Jimmy Carter’s Presidential Directive 59 was supposedly designed to scare the Russians by announcing a new U.S. strategy which contemplates retaliating against some military targets in case of nuclear war. The real purpose, however, was to confuse the voters into believing that the Carter Administration is doing something effective to defund us against the horrendous threat (admitted by Defense Secretary Harold Brown in his recent Naval War College speech) that the Soviets now have thousands of ICBM warheads accurate enough to knock out our minuteman missile force.
Supposedly, this new strategy adopted by the Carter Administration will be better able to cope with a war threat from the Soviet Union because our plans will give priority to attacking Russian military installations rather than their cities and industries. This new strategy supposedly enables us to fight a “limited” nuclear war rather than only a “massive” one, a “prolonged” nuclear war rather than only a “quick” one.
These are all just empty words which have no meaning beyond campaign rhetoric. The Carter Administration has no military capability to carry out such a strategy, and doesn’t have any intention of building the weapons necessary to carry it out.
Attacking military targets requires weapons of greater power and accuracy than weapons to attack cities. The populations of cities have no protection against incoming enemy weapons, and cities and spread out over an area so large that an inaccurate hit will nevertheless kill thousands of people.
Military targets use up far less area and are often camouflaged. Missiles are sunk in hardened silos; submarines can hide in the wide reaches of the ocean.
The United States has many weapons which can kill Russians, but we have almost no weapons which can “kill” Soviet weapons. Indeed, our entire nuclear arsenal has been designed to carry out our 15 year old strategy of targeting only Russian people rather than their weapons.
Thus, when critics of SALT II accurately changed that the Treaty allowed the Soviets to keep 308 “heavy” missiles, but did not allow America to build even one, the Carter Administration replied: But the United States decided years ago not to build heavy missiles and we don’t want to build any now.
The Carter Administration also canceled the B-1 bomber, and has delayed for years the initial operating capability of the MX missile, the Trident submarine, and the cruise missile. The Carter Administration centered its foreign policy on the SALT II Treaty which was based on the doctrine of Massive Mutual Assured Destruction of population, not weapons.
Meanwhile, the U.S.S.R. has always designed its weapons to be powerful enough to destroy U.S. military targets, especially to wipe out our Minuteman missiles in their hardened concrete silos. At a fantastic cost they have now achieved their goal.
Defense Secretary Brown’s announcement last month about this new Soviet capability made front page news, but it was any surprise. The Soviets adopted their strategy more than a decade ago, and ever since have been building the weapons to fit their strategy.
The Carter Administration has seen it coming for four years, and didn’t do anything about it until the Republicans Party Platform, adopted in Detroit in July, endorsed a “clear capability to destroy Soviet military targets,” and also criticized the mutual assured destruction doctrine.
Secretary Brown’s announcement about a new U.S. stealth bomber is another transparent campaign ploy. Lt. Gen. Kelly Burke, Air Force research chief, said it is “premature” to say that a stealth bomber can be built even by 1987. Other experts believe it will take eight to ten years to get a stealth bomber in service.
For 20 years the unilateral disarmament clique has been preaching the nonsense that nuclear war is “unthinkable” because it is so horrible and total. The defect in that rationale is that the Russians have been thinking about nuclear war all these years and have both devised a strategy and built the weapons to win a nuclear war.
History does not provide any examples of nations which deterred or avoided or repelled aggression by pretending that war was unthinkable. On the contrary, history provides many lessons of nations which were thinking about war when their victims kept thinking about peace until it was too late.
The only good thing about Presidential Directive 59 is that it may force us to think about the unthinkable in time to elect a new team pledged to build the weapons to go with the strategy. In war as in poker, an empty bluff is a dangerous game.
