Offensive in nature

...In December 1983, Secretary Weinberger said that a unilateral, effective Soviet SDI "would be one of the most frightening prospects I could imagihe...

...and the staggering costs -all questions posed with shattering immediacy by the Challenger disaster...

...Space-based weapons would also reduce the present half hour of warning time to a mere two or throe minutes...

...According to Los Angeles Times reporter Robert Scheer, President Reagan took this seriously, and perhaps felt himself genuinely torn by the moral dilemma implied...

...Confident during a dangerous, rapidly evolving military crisis...

...Ironically, therefore, the bishops may bear some responsibility for the new policy, and accordingly bear responsibility to clarify their reasoning and intent...

...Official arguments for SDI have consequently shifted their emphasis to objectives such as insuring the survivability of an adequate number of American land-based retaliatory missiles...

...Paul Nitze told a strategic systems conference in February it will take that long to determine whether SDI can meet the president's "criteria of feasibility, survivability, and cost-effectiveness at the margin...

...According to a Soviet . . . . . . . ' , L . . . . ' . . . . Commonweal: 210~?'~ - . [1" soft, eminently hittable cities on which even a small number of successful strikes would do enormous damage...

...Most telling has been the report on SI)I and anti-satellite weapons last September by the congressional Office of Technology Assessment (Strategic Defense, Princeton, paper $12.50, 146 pp...

...on combustible cities they would very likely even do the kind of damage necessary to produce nuclear winter...

...A Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, forbidding all such testing instead of, at present, just tests above ground, has been ready for signature since the late days of the Carter 11 April 1986:211...

...They also made clear their extreme skepticism that any nfilittry specialist, Col...

...The administration could not afford to be seen as committed to a policy of deterrence that would be judged immoral because of its effects on civilian noncombatants...

...the room for human error in such systems...

...All of these problems exist quite apart from the other, myriad difficulties in deploying an untested SDI: its complicated and vulnerable computer systems...

...Furthermore, Alex Gliksman, a strategic defense analyst, believes that the fullest.range of technological gains produced by SDI research is likely to be realized in conventional weapons...

...The point then is whether, even if SDI should work more or less as advertised, we would want it...

...Some elements of the system, such as space-based lasers, have a formidable potential as offensive weapons, able, for example, to hit aircraft on the ground...

...Perhaps we would never make a first strike...

...Despite this official resolve, rudimentary questions about the possible practicality of SD1 continue to arise...

...Many elements of SDI development and deployment would violate the ABM Treaty...

...But SDI promises to give significant advantages to the side that goes first...

...Nuclear-armed terminal phase defenses would probably require many new test explosions of nuclear weapons, and the X-ray laser (to be powered by a nuclear explosion) certainly would...

...security...

...But that argument -- for enhancing deterrence rather than for defending people -- lacks the simple "gut" appeal of the "peace shield," As the strength of the prudential argument begins to weaken, so too does the moral argument...

...Will a space-based defense as envisioned in President Reagan's SDI dream provide a tranquil, invulnerable shield...

...Enough American landbased missiles should survive to inflict that kind of damage...

...Is that compatible with the goal of drastic reductions in nuclear weaponry, advocated by the bishops and ostensibly the goal of the Reagan administration...

...The administration now sees SDI research extending far into the 1990s...

...So much for the mirage of SDI as inherently more moral...

...such a defense were to protect our own retaliatory vehicles, retaining an ability to "destroy the Soviet Union as a functioning society" if it should dare to attack us or our allies, it might conceivably be judged a success...

...SDI "useless junk...

...system, the U.S...

...In all likelihood, any even moderately intelligent enemy would make an end run around the SDI, with bombers, apparently peaceful merchant ships carrying bombs and sailing in and out of American seaports, and even bombs delivered by van or suitcase...

...But can the Russians be confident of that...

...The leaky shield offered by SDI may look inadequate to deal with an attack by thousands of warheads, but could be much more adequate to deal with the sharply diminished number of warheads that might be launched in retaliation after a moderately successful first strike...

...9 The easiest Soviet response to an American SDI is simply to build more offensive missiles...

...T HE ADMINISTRATION'S moral argument is in part a response to the U.S...

...The Pentagon's recent annual "Defense Guidance" document gives SDI the "highest priority" among all Pentagon programs, and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger underscored the administration's commitment to SDI at a meeting last month with NATO defense ministers: SD...

...It is also ironic that in its last drafting session the bishops' committee agreed to insert a sentence urging continued observance of the ABM Treaty, but due to staff oversight the sentence was lost...

...It concluded SDI would threaten the arms control process...

...The bishops gave but a reluctant and "strictly conditioned" acceptance of deterrence, and made it clear that certain forms of deterrence -- namely the deliberate use or intent to use weapons against civilian populations, even in retaliation -- could never be morally acceptable, and deserved condemnation...

...Using SDI technology, massive conflagrations induced from space could return an industrial nation to an eighteenth-century level in thirty minutes...

...would be the loser...

...A "mere" 161 warheads directed against cities would destroy us as a functioning society...

...The report pointed out that SDI would likely lead to greater strategic instability, and might prompt an antagonist to undertake a nuclear first strike...

...This same kind of calculation would follow for American decision-makers faced with a choice of how to retaliate to a Soviet first strike if the Soviets also had SDI...

...Thus he was all the more ready to seize upon the supposedly moral deus ex machina presented by Star Wars...

...Yet possibly the most dangerous aspect of SDI, and one which has received too little attention, is its offensive capability and the responses such offensive developments I IIII III consider possible...

...and Soviet anti-missile defenses should give some indication of the USSR's own probable resolve to offset a U.S, space-based defense...

...and lead to the abrogation of the 1972 ABM Treaty...

...It is clear why the Soviet Union's response has be~n Weinbergian...

...Should the Soviet Union ultimately decide to develop its own SDI and attain parity with a U.S...

...Finally, the basic question must again be posed...

...For the fact remains, even if the optimistic experts are right, that Star Wars cannot protect our cities...

...This judgment conformed with the traditional "just-war" criterion requiring "discrimination" in the use of force...

...But if the purpose were to protect American cities, such a success rate would constitute a resounding failure...

...And this assumes that all enemy warheads are delivered by missiles...

...SDI would then have led to a net loss in U.S...

...9 In addition to forbidding use of nuclear weapons on civilians, the bishops declared any first use of nuclear weapons unacceptable...

...Instead of becoming a policy, in the president's rhetoric, of "mutually assured survival" rather than MAD ("mutually assured destruction"), it would actually reinforce MAD...

...Vasily Morozov, the Soviet .Union air~dy possesses the basic technology for such ir at a cost of 1 or 2 percent of the Amencan SDI...

...If the Soviet leaders could not depend on destroying enough protected (hardened) military targets to be sure of inflicting unacceptable damage on the United States in retaliation for an imaginable American first strike, they would become all the more committed to targeting are bound to provoke...

...In fact, a "just-war" moral argument against SDI is a strong one, and needs to be made forcefully and clearly...

...Or will its finite and destabilizing character usher in a terrifying new world, one that sentences humanity to dangle minute by minute before the cocked tri~eer of total human de...

...Glenn Kent, USAF Ret., of the Rand Corporation, were both sides to have an equal defense of this nature, the Soviet Union would have an inherent strategic advantage because of its differing force structure, geographic nature, and political system...

...The bishops' pronouncement created a political problem for the Reagan administration, and in some degree a moral problem as well...

...Applying futuristic technologies to conventional battlefield situations might give the lead side a quantum advantage in that re.aim...

...The USSR has vowed to develop countermeasures that would render a U.S...

...use of nuclear weapons, even against strictly military targets, could satisfy the second traditional criterion of "proportionality," in that the number of civilian deaths, however unintended, would be far beyond the bounds of any proportionate good to be achieved or evil to be avoided by that use...

...Remember that the postulated success rates are technically very optimistic ones, at the edge of what informed observers J JJ JJ OFFENSIVE IN NATURE THE RISKS OF 'REAGAN ROULETI'E' W J E ARE NOW three years into the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) research program...

...Catholic bishops' pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace...

...encourage the Soviet Union to increase its nuclear attack forces...

...will not be set aside in response to any demand in connection with any arms reduction agreement," he told them...

...Robert English has detailed some of ~,, these in The New Republic (February 24...

...9 Is that marginal capability worth sacrificing existing or readily achievable arms control agreements...

...Cities -- people -- would become the target of choice...

...This may be hyperbole, but the fact that even France has announced it would mount a major effort to develop nuclear weapons capable of penetrating U.S...

...Nor have we much assurance about the ways political and military entities are likely to respond to a new and strained situation in which 'all the known parameters of the nuclear stand-off are fundamentally altered, and in which military strategy is suddenly untried...

...Space,-bas0~.~.~ . weapons using SDl-spawned technology could swiftly" "" and accurately destroy targets in space as well as on the earth's surface, making vulnerable an adversary's space satellites, its "soft communications network," its strategic missiles, its bombers on the ground, oil tankers, power plants, and even its grain fields...

...For, according to Lt...

...9 ff achieving the ability to protect cities is implausible, is its marginal capability as a defender of missile silos worth the economic costs (remember the bishops' "preferential option for the poor") and the political risks involved compared with other options for protecting missiles (mobility, or concentrating on submarine-based forces...