Whatever happened to ‘star wars’?

Press, 24 April 1987, Page 17

Whatever happened to ‘star wars’?

PATRICK BROGAN

reports from Wash-

ington on the retreat of the “star warriors” and asks ...

Four years old in March, “star wars” was going to be the centrepiece of the United States defence by now — President Reagan’s greatest legacy to a grateful nation. Instead, it is barely alive, with friends and enemies gathering at the deathbed, to grieve or gloat. Reagan will bequeath no Strategic Defence Initiative to his successor. It has all been an expensive red herring.

So who killed it? There are plenty of suspects: Mikhail Gorbachev, who feared it; Democrats, who thought it a waste of money; its most fervent supporters, whose exaggerated claims of its effectiveness made it ridiculous; technical difficulties; experts, who argued it would make the world more dangerous; and diplomats, who thought reaching an agreement with the Soviets was more valuable.

The coup de grace was delivered at the end of March by Paul Nitze, the Administration’s senior expert on arms control. An old and battle-scarred veteran of countless bureaucratic wars, he chose with care the exact moment to stick in the knife.

For the last six years, all his efforts to produce a coherent arms control policy have been thwarted by the militant cold warriors in the Pentagon, White House, and Congress. He clearly believes that things have now changed.

Before Christmas, the Pentagon tried to force the issue by getting the President to repudiate the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty with the Soviet Union (which Nitze himself had negotiated for the United States), and start deploying “star wars” immediately. The proposal has collapsed because of its technological foolishness and because of opposition in Congress, particularly by Senator Sam Nunn. Then Gorbachev sprang to life, said "star wars” would not interfere with arms control agreements, after all, and accepted the main American proposal for reducing nuclear weapons in Europe. There is now a real possibility of a serious arms control agreement, just the thing Reagan needs to end his term with credit

So Nitze published an article in the “Washington Post” ostensibly an answer to a mildly critical

piece by the former Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. In fact, Nitze’s target is the Secretary of Defence, Caspar Weinberger, and the "star wars” establishment.

“I disagree strongly with Kissinger’s proposal to commit now to S.D.I. deployment,” he wrote. “While the research programme has made great progress, it has yet to determine whether protective defensives would be survivable. Certainly there is nothing to be gained by deploying defences that could not survive an attack; in fact, such an action could be seriously destabilising. “We also do not know yet whether defences would be costeffective at the margin. Deploying defences that could be overcome more cheaply by proliferating offensives would only serve to encourage the Soviets to do just that, touching off a costly and destabilising offence-defence arms race.”

The phrase “cost-effective at the margin” is George Shultz’s. If a new weapons system cost the United States $2O billion, and the Soviet Union can counter it for $4 billion, then it is not worth the money.

Critics of “star wars,” from the beginning, have said they have been able to find a countermeasure for every weapon the Americans put into space. Those critics include Harold Brown, former Secretary of Defence and former director of the Livermore Laboratories where most of the “star wars” research is being conducted, and, on the other side, Andre Sakharov.

As for Nitze’s coy "I disagree strongly with Kissinger’s proposal ...” that’s a joke. He means Caspar Weinberger’s proposal. The Secretary of Defence and all his myrmidons have'been saying for months that “star wars” research has made so much progress that its first elements can be deployed in a few years’ time. There is some debate over why Weinberger and Co. climbed out on their limb. Last autumn, the man in charge of the “star wars” programme was saying

that it would be years before research yielded any worthwhile fruits. In fact, four years research had been so discouraging that some scientists involved in it were openly expressing doubts about the whole thing.

Perhaps Weinberger decided it was best to silence the doubters by claiming victory arid pressing ahead. It is an old Pentagon tradition that has lumbered the United States with scores of over-priced and inefficient weapons.

The trouble with deploying elements of “star wars” immediately is that the 1972 A.B.M. treaty specifically prohibits such an action. Weinberger therefore proposes to “reinterpret” the treaty. He even got the President to claim, at his last press conference, that a treaty designed to prohibit anti-ballistic missile weapons in fact permits the deployment of anti-ballistic missile weapons. Nitze, who knows better (he wrote the treaty), was in an embarrassing position. He could have resigned, or denounced Weinberger’s and the President’s ignorance or hypocrisy (it is hard to know which it was).

Neither gesture would have brought any nearer a real arms control agreement, which Nitze has the entirely honourable ambition to achieve. Like a good bureaucrat, he bided his time, waiting for the tide to turn. First, in November, in the wake of the Iran scandal, a new and highly competent national security adviser, Frank Carlucci, entered the White House. Then the “star warriors” had to admit that most of the supernew technologies they were investigating, lasers for instance, would not work. The only hope of hitting Soviet missiles as they blasted out of their silos was to have space stations in low orbit which, in effect, would throw stones at them. The trouble is the Soviets could build faster booster rockets, which would reach orbit in six minutes instead of the present 12, and the United States space stations could not react fast enough. Besides, the Soviets could as easily shoot down the space stations before launching their missiles. A technological limitation the “star warriors” have never resolved is that it must always be easier to shoot from

the ground at a space station in fixed orbit, than it can be to shoot from space at a rapidly accelerating rocket launched from the ground. Lastly, the computer specialists announced that they could not devise the programmes to control anything so complicated as “star wars.” All these technical difficulties were noted in Congress. One of the most vehement defenders of “star wars,” Richard Pearle, who does Weinberger’s thinking for him, admitted that it might not be possible to knock down more than a third of Soviet missiles. That does not sound cost effective — and Pearle has now thrown in the sponge and is resigning to write a novel.

Moscow noted it all, too, and concluded that "star wars” was not, after all, a threat to the Soviet Union. Until a month ago, most notably at the Reykjavik summit in October, Gorbachev insisted that any agreement on nuclear weapons depended on the United States abandoning “star wars.” Then he abruptly reversed himself.

Most of the pieces are now in place for a sharp reduction in

the number of nuclear weapons in Europe, and there is also a possibility for an agreement on sharply reducing the number of strategic missiles. But these agreements Will only be concluded if Ronald Reagan really wants them. For the last six years he has been incapable of making up his mind. William Satire, an exceptionally wellconnected columnist, reported on March 22 that Shultz and Weinberger had on occasion been so frustrated by Reagan’s indecision that they demanded jointly that he choose between them and allow the loser to resign. He did not. The muddle continued. Nitze’s article shows that he arid Shultz now believe the President will support them.

With “star wars” shunted to one side, their negotiators in Geneva can get on with the real business of wrapping up the proposed I.N.F. treaty (on intermediate range nuclear forces in Europe), and perhaps even the S.T.A.R.T. (strategic arms) treaty — and Gorbachev can come to Washington to sign before the end of the year. Copyright—London Observer Service.

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