Beyond the Summit: next steps in arms control

US Department of State Bulletin, Feb, 1988

But any realistic assessment of prospects in this area would lead one to conclude that it will be at least a year or two before the problem is resolved. In the meantime, why should we allow the SS-20 threat to Europe and Asia to remain, and why should we allow the promising momentum of the START negotiations to be dissipated?

As we move forward with INF and START, however, there should be no doubt that we will maintain the capabilities necessary to deter Soviet aggresssion. In Europe, this will include maintaining, after the elimination of INF missiles, approximately 4,000 nuclear warheads on a variety of delivery systems, some of which can reach deep into the Soviet Union.

Trying to resolve all of our security concerns in one fell swoop is just too difficult a task. As pieces of the problem are resolved, those solutions should be implemented, as long as they do not exacerbate other problems. Both INF and the agreement we seek in START would resolve critical security problems without aggravating others; we should move forward on them now.

START

Now let me turn to the START area. In our talks last week with the Soviet arms control experts, we emphasized three groups of START issues: counting rules, sublimits, and verfication. Significant headway was made on all three.

Counting rules--that is, the agreed standards by which the sides determine how the systems and components to be limited will be counted against the limits--tend to get passed off as part of the technical details of arms control, but these rules can have a profound impact on an agreement's effects.

To agree on rules by which the number o warheads carried by missiles and bombers are to be counted is not an easy matter; an agreement that appeared to be equal could be anything but if it undercounted the systems possessed mainly by one side and overcounted the systems emphasized by the other.

Last week, we made real progress on counting warheads on ballistic missiles and ALCMs [air-launched cruise missiles] on heavy bombers. For the former, each side has declared the number of warheads deployed on each type of existing missile, and the other side will verify it through agreed procedures, including onsite inspection of deployed missiles.

For the latter, the problem is somewhat different because, unlike with ballistic missiles, ALCM loads for bombers are normally less than the theoretical capacity and can also be changed readily. The Soviets agreed to our idea of attributing for counting purposes a certain number of ALCMs to each type of heavy bomber, regardless of the maximum number that bomber could carry and the specific number it might be carrying at any given time. This approach reduces verification problems and takes into account operational realities.

The sublimit area is one on which we have been concentrating for some time. We have emphasized that 50% reductions are not inherently stabilizing; it is necessary to ensure, through sublimits, that a side cannot retain a preponderance of the most destabilizing systems.