test_pdf.pdf

ADDRESSING
FUTURE
ARMS
CONTROL
AND SECURITY
PROBLEMS
Let’s talk a little bit about the Cold War and our current status today. This is a rhetorical question. The
question is, when did the Cold War start and when did it end? Well, it took the Department of Defense until the
spring of 1999 to define that Cold War in terms of dates. And ladies and gentlemen, the official beginning of the
Cold War was on September 2, 1945, and the official ending of the Cold War was December 26, 1991, when the
Soviet Union finally began to crumble.
Now think about that, do the math, it’s 46 years. That is the longest war we have ever fought. Now most of
you would agree that World War I ended pretty much on a big happy note, 11 th hour, 11 th day, 11 th month. You can
picture in most of your minds pictures of those in Times Square as World War II ended. But how did the Cold War
end? Was there a great celebration in the streets? Were the troops marching down Wall Street? None of that. It
ended with a fizzle. And to put it in perspective, General Marshall, 18 months after Pearl Harbor, gathered a
group of his smart folks in the Pentagon, at the War Department, and began planning for the post-World War II
world. That’s incredible.
Now here’s a quote. “We didn’t see the end of the Cold War coming. We saw the end of World War II coming
and had prior planning. This time there was no planning. The problems we are now experiencing are a result of
this lack of planning.” This was stated by General Major Vladimir Dvorkin, the chief of the Scientific Research
Institute, Ministry of Defense, in Russia, in 1994. And I would submit the United States hadn’t done much
planning about the end of the Cold War.
So when the Cold War ended, the loser really didn’t lose. Think about that. Did we say, we won? Heck, no.
Did we say, it is now time for you to disarm like we told the losers in World War I, World War II? No, we did not do
that. And I would submit, this is part of the problem, the legacy that we’re facing today in still having large
numbers of nuclear weapons in U.S. and Russian stockpiles.
And I’ve been very critical publicly, and let me just put it in perspective for you. When I get up and speak
publicly, I am apolitical. There’s only one person in the universe knows my true political bent and that’s my wife,
Barbara, and we cancel each other’s vote out every time we vote. But the point I would make to you is, both sides
of the aisle have screwed this one up big time. Both sides of the aisle. As civilians you need to understand that the
nuclear commander-in-chief doesn’t operate in a vacuum, in spite of what you may have read. The nuclear
commander-in-chief is given guidance, and that guidance starts at the White House, with presidential guidance,
and the document is top secret. It’s not very long. In a very macro sense it lays out what ought to be done with our
nuclear weapons.
Then the civilians in the office of the Secretary of Defense publish something called the Nuclear Weapons
Employment Plan and that further opens up the aperture in terms of more detail in the guidance. The military gets
involved with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon, and that guidance is further elaborated and expanded
upon, and then finally at Strategic Command that guidance is put into a nuclear war plan called the Single
Integrated Operational Plan. But the first two layers are civilian.
Ladies and gentlemen, during my tenure as commander-in-chief of Strategic Command—this was a very,
very frustrating experience for me—the guidance that I had for developing the Single Integrated Operational Plan
as I arrived in 1996 was a document, a presidential decision directive signed by President Reagan in 1981. And the
Cold War had been over since 1991. What’s wrong with that picture? Now it took—and again, I’m beating up on
everybody. It took the Clinton administration until 1997 to put out the next round of guidance. That is incredible.
I will also tell you that Congress needs to take a few, as I call them, face shots in this area, too. Now I was
astounded when I assumed command of Strategic Command to discover that the United States Congress had
mandated that I had to stay at artificially elevated START I nuclear weapons level until the Russians signed
START II. Even though I didn’t need them. I mean, it was terrible.
The Moscow Treaty that was signed is a good treaty. It’s nothing new. It took the numbers that we had
developed in STRATCOM [the U.S. Strategic Command] in late 1996, and I personally went over to the White
House and briefed President Clinton on the numbers. So we went down from START II with just the 3,000-3,500
[deployed strategic warheads] proposal, and START III was to get us down to 2,000-2,500 [deployed strategic
warheads]. The Moscow Treaty is basically the same numbers except under the counting rules, the weapons on
submarines that were in longer-term rebuild—at any given time there are two of those submarines in rehab, and
that lasts up to two years—those weapons were counted. And B-2 bombers and B-52 bombers were in long-range,
long-term rehabilitation were also counted, and basically they changed the accounting rules [to not count the
submarines and bombers in rehab] and that’s how they got [down] to the 1,700-2,200 [warhead level]. And those
are good numbers. But it’s time for us to get down to lower levels.
I just want to make very, very clear the issue of the date on the Moscow Treaty—the fact that the new level,
1,700-2,200 weapons is not to be achieved until 2012. Ladies and gentlemen, that’s 21 years after the end of the
Cold War. What’s wrong with that picture?
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