THE SUMMIT AT GENEVA : Technology Defies Arms Control Effort : Disarmament Drive Fails to Keep Abreast of Development of New Weapon Systems

In the 16th Century, Japan’s legendary samurai warriors experimented briefly with guns before giving up on the newly developed weapons and returning to their fearsome two-handed swords.

At about the same time, Machiavelli offered his mythical Italian prince no end of shrewd advice about military strategy but ignored the emerging science of artillery, which was then beginning to make a shambles of traditional warfare.

Like Machiavelli and the samurai, military strategists throughout history have had a hard time recognizing and adjusting to the implications of changing technology for the arts of war. Armies esteemed cavalry long after technology made horses obsolete. The musket first replaced the long bow because peasant conscripts could be trained with it more quickly, not because their superiors recognized its greater range, effectiveness or accuracy.

Even down to the present day, when science has created instruments of unprecedented destructiveness, the difficulty of understanding the role of technology in national security remains, and it has become a major factor in the arms control issues that loom over the summit meeting between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

“Only with the dramatic technological advances of the latter half of the 19th Century did military strategists begin to come to grips with the new situation, and then only slowly,” Ralph Sanders of the Pentagon’s National Defense University wrote in a recent article on “Technology in Military Strategy.”

And today, he said, “the complexity of the connection between strategy pull and technology push is still very poorly understood.”

Indeed, so difficult do questions of technology’s role in national security remain that strategic thinkers still cannot agree whether it is the root cause of the nuclear arms race and thus the primary threat to human survival or whether, on the contrary, technology has played a major role in saving the world from Armageddon thus far.

There is one point, however, on which almost all experts agree: Controlling the spread of military technology has proved virtually impossible and reaching useful agreements on curbing it has been almost as difficult.

Those who see runaway technology as the root of present-day security problems make this argument:

Technology creates ever-better weapons that each side seeks to obtain or match. Better weapons thus cause arms races, and arms races make war more likely if not inevitable. A corollary is that politicians are always behind the curve, racing to limit the number of weapons but never able to keep technology’s ever-smarter monsters in the laboratories.

That analysis appears to fit the drama being acted out here this week. The prospect of an anti-missile laser shield in space--President Reagan’s “Star Wars” dream--seems both to be preventing cuts in existing offensive nuclear arsenals and threatening a new arms race in space.

The other school of thought holds that technology is undoubtedly responsible for improving the terrifying quality of today’s weapons but has not made war more likely.

Instead, in this view, today’s advanced technology has changed the fundamental nature of arms races and, as a result, has brought on a new kind of military competition that actually reduces the risk of war instead of increasing it. In this view, the nuclear arms race is the primary reason that peace has been maintained between the superpowers for four decades--an extraordinarily long period, given the intensity of their mutual suspicion and hostility.

Technology, these experts say, has transformed the arms race from competition for more weapons to a rivalry for better ones. And qualitative arms races, such as those based on high-tech prowess, are held to be less likely to end in conflict than competition in sheer quantities of guns, planes and tanks.

Technological competitions may even act as “substitutes for war,” according Lt. Gen. William E. Odom, director of the National Security Agency.

A study by Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard University concludes that quantitative arms races, in which the competition takes the form of larger rather than better arsenals, are more costly and more likely to lead to war.

At the same time, Huntington concluded after examining 13 arms races since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, high-tech arms are harder to control through agreements. Moreover, advantages in qualitative arms races are seldom lasting; the other side soon catches up.

“A qualitative race,” he wrote, “tends to be a competition of elites rather than masses.” Creators of the weapons, the technologists, are more important than the users, who are the military. Indeed, he added, “peace may depend less upon the ingenuity of rival statesmen than upon the ingenuity of rival scientists.”

Huntington wrote his conclusions in 1958, but he says now that the basic argument--”that qualitative arms races are much less likely than quantitative ones to come to a definitive end in war or a negotiated agreement,” as he restated it recently--has been confirmed by events over subsequent decades.

Against this background, it is remarkable that technology came so late to weaponry. Early strategic thinkers, including classical names like Sun-tzu and Karl von Clausewitz, failed to address technology as a significant factor in war, according to the National Defense University’s Sanders.

In modern terms, the first qualitative arms race occurred when sail gave way to steam. The French launched the first propeller-driven warship in 1850; two years later, the British matched it. The second qualitative race came soon afterward, when the French built the first ironclad warship in 1859; the British matched it in 1860.

Technology Leaks Out

The U.S. Civil War saw the first battle between ironclads, the North’s Monitor and the South’s Merrimac, in 1862. It ended in an impasse. The technological innovation of one was almost immediately matched by the other in what strategists today call “symmetrical deployment.”

The lesson remains true now: When a weapon system takes several years to move from design to operation, knowledge about the new technology leaks out and the rival power gets its own program under way before the first can capitalize on its lead.

“The Merrimac reigned supreme for a day,” Huntington wrote, “but it was only for a day, and it could be only for a day.”

Although modern technology was put to use in the 19th Century, it had little impact on strategic thinking until this century, when leaders such as Gen. Billy Mitchell recognized that the internal combustion engine would mechanize warfare with the tank and the airplane.

At that point, strategists focused on ways to use the new weapons for fighting wars. With the nuclear age, however, strategists began studying techniques of avoiding war. The new emphasis stemmed from the unprecedented destructiveness of nuclear warheads and the very short time for political leaders to make decisions--the flight time of an intercontinental ballistic missile, or about 30 minutes.

Deterrence became the centerpiece of strategic thought, and the word took on a technological coloration, according to Sanders. The present concept of Mutual Assured Destruction, in which each side can annihilate the other’s population by retaliating against any surprise attack, rests on technological foundations--the ability of technically sophisticated missiles, submarines and other devices to survive attack and deliver enormous counter-blows with pinpoint accuracy.

The current strategy is for “flexible response” to counter any attack with proportionate reply. It introduces the possibility of avoiding cities by limiting nuclear war to a battlefield, to striking only military targets, even to making surgical strikes aimed only at command centers in the Soviet and American homeland.

Limited war demands even greater reliance on technology--on highly accurate weapons, miniaturized, with sophisticated warheads that can burrow into hardened silos and command posts, as well as on highly reliable, fast communications for reaction and negotiation, if possible, before any wholesale nuclear exchange.

Some experts consider this to be one of the positive fruits of technology, with military assets replacing populations as the initial targets. Skeptics doubt that any use of nuclear weapons can be limited or separated from populations, and some believe that plans for limited war make such wars closer to reality.

The new “reform school” of strategists today complains about over-reliance on nuclear weapons, despite their relative cheapness compared to standing armies to counter Soviet conventional superiority. But even these theorists want to capitalize on high technology for such weapons as precision-guided munitions, including “smart bombs” that can be steered by television signals or follow laser beams to their targets, according to Sanders.

Technological advances have been contained only poorly, if at all, so far--a record that raises doubts about whether restraints on technology are possible. Some contend they are not even desirable.

The history of MIRVs, or multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles, provides a case in point.

In 1972, the United States rejected Soviet proposals to ban MIRV warheads on missiles. Why? MIRVs were initially put on some U.S. Minuteman ICBMs in the late 1960s, according to Fred S. Hoffman of Pan Heuristics, a Los Angeles-area think tank, to increase the U.S. nuclear arsenal economically without adding more missiles and without allotting more manpower to the Air Force.

Later, MIRVs were used more extensively to compensate for the Soviet anti-ballistic missile network that began rising around Moscow; they created the possibility of overwhelming the defensive system with a flood of warheads and decoys.

Yet MIRVs have been responsible for the massive proliferation of warhead arsenals over the past decade, as each missile’s destructive power was literally multiplied by piling more warheads--now between 3 and 14--atop each missile.

For their part, the Soviets rejected a U.S. proposal in 1972, when the Anti-Ballistic Missiles Treaty was being negotiated, to bar all types of ABM defenses, including those based on the emerging new technology of directed energy such as laser beams. Soviet military technologists were apparently more optimistic about the potential of such weapons than their U.S. counterparts.

Ironically, this refusal to ban ABM weapons “based on other physical principles” has come back to haunt the Kremlin in the form of President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars” program, which specifically seeks to use exotic, speed-of-light technology to make anti-missile weapons.

Instead of a comprehensive ban, an ambiguous “Agreed Statement D” was inserted into the ABM treaty. It has become a doorway that the Administration contends could justify work on space defenses--including research, development and testing--that would go far beyond the treaty’s main section, which permits only research based on conventional rocketry.

Another pitfall illustrated by the now-controversial ABM treaty is that diplomats who helped negotiate it did not understand all the technological points involved. Gerard C. Smith, the principal U.S. negotiator, testified in Senate hearings in 1972 that the treaty prohibited testing “breadboard models” of new anti-missile weapons--small working models or prototypes of full-scale weapons.

Smith recently conceded that he did not know then what “breadboard models” were and that he still does not know. “I just read into the record a statement the Defense Department gave me,” he said.

Given the loopholes and shortcomings of arms treaties, the world armament picture would probably not be radically different if they did not exist at all. Not only has technology become the centerpiece in military thought, especially regarding nuclear war, but military strategies have become rationalizations of what war technologies allow, Sanders said.

Each side wants to exploit the technology it has. Usually, the United States is accused of breaking new ground in this respect. In the case of submarine-launched missiles, however, arms control advocates in Congress--fearing escalation of the arms race--forced a delay of 20 years in the development of missiles with sufficient accuracy to threaten hardened Soviet ICBM silos with a surprise first strike.

Now, almost two decades later, the Trident 2 missile due about 1988 will have that capability.

Moreover, it is far from certain that restraint by one side will be reciprocated. The U.S. Air Force rejected the idea of ICBMs throughout the 1950s, for example. The pilots who run that service preferred the manned bomber until Sputnik jarred the politicians to override them. The Soviets, meanwhile, pressed ahead and developed the first intercontinental missile.

Another moral of this story is that, while the military is usually entranced by technology, it is also often resistant to new technology. The same Air Force opposed cruise missiles more recently for the same parochial reason.

“Usually it is people from the outside, not the government bureaucracy, who play key roles in pushing technology,” said Harvard’s Huntington. President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb, on the advice of scientists such as Albert Einstein, for example.

Similarly, Edward Teller, who played a key role in developing the hydrogen bomb, was influential in bringing the new technological potential of space defense to President Reagan, who in turn surprised the world and most of the Pentagon bureaucracy with his public challenge to technologists to develop the “Star Wars” missile shield known officially as the Strategic Defense Initiative.

To Sanders, the SDI program is unique among military technologies.

“In history, new weapons were developed from technology, and the strategists then set out to find ways to use them,” he said. “Now, strategic theorists and technologists are starting out at the same time, so hopefully we can figure out how to use the new technology militarily and politically as it evolves.”

Certainly there is greater attention now to the potential of technology running out of control.

With miniaturization breakthroughs, for example, new weapons are also becoming more difficult to monitor under arms agreements. As Georgy A. Arbatov, director of the Kremlin’s Institute for U.S. and Canada affairs, has said: “Already there are ocean-deployed cruise missiles which are practically impossible to control.”

Similar concern has come at times from the Reagan White House. For example, Robert C. McFarlane, the President’s national security adviser, last year asked for a study to “look at our ‘stealth’ policy, and our policy in general toward what might be called ‘information-denying strategies.’ ”

The stealth program seeks to build aircraft and cruise missiles that use radar-absorbing plastics and paints, as well as new shapes, to present almost no target to radar. Such weapons, although slow moving, could become as valuable as the fastest missile warheads.

“Because of their highly sensitive nature,” McFarlane wrote, “we may not have given proper attention to the strategic implications of weapons that cannot be easily detected, or of a world in which we or the Soviets may be able to deny the other information about our activities and capabilities.”

To Hoffman, who is one of the founding theorists of the nuclear age, “there is no alternative now but to try to manage technology. Not all the technology that comes out of labs needs to be applied, obviously, but also, you can’t halt technology by agreement. It is like the economists’ view of how our economy works: When you impose restraints, it is like trying to control the flow of water on an uneven surface. It just spreads in a different direction.”

Similarly, “the notion that you can stabilize the arms competition by freezes or stopping technology is misguided, and the role of agreements in this respect is complex because there always seems room for different interpretation,” he added.

The ABM treaty, although relatively simple, seems clearly violated by the construction of a huge Soviet radar station at Krasnoyarsk. The Soviets claim that its purpose is tracking objects in space; the United States insists it can be used for battle management of a forbidden ABM system nationwide.

“It can do both,” Hoffman said. “But if it is that difficult with a radar station, imagine the ambiguities as you move backward from agreements that cover deployment to those that would limit testing. Is it a component, prototype or ‘breadboard model’ that was tested? If you tried to limit development work and research, it would be much worse.

“The further back you go into technology, the worse it gets,” he said. “It is not verification of the agreement but interpretation of its provisions that becomes the issue, and these will be much harder to resolve.

“My advice to negotiators is to follow the KISS rule: ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid.’ ”