Preserving the ABM Treaty: A Critique of the Reagan Strategic Defense Initiative

Preserving the ABM Treaty A Critique of the Reagan Strategic Defense Initiative Sidney D. Drell, Philip J. Faulty, and David Holloway I n his speech on March 23, 1983, President Reagan offered a vision of escape from grim reliance on the threat of retaliation to deter aggression and prevent nuclear war: “What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our soil or that of our allies?” The way to realize this vision, he said, was to ”embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive. . . . I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.”’ This vision appeals to powerful moral sentiments. The impulse to look to our weapons and armed forces to defend ourselves rather than threaten others is a natural one, and is not new. At a press conference in London on February 9, 1967, the Soviet Premier A.N. Kosygin said: ”I think that a defensive system which prevents attack is not a cause of the arms race. . . . its purpose is not to kill people but to save human lives.”2Two years later President kchard Nixon, in explaining his reluctant decision to forgo a nationwide anti-ballistic missile (ABM) defense in favor of the limited SafeSidney Drell is Deputy Director of the Linear Accelerator Center and Co-Director of the Center for International Security and Arms Control, both at Stanford University. Philip Farley is Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford and former Deputy Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. David Holloway is Senior Research Associate at the Center for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford and Reader in Politics at the Universityof Edinburgh. This is a much abridged version of The Reagan Strategic Defense Initiative: A Technical. Political and Arms Control Assessment, by Sidney D. Drell, Philip J. Farley, and David Holloway, published by the Center for International Security and Arms Control, Stanford University, in 1984. Many people helped in preparing that Report, and the authors would like to express here, in abridged form, the gratitude which is acknowledged at greater length in the Report. 1. The N m York Times, March 24, 1983, p. 20. 2. Pruuda, February 11, 1967.For a discussion of Kosygin’s statement, see Raymond L. Garthoff, ”BMD and East-West Relations,” in Ashton B. Carter and David N. Schwartz, eds., Ballistic Missile Defense (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1984),pp. 295-296. International Security, Fall 1984 (Vol. 9, No.2) 0162-2889/&4/020051-40$02.50/1 0 1984by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 51 International Security I52 p a r d system, said that "although every instinct motivates me to provide the American people with complete protection against a major nuclear attack, it is not now within our power to do SO."^ The ABM Treaty of 1972 did not reflect any lack of awareness on the part of the United States or the Soviet Union of the arguments for strategic defense. But however desirable nationwide ABM defenses might be in the abstract, they were judged in the early 1970s to be futile, destabilizing, and futile because in a competition between offensive missiles and defensive systems, the offense would win, especially against urban areas; destabilizing, first, because they would speed up the arms race, as both sides developed and deployed not only defensive systems, but also offensive systems to overpower, evade, or attack and disable the opposing ABM defense ; second, because each side would fear the purpose or the capability of the other's ABM (especially against a weakened retaliatory strike), and in a crisis these fears might create pressure to strike first; costly, because the offensivecountermeasures to maintain the deterrent threat of intolerable retaliatory damage appeared not only capable of...