MAKE THIS WORLD NUCLEAR-FREE:SCRAP ALL NUCLEAR WEAPONS - DEFENCE VERSUS OFFENCE IN THE NUCLEAR ARMS RACE

One thing has quickly led to another in what former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara has termed “the action-reaction phenomenon in the technology of weapons.” The development of the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) in the early 1950s led shortly to the development of a defence system against missiles (known as the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) system) in the mid- and late 1950s, and the ABM though in its infancy in turn led to the development of the MIRV to put multiple warheads on individual missiles in the mid-1960s.

                    During the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-69), the Sentinel defence system was proposed in 1967 in an election year to close another so-called “missile gap” (a leaf taken from Kennedy’s campaign in 1960). Sentinel was expressly conceived and designed to counter a non-existing Chinese missile threat.

                   Sentinel was to present a thin shield to thwart an imaginary Chinese missile attack in the 1970s. The Chinese were later to deploy their first ICBM (the DF-5) in late 1981 when they had more than 300 nuclear weapons as compared with over 23,000 nukes in the American arsenal.

                  Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense (1961-68), said Sentinel had a threefold mission: (1) to provide a thin “area defense” of the entire United States against a missile attack by China, (2) to protect against an accidental launch of a Soviet missile, and (3) to provide “as a concurrent benefit,” a limited defence of US land-based Minuteman ICBMs against a Soviet strike.

                 Scientists opposed to the urban-based Sentinel system brought the issue to the American public. The leading lights among them included the distinguished pair of Hans Bethe, a Nobel laureate and wartime director of the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos, and Richard Garwin, another theoretical physicist and protégé of Enrico Fermi, who like Bethe had done work on the thermonuclear bomb.

                Citizen protests began promptly in Chicago where a few scientists from the Argonne National Laboratory spearheaded the public campaign against the ABM.

               On 14 March 1969 Richard Nixon, newly sworn in as the US president (1969-74), announced that the ABM sites and radars would be removed from the cities to more remote locations. Renamed “Safeguard”, its primary purpose was to defend the Minutemen ICBMs (the first of which were deployed in 1963) against a preemptive Soviet strike.

                     Herbert York, former director of the Livermore Laboratory (a major centre for designing and developing nuclear weaponry), wrote in August 1969 that “Safeguard will safeguard nothing” in the field of US national security.

                       York pinpointed “the futility of searching for technical solutions to what is essentially a political problem, namely, the problem of national security…”

                      In condemning the Sentinel and justifying the rechristened Safeguard, the new Defense Secretary Melvin Laird stated in March 1969 that “the original Sentinel was potentially provocative. As such, it appeared to us (in the Nixon Administration) to be a step toward, rather than away from, an escalation of the arms race…”

                    According to the statistics compiled by Robert Norris and Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists, the Soviets nearly doubled their nuclear warheads from over 8,000 in 1967 to over 14,000 in 1972 when the two superpowers signed the ABM Treaty. Bethe and Garwin had foreseen that Sentinel “would inevitably stimulate a large increase in the Russian strategic offensive forces…” The US, however,  had nearly twice as many nuclear weapons as the Soviet Union in 1972.

                  Following Chairman Khrushchev’s abject humiliation in the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis which exposed the vulnerability of Moscow and other Soviet key targets to a devastating nuclear assault, and also in response to Sentinel’s predecessor Nike X (1962-67) which was never deployed, the Soviets developed and deployed the Galosh defence system around Moscow. And although the Soviet ABM was known to be rather rudimentary with fewer than 100 interceptors, the US responded by developing the MIRV to arm their new ICBMs with multiple warheads.

                The introduction of MIRV technology starting with the initial deployment in 1970 of the Minuteman III with three independently targetable warheads brought “the single most destabilizing element in the history of the nuclear arms competition.”

                In 1985 Henry Kissinger (US Secretary of State, 1973-77) told Micheal Charlton of BBC London in an interview: “Secretary McNamara did not want to build an anti-ballistic missile defence. He therefore developed the idea of a MIRV, arguing that with MIRV we could saturate any Soviet defence and that therefore there would be no strategic inequality if the Soviets had a defensive system and we did not…”

               The Soviets also developed their own MIRV and started deploying their super-monster Hydras with the SS-18 ICBM with 10 warheads in 1974 and the SS-19 with 6 warheads in 1975.

              “MIRV and its fratricidal counterpart ABM, the anti-ballistic missile, were respectively offence and defence, sword and shield,” Charlton has written. “Superficially they had transported this classical antithesis into the nuclear era. But given the enormous power of even a single nuclear weapon, the ancient discord of sword and shield were  adjudged unconvincing by Robert McNamara. It fell to Henry Kissinger to search for some common understanding of the proposition that, in the nuclear age, the adversary becomes in a sense partner in the avoidance of nuclear war as a political and moral necessity…”

                       Before the signing of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 1972, the Americans had to persuade the Soviet side that ABM development had destabilizing consequences. Both rivals then agreed that nation-wide deployment of the ABM system was futile, destabilizing, and costly.

                     As explained in Arms Control Today, July/August 1984: “Futile: because in a competition between defense system and offensive missiles with nuclear warheads, the offense would win, especially against populations and urban areas.

                    “Destabilising: because the arms race would be accelerated as both sides developed and deployed not only competing ABM systems, but also offsetting systems to overpower, evade, or attack and disable the opposing ABM system. Furthermore, each side would fear the purpose or the capability of the other’s ABMs (especially against a weakened retaliatory strike), and in a crisis these fears could bring mounting pressures for striking first. What strategic theorists refer to as arms race instability and crisis instability could both result.

                    “Costly: because both ABM development and deployment, and the buildup, modernization and diversification of offsetting offensive forces, must be purchased…”

                     On 23 March 1983, a decade after the signing of the ABM treaty, President Ronald Reagan (1981-89) called on American scientists to develop his so-called SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) to make nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” McNamara called the envisioned leak-proof defence system to replace offensive weapons by defensive weapons as “Star Wars I” which, he said, would not be technically feasible within the next several decades.

                     The combination of a partial defence system with offensive systems, he called “Star Wars II” which would appear to be aggressive to the Soviets and, he stressed, “that is a very great danger.”

                         Reagan’s SDI has since morphed into regular BMD (Ballistic Missile Defense) during the presidency of his avatar George W. Bush (2001-2009). Influenced much by neoconservative hawks in Washington, Bush scuppered the ABM treaty in 2002 to further develop the BMD.

                 Early June 2009, Lt-Gen Patrick O’Reilly, head of the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency, proudly told a missile defence conference in Washington that the US has fine-tuned its capability to shoot down long-range missiles launched by North Korea which had about a week earlier conducted its second nuclear test on May 25 after its debut in October 2006 (and its nuclear test on February 2013). That recalls what the old Sentinel had been supposedly tasked to do against a hypothetical attack by primitive Chinese missiles in the 1970s.

                The far-seeing physicist Herbert York tried vainly to drive home the point four decades ago that the solution of security is not technological, but essentially political.

                What Presidents Gorbachev and Reagan also vainly tried to achieve in the mid-and late-1980s, the answer is to be found in the political decision for total nuclear disarmament, without any defence system whether the SDI in Reagan’s time or currently the BMD inherited from Bush.

              “What is SDI for?” Gorbachev asked Reagan at their meeting in Moscow on 29 May 1988.

              “What missiles is it supposed to bring down if we eliminate all nuclear weapons?”

               Since the 1983 “Star Wars” speech of Reagan, the Pentagon has spent more than $200 billion in developing missile defense over the first two decades and about another $100 billion in the third decade to 2013. Just as the US military will most probably keep their nuclear weapons until the end of history, they will also keep on developing their missile defense to its ultimate realization – whatever it means.

              For an update, we take the liberty of quoting from the brief introduction in U.S. Ballistic Missile Defense co-authored by Jonathan Masters and Greg Bruno, and published on 1 May 2013:

             “U.S. missile defense systems are designed to protect the U.S. homeland, deployed military forces, and allies from limited ballistic missile attacks. The Pentagon originally sought development of ballistic missile defense (BMD) technology to counter the Soviet nuclear threat during the Cold War, but focus in the twenty-first century has shifted to defending and deterring potential strikes from regional actors, particularly Iran and North Korea.

            “In March 2013, the Pentagon announced it would shore up missile defenses on the U.S. west coast to guard against a growing North Korean threat, while effectively cancelling the final phase of plans to deploy missile interceptors in Europe over the next decade.

            “Proponents of BMD stress its role (essentially defense) in the projection of U.S. power abroad and its value as a deterrent (the prime attribute and virtue of nuclear weapons), while critics highlight BMD’s largely unproven technology and high costs.”

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           Whatever Reagan had said about making SDI to make nukes “impotent and obsolete”, the reality from the moment of its conception in his mind is apparently much more sinister and hostile to the fate of humankind.

           The presently-developing BMD is regarded as one of the essentials of the American military’s Vision 2020 for attaining the Holy Grail – total and overwhelming  military superiority, labeled as Full Spectrum Dominance (FSD).

           As envisioned, the nuclear spear is to provide a first-strike counterforce war-fighting capability while the nuclear shield will empower the Pentagon to strike any adversary with impunity, without any fear of retaliation from the other side.

          According to the US Space Command, the “emerging synergy of space superiority with land, sea and air superiority” will lead to Full Spectrum Dominance – to control, dominate and prevail “across the full range of military operations”, including nuclear war-fighting.

         With the National Missile Defense (NMD) using space systems for both defense and offense/precision strike, global surveillance/information dominance/superiority will be harnessed and synchronized to deliver a spaced-based global precision strike (GPS) capability. An American Dream, it’s quintessentially Reagan’s of 1983!

        Not everyone is convinced, however. American primacy or supremacy is not acceptable to either Russia or China. Nor is it relevant to the world of the 21^st century.

        Putin has said that Russia will continue to build up its military (having restored its nuclear parity with the US) – “not to threaten anyone” but “to feel safe…”

       Xi of China has said that a Sino-American war will be disastrous for the whole world. The message is clear enough.