Amerikai Magyar Szó, 1982. július-december (36. évfolyam, 26-49. szám)

1982-12-09 / 46. szám

Thursday, Dec. 9. 1982.

11.

AMERIKAI MAGYAR SZO

Reprinted from the Manchester Guardian

There has been widespread condemnation of President Reagan’s decision to deploy 100 MX intercontinental missiles in a “dense

pack” configuration in the United States — and much of the sternest criticism has come from Americans themselves. On this page we give the Guardian’s view

and the views of ínree distinguished American contemporaries — the • Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times.

THE GUARDIAN

Dense pack and wide opportunities

ON the other hand Mr Reagan could have said:

“Mr Andropov has made some conciliatory remarks and some realistic ones. I have sent him a realistic and conciliatory letter. He says the Soviets have no intention of disarming unilaterally, because they are not naive, and he does not expect us to do so either. We are agreed on that. But there is no need for either of us to overarm, and that is what we accused the Soviets of doing under Brezhnev. Now we don’t propose to follow that example, and what I have to tell you today is that we have shelved for the time being the MX missile system.

“Fellow-Americans, this decision has two reasons. One is that we can’t decide where to put the missiles. My predecessor wanted to build a larger version of the New York subway in Nevada. It would have 4,600 stations but only 200 missiles, and the Soviets would never know which station to bomb. But this administration has a very deep concern for the environment. In any case we thought the scheme was crazy and it would have meant deep cuts in welfare programmes which, as you know, I am pledged to increase.

“I therefore asked Secretary Weinberger, whose commitment to disarmament is beyond praise, to think of something else. He and his team at Defence invented a much better system which I will call ‘dense pack’. By siting all the missiles close together we should ensure that if the Soviets launched a first strike their first missile would disable all the rest as they were homing in. We call this concept ‘fratricide’, but it is no different from some of the films I used to watch being made on set. Fifteen Keystone Kops in squad cars would all be chasing one getaway car. The squad cars all collided and the getaway car got away.

“But while I was shaving the other morning, Nancy asked me: why do we need these missiles at all? Now you may have heard some politicians talk about a ‘window of opportunity’. Their theory is that unless we can show the Soviets that our weapons system is invulnerable to their attack they will be tempted into a first strike. I may be getting old or I may have been too long in the job but this does not strike me as plausible any more. Even if they destroyed every one of our 1,054 land-based ICBMs, and they would need to be very good shots to take them all out at once, we would still have 656 missiles on board our submarines to hit them back. We’ve got 338 long-range bombers too. And, fellow- Americans, we are building eight more Ohio submarines, each with 24 Trident C-4 missiles. So I think you will agree with me tonight, as you relax in your log cabins and drive-in take-aways, that the country is very strongly protected.

“And that goes for other European allies too. I hope they will not be dismayed by our decision not to go ahead with MX. The missiles that already defend us defend them also. Before I came on the air a few moments ago I had a telephone call from Mrs Margaret Thatcher, who shares all Secretary Weinberger’s commitments. She asked me' to tell the Soviets at the next meeting of our teams in Geneva, that as far as she is concerned the British will abandon their own independent nuclear deterrent if that will make the disarmament talks easier. She says she and her entire Cabinet recognise that the British deterrent must be added to ours for negotiating purposes.

T have invited Secretary-General Andropov to Washington or alternatively offered to meet him in Moscow. I think he has the same feeling as I have: that neither of us can disarm completely but that both of us have simply got far too many weapons for the good of mankind. Americans have been used to leading the way, not following. I believe that if we are realistic about the power of even one of these nuclear weapons we have in their thousands we shall realise that none of them can ever be used. For that reason I have decided against building any more. Thank you and goodnight.”

But he didn’t.

The Basic Assumption Mortally Wrong

A LOT of the critics of Ronald Reagan’s MX program, like those who criticized Jimmy Carter before him, argue that “as there is no problem”, the MX is no solution — only a gigantically costly and provocative enterprise. We think they are wrong. There is a problem. But the newly proposed Reagan response does not resolve it.

Rather, the so-called Dense Pack MX response may only serve to perpetuate the problem, to take the whole exotic business of who could do what (theoretically) to whom in a nuclear war to a further realm of expensive, but inconclusive, competition.

The problem to which the administration is responding is this- the Soviet Union has developed an arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles greatly larger both in numbers and in power than our own, and these have the capacity to destroy most of our own land-based missiles in a preemptive strike. Several administrations have concluded that neither the smaller American ICBMs nor our sea-based missiles or strategic bombers have an equal capacity vis-a-vis the Soviets’ land-based ICBMs.

The United States could not destroy them in a preemptive strike, because we do not at present have enough weapons of either sufficient accuracy or weight to do so. So in this sense the Russians have a clear advantage. Defense critics who have spent the past 15 years arguing that the Russians would not possibly be so spendthrift or so foolish as to develop precisely the kind of arsenal they have in fact developed are singularly poorly placed, we think, to argue now that the Russians probably would be too scared to use it or that it probably wouldn’t work or whatever |he latest nostrum is.

True, this Soviet capability is theoretical; and the chances of its being exploited are extremely remote. But the problem is no less real for that. We ourselves have no doubt that in a dread nuclear war, the whole preposterous antiseptic “scenario” business (they do this, then we do that, so they do this,

THE NEW YORK TIMES

BY DECIDING to deploy 100 MX missiles in a “dense pack” base, President Ronald Reagan is planning strategic warfare according to the principles of jujitsu — using the opponent’s own strength and weight to flip and defeat him. The closely spaced silos are meant to save at least half the missiles under attack. The blast, radiation and debris from the first enemy warheads would deflect or destroy those that follow; that is “fratricide”. If this scheme assured the survivability of U.S. land-based missiles, it would be worth $26 billion.

But there are many deep doubts. The jujitsu might work in reverse, flipping the United States into greater vulnerability. The White House plucked this quick fix out of nowhere to meet an unwarranted Congressional deadline of Dec. 1 — after a futile, decade-long search among 34 other basing plans. That does not necessarily disqualify dense pack. But it certainly argues for the most searching Congressional scrutiny.

One claim for the new weapon should be

and so forth) would be the first thing incinerated.

There are more than enough nuclear weapons on both sides now to guarantee that there would be no winners, and the Russians, unless they are true idiots, must know this, too. But a situation in which a large and central part of one side’s nuclear deterrent force is vulnerable, even in theory, to a wipeout attack by the other is a prescription for all that is worst in relations between nnclear- armed states: anxiety, suspicion, bullying, miscalculation, lack of confidence, over-qoick responses, now-or-never thinking. It cannot be acceptable for this particular situation to persist.

The Reagan administration, like the Carter administration, now seeks to redress the imbalance in two ways. One is by deploying a blockbuster missile (the MX) that is big and accurate enough to do for the Soviet land- based missiles what their SS-18s can do for ours: destroy them in their silos. The other is to make a portion of our land-based ICBM forces, specifically these new MX missiles, safe from such Soviet attack; we will try to bury them in such a manner and configuration that no SS-18 can reach or destroy them all.

That is what the Dense Pack burial plot is all about. It supersedes the Carter administration’s peek-a-boo mobile MX scheme, a different kind of technique for trying to get some land-based ICBMs out of harm’s way.

The best that can be said for all this is that conceivably it will have some impact on Soviet conduct as a pressure, as a “bargaining chip”. That is clearly the hope some of the MX’s adherents have for the new missile itself, a missile whose actual development and deployment after all would only create a world in which both sides, rather than one side, stood poised with weapons that it would pay to fire first.

And, even then, even if this rather problematical basing scheme did work, what

laid aside quickly. Mr. Reagan presented the most provocative military scheme of his presidency as an arms control measure; his press spokesman went so far as to refer to the MX as a “bargaining chip”. But the Reagan arms control proposals do not offer to abandon or reduce this deployment. Besides, the history of nuclear bargaining chips is that they are rarely persuasive until deployed, and once deployed they are very hard to abandon.

The technical issues are beyond us; perhaps only a few dozen Americans are qualified to make the necessary engineering and military calculations. Critics have envisaged new technologies that could defeat the plan, and the Pentagon acknowledges that the Russians might develop them. So the argument is over how fast dense pack could be deployed and how long the Pentagon could stay ahead of Soviet responses.

Dr. Charles Townes, the Nobel physicist who directed the administration’s two main MX studies, is extremely skeptical about the time it would take to develop the super-hard

exactly would that mean? Work for how long and against what countermeasures and at what cost in inevitable further refinements and protections and schemes to dig ever deeper and build ever bigger and more?

There will be much argument now over what kind of walls can withstand what kind of shocks, argument over guidance and impact and explosion effects and the rest. And there will also be much argument, equally speculative, over what the effect of all this will be on Soviet policy.

But in a sense these are tactical, short-term concerns that miss the major point. They assume there is some practical, economically feasible way of making our land-based ICBM force invulnerable to enemy attack. Everything we know about the subject suggests that this is not true. The history of the past couple of decades has in fact been a history of costly, escalating and eventually doomed efforts to bring about this much desired outcome. When something is pronounced vulnerable, from a carrier to an ICBM, it is somehow forbidden in certain quarters to accept that it is terminally vulnerable and to go on to better substitutes. Instead, the great attempt to add on features of “invulnerability” gets going.

That, it seems to us, is where this country is now in the great MX debate. Bright people (until they go into government, when they shut up) talk about alternatives to our huge, land-based missile system, talk about putting more at sea, less on land, talk of developing some residual, land-based, mpbile missiles but giving up this hugely costly and ultimately impractical insistence on protecting an essentially vulnerable stationary system.

We do not presume to judge now the technological or tactical merits of the Reagan Dense Pack proposal, the yeses and nos of the smaller arguments to be resolved within the framework of its larger strategic assumption that the land-based missiles can be made secure. We begin somewhere else: we think the basic assumption is mortally wrong.

silos required by dense pack. The delays involved could invalidate the concept. Even the administration’s timetable gives the MX only a brief gap-closing role pending deployment of a truly invulnerable and stable system, the submarine-launched Trident-2. Not many MX missiles would be deployed until 1987; the first 24 Trident-2’s will be at sea by 1989.

The main argument for MX is that it would be a match for the heaviest Soviet missiles. It is a highly accurate first-strike weapon, carrying 10 warheads designed to destroy Soviet missiles in their silos. But in a dense- pack base, it would have to be fired within hours. If the Russians thought it vulnerable, it could in a crisis evoke a preemptive attack or cause a president to fire too soon.

An effective defense should be moving the arms race toward stability. Congress should ask, again and again, whether the United States really wants a weapon that buys so little time but ignites so many risks.

Many Deep Doubts

LOS ANGELES TIMES

Why the MX Should Be Abandoned

IF President Reagan continues to overstate Soviet military strength relative to that of the United States, the day may come when leaders of other nations — including the Soviet Union — will believe him. The results could be disastrous to the true national security of this country.

The president, as expected, announced that he had chosen the “dense-pack” mode of deployment for the big new MX missile, which is scheduled to undergo its first flight . test early in 1983. To support his case, he displayed a series of charts illustrating the Soviet Union’s enormous military buildup in recent years. “Today,” he concluded, "in virtually every measure of military power the Soviet Union enjoys a decided advantage.”

We believe that the MX should be abandoned, because it now seems clear that

land-based intercontinental missiles cannot be made survivable within the bounds of reasonable cost and adherence to the 1972 U.S.-Soviet treaty limiting deployment of missile defense systems.

A credible U.S. nuclear deterrent can be maintained without the MX, thanks to the growing accuracy and range of submarine- fired missiles and the continuing deployment of cruise missiles aboard strategic bombers.

There is grave doubt, in any event, that Congress will vote the funds required for deployment of the MX.

All this being true, the president would have, been well advised to back away from the MX now, instead of making it sound. as though the United States’ future security rests squarely on the new missile.

It is important for an American president to

maintain his credibility, and the credibility of U.S. military power, in his dealings with both allies and potential adversaries.

Now that Reagan has made the MX the keystone of his defense policy, its ultimate defeat will, if it comes, be interpreted as a defeat for him and his presidency. It could leave allied governments more nervous than ever about following U.S. leadership. Worst of all, to the degree that the Soviets come to believe what Reagan says about the military balance, they might be tempted to take dangerous gambles that they would otherwise avoid.

It is unwise for the administration, in its anxiety to justify spending $26 billion-plus for an MX system, to rely on scaring Congress and the American people with graphs that tell only part of the truth about the U.S.-Soviet military balance.

THE WASHINGTON POST