ARMS-D-Request@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU (Moderator) (08/27/86)
Arms-Discussion Digest Wednesday, August 27, 1986 1:50PM
Volume 7, Issue 7
Today's Topics:
Why Stockpile?
Nuclear disarmament -- the aftermath
Words, words, words...
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Date: Tue, 26 Aug 1986 13:55 EDT
From: Rob Austein <SRA@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Subject: Why Stockpile?
Things being quiet, I thought I'd toss this one out and see who bites.
For some time I have wondered why it is that we stockpile so many of
the destructive toys we invent (I am thinking primarily of ICBMs and
SLBMs here, although the argument might apply in other cases). As
someone in a high tech industry I (sort of) buy the argument that the
USA can't afford to stop research on any kind of weapons technology,
for fear that somebody else will develop it first. But why, by
whatever deity you care to name, do we have to make production runs of
all these toys after we develop them? The number of warheads posessed
by both sides is, you should pardon the expression, extreme overkill.
Assuming that everybody involved is reasonable and dealing in good
faith, I see two possible arguments. One is that we need to do
production runs to keep the industrial plant involved alive (and iron
out bugs in the design, train workers, etcetera). The other reason is
a do-not-bind-the-mouths argument; the defense contractors make their
money by selling the finished product, not by doing the development
work. I suspect that the real reasons are a mixture of these.
I'm not sure what to do about the first reason; there may not be
anything that can be done about it. Do note, however, that it is not
clear how much good the production phase is when we can't test the
weapons under real conditions (a problem that has been discussed, at
length, on this forum, so I'll leave it alone).
The second reason, though, seems to have a sollution. I'd pay for the
development phase directly, and leave off the production phase if the
new weapon wasn't a significant change from existing stockpiled
weapons (making this decision is of course a can of worms, but assume
that we manage to set up a group of judges who will evaluate the
technical merits and not the vested interests). The net profit for
the development should be about equal to the net profit currently made
from a production run (otherwise it becomes a pork barrel). (I don't
expect this kind of setup would have an easy time getting past a
Congressional budget!)
The idea is like giving money to some charitable organization whose
works you approve of but whose "free" newsletter you emphaticly don't
want to receive (you'd rather have them spend the money on their
stated task than on printing up the newsletter). In this case I
believe that the production phase is a danger to be avoided when
possible, since it increases the number of loaded chambers in this
ongoing game of Russian Roulette (ahem). I am a firm believer in the
Law of Averages and one of these days we are going to have an
accidental Shot Heard 'Round the World.
My ideas on development vs. production phase may be off. I got them
from a friend in the spacecraft industry who routinely spends six
months on a proposal _before_getting_the_contract_. If his company
doesn't get the contract, that six months of R&D is written off as
overhead. In the satellite business this is sort of ok, but if the
idea is to fund weapons research we ought to be funding weapons
research, not weapons production.
Comments, anybody? I think the above is a partial answer to a very
real problem, and if it is a bad (or confused) idea (as opposed to one
that won't fly for political reasons), I'd like to know why.
--Rob Austein <SRA@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
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Date: Tue, 26 Aug 86 14:18:52 CDT
From: Will Martin -- AMXAL-RI <wmartin@ALMSA-1.ARPA>
Subject: Nuclear disarmament -- the aftermath
When I read things like the comments on Dyson's book, I am mystified
by trying to imagine what the proponents of nuclear disarmament expect
is going to happen after their desired actions take place. As I understand
it, the West concentrated on nuclear deterrence basically because it was
the most economic way to achieve the defense they desired. No matter how
expensive nuclear weapons or their elaborate delivery systems may be, they
are still cheaper (both in money and in required manpower investments)
than having the same level of strength or destructive capability using
only "conventional" weaponry.
I get the general impression that the disarmament advocates expect that
there will be some general and universal transformation of attitudes and
behavior after or as part of the scrapping of nuclear weaponry. But this
is totally unrealistic -- it would be far safer to expect that
everything else would remain exactly as-is, unchanged, and only that one
particular class of weaponry (that is, nuclear devices) would be
eliminated from the world's arsenals.
So lets say we reach a nuclear-arms destruction and inspection agreement
with the Soviets, but that nothing else changes -- that is, they still
adhere to their ideology and goals, and we to ours. This means that,
even as the nuclear warheads, bombs, and the missles that may carry them
are being dismantled on both sides, the West is still under pressure
from Soviet or client-state expansionism, subversion under the guise of
"liberation" movements, etc. Unless we also decide to not care about this,
to no longer resist such pressure, and to simply let happen whatever
might occur, we will need to increase our conventional forces to resist
such Soviet agression.
To me, this means that we would have to reinstate a draft, allocate
resources for weapon production with a higher priority than for civilian
goods, and generally move to a wartime-type economy even though we
remain officially at "peace". If we still believe that there will be a
Warsaw Pact threat against Western Europe, which could no longer be
deterred by an explicit first-use policy of using nuclear weapons
against a conventional attack, we would have to maintain a conventional
capability sufficient to stop such a possible attack. We would have to
make strenuous efforts to match the Soviet conventional war machine,
either by matching them man-for-man and tank-for-tank, or by the
application of some degree of more advanced technology that would make
one of our tanks equal to "n" of theirs, and so forth, knowing that we
do not have the nuclear option to fall back on any longer. (We do that
now, but in the context of the nuclear backup, which we would no longer
have. It would no longer be that our more high-tech tanks would have to
match "n" Soviet tanks for a certain number of days, before we resorted
to nuclear weapons to attack the Soviet forces, but that each of our tanks
would have to continually counter the "n" Soviet tanks for the entire duration
of the war. In a long-term type of engagement, I fear our high-tech
approach will not prevail -- there is too great a need for maintenance
and too much vulnerability; larger numbers of cruder equipment will
overwhelm the fewer pieces of sophisticated gear.)
I believe, and I do not think I am alone in this belief, that we simply
could not beat the Soviets in a conventional war while still maintaining
our traditional free socio-political system. (*) To fight a conventional
war against an enemy with the physical and personnel resources of the
Soviets, who have a governmental system that lets them completely
control their economy and population to devote them single-mindedly to
the war effort, would require us to do the same. We would have thus
already lost the freedoms we would be fighting for, though. This would
let us fight them to a stalemate, but not conquer them, thereby making it
a long drawn-out struggle between totalitarian superpowers, exactly as
portrayed in Orwell's _1984_.
We did not have to go this far during World War II to fight the Axis,
who could be characterized as such totalitarian states (though we did
move away from our traditionally complete freedom to some degree during
the war) simply because of the state-of-the-art in weaponry at the time,
plus the fact that we were allied with the Soviets who DID, in fact,
devote themselves utterly to the war effort. We had the luxury then of
having most of our population remain safely across an ocean, making
their contributions by means of industrial and agricultural production.
A non-nuclear but general war today would not allow us this isolation
and protection, as technology would permit the war to strike us at home,
the way WW II hit the Soviets in their cities and towns.
(Of course, a nuclear war would also destroy our system and way of life.
The intent of nuclear arms and the MAD philosophy is that they act only
as deterrence and never be used. It would be scant comfort to say that after
they do get used, though, for whatever reason.)
In the event of such an all-encompassing conventional war, how long
would it take before one side or the other "discovers" some nuclear
weapons that got "lost" during the disarmament process, or builds some
more from scratch? Escalation of such a conflict to a nuclear stage
would be limited only by the lead-time needed to produce such weapons
and deliver them!
So it seems to me that nuclear disarmament will have the beneficial
result of reducing our chances of being killed in a sudden furious
atomic exchange, but also the negative result of our expending a greater
percentage of our GNP and of our individual assets on defense spending
and also precipitate some basic changes in our society. It would lead
not toward a reduced chance of war, but an increase in the likelihood
that some war(s) would occur (without the threat of rapid nuclear
escalation, the use of military force becomes a more attractive
alternative to governments). This doesn't mean that we should not move
toward nuclear disarmament, but we also shouldn't view it as a panacea
or the advent of the Millennium. I think we will have just as many
problems the day after disarmament as the day before -- they'll just be
different problems. Maybe the change will be for the better, and maybe
not. There are an awful lot of factors to consider...
Will Martin
(*) As a side note, it just might be possible if the Soviets were faced
with a simultaneous internal revolution of the subject peoples against
Russian control, combined with some level of internal anti-Communist
resistance or rebellion, acting in conjunction with attacks from
outside. I find this scenario rather unlikely, however, given the degree
of conditioning that has been impressed on generations of Soviet youth
and the general resistance of most people to risk their lives like this.
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Date: Tue, 26 Aug 86 15:25:49 edt
From: mikemcl@nrl-csr (Mike McLaughlin)
To: Lin, arms-d
Re: Words, words, words...
"Deliberate dumbness" is delightful. Reminds me of a friend's term,
"malicious obedience," referring to carrying out dumb orders in their
infinite complexity, regardless of the consequences, and without applying
a grain of common sense.
Used car salesmen and realtors sometimes exhibit deliberate dumbness when
they discourage the owner from telling them about defects in a property or
automobile.
I do not know that "NO ONE in the scientific community believes that it is
possible to frustrate a deliberate Soviet attack on the U.S. population..."
If there is a PhD in a science who believes that, is that person de facto
excluded from the scientific community?
I do not know what "frustrat(ing) a deliberate... attack" means. If it means
deterring the attack by reducing the cost/benefit ratio to an unacceptable
level, I believe that is possible (but I am not in the scientific community
and never have been).
If it means saving a significant number of civilian lives from an inevitable
attack, I believe that is possible (but... ).
If it means saving EVERY civilian life, I do not believe that, any more than
I believe the statement that "NO ONE... etc."
SDI involves more than science, it affects billions of people, millions of
military and defense industry people, and thousands of decisions makers on
both sides of the Curtain. As such, it is not susceptible to the simple
and elegant solutions of science - neither "It won't work" nor "It will work"
is adequate.
I have five children. I hope we, and the Russians, get it right, whatever
we decide to do.
"Things are the way they are because if they were to be any different they
wouldn't have come out like this." - Tevye (Sholom Aleichem)
- Mike <mikemcl@nrl-csr.arpa>
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End of Arms-Discussion Digest
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