Shall America Be Defended?: SALT II And Beyond
Graham, Daniel O.
SHALL AMERICA BE DEFENDED? SALT II AND BEYOND Daniel O. Graham /Arlington House / $10.95 Karl O'Lessker Older readers will recall that most notorious of all presidential campaign television...
...If SALT is not ratified it would probably be the result of growing public awareness...
...The first was that they were something like 15 years behind the U.S...
...One need not envision a Soviet drive to world conquest a la Napoleon or Hitler in order to...
...to cling to its MAD strategy while they themselves pressed ahead with counterforce...
...What lack of technological finesse...
...While mumbling a few lines in support of MAD on the international stage, the Soviet leadership at home has been quite openly pursuing both a massive conventional arms superiority and a counterforce capability of precisely the kind our own defense planners have piously shunned for America...
...Clearly, then, Graham sees the treaty as seriously disadvantageous to the U.S...
...The decisive question to which our strategic thought should be directed is how we may best deter the Soviet Union from military adventures...
...We are agreeing to deny ourselves a comparable capability...
...Certainly MAD is not the answer...
...It is one of the many great merits of General Daniel Graham's new book that he lays bare this shocking anomaly in a manner as lucid as it is dispassionate...
...Senate cannot change a balance of forces that has resulted from a long-term neglect of U.S...
...As recently as 1973 Nixon could prevent the Soviets from intervening militarily in the Yom Kippur war because this nation still enjoyed an overall edge in military power-and because Brezhnev doubtless recognized that the balance would soon shift in the Soviet Union's favor...
...Put another way, the Russians didn't need SS-18s for deterrence...
...His point is not, of course, that Soviet leaders are more humane than ours...
...After a surprise attack on our retaliatory forces, using only two-thirds of their deliverable warheads, "the Soviets would still retain more ICBMs than the U.S...
...The result, according to a 1978 CIA study cited by General Graham, is that a nuclear exchange initiated by the Russians tomorrow would very likely produce some 10 to 20 million Soviet fatalities-less than in World War II -as against 140 to 160 million American fatalities...
...no options other than this nation's surrender or the indiscriminate slaughter of countless millions of civilians here and in the Soviet Union in a militarily pointless nuclear exchange...
...Nor does this shocking situation come as a surprise...
...We haven't the capacity to wipe out Russia's nuclear retaliatory forces, so our only "else" would be an attack on her cities...
...Such a 'balance' of forces is simply intolerable...
...not concerned to levy moral judgments on either side...
...A Soviet invasion of Iran, for example, would doubtless provoke an American ultimatum: Withdraw or else...
...This effort on the part of the Soviets provoked delicious mirth among the proponents of MAD...
...And so his principal indictment of the McNamara doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) is not its moral enormity but its military ineffectiveness...
...Else what...
...capabilities and an unprecedented buildup on the part of the Soviets...
...It is an altogether admirable piece of work, and I can do no better than to end this review by quoting one of the few moral judgments Graham permits himself: Above all, it is desirable to defend the United States of America because it is perhaps the most decent polity and society the world has ever known...
...Ratification would offer no direct impediment to our acquiring the sort of conventional arms arsenal that would enable us to deter the Russians from limited-war adventurism...
...So true deterrence requires above all the capacity successfully to wage conventional war, and in addition the ability to retain, even after a surprise attack, a credible nuclear retaliatory force in order to forestall blackmail...
...while the Russians, faced down and humiliated in Cuba in 1962, have plunged grimly ahead in armaments on the basis of a strategy that says nuclear war is not only thinkable but winnable...
...Could the men in the Kremlin possibly suppose that we would...
...Even though his book was published before a final text of the draft treaty was signed in Vienna, General Graham provides the reader with as lucid a discussion of its main features and their implications as anyone could wish...
...The lack of either constitutes an open-ended, undated invitation to the Soviet Union to dismember us at their convenience...
...A And now we find ourselves in the midst of a great national debate on the ratification of SALT II...
...We are agreeing to permit the Soviets to acquire a capability using less than one-fifth of their ICBM force to eliminate almost our entire ICBM force...
...SALT II AND BEYOND Daniel O. Graham /Arlington House / $10.95 Karl O'Lessker Older readers will recall that most notorious of all presidential campaign television commercials, the one in 1964 that showed a little girl plucking the petals from a daisy while the voice-over recited the countdown to an all-obliterating nuclear explosion...
...It is in fact a war-winning capability...
...in its specific provisions...
...Except that while this development was taking place, "alarmists" like Joseph Alsop were publishing article after article arguing that the monster Soviet missiles would be targeted not at our cities (where neither great accuracy nor great size is required for great destruction) but at our retaliatory forces, against which slight inaccuracies in targeting can be compensated for by more powerful warheads...
...It does this by granting to the Soviets a monopoly in-"super heavy" highly accurate ICBMs...
...Ratification or nonratification of SALT II by the...
...would in fact push the "else" button...
...Mutual destruction is so assured, therefore, that nuclear war has become unthinkable...
...Finally, even with full deployment of our planned 200 M-X missiles and an improved Minute-man, "There is ultimately no way for the U.S...
...carries enough warheads to destroy every large and medium-sized city in the Soviet Union...
...The ghastly irony of that commercial is that at the very time it was receiving the personal approval of President Johnson, his own Secretary of Defense, Robert Mc-Namara, was fixing in concrete an American military strategy that had Karl O 'Lessker, senior editor of The American Spectator, is professor of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University...
...Under those circumstances can anyone possibly suppose that the U.S...
...Graham himself and many others in the unfashionable anti-MAD, anti-SALT camp have been saying since at least 1970 that this must be the inevitable result of the differing strategies and arms procurement programs of the two sides...
...For that is what a MAD scenario would require...
...Rational men, no matter how brutal or godless, will not start a war they cannot win...
...to redress the balance in ICBMs except by acquiring as much throw-weight as the Soviet Union- and that is precisely forbidden by SALTII" [emphasis Graham's...
...The poor dumb Slavs have to develop such ballistic behemoths in order to threaten our cities because they're not clever enough to do what we are able to do with far smaller missiles and warheads...
...And third, they were more than happy to encourage the U.S...
...Second, they recognized that their own huge civil defense program coupled with America's total lack of any such program would, in the absence of an effective ABM, give them an enormous imbalance-of-terror advantage, of just those dimensions revealed in the GIA study cited earlier (at least seven to one, perhaps as high as 16 to one...
...And the difference is that ours are wholly vulnerable while Russia's are not...
...and it will remain so as long as both sides are mortally vulnerable to each other's retaliatory forces...
...If war comes it will be because each side sees a vital interest at stake in a particular arena of conflict and one side rates its own chances of winning a war as excellent...
...Most importantly: It should be clear at this point that the precise terms of the SALT II treaty are of only limited relevance to the strategic situation in which the United States finds itself at the threshold of the 1980s...
...Simply, their inability to carry it off successfully...
...What makes it all the more appalling is that the Russians, by contrast, were then elaborating a strategy designed to gain victory by destroying Western armed forces while minimizing civilian casualties: an application of classic Clausewitz-ian doctrine...
...So we are faced with the consequences of a hideous paradox: During all those years of America's overwhelming nuclear superiority, its political and cultural leaders have chorused the "unthinkability" of nuclear war...
...How could they not have been willing to bargain it away...
...Two examples will show how this has come about...
...for it is designed not to win a war but to deter the Russians from starting one-to deter them by means of a threat that, as he makes clear, "is incredible precisely at the point at which it is to be put into practice...
...One involves the Russian determination to build and deploy ICRMs far heavier than any in our arsenal...
...Moreover, SALT II would not inhibit our deployment of the M-X mobile missile system, which, along with our nuclear submarine fleet, would be practically invulnerable to a surprise first strike and, owing to its greater accuracy, would be available for counterforce purposes-that is, would have the ability to destroy land-based missiles that the Russians might keep in reserve for the purpose of calling our bluff in a crisis...
...The second example goes to the heart of the SALT I treaty, which effectively abolished the quest for an anti-ballistic missile defense...
...But in fact, as General Graham makes clear, the Soviets had three compelling reasons for agreeing to the ABM ban, none of which had anything to do with a passion for MAD...
...That is where, in General Graham's view, we find ourselves today...
...The adherents of MAD had no trouble convincing themselves that the Russian willingness to forego ABMs was evidence of their commitment to MAD itself...
...What, then, would deter the Soviets from an invasion of Iran or Yugoslavia or Western Europe...
...But he is even more distressed by its symbolism and psychology, both of which reinforce the mindset of MAD: SALT II if ratified will be the result of the political pressure from those who would abandon the proposition that America can or should be defended...
...efforts to match the Russians in counterforce capability...
...His is a military analysis by a highly qualified senior officer (his last post before retirement in 1976 was as Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency...
...But this of course would provoke a retaliatory strike on ours...
...Instead, he is invariably fair to those with whom he disagrees, presenting their arguments in cool, straightforward fashion...
...What brutishness...
...Would that not appear to be a departure from the mutuality of MAD...
...But what if one side were to develop a generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of destroying a large portion of the other's retaliatory forces-that is to say, a counterforce capability-and at the same time undertake a large-scale civil defense program...
...advocate American military superiority...
...Here and throughout the book he avoids harangues, debater's tricks, slippery logic-all the sorts of rhetorical devices that have become far too much a part of our political discourse...
...Are we quite confident that the outcome would be as satisfying to us today...
...that America faces an ominous and growing threat from the Soviet Union which can and must be met with American strength, not fragile agreements...
...It is this reality that underlies the anti-MAD, anti-SALT partisans' call for the development of city-protection systems, from fallout shelters to anti-ballistic missiles...
...in research and development of a reliable ABM system...
...President Carter put the point neatly in his 1979 State of the Union address when he reported that "just one of our relatively invulnerable Poseidon submarines...
...in fact, he is...
...In any case-and largely as a result of the efforts of those who have been insisting for the last 30 years that nuclear war is to be avoided at all costs-we find ourselves today in a situation which comes close to meeting the fondest hopes of Soviet strategic planners since at least the Khrushchev era...
...because of a fear of our ability to devastate all of its major cities and most of its industrial centers...
...In a world where decency is becoming scarcer by the day, America becomes ever more precious...
...It would signal another seven years of military decline for the United States...
...In fact, since at least the mid-sixties the Russians have pursued just such a course of military development...
...President would exchange a hundred million American lives for ten million Russians-for the sake of, say, Teheran, or Belgrade, or even Berlin...
...Readers who are either favorably disposed toward the treaty or who have not yet made up their minds are well advised to read General Graham's exceptionally thoughtful analysis of it...
...And it is one of the sovereign ironies of our age that the proponents of MAD have succeeded in portraying the anti-SALT camp as being indifferent to the horrors of nuclear war, while in point of fact it is MAD, and MAD alone, that postulates the nuclear annihilation of great cities as the logical culmination to international conflict...
...In one crucial respect, however, SALT II would gravely impair U.S...
...Paid for by the Democratic National Committee, it was designed to impute to Senator Barry Goldwater a degree of recklessness, bordering on insanity, that would, were he to be elected President, in all likelihood lead to a nuclear holocaust killing tens of millions of little children around the world...
...It is preposterous to argue that any U.S...
...they did need them for counterforce...
...MAD postulates that the Soviet Union will never undertake large-scale military adventures (including of course a surprise attack on Western Europe or the U.S...
...started with...
...Kennedy could face down Khrushchev in 1962 because neither man doubted America's military superiority...
...Indeed, even if the Russians were to launch a surprise nuclear attack on our missile sites and airfields, we would still have left enough nuclear weapons to inflict, as the McNamaraites like to say, an "unacceptable level" of destruction on them...
Vol. 12 • September 1979 • No. 9
