“Are we dangerously behind the Russians?” a television reporter asked President Reagan at his California White House this summer. To which the President replied, “I think we have been for some time.”
A few days later, also from Reagan’s ranch headquarters, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger discussed the national defense budget and why arms spending must remain high. He matter-of-factly commented, “We’re way behind … we have to close the window of vulnerability.”
Behind those two casually-reported statements lies the most shocking news story of our lifetime. Yet it was never reported as sensational news by the national media when it was happening, and, now that it has happened, it is treated as though it were a lesser item of stale news.
It’s a classic example of how the national media package the news in order to manage the thinking and direct the policies of the United States. The media decide what is important and what isn’t.
The event thus minimized by such low-key coverage is the fact that our country’s previous leaders allowed the United States to fall “dangerously behind the Russians,” and that we’ve been “way behind” the Russians “for some time.” Wouldn’t you think that this default of responsibility was worthy of at least as much indignation as Watergate or Abscam?
How far behind is “way behind”? Very far, indeed. “Window of vulnerability” is a figure of speech craftily chosen to conceal the horror of it all behind a gentle euphemism. “Windows” are pleasant things to look through and see the sights.
In this context, “window” has nothing to do with looking out to see the countryside. “Window” has nothing to do with a material substance, glass or solid; it has nothing to do with an opening of space to look out of. As used in this soothing metaphor, “window” means a period of time, a certain number of years, specifically 1981 through 1985.
Vulnerability is another word that conceals the awful truth of our present military predicament. As used here, that euphonious six-syllable word should be defined by such expressions as “naked to the enemy,” “sitting ducks,” or “they can kill us dead and we can’t hit back.”
Our present “window of vulnerability” was more accurately described years ago by General Arthur G. Trudeau in a far more apt metaphor. He said that we were fast becoming a “nuclear nudist colony.” By that he meant that we are naked to the enemy; we have no defenses that can shoot down the Russian missiles if they come at us.
The prestigious eastern newspapers, no less than network television, also treat the fact of our military inferiority to Russia as far down the scale in importance from the latest Medfly discovery or Jimmy Carter’s trip to Red China. Here is how the horrendous truth was casually reported by the New York Times.
“There is nothing the United States can do in the next four years to amend what many officials and experts see as the vulnerability of stationary land-based missiles. Thus there is no short-term solution to what Mr. Reagan has called ‘the window of vulnerability’ to a Soviet first strike.”
“Virtually all officials at the top layer of the Reagan Administration,” the Times continued, “believe that Moscow, by launching only a small fraction of its powerful and accurate missiles, could destroy in a first strike almost all 1,000 American Minuteman missiles. They hold this view even though they recognize that Soviet leaders would face considerable uncertainties in deciding to launch such an attack.”
Were those awesome facts reported under black headlines to alert the nation to our peril? Not at all. Those paragraphs were quietly buried under a headline and a lead story discussing the debate over the basing of the MX missile.
Our present drastic inferiority to the Soviet Union in nuclear missile power didn’t Just happen. It took many years to reverse the strategic military balance from the 8-to-1 superiority we enjoyed at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
The shift in the balance of power was the result of a gigantic Russian weapons building program, the U.S. weapons freeze since 1967, and the falsehoods told to the American people by our own leaders. If the American people are told the truth about the danger we face, they will support an arms building program at any cost necessary to regain our superiority.
