Notes and Comment

THE recent report by the President’s Commission on Strategic Forces—otherwise known as the Scowcroft Commission, after its chairman, Brent Scowcroft, who is a retired Air Force general—states that the aim of American military efforts “should be to have an overall program that will so confound, complicate, and frustrate the efforts of Soviet strategic war planners that, even in moments of stress, they could not believe they could attack our ICBM forces effectively.” The policymakers may or may not have succeeded in confounding Soviet “war planners,” but they have definitely confounded any members of the American public who may wish to try to make sense of their own government’s strategic nuclear policies, which are now in a state of confusion and disarray that all but defies description. For whatever logic may once have guided those policies has now undergone a public breakdown. The Scowcroft Commission was formed to solve a problem—the so-called “window of vulnerability” presented by the supposed ability of the Soviet Union to destroy the land-based strategic missiles of the United States in a first strike. But when the report appeared it turned out that the commission, instead of offering any solution to the problem, had simply erased it, by finding, in effect, that it didn’t exist. The components of the American strategic forces, including the land-based ones, they said, would become vulnerable only at the end of the century, if then. That view, of course, was in clear contradiction to the view of Ronald Reagan, who both as a Presidential candidate and as President had referred to the alleged Russian advantage as a virtual national emergency, requiring, among other things, his election to office and the passage of hugely increased defense budgets. And now the emergency was over—not because of policies and programs but because of a pronouncement.

If the commission had stopped there, its report would at least have been consistent within itself, for if, as some critics have said all along, the window of vulnerability is a delusion, then there is obviously no need of any remedy for it. The commission, however, having disposed of the problem, went on to propose a solution anyway: not, to be sure, a solution to the discarded window of vulnerability but, rather, a solution to another problem— how to provide the President with some new threat against the Soviet Union which could serve as a bargaining chip in strategic-arms negotiations. At the heart of all this strategic twisting and turning, of course, was the MX missile, which for many years had been put forward as the best means of closing the window but now, having lost that justification, was supplied by the commission with another—use as a bargaining chip. Thus, even as the original problem vanished, its solution— the missile—endured. Yet at the same time the commission, as though tacitly acknowledging the dubiousness of this decision, struck off in an entirely new direction, and proposed the development of still another missile, which would be the opposite of the MX in almost every respect. The MX is a behemoth among missiles, capable of carrying ten large nuclear warheads that can destroy Soviet missiles in their silos. The new missile, on the other hand, would be a tiny missile, capable of carrying only one small warhead. The differences in the two missiles reflect two different, and conflicting, nuclear strategies. The virtue of the MX, if one can call it a virtue, is that it would provide the United States with a first-strike capacity for knocking out Soviet missiles which would match a similar capacity that the strategists believe the Soviets to possess. But while the missile empowers its possessor to launch a first strike it also tempts a first strike from the Soviets, since it offers them the possibility of knocking out ten warheads with just one or two. The logic appears to be that if they have a first-strike capacity, then we must have one also, even though, as a matter of policy, we have disavowed any intention of launching a strategic first strike. The MX, accordingly, is an aggressive, “destabilizing” weapon, which both enables and invites a first strike, and whose only purpose is to be bargained away in exchange for a similar reduction on the Soviet side. The virtue of the small missile, on the other hand, is that if it should be deployed in the hundreds or thousands it would present the Soviets with a forbiddingly large number of targets in the event that they started contemplating a first strike. The small missile is thus both defensive and “stable.” The commission, then, seemed to point the nation in two opposite strategic directions with its two missiles—toward the development of a clearly offensive, first-strike posture, and toward a defensive, purely retaliatory capacity. (It was in trying to resolve this evident conflict that the commission spoke of the need to “confound” the Soviet “war planners.”) And, as if all this were not confusion enough, the President, in a proposal that seemed to run counter to both strategies, had recently put forward his “Star Wars” scheme for defending the nation and the world against all missiles, large and small.

Meanwhile, efforts to forestall through negotiation the development of these and other nuclear weapons were apparently foundering. To judge from testimony in Congress by our country’s chief negotiators, the talks on strategic and intermediate-range weapons are at a standstill. William H. Kincade, the executive director of the nonpartisan Arms Control Association, testified to a House of Representatives subcommittee that under the present Administration the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency “would be an international joke, were it not that the situation is so tragic.” And the Agency’s new director, Kenneth Adelman, has little expertise or standing in the field of arms control. There may be some underlying rationale that would make sense of all this, but, if so, it has yet to be revealed to the public, which is left with the impression that strategic nuclear theory has become a world of mirages—shifting, phantasmal, unreal—in which yesterday’s “fact” is today’s myth, today’s feverish rumor is tomorrow’s “fact,” and solemn “doctrines” are taken up and discarded with the frequency and unpredictability of fashions in clothes. The only constant, it appears, is the relentless invention and production of the weapons themselves, which now proliferate as though according to a schedule of their own, without regard for the reasonings and hopes of human beings, whose existence the weapons increasingly imperil. ♦