dand@tekigm.UUCP (Dan C. Duval) (09/17/84)
After I posted my last article on the Strategic Defense Initiative, I spent the weekend thinking about some of the implications and reading the latest issues of the "Armed Forces Journal" and the "Proceedings" of the US Naval Institute, as well as Ben Bova's editorial in the November 1984 issue of "Analog". There were a couple of more articles in the local newspaper, and I spent some time with one of my fellow employees here this afternoon talking about ballistic missile defense. All this left me dissatisfied with that last article. One of the troubles I have is how the Ballistic Missile Defense is to be split up between cities, Navy bases, Air Force fields, Army bases, and SAC silos and SAC control centers. Since it is run by the military, I'd be willing to wager that most of the defenses would be centered around the military locations, because the point defense of cities would "not be possible for such large areas with the limited funding we have. We can more effectively use the point defense equipment to defend missile sites." Most of the scenarios that end up with nuclear weapons falling on the US involve one of two major themes -- the Soviets "firststriking" us or the Soviets retaliating against a US firststrike. Why would the Soviets strike at US cities rather than missile silos and military bases? Probably only if the silos were empty and all the planes and submarines were on station (and thus hard to predict a location where a missile would find them), ie the US pulled the firststrike. Even if the US were merely on alert, as many ballistic submarines and strike aircraft as were operational would be put to sea or into the air, leaving the missile silos as the best targets. If the Soviets struck first, they get a selection of missile silos, ballistic missile sub bases, and strike aircraft on nice, large airfield-type targets. Again, the cities would be secondary targets. A view of the future: the MX is deployed at a cost of $12.7 billion from the FY84-87 budgets, a mere 109 MX missiles, and they are planted in Minuteman silos. As the US starts its BMD, the Soviets build more weapons to try to get around the system, most of these new weapons being submarine launched missiles, probably an equal mix of ballistic missiles and cruise missiles, neither of which are as vulnerable to a space-based defense system as the ICBMs are. By the end of the 1990s, the entire Soviet strike capability is based on submarines, mobile missiles like the SS-20, and the 1990s Soviet supersonic strike bomber. The $500 billion High Frontier system sits in space waiting for ICBMs which never come, but the US is no safer than in 1984. The Soviets may not be able to change over that fast, but even before the President's "Star Wars" speech, the Soviets were shifting their strategic weapons more and more onto their ballistic fleet subs, so how long will it take them when the US threatens to make the ICBM obsolete? My major objection to the BMD, and High Frontiers especially, is that the expense is not made up by reductions in spending on other weaponry. Indeed, how can someone claim they are in favor of building a world safe from nuclear weapons when the money for 21 MX missiles has already been allocated and another $500 million will be proposed for FY85 to seed the Midgetman projects? If Ronald Reagan, and all the others that are in favor of a ballistic missile defense, really want my support, how about tying the elimination of US ICBMs to the building of this system? High Frontiers is a three-level system, with the ground-based portion being a point defense of certain locations (hopefully including a couple of cities and not just silos and military bases.) If the US ICBMs are scrapped, and the dollars that would have been allocated to build, maintain, and man the silos and control centers were instead used on a ballistic missile defense, then there would be no need to allocate any point defenses anywhere but around the cities and towns of the US (and a few selected military bases.) You are the Soviets. You have 5000 warheads that cost you X billion rubles per year to build, maintain, and man, that are currently allocated to taking out US ICBM silos and control centers. That's ten times more than you need to take out 80% of the US population in direct blast and radiation effects. The US decommissions all of its silos. Will you continue to spend X billion rubles per year to maintain those 5000 warheads, now that they have no use but to overkill the US cities? Or spend X/10 billion rubles on the missiles and 9X/10 billion rubles on villas on the Black Sea for high Party officials or some other such worthy cause? So how about this as an idea? The US decommissions its land-based ICBM force, using the money it would have spent to maintain it, as well as the $12.7 billion that would have been used to build MX missiles, on a ballistic missile defense to defend the remaining military installations and the US cities. (Just the cost of the MX covers the money Reagan wants to allocate to studying possible ballistic missile defenses.) The US still has a plenty valid deterrent force in the SSBNs, the B-1Bs, the B-52s, and the 572 Pershing IIs and ground launched cruise missiles to be deployed in Europe, not to mention the $510 million allocated in the 1984 budget for 240 air-launched cruise missiles nor the many aircraft of the European Theater or the US Navy which can carry nuclear weapons. There are also the British, French, and Chinese who don't have much to gain by a Soviet-dominated planet either. But a very nice part of this is that the US looks good for doing it. We start a DEFENSE system, scrap a part of our OFFENSE (which we expect the Soviets to build a defense against anyway), and don't spend any more dollars on our military that we will in FY84. The MX, Minuteman, and Titan II systems are(will be) a major chunk of the US's first strike capability -- first strike can be done with submarine missiles, bombers, cruise missiles, and such, but not as effectively or as quickly as with the accurate and heavy ICBM warheads -- but the ICBMs are only a fraction of our nuclear deterrent forces. If we are interested in defending the US and the free world, must we spend money on weapons whose best utilization is in a first strike on someone else? Must we maintain a whole bunch of targets for a firststrike in the heart of the US? And the best part is that we don't even have to have the Soviets cooperate. The Soviets don't have to scrap any of their warheads and can aim them all at the cities of the US. We'd have a missile defense, wouldn't we?