U.S. SENATE,
COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS,
Washington, DC

The committee convened, pursuant to notice, at 9:30 a.m., in room SD-419, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Joseph R. Biden, Jr., presiding.

Present: Senators Biden, Pell, Sarbanes, Kerry, Robb, Wofford, Helms, Lugar, Kassebaum, Pressler, McConnell, Jeffords, and Brown.

Senator BIDEN. Good morning, Mr. Secretary, good morning, generals. It is nice to have you all here.

Before we begin, with the permission of my colleague I would like to yield to the chairman of the full committee who would like to bring his greetings to you all, and then we will each begin with a statement.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much. I just wanted to stress the importance of this hearing, and the excellent way in which it is moving along. I am delighted that Senator Biden is handling the CFE, and hopefully I can handle the START as ell and expeditiously as he does this one. I wish him well in it.

Senator BIDEN. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. The fact that Senator Helms and I agree fully on this treaty does facilitate it. I am not sure you will have the same agreement on START, but you gave me the easier assignment, Mr. Chairman, and I am delighted.

Gentlemen, let us begin.

Today, the Foreign Relations Committee continues its consideration of the CFE Treaty with testimony from Secretary of Defense Cheney, Chairman Powell of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the chiefs of the four services, and again, welcome, gentlemen-welcome all.

This treaty marks a watershed in European history, and if ratified it will eliminate a fundamental cause of tension in Europe since the end of World War 11, and that is the huge numerical advantage of Soviet conventional forces. This superiority, this huge numerical advantage, did more than jeopardize the security and prosperity of the West, in my opinion. It also fueled the nuclear arms race.

In every strategic doctrine adopted by the United States and NATO, from massive retaliation to flexible response, nuclear weapons were intended to compensate for the Soviet edge in conventional arms in Europe. Indeed, the tens of thousands of nuclear weapons we have deployed to support those strategies-the ICBM'S, the submarine-launched ballistic missiles, the strategic bombers with gravity bombs and the cruise missiles-the diverse array of thousands of nuclear weapons in the European theater have all had as a principal purpose deterring the Soviet Union from overrunning or threatening Western Europe.

While many have dubbed this treaty as historic, few have emphasized, in my view, how overwhelmingly favorable it is to the West, and how fundamentally it alters the premise of western security policy to which we have become accustomed over the past 40 years.

This treaty will not only end Soviet conventional superiority in Europe, it will actually reverse it, by limiting Soviet forces in the theater to a level well below the combined forces of NATO. In doing so it should propel us into, in my view, a review of principles with regard to the modern, postwar needs of American national security policy.

Some will argue that the CFE Treaty does little more than codify Soviet reductions that have occurred over the past 18 months, but I respond that the prospect of this treaty helped to accelerate those Soviet withdrawals and that the existence of the treaty can play a crucial role in verifying those reductions and in building a new security order in Europe.

It is true that preemptively withdrawing much of its equipment, as the Soviets did to avoid certain weapons destruction requirements before the treaty was signed-the Soviets had moved some 75,000 tanks, artillery pieces and armored combat vehicles east of the Ural Mountains-enabled them to move it outside the zone covered by the treaty.

One question we will go into today concerns the military significance of the equipment east of the Urals. If the Soviets were to cheat on CFE, whether or not that is likely, would this stockpile east of the Urals provide a means for them to generate a militarily significant force in violation of the treaty?

I predict this treaty will receive-and it is no great prediction, as the Secretary knows having served in the Congress as long as he has. It is always dangerous to predict anything that Congress is ever going to do, both bodies. In this case, it is still dangerous for only one body to make the prediction. But I think I am not alone in predicting that there will be overwhelming bipartisan support.

Unfortunately, I do not sense the same unanimity within the administration or in the Senate with regard to what this treaty and the changed reality it codifies may permit us to accomplish in the future.

The CFE Treaty signifies an end to the cold war, but will it help us to build a new order that transcends the relentless arms competition seen over the past half-century? Will it help us to move not only beyond containment, as the President has so often suggested, but also somewhere else, which has not been clearly suggested?

If that "somewhere" is what the President calls a new world order, will it be one that permits us to reorient the entire defense establishment away from deterring Soviet aggression in Europe and away from the U.S.-Soviet arms race, and what are the implications for U.S. and NATO doctrine with Soviet superiority eliminated in the European theater?

Can we fundamentally revise our entire strategic posture including the SIOP (the single integrated operational plan) under which we still plan for and target our weapons for a nuclear holocaust arising out of a war in Europe?

Let us be honest. Even a completed START Treaty, which the administration is anxious to finish and which I intend to support, will still permit us to deploy all the strategic nuclear weapons the Pentagon seeks, assuming Congress provides the money.

In the past, this kind of arms control was thought to be optimal, constraining the other side while remaining free to build all that you yourself may want, but such so-called success in arms control may now, more than ever, be a recipe for waste.

I would suggest that while the START Treaty will favor the United States-and I say START Treaty here, not CFE-it will still leave the superpowers with Armageddon arsenals that far exceed any rational need. Why is not the B-2 bomber, the principal, purpose of which is to attack the remaining Soviet missiles in a second-phase of a global thermonuclear war, as much of a cold war relic as the Berlin Wall? Must we continue to accept a world in which the capability to detonate tens of thousands of Hiroshimas is deemed a necessary and a normal fact of international life?

The truth is that START, as the name aptly implies, suggests only a beginning, and even its prompt completion will leave us wit most of the work still ahead in bringing nuclear arsenals into line with the new postwar realities.

With the cold war over and the nuclear technology spreading to the Third World, I believe we simply have no time to waste in reacting to the critical nuclear threat that if we are complacent may grow rather than recede.

In summary, Mr. Secretary and General Powell, the CFE Treaty formalizes an end not only, in my view, to the Soviet conventional superiority in Europe, but also an end to a long-standing premise of American defense policy, and in doing so, I believe it raises the profound question of how far the United States could safely reduce its nuclear arsenal if the Soviet Union is willing to parallel that reduction.

These are some of the questions that I will be trying to explore today with you, Mr. Secretary, and General Powell, and with the chiefs. Others relate to the conventional force levels in Europe and to the dangers associated with the possible breakup of the Soviet Union.

But there is much to cover, and I appreciate the indulgence of my colleagues in this brief opening statement, and now I will yield to my colleague Senator Helms.

Senator HELMS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I came up on the elevator with enough brains in the military to do whatever we want to do in Iraq. They just did not have the guns with them.

But we welcome you here, too. Joe and I do not fully agree on this treaty, and I do not mean to denigrate any of you, but I am skeptical right on as to the Soviet Union.

Now, as we turn to the CFE, it seems to me that we just have to determine whether this treaty means anything from a military standpoint, or whether it is just deja vu all over again with the Soviets' lying and cheating and deception. Some of us in this Congress have pointed out from time to time over the years that the Soviets have violated every treaty they have ever signed.

To put it into legal terms, is the CFE Treaty an example of circumvention, fraud, and what the international legal types call fraud in the inducement? That is, giving us false data to induce us to sign a treaty.

It is common knowledge, for example, that during the negotiations of this treaty the Soviet Union moved up to 75,000 pieces of equipment intended to be limited by this treaty from the area west of the Urals to the area east of the Urals, outside of the treaty's reach. Now, what goes on?

In April, the ideological journal of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union-and it is called Communist, which is a pretty good name for a Communist Party journal-said this in an outburst of candor, and I think we ought to ponder the words: "Thanks to this transfer of armaments, unprecedented in peacetime and even in wartime, we will not only have about one-third of all armaments remaining in Europe under the CFE Treaty, but we"-and this is the Soviet Union he is talking about-"will also keep a quantitative advantage in land armaments over NATO, China, and Japan combined."

If that is not saying to those who negotiated this treaty in good faith, "Hee-hee, haw-haw, we've got you again, Buster", I do not know what is.

In other words, the Communists claim that they have maintained conventional superiority in Europe as a result of this treaty. We have to ask ourselves, I think, whether this is the kind of circumvention that defeats the end and the purpose of this treaty.

Second, it has been widely reported that originally there was a gap of from 30,000 to 40,000 between the number of pieces of treaty-limited equipment which the Soviets have declared when they were trying to get us to sign the treaty, and the number which U.S. Intelligence thought the Soviets had. A gap of 30,000 to 40,000. In other words, the Soviets were lying about the number of pieces they had, even after they had moved tens of thousands of pieces to the other side of the Urals.

Now, I am told, the word went out to the U.S. Intelligence analysts that this gap was just a little bit embarrassing, and that the intelligence people ought to get rid of this gap by what they call "creative reanalysis," whatever that is. After all, how could we ratify a treaty when the data was so far off?

Well, they went to work, but the best they could do, Mr. Chairman, was to get the gap down to about 18,000 or 19,000 pieces of equipment.

Now, the question, it seems to me, is, then, did the Soviets commit fraud to induce us to sign this treaty, and that depends, as I tried to make clear at the beginning, at what point does just plain cheating become massive fraud?

Does it take 18,000 or 19,000 lies to add up to one major fraud? Does a fraud of 19,000 pieces amount to militarily significant fraud? Or perhaps it is not military significant until it reaches 20,000-who knows?

These are the kinds of questions I think we ought to ponder this morning, and I join the chairman and other Senators in welcoming all of you here this morning.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Senator BIDEN. Mr. Chairman, in your absence last time I got away with violating the full committee rule and allowing other members to say something in opening statements, but in your presence, I am going to strictly enforce 2 minutes for additional statements because the Secretary must be out of here promptly, and we want a chance to hear him and question him. But General Powell has told us he can guarantee the presence of the chiefs for a while. Actually, he did not say that, but I am counting on him doing that.

So Senator Sarbanes, let us really keep it at 2 minutes if we have opening statements.

Senator SARBANES. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to join in welcoming the distinguished Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to the committee. The fact that they are personally here this morning indicates the importance of this treaty, to which we have been asked to give our advice and consent, and I want to commend both of them and the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for their evident success in having moved the negotiating process forward to this point.

Obviously, the committee will examine these documents very carefully to make certain there is no room for a misunderstanding as to the commitments we are taking upon ourselves and those we expect of the Soviets, but any treaty which involves 22 signatory States is necessarily going to be complex. I think sometimes we lose sight of the fact that part of this negotiating process involves the negotiations within the separate alliances as well as between the United States and the Soviet Union. This is not a bilateral treaty, this is a multilateral treaty, and that raised a number of very difficult problems which had to be resolved.

I think it is very important to get a conventional forces treaty in place at the earliest possible time, in view of the rapidly changing security arrangements in Europe and in view of the volatile political situation in the Soviet Union. Not only is it important in terms of our own strategic posture and our own economy, but it is important for locking in the momentous changes which have already taken place in the Soviet Union and Europe, and for setting the stage for further arms reductions.

I will be interested in particular in hearing your views as to whether the verification provisions are not amongst the most far-reaching that we have ever been able to achieve, and whether they will not go a long way toward building our confidence about the other side's capabilities and intentions.

I have been struck that throughout much of the postwar period we have had to guess what the other side was doing, and if we can move to a position where we know what the other side is doing with some degree of certainty, it may markedly affect the way we are able to do business.

Mr. Chairman, I look forward to hearing the testimony of these distinguished witnesses. Thank you very much.

Senator BIDEN. Thank you. Thank you for keeping it at 2 minutes. I appreciate it. Senator Lugar.

Senator LUGAR. Mr. Chairman, I welcome distinguished Americans to our panel today. They have a proven record in defense and security recently demonstrated in the Persian Gulf. We should focus today, however, on the European security picture that the CFE Treaty will both contribute to and formalize.

The United States has an important role to Play in European security. With implementation of the CFE Treaty, for the first time since the end of World War II the Soviet Union will not be able to dominate Europe militarily. But while the risk of war involving the superpowers has diminished, there are clear signs that other traditional sources of European instability have been unleashed, and the current threat of dissolution of Yugoslavia is an obvious case in point.

We can expect continuous change in the European and global security picture over the course of this decade as the Soviet Union declines and the full effects of its withdrawal from Central and Eastern Europe behind its own borders are felt. This includes the possibility, however remote, that a reactionary military regime could come to power in the Soviet Union that would capitalize on a feeling of national humiliation and blame all of its problems on President Gorbachev and the West and seek to regain lost influence or territory in Eastern Europe, thus causing a grave international crisis.

This is not the time to be considering a complete or radical withdrawal of American troops from Europe, let alone the dissolution of NATO. Our national interest is as intertwined with the security of Western Europe today as it was in 1941. We must not allow a hostile power to hold sway over that strategically important region. Our soldiers on the European Continent not only play an important military role, but provide a visible symbol and a tangible manifestation of our commitment to the stability of that democratic region, a region whose countries are our natural allies in the pursuit of our international goals. We must keep sufficient troops and equipment in Europe to maintain a vigilant presence against unforeseen threats and to permit our swift and smooth return if required.

This will require changes in strategy, improvements in some military capabilities, and shifts in procurement requirements. The ultimate level of our European troop presence should be decided only after completion of a CFE-1A agreement and consultation and coordination with our allies in the light of ongoing events. We will need to find a level that both fits our needs and that our public will support.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Senator BIDEN. I agree with you on that matter. Senator Robb.

Senator ROBB. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate hearing from our colleagues. However, I too am under some severe time constraints and I hope by yielding back the last minute and 55 seconds, that I will have an opportunity to at least hear the opening statements from our distinguished witnesses.

Thank you.

Senator BIDEN. Senator Kassebaum.

Senator KASSEBAUM. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I too am anxious to hear the witnesses and will save my comments until later.

Senator BIDEN. Senator Pressler.

Senator PRESSLER. I join in those eloquent remarks. [Laughter.]

Senator BIDEN. Senator Brown.

Senator BROWN. Mr. Chairman, I would like just to note that I think the ratification of this treaty and its presentment to this committee it a tribute to the wisdom and the effort of several generation's of Americans who believed that reductions in defense have to be mutual, not unilateral.

I think it is a tribute to American forces that stood by in Europe through some difficult, difficult years, out numbered by great odds on the other side and were able to contain a Soviet expansionist philosophy at a time it continued to be a great danger.

So today is, I think, recognition of a mutual reduction in force; but it also should be a day where we recognize that the perseverance and courage of those who put on the uniform in this country, brought us to this day.

Senator BIDEN. Well said. Mr. Secretary.

Secretary CHENEY. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. I am delighted to be here today to participate in what I think is a historic debate.

My purpose in being here today is to set before the committee the reasons why the administration supports speedy ratification of the CFE Treaty.

In particular, I want to emphasize why the treaty matters from a military standpoint, even after sweeping changes in Central and Eastern Europe have eroded the Soviet position there. I also want to set before the committee the way in which this treaty fits into our new military strategy, particularly in Europe.

Clearly, the world has changed dramatically since the beginning of the negotiations on CFE in March of 1989. New security arrangements have emerged in Europe. We are working with our NATO allies to formulate a new military strategy for the alliance.

We are also fashioning a new military strategy for the United States, and all of these are part of a process that will, in my judgment, allow us to meet any threats to U.S. and allied security in the future, even as we cut our defense budget.

When we began the CFE negotiations, we did so focusing on the preponderance of Soviet military power, especially in the center of Europe. It is useful to compare the situation now with the circumstances at the outset of the CFE negotiations. As the negotiations began in the Spring of 1989, just a little over 2 years ago, the conventional forces of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies still represented a direct military threat to NATO and Western Europe due to their overwhelming size, offensive capability, and capacity for surprise attack.

In strictly numerical terms, the disparity between NATO and the Warsaw Pact was dramatic. In the territory covered by the CFE Treaty, NATO had roughly 23,700 tanks, the Warsaw Pact held over 56,000 tanks. In that same area, the Soviets held over 41,000 tanks, the U.S., 6,200.

Profound changes swept over Europe during the course of these negotiations leading to the unification of Germany in NATO, to the establishment of new democracies in Eastern and Central Europe, and to the collapse of the Warsaw Pact.

These new democracies set about to regain sovereign control over their own territories and military forces. Today, there are no Soviet forces in Czechoslovakia or Hungary. By 1994, there will be no Soviet troops in Germany; and shortly, Poland and the U.S.S.R. are expected to conclude negotiations on a final date for Soviet withdrawal from Poland.

There has also been great change in the Soviet Union itself. It is struggling with its staggering economic problems and grappling with how to achieve real political reform. Great uncertainty plagues virtually every aspect of Soviet life. The collapsing Soviet economy places a limit on the ability of the Soviet Union to project conventional military power beyond its own borders.

It is very much in our interest to move forward with the CFE Treaty. CFE represents a major contribution to the future security of the United States and Europe. It places limits on offensive military hardware within the European portion of the Soviet Union, requires the destruction of thousands of pieces of Soviet equipment, and establishes an effective verification regime.

CFE thereby puts in place a regime that will help to guarantee sufficient warning of a changed Soviet threat in time to allow the United States and its NATO allies to respond by reconstituting their own forces. At the same time, CFE will foster a security environment in Europe which will reassure the Soviets that NATO remains a defensive alliance posing a threat to no one.

For the United States and its NATO allies, the treaty's military value is readily apparent. CFE establishes legally binding ceilings on the levels of Soviet military equipment in Europe. The Soviets are permitted a maximum of 13,150 tanks; 13,175 pieces of artillery; and 20,000 armored combat vehicles; 5,150 combat aircraft; and 1,500 attack helicopters west of the Urals.

These limitations will go a long way toward restoring a military balance in Europe once the treaty is fully implemented. It will mean the end of the enormous numerical superiority previously enjoyed by the Soviet Union over NATO.

The Soviet Union will no longer have within the treaty area almost twice as many tanks and over twice as much artillery as all of NATO combined. The Soviet tank holdings in the ATTU, for example, will go from over 41,000 tanks to a little over 13,000.

These limits translate into real limits on Soviet military capability. They represent equipment for approximately 60 divisions for the Soviets. In the past, the Soviet military threat represented a capability to mount a theater-wide campaign, utilizing forces of the non-Soviet Warsaw Pact nations, utilizing Soviet forces stationed in Eastern Europe, and the high readiness units of the Western military districts of the Soviet Union.

This formidable force was positioned well forward and considered ready to fight on very short notice. Under CFE limits, the Soviets would be denied the ability to mount this kind of threat.

Once CFE is fully implemented, we will have seen the Soviets convert or destroy vast quantities of tanks, artillery and other military equipment. We expect ultimately to see some 10,000 tanks destroyed or converted.

But equally important, the CFE Treaty will push the center of gravity of the remaining Soviet forces far to the East. The Soviets already are withdrawing from Eastern Europe. The treaty effectively puts a cap on the Soviet forces located in the Soviet Union west of the Urals. Thus, the center of gravity of Soviet peacetime military deployments will shift eastward, first and foremost to the European U.S.S.R., but also beyond the Urals.

All this means a reduction in the size and gravity of the Soviet threat to Europe. The time required for the Soviets to reconstitute the kind of threat we have seen in the past would provide NATO sufficient time to respond and regenerate its own forces.

The verification provisions of CFE will allow us to track the future size and nature of the Soviet military with a much higher degree of accuracy. The regular, comprehensive exchanges of information, coupled with extensive onsite inspection will provide a high degree of transparency about the structure, size, and disposition of Soviet forces in Europe.

It could also provide us with additional early warning of changes in Soviet capabilities. With CFE in effect, a renewed or increased Soviet threat would become readily apparent. It would be visible under the CFE verification regime and would inevitably lead to treaty violations. We would have time to respond as required.

CFE allows us to modernize alliance forces and improve the distribution of defense burdens within the alliance through transfers of treaty limited equipment. The administration has recently introduced a bill to implement this NATO program and we urge expeditious congressional consideration.

As I noted earlier, CFE will play an important role in our new military strategy. Our old strategy was based on planning for a massive, short-warning Soviet-led, Warsaw Pact assault on Europe that escalated rapidly to global conflict.

In our new strategy, we are focusing on the need to deploy forces based on regional contingencies such as we just faced in Southwest Asia. Even in Europe, we believe a conflict in the future is most likely to be a regional conflict rather than a brief prelude to global war. We will have time to reconstitute our forces before a major conflict ensues.

The transformation of our basic military strategy derives from the military significance of the changes that have occurred during the past 2 years. A sizable reduction in Soviet forces, the complete withdrawal of Soviet forces from Eastern Europe, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and the conclusion of a CFE Treaty with its legal constraints on Soviet military hardware-all combine to correct the postwar imbalance in Europe and to allow us to transform dramatically our basic military strategy.

But there are still some important constants in our approach to security in Europe. I would like to take just a moment to underscore these constants and outline key elements of our strategy for a post-CFE Europe.

Despite the transformation of our basic military strategy, NATO will continue to play a preeminent role in European security. There is no question that NATO has been one of the most successful-perhaps the most successful-defensive military alliance in history. It links 16 independent and diverse nations based on democratic principles. For 40 years we have stood together in the face of the most massive military buildup the world has ever witnessed.

NATO has defended an idea as much as it has defended national borders. Common defense is impossible without common principles, without our commonly held idea of liberty. We have backed up those political principles with significant military force. Our citizens have supported this wise investment in preparedness, and it has paid enormous dividends in terms of peace, prosperity and the spread of democracy around the world.

Today, with the end of the cold war and the demise of the Warsaw Pact, there is no single, overwhelming threat. The threats are ambiguous and the worldwide situation more fluid than any of us can remember. Having outlasted the Soviets, some suggest we can all now go our separate ways and leave NATO as just a monument to what was needed in the final years of the 20th century. I think that would be a grievous mistake. There are still good and sufficient reasons why we should preserve this security alliance, even in the context of post-CFE Europe.

First, while the Soviet threat has diminished, it has not been eliminated. The Soviet Union remains the largest military power in Europe. NATO remains an essential counterweight to the Kremlin's military power. The U.S.S.R. is still spending enormous sums on its military. It is modernizing its nuclear forces, and its conventional strength remains formidable.

Second, there remains a great uncertainty about the future course of events inside the Soviet Union. The struggle between traditionalists and reformers has not been settled. We simply cannot rule out the possibility of changes in Soviet policy that would result in a more threatening security environment. In that event, NATO will be required to provide an effective counterweight to the Soviets and their ability to influence events in Europe.

Third, we should also remember that while Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe means a reduced overall threat in Central Europe, our allies on the flanks are still in direct contact with the Soviet Union, at a time when that nation may find it increasingly difficult to control events inside its own borders.

The fourth reason to keep NATO strong is to help ensure that Eastern Europe can make a successful transition to democracy. That transition faces tremendous hurdles, including traditional national rivalries, and ethnic tensions. NATO can provide a solid security anchor in this challenging period. Indeed, former Warsaw Pact nations such as Czechoslovakia and Poland have become among the staunchest advocates of a strong NATO.

Finally, I think it is essential to keep the United States involved in European security issues. The world is too small for us not to be fully engaged in the defense of our fellow democracies. Continuing uncertainty about developments inside the Soviet Union, economic collapse, the possibility of massive flows of refugees, the potential for violent ethnic strife, all underscore the need for the stable, strong security framework provided by NATO and the U.S. presence in Europe.

There is one final reason why NATO must not be abandoned. If it was not obvious before August 2 of last year, it should be crystal clear today-there are still threats to our interests and our allies. We still need to maintain our system of alliances and forward deployed forces to deal with those threats. NATO is a vitally important part of that strategy.

Here in the United States, CFE also has significant implications, not the least of which is its relationship to the defense budget. The Congress has clearly directed the Defense Department to cut military spending. Last year's budget agreement gives us a top line for defense for 1992-93, as well as a good idea of what that figure will be for 1994-95.

Defense spending will decline in real terms for the period of 1985 to 1995 by approximately one-third. By the mid-1990's, defense spending will represent 18 percent of the Federal budget, and 3.6 percent of our gross national product. These will be the lowest levels of defense spending in more than 50 years, since prior to World War II.

It is possible to make these adjustments and reductions because of changing world circumstances, particularly the favorable changes that have come about in Europe. As a result, we have been able to alter our planning assumptions regarding the sizing of U.S. forces. Successful implementation of the CFE Treaty will give us further confidence that we can embark upon this course of action prudently, with mechanisms in place to give sufficient warning of any changes in the threat.

Because of its wide-reaching impact on Soviet force levels, its comprehensive coverage of major conventional systems, its intrusive monitoring regime, and its important role in the recent, dramatic evolution of the European security environment, CFE is critical to our plan for assuring the security of Europe. The implementation of CFE, combined with the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, eliminates the Soviet ability to mount a large-scale, short-warning attack on Europe and locks in Soviet reductions.

CFE represents the means for assuring that these changes are permanent. It will help us to move into the 21st century with a new U.S. strategy designed to respond to these new realities. For all of these reasons, I urge the speedy ratification of the CFE Treaty.

Senator BIDEN. Thank you, Mr. Secretary. General.

General POWELL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, members of the committee. It is a great pleasure to be here today to testify in support of ratification of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe.

Secretary Cheney has given you an appreciation of our new defense strategy and how we envision its application to Europe and how the CFE Treaty contributes to that strategy. I will cover the treaty's military implications.

I believe the CFE Treaty is a major success story for the Atlantic Alliance. I, and my colleagues in the Joint Chiefs of Staff, believe the treaty achieves our objectives which were to strengthen stability and security in Europe. The treaty accomplishes this through the establishment of a stable and secure balance of conventional armed forces in Europe at much, much lower levels; the elimination of disparities prejudicial to stability and security; and as a matter of priority, the elimination of the capability for launching surprise attack and initiating large-scale offensive action in Europe. This treaty allows us to alter formally and permanently the shape of the military confrontation in Europe and to solidify the foundations of a new political and military order.

Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, as you know, I have been involved in one way or another with the arms control process for a number of years, and a few years ago when we completed the INF Treaty, I thought that was historic in that it eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons. I believe the CFE Treaty is also historic; with more profound implications than the INF Treaty.

Just by way of an anecdotal example, I have with me a document which details the entire Soviet force structure, unit by unit, and the equipment associated with these units and the region covered by the CFE Treaty, from the Atlantic to the Urals region. I can tell you that as Commander of V Corps in Germany 5 years ago, sitting in Frankfurt, facing that Soviet Army, I would have paid a fortune for a document such as this which tells me where those forces are. But even more importantly, with this information, we are now also, with this treaty, able to visit many of these units, look at much of this equipment, and to verify on site throughout this entire region, the accuracy of the information being provided to us.

In early 1989, when I was still the National Security Advisor, we concluded the Vienna CSCE Review Conference which produced the mandate for the CFE negotiations which began 2 months later in March 1989. You may recall that the initial NATO CFE proposal would have set limits of 20,000 tanks, 28,000 armored combat vehicles, and 16,500 artillery pieces for each side. The actual limits in the treaty signed 20 months later are: 20,000 tanks, the initial proposal; 30,000 armored combat vehicles, a little bit higher; and 20,000 artillery pieces, a little bit higher-very close, though, to our initial position.

During the course of the negotiations, however, we also succeeded in that U.S. initiative, in adding to the negotiations a combat aircraft limit of 6,800 and an attack helicopter limit of 2,000. This, it seems. to me, goes well beyond our initial proposal which was deemed sufficient to insure NATO security. In short, ladies and gentlemen, we achieved even more in the treaty than we were originally seeking.

To reach these levels, the other side will have to reduce approximately 54,000 pieces of combat equipment. NATO will have to reduce about 16,000. The irony of it is that the majority of the equipment NATO has to reduce, is former East German military equipment, inherited by the Federal Republic of Germany upon unification. And most of these reductions will be by destruction of the equipment.

When we began the CFE negotiations, the Warsaw Pact was a fact of cold war life, whose conventional forces loomed menacingly over Western Europe. The Warsaw Pact is now political and military history. One of its members, East Germany, has ceased to exist entirely, and its former territory is now in NATO. The remainder of the East European members are free of the Soviet yoke, and not likely to array against NATO, even the reduced forces allowed them by CFE.

The only nation in the ATTU with strength sufficient to pose a post-CFE threat to NATO is the Soviet Union whose reduced military will be confined within Soviet borders. CFE sufficiency rules prevent the Soviets from compensating for the loss of their East European allies. The Soviets are limited in the ATTU to approximately two-thirds of the total group of six CFE allocations or one-third of ATTU-wide holdings oil both sides.

A moment ago I talked about total CFE reduction requirements. But when you look at the Soviet Union alone, we estimate that they had about 152,000 pieces of treaty-limited equipment in the region in 1988 before the negotiations began. Soviet CFE required reductions, plus their unilateral pre-CFE reductions they made, total about 99,000 pieces of equipment. So after this treaty enters into force, and after the Soviets complete their withdrawal from Eastern and Central Europe, there will be approximately 35 percent of their original 1988 strength in the region.

In short, the CFE Treaty not only codifies the unilateral Soviet force reductions but increases the size of those reductions, while giving NATO a highly intrusive monitoring regime to guard against any cheating. Taken together, all these factors add up to the Soviets not being able to mount a significant short-notice surprise attack against NATO. An undetected deliberate buildup is not likely. In short, the treaty will significantly reduce the military threat in Europe.

Naturally, the other side of the equation is the military capability left to NATO by the treaty. NATO comes out well in this comparison because it retains the right to deploy as many forces as could have all of the former Warsaw Pact countries. NATO's key advantage, of course, is that it still remains a viable alliance, a single military entity whose most significant potential opponent is withdrawn within its own borders and is legally restricted to only two-thirds of NATO's capability.

The intrusive monitoring and verification regime vastly improves NATO's ability to evaluate opposing forces in the region, making it virtually impossible, in my judgment, for any treaty signatory to cheat to any significant level and not get caught. This increased transparency results in increased warning time. NATO can then react to emerging threats sooner, and perhaps at less dangerous levels. Thus, while NATO reduces its own forces to meet CFE limits, it will actually improve its military posture, vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. Stated another way, the CFE Treaty significantly increases NATO's relative defense capability.

We believe NATO could successfully defend against any no-notice or short-notice conventional attack by treaty-constrained Soviet forces. While we are confident that the net military advantage of the CFE Treaty belongs to NATO, we have examined a cheating scenario that might give the Soviets a militarily significant advantage. Given some months of mobilization and by violating the treaty, the Soviets could theoretically generate a force on the order of several tens of additional divisions outside the region, which, when added to the forces inside of the region, could have some limited success against NATO. But if NATO detects the mobilization-which is almost a certainty-and reacts, the theoretical attack would be defeated short of seizing any meaningful objectives on NATO's soil. The bottom line is that even when we used our war games to stack the cards in the favor of the Soviets, we did not find a realistic scenario where the Soviets have a militarily significant advantage, so long as NATO remains intact and so long as NATO responds promptly to the threat.

The question arises as to what we would consider a militarily significant violation. Of course, any violation carries political significance, as Senator Helms mentioned in his opening statement. One tank over limits is a violation and should cause us some concern. In my judgment, however, a militarily significant violation is one which gives the Soviets some military advantage to which NATO would have to respond militarily. We have to view any violation in an operational context and on a case-by-case basis to determine its military significance. We did that in our studies and wargames, and with every reasonable advantage given to the Soviets, the mobilization requirements coupled with the CFE Treaty verification scheme made it a near certainty that NATO would detect any potentially militarily significant treaty violation in time to react and counter that violation. In my judgment, NATO retains the advantage even in the most dire cheating scenario one could come up with.

Let me add one qualification to this assessment. We will not allow U.S. security interests in Europe to rest solely on the CFE Treaty. The enhancement of security and stability in Europe will be dependent on a highly-capable NATO force to detect and deter the Soviets from ever contemplating a worst case option. The U.S. contribution will consist of a two-division Army corps along with adequate tactical air support and a combination of POMCUS equipment and support personnel to allow us to react rapidly to any crisis or threatening activities within the region. We plan to have forward deployed about half as many U.S. military personnel as we have now.

We will also continue to train and equip ground, air, and porting naval forces for rapid deployment back to Europe if needed This Base Force concept-forward deployed forces, backed up by capable reinforcements-will provide a continued credible deterrent in the new, post-CFE environment in Europe.

Additionally, we must ensure that we retain the capability to reconstitute forces. Preserving the potential for timely expansion of air, ground, and maritime forces will give us the ability to respond to any reversal of current trends. CFE supports our future strategy, and our future strategy supports CFE. They are inseparable.

The treaty before you provides two unique benefits. First, it codifies in a legally-binding agreement, a much-reduced Soviet capability, It forces destruction of many of the tools of war or otherwise restricts their use. And second, the changes are irreversible. A unilateral decision can be unilaterally ,reversed A legally-binding agreement with the inspection rights the CFE Treaty gives us cannot be reversed without us, and every other CFE signatory, knowing about it.

The intrusive verification provisions to include onsite inspections, challenge inspections, and observation of destruction, provide the unprecedented opportunity for us and our allies to monitor Eastern Europe and the western half of the Soviet Union. We have never had this degree of transparency before.

In sum then, the treaty codifies the reduction of forces already taking place in Europe and establishes even lower limits. These reductions, coupled with the inspection provisions, make this treaty a valuable, stabilizing agreement.

The CFE Treaty clearly enhances stability and security in Europe. The practical threat of surprise attack and large-scale offensive action in Europe is effectively eliminated by the treaty. At the same time, the treaty provides NATO with a militarily sufficient basis from which to mobilize and conduct a cohesive defense should that become necessary.

As a principal military advisor to the President, and on behalf of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I recommend. ratification of this treaty.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[The prepared statement of General Powell follows:]

As the principal military advisor to the President and on behalf of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I recommend ratification of this treaty.

Senator BIDEN. Thank you very much, General and Mr. Secretary. I have a number of questions relating to the military significance of the 75,000 pieces of equipment that found their way east of the Urals that otherwise would have been left in the zone covered by the treaty. But I am going to save those if they are not asked by the time I get around to it again, for when the Chiefs are up with you, General.

And since the Secretary, I am told, is on a relatively tight schedule, and all our colleagues want to get a chance to direct some questions to you, I am going to, in a sense, Mr. Secretary, sort of skip over a few of the details of the treaty, and move to what you spoke about, and General Powell alluded to, and that was the military strategy that underlies the rationale for this treaty and the direction it takes us in.

Now, you and I have been around the Congress a long time. It has been 18 to 19 years. And from the outset, every time we would have a discussion, whether it revolved around MBFR or the original arms control agreements that we were fooling around with in the late 1960's and early 1970's, American nuclear strategy was premised on the Soviet conventional superiority in Europe. That drove our nuclear strategy. It was not the only reason we had a nuclear capability, but it drove our nuclear strategy.

My first question, Mr. Secretary, is, is that premise correct, that this overwhelming conventional superiority in Europe was, in effect, countered by the notion that if the Soviets used the geographic and conventional force advantage they had, we might, although we never spoke about it much, use nuclear force to respond to their initiative. Is that correct? Was that a basic premise of our nuclear strategy?

Secretary CHENEY. Well, I think certainly that was a key consideration in our deployment of theatre nuclear capabilities in Europe. Clearly it was not the only thing that drove our nuclear strategy. That is driven, I think perhaps first and foremost on a world-wide basis on the need to deter an attack upon the United States and maintaining our strategic deterrent capability achieves that. But deploying tactical nukes, theater nuclear capability in Europe did a number of things. It clearly would offset the overwhelming Soviet conventional capability that did exist. It did create uncertainty in the minds of our potential adversaries, that if they did launch an attack with those conventional forces in western Europe, that we might well respond with nuclear capability.

But it also tied the defense of Western Europe with the defense of the United States. It reassured our European allies that an attack upon them might well escalate immediately or shortly thereafter to the use of our full range of capabilities to respond.

Senator BIDEN. Strategic as well as tactical nuclear weapons.

Secretary CHENEY. Exactly. So it has been an important consideration, but not the only one.

Senator BIDEN. Because every time we talked about a change in strategy from things which I think were very rational at the time, although I suspect certain phrases are going to be relegated to history books and people are going to wonder what the hell we meant by them, you know, that ladder of escalatory response, and all the things that were terms of art that are being rendered less applicable to the present strategies and needs.

Well, you laid out in your statement, Mr. Secretary, a very eloquent description of how the world has changed in Europe. The Berlin Wall is down. The U.S.S.R. is going through the prospect of disunion rather than union. The economic disaster and the political instability in the Soviet Union, the Soviet interests in eastern Europe have changed drastically. And you mentioned strategy. But neither one of you mentioned nuclear strategy as any part of the new strategy we are talking about in Europe.

And without the driving rationale of Soviet conventional superiority and geographic advantage, the fact is that we are going to have probably a numerical advantage, NATO, if NATO stays together, when things are all over. And the geographic advantage has not been eliminated, obviously, but it surely has been changed with the changes in the unification of Germany, changes in Poland, and all of eastern Europe for that matter.

But after START, we are still going to have approximately 9,000 nuclear warheads, if you count those that are counted in the treaty, the 6,000 and roughly 3,000 that are not counted in the treaty, we will have between 9,000 and 10,000 nuclear warheads. And what I want to talk a little bit about is what we are focusing on for the future. What are the possible rationales that sustain a strategy in the near term and in the long term of maintaining 9,000 to 10,000 nuclear weapons? How are you all thinking about a long-term strategic plan that countenances a change in strategic weapons as well as the change on the ground in Europe? And how is our strategic planning accommodating the realities that you pointed out?

There seems to be four schools of thought that are emerging-we all put everything in schools in this town. There is the Scowcroft-Nunn notion that we are probably only going to need about 7,000 nuclear warheads; and Nitze and Perle are talking about 4,000 to 5,000; and Brown and Slocombe and others say about 3,000; and McNamara about 300 or 500 or 100. And when START, if we put CFE in place, which I think we are shortly going to do, is ratified, no matter what the numbers are, you have set up a framework in START for how to count, how to define, and how to verify nuclear weapons. And I guess my question is, how can, with CFE ratified, we justify on any grounds other than a refusal of the Soviets to co-operate, keeping our nuclear strategic arsenal at the 9,000 to 10,000 range?

It is a long question, but I hope you understand the thrust of it.

Secretary CHENEY. Sure. Let me, if I may, comment on two different levels. First of all, with respect to Europe itself, just as we are changing our conventional strategy, we are also actively involved in changing our nuclear strategy in Europe. That effort is being worked now within the NATO alliance. We will have a meeting in Italy of Defense Ministers in October, a nuclear planning group meeting, and Chiefs of Staff where we will talk about these specific issues.

Senator BIDEN. Will that lead to SNF right away?

Secretary CHENEY. It will lead clearly to fundamental changes in our current posture. At present, of course, we have relied upon artillery and upon short-range missiles, SNF. Clearly those two systems lose a lot of their validity once we have seen the changes that are occurring there. We still, I think, want to maintain, though, our dual capable aircraft in some fashion. We think it is still important to keep the strategic security of Europe tied to the strategic security of the United States. And that we share the burden within the alliance of the responsibility for basing those systems.

With respect to systems, the START Treaty is perhaps in the final stages. We have been working very aggressively on it now for 9 years. My colleague, Jim Baker, spent a lot of time on it last week. We still have a significant issue that is as yet unresolved.

If we are successful in concluding the START agreement that will clearly reduce the number of strategic systems on both sides. That is a positive development. That will allow us not only to cut the total number of nuclear weapons and strategic systems we deploy, because of the limits that will be imposed, but also because it reduces the number of targets inside the Soviet Union as they cut their strategic forces.

We have already made some adjustments in our strategic planning with respect to the kinds of forces we will require. For example, since I have become Secretary, we have decided to cap our Trident submarine buy of 18, instead of going to 23 or 24 which had originally been planned. Instead of buying 132 B-2 bombers, we have cut that buy back to 75.

So there already adjustments taking place within our force structure in an anticipation of the evolution of our requirements, partly in connection with START itself.

Finally, and part of this gets into an area that obviously cannot be discussed in open session in terms of specific planning, the strategic, single integrated operating plan you mentioned.

I can assure that committee that as the circumstances have changed, as Soviet forces have withdrawn from Eastern Europe, as Communist regimes have been replaced by democratically elected regimes, those kinds of changes are reflected in our planning for the possible application of our war plans.

Senator BIDEN. Mr. Secretary, in the appropriate environment, would you be willing to share that with this committee?

Secretary CHENEY. Certainly, we would be happy to sit down and talk as appropriate about those specific changes, and we would be happy to make arrangements to do that.

Senator BIDEN. For example, START will save us some money, less money than we anticipated, and the reason for that is because we have anticipated much of what START is going to deliver, so we have already had savings that, ultimately when START is ratified, will not render as big a number as it would have, had we not anticipated it coming about.

But one of the things I am worried about is that it seems to me that the radical changes that have taken place and the soon to occur codification of a conventional relationship between East and West is going to render the need for anything approaching 10,000 warheads totally out of the question, unless the Soviets were unwilling to negotiate from there.

And one of the things we are faced with, as you will remember from the good old days when you were in the House, is the decision whether or not to even buy the 75 B-2's you want. We have to decide whether or not to stay at 19, I think it was 19 you said for the Trident. Was it 18 or 19?

Secretary CHENEY. 18 Tridents.

Senator BIDEN. 18 Tridents and so on. And so it seems to me that it would be useful at some point, between now and the time START is up here, that the integration, if you will, of the conventional treaty and the strategic treaty that we are about to act on can be viewed with a focus, conditioned upon continued Soviet co-operation and compliance and willingness to negotiate, as to what our target should be.

Should our target be in the range of 7,000 or 4,000 or 3,000? General, let me end as we began. You pointed out, I think quite accurately, the startling success of this CFE agreement.

You and others came before this committee several years ago and said, we are talking about 20,000 tanks. A lot of us were sitting down with the Rand guys, trying to figure out, would they ever go for 2 to 1, let alone 4 to 1 or 5 to 1. And you laid out your objective.

You did not say you were going to reduce to that ratio or that they would have to reduce to that ratio. You said, this is your objective. I think what we need to establish and what is still missing, maybe it is there and you have not deemed it appropriate to share at this point, is what the goal is. What should our objective, from a military standpoint be, assuming that Soviet cooperation is forthcoming in a bilateral agreement that is independently verifiable, be?

What should our goal be in terms of total number of strategic nuclear warheads once we get START locked in?

Secretary CHENEY. If I may, Mr. Chairman, I would put forward the proposition and the chairman may want to chime in as well, that the President's 6 year defense program that we submitted in January that looks out to the 1996-97 timeframe does take into account our expectations about what we will require, both in conventional and strategic forces, assuming we see the continued kind of positive developments that we have already seen.

The base force that the chairman talked about in his remarks, the reduction of about 25 percent and the overall end-strength of our conventional forces, the cut back in strategic forces, all of that is based on the assumptions that are implicit, I think in your question.

That is to say, in doing our long-range planning, we have tried to do precisely that of building into our expectations and objectives of what we think we will require, the kinds of developments that you have talked about.

So I think the plan is there. We can debate whether or not it is the right plan or whether or not it ought to be changed or modified, but we have spent an enormous amount of time over the last 2 years developing exactly that kind of proposal.

Senator BIDEN. But, General, does that mean 9,000 to 10,000 nuclear warheads?

General POWELL. We do not know yet, Senator. The point I would make is that the strategic program the Secretary laid down of 18 Tridents and 75 B-2's, and what we are doing with MX and the research and development, we are continuing with the small ICBM, all were factored into the results of the CFE Treaty and the result of START.

I think there is a greater relationship between conventional forces treaty in Europe and our theater nuclear force posture than there is between changes in conventional forces in Europe and our strategic nuclear force posture.

The strategic forces of the United States now and in the future, whatever happens with the Soviet reductions, must be able to deter a Soviet strategic strike against the United States. So that stands--

Senator BIDEN. That is the issue.

General POWELL. That is the issue, and whether it takes 9,000 or some other number that is what we will have to look at. But the way we will analyze that within the Pentagon will be, what will it take to make absolutely sure that no Soviet leader ever considers the use of strategic nuclear forces against the United States and there is not a direct relationship to what the CFE levels might be. So there is less of a relationship.

Senator BIDEN. CFE and Europe are out of the picture in terms of that equation, and what we are talking about now is strategic versus strategic. If they go down, it seems to me, in direct correlation, there is no reason why we cannot go down in direct proportion.

General POWELL. They may not.

Senator BIDEN. They may not, my point is, what is the minimal level that we could go to and have assured strategic security?

General POWELL. That is exactly the right question, Senator, but we do not build our strategic forces in direct relationship to the number of warheads we think they may or may not have. We have other criteria.

Senator BIDEN. No, I overstated it. There are clearly other criteria, but they are strategic criteria and not conventional criteria.

General POWELL. And not to belabor it, I also would--

Senator BIDEN. Keep going, it is fine with me.

General POWELL. I would argue with the premise that Europe is completely out of the equation. I do not think it is and I do not think we should give that impression either to the Soviets or to our European friends.

Senator BIDEN. Well, I appreciate it. I appreciate the indulgence of my colleagues. Senator Helms.

Senator HELMS. I think you had some good questions, Joe. I am fascinated by this militarily significant jargon. It comes to mind that Lewis Carroll wrote a book one time, "Through the Looking Glass," and he had Humpty-Dumpty saying, when I use a word, it means precisely what I intend it to mean, nothing more nor less.

I will get back to that in just a minute, but Mr. Secretary, you recall I am sure that last summer the Senate unanimously passed an amendment that I had a little something to do with, I wrote it, which was included in the final fiscal year 1991 defense authorization act, requesting that before the United States signs a START Treaty with the Soviet Union, the President should report to the Congress as to whether the covert Soviet SS-23's in Eastern Europe violated the INF.

Now, I think it was in March, the President did send a report which I imagined was fashioned in the offices of you two gentlemen, stating that the Soviet SS-23 deployment in Eastern Europe was an act of bad faith.

Now there is Humpty-Dumpty, what does that mean? He did not say it was a violation of the INF Treaty. Moreover, the cutoff date for the information in his report was set arbitrarily by somebody. I have not been able to find out whom, to be November 1990, right after the election.

Yet I understand that between the arbitrary November date and the actual date of the report this past February, the United States received significant new information about that Soviet SS-23 deployment.

Now my question is, and I ask it respectfully, what has not Congress been sent the information that was clearly specified last year in the defense bill?

Secretary CHENEY. Senator, I am not aware that Congress has not been supplied the information, but certainly it would seem to me that it would be appropriate. If you have questions about what we know about those SS-23's deployments, I cannot see any reason why under the appropriate safeguards, they should not be provided to the members of the committee.

Senator HELMS. It has not. We checked on it, and requested about it.

Secretary CHENEY. Did you request it from the Defense Department or some other part?

Senator HELMS. Both. But you going to bring up another thing, Malcolm Wallop, you know him?

Secretary CHENEY. I do indeed, my former colleague from Wyoming.

Senator HELMS. You bet and a good guy and a good Senator, Malcolm and I sent a letter, I think it was back long about June 25th to you and our letter concerned Boris Yeltsin's statement to 72 Senators gathered over there on the second floor of the Capitol about Soviet data falsification and deception in arms control negotiations.

Now I sat right by Boris Yeltsin while he was making the statement, and I will say as an aside, that this guy understands English a lot better than he pretends to because during the translation that gives him a chance to think and I do not think there is any question about what he said in Russian.

Now I understand you also met with him, you did, did you not, and that he said something similar to you about the Soviet arms control fraud and I am not going to ask you what you believe he said.

What I am asking you is did your staff give you that letter that Malcolm and I sent to you?

Secretary CHENEY. I have seen the letter.

Senator HELMS. It was given to you this morning. I directed staff to hand it to you.

Secretary CHENEY. I had seen it previously.

Senator HELMS. You had?

Secretary CHENEY. Yes.

Senator HELMS. Well, may I presume that you are going to give us an answer to it?

Secretary CHENEY. Certainly. But again, my recollection is the question came out of the meeting that Mr. Yeltsin had with members of the Senate, and of course, I was not present there.

With respect to the conversations I had with him, I did not come away with the same impression from those conversations that apparently he left in his comments on the hill with respect to the past Soviet compliance.

Senator HELMS. Well, I understand that the interpreter he had sitting by him was or had been associated with the KGB. So anticipating that, I had a friend of mine who is very fluent in Russian to attend that meeting, to stand over in the corner and he took notes and there was not any question about what Yeltsin said according to my friend who speaks Russian.

Now getting back to this militarily significant thing, and I am not quibbling about it, I just want to know what we are talking about. Are we saying we are just going to let the Soviets steal out of the till until it becomes a significant amount?

We had a case down in my hometown, a fellow was stealing a dollar or two out of the till in the grocery store where he worked and finally the owner of the store took him to court because he stole $10. He said, well, I did not mind while he stole a dollar or two a day but when he started stealing $10 a day that made a difference.

Is that sort of the thing we are doing? We really know about these violations, but we do not contend that they are militarily significant? Is that the name of the game in these treaties?

Secretary CHENEY. Well, I think Senator, it really depends a lot upon what kind of treaty we are talking about or which treaty we are talking about.

Senator HELMS. Any treaty, INF or this one.

Secretary CHENEY. With respect to INF, because INF called for the abolition of an entire class of weapons, one banned weapon is a violation, and the regime that set up to verify whether or not there is compliance is structured accordingly.

What we are talking about with respect to CFE I think is a somewhat different proposition in that we are not banning weapons altogether, we are not abolishing armored divisions, et cetera, saying nobody can have any tanks. We are trying to place limits on the number of systems deployed on both sides and the degree of verification that is required, the investment we make in terms of our own efforts to assess the degree of compliance on the other side, we think can safely be judged in accordance with the criteria of what is militarily significant.

And when we are talking about eliminating 60 divisions worth of equipment from the Soviet area west of Urals in Eastern Europe, I would say a few tanks is not militarily significant. Several divisions worth of equipment would be militarily significant.

Senator HELMS. Well, how about the undeclared Soviet covert or illegal CFE force consisting of those 15,000 to 30,000 pieces of treaty-limited equipment? Is that militarily insignificant? That seems like a pile to me.

General POWELL Anything that is in excess of treaty constraints is a violation of concern. If my staff were to report to me, the intelligence community were to tell me that they had discovered that there are 20,001 tanks, I would consider that a violation and I would seek redress of the violation through the joint consultative group.

But I would not start to ring the alarm bells because we discovered one more tank. If I started to sense that there were tanks in the order that you described, Senator Helms, 15,000 treaty-limited pieces of equipment that had been covertly infiltrated back into the ATTU in violation of this treaty, that is indeed militarily significant.

Senator BIDEN. Excuse me, the ATTU you refer to is Atlantic to the Urals.

General POWELL. Yes, the Atlantic to the Urals.

Senator BIDEN. You all love these acronyms, I tell you, but that is what you mean, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains.

General POWELL. From the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains, I think you can see it clearly on the map.

Senator BIDEN. I just want everybody to know what we are talking about.

Senator HELMS. You do not question the undeclared force of 15,000 to 30,000, do you?

General POWELL. Which undeclared force are you referring to, Senator?

Senator HELMS. I am talking about the covert.

General POWELL. If there are forces to the east of the Urals, they are not limited by treaty. If the equipment associated with those forces were moved out prior to the signing of the treaty and the exchange of data related to the treaty, then we might question whether that was a wise thing for the Soviets to do, but it is not prohibited by the treaty.

Now, in response to negotiations that took place after the treaty was signed last November, the Soviets have given us an accounting for the equipment they have, or will be giving us an accounting for that equipment. They have also agreed to eliminate, reduce, roughly 15,000 pieces of that equipment, and they have told us it will not be stored in unit sets.

They have no intention of marrying that equipment up with a unit and in due course, they use the term, it will be depleted as they use that equipment to modernize forces east of the Urals, in their eastern regions and eventually convert some of it and destroy other parts of it.

So it is something we will have to monitor very carefully-how that equipment is being stored east of the Urals, but at the moment, it is equipment in storage areas east of the Urals and not equipment in units west of the Urals threatening NATO.

Senator HELMS. Well, we have a little bit different opinion about that, General, and I respect you, as you know, but what are we doing in terms of the Baltics? We just cut them loose and said, too bad about that, folks. You ought to be free and all of that, but we are not going to help you.

General POWELL. In terms of this treaty, the Baltics are not an issue.

Senator HELMS. I know that. But I just somehow think that in everything that we do involving the Soviet Union and others, that we ought to consider these people who are trying to be free and you know, just driving on the other side of the Urals, I know they appreciate it over there in the Baltics, and not a mumbling word has been said by my administration about that.

But this is the sort of thing that bothers me, because I do not think this treaty is going to make a whole lot of difference one way or another. I have to disagree with you. I have said that before because the events have overtaken us in Europe. You got that right and the very colorful map is very interesting.

But anyway, I thank both of you for coming up this morning.

Senator BIDEN. Senator Pell.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I would like to follow-up on Senator Biden's question as to the eventual strategic objective. When you are sitting on this side of the desk, the years go by very quickly. Thirty years go by in my case and you see many changes.

If you could look down the road, 30 years down the road from now for example, what would be the objective of this administration? Would it be a nuclear-free world? Do you see that as being a possible goal, not in your administration or the next administration, but eventually as a goal?

Secretary CHENEY. This is my personal view, Senator, and I want to separate that out, I have never had a conversation, sort of officially of where we want to be 30 years from now on that specific issue.

But I do not expect--

Senator PELL. Excuse me. I do not mean necessarily exactly 30, but I mean the eventual end objective.

Secretary CHENEY. I do not Realistically expect or plan for a nuclear-free world. I think the trend is in the other direction. I think that in fact what we should anticipate, certainly from the standpoint of the Department of Defense is the need to make certain that we can guarantee the security and survival of the United States in a world in which more nations rather than fewer have nuclear weapons than is the case today.

And that is what leads me in the direction of doing several things, one of which is to make certain we maintain adequate deterrent capability to dissuade any would-be nuclear power from attacking the United States; but I also think it is one of the strongest arguments for why we must go forward with our own defenses.

For example, SDI, the Strategic Defense Initiative, ballistic missile defense capability, which I think is absolutely essential and will be even more important 30 years from now than it is today.

General POWELL. It would certainly be, I think the hope of every American and everybody in the world that we could get rid of nuclear weapons, but I share the Secretary's view that the trend seems to be the other way, Mr. Chairman.

I think what we have seen happening in Iraq in recent months and what we have discovered about Saddam Hussein's program, should cause us to be even more concerned about the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

And I would hope that over time, through agreements and other means, we could reduce the reliance that the United States and the Soviet Union have on nuclear weapons, as part of our arsenals, but I think it is sometime in the future before we could ever wish the possibility that nuclear weapons would be eliminated from the face of the Earth.

The CHAIRMAN. After every war and after every exchange of hostilities, you hear talks of possible defense savings. You, Mr. Secretary, have done a wonderful job in reducing as you have. And we hope you continue in that way.

But a few months ago, there was a lot of chatter about a peace dividend. You do not hear that much now. What do you think the effect of the CFE will be in that direction? Do you see a peace dividend coming, and if so, how much?

Secretary CHENEY. Well, I am reluctant to use the phrase "peace dividend," Senator. We like to think at the Department of Defense that peace is the dividend that our military investment has bought and that it was well worth the expenditure. Clearly we will spend less on defense in the future than had been anticipated prior to the developments that have occurred over the last 2 years-the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe.

I think as a result of this combination of things, of CFE plus the withdrawal of the Soviets from Eastern Europe, we will see savings and those savings are reflected in the defense plan that has already been submitted. It takes the form, for example, of about a 50 percent reduction in the number of forces we have forward deployed in Europe.

It is at the heart of the decision we have made to recommend to the Congress a reduction of nearly half a million active duty personnel in the U.S. Armed Forces over the next 5 or 6 years.

So, clearly, the changes in Europe that we are talking about here today very much including CFE, clearly will result in reductions in the U.S. defense budget. It would be difficult to put a precise dollar figure on it because it touches a number of different areas. But that is no question but what these changes have been absolutely vital, probably the most significant part of the altered circumstances that have allowed us to modify our military strategy.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much. No further questions.

Senator BIDEN. Thank you very much. Senator Lugar.

Senator LUGAR. Mr. Chairman, I would like to pursue an issue that my colleague, Senator Helms, was raising a moment ago. First of all, let me just say for the record that in the conversation with Boris Yeltsin that Senators enjoyed, I do not recall Boris Yeltsin addressing the question of whether the Soviets had deliberately offered misinformation as part of their conversations on strategic weapons and negotiations.

Senator Helms, I think, has pointed out that the translator of Boris Yeltsin, is after all was speaking in Russian, may have been a KGB officer. Therefore, Senator Helms' reliance may be on a friend, as he points out, who was in the corner of the room, who also understands Russian, and who he believed transcribed or translated more accurately what was said.

I have seen this story bandied about and apparently a letter has gone to the Secretary of Defense which he is about to answer. There may be other Senators of different recollection. I was seated not as close as Senator Helms was to Boris Yeltsin, but probably not more than 5 or 6 feet more away, and did not have the same recollection.

Leaving that aside, the problem of whether Boris Yeltsin was recounting old stories about Soviet negotiating postures points up the fact that we have had this sort of debate before, and probably will have it again, as to how reliable Soviet figures are. In fact, during the INF dispute, we had published in the papers of this town at least three intelligence estimates attributed to our defense establishment or CIA as to how many INF warheads were out there.

This led to some consternation on the part of Senators who were trying to decide how reliable any of the figures were-those we were offering quite apart from those the Soviets were offering.

Now ultimately we came to judgments. I think it is just important for the record to show that the 3 years of destruction regime covered by the INF Treaty have been completed. And all of the warheads, missiles, and apparatus have been destroy. Almost no notice was paid to this at all in the press-merely a footnote. We have been down this trail before. We had to make some judgments. And we finally relied upon gentlemen like you who, at least in your own expert testimony, were giving us your best judgment.

I think we are in a similar situation with regard to the CFE figures. I suspect that we already know that intelligence estimates on our part, on the United States' part, involve some conflicts or raise some confusion. They are probably settling down into a range, maybe into an exact figure in due course, quite apart from what the Soviets report.

Eventually you, Mr. Secretary, and the Chiefs are going to have to tell us reliably on what we should base our judgment. That is the important factor, not Boris Yeltsin or the KGB or maybe even our own intelligence people. You have got to read those reports the same as we do and interpret them. I underline that because I think a degree of trust and faith is going to be required.

What I want to pursue with you is our actions after we detect a violation. With respect to the INF Treaty, quite apart from the CFE Treaty, there is no cosmic referee out there who blows the whistle and assesses penalties.

For example, if somebody cheats, there is not a third party that enters in, assesses a penalty, and threatens to implement it if the transgression is not rectified. There is not such a mechanism.

I gather what General Powell was saying, if a violation is "militarily significant," then this might be grounds for us to respond in an appropriate way. But ultimately such a determination will probably be up to us, hopefully to other allies, other parties of this treaty, of whom there are many, as opposed to the bilateral INF Treaty.

But if we had detected the Soviets cheating on INF, then it was up to our leadership, the President, the Secretary, the Joint Chiefs to determine an appropriate response.

Now in this particular case of the CFE Treaty, just guide me through it in terms of reasoning. Let us say that you find militarily significant cheating. And that is a professional judgment of military people as to what will endanger our security. What would you do about it? What are the progressive stages in which we react as a country so that the American people know that if we find such a major violation, we have a way of dealing with it, as opposed to the notion that we would wink at it or ignore it or even deny that it exists.

In a straightforward way, what do you do if somebody cheats in this treaty in such a way that it becomes militarily significant to the United States?

Secretary CHENEY. Senator, if I might respond briefly and then ask my colleague, General Powell, to say a word or two.

Out of the arrangements in the CFE Treaty and specifically the verification regime that is an integral part of it, we think we will have much better, more complete, comprehensive information than we have ever had before about the disposition of conventional Soviet forces in that area west of the Urals, the western part of the Soviet Union.

That should create much greater ability on our part to discern any cheating on their part that would signify a shift in strategy, would signify a decision by them to violate the terms of the treaty and to deploy the kind of force that could indeed launch a short-warning or no-notice attack against our interests in Western Europe.

Second, as General Powell pointed out in his statement, it is very important that everybody understand that effective response requires a decision, a political decision, by the national security leadership of the country-the President, the Senate, and the House-to do something about it, either diplomatically or by deploying additional forces or through whatever means we deem essential.

The fact is that the reductions that we are taking in the Defense budget and the reduction on our forces will enhance risk. That is to say there will be greater risk with an Army of 12 divisions than we would have with an Army of 18 divisions. but we think the world is going to be safer so that we can safely make that adjustment.

But going to those lower force levels, reducing our presence in Western Europe, cutting back on the size of the Navy and the Air Force, all depend upon our having the national will, should it be necessary, to reverse that trend and to decide that, in fact, circumstances have changed sufficiently so that we have to make a decision to reconstitute forces to deal with what is a change in the strategic threat. And that is an assumption that is underlining, I think, our endorsement of this treaty.

General POWELL. The referees, to some extent, Senator, are the 22 signatories of the treaty, all of whom will be conducting inspections and examining each other, and in fact, I think 21 of the 22 will be focusing on the 22d, for the most part.

So I think there is a process by which we can detect this cheating, and there is also a joint consultative group that the violations can be brought into for examination.

It also will not be happening in a vacuum. There obviously will have been, there seems to me, a deterioration in the political situation and in the international situation which would have caused the Soviet Union to decide that they could take the risk of trying to cheat in a militarily significant way which would alarm the entire world, it seems to me.

But let us say that that does happen and they start to build up their forces east of the Urals. We will see that. There is nothing that prohibits them from building up their forces east of the Urals. The violation comes and the significance takes place when we start to see things happening west of the Urals in the western military districts of the Soviet Union.

I can assure you as that was reported to us we sought from our own inspections, as national technical means made it known to us, as all of the other nations who are signatories to this treaty saw it happening and reported it to us, the Chiefs would begin to meet on the subject. We would analyze it, and if we felt that our military position was being eroded or we were not taking use of the warning time we were being given by the intelligence community, I can assure I would be up in the Secretary's office and recommending to him that we go over to the National Security Council and to the President and start to respond in similar ways by calling up the forces, by reinforcing our position in Europe.

We may well find that we are below our treaty-limited levels and we could do some building up without exceeding our treaty-limited levels by the time we get out to 1994 and 1995. So I believe we would have to respond.

Senator LUGAR. Mr. Chairman, I know my time is up, but let me just underline the point you made about the national will. You do all of these things. You bring the recommendation to the President. But ultimately, as in the case of the Desert Storm operation, the cheating was apparent. The invasion was flagrant. This does not necessarily make it automatic that the Nation is going to resist or going to act.

The point I want to reiterate is that, after all of the expertise has been given, this finally is a matter of national will as to whether, if we sign this treaty and we ratify it, we are prepared really in the Congress as well as in the administration, to take those steps that are required.

General POWELL. You are exactly right, Senator.

The CHAIRMAN. Senator Sarbanes.

Senator SARBANES. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Gentlemen, I have a number of questions I want to ask, but first I am concerned by two answers that I heard you give previously. General Powell, Senator Helms posited a situation where there would be an additional 15,000 tanks, I think, in the treaty-covered area. And you indicated that if they had one extra tank, it would be a violation, but you would not regard it as military significant. But if you discovered that they had infiltrated forces of that magnitude into the treaty-covered area, why, that would be obviously military significant; you would be very concerned about it.

This, however, left open the suggestion that somehow the Soviets might be able to introduce 15,000 tanks into the treaty-covered area without out noticing, and then, all of a sudden, we would discover it.

Now I know one of the premises of this treaty was that the verification regime was set up in such a way that if the numbers started to assume even a minor magnitude, we would know about it right away. They might have 1 or 10 or 20 tanks above 20,000 without our knowledge, but as soon as the numbers began to amount to anything, we would know about it. Is that not the case?

General POWELL. That is exactly right. Of course, I was answering directly a question posed to me by Senator Helms, about 15,000 in excess of 20,000-15,000 over 20,000. But just to come back on the point, they are authorized 20,000. Anything over 20,000 is a violation, and we should be concerned.

Our intelligence community, and you will hear from them directly, believes t a when you start to get up, 9,000 or 10,000 items of treaty-limited equipment being covertly sneaked into the region, it would be hard for that to happen without it being noticed. I have high assurance that we would see it at that point.

From an operational perspective, I would be more interested not in treaty-limited pieces of equipment, but in actual units that are starting to form and capability that is starting to exist within the treaty-limited area.

So it is a judgment matter, as I said in my statement, Senator Sarbanes. You would have to make a judgment on a case-by-case basis as to what constitutes military significance.

You would not wait until there was so many treaty-limited items reintroduced into the zone that you were in a disadvantageous position. Long before that, we are confident we would know it and we would know it in time to give our political leaders the opportunity to make political judgments to respond to the slightly series of violations which constitute a militarily significant matter.

Senator SARBANES. Now, Secretary Cheney, you said in response to Senator Lugar that if we had 12 divisions rather than 18 divisions, we would be at greater risk. I do not quite follow that argument, if what we are directing our forces against has also been measurably reduced.

It seems to me that we could have fewer divisions and be at lesser risk, not at greater risk, because of the reduction that had taken place on the other side. In fact, I thought that was in essence the premise of this treaty. Is that not correct?

Secretary CHENEY. I think it is, Senator. I am not sure you and I disagree at all. My point was that smaller forces mean you have less capability to deal with whatever might develop out there.

Senator SARBANES. Yes, but if the other side is--

Secretary CHENEY. But the reason we think we can do that is because in fact the Soviets are withdrawing from Eastern Europe. We can reduce our force levels in Europe. That is why we are making the force structure cuts we have made. And if the risk were to increase, if the threat were to increase, we would come back and say sorry, we cannot go that low or we think that we have got to maintain larger forces.

Senator SARBANES. Well, it is your view that with this treaty in place we will be at lesser risk, not at greater risk, even though we have reduced forces, is it not?

Secretary CHENEY. It is my view that the threat, as we stated very specifically in here, of an all-out Soviet attack, a short-notice attack into Western Europe, is significantly diminished or eliminated. For that reason, we can cut our forces.

Instead of the old commitment, for example, that we would have to have 10 divisions deployed in Europe within 10 days of a decision to mobilize, we think that is no longer required, instead of having four and two-thirds divisions on the ground in Western Europe, we think we can go to about two divisions. So to that extent, yes.

On the other hand, if we go down, which we clearly are, which we anticipate, we have to deal with the Southwest Asia problems such as we just dealt with in the Gulf. You have got less capability; you have got fewer divisions to spread around the world to deal with trouble should trouble arise in several places at the same time.

Senator SARBANES. I want to be very clear. Would you not prefer the situation that you will have after this treaty--

Secretary CHENEY. Absolutely.

Senator SARBANES [continuing]. Than to retain the greater capabilities but not have the protections contained in this treaty?

Secretary CHENEY. Absolutely, Senator. Maybe we are getting into a semantic argument over risk and threat. Our position is clear. The President has accepted our recommendation to cut our forces by about 25 percent over the next 6 years and we are doing that because the world is not going to be as threatening as it has been for the last 40 years.

Senator SARBANES. Now, General Powell, you said--

General POWELL. May I add a word to that, Senator? I will be very brief.

Senator SARBANES. Yes, but I am running against the clock here. General POWELL. The world will be less threatening but we will lose by going down in our force structure the flexibility to respond to a number of things happening around the world. If this was 1995 and not 1991 when we had to Desert Storm, it would be a lot more difficult to pull a corps out of Europe and send it to Southwest Asia because we would not have a corps to leave behind, as we did this time.

So you lose some flexibility and the force structure is not there just for Europe; it is there for all of our worldwide commitments. I believe, and I think the Chiefs would second this, that the base force we have presented in the President's program is as low as we could reasonably go and still protect our interests around the world.

Further changes in Europe and the Soviet Union would not induce me to believe that we can allow our base force to go any lower or significantly change the programs that the President has presented to the Congress this year.

Senator SARBANES. Now you said that you have a plan under which we would have forward-deployed about half as many U.S. military personnel as we have now.

General POWELL. That is correct, sir.

Senator SARBANES. That is in the NATO theater. How much will the NATO forces be reduced? The deployment of NATO personnel?

General POWELL. Each nation is making its own judgment.

Senator SARBANES. I understand. In the overall.

General POWELL. In the overall, I would estimate it is in the 30 to 50 percent range.

Senator SARBANES. Are we going to have a larger percent of the NATO force being American after the CFE Treaty than is the case prior to the treaty?

General POWELL. I cannot answer that right now, and a lot will also depend on what happens in CFE-1A when you start to deal with the manpower issues.

Secretary CHENEY. If I might, Senator.

Senator SARBANES. Let me just say, Mr. Secretary, I am obviously leading you right to the burden-sharing question, since there is a strong perception in this country that we have assumed a disproportionate share of the burden in the NATO context, and the various figures support that. In fact, even a study by the Defense Department itself provides an underpinning for that.

What I really want to know is whether at the end of this process we are going to have improved our relative position with respect to burden-sharing, or whether we end up carrying the same or even a heavier burden than has heretofore been the case?

Secretary CHENEY. Let me make a guesstimate, Senator, at this point because a lot these issues have not yet been resolved. They are going to turn upon the decisions that we finally make with respect to NATO strategy inside the alliance and NATO force structure, and much of that work is proceeding now.

But I would expect that the cuts that we will take will be roughly proportionate to the other members of the alliance. That is to say that everybody is going to go down by roughly a proportionate amount.

Now it remains to be seen on the national decisions that are made in each of those other countries. But I do not anticipate that coming out of this exercise, we will end up with the United States bearing a larger, relative share of the defense burden than we have in the past.

Senator SARBANES. Will we bear a relatively smaller share? Will we improve our position on burden-sharing after these very significant reductions?

Secretary CHENEY. I cannot give you a precise answer at this point, Senator. I know, for example, if you look at Japan, clearly there the burden-sharing equation is shifting in our direction. The Japanese are increasing their contribution to the cost of maintaining our forces in that part of the world. I think we will have to look at it on a case-by-case basis, and clearly that is something we would provide to the committee.

But I do not see this as fundamentally altering the basic relationships within the alliance. The United States is still going to be part of NATO, we are still going to have forward-deployed forces in NATO, but at lower levels than has been true in the past.

Senator SARBANES. I want to put one final question to you, and that is, what issues do we need to be sensitive to on the NATO side in looking at this treaty? In other words, what were the complexities on our own side of the scales? Following up on that, is there a break occurring in the interests of NATO countries on the extent of Soviet armaments east of the Urals? For example, the U.S. has global responsibilities, and therefore we have a concern about the state of Soviet forces wherever they may be located.

However, for some of our European allies the main concern is in getting Soviet forces east of the Urals, from where they figure they would have plenty of warning. This would reduce the chances of surprise attack, and the size of Soviet forces is no longer such a big problem for them. Therefore, their concern about what transpires east of the Urals diminishes, whereas our concern must remain since it has global implications to it. Has this produced any sort of disconnect in NATO thinking?

Secretary CHENEY. I think that is as fair statement, Senator. It is reflected a little bit within the alliance in that, for example, our friends in Norway and Turkey are still directly engaged with Soviet forces on their border. There has been no withdrawal there, as has occurred in Central Europe.

But the treaty attempts to deal with that problem within NATO by placing limits on what the Soviets can put on either flank, and certainly if all of the equipment being moved east of the Urals were to be shoved all the way east and suddenly become threatening to parts of Asia, that would be of concern to us.

But I think at this point I would yield to the chairman. The location east of the Urals, sort of in the central part of the Soviet Union, probably is the least threatening location for it and the best thing they could do with it short of outright destruction.

General POWELL. We do not sense any large build-up of force structure in the far eastern dist