Upsetting a Delicate Balance

Perverse and paradoxical as it seems, the central assumption underlining attempts to keep the nuclear peace for decades has been that offense is good and defense bad. The superpowers have been deterred from nuclear war by the certainty of retribution. Safety, as Winston Churchill noted in 1955, would be “the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.” Each side had to have confidence that it could survive an enemy first strike and retaliate with a vengeance. That way, neither side would have the incentive to strike first. This principle, described sardonically as Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD, was the basis of the 1972 SALT I treaty severely limiting antiballistic missile (ABM) defenses.

But now Star Wars threatens to upset deterrence and arms control alike. In his landmark speech unveiling his Strategic Defense Initiative (S.D.I.) in March 1983, Reagan said that his goal was to make nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” The Soviets read this not as a utopian dream but as an ominous threat: it was clearly their nuclear arsenal that Reagan most wanted to consign to the ash heap of history. The effect, as they saw it, would be to neutralize Soviet retaliatory forces and thereby make the U.S.S.R. a tempting target for a first strike.

When Secretary of State George Shultz met with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in Geneva on Jan. 7 and 8 to set the ground rules for next week’s negotiations, Gromyko repeatedly objected to the description of space weapons as defensive. The term, he said, was meant to “camouflage” the real purpose, which was actually highly offensive in every sense of the word.

Gromyko asked Shultz to pretend that he was on top of a tower in the Kremlin so that he could see, “objectively,” how threatening Star Wars looked from that perspective. Reagan has lamented the unofficial American nickname of S.D.I., insisting that its aims are entirely peaceful, while Soviet spokesmen relish using the literal Russian translation of Star Wars, partly because the phrase includes the word war. Since his meeting with Shultz, Gromyko has continued to heap contempt on the defensive rationale for Star Wars. Mixing his metaphors a bit, he has said that if the U.S. persists with the program, the world will end up “under a Sword of Damocles” and “on a tightrope over the abyss.”

Shultz’s reply to Gromyko, which Max Kampelman will echo to Victor Karpov next week, was that the promiscuous Soviet buildup of offensive weapons has created a “strategic environment” in which the U.S., out of simple prudence, must consider an offsetting buildup in defenses. By the Administration’s reckoning, it is the U.S.S.R., not the U.S., that has sinned against the once sacred principle of MAD.

Moreover, according to the official American view, the President’s dream of March 1983 can come true in a way that will increase the safety of both sides and diminish, if not eliminate, the threat of nuclear war altogether. The Administration hopes to convince the Soviets not only to blunt their offensive threat but to join the U.S. in the repudiation of MAD and in the embrace of strategic defenses. The superpowers, Kampelman will tell Karpov, have a mutual interest in gradually moving away from their current reliance on offensive nuclear weapons and letting their arsenals shrink under the benevolent influence of omnipotent antiweapons. That evolution, the U.S. negotiator will say, can be regulated by arms control.

Even optimists in the Administration expect it to take years to bring the Soviet Union around to the President’s vision. Meanwhile the Administration will have an almost equally difficult task overcoming the skepticism of domestic critics, who doubt that Star Wars will work and who fear that the program will provoke a surge in offensive arms. Without public and congressional support for the program, U.S. negotiators in Geneva will stand no chance at all. Only if the Kremlin leaders believe that the U.S. fully and firmly intends to proceed toward deployment of Star Wars will they reconsider their opposition to the idea of moving in tandem toward the high frontier of space defenses.

In preparation for this uphill, two-front campaign to sell Star Wars, the Administration has closed ranks behind a four-sentence, 98-word distillation of its philosophy. Known as the “strategic concept,” the statement was drafted during the weeks leading up to the Shultz-Gromyko meeting in January. The principal author was Paul Nitze, the Secretary of State’s closest adviser on arms control.

The full statement reads: “For the next ten years, we should seek a radical reduction in the number and power of existing and planned offensive and defensive nuclear arms, whether land-based, space-based or otherwise. We should even now be looking forward to a period of transition, beginning possibly ten years from now, to effective nonnuclear defensive forces, including defenses against offensive nuclear arms. This period of transition should lead to the eventual elimination of nuclear arms, both offensive and defensive. A nuclear-free world is an ultimate objective to which we, the Soviet Union and all other nations can agree.”

For Ronald Reagan, the final two sentences are crucial. His passionate commitment to Star Wars is rooted in his belief that MAD is a) immoral and b) perhaps unnecessary. During his first term he became fascinated by the idea of pure protection, a defense that defends so completely that offensive nuclear forces lose their reason for being (see box).

Experts within the Government were initially doubtful, and many of them remain so. Technicians believe it unlikely that an impenetrable defense is feasible, and theoreticians question whether a nuclear-free world is even desirable. They point out that other countries, including some notably reckless ones in the Third World, could not be counted on to adhere to a nuclear-weapons ban sponsored by the superpowers. What is more, if the superpowers were released from the suicide pact of nuclear deterrence, they might be more likely to get into a conventional war. Since the knowledge of how to build nuclear weapons would still exist, it might then be only a matter of time before one or both superpowers rebuilt a nuclear arsenal. Finally, many students of the Soviet system and mentality believe that Kremlin leaders will never give up their ultimate weapons, since military strength is both the symbol and substance of their power, and the major compensation for their many weaknesses.

In short, these skeptics say, the genie is out of the bottle; it is a MAD world–like it or not. That was the reply of the State Department when, during Reagan’s first term, the White House requested a secret study on the elimination of nuclear weapons. The President, however, resisted the conclusion of the report and demanded that the goal of a nuclear-free world be made a centerpiece of his arms-control policy. That presidential imperative was politically brilliant. It allowed Reagan to escape from the corner into which critics on his left had tried to paint him. No longer could they accuse him of being “against” arms control. He could go them one better, outflanking the arms-freeze movement and matching the nuclear abolitionists. Star Wars, if it worked, would even be a “cure” for nuclear winter.

Reagan’s determination to exorcise the demons of Alamogordo and Hiroshima explains the insistence in the strategic concept that defenses too must be nonnuclear. Some of Reagan’s own Star Wars planners privately feel that the language of the document is too restrictive, since some possible schemes for S.D.I. would require nuclear explosions in order to work (see following story). While Reagan takes seriously the goal of a nuclear-free world, most members of his Government still do not. “It’s there in our rhetoric because the President wants it there, and he’s the boss,” says a Pentagon official who is an advocate of Star Wars but not a believer in the elimination of nuclear weapons. “We’re worried not so much about how to get from here to that pie in the sky, but how to get from here to the 21st century in one piece.”

The strategic concept has an answer to that question, a highly problematic one. The document envisions a “period of transition,” starting around 1995, during which both sides would still have their offensive nuclear missiles. Those weapons would be protected by a latter-day version of ABMs called ballistic missile defense, or BMD. If American missiles and command centers were effectively guarded with radar-guided interceptors and death rays that could destroy incoming warheads, the Soviet Union would never be tempted to think that it could disarm and decapitate the U.S. with a pre-emptive strike. In principle, the Soviets could have a similar system.

For such an arrangement to be truly an improvement on the current “offense- dominated” form of mutual deterrence, there would have to be a delicate and mutually recognized balance between too little defense and too much. There would also have to be rules to make sure that neither side stepped over the line. Each side would have to be confident that its own defenses constituted adequate insurance against the threat of pre-emption; at the same time, each side would have to be just as confident that the enemy’s defenses were not too extensive. Reason: if the enemy were not just safe from pre-emptive attack but invulnerable to retaliation, it would enjoy a considerable military and political advantage.

Thus strategic defenses, in order to be “stabilizing,” must as much as possible discourage either side from being tempted to try a first strike while at the same time leaving both sides the capability of delivering a second strike. Otherwise, the side that fears its second-strike capability is in doubt will build up its offensive forces, in which case the other side will bolster its defenses even further, and a vicious circle will be under way.

That is the nub of one objection to Star Wars: some time between now and the idyllic, nuclear-free future, the U.S., without meaning to, will provoke the Soviet Union into what is sometimes called an “offense/defense spiral.” To be in the coils of such a spiral would be far more expensive, and far more dangerous, than the MADness of the present.

The Soviets could compete in both offense and defense, and indeed are already vigorously doing so. While General Nikolai Chervov, the chief of the directorate of the Soviet General Staff that deals with arms control, has warned that Moscow is able to match any U.S. program, he has claimed that the U.S.S.R. will not try to deploy a Star Wars system of its own even if the U.S. does. Instead, he says, his country will do “everything possible” to undermine the effectiveness of American defenses. Georgi Arbatov, director of Moscow’s Institute for the Study of the U.S.A. and Canada, made a similar point in an interview with TIME Moscow Bureau Chief Erik Amfitheatrof. “If you start to build Star Wars,” he said, “we will be obliged to build new nuclear weapons, and more of them, which can penetrate your defensive shield.”

That is not an idle threat. In nuclear one-upmanship, the advantage has always rested with the offense. That is a function partly of the sheer destructiveness of nuclear weapons. The Royal Air Force managed to defeat the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain by downing only a small fraction of the bombers that attacked on each sortie, but in a nuclear war, even a kill rate of 90% or higher in stopping enemy warheads would be insufficient, given the vast destruction that would be caused by the few that got through. Besides, space defenses might be vulnerable to antisatellite weapons, orbiting “mines” and other devices. Moreover, it is easier and cheaper to hurl extra warheads than it is to bolster a defensive system that can detect the attack, distinguish real warheads from decoys and intercept them in the minutes or seconds before they reach their targets.

In a number of recent public statements, Nitze has stressed that before it is deployed, a strategic defense must be certain to survive attack and be “cost- effective at the margin,” that is, be less expensive to build than the offensive systems designed to foil it. It follows from Nitze’s cautionary assessment that if Star Wars research fails to produce a scheme that meets those two criteria, the U.S. would be better off trying to make the best of MAD by inducing the Soviets to scale back their offenses and by reaffirming both sides’ adherence to the 1972 ABM treaty.

Indeed, if Reagan were to relent in what now seems to be his uncompromising commitment to Star Wars, one conceivable outcome of the forthcoming negotiations might be an updated, modified version of the ABM treaty, combined with a cutback in offensive forces. What the strategic concept sees as the “period of transition” would in fact be the goal of the process. That would be a disappointment to those, like Reagan, who want to see arms control eliminate nuclear weapons from the face of the earth, but it would be a relief to others who believe that the best arms control can do is just that–control nuclear weapons, not eradicate them.

Any new agreement that regulated and restricted defenses in a way the Soviets could live with would almost certainly preclude the operational testing as well as the deployment of Star Wars. (Presumably laboratory $ research could continue.) The object of Star Wars, as seen by the Soviets, is to deprive them of any effective offensive force, be it for first strike, second or third. For that reason, they are unlikely to sign any accord that leaves open the possibility of the U.S.’s eventually developing defenses more ambitious and comprehensive than those permitted under an interim agreement of some kind. The Soviets fear American technology as if it were black magic. This fear may have opened a window of negotiability for the forthcoming Geneva talks.

Soviet officials have indicated that they might accept numerical reductions in existing offensive forces on their side for constraints on the “modernization” of American forces. So far, the U.S. is playing very coy about what, if any, new offensive weapons it might be willing to discard in exchange for the right Soviet concessions. That coyness is understandable since the players are just returning to the table.

At the same time, however, the one prospective system that gives the U.S. the most bargaining leverage–Star Wars–may be unavailable for trade-offs, now or ever. Administration officials, including the President, have been vague about whether and under what circumstances S.D.I. would be negotiable. In Geneva, Kampelman and his colleagues will deliver lectures on the virtues of the U.S. strategic concept. Karpov and his comrades will fulminate against the evils of Star Wars. At the same time, they will probe for some sign that space weapons might be negotiable after all.

The Americans will probably then see if they can tempt the Soviets into deferring the disagreement over Star Wars and cutting a deal on offensive weapons alone. The Soviets have softened their line on some other issues in order to return to the Geneva talks, but the chances are next to nil that they will give up their insistence on linkage between any agreement on offensive weapons and parallel progress in the talks on defense. It was at Soviet insistence that the communique released by Shultz and Gromyko after their January meeting in Geneva said, “The sides agree that the subject of the negotiations will be a complex of questions concerning space and nuclear arms –both strategic and intermediate-range–with all these questions considered and resolved in their interrelationship.” The Soviets maintain that the prospect of Star Wars has transformed the debate about the future of the strategic relationship and that it now dominates the agenda for arms ! control. On that much, at least, Kampelman and Karpov can agree. So can Ronald Reagan.