‘Star wars gamble’

Press, 6 December 1985, Page 6

‘Star wars gamble’

NZPA-AFP < . London Ronald Reagan’s strategic defence initiative is a dubious and expensive gamble on building a nuclear weapons shield in space, according to “Jane’s All The World’s Aircraft, 1985-1986” encyclopaedia, released in London yesterday. “By launching the strategic defence initiative or ‘star wars’ programme, President Reagan committed the United States to expenditure so immense and unpredictable that all estimates tended to be meaningless,” wrote “Jane’s” editor-in-chief John Taylor. “Estimates that for SUS6O billion ($104.4 billion) America might get a system 90 per cent effective against Soviet ballistic missile at-

tack sound encouraging until one thinks of the remaining 10 per cent of the Soviet Union’s 8500 strategic nuclear warheads falling-on U.S. cities and adjacent targets.” But the nearly 1000-page volume also acknowledges that existing nuclear defence is clearly outdated.

“Whatever the outcome of the Geneva strategic arms reduction talks, nobody doubts that the nuclear deterrent is dead in its traditional form,” Jane’s said.

“Even America’s Congressional Armed Services Committees have refused to authorise deployment of more than 50 of the 100 Peacekeeper (MX) missiles •once considered essential to maintain the effectiveness

of the nation’s ICBM force,” the study said, referring to intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The issue publishes the first photographs of a new Soviet fighter plane, the Su-khoi-27, dubbed “Flanker” by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Its design owed much to Western military technology, particularly electronics and radar. Jane’s said.

The photograph reflects “the high cost to the West of United States technology transfers to less-than-reli-able friends,” Taylor wrote. Asked to be more explicit, he recalled how the Soviet’ Union acquired American built Tomcat planes through Iran, which lent them to Moscow to be “examined.”