Abstract
In late April, at about the time the May/June issue of this magazine was finding its way into subscribers' mailboxes, the Bulletin itself received some very unusual mail—copies of several documents, including the “Talking Points” that U.S. negotiators had presented to their Russian counterparts in January, during discussions about modifying the abm Treaty.
Translated into Russian by Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and subsequently translated back into English, the Talking Points had traveled a long way, but came from a trusted source.
In just a few days, at a scheduled five-year review conference, the United States was expected to assure the 187 members of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (npt) that it was renewing its pledge to work toward nuclear disarmament. But the “Talking Points” told a very different story.
While pressing the Russians to agree to changes in the abm Treaty to accommodate the U.S.-planned “national missile defense,” the American negotiators argued that the deployment of a paltry 100 U.S. missile interceptors need not concern Russia, because that country, like the United States, “will possess under the terms of any possible future arms reduction agreements, large, diversified, viable arsenals of strategic offensive weapons” capable of delivering “an annihilating counterattack” on the other side. In addition, said the U.S. negotiators, Russia would of course maintain these nuclear forces on “constant alert” (critics who fret about accidental launch prefer to call it “hair-trigger alert”).
It seemed surreal. When the Russians recently proposed that the two countries agree to reduce their nuclear arsenals to the 1,500-warhead level, the U.S. government said no, it needed more nukes; now we know it was actually encouraging Russia to keep larger numbers of weapons and to keep them on high alert. Yet the central purpose of those weapons is to threaten the destruction of the United States.
The Bulletin made the “Talking Points” available to the New York Times and posted copies, along with several commentaries, on the Bulletin Web site (thebulletin.org/issues/2000/mj00/treaty_doc.html) on April 28, concurrent with a Times front-page story.
Two months later, it's still impossible to evaluate the full effect of making the documents public, but we know the story continued to reverberate, whether in the halls of the United Nations, where npt members were meeting, or at the Pentagon, where Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Office, called the disclosure “unfortunate.”
Kadish wasn't complaining about the revelation that the United States is encouraging potential enemies to maintain an “annihilating” nuclear force on hair trigger alert, though. He was upset because the “Talking Points” revealed that his organization expects the proposed U.S. 100-interceptor system to defend against 20 to 25 warheads. The ratio of four or five interceptors to one missile is apparently considered “classified”—all right to tell the Russians, Kadish said, but something that should be withheld from the public.
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Editor Mike Moore, headed for semi-retirement, wrote some very generous comments about me in this column in the May/June issue. As I assume the editorship of the Bulletin, I am fully aware of the remarkable legacy of all the magazine's editors, and I will do my best to live up to Mike's kind words.