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Verification in an Age of Mobile Missiles
| Article
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13449 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1987 |
4,606 Words |
| Author
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Kenneth L. Adelman
A former director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament
Agency, Kenneth L. Adelman is now vice president of the
Institute for Contemporary Studies and coauthor (with Norman
Augustine) of The Defense Revolution (ICS Press). |
One of the areas of arms control that the American people feel most strongly about, opinion polls consistently show, is verification. Exact numbers vary, but polls generally indicate that about 80 percent of the public disapprove of arms agreements that cannot be effectively verified. This is rightly so.
However, the American attitude toward verification is a bit paradoxical. On the one hand, we seem to care very much about it. On the other hand, we sometimes tend to take it for granted.
Verification is one of those fields where we have become, to some extent, victims of our own success. It took quite a number of years to persuade the American people and Congress that satellites and other electronic intelligence could make possible arms control agreements that otherwise would be beyond our reach. Such methods are referred to euphemistically in arms control treaties as each nation's "national technical means" of verification.
The use of satellites to verify arms control agreements was probably the single most important break-through in arms control in the 1960s and 1970s. It made feasible the SALT agreements of the 1970s. Up to that time, the Soviet obsession with secrecy and the refusal of the Soviet Union to permit overflights of Soviet territory or on-site inspection in any form made arms limitation agreements unwise, if not impossible.
However, now that Americans have become convinced of the supposedly wondrous things we can do with our reconnaissance satellites, it is sometimes difficult to persuade them that these tools have some limitations. There is much misinformation in the public domain concerning the capabilities of satellites.
Today it is tougher, not easier, than it was 10 years ago to guarantee effective verification of arm control agreements we may sign with the Soviet Union.
This is so for basically three reason:
·Technology. Owing to advances in technology, nuclear weapons systems today are becoming smaller and more mobile and hence a lot more difficult for satellites to find, much less track. ·Soviet noncompliance. While we have always understood that the Soviet Union was capable of violating agreements, the strong presumption in the 1970s was that it was unlikely that the Soviet Union would violate arms control
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