Strategic Vulnerability: The Balance between Prudence and Paranoia

Abstract

IXmong its many consequences, the basic agreement on strategic arms limitations announced at the Vladivostok summit in November 1974 seems destined to energize a long simmering debate over the vulnerability of the land-based missile component of the United States strategic forces. The decidedly permissive limit on multiple-warhead missiles, tentatively set at 1320, means that each side will be able to allocate a relatively large number of separately directed warheads to each of the opponents' landbased installations. Since controls are imposed 'on current missile installations and since the Soviets have built larger silos for missiles with greater payload, they will be able to build a force with six or more warheads targeted on each silo in the American force-if they match American warhead technology and if they strain the limits of the agreement. Trends in accuracy and yield-to-weight efficiency are such that a force of this size according to standard, widely accepted calculations would appear to give the Soviets a decisive first strike advantage against one component of the United States' strategic forces-the one which contains most of our capacity for flexible nuclear retaliation. It has been authoritatively asserted and seems to be widely believed that such an apparent advantage would translate into diffuse but significant political advantages across the many international issues in which the two countries are involved. There have been many attempts to deal with this issue of ICBM vulnerability by summary arguments designed to remove the problem a priori. Many have pointed out, for example, that strategic missile submarines remain invulnerable to a swiftly executed preemptive attack, and they have argued that devastating retaliation. from the United States submarines (or submarines and bombers in combination) would be so certain as to render a first strike completely irrational and therefore as unlikely as any deterrent policy can make it. Others have noted that various detection systems allow the United States to observe Soviet missile launchings and to plot their trajectories, and they have argued that this capa-