A case for Star Wars defences

Press, 10 August 1985, Page 18

A case for Star Wars defences

From ‘The Economist,’ London

The time is, let us say, 1925. The French army possesses a force of about 8000 tanks, impervious to machine guns and ordinary artillery and unstoppable by other tanks, which can crunch its way through to Berlin within 24 hours. The German army has about 8000 tanks of its own which can do the same to Paris. The conventional wisdom of 1925, nodding sagely, says that this will prevent another Great War because both sides know that if they march for the other’s capital they will lose their own: it is the safety of deterrence. Enter an inventor, claiming that he thinks he knows how to make an anti-tank weapon which can stop at least a fair proportion of these hitherto unstoppable monsters. Is he told to forget about it? During this week’s 40th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, a world which has long believed that the only defence against nuclear mass slaughter is to threaten nuclear mass counter-slaughter should be contemplating the nuclear equivalent of that parable of the tanks. When President Reagan proposed an anti-missile defence system in 1983, most people’s first reaction was contemptuous dismissal — partly because the idea came from old Ronnie Reagan (and Mr Reagan did over-simplify), but also because most people usually find new ideas incredible. That first reaction has now changed. The change comes to some extent from a sense of inexorability. The Reagan Administration is pressing steadily ahead with its

anti-missile research plans, and congress is putting up most of the cash the plans need. If Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov really has been restored to favour in Moscow,-that almost certainly means that Russia too is a convert to Star Wars. Marshal Ogarkov is the Soviet army’s high-tech man; since he is on record as saying that Russia needs the new technologies for battles on land, he is unlikely to overlook what they : mean for the balance of nuclear power in the sky. All this has helped to soften the original scepticism about Star Wars. But the main reason for the softening is that since 1983 a lot of people have come to see the idea as more workable and less immoral than they had first thought. It looks more workable because the Reaganites — well, most of them — have come clean about what they have in mind. The President’s original suggestion of a solid roof of protection over the whole United States is wildly implausible, and is now generally admitted to be. But this still leaves open the possibility of a defensive screen capable of stopping quite a lot of the Soviet warheads aimed at America’s nuclear forces and command centres. The kinds of technology needed for this defence of specific targets seem quite feasible. The benefits would be large. Such a defence would make it almost impossible for the Russians to risk a disarming first strike against America. If America had this protection and Russia did not, it would also make the nuclear umbrella the Americans hold over Europe and Japan a lot less threadbare than it is now, when America is naked to missiles.

Of course, it is important to be sure that this silos-and-headquar-ters-protecting screen could not itself be knocked out by a surprise attack, or swamped by increasing the number of attacking Russian warheads. To ensure that is not impossible. It is simple arithmetic to see that, if the Americans can put up two or three layers of defence, the number of extra warheads Russia would need rises very sharply as the American knockout radio at each layer improves. Star Wars Mark II is a starter. It has also begun to occur to the sceptics of 1983 that Star Wars is, after all, an anti-nuclear proposal. The irony of this cuts both ways. The people who used to argue that nuclear weapons were the mingy-with-defence-money democracies’ equaliser against Soviet superiority in ordinary weapons now find themselves advocating a scheme that would reduce the value of nuclear arms. But the embarrassment is even greater on the other side, as the anti-nuclear movement struggles to find a way of resisting an antinuclear idea. The issue is slightly blurred because one particular anti-missile device, the X-ray laser, requires a nuclear trigger, it would be better to steer research in purely non-nuclear directions. The main point, however, is clear.

The successful introduction of anti-missile defences will not remove the problem of nuclear weapons. These will continue to exist, and to be deliverable by other means than missiles, and most countries will anyway not be able to afford an anti-missile system. But for those powers which can afford it — which may mean only America and Russia, but possibly Japan and Europe too —

the effect will be radical

These countries will no longer have to worry so much about a missile attack, or spend so much money and intellectual effort on their own missile forces. That should make it easier for them to reach agreement on cutting their nuclear armouries.

The role played by nuclear weapons in their defence planning would then get even smaller. Instead of being the centrepiece, the things would gradually become an insurance policy against a residual risk of nuclear war.

The change in strategic thinking this implies could lead to an equally big psychological change. The belief that 1945 ushered in an era when security depended on keeping a permanent finger on the nuclear trigger would slowly start to fade; and the world would be an easier place for it.

There remain a number of reasons for hesitation before anybody says Godspeed to Star Wars. It is not certain that the technologies required for even a limited a defence system can be made to work at a price even America can afford; the evidence suggests they can, but it is not yet proved. If it is proved, these technologies can also do some decidedly worrying things, like shooting down the early-warning satellites the West’s defence depends on. There are also people who fear that, if the Russians thought America was about to deploy such a system before Russia could, Russia’s missiles would be launched to prevent it. That seems unlikely — what looks like nuclear suicide to Russia now would presumably still look like suicide then — but the advantages to Western security of even a few years’ American monopoly

of anti-missile weapons have to be weighed against the counter-ad-vantages of negotiating a roughly simultaneous Russian and American deploymnt of these weapons. That can be arranged by Russia and America agreeing to amend the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty so that in future new antimissile systems cannot be deployed with less than, say, three or four years’ notice. It is also worth observing that nobody should want to devalue nuclear weapons too much, if that opens the door to the horrors of high-tech “conventional” wars. It would be the sharpest irony of all if diminishing fear of nuclear conflict made it easier to have an even more vicious Verdun, a bloodier Stalingrad. Maybe that is fanciful: so long as nuclear weapons exist, they will be a check on the aggressiveness of anybody who might have to face them. But let it be remembered just how efficient a check the Bomb has been these past 40 years, and let its deterrent effect be to some extent preserved. For all that, there are obvious attractions in reintroducing the idea of defence into a world where it has seemed that murderous attack can be met only by murderous counter-attack. These attractions justify the spending of large sums of money on antimissile research. They may even justify carrying the venture into space, if the patrolling of empty space seems likely to make the inhabited earth safer. In the week when people are recalling the horror of Hiroshima, they should be looking with respect at new inventions which reduce the risk of another global Hiroshima. Copyright — The Economist.