Eliminating Ballistic Missiles Dangerous, Scowcroft Contends

Former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft on Friday characterized President Reagan’s proposal to eliminate all U.S. and Soviet ballistic missiles as dangerous, telling a congressional panel that Reagan’s Iceland summit talks with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev had “cast a doubt on the structure of deterrence.”

“Fundamentally,” he said, “the problem is that whatever the abstract benefits are, they have struck at the policy of strategic deterrence, which has been the bedrock of policy toward the Soviet Union for 40 years.”

The somber assessment by the retired Air Force lieutenant general, who served as President Gerald R. Ford’s national security adviser, added to criticism of the Reykjavik summit meeting that has continued unabated for nearly two months. It came as a House Armed Services Committee panel neared the end of hearings on the controversial Iceland session.

Scowcroft’s remarks received close attention because he earlier had headed a special commission appointed by Reagan to look into a basing plan for the MX missile and the modernization of U.S. strategic deterrent forces. Just last week, amid the Iranian arms sale scandal, he was named to a new panel, along with former Secretary of State Edmund S. Muskie and former Sen. John Tower (R-Tex.), to investigate the workings of the National Security Council.

While he took sharp exception to the details of Reagan’s sweeping proposals to the Soviets, Scowcroft told the panel that they were, nevertheless, consistent with the President’s vision of a world in which strategic defense supplants reliance upon offensive weapons.

Rep. Norman D. Dicks (D-Wash.), one of Congress’ foremost critics of the Administration’s strategic arms and arms control policies, suggested that Reagan’s Reykjavik initiative amounted to a move by the President to trade all U.S. ballistic missiles to preserve the Strategic Defense Initiative, known as the “Star Wars” missile defense program.

“I guess I would say that’s implicit in the way I have described it,” Scowcroft answered. But he added: “I wouldn’t put it quite so crudely as you have because the President has a vision of where he wants to go, but the net effect is that. Absolutely.”

James Woolsey a former undersecretary of the Navy and a former U.S. arms control negotiator, was even more pointed in opposing the concept, as discussed in Iceland, of phasing out all ballistic missiles over the next 10 years.

Given the Soviets’ development of mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles and an alleged record of having violated terms of the 1979 strategic arms limitation pact, Woolsey said, the elimination of all ballistic missiles in the foreseeable future would expose the United States to unacceptable risks.

“We really would be faced in a zero ballistic missile world by a Soviet Union with every prospect of being able to retain a ballistic missile force while we would not,” he said.

While he did not quarrel with an ultimate objective of eliminating nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles, he took sharp issue with the idea, as discussed in Iceland, of cutting by 50% within five years, then negotiating total elimination by the end of a decade.

“I believe a proposal of that sort is entirely unsound, unwise and irresponsible,” Woolsey said.