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Missile Defense

Russian military leaders have expressed concern about US plans for a national missile defense system. Will defense technology be limited by possibilities for a strategic imbalance? Is this just SDI all over again?

rshowalter - 04:11pm May 7, 2001 EST (#3424 of 3427)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

let me recopy 2999: rshowalter 5/2/01 1:41pm which responds to your 2997. I believe, now, that a good deal of it should be "common ground."

gisterme 5/2/01 1:09pm "Okay, Robert, I'll bite. What are the lies, the missteps and who is the very small extraconstitutional group?"

Lies:

The United States, from the time of the Eisenhower administration on, had a policy of threatening - in effect, scaring, the Soviet Union into a situation where long-term collapse of the Soviet Union would occur. The Russians were vulnerable to this, and we knew it. We scared them to the edge of paralysis, and put their system under pressure that, over years, they could not withstand.

To do that, there had to be a great deal of deception and manipulation in our dealing with the Soviets -- it was in our interest to let them feel that we were, continuously and actively, plotting first strikes -- something that they did believe.

To make the strategy work, the United States government also had to overstate, continuously and often radically the extent of the Soviet threat to both the American people and to Congress, which, very, very often, funded the US defense system under false pretenses. ( The Soviet postion, monstrous as the society was in many ways, was usually defensive --- we were practically never "outgunned" any militarily significant way, from 1955 on. )

There were many lies involved with this policy. Perhaps they were lies in a good cause, and justified. But a tremendous amount of deception, over long duration, and much manipulation of Americans in ways inconsistent with American ideals and institutions.

Missteps:

There were a number of missteps, but I feel this one was the largest: .... When the Soviet Union did collapse, we did not turn our nuclear threats off, and the Russians have been near-paralyzed, as a result of psychological warfare that should have been ended, since.

The very small extraconstitutional group:

To run the very long term policy of getting the Soviet Union to break, by maintaining very high fear levels, and at the same time to minimize tensions on our own side, and to keep threats we were making, that our own people would not tolerate, from being known, a small group of military and CIA officers, initially very much influenced by Curtis LeMay, set up a long-term organization. The organization was extraconstitutional and in some ways informal, and very largely independent of political control. After the Kennedy administration, it was not entirely under the control of the President of the United States. At sometimes, almost independent of presidential will. The President did, in more than name, control the decision to actually fire nuclear weapons (LeMay had tried to take that unto himself) but LeMay and related people and their successors did, as a practical matter, control most nuclear policy, with little or no effective supervision, or really capable financial accounting.

On these threads there's a good deal more detail, and I'll go after it -- but that's the gist of it.

There were reasons why this happened. Some of them good reasons at the time.

But the nuclear terror is an American invention and development. We've used threat and terror, very effectively, for a long time. If we took action, and acknowledged what we did, then effective nuclear disarmament would be possible -- at least to the point where nuclear risks were no larger than many of the natural disaster risks we cope with.