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\centerline {HAWK'S PROGRESS IN THE USSR}
\centerline {by}
\centerline {Lt. General Daniel O. Graham}
\centerline {Director, High Frontier}

In mid-may, my office received a call from the office of the Secretary
General of the United Nations. I was invited to participate and deliver a
paper at a ``meeting of experts'' at Sochi on the Black Sea in the
U.S.S.R. My subject was to be the ``military uses of space in the 1900s.''
This aroused my curiosity. For one thing, I was sure the UN Secretary
General didn't know me from Adam, and secondly, my views on the subject
have been published in many a book and article.

	When the details arrived, it turned out not {\bf really} to be a
UN affair but a Soviet affair paid for in full by the U.S.S.R. When this
became clear, I demurred on the basis of my policy not to go anywhere on
Soviet money.  But they insisted. I nominated other American spokesmen.
Still they insisted. I said I owed my wife some time at home. They invited
her to come also.

	Finally, I became so curious as to why the Soviets wanted to hear
from this stauch opponent on issues such as SDI, I agreed.

	The junket proved most interesting. Representatives of 25
countries assembled with a high-powered contingent of Soviets including
the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Alexander Bessmertnykh. Two
Arlingtonians, Ambassador Ed Rowny and I, spoke for the United States. Of
course, all the Soviet satellites were represented, as well as China,
Japan, India, France, Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom, Sweden,
Austria, and five or six Third World nations. The meeting was chaired by a
{\bf very} careful Japanese UN official. The Soviet press was there in
force, but no Western press---this despite efforts on my part to have it
otherwise. Visas were refused U.S. reporters whose editors had agreed to
send them at their newspaper's expense. The Soviet excuse: no
accomadations at Sochi.

	Since Ambassador Rowny was able to attend for only a short time,
the conference of ``experts'' centered on a head-on conflict between me
and Soviet three-star general Chervov of the Soviet General Staff over
SDI. Chervov was the typical Russian bear. He blustered and paid no heed
at all to the discomfited Japanese chairman's attempts to shorten his
tirades or give others equal time.

	Chervov's message: Defenses against ballistic missiles on the
ground (such as the Soviets have now) are moral and benign;such defenses
in space (such as the Soviets want but can't get as fast as we can) are
immoral, evil, and destabilizing.  He rattled on at length with the
anti-SDI arguments we hear from American critics---SDI militarizes space,
causes a new arms race, threatens attack on the USSR, offends the ABM
treaty, etc. But two arguments we hear in the United States were
conspicuously absent: that it can't be done, and that the Soviets would
simply build more missiles to ``overwhelm'' any U.S. SDI defenses. They
would not make these arguments even though I doggedly challenged them to
do so. They know better.

	My position was made easy by quoting Soviet authorities on
strategic defenses.  Colonel General Talensky, eminent Soviet strategist,
said that such defenses are stabilizing since they do nothing unless
``nuclear aggression is already underway.'' Vice Premier Kosygin said that
defenses are designed to save lives rather than destroy them and are
therefore sensible. Marshal Ogarkov, former Soviet Minister of Defense,
said in 1982:``Strategic defenses are not only desirable, they are
inevitable.''

	All I had to do was agree with these Soviet spokesmen and let
General Chervov try to make the case that one kind of technology,space
technology, should be excluded from use in the cause of defense versus
offence. He couldn't do it.

	The trip was pleasant. There is nothing like going first class in
a classless society. And it was useful in that it showed a near frenetic
effort on the part of the Soviets to kill off SDI politically, since they
have no real military-technical counter to it. The Soviets wanted this
particular champion of SDI to attend in order to determine what might
cause people like me to back off.  They found that for those of us who see
SDI as the real change of strategy it is---away from reliance on the
nuclear vengeance of MAD to the sensible notion of self defense--- there
is no effective Soviet blandishment.
\end