THE DENVER POST - Saturday Forum
December 26, 1987
On the same day that the United States and the Soviet Union announced their agreement to eliminate short- and medium-range nuclear missiles, President Reagan, before a large group of adulatory Martin Marietta employees, reiterated his pledge never to abandon the Strategic Defense Initiative or to use it as a bargaining chip in future negotiations.
Despite the fact that the INF Treaty, when ratified, will represent the first experiment toward the elimination of an entire category of nuclear weapons systems, the president's concurrent declaration ironically ensures that any comprehensive agreement on long-range nuclear weapons will be bitterly contested by the Soviets on grounds of SDI and may be indefinitely postponed.
The reasons for the Soviets unrelenting opposition to SDI seem to be clear to all except the president and his conservative congressional friends. A 1983 report port by the Soviet Academy of Science best describes the Russian reaction to a proposal to deploy SDI illegally: "such a system might give the illusion that it could provide an effective defense against a retaliatory strike. The deployment would therefore have to seen by the other side as a very threatening move. The net effect of deployment would not be to provide an escape from the relationship of mutual deterrence, but rather to make the relationship less stable."
The fact that a deployment of SDI, early or otherwise would be contrary to the 1972 ABM Treaty, and therefore illegal, appears to be of little moment to this president. In a recent speech in Washington, the president asserted, "We will research it, we will develop it, and when it's ready, we will deploy it."
It is characteristic of this president to forge ahead with a policy of his own invention without regard to any legalities that may be violated in the process. Months ago we learned the administration wished to broaden its interpretation of the 1972 ABM Treaty while the defense secretary pressed forward with his agenda to deploy Phase I of SDI by the early 1990s. Either policy by itself would almost certainly guarantee the demise of the ABM Treaty and the cessation of further negotiations on strategic arms control. Members of Congress have warned the president of an impending constitutional confrontation in the face of what Sen. Sam Nunn called a unilateral executive branch decision to disregard the will of the Senate that ratified 1972 ti-enty. Scientists from the nation's laboratories and universities continue advise the administration of their conviction that SDI is ill conceived, technically flawed and politically destabilizing. Western allies have expressed their misgivings over either a "broadened interpretation" or early deployment of SDI. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and West Germany's Chancellor Helmut Kohl agree that the U.S. should persevere with the traditional, globally accepted interpretation of the ABM Treaty.
However, it seems fairly clear that both the president and the now-former defense secretary fear that a new administration or a future Congress may gut SDI before it has a chance to fly. Their objective, therefore, is to try to lock the system into place by an early commitment to deployment that would present a new administration with a fait accompli. The first step in this procedure is to sidestep the legal ramifications by a de facto voiding of the ABM Treaty through perceived loopholes. However, this political ploy is being resisted by Senator Nunn, an acknowledged expert on such matters. He avers that the ABM Treaty is ironclad in its present form.
Such reasoned judgment on the part of congressmen, scientists and allies may prove to have little influence on controlling real events. In April 1987, the prestigious American Physical Society completed a long-awaited independent study by a group of 16 distinguished physicists to evaluate the president's SDI proposal. The physicists report revealed the extraordinary deficiencies of SDI and its principal reliance upon directed energy weapons (DEW). These weapon systems are demonstrably "orders of magnitude" short of achieving any real threat to offensive missiles; moreover, the report said, it will be a decade or more before even a reliable assessment could be made as to whether such systems can ever become workable. That report did not address the arena of spaceborne kinetic energy weapons (KEW) which are basically conventional rockets, or the more exotic rail guns which destroy by impact or with the use of explosives. This omission is understandable. Kinetic weapons have insufficient velocities to cover the thousands of miles to reach the offensive rockets in the critical few seconds after launch.
Yet the Reagan administration is firmly committed to a policy to deploy kinetic weapons in the early 1990s. This follows with their own admission that directed energy weapons are developmentally too distant to constitute an early deployment weapons system. The problem with a kinetic system, according to a recent Senate special investigative report, is that these weapons will be capable destroying only one warhead in six.
Are we then to deploy a highly provocative, treaty abrogating, costly and internationally unpalatable system in order to realize a 16 percent efficient defense? This is utter madness. If the USSR were to target its missiles to obtain maximum damage to the U.S., it would require 5 percent of its current strategic force to kill half of the U.S. population.
It is difficult to imagine a more hazardous policy. We shall not have improved the protection of our citizens by the deployment of such a system. Indeed, we shall have materially degraded it.
There is little doubt that the world yearns for a believable alternative which is a little more comforting than mutual deterrence. Neither SDI nor indeed any proposition based on gadgetry, no matter how exotic or futuristic, will supply the needed solution. There is no alternative to preventing nuclear war and the probable extinction of life on this planet outside of the political process. Deterrence merely furnishes us the necessary respite and calmness with which to get down to the real business.
Howard Garcia is a Boulder scientist and writer