When Pauline Frederick opened up the Ford-Carter debate on foreign policy, she reminded us of the historic significance of the location. It was 31 years before that San Francisco had played host to the first conference of the United Nations.
The biggest controversy of that first UN meeting, for which Alger Hiss was the Secretary General, was Poland. Although Poland was the first country to resist Hitler and was the reason why World War II was fought, she was barred from the UN until the legitimate anti-Communist government of Mikolajczyk was replaced by Communist stooges from Moscow. Poland’s empty seat hung like a ghost over the UN conference.
When President Ford announced in his debate with Jimmy Carter that there is “no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe,” and that Poland is “independent” and “autonomous,” he simply demonstrated that he is out of touch with the real world. For 31 years no one else this side of the Iron Curtain has claimed that Poland is not under the domination of the Soviet Union.
President Ford made the same type of divorced-from-reality statement when he said at two different times during the same debate that, in his Vladivostok agreement with Brezhnev, “we put a limitation of 1,320 on MIRVs.”
It would only take 440 Minuteman III missiles with three MIRV warheads each to give us 1,320 MIRVs, but we have already deployed 550 Minuteman IIIs with MIRVs. Therefore, if the Vladivostok agreement had put a limitation of 1,320 on MIRVs, this would mean that we
would have to scrap 110 Minuteman III missile warheads and replace them with either a single-warhead or an MRV-warhead version.
But scrapping 110 Minuteman III missile warheads would be just the beginning. If the Vladivostok agreement had really limited MIRVs to 1,320, that would mean that every one of our Poseidon missiles, each carrying 10 or 14 MIRV warheads, which we have just built at a cost of some $8 billion, would have to be scrapped or reconverted to single-warhead missiles.
Quite obviously, this is not what the Vladivostok agreement did at all. What the Vladivostok agreement did was to place a limit of 1,320 on missiles that can be MIRVed. This means that the
Soviets can MIRV all their 313 giant SS-18 missiles, plus more than a thousand other ICBMs.
The number of MIRVs a country can build is determined directly by its throw-weight. The Soviet throw-weight superiority over ours was four to one at the time of the SALT I signing in 1972, and is probably six to one today.
Because of their vastly greater throw-weight, the Soviets can build MIRVs of two to three megatons each, American MIRVs vary in yield from 170 kilotons on the Minuteman III down to 17 kilotons on the Poseidons.
If the Soviets decide to go for the large MIRVs of two or three megatons each, they could build about 8,000 MIRVs under the Vladivostok agreement. If they decide to build MIRVs of the small size we have on our Poseidons, they could probably deploy up to 80 MIRVs on each of their SS-18 missiles.
American security requires a better understanding of the terms of the Vladivostok agreement.
