STAR WARS AND GENEVA
by
Richard L. Garwin
IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center
P.O. Box 218
Yorktown Heights, NY 10598
(914) 945-2555
(also
Adjunct Professor of Physics,
Columbia University;
Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large,
Cornell University;
Adjunct Research Fellow,
CENTER FOR SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University)
September 9, 1985
Abstract:
Unlike President Reagan's 1983 vision of strategic defense
which would protect us so well from Soviet missiles that we
could give up our nuclear weapons, the SDI program is now
oriented toward strengthening deterrence by preserving
our ICBMs and other military targets. To negotiate over the SDI
in Geneva would be to end the 1972 ABM treaty and all limits
on Soviet forces, but to proceed with the SDI without
negotiation would do the same. The summit meeting would be
a good opportunity for President Reagan to reassert his
leadership by announcing the reorientation of the SDI toward
theoretical and laboratory research only, toward the
discovery of new phenomena which might hold the hope of
realizing the President's dream of a defense so complete
that nuclear weapons of any kind would lose their terror.
252|SWAG 090985SWAG DRAFT 1 09/09/85
Views of the author, not of his organizations
In his speech of March 1983 launching the SDI program,
President Reagan presented the hope of "countering the
awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are
defensive"-- protection rather than retaliation (call this
SDI-1). But the SDI program itself and its participants and
supporters, now offer only the hope of strengthening
deterrence by threat of retaliation, rather than replacing
deterrence by the President's dream of an impenetrable
shield.
The President's announcement emphasized the continuing
effectiveness of our nuclear weapons in deterring attack by
the Soviet Union; it launched an SDI in the hope sometime in
the next century of giving the American people a means of
preventing attack with which they would be more comfortable
than the threat of retaliation against an entire society.
SDI-1 is the President's noble dream; its announcement
surprised the Defense Department and the State department,
and no analysis before or since shows it to be feasible with
anything we now know or imagine. The Reagan dream is of a
magic spell to disable nuclear warheads worldwide, or turn
them into dust; such magic (and many scientific advances
would have been regarded as "magic" if they could have been
clearly foreseen in full operation) would pose no threat of
offensive use. But by eliminating the threat of nuclear
weapons, it would "make the world safe for conventional
war," biological warfare, or the like. In any case, the
real SDI (SDI-2) is not pursuing the President's dream, and
it may well make it even farther from reality, since studies
done for the Defense Department after the President's speech
conclude that an effective defense against Soviet ballistic
missiles cannot be achieved unless the Soviets limit (do not
expand greatly) their strategic forces.
SDI-2 is demanding $26 B over the first 5 years (some $70
billion in 10 years) for research and demonstration; its
strongest advocates claim it is necessary to preserve our
deterrent and because the Soviets are ahead of us in Star
Wars research; and some of its most powerful participants
see the key to success in an x-ray laser powered by a large
nuclear explosion in space. In contrast, the Scowcroft
commission, apppointed by President Reagan in January, 1983,
reported in April 1983 and March 1984, emphasizing that our
deterrent was sound and would remain so, without strategic
defense, if we took prudent steps to develop and deploy
small single-warhead ICBMs to supplant the present
multiple-warhead missiles, and smaller submarines with fewer
missiles aboard to succeed the 24-missile Trident ships.
We are modernizing our nuclear weapons, explicitly seeking
the ability to destroy in their silos the Soviet ICBMs that
contain 80% of Soviet strategic weapons; to this, SDI-2 adds
the threat of destroying a large fraction of those which
have been launched. Without the hope of defeating a first
strike by the Soviet Union against U.S. society, and
without the necessity of intercepting nuclear warheads
launched by the Soviet Union against our own ICBM silos, the
SDI is seen by the Soviets as a threat to their survival--
seen as leaving the U.S. with a powerful nuclear attack
capability, while disarming the Soviet Union. Our conduct
of SDI-2 will drive the Soviets to an urgent expansion of
their nuclear force, from the present 9000 warheads to
50,000 or more, some of this expansion being on small ICBMs
carrying a single warhead just as deadly to our society as a
warhead on a large missile and peculiarly suited to
attacking or escaping from space- based defenses, if we ever
learn how to build them. The Soviets will perfect and test
new antisatellite weapons, including "space mines" to
accompany U.S. satellites from the moment they go into
orbit, ready to destroy them in an instant in case of war.
The most important fact about the SDI is that no system yet
imagined can protect our society against Soviet nuclear
weapons or their society against our retaliation, if a
nation chooses to employ existing technology to counter the
defense; the SDI program will further expand the ability to
defeat the defense.
Among our concerns as a nation are:
1. The Soviet nuclear threat to our society.
2. The potential spread of nuclear weapons to other
nations.
3. Soviet expansionism, Soviet denial of human rights in
the USSR, their doctrine of state supremacy, the suppression
of minorities.
The first is an urgent problem for our survival; the second
a problem which is of vital importance for our future
security, and one in which the interests of the Soviet Union
and the U.S. are aligned; and the third is one in which our
interests are opposed.
We cannot depend on the Soviets to solve these problems for
us-- we can and should make sound decisions in defense
management; we should join with allies and neutrals to
pursue our goals; and we can attempt to persuade the Soviet
Union, by promise of reward or punishment, to strengthen our
security and to save us money. Formal negotiations in
Geneva are a small and inefficient part of this process; in
this age of telecommunications and after more than a decade
of working-level contact between the Soviet Union and the
United States, Geneva negotiations are the Potemkin village
of bilateral relations-- a false front covering the
reluctance of one or both sides to conclude a formal
agreement.
SDI advocates do the President a disservice. The road to
realizing the President's dream lies not in SDI-2 but much
more in limiting and reducing offensive forces on earth; in
removing the rough edges from the 1983 Soviet draft treaty
to ban the stationing of all weapons in space, to ban the
test of weapons from earth to space, space to earth or space
to space; in strengthening rather than undermining the ABM
treaty of 1972; and in moving toward acceptance of a
companion principle which would permit a truly major
reduction in nuclear weapons from the present 25,000 on each
side to some 2000-- the agreement not to produce or test
weapons to threaten the retaliatory force on the other side.
Since SDI-1 is in any case a decades-long research program,
in the mind and in the laboratory, we would have plenty of
time to invite the Soviet Union to join us in a new
defensive era in case we discovered some new phenomenon
which could lead to an effective and durable defense of
society, or, if they did not agree, we could then abandon
the treaty.
An early major reduction in the Soviet threat would not only
be a triumphant legacy for the President (never mind the
tortuous path followed to its achievement), but it would
allow the principal nuclear weapons states, together with
the great majority of the world's nations that have promised
under the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1967 never to acquire
nuclear weapons, to concentrate their efforts to ensure that
no other nation would see any benefit in nuclear weapons in
the face of this determined opposition.
I played an important role in the creation of the first
hydrogen bomb, tested in 1952, in bringing the air-launched
cruise missile into the U.S. strategic forces (the most
modern and most accurate strategic retaliatory weapon in the
world), in helping the government with arms control
agreements and analyses since 1958, and in the development
of defenses against aircraft and missiles from 1953 up to
the present day. To those who say arms control in general
(and the ABM treaty in particular) is a failure, I recall
that in the few years before the ABM treaty of May 1972, we
were planning our missile forces to penetrate a nationwide
Soviet ABM system equipped with with 5000 or more
nuclear-armed defensive missiles. Contrast this with the 32
actual defensive missiles around Moscow, of the 100
permitted nationwide by the ABM treaty. This is why the
Joint Chiefs of Staff have supported strategic arms control
as an important contribution to our security; building the
50,000 strategic nuclear warheads viewed in the 1960s by
Secretary of Defense McNamara as our likely response to a
nationwide Soviet ABM system might have cost less than the
defense that provoked it, but would not have improved our
security at all.
The Reagan administration argues that the SDI is not up for
negotiation in Geneva. Defense Secretary Weinberger said
(01/14/85), "I am ruling out the possibility of giving up a
strategic defense either in the research phase, or, if it
becomes feasible, in the deployable stage." But the U.S.
has bound itself by the 1972 ABM Treaty not to deploy a
defense against strategic ballistic missiles; to negotiate
over the SDI would be to destroy the ABM treaty and all
limits on offensive weapons.
The summit meeting would be a good opportunity for President
Reagan to reassert his leadership by announcing the
reorientation of the SDI toward theoretical and laboratory
research only, toward the discovery of new phenomena which
might hold the hope of realizing the President's dream of a
defense so complete that nuclear weapons of any kind would
lose their terror. An SDI-2 program spending $3 billion
this year and demanding perhaps $5 billion next year will
soon collide with our obligations under the ABM treaty and
thus destroy all limits on Soviet weapons programs. By
throwing money at the problem, SDI-2 steals scarce defense
research funds from fields in which they can better aid our
security; in the words of Harold M. Agnew, Vice-Chairman of
the Fletcher Committee which outlined the SDI program, the
present program risks having the "hogs trample the piglets
on the way to the (Defense Research and Engineering funding)
trough."
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