Gen. Scowcroft Critical of ‘Stars Wars’ Program

In a sharp break with the Administration’s approach to arms control, Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, the man President Reagan chose to chair his MX Commission, has attacked the “Star Wars” proposal, which the White House has made a centerpiece of its defense budget.

According to Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser to President Gerald R. Ford, the proposal, which is officially known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, will seriously complicate the coming round of arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union.

“There are immense arms control implications because it has been difficult enough to negotiate simply strategic offensive weapons agreements. When you throw defense in, it obviously makes it immensely more complicated,” Scowcroft said in a telephone interview.

Scowcroft, the retired Air Force general who last year chaired the commission that Reagan named to evaluate U.S. strategic capabilities, was expanding on remarks scheduled to appear in Perspectives magazine, a publication of the Institute For National Strategy, the Los Angeles-based think-tank founded by former California Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr.

Scowcroft was responding to the magazine’s publication of a previous interview with presidential science adviser George Keyworth, who argued that the development of a strategic defense system is a necessary prelude to a reduction in the number of nuclear weapons.

“Effective arms control does not require defense,” Scowcroft argued. “I do not agree with Keyworth there.” In the magazine interview, Scowcroft added, “As a practical matter, it would be very difficult to induce the Soviets to reduce their offensive forces if they faced the prospect of a strategic defense for which they might need those offensive forces to penetrate.”

Citing the U.S. reaction to earlier Soviet efforts at a defensive system, Scowcroft said in the telephone interview that he disagrees with Keyworth’s assertion that defense would facilitate nuclear arms reduction.

“That is unlikely to be true,” he explained, because “the most reasonable reaction is quite the opposite. And that, in a sense, is what happened in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s when the Soviets moved toward building an ABM system. We increased our offensive forces and went to MIRVs (missiles with multiple independently targeted warheads) in order to maintain the ability to penetrate a defense. I’m not saying the other reaction couldn’t take place, but I think it’s not--and has not historically--been the normal reaction.”

According to Scowcroft, who has served as a U.S. representative to previous arms control negotiations, “It is difficult enough, given the kind of asymmetries between the U.S. strategic forces and the Soviets’ strategic forces, to figure out what balancing reductions might be among bombers, submarine missiles and ICBMs. When you add the implications of the possible deployment of a defensive system and how one has to deal with that and how one balances that off against the various offensive systems, it just gets very, very complicated.”

Noting that it would take a decade or more for a “Star Wars” system to be developed, Scowcroft suggested that the Soviets would delay any move toward the deep cuts in nuclear arsenals called for by the President until they could assess the effects of the new systems. He added that such systems also would seriously compound problems of verification in any future arms control agreement.