The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; Neutron Bomb

ROBERT MacNEIL: Good evening. After two decades of quiet development the so-called neutron bomb has leaked into the news: a useful advance in nuclear weaponry to some, a frightening, inhuman development to others. Yesterday President Carter said he favored producing the bombs but said he hadn`t decided yet whether they should be given to the U.S. Armed Forces. The bomb is said to kill by radiation while causing little property damage. Today the United States Senate debated the issue for hours -- whether to kill the bomb or go along with the President. From Moscow came a strongly worded warning that deployment of neutron bombs would interfere with the U.S.-Soviet talks on limiting strategic armaments.

Tonight: why does the U.S. need this new nuclear weapon? And what are its risks? Jim?

JIM LEHRER: Robin, those are exactly the questions the Senate is debating now, and this is not the first time the Senate has tackled the issue. On July first, just before leaving on its July Fourth recess, the Senate went into a two-hour closed session to debate the issue. There were several votes then, with the final one being a forty-three to-forty-two squeaker defeating an amendment by Senator Mark Hatfield, Republican of Oregon, that would have eliminated funding of the neutron bomb. After the defeat Senator Hatfield launched a filibuster to prevent further action, and the Senate then adjourned to take it up another day. And that day was today. Another anti-neutron bomb leader in the Senate along with Senator Hatfield is Senator John Heinz, Democrat of Pennsylvania. Senator, you`ve just come from the Senate. Where do things stand now? They`re in the middle of a debate, I presume.

Sen. JOHN HEINZ: Things were fine until you called me a Democrat. I`m a Republican.

LEHRER: My apologies.

HEINZ: Where things stand now, Jim, is that the debate -- the filibuster, someone called it -- is still going on, but there could be votes later on this evening but it`s likely that the issue will finally not be resolved till tomorrow.

Why?

LEHRER: All right. Senator, you are opposed to the neutron bomb.

HEINZ: I`m opposed to our rushing into a new technology, a very costly technology -- by estimates, two or three billion dollars at minimum -- without the Senate`s committees really understanding what the tradeoffs are or the problems are with the neutron bomb. There have been no hearings, Defense Secretary Brown did not know the money was in the ERDA budget. President Carter, until he made his statements of yesterday and today, simply had not taken any position on it. Nobody from the administration has come down to explain how the bomb would be used, how it would be deployed; and most Congressmen, particularly the House of Representatives, which voted on the ERDA budget, voted on it,, did not know the bomb was in the budget and read about the bomb in the newspapers. That is no way for the Congress to conduct the nation`s business.

LEHRER: Senator, how does something like that happen?

HEINZ: Well, this is a secret weapon system, although ironically, advanced radiation weapons have been under development for ten to fifteen years. I think Defense Secretary Brown was out at Livermore Laboratory in the late fifties working on this. But I think it`s very difficult to understand how this got in. I think in this instance the Defense Department simply didn`t know it was there. OMB did, and the Congress for the most part didn`t. It`s one of those things.

LEHRER: Above and beyond what one Senator called today the "knowledge vacuum" over this neutron bomb, are you opposed to its use or its development as a tactical weapon in the United States arsenal, period?

HEINZ: No, I`m not. I`m not opposed to its development. Indeed, the argument we`re having is over the production. And President Carter, of course, has said he would like to go ahead with production but he hasn`t decided on deployment. It`s hard for me to understand what he is going to do with the bombs -- maybe pile them up in the basement of the White House -- if he doesn`t turn them over to the Pentagon, who will immediately deploy them. But I think one of the reasons that we built into the State Department authorization a few years ago the requirement that there be an arms control impact statement submitted to the Congress is that we don`t go off half-cocked on a billion-dollar weapon system such as we are on the brink of doing.

LEHRER: Do you have any opinion as to whether or not we need the neutron bomb?

HEINZ: I`m reserving judgment on that. I don`t think the Senate has enough information to make a studious judgment, and that`s why I feel very strongly that we should postpone a decision until a much later time, until we have that information.

LEHRER: All right. Senator, thank you. Another view now from Dr. Fred Wickner, Professor at the University of Miami and a consultant on nuclear strategy to the Defense Department. Dr. Wickner was chairman and is still a member of the Scientific Advisory Group to the Joint Strategic Planning Target staff at the Pentagon. First, Dr. Wickner, can you give us, in laymen`s language, exactly what the neutron bomb is and how it differs with what laymen normally refer to as the atomic or hydrogen bomb?

FRED WICKNER: Well, the neutron bomb is a device that`s designed to minimize certain effects of the explosion of a nuclear weapon and at the same time maintain the ability to produce a decisive military effect on military forces that one might encounter in a theater such as NATO. So there are two things in mind: one, to produce an effect on your opposing forces that`ll make a difference to them -- perhaps cause them to stop an offensive attack in NATO, if that`s what they have in mind -- and at the same time to keep from harming your own troops that would be near to the place where these detonations might be occurring, and in addition to spare unwanted damage to non-civilian participants and to civil and other structures that you don`t want to destroy. There isn`t any military advantage to be gained by destroying what it is you want to save.

LEHRER: Well, Doctor, do you feel that this is an effective weapon and a weapon that the United States should develop and deploy?

WICKNER: Yes, I do. The purpose of these types of weapons are to deter war, and there are two things at least that you have to keep in mind when you think about that. We don`t want any war to happen in Europe. We`d like to have these nuclear weapons assist in that task of keeping war from happening. And to make them credible you have to persuade your adversary of two things: one, that they`ll produce a decisive military effect on your military adversary; and that secondly, the threat or actual use of them will be credible not only to them but to you in the United States and to our NATO allies. We do not have the liberty to deploy weapons and plan for the use of them in Europe if they have arbitrarily large destructive power. Our NATO allies will never go along with that. Neither do we want to plan to use weapons against our adversaries such that if we used them they would also cause severe damage to our own troops. We have no desire to destroy our own forces.

LEHRER: And in your opinion, the neutron bomb, as it`s called, fits the description of that.

WICKNER: It fits the description in the sense that it produces a very decisive military effect on one`s adversary and at the same time it minimizes damage to your own troops and to the region in which you`re employing this particular weapon or planning to employ this particular weapon.

If I may just remark on something that the Senator said, one should remember that over two years ago Senator Nunn asked for a report from the Defense Department...

LEHRER: This is Senator Nunn, Democrat of Georgia, who`s on the Armed Services Committee.

WICKNER: That`s correct -- asked for a report on how we would plan to deploy and employ nuclear weapons in Europe. The Defense Department supplied a classified and unclassified document to five committees of the Congress two years ago. This the Senate and House Foreign Affairs Committees, the Defense Committees as well as the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. And in that particular document there`s a full statement given as to the reasons for these weapons, how they might be employed, to the degree that we`re allowed to describe those matters as restrained by the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, which of course places certain restrictions on release of classified material.

LEHRER: All right, sir. Thank you. Robin?

MacNEIL: One of the sharpest critics of the neutron bomb is Herbert Scoville, Jr., former Technical Director of the Pentagon`s Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, a job very similar to the one Mr. Wickner now holds. Mr. Scoville has also served as Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and at present he`s secretary of the Arms Control Association, a Washington-based organization that studies defense issues. Mr. Scoville, why are you opposed to the neutron bomb?

HERBERT SCOVILLE, JR.: I`m opposed to the neutron bomb for three main reasons. One, I don`t think it`s a militarily effective weapon.. The neutron bomb, as you know, kills by radiation. But if you attack troops with a neutron bomb and they`re exposed to a lethal dose of radiation, they`re not put out of combat immediately. They could go on fighting for maybe two hours thereafter. Now, I don`t think it is a very good military weapon to have your troops that you had thought you had put out of action still able to come at you in their tanks for a couple of hours after you have supposedly knocked them out. They will only be affected later, and die may a week or two or three weeks later.

Secondly, I don`t call it a humane bomb. There`s been a lot of talk about it being humane because it saves people. Well, it doesn`t save people in the long run because what it does do is save buildings. But people who are in the neighborhood of where this bomb goes off, within a radius of three quarters of a mile or half a mile, depending on exactly how it`s used, are going to be exposed to this radiation and they too are going to suffer radiation sickness, the same kind of sickness that people have when they`ve had radiation therapy for cancer and that sort of thing. And they, too, will be dying off weeks or months or so later, and there will even be prolonged effects for years. I don`t think this is very humane, and I don`t understand why our NATO allies would find it particularly attractive for their populaces to be exposed to this radiation.

But foremost of all the reasons that I`m opposed to it is that I think it can possibly make nuclear war more likely. And this to me is just the opposite of what our objectives should be.

MacNEIL: How can it make nuclear war more likely? Mr. Wickner`s just said it would be a deterrent.

SCOVILLE: Yes, but he says in order to make it a better deterrent you have to make it more credible that we might actually use it. I think this is just a contradiction. I don`t see how you can make it more credible that you`re going to use it unless there is a better chance that you would actually use it; and therefore what we are really doing by deploying this weapon if the President were to make that decision -- and I hope he doesn`t -- is to be making it more likely that nuclear weapons would be used in a conflict in Europe. And I find this just the wrong thing and a very dangerous move, and one which we should be taking steps in the opposite direction. And up to the present this has been a point which President Carter has been very strong on. For example, yesterday in his press conference he mentioned that if nuclear weapons are used, and specifically these kinds of weapons were ever actually used, there`s no way for knowing that the thing would not escalate into a complete nuclear catastrophe for the people of this country.

MacNEIL: I see. Several years ago the United States pledged, I`ve read, that it would not develop mini-nuclear weapons. Is this not a mini-nuclear weapon?

SCOVILLE: Sure. That`s exactly what it is. The only way you can have these radiation weapons is to have very small nuclear explosions. Small nuclear explosions always will kill by neutrons. Once they get large, no matter what kind of a weapon they are, they will kill by blast and thermal radiation. But when you get down into the kiloton or subkiloton range -- and I presume that`s what this is -- you will be getting -- and that`s what mini-nukes are also -- then you will start killing with neutrons. And all this is is a mini-nuke dressed up in slightly gaudier clothes to make it more saleable.

MacNEIL: Thank you. Jim?

LEHRER: Yes, I just wanted to report, Robin, that the Senate is in a few moments about to vote on this issue, and Senator Heinz, who is a Republican from Pennsylvania, must now leave us. Senator, good luck to you.

HEINZ: Jim, thank you. If I might just say in closing, fifteen seconds, that the issues that have just been brought up by Mr. Scoville, that Mr. Wickner`s brought up and that I expect Mr. Lehman will bring up are the kinds of issues that the Senate should be debating. That`s exactly what hasn`t happened in our committees today, either in the House side or in the Senate side, and why I think this issue really deserves a great deal of careful study. And I thank you for the opportunity of appearing on your show.

LEHRER: All right, Senator, have a nice trip back to the Hill.

HEINZ: Thank you.

LEHRER: Robin?

MacNEIL: Thanks, Senator. Yesterday General Alexander Haig, the NATO Supreme Commander, urged that the neutron bomb be placed in NATO`s nuclear arsenal. He said it had "enthusiastic support" from European NATO members and would give the alliance more flexibility in decision making. The question in the minds of many strategic experts is whether NATO in fact needs additional tactical nuclear capacity because it`s unable to match the Soviets` conventional forces. Yesterday at his press conference President Carter appeared to deny this.

PRESIDENT CARTER: My guess is -- and my belief is -- that without the use of atomic weapons we have adequate force strength in NATO to stop an invasion from the Warsaw Pact forces. There is some advantage in the commitment and effectiveness of the forces of a defending nation if they are fighting on their own invaded territory, and I think this would mean that in a rough balance that the invading nations would have to have an overwhelmingly superior force.

We are now putting as a much greater priority in our budget request for defense expenditures monies for improving our conventional forces in Europe. In years gone by, fifteen or twenty years ago, we had an overwhelming superiority in nuclear weapons. Now, I would say, we have a roughly equivalent strength in atomic weapons. And so we must insure that within the bounds of measurement that our conventional forces are equivalent also. And I don`t acknowledge at all the fact that an invasion of the Warsaw Pact nations would be successful without the use of atomic weapons.

LEHRER: All right, on the specific question of NATO we want to go first now to John Lehman. Mr. Lehman served on the National Security Council staff in the Nixon and Ford administrations and was Deputy Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Since leaving the government he`s been with a private consulting firm here in Washington.

First, Mr. Lehman, do you agree with the President`s reading of the situation in NATO?

JOHN LEHMAN: Well, I would say marginally that the NATO forces have an ability to stop a conventional attack today. But the disturbing situation in Europe and the one that General Haig often speaks to, quite rightly, is that the trends are very disturbing. The trends are all in the wrong direction. The Soviets have embarked on a very steady improvement, modernization and buildup of their forces in NATO to the point where the Pact now has about 950,000 combat forces and about a 2.6-to-1 advantage in tanks and armor postured in a way that is built for a blitz, a fast blitz to bust through a point in the NATO line. Now, I think right now that we have, especially with the modernization programs that the German government has embarked on and some of the modernization innovations that General Haig has started, and further improvements that are on their way, like AWACS...

LEHRER: What`s AWACS?

LEHMAN: AWACS is the Air Defense Early Warning Radar and Commanding Control System, which will greatly improve our conventional punch in air power. But the trend still is bad, because there is not a significant increase in the level of defense expenditure in conventional weapons going on in the United States or in the Western European countries, while the increase in the Pact side continues. And indeed, I was surprised to hear the President`s remark yesterday because he seems to be going off on a very different tangent than his own bureaucracy, which is under way in a major study that is recommending that there be substantial cuts available across the board in conventional power. So the administration is tending to speak with two voices. I like the President`s voice; I think there should be a greatly increased emphasis in conventional firepower in NATO because that`s what will preclude the necessity to use tactical nuclear weapons.

LEHRER: All right, how would you fit the neutron bomb into the situation as you know it that now exists in NATO? Is it needed?

LEHMAN: I think a lot of the confusion in the debate has been caused by a sort of confusing the costs of the system that are already there with the cost of the development of the new warhead, because the cost of billions that the Senator alluded to is really in the delivery systems themselves. The warheads cost approximately ten percent of the overall cost that in fact many in the Senate are using in the figure, and they`re already in place. We have the 155 and the eight-inch artillery and we have the Lance already in place with nuclear warheads, but they`re much less militarily effective nuclear warheads. So the costing factor is one that`s significantly lower from modernizing. The military effects -- you have to decide whether you want to continue to depend, as this national and alliance policy is, on tactical nuclear weapons as part of your declared policy. That`s a debatable point, which I won`t go into now. But if you do, there`s no question that militarily a weapon that can stop mass tanks, which are the threat...

LEHRER: And the neutron bomb can do that.

LEHMAN: The neutron bomb can stop tanks. You know, the best bomb shelter in the world is a tank. And with the current weapons we have over there unless you virtually get a direct hit you`re not going to stop that mass tank attack, and the effects -- when we went into this in depth in the Arms Control Agency, and indeed, discussed and briefed a great number of members of the Congress and their staffs over the last three years because, as the Senator said, it`s not a new issue -we really found that the effectiveness of these weapons in stopping the crews was that while they may not die, actually, for a half an hour, they`re not terribly effective. And so you can stop mass armor; and that`s the real danger, the real destabilizing factor in NATO today, the danger that there will be a conventional armor breakthrough.

LEHRER: All right. Thank you, Mr. Lehman. Robin?

MacNEIL: Yes. Let`s pursue this situation in NATO a bit. Professor Wickner, does NATO need the neutron bomb now because it is not strong enough in conventional arms, in the Pentagon view, to stop the threat of a Soviet invasion?

WICKNER: The answer to that I`d like to give this way: theater nuclear forces, which are of short, intermediate and long range, have an important impact on Soviet military forces. The Soviets, if they believe that they might be attacked by nuclear weapons from NATO, must posture themselves to minimize the effects that these weapons might have on them. In doing that, they allow us to provide a conventional defense against forces deployed in East Germany and Czechoslovakia with the current forces deployed in NATO at a cost that we can afford and with the forces that we presently have deployed there. As we enhance the threat and the capability of theater nuclear forces we can with our conventional force modernization program develop a substantial deterrent which is really quite capable against the forces in East Germany and Czechoslovakia and thereby very effectively deter the Soviets from ever thinking of launching any type of war utilizing a combination of either conventional, chemical or nuclear war...

MacNEIL: Is what you`re saying -- just so I`m clear about it -that with this bomb they`d have to spread their forces out or do something to protect themselves so that we then wouldn`t have to spend a whole lot more money on conventional forces, which is a political problem in Europe?

WICKNER: That`s exactly right.

MacNEIL: That is. How do you come down on this argument as to whether we are in such a vulnerable position now in the NATO situation, Dr. Scoville, that we need something like this to get around the fact that it`s politically unpopular and very difficult and expensive to build up the conventional weapons as the Russians have?

SCOVILLE: I think Mr. Wickner already answered this question in that we already have the kind of nuclear weapons that are available in the theater to force the Soviets into the kind of spread deployments which permit us to deal with them with conventional forces. And I was very pleased to see the statement yesterday by President Carter that we have the conventional forces which are necessary to defend ourselves against an aggression by the Soviet Union. I`m also pleased that he believes in building up those forces, and I would much prefer to see the money that is going into this new kind of nuclear weapon which might make nuclear war more likely being put into the conventional forces.

And incidentally, I think it was Mr. Lehman who said that these things don`t cost very much because the warheads are much cheaper than the delivery vehicles and we already have the delivery vehicles. Well, a number that I have seen quoted publicly is $600 million just for the warheads for one of the artillery shells, and there are three of these systems, so it is clearly going to go into the billions of dollars for these warheads, and that will buy a lot of conventional capability.

MacNEIL: Let`s go back to Mr. Wickner for a moment. Is that what you understood the President to be saying, that we have the conventional forces but implied there was an "if we have these neutron bombs on top of them"?

WICKNER: I don`t presume to put words in the President`s mouth, so let me just say what I think is important. The Soviets in the last ten years have made very substantial improvements in three components of their theater forces: their conventional forces, those portions of those theater forces that are able to deploy and use chemical weapons, and those nuclear weapons that they also have provided to the full spectrum of the theater forces. The time has now come for the West, for NATO, to recognize the improvements that have been made in these three components and to face up to the problems of deterring the use of them. And the judgment that I have come to and a number of other people have come to is that there are a number of things that we must do. We must not only improve our conventional forces, we must also improve our theater nuclear weapons and the deployment of our conventional and nuclear forces in NATO and the employment plans that we have for the use of these.

MacNEIL: Okay.

WICKNER: We must pay attention to the threat and we must plan our defensive alliance so that there`s no opportunity, or no hint of an opportunity, to the Soviet Union that they can exert political coercion through the threat of the use of their forces or through the actual use of their forces against the Western European countries.

MacNEIL: Thank you. Jim?

LEHRER: Mr. Lehman, Senator Hatfield and others have said that if the neutron bomb is developed that it could result in an escalation of the arms race. What`s your view of that?

LEHMAN: I just don`t see the relevance of that argument. In MBFR, where we`re negotiating about...

LEHRER: MBFR?

LEHMAN: Excuse me for lapsing into jargon, but this is the Mutual Balance Force Reduction talks, of which I was a member of the delegation for six months -- we`re negotiating a reduction, or we`re trying to, between NATO and the Pact of these conventional forces in Europe to lessen the imbalance that now exists. And the United States has taken the initiative of offering to withdraw a thousand nuclear warheads if the Soviets will somewhat lessen the imbalance that they have of a preponderance in manpower and tanks. Now, I think that the effects of making the believability of our use of these nuclear weapons at the same time as showing our bona fide as an offering to reduce them -- and frankly, I personally would like to see them all withdrawn from Europe in the proper negotiated context, but I see nothing but benefit at the negotiating table to having the threat of use of them -- as long as you keep them there -- improved.

LEHRER: Dr. Scoville, do you agree with that?

SCOVILLE: No, I don`t want the threat of the use of them to increase, or I don`t want the likelihood of them being used increased. I think we already have a good nuclear deterrent, and I don`t see why we have to add a whole new family of weapons at this stage in the game which make the use of nuclear weapons more likely. It seems to me a wrong direction.

MacNEIL: I`m sorry, Dr. Scoville, I have to leave it there. Thank you all in Washington very much. Good night, Jim. Good night, Dr. Scoville. That`s all for tonight. Jim and I will be back tomorrow night, when we`ll examine President Carter`s dispute with some European countries over his opposition to fast breeder nuclear reactors. I`m Robert MacNeil. Good night.