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#1
Moscow Times
December 3, 2001
U.S. Missiles Still on Alert
By Matt Bivens

NEW YORK -- De-alerting nuclear weapons means keeping them, but making them harder to use. It might start with a new presidential order -- "We don't launch until we've taken, say, five hours to think about it." A next step could be as prosaic as taking the launch keys away from the junior officers out in the ICBM silos. Over time, warheads could be taken off of missiles and stored. Candidate George W. Bush campaigned on de-alerting the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Enter the handshake in Crawford. President Bush agreed to reduce the U.S. arsenal from 6,000 nuclear missiles to as low as 1,700. But oddly, he also said it would take 10 years -- even though his administration has been quite specific that it is not scrapping the missiles, only "de-alerting" them -- which in this case apparently extends to removing and storing warheads.

"Why that would take 10 years is beyond me," said John Isaacs of the Council for a Livable World, a disarmament group focused on lobbying Congress. Simply by giving new orders and collecting launch keys, those 4,300 nuclear missiles could head into de-alert within 24 hours.

And what of the remaining missiles? It seems they are not going to be de-alerted at all. A classified Nuclear Posture Review drawn up by the Bush administration should soon be in the hands of key members of Congress. Sources familiar with the report's contents say it keeps thousands of missiles ready to go in minutes. "They've categorically rejected de-alerting," says Bruce Blair, president of the Center for Defense Information. "[Bush] has reversed himself completely [from his campaign pledges]."

Blair, speaking at a conference last week in New York, reminded us where we are 12 years after the Berlin Wall fell: America still has nuclear weapons aimed at 2,360 Russian targets and poised for launch in just minutes. U.S. reconnaissance planes still prowl the edges of Russian air space, looking for entry corridors for B-2 and B-52 bombers. "They fly around the borders checking the performance of air defense radars, assessing coverage, looking for where the holes are," said Blair.

Several months ago, Blair -- himself a former Minuteman missile launch officer -- spoke with a flight crew in Nebraska that was fresh back from just such a border-probing exercise. The crew told him they hadn't seen a Russian fighter jet come up to challenge them in years.

Meanwhile, a launch somewhere in the world just about every day sends NORAD, the strategic command outfit, into "three-minute huddles." They are supposed to emerge in that time period with an evaluation of the threat, if any, and recommendations for the president, if appropriate. On a recent visit to NORAD, Blair watched just such an emergency huddle in response to a Russian missile launch. It turned out to be a SCUD missile fired into Chechnya, he said.

In Wyoming two years ago, Blair watched two junior officers performing the same job he had performed 30 years ago: rehearsing a launch. These men -- both in their 20s -- were capable of launching 500 nuclear warheads within just two minutes of receiving their orders.

P.S. Victory over communism! My home county's don't-smoke-at-home ruling, which I wrote about last week, has been vetoed by the county commissioner. Even council members who had voted for it were relieved; as one put it, "everyone I ran into was enraged, to put it mildly."

Matt Bivens, a former editor of The Moscow Times, is a Washington-based fellow of The Nation Institute [www.thenation.com].

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