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Editors' Note I T h e United States faces critical choices as it modernizes its strategic nuclear forces. Whether to build the B-2 stealth bomber has emerged as an important issue, but it must be viewed in the context of overall strategic modernization, the ongoing START negotiations, fiscal constraints on the defense budget, and changes in the Soviet Union. This issue of International Security accordingly presents several perspectives on the future of the U.S. bomberforce. Michael Brow.n, senior research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, argues thaf considerations of survivability and cost-effectiveness will become increasingly important in assessing the role of the penetrating bomber in the 1990s. Many of the bomber's hitherto unique advantages will be offered by other strategic systems; Soviet SLBM advances will make U.S. bombers more vulnerable to surprise attack; and the soaring costs of the B-IB and B-2 will impose heavy burdens on the U.S. defense budget. Brown concludes that the B-2 should be canceled, the Bl-B retained as a cruise missile carrier, and the Midgetman missile deployed to provide a survivable and affordable deterrent in the 1990s. Iasper Welch, former U.S. Air Force assistant deputy chief of staff for research, development, and acquisition, argues that stealth technology offers important strategic benefits. Welchpoints out that becausestealth bombers do not have to avoid or suppress active air defenses, they can, for example, search out mobile targets and devote more of their payloads to deliverable weapons; stealthy aircraft would also be useful for theater and conventional missions. These new and enhanced capabilities, Welch concludes , may well justify the incremental costs imposed by stealth technology. Iohn Lepingwell of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign points out that U.S. stealth bombers and stealthy cruise missiles threaten to render obsolete an air defense system in which the Soviet Union has invested approximately $400 billion. After reviewing the evolution and capabilitiesof Soviet air defenses, Lepingwell argues that the B-2 will probably not stimulate a crash program to modernize Soviet air defenses. lncremental modernization is more likely, combined with offers to reduce air defenses in exchange for limits on the B-2 and stealthy cruise missiles. He concludes that both superpowers might benefit from a reduction in the air offense-defense competition. In May 1989, Mikhail Gorbachevannounced that Soviet defense spending amounts to 9 percent of its gross national product, but the CIA has long estimated the figure at 15-1 7 percent. Franklyn Holzman of Tufts University identifies important methodological errors that have inflated the CIA estimate. He speculates that the CIA'S estimates may reflect a political compromise with the Defense Intelligence Agency, which has traditionally presented higher estimates of Soviet militay spending on the International Security, Fall 1989 (Vol. 14, No. 2) 0 1989 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 3 International Security 14:2 I 4 basis of alternative methods that Holzman finds even more dubious. After correcting for CIA methodological errors and different calculations of GNP, Holzman finds that Soviet military spending is 8-10 percent of GNP. Barton Bernstein of Stanford University examines a little-known 1952 episode in which the Panel of Consultants on Disarmament, a respected group of advisers to President Truman, sought to block the first test of the U.S. hydrogen bomb and to seek a U.S.-Soviet agreement to prevent thermonuclear tests. Bernstein suggests that such an agreement would have been desirable and might have been negotiable. The bureaucratic pressures to test the hydrogen bomb were too powerful for the test ban idea to succeed, however, and the thermonuclear age proceeded inexorably forward. The image of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain as he returned from Munich promising "peacefor our time" has strongly influenced U.S. foreign policy. Statesmen and scholars alike have held that the lesson of Munich is that appeasement never pays. Robert Beck of the University of Virginia reviews the five-decade historiography of Munich and argues that the traditional lessons of Munich should be reconsidered in light of recent historical scholarship. Chamberlain was not as naive as previously supposed, and his diplomacy...

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