Bomber blues

Mitt ("the man") Romney has an op ed screed in the NY Kaplan Post today in which he attacks the strategic arms treaty Obama signed with Russian president Medvedev. Trouble is, Romney -- or his ghost writer -- doesn't know very much about nuclear weapons, according to Fred Kaplan. I don't much about the subject either, but I do know the diference between a missile and a bomb.

"Similarly, multiple nuclear warheads that are mounted on bombers are effectively not counted. Unlike past treaty restrictions, ICBMs are not prohibited from bombers. This means that Russia is free to mount a nearly unlimited number of ICBMs on bombers—including MIRVs (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles) or multiple warheads—without tripping the treaty's limits."

This is where I began to wonder if Romney had fallen prey to someone, perhaps a spy from Sarah Palin's camp, who wanted to make him look like an idiot.

ICBMs are not "mounted on," or loaded inside, bombers. The only nuclear weapons carried by bombers are bombs; that's why they're called bombers. (Many years ago, some B-52s and B-1s were equipped with air-launched cruise missiles, which flew through the atmosphere, as opposed to intercontinental ballistic missiles, which arc outside the atmosphere. These ALCMs no longer exist, in any case.) Certainly bombers are incapable of carrying MIRVs (which, by the way, are "multiple warheads" loaded onto the tips of missiles).

I think Romney's ghostwriter might have mixed up one of his talking points. New START counts each bomber as if it is carrying just one nuclear bomb, even though it almost certainly carries several. This counting rule was established for practical reasons. A bomber might carry three bombs one day, a dozen the next, with no need to alter its design. There's no way to verify how many it's carrying. So they agreed just to count one bomber as one bomb.

The thing is, this counting rule is to the United States' advantage, not Russia's. We have 113 heavy bombers; they have 77. So, if this is what Romney's ghostwriter meant to take note of, it's not a problem with the treaty, not from the U.S. point of view.

The problem is, as Marc Ambinder muses, if Romney is pushing out propaganda about the treaty, it means he means to make it part of the 2012 campaign. Which means the treaty, which has the support of most U.S. experts as well as the Pentagon brass, will be another Republican talking-point and will surely not get the bipartisan support these treaties generally receive, whether negotiated by a Democratic or a Republican administration.