Soviet boss Mikhail Gorbachev has made President Reagan an offer: First, scrap SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) and, second, we’ll join in a “builddown” of nuclear weapons. Should Gorbachev be taken seriously? No, he should be ridiculed as the hypocrite he really is. Logic, fact, and experience all teach us that, if or when any builddown begins, that is precisely when we will need SDI (a space shield) most of all because the builddown creates the opportunity for the cheater to strike.
The United States and the Soviet Union each now have about 10,000 nuclear warheads. If one side cheats by 1,000 that doesn’t make a great deal of difference. But if each side builds down to only 1,000 warheads, a cheater who hides 1,000 which he claimed he destroyed could make a fatal difference. In a world of no nukes, one nuke is king! When nations agreed to outlaw gas warfare, they wisely kept their gas masks in case any aggressor decided to cheat.
Even if both sides abolished all nuclear weapons, someone might build a new one. We can destroy the bombs but we cannot destroy the scientific knowledge. We simply can’t put the genie back into the bottle.
Gorbachev’s plan is completely unverifiable because the Soviets are going full steam ahead with mobile missiles. “On-site verification” used to be the acid test of Soviet arms-control compliance, but it’s a farce if they agree to it today because there isn’t any “on-site” location for mobile missiles. They can be moved around on command, on railroad tracks, on trucks, hidden in the thousands of square miles of Siberia, under foliage, roofs, or cloud cover. The United States can never play a hide-and-seek game like that because the New York Times and the Washington Post will constantly monitor and disclose our missile sites. The factors of mobility and cheating make Gorbachev’s proposal nothing but a media ploy.
SDI is, for good reason, the centerpiece of the Reagan plan for the strategic defense of America. He knows that the “balance” of nuclear terror is badly out of balance, and Mutual Assured Destruction isn’t mutual any longer. The 10,000 Soviet warheads are mostly of the first-strike kind. They have 6,500-8,000 high-accuracy missiles which can hit a military target in 30 minutes within a 250-yard radius 8,000 miles away. Since there are only 2,000-4,000 military targets in the United States, the Soviets can simply target two warheads on each one and destroy our ability to retaliate.
The 10,000 warheads owned by the United States are very different: only 900 of them are first-strike weapons as opposed to the 2,000+ military targets in the Soviet Union. A first-strike force requires both accuracy and numbers, and we don’t have the numbers of sufficiently accurate missiles. The majority of our nuclear force consists of 3,000 bombers designed to be delivered by planes which take 12 hours to reach their destination and 5,000 submarine missiles, which are relatively inaccurate because nobody knows where they will be when a command is given to fire them. They are accurate only within a 400-500 mile radius, and that’s not good enough to knock out a military target.
This ominous imbalance is what makes Ronald Reagan steadfast in his determination to build SDI, a space shield which can kill enemy missiles before they kill us. He also knows that the Soviets are moving ahead with their fifth generation of missiles: SS-24, SS-25, SS-26, SS-27, and SS-28; they have long since passed the bounds of reasonable deterrence. Not only do the Soviets have this awesome superiority over the United States in first-strike weapons, but they have their own “SDI” funded at ten times what Congress has appropriated for ours. President Reagan requested $3.7 billion. Congress appropriated only $2.7 billion, while the Soviets are spending $25 billion on their SDI-type research.
In a current classic case of chicanery, two Soviet scientists received a Nobel prize for their work on Russia’s SDI, and then signed a letter denouncing the American SDI. In addition to all these massive offensive and defensive systems, the Soviets have enough hardened civil-defense bunkers to shelter 175,000 people. That means they can assure the survival of the Party, military, and scientific officials who are important to their goal of world domination.
