BOULDER SUNDAY CAMERA - Insight and Opinion
June 7, 1987
Just over four years ago in a nationally televised speech President Reagan sought to lift the spirits of a nation, grown weary of the endless cycle of cold war, by announcing the dawn of a new era in which nuclear weapons were to be rendered "impotent and obsolete." He called the program the Strategic Defense Initiative and challenged American technology to devise an effective defense against ballistic missiles.
In November of that year (1983), the American Physical Society (APS) authorized an independent study by their own scientists to evaluate the President's proposal. The long-awaited results of that study were revealed last month at the APS Spring Meeting in Crystal City, Virginia.
Richard DeLauer, Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering at the time the study group formed, welcomed an independent and impartial study by a "prestigious professional organization," believing it "could be highly beneficial in coalescing scientific opinion in fulfillment of the president's aims." However, contrary to the administration's hopes and expectations, the report turns out to be another devastating indictment of SDI and its principal reliance upon directed energy weapons. Furthermore, the report goes on to criticize SDI's blind disregard of parallel developments in countermeasure technology that will ultimately jeopardize both the efficacy and the survivability of SDI in all of its proposed scenarios.
The fact that the public has been beguiled into acceding to the president's commitment to proceed with this technically dubious program, despite the immediate disapprobation of the scientific community, speaks to the enormous influence wielded by this popular president. The outrageous claims made by the administration, totally unsupported by the facts concerning SDI, are accepted for the most part without question by a people who yearn to believe that nuclear war can be prevented by a new and exotic technology that will ultimately take its place among the great achievements of science.
In this case, the urge to place unmitigated trust in the national leader is reinforced by the irresistibly appealing notion that self defense is infinitely preferable to mutually assured destruction.
Party undertakes not to deploy ABM systems for a defense of the territory of its country and not to provide a base for such a defense, and not to deploy ABM systems for defense of an individual region except as provided for in Article III of this treaty." This passage in Article I of the 1972 ABM Treaty goes to the heart of the issue, and in so doing it illuminates a novel idea probably never previously encountered in human affairs.
As in the case of many other bewildering aspects of nuclear war logic, the rationale underlying a philosophy that rejects strategic defense appears to be counter-intuitive. President Reagan placed the rhetorical question before the nation in March 1983, "Wouldn't it be better to save lives than to avenge them?" Instinctively, such a proposition appeals to humankind's noblest ideals, that to defend oneself is eminently justifiable and honorable; whereas, to threaten another with injury reflects our very worst nature.
However, at our own peril we must examine more closely the hard facts that attend the complex realities of nuclear war. The history of civilization and common sense insist that the governments of nations have a duty to defend their citizens. No reputable scientist or scientific group that now stands in opposition to SDI today has ever advocated the complete dereliction of research on ballistic missile defense.
What possible motivation prompts such a determined and uncompromising posture on the part of the majority of scientists and scientific institutions in this country against SDI? The reason becomes abundantly clear just by standing in the other fellow's shoes.
However we may perceive our own good intentions, in the Soviet view our proposed strategic defense program, taken together with our ongoing intensive effort to enlarge and diversify our strategic offense forces, is strong evidence of our intention to gain strategic superiority. Moreover, they may believe that we, with full confidence in our imperfect but marginally effective strategic defense, may launch with impunity a first strike against their heartland, and then defend successfully against retaliation by their remaining decimated forces.
Dare we listen to the Russian side of the argument? Following the President's 1983 speech, General Secretary Andropov had this to say, "...the intention to secure itself the possibility of destroying with the help of the ABM defenses, the corresponding strategic systems of the other side (viz. USSR), that is of rendering it unable of dealing a retaliatory strike, is a bid to disarm the Soviet Union in the face of the U.S. nuclear threat."
President Nixon, echoing a similar sentiment from the American perspective of a slightly earlier time, said, "although every instinct motivates me to provide the American people with complete protection against a major nuclear attack, it is not now within our power to do so. The heaviest defense we considered, one designed to protect our major cities, still could not prevent a catastrophic level of U.S. fatalities from a deliberate all-out Soviet attack... and it might look like a prelude to an offensive strategy threatening the Soviet deterrent."
Lest the reader may believe that some modern miracle of science shall have been introduced in the meantime to contravene the principles that led both sides to the ABM Treaty of 1972, he should contemplate the results and conclusions of dozens of recent studies by American scientists who have dedicated more than a quarter century to the problems of strategic defense.
It is almost absurdly easy for scientists to demonstrate (as they have done repeatedly) that any of the proposed space defense strategies is hopelessly flawed by the many ways that the adversary may choose to defeat it.
Perhaps a greater hazard posed by ABM defense is that a nuclear war precipitated in the presence of strategic defense will be far more destructive than one in its absence. The attacker must of necessity overestimate the requirements for overcoming the defense. He will employ whatever penetration aids that are necessary to confuse, conceal, spoof, bypass and saturate the defense while his offensive force is made sufficiently large and devastating so as to guarantee that it achieves its intended effect. This includes the indiscriminate war on population centers, the softest and most readily attacked in a world freed from constraints on offensive forces by the abdication of all forms of arms control.
We may regard it a good fortune that some members of the present administration have had the fortitude to face the problem squarely. Dr. DeLauer, shortly after the president's 1983 speech, admitted to newspaper reporters, "With unconstrained proliferation, no defensive system will work." Such honest appraisals, however, are the rare exception even among the scientific representatives of the administration.
s forced to ask, does the president actually believe that we can count on the Russians to cooperate magnanimously with his plan to disable their strategic force by exercising restraint in its further enlargement or improvement? If such naive and specious reasoning continues to guide this administration, the future prospects for progress toward a peaceful denouement are very bleak indeed.
Howard Garcia, Ph.D. is a Boulder physicist