'Overkill Is Not Enough'
'Overkill Is Not Enough' In the last dozen days of February, while President Nixon was wielding chopsticks in China and evoking euphoric visions of a world from which not only wars but even walls...
...strategic submarines and sea-launched ballistic missile systems...
...Now Laird believes that "Soviet MIRV capability could be achieved next year...
...The President's unprecedented mission to Peking coincided with the Pentagon's annual mission to Capitol Hill—the series of appearances before the Senate Armed Services Committee in which the civilian and military chiefs of the Defense Department explain and justify their budget requests for the coming fiscal year...
...Our planning calls for moderate improvements in our current capabilities in this area...
...Secretary Laird is asking Congress for "decisions [that] will reach their optimum application in the Twenty-first Century...
...And Admiral Moorer assured the Senate that no matter what turn relations may take in the future between the United States and the Soviet Union or China, "U.S...
...a follow-on submarine, that's absolutely essential if we are going to stay up with the momentum of the Soviet Union...
...In a February 17 interview on the "Today" show, Secretary Laird saw no reason to "associate the ULMS, the Pentagon's projected new underseas long-range missile system, with the SALT talks or the arms limitation agreement...
...Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird led the parade, delivering an elaborate "posture statement" entitled National Security Strategy of Realistic Deterrence...
...The new submarine system, he said, is "a replacement...
...Those now on hand and in development clearly will not suffice, though they are capable of devastating the Soviet Union, China, and, for good measure, the rest of the world...
...If the United States ever loses its "edge" to the Soviet Union, Foster warned, "we will have forfeited our insurance policy on the future—for ourselves and for our Allies...
...total will grow by 1,000 to 5,700...
...Together, their testimony filled hundreds of closely printed pages, studded with statistics, charts, graphs, and tables, but its essential message could be condensed to just four words: Overkill is not enough...
...The future—our future—as seen from the Pentagon is one of unremitting Cold War, of a perennial policeman role for the United States, of ever-escalating military budgets, of a world at war without end...
...attack submarines...
...The purpose of R&D, for which the Pentagon seeks almost $8.6 billion in the coming fiscal year, is to devise new weapons systems...
...These major elements, along with the minor ones, are scheduled to provide the Pentagon with $83.4 billion of new spending authority in fiscal 1973 —$6.3 billion more than the total for the current year...
...Still, Laird warns, "with the continuing technological effort on their part, we must expect the Soviets will be capable of reducing our technological lead and in some areas, at some point in the future, we could even lag in certain critical areas...
...The $1 billion increase in the [fiscal] 1973 R&D [research and development] budget over that which Congress gave us last year is aimed at maintaining that superiority...
...None of these facts, however, sufficed to allay the deep anxiety of Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, whose pessimism, verging on desperation, surpassed that of all his colleagues...
...Vietnam is barely mentioned in the 203-page report, but the Secretary warns, ominously, that "the continuing rise in the Communist insurgency in Thailand provides a clear example of the ever-present danger of modern revolutionary warfare, in which external Communist influence and support fan problems arising from ethnic and social class differences into international political subversion and thence to open armed aggression...
...strategic forces must always be sufficient to cope with both the Soviet Union and China simultaneously...
...He told the Senate Committee: "There can be no question that during the past five years we have witnessed a most dramatic shift in the balance of military power—between the United States and the Soviet Union...
...Indeed, the question now before us is how best to maintain the security of the United States and its allies in the face of the significant increase in Soviet military capabilities...
...Laird himself is conscious of the parallel, for his report cites "the need for a public dialogue such as we have not had since the days of the genesis of the Marshall Plan...
...John S. Foster Jr., the Pentagon's director of R&D, cast the problem in even more dramatic terms in his testimony before the Armed Services Committee, voicing his fear that "the mood of our country would permit the continued, gradual erosion of our military technological superiority...
...strategic bombers...
...The task confronting the national security bureaucrats is a formidable one, comparable to the great scare campaign of the mid-1940s which remobilized America for the Cold War...
...To overcome Stennis's reservations, not to mention the more energetic opposition of liberal critics, Laird and his associates are prepared to ring some changes on the tune they have played so successfully in the past...
...Admiral Moorer formulates this ingenious notion more precisely: "We will pay a very high price in our diplomacy if we permit the Soviet Union to achieve a clearly evident strategic superiority, even if that superiority would have no practical effect on the outcome of an all-out nuclear exchange...
...Noting the "stratospheric price levels" of the strategic weapons systems that dominate the military chiefs' extensive shopping list, Stennis observed: "Even at last year's prices, weapons systems now in development or procurement are expected to cost more than $100 billion when eventually delivered...
...In mid-1971, Russian heavy bombers and missiles carried an estimated 2,100 nuclear weapons, while the United States was ready to launch 4,700...
...For all his fear of Soviet "superiority," Foster told Congress that the United States retains its "technological lead" in all the basic systems of nuclear deterrence—intercontinental ballistic missile guidance, and penetration aids...
...Even if we were involved in a nuclear war with only one of these nations, we would still need sufficient forces to deter, simultaneously, a nuclear attack from the other...
...The Nixon Doctrine of worldwide Vietnamization has its limitations: "We will act to defend our interests whenever and wherever they are threatened any place in the world," the President told Congress in January, evoking echoes of John F. Kennedy's inaugural address...
...The difference stems from the fact that the United States is rapidly deploying multiple independently-targeted re-entry vehicles (MIRVs), while the Russians, Laird acknowledges, have probably not even flight tested such weapons yet...
...The military budget is on the rise again, and the military have launched a hard-sell drive to persuade Americans that it must continue to increase for the indefinite future, despite the President's political ventures into detente diplomacy...
...Emphasis added...
...Overkill Is Not Enough' In the last dozen days of February, while President Nixon was wielding chopsticks in China and evoking euphoric visions of a world from which not only wars but even walls will have been banished, the men who preside over America's massive military establishment were projecting their own, quite different, view of the future...
...They pay passing lip service to—but make no allowance for —the possible achievement of a strategic arms limitation agreement...
...Translating this doctrine into specifics, Laird's report visualizes the use of nuclear weapons not only as a deterrent to strategic warfare, but also "to help deter conventional aggression because of the uncertainty surrounding the circumstances under which theater nuclear weapons might be employed...
...He was followed, in turn, by the civilian service heads and the admirals and generals who constitute the Joint Chiefs of Staff...
...Three years ago, Laird warned that Soviet MIRV deployment was imminent, and last year the Pentagon predicted tests of a Soviet MIRV by mid-1971...
...Emphasis added...
...He promised to "subject each program to the closest sort of scrutiny...
...He is convinced, he said without explaining why, that "from a position of technological parity or inferiority, a free society cannot confidently deter any aggressive tendencies of an autocratic and secretive society...
...A chart in Secretary Laird's report reveals what is never explicitly stated in the reams of Pentagon testimony: that the United States continues to build its enormous lead over the Soviet Union in the number of launchable nuclear warheads...
...Even the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Senator John C. Stennis of Mississippi, who has usually taken a benignly indulgent view of the Pentagon's spending requests, found these totals to be an "unsettling" contribution to "what is already an awesome display of red ink...
...Technical surprise in military weaponry could be extremely dangerous for ourselves and for our Allies...
...We may not be able to restore it in time to prevent some military or political disaster...
...and anti-submarine sensors and patrol aircraft...
...The Pentagon planners are not caught up in the general euphoria of the President's Peking spectacular, or in the expectations of his forthcoming visit to Moscow...
...He plans, he told Congress, "to visit with citizens throughout our country, to share with them my thoughts and to hear directly from them their views on the major elements of our strategy...
...We no longer have that predominance of strategic power which for about a quarter of a century has significantly contributed to our avoidance of nuclear war and which has been such a major factor in the defense of Western Europe...
...Beyond all these dangers, real and imagined, there is one intriguing new rationale for a military machine that far surpasses the demands of overkill...
...By mid-1972, the Soviet total is expected to increase by 400 to 2,500, while the U.S...
...Furthermore, the military are keeping their options open on fighting more "brushfire wars," though these have a new name now—Laird's report calls them "Sub-theater/localized threats...
...There is to be no rest, therefore, no let-up...
...Regardless of the balance of terror, Laird suggests, there is a need for a "new initiative" to serve as a "signal to the Soviets and our allies that we have the will and the resources to maintain sufficient nuclear forces in the face of a growing Soviet threat...
...The Pentagon is, of course, also planning for less cataclysmic contingencies...
...There, it would seem, we go again...
...The basic theme remains the same—the threat of a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union or, somewhat more remotely, by what the bureaucrats now breezily call "the PRC," the People's Republic of China—but a new variation is receiving heavy stress, in the threat of a "technological lag" that will somehow imperil the United States despite its vast superiority in deterrent weaponry...
...Foster sees "no security for us in resting at some technological plateau...
...There is no evidence, of course, that America is about to lose its technological lead...
...It is absolutely essential," says Laird, "that we maintain technological superiority...
Vol. 36 • April 1972 • No. 4
