Europe Eyes New Defense of Its Own : However Ambitious, It Would Involve ‘Star Wars’ Technology

While America’s key European allies ponder what role they should play in President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative--popularly known as SDI, or “Star Wars”--a related debate is under way in Europe over something called the European Defense Initiative.

The proposal envisions as a first step the upgrading of European defenses against attacking Soviet aircraft and cruise missiles, with marginal capabilities against ballistic missiles.

But West German defense planners, if not their political superiors, favor a building-block concept leading ultimately to a joint European effort to create an anti-tactical ballistic-missile system, or ATBM, whose capacity to intercept short-range Soviet ballistic missiles would be more than marginal.

So far the ATBM is little more than a gleam in the eyes of West German defense planners, and may never get beyond that point. But it is a subject of growing discussion in Western Europe, and it deserves more attention than it has been getting in the United States.

Although the ATBM would be a kissing cousin of the Reagan Star Wars proposal, there are fundamental differences.

The strategic defense system envisioned by the President would be aimed at shielding population centers and military targets in the United States, and perhaps in allied countries, from long-range Soviet ballistic missiles armed with nuclear weapons of awesome destructive power.

The ATBM, by contrast, would be designed to deal with much-shorter-range Soviet ballistic missiles that would be armed primarily with conventional non-nuclear warheads and aimed essentially at specific military targets inside Europe.

According to Western experts, Soviet strategy in event of a European war envisions a massive conventional attack in the initial stage, complete with air attacks on allied command facilities, airfields, ports, reinforcement depots and nuclear-weapons sites. The idea would be to win a quick victory before the North Atlantic Treaty Organization could decide whether to use nuclear weapons. The Soviets probably couldn’t manage the required air superiority to pull it off. But they are now in the process of deploying SS-21, SS-22 and SS-23 missiles in Eastern Europe--weapons with a range of a few hundred miles--armed with conventional or chemical warheads and capable of pinpoint accuracy.

Such Soviet capabilities, if not counterbalanced in some fashion, would create a situation in which the Soviets had an intimidating superiority in both conventional weapons and, thanks to their deployment of SS-20 missiles, regional nuclear dominance as well.

Such an imbalance conceivably could encourage Moscow to imagine in a time of crisis that it could invade Western Europe without triggering a nuclear war. Under present circumstances, the only Western recourse would be to keep U.S. nuclear forces on a hair-trigger, use-’em-or-lose-’em alert.

Living with that kind of precarious instability is not a comfortable prospect to thoughtful Europeans.

The remedy being pushed by West German Defense Minister Manfred Woerner is a joint European effort to develop a defense against the growing Soviet conventional threat.

As he told a meeting in Bonn last week of U.S. and European experts, the need for such a program would exist even if Reagan had never launched his strategic defense program and invited European participation. But there is no question that the two are related.

First, there is a coincidence of timing: Discussion of the so-called European Defense Initiative didn’t emerge until the debate over Star Wars was already under way. There is also the fact that anything beyond a rudimentary upgrading of air defenses would involve some of the same technologies involved in the more ambitious American SDI.

There isn’t much question that what Woerner really wants is an ATBM system. But such a “son of Star Wars” program would be costly, and the money would have to come out of European pockets.

Domestic political considerations loom large, too. Aside from British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, European political leaders--including West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl--are nervous about appearing to be too closely identified with the American SDI program, which they think could threaten arms control.

As a result, the West German defense minister is now downplaying talk of an ATBM. The European Defense Initiative is being described as a modest proposal involving upgrading of defenses against air and cruise-missile attack.

Advocates of an ATBM within the West German military establishment are impatient with the political shadowboxing. They also argue that the full-scale program, if ultimately approved, should be in conjunction with the American SDI program; to pursue it as a parallel but separate and tardy program would be costly and ineffective, they say.

So far they are not winning the argument.

The Reagan Administration has been non-committal so far, and indeed caution is in order. But it is worth remembering that American troops in Europe would be on the receiving end of those Soviet tactical missiles along with their European comrades. And, as a nation pledged to the last-resort use of nuclear weapons for the defense of NATO countries, we should be at least as worried as the Europeans about the destabilizing implications of an imbalance of conventional power in the heart of Europe.

The Administration might be wise to pick up on the suggestions from some quarters that the United States and its European allies should arrange a division of labor, with Washington pushing development of a strategic defense system while encouraging Europeans to concentrate on their main worry: defense against conventional attack.

At this point, however, the Europeans themselves haven’t made up their minds on how seriously to take the European Defense Initiative.