Video Defense

YOUR A I the console of a futuristic space video game. Five enemy ships blink at you malevolently. You have 15 ships: if they get zapped you're out. You out number your opponent, but each of the enemy ships has five missiles. You naturally fuel threatened.

Suddenly, before you can do anything, each of the five ships uplifts into live new ones. Now there are 25 ships pledged to you destruction. The number of missiles hasn't changed--each new ship has only one--but you can't hit them all at once. Even if you try, enough will be left over to zap you. What do you do now? Whatever you do, you won't be tempted to attack, simply because you can't be sure of blasting all your enemy's ships at once.

Although put in a simplistic form, this scenario essentially duplicates the conclusion of the recently released Scowcroft report on America's strategic nuclear forces. The player of the game is the Soviet leadership the "enemy" is the U.S. ICBM force, and the end of the game brings greater stability and a more assured peace. But before that game gets moving, the Scowcroft report recommended a long, costly, and potentially dangerous "time-out" in the form of the MX missile.

President Reagan and Congress last week accepted the need for this "time out," appropriating more than half a billion dollars for flight testing of the missile. Now the U.S. will almost certainly adopt the MX--a measure which despite the Scowcroft recommendation it gained is in no way essential to the commission's argument.

The President's Commission on Strategic Forces, chaired by lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft, was originally charged with finding a basing mode for the MX missile after Congress correctly rejected "dense pack." The Commission included such defense specialists as Alexander Haig and Harold Brown, and The New Republic calls their product "one of the most serious and sophisticated official documents of the nuclear era." The members of the Commission made three basic recommendations. Discard the notion of U.S. strategic inferiority by considering simultaneously bombers, missiles and submarines, deploy 100 MXs, each with 10 warheads, in hardened Minuteman silos, and for the future, move away from Multiple. Independent Re entry Vehicles (MIRVs) towards a small, single warhead missile appropriately dubbed "Midgetman."

The Commission's line of reasoning was clear, and Reagan bought the conclusion appealing to Congress for MX funding. But the step he and Congress have accepted is still the one that should be eliminated.

The Commission began its argument by dealing a death blow to the emergency the MX is supposed to solve--Reagan's off quoted window of vulnerability." They did this primarily by broadening consideration of our strategic forces to include submarines as well as bombers and cruise missiles for many this redefinition may appear to be a truism; how could anyone overlook these highly effective and deferent weapons system. But the fact remains that Reagan at least in his rehtoric has done just that. By calling the US force "vulnerable" and "inferior". he has tried to create an erroneous impression that we could be completely knocked out by a first strike ignoring the ability of our submarines to deliver a second strike long after our land based forces are destroyed. The Commission sums it up this way:"... to deter such surprise attacks we can reasonably rely on both out strategic forces [we bombers and subs] and on the range of operational uncertainties that the Soviets would have to consider in planning such aggression.

After correctly disposing of the "emergency" which MX is supposed to solve though the Commission still wanted the giant ICBM. Even as the original problem vanished. The New Yorker wrote, "its solution the missile--endured." The reason must be seen as primarily political. The President created the commission to find a basing made for MX the fact that in the process the experts invalidated much of the purpose for MX, and found a better solution for the "problem" anyway, doesn't seem to have hungered them or Congress. To ensure attention for the rent of the report, including the MX was unavoidable.

CONGRESS, at Reagan's urging, passed funding for the convenient MX. But that gullibility should not prevent it from acting on the more nearly solutions Scowcroft had to offer. After essentially reducing the MX to sugar for its recommendations, the Commission introduced a final pill which shouldn't be hard to swallow at all. The pill is Midgetman, a small, mobile missile with a single warhead that could be produced in large numbers, if needed, at relatively low cost. Such a non-threatening, land-based ICBM follows naturally from the Commission's argument that the "window of vulnerability" was never open in the first place. And of course, the real selling point of the little missile as opposed to the giant MX is its stabilizing influence.

Henry Kissinger recently addressed this issue in Time, writing that "the primary cause of instability with current weapons systems is the disproportion between warheads and launchers...there is no effective or intellectually adequate solution to this problem except to seek to eliminate multiple warheads within a fixed time, say 10 years." The root of the problem is similar to the dilemma encountered by the imaginary video game player. If you face an enemy with fewer launchers (ships) than you have, but more warheads (missiles), then conceivably he can knock you out in a first strike. Therefore, in a crisis situation, you could be tempted to destroy your enemy's small number of missiles. If your enemy knows this, he'll be tempted to shoot first. The process is essentially ad infinitum, hence destabilizing.

Midgetman, as Scowcroft showed, is the way to avoid all of this A growth in the numbers of launchers (i.e. targets) without an increase in the number of warheads would deter the Soviets by increasing their uncertainty of first strike success. And it would leave them free to pursue a similar policy, making the deterrence mutual.

IMMEDIATELY AFTER Reagan's highly supportive letter arrived on Capitol Hill, the House Defense Subcommittee for Appropriations voted to release $560 million for flight testing of MX. The Senate followed suit two days later, and in all likelihood the MX is on its way.

Reagan has called the recommendation a "desirable evolution to ward small, single warhead ICBMs" it may have been MX that ensured the White House would take Midgetman and the other points seriously. But the giant ICBM will dominate the years between now and any deployment of a smaller weapon probably in the mid 1990s.

According to the Commission we now have a large fleet of effective ballistic missile submarines, with the bigger and better Trident on the way. We have bombers capable of striking the Soviet Union and incapable of being completely knocked out by a first strike. The technology for a new smaller missile wouldn't be that much different from the 20 year old Minuteman, and there is no "emergency" to require anything further. If the President really wants "attainment of stability at the lowest possible level of forces," then his only reasons for supporting MX are automatic. The reflexes of "bigger is better and "what the Russians have, we must have" have won another victory in Washington. Congress needs to rise above this glacial inertia while there is still time, move quickly past MX, and go with the weapons systems that ensure peace bombers, submarines, and Midgetman.