McNamara Claims U.S. Arms Lead

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30294, 21 November 1963, Page 11

McNamara Claims U.S. Arms Lead

(N .ZT.A.-Reuttr—Copyright) NEW YORK, November 19. The United States Secretary of Defence (Mr Robert McNamara) last night predicted a reduction in American defence spending. The defence budget for the fiscal year 1964, which opened last July, is about £23,900 million.

■ Mr McNamara painted an optimistic picture of United States and Allied strength, declaring that at every level of force “the alliance in general, and the United States armed forces in particular, have greater and more effective strength than we are in the habit of thinking we have. . . In a speech prepared for delivery before the Economic Club of New York and cleared by the White House, he gave facts and figures of comparative United States and Soviet armed forces to show what he described as the “absurdity of the picture borrowed from 1940 of a Communist Goliath in conventional strength facing a Western David, almost naked of conventional arms but alone possessed of a nuclear sling.” “Misleading Notions” He criticised “misleading or obsolete” notions with regard to "supposed masses” of Communist ground forces, and said the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s active armed forces at present numbered more than 5,000,000 compared with the Warsaw Pact total, including the Societ Union, of “only about 4,000,000.”

Mr McNamara said the fact that further increases in strategic force size would encounter rapidly diminishing returns should be reflected in future budgets.

The Defence Secretary said the United States strategic force now contained more than 500 operational longrange ballistic missiles— Atlas, Titan, Minuteman and Polaris—and was planned in increase to more than 1700 by 1966. “There is no doublt in our minds and none in the mind of the Soviets that these missiles can penetrate to their targets,” Mr McNamara said“The Soviets are estimated to have today only a fraction as many intercontinental missiles as we do,” he said.

In the last two years the number of nuclear warheads in the United States strategic alert forces had increased by 100 per cent and the megatonnage had been more than doubled. The consensus was, said Mr McNamara, that the United States was at present substantially superior in design, diversity and numbers of tactical nuclear weapons.

No Licences. — For having no current radio licence on March 28, Robert Alexander Ingram was fined £2, and for having no television licence on March 26, Leonard Russell Sears was fined £3 in the Magistrate’s Court yesterday. Mr E. S. J. Crutchley, S.M., was on the Bench.

”... We and our allies need no longer choose to live with the sense or the reality of inferiority to the Soviet bloc in relevant, effective forces,” he said.