A Different Approach To Strategic Missiles, SDI And Arms Control

Citing concerns about the strategic benefits and significant opportunity costs associated with the Bush Administration’s decisions to deploy mobile versions of both the MX and Midgetman ICBMs and to cut SDI funding, the Center for Security Policy today called for a shift in U.S. policy and recommended an alternative defense package.

"Robust strategic deterrence will require in the future a different approach than that just proposed by the Administration," Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., the Center’s director said today. "It will entail the deployment of defenses as, among other things, a key means of ensuring the survivability of offensive systems. It will also require the adoption of an ICBM basing configuration that is both militarily effective and, in the event of a Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), verifiable."

Such an approach is detailed in a paper entitled An Assessment of Future Requirements for U.S. Strategic Forces and Arms Control to be released shortly by the Center. Its recommendations include: a call for deployment of ICBMs with limited transportability in multiple, austere silos; urgent deployment of the first phases of strategic defenses as a means of preferentially protecting those silos containing missiles; and insistence that road- and rail-mobile missiles be banned in any future START accord.

"Unfortunately, the Administration’s decision to mimic the USSR’s ICBM forces is as unlikely to produce survivable U.S. missiles — given the very different societal and security conditions in which the two sides’ systems must operate — as it is likely to legitimize unverifiable mobile weapons with which the Soviets can expect to cheat on START," Gaffney noted.

Gaffney also expressed concern about the deep cut being proposed in research and development on strategic defenses. "The SDI program would have been funding-constrained, not technology-limited, under the last Reagan budget. The effect of a further $1 billion cut in SDI from the FY1991 plan and $7 billion deleted over the next five years will be to drag out — and increase the costs of — the acquisition of effective strategic defenses. Even with the new and welcome emphasis it will give the "Brilliant Pebbles" concept, the revised program is simply inadequate in light of the technological opportunities and the national requirement for a deployed SDI.