A Rethought SDI Can End Our Morally Horrifying Reliance on The Bomb

Former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara has been among the nation’s most consistent and acerbic critics of the Reagan Administration’s nuclear weapons policies. But in an interview with The Times this week, McNamara, who has just published a new book on arms control, “Blundering Into Disaster,” (Pantheon) praised President Reagan’s summit proposals to reduce offensive nuclear forces. Excerpts from the interview:

McNamara: We are now entering the second half of the first century of the nuclear age. It has been nearly 50 years since Albert Einstein wrote to Franklin D. Roosevelt warning him that it was essential that the United States develop the atomic bomb.

In the years since then, a series of ad hoc decisions by responsible officials, of which I was one, have brought us to a totally unacceptable situation. There are 50,000 warheads in the world. But no one has ever put on paper a plan for initiating their use without the destruction of our civilization. This leaves us in a situation which is politically, militarily and morally unacceptable.

Q. At the Reykjavik summit meeting, President Reagan proposed the total elimination of strategic nuclear weapons over a 10-year period if the Soviets accepted testing and deployment of his Strategic Defense Initiative, a “Star Wars” nuclear defense system. Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev insisted that SDI testing and deployment be banned, and the meeting broke up in disagreement. Was that result a step forward or a step back?

A. President Reagan’s final proposal was a gigantic step forward philosophically and strategically, as far-reaching and courageous as Anwar Sadat’s Middle East initiative. It should be recognized as such. What the President proposed, in principle, was to move as far as practical back toward a non-nuclear world. In his speech to the nation on Oct. 13, reporting on the Reykjavik meeting, he said: “We discussed ways to reduce and in fact eliminate nuclear weapons entirely.” It is a totally different strategic concept from what the Administration has enunciated in the past.

Gorbachev and Reagan both come to the problem with the same gut feeling, that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. They attempted toexpress that feeling in the form of an arms control agreement.

Reagan is saying that the United States and its NATO allies can be secure against Soviet and Warsaw Pact conventional aggression without a nuclear deterrent. He is prepared to give up the nuclear deterrent against conventional aggression. That proposition destroys the foundation of NATO’s present strategy. The strategy is that we deter Soviet conventional force aggression with the threat of the use of nuclear weapons.

Current NATO doctrine holds that we should initiate the use of nuclear weapons in response to Soviet conventional aggression. But experts recognize that the initiation of the use of nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of our civilization. That is morally horrifying.

Reagan has broken that issue open. His proposals draw questions and criticisms from some experts. But he has made the discussion of a basic change in strategy, a debate some of us have been participating in for years, respectable.

Q. Doesn’t NATO need the U.S. nuclear deterrent because of the larger Soviet-bloc conventional forces in Europe?

A. We already are hearing that argument. I’m sure that the idea of giving up the nuclear deterrent has some NATO military leaders expressing grave doubts. But the conventional balance is not as unfavorable as those arguments imply and to the extent that the conventional forces need to be strengthened, this can be done within existing political and financial constraints.

Q. But the two sides still appear deadlocked over the issue of SDI, which Reagan insists on keeping and Gorbachev insists on blocking. How do we get around that problem?

A. The Reagan Administration has already put forward two very different ideas of what SDI might be. The first was President Reagan’s initial proposal for a leakproof defense (let’s call that Star Wars I) that would shield our population from nuclear attack. That turned out to be technologically unattainable in the foreseeable future.

The second idea, which we can call “Star Wars II,” is the one the Defense Department is working on now. It would provide for a defense of hardened targets, like missile silos, and perhaps partial protection of the population. Star Wars II will prove very costly--former Secretaries of Defense James R. Schlesinger and Harold Brown estimate it would require an expenditure of $1 trillion.

It is essential to understand that these two versions of SDI have diametrically opposite objectives. Reagan’s idea of Star Wars I was that a defensive shield could lead to the elimination of offensive nuclear weapons. In contrast, Star Wars II would require that we continue to maintain offensive forces but add the defensive systems to them.

What was put forward at Reykjavik was Star Wars III. With the deployment of the SDI to be deferred for 10 years until all offensive missiles were eliminated, the defense required to prevent cheating would be a much smaller, simpler system than either Star Wars I or Star Wars II. What they are talking about is a defense that no one has really outlined yet. It is a new starting point for discussion.

Q. Why do the Soviets fear SDI?

A. We must understand that today the Soviets are guided by our actions, not our words. They hear us say that SDI is only a research program, but they see us acting in ways that they believe are consistent only with a decision, in principle, that we will unilaterally abrogate the anti-ballistic missile treaty at a time of our own choosing and in a way that will place them at a strategic disadvantage. So long as they hold that belief, they will never sign another agreement limiting strategic offensive nuclear weapons.

The Soviets know we are ahead of them in the development of a strategic missile defense. What they fear is that we will deploy SDI say five or six years from now when we are even farther ahead. They would face a period of years until they caught up to us. During that period they would fear that we had a first-strike capability. They have every reason to be afraid of that. However, I am certain that is not the President’s objective.

Therefore, the solution is that we must carry out the SDI program in ways that convince the Soviets that it does not threaten them with a U.S. first-strike capability. That means there must be some limitation on the development and testing of SDI, but I am confident we could achieve the President’s objective of probing the potential of ballistic missile defense within those limitations.

Q. Is it realistic to talk about the total elimination of offensive nuclear weapons? Wouldn’t we, and the Soviets, still need a deterrent against the possibility of a smaller country acquiring nuclear weaponry?

A. Of course. In fact, we would both need a small number of nuclear weapons against the possibility that the other side might cheat. As I have said, nuclear warheads are not weapons in any military sense. If we ever initiate their use, we destroy society. Therefore, they have only one use, and that is to deter one’s opponent from initiating the use of his nuclear weapons.

Because we can’t erase from men’s minds how to build nuclear weapons, and because we fear that any agreement to eliminate the weapons will be broken, we must protect against cheating.

No defensive system now under consideration could defend against all forms of potential cheating. So each side would have to retain a small number of weapons for deterrence. But that number would be very small indeed--a few tens or a few hundreds--compared to the present total of 50,000.

Q. So you see us at the beginning of a new period of arms control thinking and negotiation?

A. Yes. The intellectual foundations of NATO and the Warsaw Pact strategy have been broken open completely for examination and debate. I understand the difficulty in coming to agreement on a new strategy and an arms control regime to support it. But for the moment the important thing is that the first steps have been taken toward that goal. I guarantee you that five years from now we will be well on our way to achieving that objective.

I’ve lived through three potential nuclear crises: Berlin, Cuba and the Middle East. Believe me, in a crisis situation, military and civilian leaders are neither well informed nor coolly rational. We will face crises in the future. We must ensure that those crises will not lead to nuclear war. Reykjavik was a step in that direction.