Last spring the Reagan administration was faced with a problem. The public's perception of Reagan as a trigger-happy cold warrior with his finger too close to the nuclear button was being translated into political terms. The election of 1982 demonstrated strong nationwide support for a nuclear weapons freeze, and public opinion polls in the months following registered an increasing majority of the population wanting an end to the arms race.
In addition, Congress was beginning to prove troublesome on the MX missile, the centerpiece of Reagan's strategic "modernization" program. A House of Representatives vote in July came within 13 votes of withdrawing funds for the procurement of the first of these new land-based missiles.
Reagan's response to the growing clamor for an end to the arms race was to escalate the race under another name. In appropriate Orwellian fashion, the latest justification for nuclear buildup is called "build-down."
The "guaranteed arms build-down" is the Reagan administration's latest twist in the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) in Geneva. Build-down grew out of a proposal made last year by Alton Frye, the Washington director of the elite Council on Foreign Relations. Simply put, the build-down proposal as originally conceived would require the destruction of two old warheads for each new warhead built, thus automatically reducing the number of nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the two superpowers.
Congressional moderates, hoping to avoid the political fallout from the freeze explosion, seized on the Frye proposal as one that could satisfy both ends of the political spectrum back home. Build-down includes "modernization" (a buzz word that means the development of the next generation of nuclear weapons) and also claims to bring about reductions, which will, it is hoped, placate those wanting an end to the arms race.
Moderate Republican Senator William Cohen of Maine and five other members of Congress offered the administration a trade: if Reagan would support the build-down idea, the legislators would back the faltering MX missile. On October 4 Reagan agreed to the tradeoff, and he has since proposed that the United States and the Soviet Union establish a study group at Geneva to "explore" build-down as part of the START talks.
Unfortunately, build-down is not the everybody-wins compromise it might appear to be. Build-down does absolutely nothing to end the arms race, except in the almost meaningless area of numerical limits. Eighteen years ago the Pentagon forsook the quantitative arms race to develop the new, accurate breed of first-strike weapons coming upon the scene today: the MX and Trident, cruise missiles and the B-1 bomber. Build-down would allow the United States to develop all of these weapons, and allow the Soviets to build their own first-strike counterparts.
Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield called build-down a "general's dream," and said it is analogous to "trading old Volkswagens for new Rolls-Royces and sleek, agile Ferraris." Others have compared it to trading two spears for a machine gun.
The build-down proposal at START has evolved into a far more complex idea than that originated by Frye. Reagan administration negotiators have proposed a build-down formula that treats land-based missiles with multiple warheads differently than it does submarine missiles or single-warhead, land-based missiles. Under this formula, for each land-based multiple warhead missile deployed, two existing missiles would have to be destroyed. The ratio for submarine missiles is three-to-two, and for single-warhead missiles one-to-one. Thus the proposal requires a greater reduction of large, land-based missiles than of other nuclear weapons. This would be a much heavier burden on the Soviets, since 70 per cent of their nuclear weapons are on land-based missiles, compared to about 30 per cent of the U.S. nuclear force. The Soviets see this as a transparently one-sided proposal.
Under build-down the United States could deploy the planned 100 MX missiles with 1,000 warheads, upgrade the 550 Minuteman III missiles, and end up with 2,650 counterforce warheads on intercontinental ballistic missiles, almost two warheads for each of the 1,398 Soviet land-based missiles. This would give the United States a very real first-strike threat against the Soviet nuclear forces. Obviously, the Soviets will reject build-down as an attempt to use "arms control" to legitimize the U.S. move toward nuclear superiority.
Build-down allows the United States to develop first-strike weapons under the guise of arms control. With the Pershing II and cruise missile deployment begun in Europe, and with the technological arms race going full steam, Reagan does not want a meaningful limit on his arms buildup to emerge from the Geneva talks.
With the help of some moderates and liberals in Congress, the Reagan administration has found in the build-down a phony non-proposal intended to undermine the peace movement in this country and keep a treaty with the Russians at bay in Geneva. Without the light of public scrutiny, Reagan could pull off this public relations coup just in time for the coming election season.
Jim Rice is editor of Sojourners.
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