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From: dand@tekigm.UUCP (Dan C. Duval)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Ballistic Missile Defense
Message-ID: <204@tekigm.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 6-Sep-84 17:11:51 EDT
Article-I.D.: tekigm.204
Posted: Thu Sep  6 17:11:51 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 12-Sep-84 01:35:53 EDT
Organization: Tektronix, Beaverton OR
Lines: 71

A point that I think many people are overlooking is that the military and
a number of politicians are not looking at Ballistic Missile Defense
(Star Wars) solely as a means to defend American cities from missile
attack but rather as a means of continuing the arms race.

BMD would have to be 100% efficient to provide any sort of credible defense
against a city-busting nuclear attack. Any less than 100% and cities will
go down. I might be willing to spend $500 billion to have Los Angeles and
New York nuked, but not to spend $500 billion on defense just to have them
nuked anyway.

If we look at the current situation from the point of view of the Air Force
brass, Star Wars looks much different. As the Soviets build more ICBMs, they
can allocate more warheads to each US silo and make their chance of success
against the entire US ICBM force better, especially since the US ICBM force
will probably have to ride out a surprise Soviet first strike (see John
Steinbrunner, "Launch Under Attack", Scientific American, Vol 250, No.1,
January, 1984:pp 37-47). The Air Force's job is to set things up so that
enough missiles survive that strike to retaliate against the Soviet Union,
thus keeping up their part of deterence. The traditional means of reducing
the Soviets' chances were to build more missiles and scatter the silos around
so that the same number of Soviet warheads have more targets they need to
cover.

However, with the debates going on about MX and the Midgetman, it is not clear
that the Air Force is going to get any more missiles in the near future, so
that day by day the chances of success of a first strike grow more in favor of
the Soviets. Someone then suggests a Ballistic Missile Defense.

Even if that system is only 50% efficient, it cuts in half the number of
warheads the Soviets can assign to each silo, increasing the chance of that
silo being operable for the retalitory strike. So suddenly, the Air Force has
a way to continue in the arms race without building any new missiles. Clever,
no?

I say, "no". It may be clever, but unless a 100% effecient BMD system can be
made, that BMD is there only to provide the US with a way to continue the
arms race without building any more politicly-unfavorable ICBMs. When the
missiles start to fall, the Air Force-operated BMD is not going to be used
to stop the missiles falling on US cities but rather to defend US silos so
that the destruction of the civilized world can be completed. The politicos
in favor of BMD should make it clear that this is a strategic MILITARY
weapon that continues the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction, not a
system to replace MAD.

Some say that the money desired now is seed money to decide if such a
system is feasible or not. If part of the $24billion Research and Development
money that the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines allocated in the
1984 budget (Armed Forces Journal, Vol 121 No 6, January 1984) is not being
used to study the feasibility of such a system, then the warplanners are
misusing those funds. Indeed, if such studies haven't been undertaken on
a regular basis since the first ICBMs, then our military and civilian leaders
have not been doing their jobs. I prefer to think that these people are not
stupid and that they are conscientious and that these studies have been
done regularly under existing and previous budgets, so we shouldn't need more
money for more studies unless there is a breakthrough they'd like to announce
to us.

My conclusion is, if we are not going to spend money on new missiles to
continue the arms race, we should not spend money on a BMD that is less than
100% efficient, for it is merely another way to continue the arms race. If
there is a 100% efficient BMD, then I need more information than what has been
published to convince me that it is feasible.

These views are not necessarily those of my employers.

Dan C Duval

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