Editorials
STAR WARS: COUNTING THE COST COMMONWEAL THE president has been busy. He has taken up the sword and shield (MX and Star Wars), wielded the budget scalpel, and swung the veto ax. Most recently he...
...When Mr...
...For Mr...
...He has, in effect, challenged them to a defensive arms race in space, the like of which we have never seen...
...As Lewis Lehrman, a supporter of SDI, has recently written {New York Times, February 19), "Certainly no strategic defense can be perfect...
...Yet, this is still faint response in the face of such a critical question...
...Those talks failed...
...The simple logic which seems to escape Mr...
...As they questioned SDI and MX last June before Congress, they must do so again with the clearest, most resonant voices...
...Schlesinger estimated would cost $50 billion a year on their own...
...Star Wars has become the touchstone of loyalty to the president, and he has made it clear that when it comes to his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), he will not be moved...
...The answer is no...
...The technical difficulties facing Mr...
...Lehrman is that an adversary trying to overcome a 95 percent-effective nuclear defense would substantially increase its nuclear offense...
...He and Mr...
...In fact, as-Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Fred C. Dele told the Senate last month, SDI is' 'not an optional program'' but is "central'' to long-range American military plans...
...What then is the road to take, and who will speak for it...
...However, the speed required for the defensive system will be so accelerated that Time reports (March 11) the following scenario: "Humans would make the key strategic decisions in advance, determining under what conditions the missile defense would start firing, and devise a computer system that could translate those decisions into a program...
...Yet whatever the degree of anxiety, neither power is wise to flail about for false, destabilizing alternatives...
...Yet, loyalty to the president precludes criticism, even the questioning of finances...
...So will the present Geneva parley unless every aspect to be discussed is really negotiable, including SDL The president is short-sighted when he says of the Geneva talks, "The one who loses is the one who gets tired first...
...If they are so afraid of SDI, hadn't we better go ahead with it...
...Computer software containing something on the order of ten million instructions will be needed for SDI and will have to operate flawlessly...
...Reagan proposed SDI in March 1983, he said it was to be a research project in keeping with the 1972 ABM treaty...
...There is some movement already...
...In response, the Soviets MIRVed...
...But even should our technologists be successful, what will they have wrought...
...First, they will have taken the decision-making process for the fate of the earth out of human hands...
...If the adversary were to deploy a similar defensive shield, it would possess similar offensive potential...
...The solution can only be political...
...If that is so, we must grant the Soviets a similarly reasonable fear...
...Unless both sides were to deploy comparable defenses simultaneously, the side that fell behind might feel so threatened it would start firing before its enemy's new defenses could be deployed...
...Ikle now indicate otherwise...
...Second, SDI will create a whole new range of offensive weapons that could be used with devastating effect...
...This is what has been forgotten...
...And even if both agreed to proceed together (but of course without sharing technologies), it could take decades of uncertainty to accomplish...
...Such deterrence already exists...
...Congress must convince the president that SDI as now envisioned is a well-meaning but hopeless crusade...
...The churches must speak up, specifically the Catholic church and its bishops...
...Weinberger answered the first question in December 1983...
...At least not in the president's own circle...
...Yet the Pentagon is so supine it concluded that "the theory had no great policy implication for the Reagan administration...
...Commonweal: 164 And in a government beguiled by a landslide president, who must speak out...
...The result: greater planetary insecurity...
...He said that a unilateral development of an effective Soviet defense "would be one of the most frightening prospects I can imagine...
...MIRVing its offensive nuclear arsenal, an increase of 5,000 nuclear warheads in seven years...
...Yet they have vowed they will not shrink from picking up the gauntlet...
...Congress must not forget that once before public opinion forced Mr...
...The opposition and the churches...
...Reagan's Star Wars speech was that for the first time the president clearly admitted the wisdom of most Americans' fears about nuclear war...
...SDI is such a leap into the fire...
...He should begin with Star Wars...
...Surely not...
...When it comes to nuclear weapons, very few are needed to cause incalculable havoc...
...The Challenge of Peace" provides the moral groundwork for condemning SDI...
...It would be terribly comfortable for the president and the secretary of defense if there was a technical solution...
...What are the costs of SDI economically ? The administration is talking about $30 billion for five years of research...
...In the end, the defensive response would be out of human hands: it would be activated by computer before U.S...
...Space-directed attacks against so-called "soft" targets on earth could "take an industrialized country back to an eighteenth-century level in thirty minutes" by starting millions of fires simultaneously across the Soviet Union using satellite-directed laser beams...
...The last attempt at defensive nuclear weapons, the Soviet ABM system, led directly to the U.S...
...Reagan back to Geneva when he showed no readiness to be there (1982...
...Like the king in Jesus' parable, however, the president himself should take counsel and count the costs...
...The difficulty, of course, is that there is no one to give counsel...
...It must continue to support the findings of its own Office of Technology Assessment, critical of SDI, and use the media to forcefully challenge the president's illusions...
...Why should SDI be questioned, and who must step forward to do the questioning...
...As for deployment, James R. Schlesinger told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month that while total defense is an "illusory plan," even the best we might do would cost "well over half a trillion dollars and probably will exceed a trillion...
...One of the merits of Mr...
...The president has also put aside his earlier offer to share defensive technologies with the Soviets...
...But," he adds, "a 90 to 95 percent effective defense would dramatically reduce American casualties and leave open prospects of national survival and recovery...
...Hans Bethe, the Nobel physics laureate, concludes: "It is difficult to imagine a system more likely to induce catastrophe than one that requires critical decisions by the second, is itself untested and fragile, and yet is threatening to the other side's retaliatory capability...
...The final nine minutes of the present space-shuttle launching, on the other hand, take a mere 88,000 instructions...
...22 March 1985:163 If SDI cannot protect populations, can it still be useful as a "point defense," one that would protect our weapons, allowing us to respond to a Soviet' 'first strike,'' and thus deterring such a strike...
...It must take the lead as true defenders of our life and liberty...
...Paul Nitze has pointed out such a process would be "tricky" to manage, one for which there is no precedent in recent diplomatic history...
...John Rather, vice-president of Kaman Aerospace Co., a laser expert and proponent of SDI, was recently quoted as saying, "A system of space battle stations designed to stop a nuclear attack also may have the potential to attack selected targets in space, in the atmosphere, or down on the surface of the earth" (New York Times, March 7...
...The Vatican recently editorialized against SDI, and Cardinal Ber-nardin made criticisms in a recent university speech...
...Why then have the Soviets come back to Geneva...
...He said it was this realization that led him to seek an alternative...
...Most recently he has taken up the two-edged sword of Scripture, asserting that Luke 14:31 supports his military buildup...
...When will the bishops speak with full throat...
...It is time for us all to sit down and count the cost...
...It would utterly upset the present state of "mutual assured deterrence'' that has kept such a fragile nuclear peace for forty years...
...It is not to be a bargaining chip a la MX at Geneva...
...Reagan's SDI are nearly countless, although they may not be insurmountable...
...Leslie Gelb noted recently, 4 'No longer is any official saying publicly what Richard D. De Lauer, former Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering said in 1983 . . . 'Congress will be staggered at the cost.' " If the aim of SDI is to protect the American population (and those of its allies), we musf ask if it will be able to do the job...
...Hans Bethe has noted the only possible solution:' 'We need to try to understand the other fellow and negotiate, and try to come to some agreement about the common danger...
...In January, Defense Secretary Weinberger had said that SDI would also have to be backed up by antiaircraft radar installations and planes which Mr...
...How can we delude ourselves that SDI is not equally frightening to the Soviets...
...For a nation attempting to slay its present deficit by cutting out Amtrak, postal subsidies, and school lunches, this should guarantee national penury...
...The Soviets, of course, will be throwing a curve ball at every batter we send up...
...But there isn't any...
...It would appear that the administration has already foreclosed meaningful discussions on the most sensitive issue at Geneva...
...In other words, our technology would not only have made us more vulnerable, it also would have taken itself out of our hands...
...This unsettling quality is coupled in the Soviet mind with the ruinous expense such a race would invite...
...And when will we...
...commanders even knew that the battle had begun...
...Lehrman has also failed to take into account (as even a Pentagon report now does) the resulting nuclear winter, and the quite possible extinction of the human race from global effects unrelated to radiation hazards...
...22 March 1985: 165...
...At least two remarkable changes...
...Yet we are told it is possible to do...
...If 5 percent of 10,000 Soviet warheads were to strike the U.S., would that leave any "prospect for recovery...
...John E. Pike of the American Federation of Scientists says that the research will more likely require thirteen years, and cost $100 billion...
Vol. 112 • March 1985 • No. 6
