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Strategic Defense and Arms Control Don't Mix
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11379 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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11 / 1986 |
2,308 Words |
| Author
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Angelo Codevilla
Angelo Codevilla is a senior research fellow at the Hoover
Institution. |
Ever since the mid-1960s, those Americans who have advocated arms control agreements with the Soviet Union have claimed - with consistent success in the struggle for control of U.S. policy - that such agreements are adequate substitutes for a variety of U.S. military measures.
Because of arms control, the advocates of SALT I in 1972 argued, the United States could safely forgo building missiles capable of striking Soviet missiles in their silos and could safely scrap our budding system for intercepting Soviet warheads in fight. The Soviet Union, they added, had also agreed to do without those means of limiting damage to it self. Hence, without effort or expense, but merely through the magic of diplomacy, which had created a stable, perfect condition of mutual vulnerability, we would be safer than we would have been had the United States built damage-limiting weapons. Such weapons would necessarily have been imperfect. Our safety would have rested on whatever edge in weaponry we might have managed to acquire for ourselves. But arms control promised perfect safety grounded on the broad bedrock of total mutual vulnerability.
By the late 1970s, however, it became increasingly difficult to deny what Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger finally said explicitly in December 1984: that the Soviets had built "precisely the kinds of military forces that we had entered into arms control agreements in order to avoid." Specifically, whereas in 1972 the Soviet Union had had only 300 warheads that it could use to destroy U.S. missiles in their silos, thereby limiting damage to itself, by 1980 that number approached 6,000. Whereas in 1972 the Soviet Union was not ringed by modern, large phased-array readers capable of managing a defense against tens of thousands of warheads and decoys, by the mid-1980s the Soviets were putting the finishing touches on just such a radar network. Moreover, all the other elements of a solid, ground-based, anti-missile defense were rolling off Soviet production lines: flat-twin local-engagement radars, SH4 long-range interceptors, SH8 short-range interceptors, and a mobile ABM system, the SA-12.
Clearly, through both offensive and defensive hardware the Soviet Union is making competent preparations to minimize damage to itself in case of war, and thereby to win that war.
Now, the very foundation of arms control was the supposition that the Soviets had given up on that intention. Arms control could hardly have been based on any other premise. After all, the axiom of a prudent diplomacy has always been that a
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