Arms Control Challenges: Past & Present

By Peter Huessy, President, Geostrategic Analysis, Senior Fellow, The Hudson Institute

Since the end of the Eisenhower and beginning of the Kennedy administration, the United States has sought to use arms control agreements with the Soviet Union to accomplish a number of objectives. 

The United States wanted to stop any use of nuclear weapons against the United States and its allies through five arms control strategies: (1) restrict the development of new uses of nuclear weapons; (2) increase the transparency of an adversary’s nuclear arsenal; (3) regulate the growth of nuclear arsenals by channeling nuclear forces in certain stabilizing directions; (4) markedly reduce the incentives to use nuclear weapons in a crisis or subsequent to conventional conflict; and (5) prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons technology to additional nations.

The limited test ban treaty under the Kennedy administration stopped atmospheric tests and drove nuclear testing underground. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1969 sought to stop the transfer of nuclear weapons technology from the current nuclear powers as well as regulating the production of nuclear energy to prevent nuclear fuel from being reprocessed or uranium enriched into weapons grade material necessary to make nuclear weapons.

In late 1968, Soviet General Secretary Brezhnev worried that the US development of a limited missile defense, called for by Defense Secretary McNamara in 1967 to protect the US from an emerging nuclear armed China, was really aimed at undoing the nuclear deterrent of Moscow. The USSR leader demanded of President-elect Nixon that a missile defense ban be adopted, which President Nixon eventually accepted with the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty of 1972.

SALT & START

The defense treaty was adopted and approved by the US Senate along with a companion offensive arms agreement known as SALT, which regulated the growth in US and USSR strategic, long-range nuclear forces. The ABM treaty allowed a single missile defense site limited to 100 interceptors protecting a nuclear armed missile site or the nation’s capital.

Given the political difficulty of protecting only the nation’s leaders in Washington but leaving the rest of America vulnerable to Soviet missile strikes, the US decided to deploy a limited defense protecting a USAF base in Grand Forks, North Dakota where were deployed one wing of Minuteman missiles. Given the Soviets could easily overwhelm such as small defense with only a fraction of the multiple thousand warheads Russia deployed under the SALT agreement, in 1974, the US Army recommended the site be taken down.

The SALT treaty allowed 2400 SNDVs, known as Strategic Nuclear Delivery Vehicles, for each country. The US had 1054 ICBMs and 656 SLBMs, while the Soviets had 2359 such missiles including 1500 land-based missiles, growing at 200 per year and 50% greater than the United States. The US missile numbers were the same as 1967 while Russian nuclear forces were growing significantly. Why was this? Secretary of Defense McNamara had told Congress in the mid-1960;s that if the US stopped building ICBMs at around one thousand, the Soviets too would cap their deployments at a similar number.