Star Wars still has a long way to go before gee-whiz becomes zap

Press, 23 February 1987, Page 20

Star Wars still has a long way to go before gee-whiz becomes zap

From the “Economist,” London

After the recent welter of words for and against the Strategic Defence Initiative, can anything be said with even a faint ring- of confidence? Try three things. It would be dotty to take a decision to deploy anti-missile weapons until it is pretty clear that they work, meaning not just that they can hit missiles but that they can hit them more cheaply than extra missiles can be manufactured, or trained to dodge them: in Mr Paul Nitze’s phrase, they must be “cost-effective at the margin” (which won’t be at all easy to calculate). If they did prove to work they would make a nuclear-armed country markedly more reluctant to press the button against anybody who possessed them. But, third, some people -worry that growing nuclear reluctance might tempt an adventurer to risk a non-nuclear war. Nobody yet knows whether anti-missile devices will pass the Nitze test: the odds seem against it, but not impossibly against. It does seem safe to say that, unless that test is passed, neither the American Congress nor the Soviet Politburo will provide the vast amount of money needed to authorise deployment.

That would be like authorising the creation of a dinosaur to try to stamp out rabbits. Mr Caspar Weinberger’s talk of possible deployment in the 1990 s may — or ought to — have been no more than a bargaining lever, an attempt to prise more S.D.I. research money out of Congress and more generous testing rules out of Russia (“We’ll shut up about deployment, provided you If - these weapons do pass the Nitze test, on the other hand, it is equally hard to imagine Congress or the Politburo not giving their soldiers the green light to move on to deployment. Even on a fairly cool assessment of what an anti-missile screen might be able to do — stop a quarter, a third, conceivably half of an incoming wave of nuclear warheads — its owner would feel a lot safer than he does now. The man who launches a nuclear attack has to be sure that he can more or less silence his adversary at the first blow. That is already hard enough. To launch the attack against a working anti-missile screen would make it even harder. Why ’not achieve the same effect by an agreement to cut the armouries of attack-warheads?

Because even the most radical cuts now under discussion would take warhead numbers only back to where they were in 1983, when few people felt particularly secure. Warhead cuts plus S.D.I. would double the security. Add the fact that the same technologies might be used to stop an enemy’s tanks and aircraft long before they reached your front line, and the temptation is obvious. There is a special benefit in this for the West. Under the current brand of nuclear deterrence, the people of the West are asked to accept that the only sure way to prevent Russia hitting them with nuclear weapons is to promise to kill 100 million Russians in reply. Not unnatur-

ally, they revolt from time to time against this revolting thought: especially at moments when a nuclear exchange seems a real possibility. It takes a stout pair of crossed ’ fingers to assume that this mixture of fear and revulsion will not sooner or later carry the day for the unilateral disarmers, at least in Western Europe. The - additional merit of the possible new brand of deterrence — a defensive screen as well as the ability to counter-attack — is that, by reducing the nuclear fear, it helps to keep unilateralism at bay. It is a psychological as well as a military stabiliser. • Might it be so much of a stabiliser that it removed the

deterrent power of nuclear weapons altogether, opening the way for the horrors of an “ordinary” war? Probably not between Russia and America directly: the "ordinary” war-maker would still have to reckon on its going unordinary when vital issues of national interest were at stake.

The people with a problem would be America’s' allies in Europe and Japan. They would either have to ask America to put its defensive screen over them too, or build one of their own: a choice between even more dependence on America, and spending much more on defence. • . ■

In the real world of today, Russia and America will carry on with their research programmes; they should promise each other not to deploy any of these devices until, say, .1996, and probably also agree on the number and sorts of tests they can carry out before them; and both should keep Mr Nitze’s cool eye watching over their shoulders.

When something can be invented, it generally will be. But you need to know a genuine invention from a gee-whiz gleam in the eye. Copyright—The Economist.