It’s Zany, It’s Hopeless

For two years defense experts on Capitol Hill have been trying to nudge the Reagan Administration into closing the gap between rhetoric and reality on the “Star Wars” program. Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger’s testimony this week before the Senate Armed Services Committee indicates, however, that it’s a hopeless cause.

Congress has cut President Reagan’s budget requests for his Strategic Defense Initiative by 30% in the last two years. Weinberger’s testimony provided no rational basis for a congressional change of heart this year.

The President has repeatedly said that the purpose of the SDI is to replace the strategy of nuclear deterrence, under which nuclear war is avoided because neither side can attack the other without serious risk of nuclear destruction in return. As Reagan sees it, a missile defense system should be a sort of penetration-proof umbrella that will protect the population against the threat of nuclear attack and, in the President’s words, render offensive nuclear missiles “obsolete.” The program is being sold to the public on this basis.

That sounds fine--we would all like to get out from under the balance of terror. But the Administration’s SDI sales job would never pass a truth-in-advertising test.

For a missile defense system to do what Reagan says, it would have to be almost perfect, because millions of people could die if just a handful of attacking missiles got through. And almost nobody really believes that a near-leakproof system will be technologically feasible for many years to come, if ever. Even inside government, the President and Weinberger have been almost alone in talking as though it will be.

Most expert critics of SDI themselves believe that research into exotic, space-based missile defenses should be pursued to guard against a surprise breakthrough by the Soviets, who also are doing SDI-type research. Some reasonable people go further and suggest that we proceed with a limited ground-based system at Grand Forks, N.D., near the Minuteman missile fields. Such a system, if limited to 100 defensive missiles, would not even violate the 1972 ABM treaty. And, proponents say, it could enhance deterrence by making an attempted knockout blow against land-based U.S. missiles even less rational than it is now.

The question is whether an outlay of $50 billion for such a system is the best use of strained national resources. We think not.

But what Weinberger told the Armed Services Committee makes even less sense. He said that the Administration is now looking toward deployment of a partial, first-phase system--but one based in space rather than on the ground. He emphasized that such a system would have the ambitious purpose of protecting the population rather than missile fields or other military targets.

This is zany. Even a partial space-based system could not be deployed without violating the ABM treaty--and to what purpose? Nobody has persuasively explained yet how a space-based system could cope with predictable Soviet countermeasures, including attacks against the anti-missile system itself. To think of an early deployment of an enormously costly system of dubious effectiveness makes no sense. We suspect that the Administration’s real purpose is to abrogate the ABM treaty and commit the country to deploying a space-based missile defense system before Reagan leaves office. Congress should not cooperate in such an atrocity against common sense.