The Missile Budget

...Now Hitch is a dedicated and able public servant, and the "overkill" critic at Columbia is given to gross exaggeration and intemperate statements...

...And even if we could do that, we know no way to destroy the enemy's missile-launching submarines at the same time...

...The strategy requires us to be able to absorb an enemy attack and still have enough planes and missiles left intact to destroy his bases and prevent a second attack upon us...

...and Russia can destroy one another in a moment, but neither can prevent the other from retaliating...

...The fact that Senator George McGovern's (D.-S...

...This grotesque "democratization" of the Bomb affects not only the great, but the would-be greats as well...

...He told Congress last year: "We have 650 manned bombers on 15-minute alert, over 200 land-based intercontinental missiles, and 144 Polaris missiles on atomic submarines...

...For one can only assume, as Secretar)' of Defense Robert S. McNamara told Congress, that "it is extremely unlikely that in the event of a nuclear strike by the Soviet Union against this country they would do anything other than to strike all of our nation with all of their power in the very first strike...

...Stung, for example, by a series of reports that the Atomic Energy Commission has been producing fissionable material out of all proportion to the Defense Department's actual needs, the Administration has ordered it to cut back on the production of both enriched uranium and plutonium...

...Critics who charge we have an "overkill" capacity far in excess of our defense needs have begun to touch a raw nerve both in the Pentagon and in Congress...

...As the Cuban showdown of October 1962 showed the limits beyond which one nuclear power could not go in treading on the interests of another, so the testban treaty of July 1963 was the official acknowledgement of the new community of interests between the United States and the Soviet Union...

...And only so long as these bases can be simultaneously destroyed and the aggressor thereby disarmed is counter-force theoretically feasible...

...Nonetheless, one cannot help but wonder what Hitch means when he says that "our principal concern in the event of attack upon this country is to destroy as quickly as possible the remaining strategic forces available to the attacker so as to minimize further damage to ourselves...

...Yet in this shortsightedness the Congress only reflects our own proclivity to cling to outdated strategies and irrelevant slogans...

...Defense, of course, is the Pentagon's business, and officials across the Potomac develop a testy defensiveness whenever the wisdom of their procurement programs is brought into question...

...Washington is a pasture of sacred cows, and the hardiest of them all is the defense budget...

...In 1960 Dr...

...Even a nation such as France, possessed of a small missile force, can inflict an intolerable retaliation upon an aggressor...

...If age has not withered, at least custom has begun to stale this penchant for infinite acquisition...

...If, as Secretary McNamara says, we cannot hope to knock out Soviet missile sites by doubling or tripling our own, then why are we doubling and tripling them...

...But this, from our point of view as well as in the general interests of world stability, hardly detracts from its desirability...

...They are quite right in looking upon it as a device by which the U.S...

...The old melodies linger on even after we have forgotten the words...

...Although we have the most powerful military force the world has even known, there is no way by which we can prevent our enemies from destroying us-other than by the threat that we will destroy them...

...Ronald Steel, a frequent contributor, is author of The End of Alliance, recently published by Viking...

...Science, however, having made missiles invulnerable, has made their indefinite proliferation unnecessary...

...Our missile force outnumbers that of the Russians at least eight to one...

...Army and Navy have indicated that even in the absence of agreements limiting force size and permitting inspection, 200 relatively secure missiles would provide an adequate deterrent...

...When Congressman William F. Ryan (D.NY) asked for an answer to a Columbia University professor's charge that we have enough nuclear power to "overkill" the Soviet Union some 1,200 times, Charles Hitch, Assistant Secretary of Defense, waved aside the whole question by arguing that "overkill" is beside the point because "the problem is not simply the number of delivery vehicles in our inventory, but rather the number we can expect to have available after absorbing a massive surprise attack...

...This skepticism may yet result not only in investigations as to why a certain Senator did not receive the TFX contract for his state, but perhaps even what kind of security the Pentagon is trying to buy with its $50 billion plus budget...

...But Dr...

...Since the Korean War, we have been operating on the assumption that every extra dollar funneled into the military budget brings us a little added security...

...Actually, since 1958 the AEC has been the beneficiary, or victim if you will, of a technological explosion that has resulted in mounting stockpiles of fissionable material...

...attack last summer on the bloated military budget attracted so much favorable attention from his normally conservative colleagues is an indication that the first stirrings of Congressional skepticism toward the military budget is in the air...

...The Congress, after all, is not an organized plot to keep the country unhealthy, ignorant, unemployed and over-armed...

...Because its major job is to turn this material over to the Defense Department for bombs, the Pentagon has been overloaded...

...What Hitch was trying to do -and we must all admire his tenacity-was to save the counter-force strategy in which the Pentagon has sunk our money and banked our security...

...However, because of a peculiar budgetary device by which the Defense Department can take as much atomic material as it wants and have the AEC pay for it, the bombs -as far as the Pentagon is concerned-are free...

...The major job of every Congressman is to get himself re-elected, and if he feels the wind shifting back home among the constituents, he will be found taking an unyielding position on the unassailable platform that "enough is enough...

...Apparently so, although unfortunately it has not made it impossible...

...Nevertheless, we are now engaged in a missile building procurement, for which Congress provided some $7 billion last year alone, that will give us a force of 656 Polaris missiles and 950 Minutemen missiles by 1965...

...Nor can it prevent a first strike upon itself...

...It came when they had both conducted all the nuclear tests they need for some time to come, and it served as a perfect instrument by which they could discourage other nations from gaining the weapons to challenge the authority of the super-powers...

...But as we all know, advances in military technology consign strategies to the dustbin with predictable regularity...

...This nuclear parity, rather than throwing the atomic powers into a paroxysm of insecurity, has actually stabilized the arms race and made "peaceful coexistence," in its various forms, the only alternative to mutual destruction...

...If the aggressor has used all his bombs in the first strike, what "strategic forces" are we going to strike back against...

...Along with aggression goes the knowledge of certain destruction...

...And who wants to look an atomic gift horse in the mouth...

...What is regrettable is that during that interminable and largely irrelevant debate last summer in the Senate over the test-ban treaty, only a handful of people seemed to have the vaguest glimmer of what it was all about...

...Is that kind of warfare any longer worth the price...

...Everyone on the Hill, it seems, loves a soldier-especially when he wears four stars and promises jobs for the unemployed voters back home...

...Like two scorpions in a bottle, the U.S...

...Today no nation can prevent its opponent from retaliating...

...One of the tragic shortcomings of this extraordinarily gifted man was that he was unable to explain that paradox to the people of this nation any more than he was able to reconcile these conflicting priorities in his own legislative program...

...And every year it whisks through a multi-billion-dollar arms budget in about an hourand-a-half, pleased with itself for a good day's work well done...

...Thus, while we can never hope to wipe out Russian missile bases no matter how much we increase our own forces, and while we now have enough power to destroy the Soviet Union, we are building a Minuteman force six times as large as we already possess, and a Polaris force four times as large...

...This is enough to destroy the 140 cities of the Soviet Union with populations of over 100,000 at least several times...

...Does that mean we are eight times more secure than they, or only that we are building eight times more weapons than we need...

...It is small wonder that France and China refused to sign the testban accord, since one of its major purposes was to prevent them from emulating their protectors...

...The building of a missile force large enough to wipe out enemy bases also presumes that a nuclear war can be confined to so-called "military" targets, and that our superior missile force would allow us to destroy the enemy's ability to retaliate...

...and Russia seek to maintain their primacy...

...As Secretary McNamara himself told Congress last year: "Even if we were to double or triple our forces we would not be able to destroy quickly all or almost all of the hardened ICBM sites...

...Yet one by-product of the current detente with Russia has been the creeping realization that perhaps we are getting a bigger bang and spending more bucks than is really necessary...

...What was good enough for yesterday's crisis is good enough for today's campaign, and Congress is unlikely to apply itself to the realities of 1964, any more than the Administration is likely to make changes in its atrophied foreign and defense policies, unless it is prodded from the outside...

...We should not, perhaps, expect more from our legislators than we do from ourselves...

...Weisner wrote those words during a time when the Democratic party was campaigning on the issue of the socalled "missile gap," a gap which mysteriously disappeared when it took office and discovered that the Russians, instead of being ahead of us, were in fact deliberately restricting their missile production and were considerably behind us...

...Even granting its optimistic assumption that cities could somehow be spared, the strength of the theory rests upon the vulnerability of Soviet bases...

...Jerome Weisner, President Kennedy's scientific advisor, wrote: " studies made independently by the U.S...

...Such are the vagaries of politics, as every Congressman knows and every taxpayer might as well learn...

...Even the Democratic National Committee would not stick its neck out on that one, but there was scarcely anyone in Congress-on either side of the aisle-who thought the question worth asking...

...Although the old definition of the cold war no longer explains the world as it is today, and although the counter-force strategy is no longer feasible, we continue to pursue a military program based on obsolete conditions...

...As President Kennedy remarked at the 50th anniversary dinner of the Department of Labor: "I don't know why it is that expenditures which deal with the enforcement of the minimum wage, that deal with the problem of school dropouts, of retraining workers, of unskilled labor-all these problems that are so much with us in the 1960s-why they are always regarded as the waste in the budget, and the expenditures for defense are always regarded as the untouchable items of the budget...

...Does that mean we are 25 per cent more secure than we were under General Eisenhower...

...Like ourselves, the Russians now have missiles hidden underground and underwater that are virtually invulnerable...

...If this reappraisal is to be made, it will now have to come from below during this election year of 1964, when every taxpayer is mysteriously transformed into that awesome taskmaster: The Voter...

...It is a barometer of public pressure, and whenever it feels a change of mood it jumps or drops to reflect it...

...Thus, during the first two years of the Kennedy Administration the military budget shot up by 25 per cent, or $10 billion...

...As Secretary McNamara explained at Ann Arbor in June 1962, we will direct our nuclear power against Soviet bases in an effort to induce them to direct their power against our bases rather than our cities, and we will strike their cities only if they strike ours first...

...FOR 'A REAPPRAISAL FROM BELOW The Missile Budget By Ronald Steel Every year Congress wrestles with its collective conscience for six months over a few million dollars for education or health insurance for the aged, proclaiming solemnly that the public purse is a public trust...

...Has the guided missile, in combination with the atom, made total war totally irrational...

...If Hitch does not know, Secretary McNamara does, because he testified that "in a second strike situation we would be attacking, for the most part, empty sites from which the missiles had already been fired...