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The committee argued that the American sea-based missiles were too inaccurate, but this need not be so. Satellite navigation systems for pleasure craft, accurate to 150 feet, can be bought readily for $3000. The argument was clearly a one-sided presentation. This view caused the Administration to make unreasonable proposals at the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks. President Reagan has since stated that he did not realize this fact when he agreed to the initial proposal for those talks, in 1981, a proposal that the Russians insisted favored the United States. The Committee on the Present Danger further assumed that a massive Soviet first strike - one involving the accurate coordination of hundreds of missiles and thousands of warheads in an attack that had never been practiced would actually work as predicted. Anyone who has ever conducted an experiment knows how unlikely that would be. Military officers use the expression "fog of war" to describe the uncertainty of everything once a war has commenced. It would certainly apply to the results of an extensive nuclear attack that has never been rehearsed. The crowning absurdity of the window-of-vulnerability argument emerged with some calculations on the weapons tradeoffin the proposed Soviet attack. As outlined by the Committee on the Present Danger, the attack would involve targeting each of the approximately 1100 American land-based missile sites with two nuclear weapons, to increase the probability of their destruction. This would therefore require the use of 2200 Soviet warheads. Even if the attack were entirely successful, it would destroy only the approximately 2000 American nuclear weapons on land-based ballistic missiles, thus putting the Soviet Union in a somewhat worse position vis-avis the nuclear-weapons balance than before the attack. (The United States would still have more than 7000 weapons at sea and on aircraft for retaliatory strikes .) I believe that a member of the committee I am criticizing would argue that after such an attack the weapons remaining to the Soviets would be more accurate and of greater yield than those of submarines and bombers left to the United States a doubtful argument; even so, however, he could hardly argue that the |
many thousands of American weapons left would not be able to decimate the initiators of such an attack many times over. This is the heart of my argument. There is no possibility of either side's carrying out a successful first strike. A successful first strike in the nuclear age is one that prohibits any retaliation an attack, that is, that leaves its initiator intact. The level of overkill available to both sides is so great that both the United States and the Soviet Union can be thoroughly relaxed on this matter. Neither nation has any need for additional long-range strategic weapons of any kind. In fact, as many commentators have said, either side can reduce its force by very large factors and not put itself in any danger of permitting a successful first-strike attack. The only reason for attempting to maintain equal and balanced forces is for the political perception, for the arguments we hear every four years at election time in the United States, for what one's citizens and the people of other countries might think. And this matter of perceptions depends almost entirely on what is said.
In 1968, the Soviet force was made more dangerous by the introduction on its missiles of an American invention, the multiple independent reentry vehicle (MIRV), which allows each ballistic missile to launch several weapons aimed at separate targets. The net result of this was to increase the danger to both the Soviet and the American landbased forces by making it possible to launch several nuclear weapons against each missile target and thus, in theory, make the survival of the land-based component of each side's deterrent less certain.BR> I say "in theory" because both the United States and the Soviet Union possess so many more weapons than are necessary to devastate each other's entire country. In response to the window-of-vulnerability fears and the more general concern about the wild estimates of new technological possibilities and Soviet threats, the United States is fielding a new generation of weapons that include the MX, the Trident I and II missiles, land-based and airlaunched cruise missiles, and the European medium-range ballistic missiles. The development of these weapons, incidentally, was begun by previous Administrations, Democratic and Republican, not by the Reagan Administration. The United States is also developing an antisatellite weapon and beginning a program of space-based missile defense systems. These new weapons systems are almost certainly being |