The Russians made themselves look ridiculous with their hysterical response to President Ronald Reagan’s televised address on nuclear arms reduction. Maybe that’s why, days later, they decided to finance a massive surrogate anti-nuclear demonstration in Holland. The street demonstrators could be given signs (and maybe a little travel money), but they didn’t need any facts.
Immediately following President Reagan’s speech (which 200 million people in 40 countries saw on television), the Russian government news agency Tass flailed around emotionally at the charts Reagan showed on TV, calling them “absolutely fantastic figures.” The Soviets could not deny their accuracy. Then, Tass accused the United States of seeking “military superiority”!
So what’s wrong with that? The surest key to peace is for the United States to have military superiority over all other nations in the world. That is not just speculation, not merely a hope, not an untried hypothesis, but a fact proved by historical experience.
For the benefit of the younger generation too young to remember, and for those who ought to remember but are blinded by their own pacifist biases, President Reagan explained one of the world’s most important events. During the years when the United States “could have dominated the world with no risk to itself … when the United States had the only undamaged industrial power in the world … [when] our military might was at its peak, and we alone had the ultimate weapon — the nuclear weapon — with the unques- tioned ability to deliver it anywhere in the world,” America chose not to take one single step toward aggression, imperialism, or world domination.
Instead, as the President so eloquently described it, “the United States followed a course “unique in all the history of mankind. We used our power and wealth to rebuild the war-ravaged economies of the world, including those of the nations who had been our enemies.”
In all history, there is no record of any other nation holding such power in its hands and failing to use it to assert dominion over other nations and men. We proved that the peace and freedom of the world are safe when America has military superiority.
The news media and the history books are geared to report events that happen. They aren’t geared to report great events that don’t happen. The Russian invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan made news and will probably each rate a paragraph in the history books.
When the United States did not use our vast power to invade any nation on earth, that news wasn’t reported. Most people still don’t realize the momentous nature of what did not happen.
In his televised speech, President Reagan went on to tell the American people the facts of life about Soviet military superiority today — a fact which had been concealed from the American people by previous Administrations. He said that, in the kinds of weapons that might be used in Europe, the Soviet Union now has “an increasing, overwhelming advantage. They now enjoy a superiority on the order of 6 to 1.”
The greatest service the Reagan Administration can provide in the field of national defense is to give the American people the facts so they can make the right decisions. In order to do this, the Defense Department recently published what may be the most important government document in recent memory: “Soviet Military Power.” (Available at $6.50 from the Government Printing Office.)
This factual and pictorial explanation of Soviet weaponry is clear enough for any citizen to understand, and it should be required reading for all Congressmen, media personnel, educators, and community leaders. It describes and lists the Soviet Union’s strategic (nuclear) forces, theater (conventional) forces, armed forces personnel, resource allocation, quest for technological superiority, and global power projections.
In the past, the U.S. intelligence network and American leaders have done a miserable job of predicting Soviet intentions and of being prepared for their surprise moves. We would be a lot better off if U.S. strategic doctrine were based on Soviet military capabilities instead of on some U.S. official’s guess about Soviet intentions. “Soviet Military Power” shows how tremendous those Soviet capabilities are.
