thank YOU very much for joining us on for this Conversation on International Affairs.
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