COMMENT ⊗   VALID 00002 PAGES
C REC  PAGE   DESCRIPTION
C00001 00001
C00002 00002	ucscc!ucscd.beeson@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU
C00016 ENDMK
C⊗;
ucscc!ucscd.beeson@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU
Star wars

Let me apologize for the arrogant and contentious style of my previous
message and again for the style of this one.  On rereading the main
point I am unclear about is the extent to which you really do
attribute bad motives to the Reagan Administration and previous
U.S. administrations.

These are scattered comments on your points rather than a considered
independent discussion of the SDI issues.

1. I don't believe that all your first points are agreed by all sides.
There are many schemes for destroying missiles being developed.  Yours
is only one.  It is intended to use more than one.  Another is
smart rocks.  There may even be a few actually secret schemes.  Not all
conceivable countermeasures can be simultaneously adopted.

Incidentally, you don't mention Soviet efforts at SDI.  Did you read the
statement of the 30 emigre Soviet scientists about this?

2. Whether SDI makes first strike easier depends on whether offensive
missiles are decommissioned while SDI is being commissioned.  Its
advocates propose to negotiate this.

3. I'm surprised that you have such confidence in what the media say.
The question of whether nuclear war is suicide depends on several
questions. (1) Can you knock out the other guy's offensive weapons?
(2) What do you regard as suicide?  Unfortunately, once wars get
started, and ancient wars were often more genocidal than modern ones,
the sides often fight until one can't fight any more.  Often the
winner has committed suicide in the sense of suffering damage
worse than losing without fighting, but it happens anyway.
(3) I rather believe that the plan to stop a Soviet tank attack
in Europe with nuclear weapons would be carried out.  It would then
be up to the Soviets to escalate further.

The Administration has been bullied into not talking about survivability,
but many don't agree.  It's a shame we have no civil defense program.
The Swiss don't agree that civil defense is impossible and have
implemented quite effective civil defense.  Nuclear winter is
questionable, though possible.  Also the Soviets talk out of both
sides of their mouths on nuclear survivability.  They have an
extensive nuclear civil defense program that no-one is allowed
to discuss with foreigners, and its doctrine is survivability.
Even with the best civil defense, millions will die in a full
scale nuclear war, but civil defense might result in saving
80 percent rather than 40 percent of the population.

	Chernobyl tends to prove the opposite of your point.

	Almost the worst possible nuclear reactor accident killed 31
people directly.  There will also be as many as a few thousand added to
the 9 million Ukrainians who will die of cancer in the next 30 years.
Some tens of square miles are contaminated and may or may not be
practically decontaminatable.  Two of the remaining three reactors in the
plant are running again, and the third will probably be running within a
year.  The Soviets have no plan to abandon this kind of reactor, although
perhaps their new ones will entirely be pressurized water reactors.  Civil
defense in the U.S. would make an enormous difference; it could even make
the worst nuclear winter scenarios survivable.  Unfortunately, even
if nuclear winter proves to be a fantasy, the direct effects of a
major attack would probably kill more people proportionally than
did the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.  I mention Cambodia to point out
that society in some sense survives the death of even a quarter
of the population, and also that after all that death, they are
still fighting each other.

	I am very doubtful that the Soviets will ever find an attack
on the U.S. a plausible proposition.  For one thing,
they have gotten too many unpleasant surprises in their surrogate
wars with Israel for the political leaders to have confidence
in assurances that Western military technology has been dominated.

	Nevertheless, it is better to be safe than sorry, and I
regard being sure that the Soviets won't regard military success
as likely as on the side of safety.  I don't regard an arms race
itself as dangerous unless politics changes for the worse.
It is important not to exaggerate the so-called arms race by
remembering that we are now spending about six percent of our
GNP on arms, including military pensions, whereas we spent
ten percent around 1960.  The Soviet Union spends a substantially
larger percentage.

	I think you are mistaken about both Nixon and Kennedy
having threatened to use nuclear weapons.  Kennedy threatened
to blockade Cuba and put our armed forces on alert.  He made
no nuclear threat.  Nixon made no nuclear threat in Vietnam,
although he did conventionally bomb North Vietnam.  The discussion
of use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam was during the Eisenhower
Administration when some military people suggested helping the
French.  Eisenhower vetoed the idea.  Truman vetoed the idea
of using nuclear weapons in Korea.

	Western Europe has more population and more industry
than the Soviet Union.  It could maintain a credible defense
if its politicians couldn't rely on the U.S.  I tend to support
the people who propose U.S. withdrawal from NATO even if it
meant German nuclear weapons.

	As I said in my previous message I don't agree with
your symmetrical treatment of the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union really is a very peculiar society ---
oppressive, feudal, far more nationalistic than any other,
and with no really legitimate way method of internal political
struggle.  Such oligarchies in the past eventually either
turn into monarchies or break down in civil war.  The half life
may be a hundred years, however.  Note that democracies don't
go to war with each other whereas communist countries do go
to war with each other.

	I don't see how you can imagine that the radioactive
cloud from Chernobyl will deter anybody from anything.  The
effects perceptible to Europeans were either media effects
or the result of actions of their governments.  I'm not saying
the governments were entirely wrong to restrict use of
certain foods --- merely that there was nothing the public
perceived directly.  Compare this with the actual devastation
of World War II, and you'll see why its long term psychological
effect will be trivial.

The Soviets have been developing the Star Wars technologies for
some years and are supposed to be ahead of us.  That's
one of the things the emigre statement said.  If they decide to
deploy it, they won't announce the fact; they'll do it as secretly
as possible.  They deploy missiles without announcement also.
A large part, maybe all, of the arms control negotiations have
been carried out with the Soviets accepting U.S. estimates of
their missile deployment and offering none of their own.

I am dubious of further arms control agreements, because even if
we detect violations, our arms control enthusiasts are likely
to continue finding innocent explanations, as for the Krasnoyarsk
phased array radar and the new missile types.

I don't agree that the Soviet offers are generous.  I doubt that even
they would put it that way.

It seems to me that destroying all nuclear weapons without creating
mutual trust makes the situation far more unstable than it is today.
If it takes approximately a year to re-establish them, then it is
possible to hope to win a race by several months, which might suffice
to destroy the other side's ability to ever produce nuclear weapons.

Such trust is in principle possible.  We don't fear the other democracies'
attacking us with nuclear weapons, and they don't fear our attacking them,
even though there are points of rivalry and conflict.  However, we
must simply wait for the Soviet Union to evolve some democracy,
however long it takes --- maybe several hundred years.

Since the Administration and armed forces thinkers don't agree with your
analysis of the situation, your speculations as to their motives are
beside the point.  It seems, however, that you are more ready to ascribe
bad motives to them than to the Politbureau that divided Poland with
Hitler in 1939, invaded Finland in 1940, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia
in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1979.  I quote what the Duke of Wellington
said in 1809.

"I am very certain that his wishes & efforts for his party very frequently
prevent him from doing that which is best for the Country; & induce him
to take up the cause of foreign powers against Britain, because the
cause of Britain is managed by his opponents."

The article seems to be unfinished.