PAGE 12
SALT’S SAVOR LOST
ing the strategic nuclear offensive weapons they possessed as
of that date.
The United Sates: 1,054 ICBM missiles and fixed
launchers; 550 ICBM launchers equipped with MIRVs; 656
submarine-launched ballistic missiles; 496 SLBM launchers
equipped with MIRVs; 573 heavy bombers, three of which were
equipped for cruise missiles capable of a range in excess of 600
kilometers.
The Soviet Union: 1,398 fixed ICBM launchers, of which
600 were equipped with MIRVs; 950 SLBM launchers, of which
144 were equipped with MIRVs, and 156 heavy bombers, none
equipped with cruise missiles.
Neither superpower claimed to possess air-to-surface
ballistic missiles.
The United States Congress refused to ratify SALT 2
as a result of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that year. Any
support of SALT was a death kiss to campaigners for public
office in the U.S. during the 1980 Presidential election. Carter,
who sought a second term as President, shelved the treaty.
DRAWINGS & THOUGHTS BY HELEN HILL
Both superpowers were to provide figures on their own
strategic offensive forces as part of an agreed upon data base.
FROM PAGE 11
The qualitative limits of SALT 2:
The number of ICBM warheads was frozen at 1979
levels, which meant the maximum number tested.
SLBMs were limited to no more than 14 warheads,
the maximum number that had been tested by either side up
to 1979,
The throw-weight and total-missile weight of light
ICBMs, SLBMs and ASBMs could not exceed that of the Soviet
SS-19. Similar limits applied to the throw-weight and launch
weight of heavy ICBMs beyond those of the SS-18.
Each superpower was permitted to test and deploy only
one new type of ICBM for the duration of the treaty.This except
ion gave the United States the right to proceed with its MX
missile but inhibited the Soviets from their past practice of
deploying three or four new types simultaneously. The new type
of ICBM could not exceed the throw-weight of the SS-19 and
was not to have more than 10 warheads. The Soviet Union was
allowed to deploy a single warhead missile or a new MIRVed
missile to replace its SS-17 and SS-19.
No more than 28 long-range cruise missiles capable of
ranges of 600 kilometers could be deployed aboard either super
power's airplanes. Any aircraft equipped with long-range cruise
missiles was counted as an air-launched cruise missile (ALCM).
The verification measures:
SALT 2 prohibited deliberate concealment of weapons
systems. Any telemetry encryption (the encoding of missile and
aircraft data) that impeded verification was banned. Any interfer
ence by one superpower with the operation of the intelligence
collection systems (referred to as “national technical means”)
which the other superpower used to verify compliance was also
prohibited.
As it was difficult to distinguish between MIRVed and
non-MIRVed types of missiles once they were deployed a set of
rules provided that all missiles of a type tested with MIRVs were
counted even if deployed with single reentry vehicles, and all
launchers of a type that contained or launched MIRVed missiles
were counted, even if they contained non-MIRVed missiles.
Because the Soviet SS-16 ICBM shared certain similar
ities with the mobile SS-20 intermediate range ballistic missile
(IRBM), including a potential capability of launch by the mobile
SS-20 launcher, the Soviets agreed to scrap the SS-16.
Both superpowers were required to notify each other in
advance of certain ICBM test launches.
UNIONTOWN
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(503) 325-8708
The U.S./Soviet Standing Consultative Commission,
which SALT 1 empowered for SALT 2, was to oversee the
verification measures of the treaty. It was explicit that verifica
tion was to be by means belonging to each government. These
included photo-reconnaissance satellites, ground based systems
such as radars that observed missile tests and antennas that
collected telemetry, and aircraft-based systems that included
optical and other sensors.
Temporary limits were placed on certain systems that
caused too much disagreement for long range resolutions to be
reached. Those limits were:
The deployment of mobile ICBM launchers and the flight
testing of ICBMs from such launchers were banned. Yet the
development and testing of the launchers themselves was not
restricted
The flight testing and deployment of air-to-surface
ballistic missiles with ranges greater than 600 kilometers were
banned.
The deployment of ground-launched and sea-launched
cruise missiles was limited to those incapable of ranges in
excess of 600 kilometers.
There were no other restrictions on the development or
flight testing of ground- and sea-launched cruise missiles, and
the 600 kilometer deployment limitations were to have expired
before the United States was ready to deploy them. There were
no limits on the range, development, flight testing or deploy
ment of air-launched cruise missiles.
The Soviet Backfire bomber, which had caused contro
versy as to classification, was given a separate category. The
Soviet Union agreed to not increase its annual production of 30
of the bombers, a commitment that was to have the same legal
force as the rest of the treaty.
The SALT 2 treaty was signed in Vienna, Austria on
June 18, 1979 by President James Earl Carter and Premier
Leonid Brezhnev. Each superpower signed a statement certify-
RADIOACTIVE MURDER
The currently maligned Clinton administration made a
useful and worthy fetish of releasing documents that confirmed
longheld suspicions of deliberate radiation exposure of Ameri
can citizens by their government over the past half century.
The purpose of these dangerous experiments was to
research on live persons the effects of radiation on the human
body and metabulism which would help scientists and military
planners formulate possible scenarios for nuclear warfare and
defense as well as design progressively lethal nuclear weapons.
The most frequent exposures were during the early
years of the Cold War and the most numerous affected were
several hundred thousand soldiers deployed near the ground
zeros of nuclear bomb tests to determine combat capacities in
nuclear war But the most despicable and sinister research was
upon private citizens who submitted to medical tests with little
or no knowledge of the risks involved.
The newly formed Atomic Energy Commission (now
the Energy Department) licensed the use of radioactive isotopes
in human research in the 1940s, with no oversight of medical
personnel, and authorized the deliberate release of radioactive
elements into the environment. (Some experiments were
conducted at the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington
State, as well as radioactive material released into the atmos
phere.) Workers at nuclear plants and medical subjects at
hospitals and universities were among those tested. They
numbered at least 9,000 (with the number expected to go higher
as more documents were released) and included children, new
born infants and foreigners.
A 1948 document said the radiation tests were “an
opportunity to secure the type of medical information required...
to interpret, in terms of human experience, the toxicological
findings of small animal research."
“We are proud of shining a light on this previously
untold part of the atomic age," said an official of the Clinton
Energy Department.
The ulta-secretive and proudly deceptive Bush
administration has abolished the document release policy.
SALT 2 was sharply criticized throughout its negotiations
and ratification by Congress was always in doubt. Afghanistan
was simply a convenient pretext to avoid the intense debate that
would have developed during an election year; perhaps the
treaty’s worst feature was its bad timing. The triumph of the
political right sent it to the junkyard.
Criticism tended to fall into two broad categories: that
from hawks who felt that U.S. security would be endangered
because SALT “gave too much to the Russians"; and by doves
who felt SALT accomplished too little arms control at too large
a political and financial cost. Some of their objections were:
-SALT was a charade: it served the political needs of
politicians, not the security needs of the human race.
-SALT only intensified the immense power the U.S. and
USSR held over the rest of the world.
-SALT would not have prevented a single qualitative
improvement of nuclear weapons. Instead it allowed both super
powers to make them faster, more accurate, more deadly and
more difficult to detect or defend against.
-SALT would not have reduced the nuclear arsenals
of either side. Instead it allowed them to increase, which might
explain why it enjoyed support from the military.
George Kennon, architect of cold war containment of
the USSR, opposed the SALT pattern, which he said were
“negotiations...in which each side is obsessed with the chimera
of relative advantage and strives only to retain a maximum
weaponry for itself while putting its opponents to the maximum
disadvantage. Such negotiations.. . are not a way of escape from
the weapons race, they are an integral part of it." Kennon pro
posed both superpowers cut their nuclear arsenals in half, then
cut them in half again. He believed the Soviet Union’s foreign
policy was based on encirclement (which containment under
scored) and not conquest, and that nuclear weapons were a
greater danger to their possessors than to their enemies. He
wrote in the New Yorker in 1981: “I believe that until we consent
to recognize that the nuclear weapons we hold in our own hands
are as much a danger to us as to those that repose in the hands
of our supposed adversaries there will be no escape from the
confusions and dilemmas to which such weapons have now
brought us, and must bring us increasingly as time goes on.”
Yet the SALT process was its most important attribute
to those who supported it. W.K.H. Panofsky wrote that although
SALT on technical grounds alone “has done relatively little to
reduce the risks this nation or the Soviet Union might face from
possible nuclear war...the SALT debate encompasses the
prospect for improvements or degeneration of U.S. and Soviet
relations and most phases of past and future military decisions
and policies of the United States. Clearly we have here...an
example of where the political impact of a military issue, in this
case a specific step in arms control, has outrun the technical
realities...In short, we have again created a situation where the
political perception of an arms control process is affected by
arguments that are irrelevant on strictly technical grounds,
but where these political perceptions will ultimately affect the
achievements of that agreement.”
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