The Case Against Star Wars Weapons

By Strobe Talbott

The esoteric yet immensely important national debate over how to avoid nuclear war has suddenly been focused like a laser beam on one issue: Should the U.S. develop and deploy a space-based system for defending itself against Soviet missiles so as to deter Moscow from ever contemplating such an attack?

Slightly more than a year ago, President Reagan surprised the nation, and many experts in his own Government as well, by calling for an all-out program, along the lines of the Manhattan Project, which developed the atom bomb, to build a defense system in space. He envisioned a network of orbiting sensors that would detect a Soviet attack as soon as it was launched, then trigger giant remote-control ray guns that would destroy attacking rockets or their warheads before they could do any damage.

The idea had been planted in Reagan's mind by his friend and frequent adviser Edward Teller, the Hungarian-born superhawk, often described as the father of the hydrogen bomb, whose bold and controversial ideas have occasionally led some of his fellow physicists to moan, "E.T., go home." Teller's brainstorm became Reagan's dream, and the dream became national policy. In a speech in March 1983, the President asked, "What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that . . . we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?" In December, with no fanfare, Reagan approved $26 billion over the next five years for research into a Strategic Defense Initiative.

Last week the program came under close scrutiny by two high-level groups on Capitol Hill, and it was found wanting. The Congressional Office of Technology Assessment released an extremely negative report warning that a comprehensive antiballistic-missile system was so unpromising "that it should not serve as the basis of public expectation or national policy." At the same time, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee subjected five Administration witnesses, including the President's science adviser, George Keyworth, and the newly designated director of the program, Lieut. General James Abrahamson, to withering skepticism. Among the doubters were moderates like John Glenn as well as liberals like Massachusetts Democrat Paul Tsongas.

Lest there be any doubt that the issue will figure in the presidential campaign, Democratic Front Runner Walter Mondale last week denounced the plan as "dangerously destabilizing" and called for a freeze on military uses of space. The Democrats believe that the President's embrace of antimissile weapons will fan fears that he is a trigger-happy nucl ear cowboy.

That charge is not only unfair--it misses the point that there are substantially more legitimate doubts about the wisdom of this policy in particular and about the President's approach to complicated national security issues in general. Reagan has often been drawn instinctively to simplistic, gimmicky solutions to problems that entail layers upon layers of historical background and technical complexity. Reagan's early fascination with supply-side economics in its least sophisticated form and his advocacy of a two-China policy are but two examples. He abandoned both during the crash course in realism that comes with being President. But he has clung more stubbornly to the idea of space-based defenses. He has done so for reasons that are as straightforward and sincere as they are wrongheaded.

In his March 1983 speech unveiling the scheme, he said he hoped the U.S. could erect an umbrella of impenetrable antimissile defenses over itself and its allies. By thus rendering an attacker's weapons impotent, the U.S. would not have to count on ballistic missiles and bombers to deter Soviet aggression or to retaliate against an attack. No longer would "crisis stability" between the superpowers have to be enshrined in a suicide pact.

In Reagan's view, the scenario for World War III would become more like an arcade video game and less like a prime-time apocalypse. Instead of mushroom clouds springing up from charred landscapes and families being vaporized in their backyards or dying slow deaths from radiation sickness, the imagery would feature unmanned enemy projectiles being zapped and disintegrating high above the earth; the planet and its population would remain out of harm's way.

What is more, the U.S. would be able to protect itself without the threat of committing mass murder. Like Darth Vader spinning helplessly but harmlessly away from the doomed Death Star in his crippled TIE Fighter, the Soviets would be mightily frustrated in their losing battle with American ingenuity, but they would not be incinerated.

Best of all, the Soviets would probably not do anything as foolish as start a fight. If they were to do so, however, they would probably not come back to fight another day: realizing the futility of their earth-based spears against the new, space-based American shield, the Soviets might set down, or at least phase out, their missiles and other weapons of aggression. Following the American example, they too would shift to defense rather than retaliation. The world would be a safer place. Reagan has even suggested that the U.S. might some day share its defensive technology with the Soviet Union.

Critics quickly dubbed the Strategic Defensive Initiative "Star Wars." That sobriquet suggested a fantasy--not just a dream, but a pipedream, and a potentially perilous one at that.

The case against Star Wars rests on a cluster of mutually reinforcing arguments. Strictly on technical grounds, experts all across the ideological spectrum doubt that space-based ray guns would work well enough to vindicate Reagan's vision. To provide the sort of blanket protection the President and Teller originally had in mind, the system would have to offer a 100% guarantee (an untested guarantee at that) of intercepting and disarming an entire huge barrage of Soviet warheads. If even a tiny percentage of the warheads "leaked" through, the devastation in the U.S. would be horrendous, and the American leadership would very likely feel compelled to order a retaliatory strike with whatever remained of its offensive arsenal.

After a year of study and refinement in the Executive Branch, the Strategic Defense Initiative now implicitly accepts the impracticality of a leakproof umbrella. Instead it adopts the somewhat more modest "interim" goal of "enhancing," rather than replacing, deterrence based on offensive weapons. The idea is that Soviet plans for an attack would be further complicated by even an imperfect American defense.

The President's program remains, however, a radical, unilateral American departure from the rules that have governed the strategic competition between the superpowers for two decades. As seen from Moscow, it is bound to look like an attempt to create an invulnerable sanctuary from which the U.S. can attack the Soviet Union with impunity. American leaders insist, of course, that they would never consider such a thing, but the Soviets will not believe such protestations. Instead, they will see the U.S. indulging in a deadly combination of ambitions--better offense, better defense--that the Soviets are sure to try to match.

It has long been part of the dogma of the nuclear age that the best defense is a good offense. That is what deterrence is all about: the other side is less likely to attack if its leaders know they will prompt a vastly destructive counterattack. A corollary to the dogma of "offense-dominated" deterrence is that there is nothing more provocative and destabilizing than a strategic defense. The more one superpower tries to protect itself against attack, the more the other side will try to improve its offensive weapons to be sure it can overwhelm and thwart those defenses. Thus a defensive arms race will exacerbate and accelerate the offensive one, with the advantage always remaining with the offense.

The classic example of how this dynamic has worked in practice can be seen in an insidious interaction between two high-tech systems: today's ultimate offensive weapons, multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles, or MIRVs, and yesterday's misconceived defensive weapons, antiballistic missiles, or ABMs.

The Soviets erected a primitive ABM defense around Moscow in the '60s. Like Ronald Reagan today, the Kremlin leaders of 20 years ago believed it was a matter of common sense and irreproachable civic responsibility to do whatever they could to protect their country from nuclear attack. "A defensive system that prevents attack is not a cause of the arms race," said the late Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in 1967. It took former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and other officials of the Johnson Administration hours of arduous discussion to persuade Kosygin and his comrades that they were wrong, and that an ABM race would only intensify efforts to create even more destructive weapons. The U.S., in any case, had an ABM system of its own. It also had an incipient MIRV program that would allow it to penetrate, or beat, any Soviet ABM network simply by hurling more warheads (and decoys) at the U.S.S.R. than the Soviets had interceptors.

Shortly after coming into office, Richard Nixon 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 . . . And it might look to an opponent like the prelude to an offensive strategy threatening the Soviet deterrent." Nixon was aware of the paradox that Reagan has overlooked: one side's quest for safety can heighten the other side's insecurity. By 1972 the Soviets had accepted the logic of the American position and agreed, in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), to severe restrictions on ABMs. But if one lane of the arms race was thus closed down, another stayed wide open when the U.S. passed up a chance to negotiate limits or a ban on MIRVs. Why? Primarily because MIRVs, with their microcomputers and other prodigies of Yankee electronic wizardry, were then seen to be an area of permanent American technological superiority, an ace not to be discarded in the nuclear poker game.

Within a few years, however, the Soviets not only had mastered MIRVing but in some areas were outdoing the U.S. at it. With their Hydraheaded monster rockets, they were able to pull sharply ahead of the U.S. in the land-based MIRV race. It is partly to compensate for that imbalance that Reagan finds Star Wars appealing. But the risks are daunting. One is that the ABM race that was called off a dozen years ago might resume with a vengeance, only this time utilizing space-based death rays and satellite killers in addition to ground-launched antimissile interceptors. The Soviets are poised on the starting blocks for such a race themselves. They have been experimenting vigorously with directed high-energy weapons.

Even if the U.S. were able to perfect and monopolize space-based defensive weapons capable of neutralizing the entire Soviet arsenal, these American wonder weapons might still eventually prove to be sitting ducks for pre-emptive attack by Soviet antisatellite (ASAT) devices. So far the Soviets have been experimenting only with rather cumbersome ground-launched satellite killers that can strike at relatively low altitudes; the U.S., meanwhile, has a more sophisticated, versatile and effective aircraft-launched weapon in the works. But it would be unrealistic to assume that an American lead in ASAT would prove any more permanent than the one the U.S. enjoyed in MIRVs twelve years ago.

The Kremlin has professed a willingness to stop the ASAT race before it begins. Thirteen months ago, the late Yuri Andropov called for an international ban on space weapons, and last August he declared a unilateral moratorium on Soviet launches of antisatellite weapons. While there is good reason to be wary of Soviets bearing disarmament initiatives, there is no reason for refusing to probe them further. Yet the Reagan Administration dismissed Soviet ASAT feelers out of hand. It did so partly because of its shortsighted and amnesiac confidence in the superiority of American high tech, and partly because of its deep-seated distaste for arms control of any kind.

No program of strategic defense should be launched unless a comprehensive arms-control program that places sharp limits on offensive weapons is established first. That way, strategic defense might conceivably serve as a useful backup to traditional deterrence, an extra insurance against war breaking out by accident (a space-based American death ray might knock out an errant Soviet missile, for instance, without necessarily touching off a full-scale Soviet attack) or against war being started by a reckless newcomer to the nuclear-weapons club.

But the current situation could not be less propitious, or the dilemma more obvious. It was articulated clearly by a top Administration military scientist, Richard DeLauer, Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, about six weeks after Reagan's original Star Wars speech. The proposed defensive system, said DeLauer, could be overcome by Soviet offensive weapons unless it was coupled with substantial controls on offensive arms. "With unconstrained proliferation" of Soviet warheads, he added, "no defensive system will work."

Yet offensive arms control is dead in the water. The Administration's proposals in the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks in 1982-83 were transparently nonnegotiable because they required drastic, one-sided cuts in Soviet forces. To make matters worse, the Soviets walked out of those talks last year. As of now, the Administration has no unified plan for resuming negotiations, much less achieving an agreement. Star Wars itself jeopardizes what little is left of arms control. Despite Administration disclaimers to the contrary, an all-out Strategic Defense Initiative would surely bring the U.S. into violation of the nuclear-arms-control agreements still formally in force with the U.S.S.R., including the ABM treaty concluded as part of SALT I.

Meanwhile, offensive weapons are proliferating on both sides, and the prospect for limits any time soon, to say nothing of reductions, is bleak. That makes today the worst possible time for the superpowers to carry their competition into space--or even to threaten to do so.

--By Strobe Talbott