Soviets Ride a Crooked Mile in Space : They Lie About ‘Star Wars,’ but We Should Still Negotiate

“I think that a defense system which prevents (missile) attack is not a cause of the arms race . . . . Perhaps an anti-missile system is more expensive than an offensive system, but its purpose is not to kill people but to save human lives.”

The quotation sounds like Ronald Reagan, promoting his Strategic Defense Initiative--popularly known as “Star Wars.” In fact, though, the words are those of Aleksei Kosygin, then Soviet premier, at a London press conference in 1969.

With the summit meeting between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev only three months off, it helps to remember this old quote and the history of which it is an indelible part. The Reagan Administration is taking a lot of heat, much of it justified, for its refusal to put SDI squarely on the negotiating table at Geneva. But the Soviets are getting more mileage than they deserve from their pious and patently dishonest propaganda campaign against the U.S. “militarization of space.”

To hear the Russians tell it, the United States bears full responsibility for the prospect of an arms race in space. To quote a recent Pravda editorial, “The Soviet Union, unlike the United States, is not conducting any research aimed at the development of attack space weapons.” In fact, the Soviets have been engaged in a Star Wars program of their own since the 1960s--a reality that must be taken into account in any attempt to negotiate barriers to deployment of a futuristic missile defense system by either side.

Prof. Herbert York of UC-San Diego--physicist, former Pentagon official and test-ban negotiator--has his own doubts about the wisdom of building a defensive shield against missiles. But he recalled not long ago that both America and Russia have “been conducting research on exotic systems that might one day be used to destroy satellites and to intercept ballistic missiles while they are still out in space.”

“On balance,” York said, “the Russians are probably spending roughly 10 times as much as we are on strategic defense initiatives.” Arms-control negotiations, therefore, “must start out from the facts of the already-existing Soviet strategic defense and space initiatives, and not simply from projections of possible future U.S. activities. Only on the basis of that kind of realism will it be possible to develop new limitations and restrictions.”

The record, in its essentials, is not in dispute among American experts. The Russians have always spent as much on strategic defense, broadly defined, as on offensive nuclear forces. They maintain an in-depth defense against bombers, which is huge compared with its U.S. counterpart.

The Soviets have in place around Moscow the world’s only operational ballistic missile defense system. (The United States, allowed an equivalent installation by the 1972 ABM treaty, elected to do without one.) They have extensively tested an anti-satellite weapon; the United States, playing catch-up, is in the early testing stage of a better system.

According to David Holloway of Stanford, a Star Wars critic, Moscow started work on ballistic missile defense in the early 1950s. Nikita S. Khrushchev boasted in 1962 that his scientists had developed an ABM missile that could “hit a fly in space.” The 1960s saw construction of the system around Moscow, a decision by the Johnson Administration to respond with an ambitious ABM system of our own, and the beginning of negotiations that finally paid off with the 1972 ABM treaty, severely limiting the deployment of ballistic missile defenses by both sides.

After the signing of the 1972 treaty, then-Defense Minister Andrei Grechko told the Supreme Soviet that the accord “imposes no limitations on the performance of research and experimental work aimed at resolving the problem of defending the country against nuclear-missile attack.”

Both major powers have in fact pursued active research programs into ABM technologies as a hedge against violation of the treaty by the other side. As the Geneva-based International Defense Review put it this month, “Despite its shrill protests against President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, the Soviet Union has been developing its own Star Wars space weapons since 1964.”

The post-1972 Soviet program, like ours, has included the exploration of such exotic technologies as high-energy lasers, particle-beam weapons, radio-frequency weapons and electromagnetic rail guns. As a study by the liberally inclined Brookings Institution observed, “The Soviet Union has been devoting more effort than the United States to research on ballistic missile defense,” or BMD.

Ground-based lasers at the Sary Shagan missile test center may already be capable of interfering with American satellites in low orbits, and U.S. experts say that the Soviets might be capable of deploying space-borne anti-satellite lasers in the mid-1990s.

Despite the scope of the Soviet Star Wars program, most U.S. experts believe that this country remains well ahead in the more advanced technologies. But participants in a joint study by Brookings and a group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have warned, “If either side were to abrogate the treaty today, the Soviets could put a working BMD system into operation faster than the United States.”

The fact that the Soviets find it convenient to lie about their long history of Star Wars research and development does not mean that the Administration is right in its reluctance to negotiate restraints on a new arms race in space. Far from it. But the Administration’s critics do a disservice when they pretend, with the Soviets, that the Star Wars zealots in the Reagan Administration are the only problem.

Paul H. Nitze, special arms-control adviser to the President, has pointed out that some Soviet experts who have talked the loudest against the American SDI program are themselves involved in the Soviet Star Wars effort. Americans who genuinely want to return Star Wars to the comic pages should understand that an essential first step is to let the Russians know that we really weren’t born yesterday.