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SDI: A Flawed Approach
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13447 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1987 |
2,768 Words |
| Author
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Paul C. Warnke
Paul C. Warnke is former director of the U.S. Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency (1977-1978). |
Strategic defense has always been both a major stimulus and a major problem for nuclear arms control. It was U.S. concern about the possible Soviet deployment of a strategic defense system that led to the effort, in the late 1960s, to engage the Soviet Union in the strategic arms limitation talks (SALT).
In June 1967, at Glassboro, New Jersey, President Lyndon Johnson met with Premier Alexei Kosygin, who was in the United States to attend a UN session. This was an impromptu summit, largely occasioned by U.S. worries about Soviet plans for an antiballistic missile (ABM) defense. Then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had become increasingly concerned about what he termed "the mad momentum of the nuclear arms race." In the evolution of his strategic thinking, he had come to realize that stability and peace in the nuclear age required that each side be relieved of the fear of a preemptive nuclear strike by the other. To him it was clear that the only security available to either nuclear superpower lay in an assured retaliatory deterrent.
With this condition of mutual deterrence, neither side could contemplate gaining any military advantage from initiating a nuclear attack. Even more important, neither side would be panicked into contemplating a first strike for fear that its forces could not survive a preemptive attack and that therefore it lacked that retaliatory deterrent.
Both at Glassboro and for some time thereafter, the Soviet leadership resisted the concept that restrictions should be placed on strategic defense. They argued, as do today's supporters of the Reagan administration's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), that defense was a preferable alternative to deterrence through threat of retaliation and that the so-called balance of terror could be replaced by a situation of assured survival through defenses that would make weapons of mass destruction ineffective.
Many in the U.S. Congress echoed the Soviet view that defense was inherently good and only offensive weapons should be restricted. The problem of the Soviet approach to security through ballistic missile defense was that any available technology could readily be overwhelmed by increases in offensive forces. In fact, the U.S. development of multiple independently target able reentry vehicles (MIRVs) was driven by concerns that nationwide Soviet ABM deployments would cast in doubt the efficacy of the U.S. second strike, retaliatory capability.
Eventually,
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