SDI: new technologies but old questions
Hehir, J. Bryan
T O THE dismay of some and with the endorsement of others, the debate about a defensive strategy against nuclear attack has been placed front and center. The impetus has been provided by President...
...Technologies under dis- cussion today were not envisioned in the late sixties...
...Assessing the consequences of pur- suing the SDI moves the moral discus- sion to a consideration of the political and strategic arguments about defensive systems...
...The pursuit of both defense and offense can kill the ABM Treaty, doom the fragile hopes for a Comprehensive Test Ban and foreclose the possibility of banning Anti-Satellite Weapons...
...Commonweal: 552...
...Their critics argue that pursuit of defen- sive strategies ignores the qualitative change which occurred in the nuclear revolution...
...The moral case used today in support of SDI is identical to the one espoused in support of ABM in the late sixties...
...T O THE dismay of some and with the endorsement of others, the debate about a defensive strategy against nuclear attack has been placed front and center...
...Have nuclear weapons essen- tially changed our notions of politics and strategy or have they simply made the classical calculations more compli- cated...
...Each defensive meas- ure, it is feared, will breed new offen- sive countermeasures...
...The political, strategic, and moral questions remain remarkably the same while the technological question has changed...
...Ambassador Gerard Smith who negotiated the ABM Treaty for the Nixon administration calls the Star Wars proposal a "crucial illusion...
...I use the term intuition because at the foundation of every nuclear policy debate is a basic perception of the nature of nuclear weapons...
...The technological discussion must go for- ward but it should be interpreted in light of broader political, strategic, and moral arguments...
...The technological dimension of the Strategic Defensive Initiative debate will be its leading characteristic in the 1980s...
...Essentially it is an argument against mutual assured destruction, which stressed the primacy of offensive weapons and held open the possibility/necessity of targeting civi- lian centers...
...The critics of SDI contend that its strategic outcome will not be a dis-placement of the offensive threat to each superpower, as Mr...
...In spite of some loose claims about "total defense" no one in the technical debate believes that foolproof defense against nuclear attack is possible in the fore- seeable future...
...But the policy decisions about SDI Church/world watch SDI: new technologies but old qu 'tions J. Bryan Hehir I II cannot be left to the technicians...
...Reagan hopes, but a combined offensive and defensive race...
...Even those who profession- ally follow the nuclear debate and have mastered the alphabet of acronyms from ABM to NPT may have difficulty following the technological debate about SDI...
...J. BRYANHEHIR (J...
...Star Wars',) proposal Mr...
...Reagan recently said the United States had a "moral obligation" to de- veiop such technology...
...This debate on politics, technology, morals, and strategy is destined to continue...
...The political argument turns on an intuition about the nature of nuclear weapons and the impact of pur- suing defensive policies...
...The cost will be astronomical --estimates run to $1 trillion for defensive systems alone...
...Does the classical idea of "de- fense" mean anything in the nuclear age or is "deterrence" (a quite different notion) the best we can do...
...The defensive option is morally superior, it is claimed, because it targets weapons not people (a valid point) and because it aims to insulate the world from nuclear danger (a more problematical claim...
...the vulnerability has been the conse-quences of trying to implement the pol- icy...
...Bryan Hehir was recently ap- pointed senior research scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and re-search professor of ethics and interna- tional politics at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown...
...In support of his SDI (i.e...
...particle beam weapons...
...The defensive debate is not a new issue...
...The structure of the debate will follow the one which pre- ceded the ABM Treaty from 1968 to 1972...
...The division among the experts is deep and the details of the technolog- ical argument are dense...
...The dimensions of the debate will be political, strategic, technological, and moral...
...But Secretary Weinberger has spoken confidently of building a "thoroughly reliable and total" mode of defense against nuclear weapons...
...it is an old question in new technological garb...
...The advo- cates of defensive systems, in their ex- pansive moments, seem to believe de- terrence can be replaced by defense...
...The strength of the defensive option has always been the intention guiding the policy...
...A morality of consequences is never a sufficient moral assessment of nuclear policy, but it is a necessary di- mension of any moral evaluation...
...The technicians are arrayed behind these positions with intricate debates about "boost phase interception" of missiles, "mid-course kill capabili-ties," and laser vs...
...This debate about the nature of nuclear weapons leads to differing views of the strategic impact which the SDI will have on the arms race...
...Hence the decisions to proceed with less than perfect defense should not be made simply because the technology today is new and better than that of the 1960s and 1970s...
...Final answers are not in order at the moment, but it is clear that one need not be an enthusiastic supporter of the pre- sent offensive arms race to be quite unenthusiastic about opening the de- fensive frontier...
...The impetus has been provided by President Reagan's March 1983 speech on a "Strategic Defensive Initiative" (SDI), but the debate in- eludes a review of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 (ABIV0 and ex- tends to the arena of Anti-Satellite Weapons (ASATs...
Vol. 111 • October 1984 • No. 18
