A Brand New 'Missile Gap'

...In public speeches, press briefings, and frequent appearances before Con- gressional committees, John S. Foster Jr., the Pentagon's director of research and engineering, has warned over the last two years that America is about to lose its military superiority...

...In this good and honorable cause, the Pentagon's force of more than 300 legislative lobbyists—whose activities alone account for $4.4 million of the budget—is working feverishly to fore- stall any feeble assault that might be mounted in the Senate against the De- fense Department appropriations for the current fiscal year, which are still awaiting final passage...

...This year it was rejected 63 to 24...

...An- other way would have been simply to cut the Pentagon budget by six per cent...

...We have been in- creasing at about four per cent per an- num...

...But there has been no parallel change in voting patterns...

...The present situation in strategic weaponry, he noted, "is one of great overkill and considerable sta- bility...

...The Soviet Union intro- duced them at a much later date and is still deploying liquid-fueled systems...

...he said, or meant to say, "few years...

...Finally, in computer technology, which is essential not only to ABM systems but to many other military sys- tems, you will find that the United States has a truly enormous lead...

...And in testimony released by the House Appropriations Committee only a few weeks ago, he predicted that the Russians "will attain technological superiority in area after area on which they choose to concentrate...

...Incidentally, the rhetoric pouring out of the Pentagon is an expensive item in its own right...

...cancel plans for the B-l manned bomber and a new defense against Soviet bombers...

...The General Accounting Office, the Congressional "watchdog" agency which has been less than vigilant at times in scrutinizing Pentagon claims, reported in July that it had "reserva- tions" about the military's case for an R&D gap...

...For the first time, members of these committees are be- ing exposed to alternatives to the Pentagon line, presented by experts whose establishment credentials cannot be questioned...

...In an airborne press conference (en route from Washington to a naval cer- emony at Norfolk) Laird told Penta- gon correspondents that he foresaw a military budget of $80 billion in the fiscal year starting next July 1—about $3 billion more than the total for the current fiscal year...

...The Indochina war, which drained the Treasury of close to $30 billion a year at its height, is esti- mated to cost $8 billion in fiscal 1972...

...A Government Accounting Office study released re- cently revealed that the Defense De- partment spent $54 million on publicity last year—$14 million more than the amount provided for in its already ex- pansive budget for "public relations...

...All these steps could be taken without jeopardizing the na- tion's defense posture, the scientists said, and would save a total of at least $80 billion over the next decade...

...He told the Veterans of Foreign Wars, assembled in convention at Dallas, that Amer- icans must "remember that the strength that commands respect is the only foundation on which peace among nations can ever be built...

...Where are the billions that once were prom- ised as a "peace dividend" to realign the nation's skewed priorities...

...What sets the R&D gap apart is that its assumptions are under authoritative challenge right now, when there may still be time to blunt the latest scare campaign...

...Our real concern," Foster told a Senate committee in 1969, "is the fact that for the last decade they [the Rus- sians] have been going up at a ten per cent rate per year...

...A few days later, when he took to the road to sell his economic plan, the President made explicit what had only been implied in his address to the na- tion—that the military establishment would be exempt from any program of Government austerity...

...Secretary Laird, who predicted in 1969 that the United States would be in "severe dan- ger" by the early 1970s, has deferred but not withdrawn his forecast...

...There is an official rationale for this, and it is more specific than the Pres- ident's commitment to "the strength that commands respect...

...Given a publicity and propaganda kitty of this magnitude, it is understandable why Laird's aides can note with pride that he has not lost a major skirmish on Capitol Hill since taking office in 1969...

...Even with inflation and pay raises^" says Senator William Proxmire, Wis- consin Democrat, "these huge reduc- tions should be reflected in military outlays...

...In June, Senators Proxmire and Charles M. Mathias, Maryland Republican, pro- posed an amendment that would have set a $68 billion ceiling on defense spending this year — precisely the amount recommended by a panel of the Federation of American Scientists...

...And in the latter half of this decade they will probably be technologically superior across the board...

...The Federation, founded in 1946 but inactive for many years, has recently resumed a vigorous role as a "scien- tists' lobby...

...Pentagon spokesmen point out that they, too, are victims of inflation and need more money just to "stay even...

...If this is allowed to continue for another decade, I believe that there is no doubt that the Soviet Union will be technologically superior to the United States...

...The ballistic coefficients of U.S...

...halt the Safeguard ABM, and reduce the Navy's force of aircraft carriers from seventeen to nine...

...in the same sense that we are today technologically su- perior across the board...

...Its report on the R&D gap—written by weapons experts, one of whom formerly worked for the De- fense Department—not only attacked the assumptions underlying the gap, but warned that the current Pentagon campaign could easily result in reduc- ing rather than enhancing American "security...

...But the Army, now down to 1.1 million men from its 1968 peak of 1.6 million, is scheduled to shrink further to about 820,000 by the middle of 1973...

...In his televised speech on the economy, he proclaimed a $4.7 bil- lion cut in Federal spending to be achieved by reducing the Government payroll, paring foreign economic aid, and postponing his revenue sharing and welfare reform plans...

...They predict his string of victories will remain intact this year—and next...

...A year later, according to the tran- script of a House appropriations sub- committee, he warned that "if the Soviets continue to increase their effort devoted to militarily-related research and development and we continue our present trend, within the next two years the Soviet Union will assume technological superiority...

...he now sees the period of peril as coming later in the decade...

...Why, then, is it going up...

...The Federation's report appears in full in part four of the Senate Armed Service Committee's hearings on the fiscal 1972 authorization for military procurement, research, and develop- ment, and is available free from the Committee, 202 Old Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C...

...We have com- pleted development of two MIRV [multiple independently targeted re- entry vehicle] systems and are now de- ploying them while, insofar as I am aware, there is still uncertainty about whether the Soviet Union has yet had a single true MIRV test...

...Four other spokesmen for the Fed- eration—among them a former Pres- idential science adviser and a former deputy director of the Central Intelli- gence Agency—told the Senate Appro- priations Committee a few months ago that the Pentagon should be directed to cancel the Minuteman MIRV...

...Testifying in behalf of the Federa- tion, George Rathjens of the Massa- chusetts Institute of Technology, for- mer deputy director of the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency, gave the Senate Armed Services Com- mittee this perspective on the current state of the arms race: "As regards ballistic missiles, I be- lieve you will find that the systems we are now deploying will deliver their warheads with higher accuracy than the Soviet missiles now being deployed...

...and that will not depend on whether or not one side or the other has somewhat superior weaponry...

...If you consider submarines," Rath- jens continued," I believe you will find that the ships we are now deploying are significantly less noisy than their Soviet counterparts, and in sonar de- velopment we also probably have a significant lead...

...When their la- bors for fiscal 1972 are finished, it will be time to start promoting the bigger budget for 1973—which Secretary Laird will doubtless describe, as is his custom, as "bare bones" and the min- imum required to preserve America's fragile "national security...

...Nixon agrees that this is "not the time...

...It's starting out as an expensive "genera- tion of peace...

...the ABM gap in 1967, and Secretary Laird's own SS-9 (large missile) gap in 1969...

...I do not expect ever to see the strategic weapons used—and if they are, I do not expect that this nation will survive as a going society...

...de- fer the Poseidon MIRV...

...It is a difficult thesis to defend, since the Pentagon's own tabulations still show vast U.S...

...On the basis of the limited informa- tion available to us," the GAO told Congress, "we believe that extreme secretiveness by the Soviet Union re- sults in data which are insufficient for a realistic measurement of its military R&D efforts...

...There have been famous previous "gaps," of course, in the U.S.-Soviet military balance—the bomber gap of 1955, the missile gap which helped elect John F. Kennedy in 1960...

...The Pentagon budget should be coming down, instead of going up...

...war- heads, you will, I believe, find to be higher than those of the U.S.S.R., an important consideration for the attain- ment of high accuracy and penetration of possible defenses...

...The GAO noted that it had been denied access to the "intelligence reports" on which the Pentagon's asser- tions are based...

...Such "outside" testimony is a rel- atively recent development in Congress —particularly before the committees concerned with military authorizations and appropriations...

...superiority in every quantifiable form of strategic weapon- ry...

...A BRAND NEW 'MISSILE GAP' by ERWIN KNOLL On Saturday, August 14, while President Nixon was putting the final touches to a "new economic pol- icy" designed, as he was to tell the na- tion the following night, "to bring about a full generation of peace and to create a new prosperity without war," Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird was laying the groundwork for a bigger war budget...

...He added: "To those who attack the morality of strength with claims that our de- fense establishment is Militarist' and evil, we must reply that it is war which is evil, and that the vigilance which prevents war is honorable and good...

...But the military have overcome this difficulty by finding and proclaiming a "research and development gap...

...Despite Washington's occasional hopeful allusions to the languishing strategic arms limitation talks, Amer- ica is embarked on a new round in the arms race...

...As the front-runner in the arms race, we must make sure that we do not run this race with ourselves...

...Even more to the point, Rathjens emphasized in his testimony the sheer irrationality of stepping up the arms race at this point...

...that the Soviet Union is "catching up" and threatens, in the ever-closer future, to erase and even reverse the advantage in the nuclear balance of terror which the United States has held since the beginning of the atomic era...

...it characterized Foster's cam- paign as "a classical numbers game featuring selective disclosure, question- able assumptions, exaggeratedly precise statements, misleading language, and alarmist non-sequitur conclusions...

...Two years" was a misprint in the transcript, Foster now maintains...

...They also argue that added funds will be required to pro- vide the pay raises and other induce- ments essential to creation of an all- volunteer Army...

...The Federation of American Scien- tists, in a detailed critique entitled Is There an R&D Gap?, was more out- spoken...

...Since the Soviet Union rapidly learns of our discoveries," the scientists noted, "we are protecting against being surprised by new weap- ons only by guaranteeing that we will be confronted by these same weapons...

...20510...

...With rising urgency the military propagandists warn that America is "falling behind" in its elusive quest for security...

...Although we believe the Defense Department methodology with its limited data base may be use- ful in indicating trends and the ap- parent magnitude of the Soviet Union military R&D threat, we have reserva- tions as to its usefulness in quantifying relative efforts or spending gaps be- tween the countries...

...Why is this "not the time" to make substantial cuts in the vast sums this nation lavishes on its huge military establishment...

...Each of these gaps has been trumpeted as the rationale for escalat- ing the arms race, and each has turned out, in retrospect, to have been the product of feverish political and mil- itary imagination...

...We all understand that there are other pressing priorities for the Government," the Secretary said, but this, he emphasized, is "not the time to have reductions as far as the defense establishment is concerned...

...Even a cursory reading of the Congressional Record reveals that the level of debate on military matters is far more sophisticated than it was only a few years ago, when Pen- tagon assertions went virtually unchal- lenged...

...If you consider ABM defense, I be- lieve you will find that, ineffective as Safeguard is likely to be, it incorpo- rates interceptors and radars of higher performance than the Soviet systems...

...For the most part, those billions have been pro- grammed for the production of new, costly, and devastating weapons sys- tems—new bombers and missiles, mul- tiple warheads and anti-missile systems, super-submarines and electronic battle- fields...

...Early this year, he testified that "if present trends continue, . . . the Soviet Union could assume technological su- periority in military research and de- velopment in the latter half of this decade...

...Proxmire blamed the defeat on Secretary Laird's "rhe- torical overkill," but the point is, it worked...

...Cit- ing mysterious and impenetrable "in- telligence," they claim to have estab- lished that the Russians are outspend- ing the United States by about $3 bil- lion a year on the long-range develop- ment of arms...

...His time- table, too, has been revised as need arose, but his essential message has re- mained the same...

...ERWIN KNOLL js Washington Editor of The Progressive...

...Last year, a similar amendment spon- sored by Proxmire and Mathias was defeated 42 to 31...

...In this way," the President said, "I am re- ordering our budget priorities...

...We have been using solid propellants since the early Sixties...