Space Cadet

IF RONALD REAGAN gets his way the U.S. will soon embark on a costly and insane attempt to protect itself from nuclear attack with a vast array of space and earth-based lasers, particle beams, and missiles.

This system, known as an ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) system, has been a favorite of the Administration ever since Reagan made his March 1983 "star wars" speech. In his address the President held out the prospect of an America living secure in the knowledge that it "could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies.

The Administration hopes to spend almost two billion dollars researching an ABM system next year. It envisions a five year program that will spend twenty four billion dollars by 1989 determining whether the concept is feasible. Recent studies indicate that the cost of constructing and adequate shield within twenty years would be $250-$500 billion.

The rationale for spending this enormous amount of money is alluring. If the U.S. could successfully defend itself against nuclear attack the nuclear dilemma would be radically altered. The need to threaten mass destruction to deter attackers would disappear Peace would cease to depend on the sanity and stability of our enemies Americans would no longer have to live with the knowledge that they, their families and their civilization could be blotted out in an instant.

Unfortunately a feasible ABM system remains a dream. It is the modern-day version of the French Maginot line--a large and expensive shield that will give us the illusion of safety, but will fail us should the final crisis ever come. Even the attempt to erect a ballistic missile defense will prove disastrous to national security. If we press ahead with Reagan's "star wars" concept, we will alienate our allies, spark a new arms race, and waste billions of dollars that could be better spent on conventional defense or social programs.

If the Administration pushes ahead on an ABM system, not only will it waste a huge slice of the nation's wealth, but it will also break one of the most successful arms control agreements in history: the ABM section of the 1972 SALT I treaty. Recent evidence indicating that the Soviets have violated certain provisions of the treaty still gives no justification for a complete US abrogation. Arms control agreements are few and far between in our conflict-ridden world. They provide a major source of stability at a time when U.S. U.S.S.R. relations are at a new low.

OFCOURSE, it makes little sense to support arms control agreements merely for their own sake. Breaking the ABM treaty, however, will have an immediate and adverse impact on the unity of the Western alliance. The deployment of Euromissiles last fall was enough to bring out hundreds of thousands of demonstrators. How will Europeans respond to a unilateral American abrogation of one of the most successful arms accords ever negotiated?

Even Europeans who dislike pacifists, fear Reagan's "star wars" push. Hardliners such as Franz Josef Strauss, the leader of Germany's conservative wing, have protested America's plans. These Europeans worry that strategic defensive systems would "de-couple" the U.S. from Europe. If the superpowers were to develop a workable ABM system--a big if--then the American nuclear guarantee would no longer be credible. The Russians could invade Europe without having to worry about an American intercontinental nuclear response.

But the "star wars" approach to nuclear weapons shouldn't scare only the Europeans. It would deeply exacerbate the arms race, and make everyone more insecure. Proponents of an ABM system argue that it would actually enhance arms control--first, by giving each side enough security to negotiate deep force reductions, and second, by reducing each side's fear of a preemptive strike. Developing ABM capabilities would supposedly change the arms race into a "defense race."

This reasoning couldn't be more specious. When two men are pointing guns at each other, they are hardly likely to consider it defensive when one of them starts edging behind a pillar. The benefits that a "star wars" defense could bring exist only if the system is already in place and works.

Yet getting behind the pillar will take us at least twenty years. In the meantime, a full-fledged space race will develop, in which each side seeks supremacy in technological areas that would be vital to any ballistic missile defense. And while the U.S. may hold a temporary lead in space technology, it is also vastly more dependent than Russia on satellites for communications and reconnaissance because of its wide-flung network of submarines, bomber bases, and other defense installations.

AN EVEN MORE practical and immediate objection to the porposed system lies in the complex technology required. Even if only ten warheads breached our shield, they would wreak destruction on a scale never before witnessed by man. Yet in a full-scale attack, ten thousand warheads would be launched. They would come from all directions at the same time and at high speed. To stop every one would require, as a recent Foreign Affairs article by William E. Burrows points out, "a defensive system able to react with almost unbelievable speed and flawless lethality..."

To build such a system even in the absence of a Soviet response would be a daunting task. However, as many years as we take to develop an ABM system, the Soviets will use to think up a means of circumventing it. Every proposed version of the "star wars" shield has an easily exploited weakness. The Russians could preemptively attack laser satellites. They could confuse tracking systems with thousands of decoy rockets. They could fire submarine-based missiles on low trajectories which couldn't be spotted. Of course, we might be able to solve some of these problems. But the Russians would have a continuous incentive to think up new ones, and we could never be sure that our system actually worked.

Ronald Reagan's ballistic missile merry-go-round simply isn't worth the cost. The President wants us to pursue the mirage of absolute security in an age when weapons of mass destruction make such security impossible. Only myopic could lead us to break a successful arms accord, destroy our European alliance, and spark an arms race for the sake of a new Maginot line which would never work. Spending tens of billions of dollars researching a fatally flawed idea, and perhaps hundreds of billions implementing it would indeed require blindness on a national scale.