Empty Promise: The Growing Case Against Star Wars, and: Star Wars: Suicide or Survival? (review)

214 SAIS REVIEW indeed, all critics of the government, even within the Catholic church, are "spokesmen" for the communist insurrection. My Story, written in English, tells the American public what it wants to hear: regardless of the odds, and irrespective of his faults, José Napoleón Duarte is the single best hope for El Salvador. As the myth goes, the details are unimportant ; as long as Duarte remains in office, the country is better off. Americans have seen more than one presidential myth fall by the wayside. Perhaps an informed reading of My Story will begin to unveil one more. Empty Promise: The Growing Case Against Star Wars. By The Union of Concerned Scientists. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1986. 230 pp. $7.95/paper. Star Wars; Suicide orSurvival? By Alun Chalfont. Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, 1985. 160 pp. $16.95/cloth. Reviewed by George L. Faux, M.A. candidate, SAIS. President Reagan's proposed Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) is a blueprint for the most comprehensive restructuring of the U.S. military network since the deployment of the atomic bomb. A long-term, futuristic plan to put missile defenses in space that would take years to develop and billions of dollars to deploy, SDI has spawned intense academic and political debate around the globe. Questions about SDI are as complex as the system itself: Does the United States have the technical capability to develop such an elaborate defense system? Is SDI legally and morally sound? What will SDI do to the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) and the balance of power between the United States and the Soviet Union? Participants in the debate have struggled to produce definitive answers. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) produced Empty Promise in the hope of answering the nagging questions surrounding SDI. Nine members of UCS have contributed to a book that seeks to refute the initiative's political, strategic, and technical justifications. The Union's most convincing arguments by far concern SDIs technical aspects. The acknowledged experience and expertise of the authors lend considerable credence to their arguments. Robert Zirkle contends that most analysts overlook the necessity for SDI to operate as a system. A complex of lasers, sensors , and computers would all have to intermesh quickly and efficiently for the system to work. Military command and control, decisionmaking hierarchy, warning and intelligence components, and response procedures would all have to be linked together to produce an effective defense. A web-like SDI system would be vulnerable in two distinct ways, according to Zirkle. First, the command and control apparatus of the system would be vulnerable to a preemptive nuclear attack. Destruction of the heart of the system BOOK REVIEWS 215 would leave the remainder unorganized in the face of Soviet aggression. Second , the coupled nature of the system would increase geometrically the possibilities for error, whether by a person or machine. In 1980 a faulty computer chip caused a false alarm that sent U.S. forces on alert against a Soviet attack. A complex SDI system would be far more vulnerable to such technical difficulties. While SDIs software component raises serious reservations about a ballistic missile defense system in general, other problems would surface even if the software flaws were corrected. The union contends that SDI could not even function as a limited defensive system without escalating tensions and spawning counteractive weapons systems. The Soviet Union would have several response options, ranging from the modification of current systems to the development of a new generation of weapons. Missiles might be hardened against laser attack or redesigned to be more difficult to track and destroy, taxing the capability of a space-based system. Deployed satellites would be vulnerable to a saturation attack by antisatellite (ASAT) weapons already developed by the Soviet Union. The capabilities of ASATs can only increase in the future, leading to an escalation of countermeasures that would be costly and possibly ineffective as the defenses could be overwhelmed by a greater number of ASATs. This is the paradox that faced antiballistic missiles (ABMs), a problem for which technology has no solution ; a strategy designed to overwhelm defenses is limited only by the size of a country's budget...