How to Make Nuclear Weapons Obsolete

...Arms Control and Disarmament Agency: "In my view, this kind of thinking [i.e., Soviet doctrine that nuclear wars are win-nable] is on a level of abstraction which is unrealistic...

...Time and again they declare as if conclusively that no defense against Soviet ballistic missiles can be 100-percent perfect and thus no such defense is worth striving for...

...Put another way, the U.S...

...These reflections are prompted by the important new book by Robert Jastrow, How To Make Nuclear Weapons Obsolete...

...All the more so in light of this new book, which is short and lucid enough for even the giants of the Nuclear Freeze and No First Use movements to comprehend...

...It is an answer to the question of our age: What if deterrence fails...

...In his knowledge of the principal technological areas out of which missile defense will come, Jastrow yields nothing at all to Sagan, Garwin, or even Nobel laureate Hans Bethe (who, as Gregory Fossedal reports in the Wall Street Journal, has lately been dropping hints that the scientific objections to SDI might not be so well founded after all...

...And even non-scientists may be made uneasy by the, well, facile way in which Jastrow makes the development of complex new technologies seem merely a matter of time...

...While proponents such as Daniel Graham, Colin Gray, and Robert Jastrow almost always present their case coolly and analytically, critics such as George Ball, Carl Sagan, and the legions of op-ed strategists seem unable to resist the use of sarcasm, invective, and intimations of apocalypse!' Consider, for example, former undersecretary of state Ball's lengthy assault on Star Wars earlier this year in the New York Review of Books, where in the very first paragraph he characterized President Reagan's announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative as "one of the most irresponsible acts by any head of state in modern times" before treating us to such slashing apercus as "the President announced his decision with breathless awe," "the President's proposal did not seem bizarre to a public used to science fiction and conditioned by long exposure to Buck Rogers, Star Trek, and Darth Vader," "all this blathering," "all this mindless hustle and bustle," and much, much more...

...The rest of us may be forgiven for thinking that we'd damned well better take seriously what the leaders of the world's largest army and most powerful nuclear strike forces say about their own intentions...

...1 I am not being smart-alecky...

...Can we, in other words, deploy a missile defense that will actually do what it is supposed to do, and at a cost the nation can afford...

...None is more important than this: For all their frenzied rhetorical assaults on America's SDI program, the Soviets themselves are, and long have been, hard at work on their own...

...technical aspects of SDI-how it's supposed to work, the alternative technologies for enabling it to do so, responses to possible Soviet countermeasures, and the like...

...The problem, no doubt, is that he chose to write a primer for a mass general audience rather than for one made up of people already conversant with strategic defense...

...Which leaves Robert Jastrow as the most effective proponent we have for SDI...

...It is also worth noting that while supporters of SDI make it a point to raise and to attempt to refute the arguments against their own position, opponents do so only rarely...

...For the Soviets, a pre-emptive first strike with a strong probability of destroying the major portion of America's retaliatory capability might prove, in a crisis, immensely tempting...

...It may indeed turn out to be so...

...At the same time, there is no doubt that some of the fundamental strategic issues are simple and to present them as complex is merely to obfuscate...

...It's one thing to simper behind one's hand at what an ignoramus Ronald Reagan is, but quite another, to patronize so eminent a scientist, writer, and administrator as Jastrow...

...It is settled doctrine...

...With a Ph.D...

...Critics ask: Is a reliable strategic defense technically feasible...

...Still in thrall to their doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (which Soviet military theorists dismiss with contempt, though it's supposed to be mutual), they simply ignore what the Soviets say about their intentions or else, like Paul Warnke, assure us it's only a matter of our needing to educate the poor brutes to their own self-interest...

...No "League of Confident Scientists" for them...

...What if, despite all our threats of retaliatory mass destruction, crisis escalates to war...

...Under the best of circumstances a decision on either side to start a nuclear war must carry a burden of unprecedented risk...

...SDI opponents insist there can be no defense against ballistic missiles because the attacker can take cheap and easy countermeasures to foil the defense...

...This would assuredly provoke a Soviet strike against ours...

...Nor is his discussion of the major strategic issues wholly satisfactory...

...Certainly it is brief-fewer than 130 pages of text and notes, some of which looks suspiciously like padding (a couple of pages on the history of rockets, for example...

...HOW TO MAKE NUCLEAR WEAPONS OBSOLETE Robert Jastrow/Little, Brown/$15.95 Karl O'Lessker A striking feature of the great Star Wars debate is the difference in tone between supporters and opponents of the plan in the national security community...

...This may or may not be a perfectly brilliant concept...

...The essence of the matter," he says, "is that the Soviet Union has already assembled many of the pieces necessary for a nationwide defense against American missiles...

...Not that he is necessarily right and opponents wrong about SDI...

...These strategic circumstances lead to this familiar scenario: The Soviets could launch a disarming first strike against our land-based missiles, bomber and submarine bases, and command and control centers while sparing our major population centers, and then present our government with an ultimatum to the effect that if we refrain from retaliation with what's left of our badly depleted missile forces, they-with a huge number of nuclear warheads still poised to strike-will spare our cities...

...Jastrow's scientific credentials are helpful: When he talks, for example, of the thickness of the lead-shielding the Soviets would have to put on their rockets to protect them from the defense's particle beams (it would have to be much too thick and therefore add far too much weight to the rocket to make it practicable), Jastrow's stature as founder and first director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies provides a powerful subtext to his argument...

...This is not to say that the Soviets are at the moment coldly planning a bolt out of the blue...

...In a word, the Soviets would be deterred from striking...

...What most worries national security analysts is the possibility that the Soviets would be irresistibly tempted to launch a preemptive strike in the context of an escalating international crisis, one they felt was leading to war...

...As everyone familiar with the debate knows, Jastrow is the single most influential proponent of SDI outside the government...

...In .testimony before Congress, in countless op-ed pieces, in an entire book published by one of the nation's most respected publishers, the UCS has traded heavily on its members' scientific credentials to try to convince the public that SDI is not only infeasible but chimerical-a staggeringly expensive boondoggle that can never work...

...Defenders of the strategic status quo react to this scenario by arguing that the Soviet rulers-not being madmen-would never launch a first strike and leave the USSR vulnerable to our surviving nuclear submarines...

...but I'm not at all sure the author does a service to the cause by failing to lay out the difficulties standing in the way of at least some of them...

...But one would suppose that simple prudence would impel critics to take his work seriously and to attempt to refute his arguments on the merits...

...The facts, presented here by Jastrow, need to be known.e by Jastrow, need to be known...

...Try as they may, the strategic thinkers of the Union of Concerned Scientists will never be able to explain to the American people why we should cease and desist our own strategic defense efforts while the Soviets are plunging full speed ahead on theirs...

...They are perhaps at their most blatant on the issue of ballistic missile defense infallibility...

...But if a surprise attack would leave the U.S...

...But with the two exceptions of Edward Teller and Robert Jastrow, they remain anonymous...

...With the Union of Concerned Scientists leading the charge, opponents of SDI have been insisting that the answer to both parts of the question is a resounding no...

...Here we have the central purpose of SDI...

...Karl O'Lessker is senior editor of this journal, professor of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University, and senior research fellow of the Hudson Institute...

...Teller, unfortunately, has been displaying all the quirkiness of his genius by insisting on the development of the most exotic-and scariest-of technologies, an X-ray laser to be generated by atomic explosions in space...

...today is incapable of retaliating with a measured, proportionate strike against Soviet military targets...

...Here is what Warnke actually said while heading the U.S...

...In other words, they refuse to address the perfectly straightforward, insistently repeated argument that, for one thing, no one has ever claimed a BMD could be made leakproof, and moreover, that in order to accomplish precisely what its proponents want it to, it doesn't have to be...

...It is unquestionably a public relations disaster...

...A magazine like Newsweek may quote them accurately enough but imply that these "Star Warriors" all have a personal financial stake in SDI...

...An honorable exception is an article in the July Atlantic by Robert McNamara and Hans Bethe...

...The only answer is strategic defense: We must be able to defend against-and in so doing deter-a Soviet pre-emptive first strike against our retaliatory forces and the command and control system that operates them...

...no automatic access to the major media and to fashionable publishers...

...That at any rate is Robert Jastrow's point of departure for assessing the merits of SDI...

...And so we learn about lasers and particle beams, satellites and smart bullets and electromagnetic railguns and a host of other defensive options, some of them deployable in the next couple of years, others decades off...

...Moreover, Jastrow is a gifted writer, a talent that stands him in good stead in the sections he devotes to explicating the more...

...Critics are likely to say that the book is altogether too elementary and facile in its treatment of complex strategic and technological issues...

...Jastrow begins with a succinct description of the current strategic reality: The United States has no defense against ballistic missiles, indeed is prohibited by the ABM Treaty from developing one, and is thus vulnerable to devastation by the immense and growing Soviet rocket forces (a set of facts not known to most Americans, who, in their innocence, fondly believe that the government they pay all those taxes to is performing its bedrock function of protecting the nation against annihilation by an enemy...

...The reasonableness of this is self-evident to most of us, if not to even the most sophisticated opponents of SDI, and it is here that Robert Jastrow is indispensable...

...Would any President in those circumstances choose national suicide for the dubious pleasure of slaughtering tens of millions of ordinary Soviet citizens...

...But again, this ignores the distinction between missiles that can destroy missiles (and command and control centers) and those, of lower accuracy, that can destroy only large population centers...

...Instead they continually, almost obsessively, restate their major contentions, oblivious to the factual and logical points that have been raised against them...

...And deterrence, after all, is the standard around which advocates of MAD and SDI alike have always gathered...

...Still, by pitching the discussion at a level well below that of even his own exemplary articles in Commentary, he opens himself to the sort of attack one can easily envision in the prestige press...

...These include everything from lots more warheads and a blizzard of decoys to spinning the rocket or shining its surface...

...This is no longer, if it ever was, a subject for debate inside the USSR...

...in theoretical physics from Columbia University, postdoctoral study at Leiden, Berkeley, and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, and his former positions as founder of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and chairman of its Lunar Exploration Committee, he has the kind of scientific credibility that makes things awfully sticky for SDI opponents...

...Some of Jastrow's most powerful pages are devoted to just this point...

...But for the Balls and Bundys and McNamaras, this is all irrelevant...

...A critical consideration here is the heavy emphasis Soviet military doctrine places on preemption...

...The voluminous literature on the subject is unequivocal: If there is to be a war, Soviet forces must strike first, with all the weapons at their command, at the enemy's war-making capacity...

...Especially valuable is Jastrow's handling of the countermeasures question...

...An American President would then be left with the choice of either surrendering or launching a retaliatory attack against Soviet cities, because submarine-launched ballistic missiles are not accurate enough to hit military targets...

...By contrast, the large number of scientists and engineers who are confident that SDI is feasible are virtually unknown to the general public...

...If one country gets a missile defense before the other, it will be the Soviet Union that does so and not the United States...

...with most of its strategic forces undamaged, it would almost certainly lose its attraction...

...Here again Dr...

...It seems to me that instead of talking in those terms, which would indulge what I regard as the primitive aspects of Soviet nuclear doctrine, we ought to try to educate them into the real world of strategic nuclear weapons...