The thing that bugs me about CART is just how they're going to prevent the Soviets or the United States from cheating and declaring only some of their warheads. It's a hell of a lot easier to hide a bunch of RVs or bombs than it is to hide a bunch of actual missiles or bombers, after all. I tend to think that's a big reason behind why the OTL treaties targeted missiles, not warheads...
I'd like to thank
@Workable Goblin for his useful doubts here because they do two very useful things as I start to ease us gently into the arms-control weeds. First, they give me a base to work from with this Q&A/Socratic-style intro-for-the-perplexed thing I mean to do in this particular comment. Second, they help me through the editing process (*scary ethereal
Village of the Damned voice* there's
always more editing, always...) as I try to make sure that the points gotten across in the actual chapters, especially the policy stuff, comes through clearly.
In terms of what CART does on paper (ha see what I did there) really its structure, in the two treaty articles on nuclear weapons, is a version of this come early. To quote
from the wiki:
The START proposal was first announced by
United States President Ronald Reagan in a commencement address at his alma mater,
Eureka College on 9 May 1982,
[3] and presented by President Reagan in Geneva on 29 June 1982. Reagan proposed a dramatic reduction in strategic forces in two phases, which he referred to as SALT III at the time.
[4] The first phase would reduce overall warhead counts on any missile type to 5,000, with an additional limit of 2,500 on
ICBMs. Additionally, a total of 850 ICBMs would be allowed, with a limit of 110 "heavy throw" missiles like the
SS-18, with additional limits on the total "throw weight" of the missiles as well. The second phase introduced similar limits on
heavy bombers and their warheads, and other strategic systems as well.
OK smart guy, so what does that do for us in McGoverning?
Hey, everybody, it's Vaguely Creepy Contrived Internal Monologue! Long time no see! What it does is lead us in the direction that CART goes, where the essential goal is true limits/reductions regarding the signers' nuclear arsenals, which is to say limits/reductions on
warhead levels - the things that actually go boom - that are
entwined with specific language about
delivery systems ("central systems" in the SALT-y language of the time) and about how you
inspect these items.
So why is it a big deal, this switch from affecting delivery systems with SALT to talking warhead stockpiles/numbers with CART?
The 1972 SALT agreement did some very important things to throw one kind of brake on the escalating arms race between the superpowers. At the same time, that had a relatively limited effect, in that it came during what we could call (people at the time didn't but they easily could have) the MIRV Race. MIRVing your missiles (while at the same time developing the use of rotary launchers in the bomb bays of bombers that are exactly what they sound like, a kind of massive revolver chamber loaded with missiles, which is a form of MIRVing all its own) meant that you could have any number combination of missiles and what the folks in the business call "penetration aids" - decoys of several different types - aboard a missile up to the max of what it could carry. That maximum, for your given missile, was a correlation between the diameter of the main surface of its "bus," the part where you load up the warhead(s) and "penaids" (decoys/diversions), and what's known as the "throw weight" of the missile. Throw weight, taken from the aerospace terminology that missiles "threw" payloads, is the maximum weight of what you can load onto the warhead part of the missile, factoring for the delivery bus itself and the warhead "shroud" (its covering, basically, the bullet-shaped part at the top you see on an intact missile.)
So why in all of that does the number of warheads matter so very much? Three reasons. The first two are obvious when you think about them. The first, rather like the first rule of engineering, is that the more things you have that go boom, the more things you have that go boom. If you see that as a bug more than a feature, you'd like that number to drop.
Related to that is what the nuke guys call
yield: the sheer destructive power of the warhead. The more accurate your weapon, the smaller the yield can be because its maximum effect is in much greater proximity to the target. But you can get missiles, as the Soviets often did (because their missiles tended to be less accurate until late in the Cold War game), with really big yields to do similar damage. Of course, like the whole "horseshoes and hand grenades thing" there are side effects, namely that the big Soviet warheads would tend to destroy
a hell of a lot more than they were strictly asked to. For example, if you mounted a single warhead on the Soviet SS-9/SS-18, the maximum single warhead they built for it had a 25 Mt yield. What does that mean? The first properly-MIRVed US missiles were the
Minuteman III land-based ICBM, as you'd guess the third generation in the
Minuteman series that made up the vast bulk of American land-based nuclear missiles, and also the UGM-73
Poseidon sea-launched ballistic missile (SLBM). Those were already in service when George Stanley McGovern took the presidential oath of office ITTL.
Before those MIRVed missiles came along, a general rule of thumb was that you could assure "sufficient" destruction (you need a nice, warm bath in a swimming pool of disinfectant after reading enough nuclear-warfighting material) of a significant urban or command-and-control target with a one-megaton (1 Mt) warhead. Now that big fucker on the SS-9s/-18s had a projected yield of
twenty-five goddamn megatons. That's enough to stomp a mudhole in a major metropolis like the Fist of Actual God Herself No Fooling,
and obliterate satellite burgs twenty miles down the road as though the warhead had landed directly on their heads. It's a sickening level of overkill. So there's a kind of feral commonsense that the fewer such things you have lying around the better.
But in terms of strategic calculus and the bloody arithmetic of the Cold War nuclear arms race, the reason you're concerned about warhead numbers over and above delivery systems is explicitly and specifically this big bar steward, shat directly from the Devil's Own Arsehole:
DUDE IT'S A FOOT LONG I SWEAR LEMME WHIP IT OUT AND I'LL SHOW YOU
That is the R-36M intercontinental ballistic missile, in Soviet nomenclature, known in NATO type designation as the SS-18 Satan. It is the mightiest goddamn nuclear weapon with which the cold and heartless Elder Gods have cursed the world to date. And in the early 1970s, as the HMS
Dreadnought had transformed naval arms races at the start of the 20th century, this threatened to unbalance fatally the nuclear arms race between the USSR and the USA. It had the greatest throw-weight of any ballistic missile ever designed, so vast that even OTL's huge American MX missile had a throw-weight about a third as large. Based on the correlation of its vast diameter under the warhead shroud (it's even bigger than it looks in the picture #thatswhatshesaid because nukes are the most Freudian technology ever devised) and that boggling throw-weight, you could potentially put
forty really quite big and powerful MIRVed warheads on board just one of these. Forty. Four-zero. An MX could carry ten, the most-MIRVed US missile of that day, the
Poseidon SLBM, carried a max of 14 warheads with much smaller yield because of their high accuracy. This was one of the first, if not the first, fully MIRVed Soviet missile. Unlike some of its MIRVed contemporaries in Moscow's arsenal, it was also decently accurate. And that's where the nightmares started.
Because it was decently accurate and because it could bust through defensive measures with big warheads (the principal deployed version, properly the SS-18 Mod 3 in NATO classification, carried ten 800-kiloton warheads plus a couple dozen penaids), it appeared that SS-18s could strike and destroy American
Minuteman silos. Over the course of the Seventies and into the Eighties, the US nightmare scenario where a sneak attack with SS-18s crippled the US ICBM arsenal in its silos became null for complex technical reasons to do with computerized retargeting and response time (tl;dr by the Eighties the SS-18s simply couldn't get there fast enough to stop a
Minuteman launch if the US "launched on warning") but it was a profound and existential fear of US planners in the Seventies. Add to that these really are fully MIRVed, and a MIRVed missile could, at maximum spread, throw individual warheads at targets a few hundred miles from one another. That way "just" a few hundred of these SS-18 nightmare tools of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse could do major damage to US land-based nuclear weapons
and destroy urban life in the continental US all by themselves, any extra Commie missiles would just make the wasteland glow.
So, the learned minds who plotted out US nuclear strategy and concerned themselves with protecting the country, and by extension the world, from the Cold War going hot, had to figure out some way to corral this particular system. In
McGoverning, that's a very large part of what leads Jeremy Stone and the rest of Clark Clifford's merry band to embrace President McGovern's educated-layman concern that dickering over missile technology doesn't keep the warheads from piling up.
That's well and good, but what about Goblin's objection? Why not just go Cheater AF and hide a bunch of warheads?
Because counting warheads is not all CART does. It works by an interrelationship of components that's actually more complex than what Saint Ronnie of Pacific Pallisades offered at Eureka College and eventually turned into OTL's START agreement. It's more detailed because as they get into it the McGoverners want to strike at this
schwerpunkt (point of maximum effect, if you attack it) in the world the Trinity Test made. They want to affect the arms race, the military-industrial complexes on both sides, the whole damn thing. So, how do they do it? Let's look.
First they say "here's the first component in how this treaty's going to work. We set an absolute ceiling for each 'Rambouillet side' on warhead numbers. Here's the total ceiling, can't have more than that."
So they do that. Nice. Where does that get you? Well, it's not the only ceiling. There are also what arms-control-treaty-writers call "sub-limits." Perhaps the most significant is on "modern large ballistic missiles," a term coined in the Seventies for the SS-18 and anything that came along reasonably akin to it. It says each side can only have so many of these game-changing nightmare weapons, and even within that only a sub-limit of the sub-limit can be "fully MIRVed." (There is a halfway-step approach on the way to MIRVing, developed earlier, called Multiple Re-entry Vehicles, which is simply putting multiple warheads on a bus and throwing them at the
same target like pellets from a shotgun shell, to "assure destruction." Yeesh.) But more than that, and more than any treaty signed IOTL, after months of each side sorting out just what it wants in their "mix" and how much thereof, CART in final form uses language like this. (Not necessarily a direct example from the treaty, but an illustrative one)
"(iii) 1100 [INSERT TECHNOBABBLE TYPE DESIGNATION] 800kt warheads, to arm 100 SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMS), each with ten (10) MIRVed warheads each"
Rather like programming language this specifies not just warhead numbers but interrelated things. First, that you have a maximum allowed (chosen freely by your side within your "mix" of forces) warhead stockpile of this specific type, which the treaty calls "useful" warheads - ones you could actually stick on a missile and fire - and includes the number you plan to stick on missiles plus an overage for test warheads and spares. Then, in the same line in this subsection-of-a-subsection, it specifies the number of delivery systems you will deploy, and the allowable number of warheads aboard each "central system," e.g. each individual missile. In this case a thousand warheads on SS-18s, plus ten percent of that thousand on top for tests and spares, for a hundred SS-18s at ten MIRVed warheads per missile. (Knock yerself out on penaids, Ivan. Have a ball.) By specifying how many delivery systems there will be, too, and how many warheads aboard each delivery system, it also means that the signatories don't get to have, say, three hundred spare ICBMs with no warheads lying around just cuz.
CART goes down the enumerated laundry list of nuclear "central systems" that way. This then affects the
inspection language as well. Want to ask a leading question about that?
Sure. What's with the inspection language?
A few things. First, it exemplifies a branch of game theory that wasn't even fully developed yet in the Seventies IOTL or ITTL,
but it is very much the kind of thing a shrewd lawyer in a major civil settlement would do to reach an acceptable agreement with opposing counsel. Indeed it's what any smart parent, or oldest sibling in a large family, would do when the kids/younger siblings are kvetching about who's going to get the bigger piece of cake. You hand the cutting knife to one of them, and tell the cutter that they get the
smaller piece of cake.
That's basically what Clark Clifford does with the Soviets here. He lets the Soviets draft the inspection agreement. The Soviets are, of course, as prepared to cheat around the edges as any real-world signatory to an arms control agreement usually is. But. They don't want the agreement to be a sham, a tissue of lies that will fall apart at the first push. They have some genuine political motives and political capital invested in an agreement themselves, in particular Leonid Brezhnev does who's coming into his own at this point as the boss-man of the USSR. So they need to draft inspection language that will bind the US enough that the USSR can believe the Americans are upholding the agreement. They - the Soviets - will be bound by the same language. But they're most interested in holding the Americans accountable, so they will tighten up the language as far as they themselves can reasonably stand it in order to keep a good eye on the Yanks. But it won't be too tight, and it won't contain any poison-pill provisions, because they know the Americans have to get it through a vote in the Senate (the parliamentary Brits and parliamentary-kinda-in-this-case French can mostly guarantee approval.)
But it will be relatively tight. Knock-and-announce inspections, disclosure of stockpile numbers and storage locations, public witness to dismantling and demolition of proscribed systems, etc. Plus all the SIGINT and TECHINT to keep an eye on what the other side is testing or might be up to. And you can inspect
different things. The treaty's baroquely-specified warheads-and-systems language gives you multiple points of verification. You can check warhead storage magazines for spares. You can check randomized missiles in randomized missile batteries to see that they don't exceed the number on board that they're allowed. And, rather like train conductors, you don't have to punch every ticket to intimidate people into having them handy. Again, if you're really dedicated to cheating, you can. There are
always ways. But there are several means to check up on what the other side has that they're not supposed to.
But what about this whole brake on the military-industrial complex? That probably won't go over well.
Our plucky band of negotiators have thought of that - this is why it's useful to have a combination of game-theory chess masters and really,
really good lawyers on the case. First of all, there's the magic term "end state." CART specifies a time - January 1982 in CART's case - as the "end state" moment, if you will, for the treaty, the time at which its language about what systems you get to have and which ones you're required to scrap must be met. For people haggling this out in the mid-Seventies, that means a number of systems still in the development pipeline can be "end state" systems in the treaty, deployed in the field by the time its sunset provision kicks in. That's the "newer but fewer" bit Jeremy Stone's on about.
Also CART specifies that signatories may develop X-many new types of different weapons, and introduce them on a one-for-one replacement basis with "end state" systems. That is to say, the "one for one" is that you need to match up a warhead stockpile equal to the one you've chosen to retire/dismantle, and delivery systems in appropriate proportion. This means that there's a future for the dark satanic arms mills of both sides, indeed that tut-tutting legislators should be happy there will be more intense competition for more limited contracts which might drive down costs or at least contain them (so the legislators/commissars hope), because you're allowed fewer opportunities to, say, design a new ICBM or ballistic-missile-carrying submarine (SSBN).
That's a look at some of the logic and ingredients that go into CART. Next comment around I'll offer up a sketch of what's in the agreement itself both for sweet sweet G R A N U L A R I T Y and also for further clarification.