The Case for Reviving the ABM

...The "Safeguard" system, as it was now called, was urged on Congress as a means of protecting land-based ICBMs, and only secondarily as a defense against a Chinese attack or an accidental or unauthorized launching from any source...

...Wouldn't the Soviets assume it was in any case, and react accordingly...

...After failing by merely a single vote to eliminate ABMs altogether, the legislators approved funds for two ABM installations, only one of which has been constructed (to shield an ICBM site at Grand Forks, North Dakota...

...The cost for this kind of security system would probably be somewhere between $2-4 billion a year for about five years...

...The going was very rough at first, not only because of the U.S.'s limited bargaining leverage but more fundamentally because Soviet military thinking has traditionally favored defense...

...More and more the ABM appeared to be a weapon in search of a rationale...

...In part, the ABM contest was a symbolic affair...

...To be sure, there were reasons for rejecting ABMs on the merits as well...

...Despite its enormous costs-some estimates ranged up to $100 billion-a heavy population defense system would not work, for even if the most optimistic technical assessments were correct, the Soviets could always add new offensive missiles in sufficient numbers, and at substantially less expense than ABMs, to overwhelm city defenses (which have to be 100 per cent effective to be effective at all...

...Finally, such structures are irrelevant to the hazard of terrorist or blackmailing attacks, whose risks are bound to increase as nuclear weapons and long-range delivery systems proliferate...

...Nonetheless, in 1972 salt resulted in a permanent treaty limiting each superpower to a maximum of two ABM sites with 200 launchers and prohibiting the development, testing or deployment of any new missile-defense systems (e.g., lasers...

...While this amount may seem large, it could be offset by phased reductions in offensive missiles, or by cancellations of some unnecessary new military projects...

...As Mc-George Bundy, Special Assistant for National Security in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, and Fred Ikle, current director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, have observed, among minimally rational political leaders, the prospect of even a few cities being utterly destroyed should be deterrent enough...

...Unfortunately, the ABM agreement has not broken the action-reaction cycle that was thought to be the main driving force behind the offensive arms race...

...It was standard doctrine in the United States that the stability of the nuclear balance of terror rested on the capacity of each superpower to completely destroy the other...

...In 1970, Congress rejected the Nixon Administration's request for a 12-site antiballistic missile system to provide point defense for four intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) complexes and a nationwide population defense against a possible Chinese nuclear attack...

...the Soviets will soon have a comparable capability...

...The Soviets, moreover, might feel compelled to respond immediately, destroying McNamara's hopes of braking the "mad momentum" of the arms race...

...Certainly it has served to deter direct conflict between the United States and Soviet Union in the last three decades, no mean feat...

...Indeed, not only will the installation of mirvs allow each side to more than quadruple the nuclear warheads in its arsenal, but the recent Vladivostok agreement between President Gerald Ford and Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev actually legitimates substantial future expansions...

...the caption reads, "From the people who brought you Vietnam-the antiballistic missile system...

...But this state of "Mutual Assured Destruction," or mad as some had come to call it, could theoretically be threatened by ABMs: Should one side believe it could effectively defend its population, it might be tempted in time of crisis to initiate a surprise attack, striking at its opponent's ICBMs and relying on its ABMs to shoot down any enemy missiles that escaped...

...It was this reasoning that persuaded Robert McNamara in the mid-60s to resist pressures from within the Pentagon and from Congressional hawks for a full-scale ABM system...

...It was based on the premise that China might attack the United States with a few nuclear missiles knowing it would be utterly destroyed in retaliation...

...This approach, though, was no more persuasive than its anti-Soviet predecessor...

...In this situation, the case for U.S.-Soviet negotiations to reintroduce ABMs appears overwhelming...

...In addition, the problem of devising foolproof command and control structures is unquestionably greater for the less experienced, smaller nuclear powers-Britain, France, China, India, and probably Israel...

...In retrospect it is apparent that many opponents of ABM exaggerated the impact of the interaction between defense and offense as the primary cause of the arms race-particularly compared with such equally or more powerful factors as technological determinism (what can be done will be done), interservice rivalries, the desire for negotiating advantage in future arms-control talks ("bargaining chips"), and sheer governmental inertia...

...But no one claims these measures make accidental or unauthorized firings impossible, and, given the current level of technology, an unauthorized attack, even if it didn't precipitate an all-out war, would not be very different from a deliberate, full-scale assault 10-15 years ago...

...and USSR would both have spent enormous sums of money and come out with less protection than they had when the whole cycle began...

...If they thought the way American military strategists did, they certainly would...

...A cartoon widely circulated at the time by sane neatly captured the spirit moving the liberals...

...Thus, after five years of intensive "arms control" negotiations, we continue to live in a world of mindboggling military escalations and reliance on mad to avoid nuclear catastrophe...

...Because a modified ABM system might well be employed to support a confrontationist strategy against China, liberals, already deeply-and rightly-worried about their own government's rationality, were less than enthusiastic about the idea...

...IN OUR 'MAD' WORLD The Case for Reviving the ABM BY JEROME SLATER It has now been almost five years since liberals won one of their few major (if not complete) victories over military expenditures...

...It was true enough that in the paradoxical logic of nuclear deterrence, defense of missiles was less likely to set off a new escalation of the arms race than defense of people, but Safeguard raised other questions...

...would be in response to an American-initiated attack...

...The Soviets, therefore, would have been likely to try to offset deployment of an American ABM system, especially since they could do that with relative ease...

...Former Senator J. William Fulbright summed up the objections with his usual eloquence: "The deployment of this dubious new weapons system, virtually certain as it would be to destabilize the present arms balance and to initiate a costly and futile intensification of the arms race, would be the antithesis of prudence, at best wasteful, more probably prodigal, and quite possibly disastrous...

...Was it really necessary to spend at least $10-15 billion to protect ICBM complexes when the Soviets, even with a devastating first strike, could not destroy our extensive bomber and sea-based nuclear forces...

...In the summer of 1974 an amendment to the treaty reduced the allowable sites to one each, with the United States giving up its projected ABM defense of the national leadership in Washington...

...In the end, the U.S...

...Jerome Slater is a professor of political science at SUNY Buffalo...

...Yet mad can prevent only large-scale nuclear wars deliberately initiated by governments, probably the least significant danger in years to come...

...Admittedly, in the past decade various steps have been taken by both the United States and the Soviet Union to strengthen central controls over nuclear weapons...

...Besides making it possible to save millions of lives without upsetting the balance of deterrence, limited ABM systems could open the way to the progressive dismantling of the doomsday machine we have created: i.e., to the replacement of mad with more defense-oriented strategies in which far fewer warheads than at present are aimed mainly at military targets, and still fewer are aimed at cities for the purpose of pure deterrence...

...A group of obese generals and industrialists are gathered around a toy rocket, rubbing their hands and chortling with glee...

...Would the men in the Kremlin really have reacted in that manner...

...Faced with effective Congressional opposition to all but the most minimal ABM system, the Nixon Administration was compelled to seek a negotiated abolition or strict limitation on ABMs during round one of the strategic arms limitation talks (salt...

...Many strategists, of course, argue that mad isn't so bad, or at the minimum that no plausible alternative exists...

...The result would have been dangerous new tensions, and probably an accelerated arms race...

...Controlled and limited ABM defenses would provide both superpowers with substantial protection against a variety of possible light attacks, but none at all against a full-scale, retaliatory action with Mraved missiles-and since the mad policy of total destruction would remain effective, no additional expenditures for offensive weapons would be required...

...The argument assumed, in other words, that the leadership in Peking was capable of totally insane behavior, an assumption completely at variance with its proven global caution...

...What is worse, as the sole means of dealing with these possibilities mad threatens to turn them into the apocalypse...

...Frustrated by their seeming inability to stop the Vietnam war or its escalation into Cambodia and Laos, antiwar and anti-militarist Congressmen focused on the ABM as a surrogate...

...Was Safeguard still another maneuver to keep alive the possibility of shifting to a heavy system...

...In any event, limited ABM systems are justified by the changing international realities...

...The weapons had originally been designed to provide public protection in the event of an all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union, but it was easy to show that their deployment would in fact be entirely useless...

...Consider this: A single American nuclear submarine with Mirved missiles can today target 160 separate Soviet cities...

...It is completely useless against unauthorized actions of fanatical local commanders, misfirings due to technological accidents or communications errors, or third-party "catalytic attacks"-missiles launched surreptitiously by a government or terrorist group hoping to precipitate war between the superpowers...

...and the projected Trident submarine will be able to strike at 240 cities...

...In 1967 Premier Aleksei N. Kosygin himself had specifically rejected McNamara's claim that ABMs were provocative, and several years of strenuous diplomatic efforts were required before the Kremlin finally saw Washington's logic...

...They knew, too, that an anti-China ABM system could become an entering wedge for a heavy anti-Soviet system, as many Pentagon officials were clearly hoping...

...In the years since the original salt Treaty the two superpowers have simply concentrated on "qualitative improvements"-multiple independently targetable warheads (mirvs), new missile submarines (Trident), more sophisticated bombers (B-1), and so on...

...As the 1968 Presidential elections approached, however, Lyndon Johnson became uneasy about possible Republican charges that he was neglecting the nation's security, and forced his reluctant Secretary of Defense to agree to a compromise-a modified ABM system, not extensive enough to worry the Russians but adequate for warding off the much lighter nuclear assault China was expected to be able to mount by the '70s...

...By 1969, when the new Republican Administration came in, the critics had succeeded in making their point, and Richard Nixon undertook to change the argument for the ABMs once again...

...Indeed, about the only remotely conceivable situation in which the Chinese might fire nuclear missiles at the U.S...

...In fact, it is difficult to understand why there has been so little public outcry against abolishing them...