Post-START II Arms Control
U.S. Strategic Command, 1996

The Post START II Arms Control study followed on the heels of the completion of the Clinton administration's Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) in September 1994. For STRATCOM, the NPR provided the first post-Cold War guidelines for how America's nuclear forces should develop in the following decade.

To ensure international support for an indefinite extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) at the NPT Review and Extension conference in New York in April 1995, the White House promised further nuclear reductions in compliance with the treaty's Article VI beyond those achieved by START I and II. Coinciding with the NPT conference, President Clinton in the late spring of 1995 signed into effect Presidential Decision Directive 37 (PDD-37) to provide guidance to the agencies on arms control after START II. PDD-37 included a list of four "first principles" that should guide the U.S. approach to arms control:

• * Deterrence

• * Stability

• * Equivalence

• * Hedge

Building on PDD-37, CINCSTRAT Admiral Chiles directed the Policy and Doctrine Branch (J512) at STRATCOM to prepare a study that outlined STRATCOM's position on post-START II arms control. The resulting study was prepared under the direction of Air Force Major J. L. Hogler and approved by the Strategy and Policy Division on 16 September 1996. The study based its analysis on the four principles in PDD-37, which was described as the "primary source" for guiding post-START II arms control.

Three of the four principles were well know to STRATCOM from the Sun City and Sun City Extended studies that determined the Nuclear Posture Review. The fourth principle, equivalence, was a new term, however, but closely linked to stability and the increasingly important issues of transparency and irreversibility of future reductions. The study used these four principles to identify U.S. objectives for post-START II arms control:

• * Protect the U.S. Strategic nuclear delivery vehicle force structure. Because no new platforms are planned, "it's important to retain as many of the existing ones as possible." (Hedge)

• * Retain U.S. warheads at a level consistent with war-fighting needs. (Deterrence)

• * Minimize the impact of those Russian systems, [deleted], that pose the greatest threat to U.S. interests. (Deterrence, Stability)

• * Reduce and eliminate U.S. and Russian non-deployed warheads and fissile materials. (Equivalence, Stability)

• * Address non-strategic nuclear forces as part of the overall effort to stem the proliferation threat. [deleted]. (Equivalence, Stability)

Based on these principles, the study first examined the U.S. force structure to identify those forces that must be protected (i.e. the most capable) and those that can be included in further reductions (the oldest and least capable). Next it examined the Russian force structure, but in this effort the methodology was the reverse: the most threatening forces would also be the most important candidates for negotiated reductions.

Since the principle of warfighting was the primary constraint for how deep the cuts could go, the effect of target coverage requirements in counterforce strategies became a major roadblock to too deep reductions. The more cuts would affect and limit U.S. capabilities to inflict maximum damage, the less desirable it was deemed to pursue them. As a result, the study's list of potential post-START II arms control actions recommended against reducing strategic offensive weapons lower than 2,000-2,500. Below this number, here simply wouldn't be enough warheads on sufficiently capable forces to effectively cover all potential scenarios.

Within this constraint, the study outlined the various force structure combinations of mainly SSBNs and bombers. It concluded that the large number of air-launched cruise missiles still allocated to B-52H bombers would have a significant impact on how many SSBNs could be retained. Reducing U.S. ICBMs below 500 Minuteman III, however, would only have "modest value" in encouraging Russia to accept mobile ICBM reductions because their downloaded payload of 500 warheads was too small to be used as a bargaining chip. Besides, STRATCOM concluded, further reductions in the U.S. ICBM "erodes the number of [Russian] strategic targets in the U.S. and could be considered destabilizing." (!)

The study ended by combining this three-part analysis into a comprehensive recommendation for a post-START II arms control framework. Foremost among these was that warheads from already accomplished cuts should be dealt with prior to achieving new reductions. Key to this objective was an increase in transparency and irreversibility, the study concluded, and the most important goal was to obtain verifiable data about total warhead numbers in Russia.

The issue of fissile material disposition, however, was less important. In what seemed to be a confirmation of the Threat Reduction Program in Russia, the white paper concluded that "it is not desirable to proceed with warhead elimination until detailed, verifiable information on the strategic and nonstrategic stockpiles is obtained." On the other hand, although fissile material disposition was described as "a worthy goal," STRATCOM pointed out that failure to reach an agreement on the disposition of fissile material from eliminated warheads "should not be a showstopper" for deeper cuts.

This Post START II Arms Control study was undertaken in parallel with the Warfighter's Assessment study that was completed a few months later, and together the two studies formed the basis of STRATCOM's position in preparation for the Helsinki meeting in March 1997.

(An earlier description of this study was first published by the Nautilus Institute Nuclear Strategy Project. An in-depth analysis of this and five other STRATCOM studies is available in Hans M. Kristensen, "The Matrix of Deterrence: U.S. Strategic Command Force Structure Studies," May 2001, The Nautilus Institute, Berkeley, California, at URL  http://www.nautilus.org/nukestrat/matrix.pdf)