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Stability and Strategic Defense
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13554 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1988 |
3,440 Words |
| Author
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Peter Sharfman
Peter Sharfman directs the International Security and Commerce
Program of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment,
which recently completed a study of new technology for NATO.
The views in this essay are his own. |
STRATEGIC DEFENSES AND ARMS CONTROL
Alvin M. Weinberg and Jack N. Barkenbus, eds.
New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1988
236 pp., $12.95
The Reagan administration has set as a major objective replacing the existing strategic nuclear forces (missiles, bombers, and nuclear warheads) with strategic defensive forces. The threat of nuclear attack as a means of deterrence is to be replaced by the ability to shoot down the attacking weapons before they reach their targets. President Reagan's 1983 "Star Wars" speech set the agenda for the strategic defense initiative (SDI), a research and technology development program designed to lead to a deployable system for defending against nuclear ballistic missiles. The president's support for arms control agreements to reduce strategic nuclear weapons became more intense and more credible as it was realized that the ultimate goal of SDI--protection of the American population against nuclear missile attacks--would be far less remote if the Soviets agreed to reduce the number of missiles that the future defensive system would attempt to shoot down.
There is considerable ambiguity--and political controversy as well--about how these long-term objectives translate into short-term objectives. While the long-term goal of SDI is an effective defense of the entire United States against even a determined Soviet attack, the initial phases of a deployed system would "enhance" deterrence rather than replace deterrence. While an effective defense against ballistic missiles would need to be complemented by an effective defense against bomber and cruise missiles, work on these objectives has received a much lower priority--and the technical tasks may be just as challenging. In the arms control arena, the "50 percent reductions" called for in summit meetings are portrayed as steps toward even greater reductions in the future, but the desired final state of offensive forces has never been clearly defined. Nevertheless, it has been clear enough that President Reagan sees the near-term objectives as being good in themselves, but primarily justified as steps toward the goal articulated in the "Star Wars" speech: "What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil and that of our allies?"
For the most part, administration spokesmen have talked as if the desirability
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