Below are the first 10 and last 10 pages of uncorrected machine-read text (when available) of this chapter, followed by the top 30 algorithmically extracted key phrases from the chapter as a whole.
Intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text on the opening pages of each chapter.
Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.
Do not use for reproduction, copying, pasting, or reading; exclusively for search engines.
OCR for page 19
The impact of Defenses on
Offensive Reduction Regimes
Spu rgeon M. Keeny, A r.
The Reykjavik Summit demon-
strated clearly, if there was any doubt, that strategic defenses have
a critical impact on the attempt to achieve substantial reductions in
offensive strategic systems. Although there were some remarkable
discussions and considerable agreement at Reykjavik, when President
Reagan was faced with a choice between a strategic defense and (leep
reductions, he chose strategic defense. in the same sense, you might
say that, when faced with strategic defenses as a price for deep
reductions, General Secretary Gorbachev chose not to make a deal.
It is true, as Deputy Secretary of Defense Fred Ikle and Dr.
Wolfgang Panofsky have said cluring the seminar, that Reykjavik
recorded an agreement in principle to the concept of 50 percent
reductions in strategic weapons. Yet both sides actually had these
positions on the table before Reykjavik. It was therefore more
significant that they made notable progress in resolving some of the
many difficult problems that result from the fact that the forces of
the two sides are very asymmetric.
There were a number of additional issues, as Dr. Panofsky's
Figure ~ indicates, that remained to be resolved. But in the final
19
OCR for page 20
20
REYKJA VIK AND BEYOND
analysis, the U. S. position at Reykjavik was that in order to consent
to these deep reductions, the ABM treaty shouic! be amended in a
manner that would allow unlimited development and testing of
strategic defenses in the immediate future and that wouIc! convert a
treaty of unlimited duration to one that terminates! at a fixes! date
10 years in the future. These were the points that the Soviet Union
would not accept.
What was the reason for the Soviet position? Was it simply an
effort to interfere with our development efforts for strategic defense,
or were there rational, legitimate military concerns? Trying to
analyze this problem is extremely difficult because of the confusion
that exists at present as to what the SDI is all about.
As you may recall, in March 1983 when President Reagan initiated
the program, he held out the vision of an essentially impregnable
shield that would make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete."
This vision remains the official objective of the program and is
certainly ascribed to by President Reagan and Secretary of Defense
Casper Weinberger. But beyond that, there is a vast range of views,
even within the government.
For example, General Abrahamson, director of the Strategic
Defense Initiative Organization, and other officials closely related to
the SDI program emphasize the concept of partial defense, either as
an end in itself or possibly as a stepping stone to an essentially
impregnable or highly effective defense in some distant future. On
the other hand, during the seminar, Secretary Ikle suggested a more
modest objective: a system effective against the rather small threat
that could exist when there were no ballistic missiles but only the
residual problem of clandestine missiles or possibly a breakout from
a treaty regime.
There are also more pragmatic approaches. The Attorney General
has recently called for an early deployment with the purpose of
"getting something up there," in his words, so as to lock in future
administrations to a strategic defense program, whatever its objec-
tives might be. Anti there is another school of thought in and out
of the government that has no goal in mind but looks on the
program as a bargaining chip. This school emphasizes that, to the
extent we can expect any progress in arms control, it wit} clepend
on the Soviet reaction to the uncertain threat of a defense system.
OCR for page 21
21
IMPACT OF DEFENSES ON OFFENSIVE REDUCTION
I think you will finch there is yet another school that looks on the
SDI as part of an economic warfare against the Soviet Union with
the objective of engaging the Soviet Union in a high-technology
military competition. This school believes the United States has a
substantial long-term advantage in this competition that will absorb
Soviet capabilities in high technology ant! prevent the Soviet Union
from becoming a greater threat to us in a broader economic sense
by holding down any changes in their society that might make it a
more effective competitor.
These different approaches demand! very different technologies,
which I am not going to discuss today. The prospects of these
technologies have been addressee! by others. There is an excellent
paper by Harold Brown in Foreign Affairs (Vol. 64, No. 3, pp. 435-
454, 1986) that discusses the current status and overall timetable of
various technical approaches. The most recent input to this analysis
is the American Physical Society report that was released on April
23, 1987. The report explores in great detail the status of the exotic
technologies that were at one time to have been the focus of the
SD} program.
There are obviously tremendous differences between a system that
is 100 percent effective, 99 percent effective, 50 percent effective, or
10 percent effective. But it is precisely these differences and the
resulting uncertainties that produce the tension between strategic
defenses and real or perceived military requirements for offensive
forces.
One can, for example, imagine a system that might be 50 percent
effective, but one cannot assess it as being the same as a 50 percent
reduction in offensive forces. The difference arises from the fact that
a military planner must consider worst-case scenarios and wants to
have reasonably high condolence in his war plans. If there are no
strategic defenses on both sides, the military planner knows how to
execute a first strike, or preemptive attack, and can make some
reasonable estimates of his ability to retaliate with his secure,
surviving forces after a first strike by his adversary.
But in the absence of any hard facts on the capabilities of future
defense systems, a military planner will credit his opponent's future
high-technology systems with potentially high capabilities. This wild
be true even if the military planner really suspects, or thinks he
OCR for page 22
22
REYKJA VIK AND BEYOND
knows, that in practice the adversary's defense system would have
little effectiveness and would probably collapse totally under a
massive attack. A military planner concerned with ensuring his
ability to retaliate after absorbing a major counterforce first strike
would understandably emphasize a worst-case assessment. A na-
tionwicle defense system, whatever its effectiveness, would clearly
operate best against a so-called ragged retaliatory strike, in which
the retaliatory force had been reduced in its size by a counterforce
attack and also reduced in its effectiveness by disorganization in
timing, tactics, and possibly its target coverage.
Looking back in history, when the Pentagon planners were first
reacting to the Moscow ABM system in the mid-1960s, there were
estimates that if such a system were deployer! by the Soviet Union
on a nationwide basis, the U.S. ability to retaliate in the mid- to
late 1970s might essentially shrink to zero. At the same time, ~ think
most of the technical community assessing the Moscow system at
the time had a very low opinion of the emerging Soviet defense
system's capabilities, but it was impossible to quantify the system's
effectiveness. Consequently, there was a tendency to assume for
purposes of calculations that it just might work. This uncertain
future threat had a major impact on military procurement. In
particular, it was an important, perhaps the main, driving factor in
the decision to go to multiple independently targetable reentry
vehicles (MIRVs) to expand the firepower of our existing missile
forces.
As evident from lohn Steinbruner's description of the CISAC
study and some of our calculations, the present concept of deterrence
involves a very large number of targets. Nevertheless, as he pointed
out, the size of our present stockpile is so large that given mutual
reductions, one could reduce 50 percent or even 75 percent of our
existing strategic forces and still maintain essentially the same target
coverage. Moreover, such a reduction would maintain the same
extended deterrent directed not only at deterrence in the normally
accepted sense but also in the sense of preventing the Soviets from
sustaining their war effort in the field on the assumption that the
Soviets could do this even in the face of the loss of their society.
Some sample calculations indicated that a defense of 50 percent
effectiveness would certainly not defeat an attack with the current
stockpile employing the current targeting philosophy. It also could
OCR for page 23
23
IMPACT OF DEFENSES ON OFFENSIVE REDUCTION
not defeat such an attack if there had been mutual 50 percent
reductions in strategic offensive forces. But the problem is any
system that you can credit as being 50 percent effective would be
such an elaborate, nationwide system that it would probably be
perceived by nervous military planners on the other side as possibly
having a 90 percent capability, in the right circumstances, or even a
99 percent effectiveness, particularly against an uncertain worst-case
retaliation. At these higher levels of defense, the military would not
have high confidence in carrying out their retaliatory strike, given
the present concepts of extended deterrent war plans.
The CISAC analysis discussed by Dr. Steinbruner essentially
assumes this broader deterrent concept that, among other things,
comprises attacks on a large number of military and command and
control targets and on assets necessary to continue the Soviet war
effort. ~ personally believe that a much smaller target set directed
solely at economic targets would have the same deterrent significance.
Such targets are essentially population targets, but as Dr. Steinbruner
pointed out, the much more extended deterrent war plan also covers
and has the same impact on population. In the late 1940s and early
1950s I was involved to some extent in war-plan development in
the Air Force. In those days, when initially there were on the order
of only 100 Nagasaki/Hiroshima-yield weapons, we thought we had
not only a very powerful deterrent but that we could also very
effectively impede the ability of the Soviet Union to conduct its war
effort because of the high confidence that these weapons could be
delivered on their targets.
With the vast expansion of the number and yields of weapons,
the categories of targets that could be targeted has grown and grown
and grown. Our study concluded that ~ 00 so-called equivalent
megatons would certainly be enough to inflict devastating damage
on Soviet society. This is not surprising because 100 equivalent
megatons means 100 one-megaton weapons or the number of
weapons that would have the equivalent destructive power of 100
one-megaton weapons. Such an attack would cause some 20 million-
40 million Soviet prompt fatalities, and I am sure at least twice that
many delayed fatalities from untreated casualties and secondary
effects. As Dr. Panofsky pointed out, a single Trident 2 submarine
with D-5 missiles would have more than this amount of equivalent
megatonnage on board.
OCR for page 24
24
REYKJA VIK AND BEYOND
This same level of damage might be achieved with the present
stockpile 10,000-15,000 strategic weapons against even a 98-99
percent effective defense. But this would involve quite a different
targeting strategy in which extremely heavy firepower might be
concentrated against the defended side's highest value economic/
societal targets. For example, with present stockpiles, as many as
100 warheads could be directed against each major target. This
would certainly accomplish the destructive objective.
Such a change in target strategy, however, would be disconcerting
to the military and, again, would be subject to great uncertainties;
for example, what does 99 percent really mean? Of course, the
probable outcome of such a targeting doctrine would be absolutely
disastrous to both countries because under that level of attack the
defense systems would, in all likelihood, collapse, and there would
not even be any rubble left to bounce for any of the urban areas in
the two countries.
These comments illustrate the fact that a defense-oriented strategy
requires not only an incredibly effective ABM system (as well as an
effective air-defense system, which we have not as yet mentioned)
but also radical reductions in offensive weapons as well.
As ~ have pointed out, however, these reductions cannot take
place without the perceived loss of deterrence long before achieving
a known level of defense. This is the problem of a transition point
from an offensive to a defensive strategy. To my knowledge, no
one has even come up with a concrete proposal as to how you walk
the offensive forces down to this point while developing this highly
uncertain, unpredictable defense on the other hancI. This includes
the President's proposal at Reykjavik, to which Secretary Ikle
referred, to reduce ballistic missiles to zero.
Let me pursue this a bit further and emphasize that in approaching
this transition point in which you move from deterrence to no
possibility of nuclear attack, there is going to be a wide band of
situations in which a preemptive strike may appear to one side, or
possibly both sides, as an acceptable gamble. This would be partic-
ularly true in a situation of high tension in a severe crisis, a situation
in which there appeared to be a high probability that nuclear war
would occur. It might be considered an acceptable gamble if one
side felt that its defense was sufficiently effective to have a reasonable
chance of actually defending against the degraded offense of the
. . .
OCR for page 25
25
IMPACT OF DEFENSES ON OFFENSIVE REDUCTION
other side. The force of this logic would increase if the levels of the
other side's offense had been radically reduced from present levels.
~ think the closest thing to any proposal that has come up has
been the President's, I suppose rather offhand, idea that the United
States should share its strategic defense technology with the Soviet
Union. But ~ do not think anybody, including Secretary Weinberger,
has felt that this was a credible proposal, given the present adversarial
relationship of the two sides. ~ think the best way to describe this
whole problem was put forward by the President's arms control
advisor Paul Nitze, who, when pressed on this issue, said the
transition problem from an offense- to a defense-oriented strategy
would be "very sticky."
In this business, there is considerable experimental evidence to
consider. In the late 1960s, when the United States became concerned
that the Soviet Union might be contemplating a nationwide ABM
defense, we did not abandon our ballistic missiles. On the contrary:
we made a decision, largely driven by the potential Soviet deploy-
ment, to MIRV all of our ballistic missiles and to take other relatively
simple measures, such as putting chaff on ballistic missiles to confuse
Soviet radars. With those responses the military felt confident they
could penetrate the Soviet ABM system.
Today, there is a fundamental contradiction in the view of our
leadership on the issue of strategic defense. While pursuing the
concept of strategic defense as the answer to the threat of nuclear
weapons, they are extremely concerned with the possibility of what
would happen if the Soviets had a strategic defense.
There are yards and yards of quotations, but ~ think one that gets
to the heart of the matter is found in the January 1985 White House
white paper on the SDT that described what would happen if the
Soviet Union deployed a nationwide ABM defense: "Were they (the
Soviets) to do so, as they could, deterrence would collapse and we
wouIc3 have no choice between surrender and suicide." A little later,
Secretary Weinberger, in his famous letter to the President on the
eve of the 1985 Geneva Summit, in the context of the Krasnoyarsk
radar, made the statement that "even a probable Soviet territorial
defense would require us to increase the number of our offensive
forces and their ability to penetrate Soviet defenses to assure that
our operational plans could be executed."
Now, in this whole debate the Joint Chiefs of Staff have remained
OCR for page 26
26
REYKJA VIK AND BEYOND
remarkably quiet. One cannot help but wonder what the Joint Chiefs
would say if the Soviets either had made the original SDI proposals
or were to accept the U.S. proposal. If the Soviets were to say,
"Let's have deep reductions and open the gates for an all-out strategic
defense race," I would be most interested in how the joint Chiefs
would respond.
The uncertainty of these exchange ratios of offensive weapons in
the face of an uncertain defense contrasts sharply with the rather
straightforward and relatively cost-effective things that the offense
can do in response to a strategic defense to maintain high condolence
in its ability to cleter uncler the broadest possible range of circum-
stances. I will not go into these in any detail because you are all
probably familiar with them, but I will just identify the general
approaches. The best way to defeat defenses is by using your existing
resources to attack the extreme vuInerabilities ofthe defensive system.
The vulnerability of prime radars was one of the reasons we
abandoned the Safeguard/Sentinel approach in the late 1960s and
early 1970s. Space-based defense components present the ultimate
attractive targets that could cause the defensive system dependent
on them to collapse, even in advance of hostilities.
Another approach is to increase firepower by buiTcling more
missiles, more MIRVs, more decoys to simply overwhelm the
defensive system. Another approach is just technological innovation,
which can anticipate and defeat the operation of a defense system.
This path leads us to such ideas as fast-burn boosters and other
devices that could completely defeat, at much less cost, a very long
lead-time, finely tuned defense system. Finally, there is the whole
area of circumvention. If one were concerned about the ability of
one's ballistic missiles to penetrate a ballistic missile defense system,
one would put greater emphasis on air-launchec3 ant! sea-launched
cruise missiles, or possibly on other types of attack.
In conclusion, let me say that ~ believe that efforts to achieve a
nationwide strategic defense are not compatible either in theory or
in practice with a program of deep reductions in strategic offensive
forces. In fact, I believe that the SD} program will, if pursued, result
in an increase in the quantity and quality of strategic offensive forces.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
offensive forces
