The Public Policy/SDI Deployment and History
Fossedal, Gregory A.
"The Public Policy/SDI Deployment and History" Sometime in the coming months, Ronald Reagan will decide whether or not the United States will build early layers of a strategic defense, or Star Wars shield, against nuclear weapons, within...
...Reagan is not unique...
...Fortunately, by 1917, French politicians who had cautiously deferred to their own army experts were fed up...
...Navy Minister Churchill set up his own research effort...
...And, as John Kennedy knew, a President can do an awful lot with the right janitor...
...UnUke other politicians, he took the time to meet with obscure, independent scientists, such as Frederick Lindemann, who claimed air defense could be deployed immediately...
...A blue-ribbon panel headed by Wiesner suggested that the United States "stop advertising" the manned space program as important, as it was "very unlikely" we could place a man in orbit, let alone on the moon, in the decade...
...Later the term was changed to "tank...
...True, the band of scientists and leaders cited above say America can and must proceed with Star Wars deployments...
...They allowed Clemenceau to reform military organization and production around the tank and other mobile artillery...
...See my "Is SDI Now Moving on a Faster Track...
...In his memoirs, Ike speaks of "inadequate funding" and "interservice rivalries" as inhibiting the U.S...
...MAD, Uke the Maginot Line, relies on an obsolescing technology...
...Reagan has contemplated extending the 1972 ABM treaty banning effective defense when he conducts his final five-year review of the pact next fall...
...Wiesner was correct that the two conventional options would take years and cost much...
...I don't care if it's the janitor over there, if he knows how...
...Gregory A. Fossedal is media fellow at the Hoover Institution and a contributing editor of Harper's...
...Obviously, these maxims would not have held if Churchill had been asking for, say, a special device to force German subs to the surface by boiUng the seas...
...For one thing, Mr...
...Given the difficult politics of reversing even a hazy extension of a freeze on defense, and the inertia of the Pentagon's twenty-year procurement cycle, it is hard to imagine deployments before the year 2000 without a start by Reagan...
...Notably, though, it was political leadership that made technical progress possible...
...Luddendorf called it "the black day of the German Army...
...Prime Minister Baldwin wasn't against defense per se, but saw little point in building when "the bomber will always get through...
...Could an elite army of 100,000 men have saved France in 1940...
...Reagan's own aides who say such a coiu-se is technologically unsound, politically risky, and strategically provocative toward the Soviets...
...Churchill reasoned that if the prospect of German city attacks could arouse such fear, some defense was all the more imperative...
...By a similar sleight of history...
...I ke's bold action to build—not research—the ICBM helped make possible the decision by John F. Kennedy to send men to the moon...
...Kennedy's top advisers, led by scientist Jerome Wiesner, saw no way to outdo the Russians in space...
...For Churchill faced a problem similar to that posed by today's dogma of Mutual Assured Destruction...
...The proposal to announce and initiate a Star Wars deployment in Reagan's term already has the support of the program's leading proponents in the scientific and political communities.' Among those who signed an October 2 letter to the President calling for rapid deployment are: Alexander Haig, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Allen, Eugene Rostow, Herbert Stein, Jack Kemp, James Courter, Malcolm Wallop, Dan Quayle, Ernest Rollings, Rudy Boschwitz, and a dozen other SDI supporters in Congress...
...After all, if Star Wars truly can bear no fruit for ten years or more, why reject out of hand a Soviet offer to tear up most nuclear weapons in exchange for limits on SDI not radically different from those Mr...
...For in facing this choice, Mr...
...What was needed was a presidential decision that we should challenge the Russians...
...Nobel prize winner Vannebar Bush had said: "There has been a great deal said about a 3,000 mile rocket...
...few disputed that...
...At the least, this formulation suggests that Mr...
...a frustrated President asked his can't-do aides...
...Others doubted an ICBM could even function...
...Faced with such broad and bitter division among experts about the basic facts, how can a President be expected to plow ahead with construction of such a controversial set of defenses...
...And, being the best, they were not going to defer to the second-best...
...T ragically, it was the Germans who absorbed mobility's lesson between the wars...
...Thus, the scientists should be told what facilities the air force would like to have, and airplane design be made to fit into and implement a definite scheme of warfare...
...For it was another ICBM proponent, Werner von Braun, who played a key role in winning JFK...
...Construction of early parts of the defense, including human spotting stations along the Channel and small air defense batteries, began that year...
...Kennedy ordered Vice President Lyndon Johnson to call in experts to give their views on "how...
...In 1955 Eisenhower demanded an ICBM and the services, seeing his interest, scrambled to support the project...
...On taking office in 1953, he learned the Soviets were on the verge of making an intercontinental missile, or ICBM...
...But the defenses available would be imperfect, and hence, it was argued, useless...
...De Gaulle railed against the cult of "orthodoxy" that grew out of the first war and called for the creation of a swift, mobile force capable of striking at German supply Unes...
...MAD, like the Maginot Line, assumes—correctly— that the nation will not support an offensive strategy...
...politics...
...Such a vehicle, he argued, could puncture barbed wire and heavy fire and put an end to the terrible carnage of the trenches...
...Kennedy summoned his advisers...
...Ike thus foresaw the Union of Concerned Scientists...
...S ometime in the coming months, Ronald Reagan will decide whether or not the United States will build early layers of a strategic defense, or Star Wars shield, against nuclear weapons, within this century...
...But Churchill knew radar and other defenses were evolving rapidly...
...Reagan's political body language is clear, defense retains powerful opponents...
...We have spent millions on the Maginot Line," the ring of forts designed to shield France from a German invasion...
...By 1918, Churchill's concept was ready for its fair test...
...Washington Times, October 10, 1986...
...Reagan himself proposed in July...
...Unflapped...
...When Kermedy moved, "there was no unanimity in the scientific ranks," writes Time journalist Hugh Sidey, who attended the critical 1961 meeting...
...Such men, Nixon writes, "assemble the advice of others, but follow their own judgment . . . their own instincts...
...E ven when tests proved individual tanks feasible in 1916, the army resisted, pointing out that the workability of single units did not prove the tank could be used in battle on muddy fields...
...Let's find somebody—anybody...
...He seeks, instead, a way to make the shift of strategies from offense and retaliation to defense and protection a permanent fact of U.S...
...For Mr...
...The point is, as in 1930s France, our deterrent forces rely too much on a single technology...
...One may doubt i t . . . . What is certain, however, is that if at least part of such a striking force had been available in 1936, it could have prevented Hitler's reoccupation of the Rhineland, and so the war itself...
...Mr...
...Robert Oppenheimer opposed Edward Teller's push to produce an immensely powerful bomb needed to make the inaccurate missiles workable...
...He did not trust the information filtering to him through the anti-defense Air Ministry...
...His advocacy convinced the government to appoint him, in 1935, to a special air defense committee outside the regular Air Ministry bureaucracy...
...It's unfortunate that many writers today misstate the error of the Maginot Line in terms of a reliance on "defense" against "offense...
...Days later: "General tactical considerations and what is technically feasible act and react upon one another...
...Reagan, then, could do worse than to follow his own instincts on the matter of Star Wars...
...SeverEil of this century's great leaders arrived at just such a decision amidst a similar tempest of confusion...
...A few firebombs, said one member of Parliament, could result in "a total holocaust...
...In these matters, when the need is fully explained by the military and political authorities...
...Arriving British and American forces were mostly equipped, historian William McNeill reports, by the factories of Renault...
...In my opinion such a thing is impossible for many years...
...Seeking a leakproof Maginot defense, France neglected vital active defense measures...
...One after the other, they pointed to an estimated cost of up to $40 biUion (actual cost: $20 billion), and the difficulty even then of winning a space race...
...Churchill's orginal memo went to Lord Kitchener, who had little interest in "Winston's folly" and passed it to lower-level army technocrats...
...writes de Gaulle biographer Alexander Werth...
...Reagan has requested various reports on the feasibility of near-term deployment from his own science adviser, from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and from the Pentagon's SDI office...
...Winston Churchill's tireless advocacy of air defense from the mid-1930s on, the salvation of Britain, is an oft-cited example of technologiceil insight saving the day...
...Science is always able to provide something," he wrote on June 7, 1935...
...On the darker side, the Administration has already proposed postponing until 1996 even beginning construction of a defense...
...For in most respects, it is proponents of MAD orthodoxy who resemble the French establishment battling for the Maginot Line...
...program...
...A bill was introduced in parliament to fund deployment, but as one general commented, "It would be folly...
...It would be an abdication of responsibility, like refusing to cut tax rates because "most economists" predict disaster...
...Operating as a back-bencher, he managed to secure research funds for exotic technologies such as radar...
...The von Neumann report, plus a similar paper by the Rand Corporation, tipped the scales...
...Reagan to see in today's confusion a compelling argument agEiinst deployment would therefore be to misunderstand the proper relation between science and leadership...
...Several aspects of that episode, though, bear emphasis...
...Also signed on were the top scientists who support Star Wars: Lowell Wood, Edward TfeUer, Robert Jastrow, Fred Seitz, and Greg Canavan...
...A similar dynamic had led Churchill, in 1915, to advocate construction of what he called, because they had no name, "a number of steam tractors with small armored shelters, in which men and machine guns would be placed, which would be made bullet proof...
...The result, though mitigated by reluctant execution, was devastating...
...Is there any place where we can catch them...
...Our offensive missiles and bombers, unshielded like our cities, resemble the French forts and towns, fixed and undefended by the strike force—an active defense to strike at German communications and supply lines—advocated by de Gaulle...
...Ike shrewdly appointed a teeim of ICBM enthusiasts to report on the issue, selecting John von Neumann as head...
...To keep the Germans and Kitchener in the dark, the craft was described as a "land ship" to carry water to the Czar's troops in Russia...
...Von Braun made his case, and eventually, NASA bought his concept...
...If his top advisers cannot unite behind a plan to start building defense, there awaits a vast Bteam of outside supporters eager to do the job...
...So did an obscure French officer, who in 1932 and 1934 published a collection of lectures and papers he had ghost-written for Marshal P^tain: Charles de Gaulle...
...Why the rush...
...And Ike's actions speak louder than out-of-context quotations...
...The urge of history's great leaders seems to have been just the opposite...
...Once Kennedy announced our intention to put a man on the moon, "the one important decision—the political decision'^— had been made...
...Von Braun, however, saw a third, near-term option: a lunarorbit rendezvous that could be built within the decade and didn't require the massive booster of direct ascent to the moon itself...
...Stubborn commanders didn't use the tank properly, insisting on combining it in small waves with clumsy cavalry movements, and British manufacturers, sensing a lack of interest, never produced an effective design...
...Along with nuclear warheads, these missiles would leave America's cities and military forces open to a devastating attack...
...Reagan's courageous dealings in Iceland seem to indicate he is moving toward a decision to deploy...
...Yet in a nowignored section of that speech, Eisenhower warned of an equal danger from a Military-Scientific Complex that might ossify strategic thinking and make weapons subject to a veto by technical elites out to displace what they see as an ignorant public and Congress...
...Events in Iceland, and my own sources, suggest that Mr...
...Who was right...
...Yet while Mr...
...Writes A.J.P...
...That he will make this decision is not widely known, but it is a fact...
...History answers...
...Reagan had more in mind than merely evading the total demolition of strategic defense demanded by Gorbachev...
...These were present, but so were deep scientific divisions...
...For each supporter, however, one could name a legion of important scientists, politicians, and Mr...
...If somebody can just tell me how to catch up...
...British troops moved through wide gaps in the German defenses, breaking through the sacred Hindenburg line on August 8 at Amiens...
...Their common instinct was to take any decision they could unto themselves, knowing, as Richard Nixon put it, "that they were at the top for a reason: because they were the best for the job...
...Instead, we should find effective means to make people appreciate the cultural, public service, Euid military impact" of a lesser program...
...The only way to do so is to leave behind actual systems, the start of a first layer or two of a shield that will some day be several layers thick...
...Von Braun's view never fully reached the President until the Soviets, shortly after the Bay of Pigs, put cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into orbit...
...Defenses were available...
...Taylor: "Amiens shattered the faith in victory which, until that moment, carried the Germans forward...
...By 1960 Ike had deployed not only the ICBM, but a nuclear-powered submarine armed with similar missiles...
...Star Wars opponents cite Dwight Eisenhower's warnings about the MilitaryIndustrial Complex as an indication that Ike would be against such technological risk-taking...
...Churchill knew that, politically and bureaucratically, doing something soon was the key to doing more later...
Vol. 19 • December 1986 • No. 12
