Air-Launched Cruise Missiles Dispute Is Biggest Hurdle in U.S.-Soviet Arms Talks : Disarmament: Cutbacks in B-2 Stealth bomber program fuel Pentagon’s position. But U.S. war plan may be outdated due to recent changes in East Bloc.

WASHINGTON —  A seemingly straightforward dispute between the United States and Soviet Union over how many cruise missiles a bomber can carry has emerged as the greatest remaining obstacle to a Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty that would cut offensive nuclear weapons by about half.

The issue will be the first order of business when Secretary of State James A. Baker III flies to Moscow in a few weeks. It will be very difficult to resolve because it cuts to the heart of U.S. nuclear war plans. There is concern that unless the matter is resolved in favor of the U.S. position, the Joint Chiefs of Staff may not fully support ratification of the treaty.

The dispute over cruise missiles has taken on significantly greater importance in recent months because of anticipated cuts in the B-2 Stealth bomber program.

The Pentagon was counting on having a fleet of 132 Stealth B-2s to carry nuclear bombs. Now, however, Congress is not expected to fund even half that number of bombers, which cost $500 million each.

War Plan Debate

With the B-2 Stealth cutback, the Pentagon believes it needs to rely more on air-launched cruise missiles. If the extra cruise missiles are not permitted, the military is concerned it will not have enough power to threaten all of the Soviet facilities that former President Ronald Reagan and President Bush have directed to be targeted.

The bind occurs in part because the latest U.S. war plan, which went into effect Oct. 1 but still echoes the worse days of the Cold War, orders that U.S. nuclear weapons “place at risk” the political leadership of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union and Soviet Bloc nations.

To many observers, these targets seem largely irrelevant in the light of dramatic reforms in the Soviet Union and Soviet Bloc. A measure of the radical reversal of U.S.-Soviet hostility was Baker’s remark last week that the United States would support a Soviet military intervention in Romania to stop the fighting then raging.

“The real situation today is that Gorbachev’s perestroika threatens as much of what the Soviet leadership ‘holds dear’ as our SIOP,” one knowledgeable U.S. official said. Perestroika is Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s program of restructuring. SIOP is an acronym for Single Integrated Operations Plan, as the U.S. super-secret nuclear war plan is known.

But Bush cannot change the war plans to eliminate or curtail such targets now, said one official, because to do so “would open him to charges (from conservatives) that he cut the requirements of nuclear deterrence to fit the anticipated arms treaty.”

Baker and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze also will seek in Moscow to resolve at least two other issues on the U.S. agenda in an effort to clear the remaining hurdles to a strategic arms agreement.

The goal is to have all major problems resolved before or during the next summit meeting between Bush and Gorbachev, scheduled for late June, officials said. The full treaty would then be completed by the end of next year, with ratification hearings to follow.

Besides the cruise missile obstacle, the differences that the United States wants discussed are known as “data denial,” which deals with ending the secrecy surrounding missile flight tests, and “non-deployed missiles,” which deals with ensuring that large caches of Soviet missiles are not hidden in secret storage.

But topping the agenda of both nations is the air-launched cruise missile counting rule for bombers, now posing the knottiest problem in the talks. It previously was recognized as a difficult issue. But congressional opposition to the B-2 Stealth bomber, largely because of its great cost in a time of budgetary contraction, has greatly increased its significance.

U.S. and Soviet negotiators previously had agreed that a bomber would count as one weapon against a 6,000-weapon ceiling no matter how many bombs or short-range missiles it carried.

Partly for this reason, the true ceiling on nuclear weapons permitted by the strategic arms treaty now under consideration is not 6,000, but between 8,500 and 9,500 when all of the missiles and bombs are counted. Currently, each superpower arsenal has about 13,000 nuclear weapons.

Relying on B-52s

But now that not all of the 132 Stealth bombers are likely to be built, the Pentagon hopes to make up the difference in destructive power by mounting more of the cruise missiles on older B-52s.

However, the Soviets want to count all the cruise missiles that the bomber can be equipped to carry--a total of 20 for the B-52H. The United States wants to “attribute” a smaller number of cruise missiles to each bomber, on the grounds that bombers would seldom carry maximum loads because of the demands of missions and range limits. Instead, the Pentagon claims that a B-52H carries an average of 10 air-launched missiles.

The bottom line is that the Pentagon could deploy about 1,000 more cruise missiles under the U.S. counting rules than under the Soviets rules.

If only one-fourth of the planned fleet of 132 Stealth bombers is purchased, as Defense officials fear, this would eliminate about 1,000 to 1,500 nuclear bombs upon which war planners were counting.

As a result, the Defense Department is expected to dig in its heels against the more restrictive counting rule proposed by the Soviets.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff had calculated that all of the targets defined in the Reagan-Bush guidelines could be covered, despite reductions under the proposed treaty, because of increased accuracy of anticipated new missiles and expected purchase of the B-2s. But without the B-2s, some targets would be left uncovered.

If the Bush Administration compromises with the Soviets on the counting rule, there is concern that the Joint Chiefs’ endorsement of the emerging treaty will be equivocal and will allow conservative senators to claim that national security would be jeopardized by the treaty.

The Bush Administration missed the opportunity this spring to reduce the number of targets in the Soviet Union under new targeting instructions. As expected, it allowed the Pentagon to continue planning to obliterate the Soviet Union in compliance with a directive handed down initially by Reagan in 1986.

That directive in turn was a direct descendant of guidance issued by former President Jimmy Carter in 1980, shortly after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan pushed East-West hostility higher.

As reported in a series of articles in the Los Angeles Times in July, the Carter directive ordered U.S. weapons to be aimed at the Soviet political leadership as well as the more traditional targets of military weapons and war-supporting industries. But the Reagan directive went qualitatively further in focusing on Soviet leadership, almost elevating it to the same level as all of the other targets combined, in a series of war plans designated SIOP-6.

In October, Bush approved a new version of the war plan, tentatively called SIOP-7, even though experts had expressed concern in advance that the plans would give new and alarming emphasis to hitting Soviet leadership shelters much earlier in a nuclear war as well as striking mobile Soviet missiles and command posts.

The new plan would be more dangerous and costly and probably would be ineffective, the specialists warned. It also would increase the risk of war because the capability of an early, decapitating strike against Soviet leaders would put Soviet fingers closer to nuclear triggers and increase the number of Soviet officers authorized to fire in case of war.

Some experts also said that they doubted the plan would work as programmed because the Soviets already had begun to dig deeper shelters and expand their command system and because studies had found that only between 10% and 20% of Soviet mobile systems would be identified and struck, even if the entire B-2 fleet were built.

The new Administration designated the new plan SIOP-6F, changing only the last letter from the final Reagan version of the plan, SIOP-6E, to emphasize its continuity and, according to some experts, to reduce the controversy that was growing around it.

Senior Administration officials explained that the White House was too preoccupied with other strategic reviews to give detailed scrutiny to the plan during Bush’s first year in office.

“Lots of other problems seemed to require more urgent attention,” one White House official said. “We recognized that the confluence of the START cuts (in arsenals), tighter budgets and the changing international environment would drive us toward a targeting review, but we figured we could do it later, maybe next year.”

“Perhaps we now need a fundamental new look at targeting,” the senior Pentagon official said. “The world has obviously changed.”