War and Peace in the Nuclear Age; Interview with Richard Garwin, 1987

What we started long ago with a nuclear force we had to move them near their targets. Bombs dropped on Japan were delivered by airplanes. When the Soviet Union became the number one enemy we had nuclear weapons forward based on airplanes in Europe than on missiles in Italy and Turkey. But that's inconvenient to put them in the ocean is good for the Navy and a marvelous technical achievement but it doesn't do much for the Air Force. Early on we could get accurate delivery with ballistic missiles only from silo basing. We could build weapons which could throw nuclear warheads a quarter world away the ICBM. And that's why we had them in silos. Now why silos. We did not start with silos we started with the Atlas and the Taiping missiles. They were above ground. They were soft. They took much

longer to fuel than they did to fly. They had one warhead each. And it was a monster with the first hydrogen bomb many megatons of yield but they were very vulnerable and obviously even Soviet bombers could come and destroy these missiles above the ground. So after we had deployed them and we learned that we could build re-entry vehicles which were much much less massive than we had imagined in the first place we decided we should improve the survivability of these things and harden them with concrete and steel initially to a few hundred pounds per square inch a few times the pressure in your automobile tire. And now to a thousand or 2000 pounds per square inch hardness. So right now in the Minuteman fields we have a thousand missiles and there are about seven mile centers. Each one requires

a direct hit from a Soviet nuclear weapon landing within a 100 or 200 yards to destroy it. And so I would take a couple of thousand accurate fairly reliable Soviet weapons to destroy our Minuteman silo based force. It has 11 desirable characteristics which were enunciated by Lou Allen then chief of staff of the Air Force in response to a 1978 question from the head of the House Armed Services Committee. Among these properties are accuracy. Good communications good controls. They won't go and you don't want them to go. And promptness of lunch. There are others low operating cost is among them you put them in the ground and you don't just forget them but they don't require much in the way of maintenance. Yes. You.

Know what people who are involved with any program want to improve it. It's in the nature of people and they get paid for doing so even when the improvements really don't provide any benefit to the taxpayer the sponsor or to national security. So the things that you might improve are to make a weapon smaller for delivering the same yield the same explosive power you might make it more accurate so that it could destroy hardened targets you might provide earth penetrating capability you might add penetration aids so that the weapons could more easily go through a defense that the other side has you might harden them. The basing system or the missile itself so as it's launched the x rays from an enemy nuclear warhead could not

destroy it so easily. All of those things. But I suppose capability might be defined as a number of targets that can be killed. How long it takes to destroy them and how hard those targets can be. And that is effected by number of warheads on our side. Good communications to them. Accuracy of the weapons themselves and all of those. For instance the Charles dark Draper Laboratory in Cambridge has been the fount of improvement in inertial guidance but they have also been the ones who have denied our operational ballistic missile forces. The benefits of radio navigation which could long ago have improved the accuracy well beyond where we are now with pure inertial guidance for as I understand the

Slesinger doctrine and I was quite exercised about it when I first heard of it in fact I went over to the Pentagon to talk with Jim Slesinger. He was on a trip so I talked with Dan Carter the assistant secretary of defense in charge of nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. They were looking for a second strike. Counter-force was a short way to put it. They felt that high quality deterrence as Paul Nitze used to put it could be achieved not by destroying or having the ability to destroy Soviet society factories ordinary military forces. But one had to be able to destroy the Soviet strategic forces themselves. And of course they could not profess that we wanted a first strike capability that would not be acceptable in the American doctrine or to the American people or to the Congress. But they wanted to ensure they said that if a nuclear war started the Soviets would see that they

would lose all of their strategic warmaking potential and therefore they would be deterred they wouldn't start the nuclear war because if they did they would suddenly become disarmed. The only problem with that is that it's a lot easier for us to get a first strike counterforce capability. That is when our communications systems are in tact when we know that all of their silos are full. When we have the opportunity for months to track their submarines in the ocean is to destroy them all out of the blue that I could build a system to do at great cost of course. And I don't know how to build a second strike counter force capability for two reasons. One the Soviets will have launched some of their weapons and not others. So you have the problem of knowing which silos are empty and which to attack. But the bigger problem is that if the Soviets are assumed to have made a first strike then they will certainly have put their remaining nuclear weapons on launch under attack.

That is as soon as we launch back against them they will fly their remaining weapons. So there's no possibility since it takes ICBMs 30 minutes to fly and it takes submarine launched ballistic missiles probably 10 or 15 from their launch sites to the silo fields no possibility of destroying the Soviet weapons before they can be launched the first time for us. I expect some people were advocating a second strike capability as a cover or an approach to their desired first strike. Counter-force first strike this arming force. I don't think Secretary of Defense Slesinger had that in mind I suppose politically he was required to build the force that he rationalized as aiding deterrence because it provided a second strike counter force even though he knew that a first

strike counter force capability was unachievable and would be very destabilizing because a first strike force has the same problem. That is when they see it coming. They would be sufficiently alert to launch under attack. The counter-force problem arose later. It reared its ugly head again in 1980 in a campaign letter that I saw from the Reagan campaign. It said that our candidate Governor Reagan is committed to a three point program first to build nuclear weapons to disarm the Soviet Union not just to destroy them in retaliation to disarm them. Second to get the political benefits from everyone in the world including the Soviets knowing that we have that capability. And third in case the Soviets by dint of hard work prevent us from getting a disarming capability they would have destroyed themselves economically. So economic warfare. The only problem logically with that

three point program aside from a moral or ethical one is that it cannot be carried through. The Soviets would laugh all the way to the bank because they could just put their weapons on launch under attack if we launched our first strike attack. The Soviets would launch their weapons and knowing that we would be deterred from ever attacking in the first place. The SDI in 1983 filled that logical gap if it could be popped up not on orbit all the time but popped up at the time that we made this first strike. Then the Soviets would have a dilemma. Either they would launch their weapons at that moment to be eaten up by the strategic defense or they would allow the weapons to stay in their silos and submarines to be destroyed by our first dry counter-force. All of this of course in the name of political persuasion and deterrence. But the Soviets wouldn't see it that way any more than we would

with. The Air Force was pursuing the line of development of evolution just the way the dinosaurs did or the boat builders or whatever people and their contractors just tried to do the best they can and things get bigger and more complex and more expensive in the process. They lose sight of the national security. There is a syndrome and it is the commander syndrome as if you're a commander of a ship you want the world's best ship and you want to maximize the survivability and the capability do the best for yourself and for your crew. Never mind that if you had a ship that was 10 times less expensive one could get a lot more of them. And overall we would have better survivability and more capability. So that's the direction in which the Air Force is going.

Putting more eggs in one basket. Each of the eggs would be somewhat cheaper but each of the baskets would be considerably more expensive. The Air Force was driven also by the 1972 salt one agreement which limited the size of the missile that we could have. It would be the Soviet SS 11 equivalent and the biggest missile we could make under that rubric of a light missile the largest light missile was excised hundred ninety five thousand pounds. There's a saying in arms control that a ceiling becomes a floor. And I never saw it more clearly exemplified than in this case where the biggest missile you were allowed to make became the smallest missile. The Air Air Force was willing to consider. And in fact a friend of mine even getting head of the Aerospace Corporation and an Air Force contractor in the mid-70s in some aspiration with

my arguing in favor of smaller missiles and other Basinger's said you know I just want the biggest missile we're allowed to make. The Soviets have missiles like that. And why can't we have missiles like that. The best rationale I've heard for the I-Max came from another friend of mine who said well you know the Minutemen won't live forever. We have to have modernizations some time. I don't know whether now is the right time but if not now five years or ten years from now and what is it that we should build. And in fact there is nothing wrong in my opinion with modernizing with continual reductions in costs. For instance if one considers 35 millimeter cameras the cameras remain at the same price in dollars and their functions improve enormously. That's the direction that we ought to take or we might even turn back some money to the taxpayer and have a finite and adequate deterrent capability. But the problem with the

multiple warhead the 10 warhead X is that it is self induced vulnerability. It's not the warheads are warheads that hurt us. It's the relatively few launchers. If we have the same number of warheads as the Soviets and we put more than one warhead on a launcher then the Soviets obviously by attacking that launcher could destroy more warheads than they lose in the late 70s. This was the vulnerability gap the window of vulnerability. Paul Nitsa was a great exponent of this window and he would show charts which showed a drawdown curve that the Soviets by attacking the Minuteman with its three warheads they would need only two to destroy a minute man with high reliability. This was supposed to be an irresistible temptation to the Soviets to nuclear attack in time of crisis. They ignored of course the fact that we had long had

maybe 600 submarine launched ballistic missile warheads in a single port that could have been destroyed with those same two Soviet warheads. So 300 warheads destroyed by one was not an irresistible temptation to attack but three warheads destroyed by two was and the IMX the proposed remedy to this Minuteman vulnerability cure admitted vulnerability. All right. But it replaced it by a worse Amex vulnerability. So that was the origin of the replacement for the simple Air Force desire to build a bigger and a more modern missile. The Carter administration said All right we ought to have some modernization but we insist that it be in an invulnerable in a survivable basing posture. If one argues that mutual vulnerability could be reduced by

greater accuracy in targeting that's assuming that the Soviets are going to have greater accuracy and will thereby reduce the yields required to destroy military targets and that to the extent that they no longer have the capability to destroy cities. Well that isn't happening. And it will not happen because in this confrontation if each side has the ability to destroy military targets after an ICBM flight time and one side has the ability to destroy the society but the other side doesn't then the destruction of military targets becomes irrelevant. All you need to do is to threaten to destroy the other side's society and it must capitulate. It's no good for it to say but I'll destroy your military targets. In fact this scenario which I gather you call the Nitsa scenario goes back in my own experience to a debate I had in 1973 with Richard Perle who was at that time a staff aide to

Senator Henry Jackson. He said in a debate in Washington that once the Soviet missiles became more accurate the thousand Minuteman missiles we had could be destroyed and the Soviets would no longer be deterred from a nuclear attack on the United States why we would still have the submarines and they were invulnerable. He said yes but the Soviet leader would tell the American president that he knew that we still had the submarines and that they could destroy Soviet cities. But the Soviets also had missiles left over from destroying our Minuteman silos and they could destroy our cities in return. So the American president would capitulate wanting more to have American cities survive than just the Soviet cities destroyed. Now Richard Perle was arguing that we ought to defend the Minuteman and build the safeguard system. But I said to them suppose that we have

perfectly invulnerable Minuteman by magic for instance. And I'll give you a perfectly accurate nuclear weapons as well. How will the scenario be different. The Soviets of course can't destroy these invulnerable Minutemen. They will send a nuclear weapon over to destroy an airfield or a dam say we mean business. We know you have those submarine launched weapons that can destroy our cities and we know you now have those Minuteman missiles whose warheads can destroy our silos but we assure you we have put our missiles all launch under attack. And if we see any warheads coming toward us we will destroy your cities and the American president. If he was deterred before and surrendered would have to surrender now. In fact the American president will not surrender in either case because he knows or she knows that the threat to destroy Soviet cities is enough to keep them from attacking in the first place.

And that is the rational planner. In the past. We had submarine launched missiles which were not sufficiently accurate to destroy silos and silo based missiles which were marginally accurate. There was a question about improving the accuracy. And I thought that neither the Soviets nor we ought to do that. And I remember writing that the world would be a better place if both of our missiles were inaccurate. But if one side had had accurate missiles then the world would be more secure if the second side did not and that failed even if that were the Soviets with accurate missiles and we without. So the worst would be when both sides had accurate missiles and they would perceive the mutual threat to destroy their retaliatory force if only one side had the

accurate missile of course that need fear nothing from the other side. And the other side could put its weapons launch under attack the first died with the accurate missile had no reason to launch rapidly. But when both sides have accurate missiles and if that were the only kind of retaliatory force then there would be a hair trigger situation with both sides on launch and under attack each waiting for the other to strike. I mean. That's pretty hard to argue with secretaries of defense and air forces and think tanks all at the same time because you never know who is scheming and at what stage they are in their persuasion. So the best I've been able to do is to publish papers many of them long in advance of the time when the question has become

popular or give congressional testimony whenever invited. Moving is a kind of self-induced vulnerability we emerged not to create vulnerable missiles for us but to increase our capability for a given number of launchers to destroy many more targets on the Soviet side. And of course we failed to grasp the opportunity in 1972 and solved one to ban Merv's which later came back to bite us when the Soviets copied us and made our own murd ICBM launchers vulnerable. We're in the early 70s the Soviet ICBMs were not sufficiently accurate to make

our Minuteman vulnerable. And only in the late 70s. Was there any argument that they had become vulnerable. Now paradoxically people argue that we must do this or that in order to prevent the Minuteman from becoming vulnerable when those same people have argued that it has been vulnerable since the late 1970s. If we are satisfied all these years with a vulnerable ICBM force why do we have to do anything about it now. The Minuteman is not vulnerable in the sense that no Soviet leader is going to launch an attack which will destroy the minute every rational Soviet planner is going to judge the United States capable of launch under attack so that the Minuteman silos might be destroyed but not the missiles. But furthermore the Minuteman will not be destroyed because it is embedded in the submarine large ballistic missiles and bomber

forces the one which is not vulnerable at all. And the second which can get off the ground before it is destroyed. So the Scowcroft commission in 1983 and 1984 gave those answers which I believe. We heard a lot about the window of vulnerability in the late 70s because it is a selling point for a program. In fact it was not a reason to build MX's and to put them into silos which is what the Air Force wanted to do. But it got people's attention and it motivated them to do something. So it is propaganda advertising. In 1973 Richard Perle made the same argument but it was perfectly clear that if I gave him invulnerable missiles and perfectly accurate ones to boot they would not remove the frightening scenario the

result that he feared namely that the Soviets would threaten to destroy US cities unless we surrendered. And it's pretty hard to eliminate that threat from the Soviet capability. Well it wouldn't be a complicated decision to rely on launch under attack. It's only yes or no. And one should not plan to rely on launch under attack. However if the submarines would suddenly and unexpectedly become vulnerable if the Soviet missiles became more accurate than we thought if an attack were imagined to be on the way then you would be better off having a launch under attack capability to deter that Soviet strike than having missiles locked up so they could under no

circumstances be launched until an hour after they were commanded to go. So as a last ditch capability not to be used necessarily but to be depended on if all else fails launch under attack is very valuable. I would hope that the Soviets have launched under attack capability because if they don't then they may argue that they have to go first. And I don't want the Soviets feeling that they must launch before we launch. I would I'd rather have the Soviets feeling that they can allow the US to launch our missiles and they could still retaliate and therefore the United States seeing this would not attack the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union would not attack the United States. So I think launch under attack is a stabilizing capability on both sides. It would be better if the strategic forces were not vulnerable. So one did not have to rely on launch under attack.

But if one has vulnerable forces then it's a good thing to have the Air Force make sure in arguing for a program you don't want to be too complicated. You want to scare the hell out of people because that gets their attention and then you want to give them a solution whether or not it solves the problem. And that's what the Air Force was doing. So assuredly the Minutemen could not be proved to be invulnerable. And so that was a good premise. Now the solution the max in fact was not a solution to Minuteman vulnerability replacing it for the most part with M-x vulnerability. And insofar as it was a different basing mode the Minuteman could have been rebase much more quickly at much lower cost. That was never candidly

analyzed. In fact it was misrepresented by Air Force general officers to the Congress and to the governors. I remember one case in which a general officer explained to Congress and then later to Governor Matheson of Utah that it would cost much more to redeploy the Minuteman missiles Minuteman 3 then to build MX in multiple protective shelters. His argument was that it would take vastly more Minuteman shelters than the 4600 that were due to be built for the max. But he had carefully and not very candidly assumed that he would start with 6300 50 Minuteman warheads and he would start with 2000 Emerick's warheads. So a key he could afford to lose a lot fewer Minuteman warheads. Had he used 2000 Minuteman warheads which we had in a few less than 700 Minuteman missiles the Minuteman redeployment would have been a lot cheaper. But the Air Force didn't tell us

that because it would have interfered with their game plan which was to push the IMX through development to manufacture and deployment. There are different parts of the Air Force there is the development part of the Air Force and they were excited about the MX because it was the next strategic program an Air Force officer told me once. We've been working on this two years now it's time for it to move into the next stage. Well when I have directed industrial research programs I was careful to have two or three competing programs that I sponsored so that at least one and maybe two or three of the groups would realize that they could not go into full scale development and production. Sometimes just a very good technical work. There is no need for this in the marketplace that's go on to the next item. But

that doesn't tend to happen in the military where there is no test of the marketplace. Now the operators of course they have an unfilled target list. There are people whose job it is to identify targets to be struck by nuclear weapons if war comes. Since we get new nuclear weapons every day they have to have a list that is somewhat bigger than the number of weapons that we have. And so they would like to make more or more effective weapons. And the IMAX was a cheaper way to add nuclear warheads than the other ways that we had bundling ten of them to a single guidance system. Incidentally since 1980 two or 83 it is no longer cheaper in my opinion to use multiple warheads Merv's for accurate delivery than to use single warhead missiles because the cost of guidance systems has come way down. And so one can't afford to have a guidance system for a warhead without running up

the cost too much for us. What are the conflict between capability the ability to put Soviet hard targets at risk and survivability was muted. The Air Force wanted capability. The Carter administration wanted survivability and they sort of didn't poach on one another's territory. But the Carter administration went to extreme lengths and President Carter himself was involved as well as Bill Perry undersecretary of defense very much in the choice of the basing modes. It was unfortunate in my opinion that we had so many modes which were considered came to life were advocated by the administration were later found to be

technically inadequate and were we were replaced by other inadequate modes. In fact there were two approaches which were never really considered. One was to put the MX missile. If you believe you have to have the I-Max missile and not waste all that development cost put it on submarines put it lying down in the water on submarines to or for to a small submarine that could produce a lot of aim points. You would have at most 40 warheads to a submarine compared with a couple of hundred now. And the submarine carrying a true ICBM could stay fairly close. A few hundred miles from U.S. shores. So Sydney drala of Stanford University and I proposed that we worked on it for the Defense Department the Defense Department then studied our report criticized it in a system Planning Corporation study and we responded to that. If you want the max missile in my opinion that is the right way to deploy it. Unfortunately

it does not give the Air Force what it wants and forgot to say was essential namely a land based replacement for the Minuteman. Why force. The Air Force never really had the competence to analyze it. They told us. But in any case it wouldn't be their responsibility and they haven't created Minuteman vulnerability in order to give the Navy another operational system. The Navy didn't like it because to even consider small submarines would show a lack of faith in their Trident program which has always had very tough sledding. And so they didn't want to imperil the continued funding. The contractors knew where they stood with Trident and they didn't know where they would stand with these small submarines. And so there was no interest on their part. It is a very important program in my opinion.

If we go to much smaller number of nuclear weapons and ought to be considered seriously. In order to let the Minuteman replacement although the condition was state had to be land based in order to be an Air Force responsibility it was the Air Force that wanted a replacement for its Minuteman. If the Air Force had been told that the replacement to the Minuteman will be C-based the Air Force would have had big programs geriatric programs for preserving Minuteman into its 30th 40th and 50th year and they would have done a good job about it. But with the possibility of an Air Force replacement with better technology and higher costs it was clear that that's what they wanted. You might imagine that a sea based replacement for the Minuteman

so Trident programs airlines cruise missiles and still another sea based program would have been the strategic choice. And I think it might have been but it was not an Air Force choice because it would have escaped the responsibility of the Air Force bureaucracy. Bureaucracies do not exist in order to put themselves out of business or to split off a large part of themselves. If the Air Force had known that the replacement to the Minuteman would have been C-based they would have had geriatric care for the Minuteman and preserved it for twenty or thirty years longer. The national security is an orphan just like so many of public interest is a kind of mirk into the system where the

people who make shoes have a lot more influence on trade legist legislation than the people who wear shoes in the people who grow food have more influence and the people who make weapons have more influence than the people who pay for them or who will die from them. And it seems to me that the national security requires in a democracy that people understand these questions. So thats why I try to testify whenever invited. And in this case the local people some of them were in favor of some of them were opposing the deployment but in some cases it seemed to me for the wrong reasons. And so I thought I would go out and tell them how I saw these things and explained to them that no you really could deploy the Minuteman in the same shelters for lower cost and that the MX deployment proposal really would not provide a survivable basing in some cases it would provide only a launch under attack and it was a very

expensive way to do a job that could have been done much more cheaply. So why should we spend the money. So I went to tell the people what I thought about it. Why are you here. The Carter basing mode which had 23 shelters per x what either have the IMAX permanently in the shelter or it would have a kind of scramble on warning. It seemed to be really very difficult to preserve location uncertainty as they called it with free public access to the roads adjoining these shelters. And the Carter administration response to that was well OK if we're worried about it when there is a Soviet launch we will have these missiles out on the road and they will dash into another shelter.

Well you're going to do one or the other. You're not going to save or scramble on warning. If you are confident that you can preserve location uncertainty scramble and warning is its own vulnerability. And we pointed out that if you are waiting 30 minutes if you have 30 minutes to scramble into another shelter then a submarine large ballistic missile which gets there in seven minutes will destroy the weapon. The I-Max before it has found shelter and the Carter administration having thought about that. So here the worst thing they could imagine the other side finding out where the weapon was they say easy was scrambled and warning. But they had forgotten that their SLBM was to attack also and the SLBM need have no particular accuracy. So really it was a big system half thought through would have been better with vertical shelters for the max missiles but it would have been far better. Redeploying the Minuteman or even

better to put a single warhead missile in a silo and give up all of this uncertainty in position because it is self-protecting it cannot be destroyed. Warhead for warhead by the Soviet Union. The Soviets could have overwhelmed the system but that would not have been their choice. I think it would have been a lot easier with sensors to find out where the missiles were and to attack them. But those missiles were unnecessary. And that's the point. And if it's not necessary to build them why build them. If you say it is necessary to build them then you have to take seriously the promise that they are going to be invulnerable and if they can be shown to be vulnerable then you shouldn't build that system. The missiles were unnecessary because we had plenty of deterrent

capability on the submarines because we could have had a last ditch launch under attack to protect ourselves if all of the weapons became vulnerable. And finally because the accuracy of the weapons submarine launched or silo based automobile could have been improved to any desired level considerably better than the current AirMax by adding ground beacon systems radio systems in the launchings fields. So there was no need to build new weapons and this was the wrong one to build if one were looking either for additional silo killing capability or survivability. Why did you find. The weapon wasn't in question and the basing mode was so I said what I thought about both weapon then basing mode and people

took that. Argument and used it in respect to the basing mode in the first case. All right. General Hecker stated out in Nevada or Utah that those people said Drell and myself among them who were opposing the I-Max basing had opposed every strategic system and they were just trying to kill the IMX. I thought that was a low blow since we had worked really very hard on the small undersea mobile submarine basing of the I-Max. And I have not wavered in my support of that. But furthermore I've been largely responsible for the air launch cruise missile one of our primary strategic weapons. And a lot of other contributions to strategic offense and strategic defense but it's pretty hard I suppose even for a military officer to keep a cool head when in an argument.

The atmosphere in Utah and Nevada was marked by a decided absence of Air Force people whenever I went. Even though people tried to get the air force on the same platform they always declined. They would come out the next day but they wouldn't show up for a debate or even a discussion. I suppose they felt that they would do a better job on selling their program if they could make their statements without somebody nearby who was familiar with them and had some perceptions or arguments about them. What do you think. Well I think the public protest in Utah and Nevada and the

Mormon Church opposition had killed the deployment in those states. Of course when the Reagan administration came in they opposed the Amex basing maybe even the IMX missile for a while as a Carter administration program and then found they had the air force to reckon with. So the Reagan administration had its own Amex missile basing follies starting with super hardening which appealed to the president and the secretary of defense. But they should have checked it out with the Defense Department first which they didn't which didn't like it. And then the dense pack in which the hundred weapons were to be based so close together that they could not all be destroyed simultaneously because the silos were harder than the incoming warheads and if one warhead went off first it would destroy the other warheads nearby. While the silos except for the closest would not be destroyed. That turns

out to be lines under attack in another guise a very expensive launch under attack because by the assumptions that the Reagan administration published the Soviets could destroy 10 percent. That is 10 of them missiles without mutual interference of the warheads coming in and then half an hour later another 10. And so in a few hours every one of those missiles would be gone unless it were launched before it was destroyed. So it is launch under attack. It is not enduring survival such as was hoped for by the mobile missiles of the Carter administration and such as would be provided by single warheads missiles based in silos. The Soviets could have built that I'm sorry the Soviets could have overcome dense pack in two ways one by destroying 10 percent and 10 percent and 10 percent with half an hour for each 10 percent or another

way giving them credit for the accuracy that the administration credits them. They could have had totally simultaneous detonation. So all of the weapons arrived each of their individual targets and detonated simultaneously to within a millionth of a second. Easy enough to do by communication among the warheads. Yes either one of these would have been a reasonable approach to overcoming dense pack for a first strike force. Do you think that. There are many people in the military with different views. Some of them are fixed than capability others like Glen Kent are interested in survivability and the problem is they are likely to compromise

to try to get survivability plus capability. And it's hard to say what that program had as a goal backed into a corner. One could always say it's a bargaining chip. If the Soviets don't like all of this accuracy and these warheads being added to our stockpile maybe they will be willing to give up some of theirs in return. So unfortunately there are many arguments which are offered. Some of them candidly but some of them dishonestly. Like. Whenever the question of first strike capability was raised of the 200 Amex Carter people I'm under 100 m ex Reagan deployment. The answer would always be this is not enough warheads to give us a first strike capability. But my response to Harold Brown and others was that

if the Soviets began to build missiles at that rate and they built 4600 shelters and they said we're only going to put 200 missiles into them we would say that was laying the bases laying the groundwork. The Care and Feeding of a vast force of missiles and we would worry that they were getting closer to a first strike capability. No the Soviets weren't worried too much about a first strike capability because they have their submarines as well and they have launch under attack but they didn't like it and it didn't drive them either into reductions of warheads. In my opinion Chris. In 1974 Secretary of Defense James Slesinger testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that there was at perhaps danger of a surgical strike from the Soviet Union against our strategic forces

against the land based missiles against the air bases the submarines in port and that perhaps not enough Americans would be killed in such an attack for us to think retaliation was necessary perhaps as few as eighty thousand or eight hundred thousand Americans. Another study by the Office of Technology Assessment led to more testimony from the Defense Department and the number became five to 20 million Americans killed by a militarily significant attack on the strategic forces. And later in the next debates the Air Force said 40 to 50 million people would be killed if the Soviets attacked and destroyed all of the land based forces. I think that people did not like being near what was. In DELICH indelicate. They called by the administration as a nuclear sponge

to soak up Soviet nuclear weapons because people know that these nuclear weapons give rise to fall out and so they were unhappy about that. But I'm no expert in the public view of M-x deployment or worry that the Air Force maintained that they could have position location uncertainty with only point security that is keeping people away from the shelters. Maybe just a few hundred feet but at times the Air Force did consider the requirements and the simulators which had to be carried so that the transporter would sometimes be carrying a missile sometimes a simulator and at various times there were arguments that the simulators would not

work unless the roads were secure as well because there could be sensors implanted in the roads. So certainly people were worried. And I think rightly so that the taking of public lands for this purpose would be a continual continual one way street and there are a lot of lots of reasons for that. It's possible that the Minuteman in silos are more survivable than the AirMax the Soviets could faint and provoke all the MX's to come out of their shelters and then with the other hand with the SLBM destroy them. And that wouldn't happen with the Minuteman certainly Minuteman redeployed would have been better than the airMAX and small missiles single warhead missiles deployed in small silos in the Minuteman

field. Even better. There is a big misconception about mobile missiles. People imagine mobile missiles are moving around but really immobile missiles are capable of being moved. It's a mobile missile if it sits in one shelter of 23 and every few months is shuffled in an uncertain fashion to another one of those shelters. So that kind of mobility with empty shelters is a reasonable thing to consider for a single warhead missiles. Not at a ratio of one full shelter to 20 two empty shelters but at a ratio of 1 to one that is every shelter full. Or maybe one to two or one to three if one gets into a warhead race. That's why.

It's pretty hard to have informal conversations with people with whom you disagree. When you as I am about to go to Congress and tell them what I know and what I think because if people say to me one thing in private public officials and another thing in public I can't conceal that. So for the most part I've solved that problem by not talking to my friends privately when they get into government. I will send them papers that I written give them my testimony and I will argue with them when their public testimony on two occasions is inconsistent size iceberg. And I said Drell we're at a hearing chaired by John cybering House public lands subcommittee. As Nyberg came in to give defense views about the small submarine he started with a 20 minute film on the

Van Dorn effect when the submarines are sloping beach than they can be overwhelmed cybering asked him what was the relevance of this film because we did not propose to put the submarines where they would be vulnerable and Seiberg said no relevance. Just thought you might be interested. But obviously he showed the film because it denigrated the small submarine. He had also present numbers in the presentation which were not the result of study but were in there simply because they made a good case against the small submarine cost numbers and whatnot. Antonia chase. It seemed to me during her tenure as Max honcho concealed deficiencies in the administration program for basing the Amex and she allowed the people in the Air Force to say things which were not true. Negative arguments against alternative basing modes.

I wrote her once and I explained to her that she was doing only half her job. She was doing the part of her job carrying out the law building things that the Congress had passed into law. But the other part of the job having a sole stewardship in the Air Force for providing information to the administration and to the Congress as to the possibilities for missile development Amex basing and so on. She was not doing and she wrote me she said yes I do regard myself as the lawyer for the max and if there are to be alternatives then they have to come from you. Well I'm only one person and I have to worry about a lot of other things. I don't have hundreds of millions of dollars to study these things and I think that it is essential that the Congress hold the administration to the standard of providing analyses and not propaganda. Giving options and not throwing cold water on everything which is not the chosen program

or. The MX missile and the Carter administration was unnecessary was the wrong missile. The basing system was inadequate in my opinion. The Soviets could not be proved to remain uncertain of the location of the missile either through sensors implanted or through spying. But the biggest argument in my opinion was that this was unacceptable. We would have been very unhappy if the Soviets had proposed such a system because even if they had built 4600 shelters and only 200 missiles we would have seen the infrastructure. The basis for an enormous force and it would have driven us up the wall. Why or why.

The only satisfactory basing for the I-Max missile is the small submarine two or four missiles to the submarine but it's unacceptable to the Air Force to put its missiles in the water where it couldn't possibly operate. It would give them to the Navy or maybe to the Coast Guard which is the Treasury Department. The Navy didn't want the MX missile and airforce missile because even to look with curiosity on it would have meant a lack of faith in the tried and submarine program and brought that program and the contractors to crashing close. So the small submarine carrying MX missiles is a good solution to a problem that doesn't exist. The Scowcroft commission January 1983 was established by President Reagan

to find a way to persuade Congress to deploy the MX missile. And I testified January 17 1983 to the Scowcroft commission. I said Look here you're going to have to go beyond the max missile. Here's what we ought to do. In the long run clearly we cannot have limited numbers of weapons if the Soviets are allowed to build ballistic missile defense. Therefore we must not have ballistic missile defense. Next we could have single warhead missiles in silos. The midget man. And if it later proved to be cheaper to build a mobile system to provide survivable basing we should move to that. But we are to develop and manufacture midshipmen replace 450 old Minutemen with them and develop a rapid capability to make new silos in the Minuteman fields. They would be self-protecting Finally big submarines with 200 warheads each are too many eggs in each submarine

basket. We have little submarines with maybe eight or so warheads each and we ought to have smaller airplanes eventually with perhaps two airlines cruise missiles each. That will make a bigger problem for the Soviets in destroying these forces on the way to the target. Allow us to have fewer warheads in the long term future. The Scowcroft commission report supported the single warhead ICBM in a survivable basing mode although that's always reported as mobile. They didn't say only mobile it supported the small submarine with sank without a trace in the swamps of Washington and it reinforced the airline's cruise missile and the absence of a defense against ballistic missiles. So I think the Scowcroft commission and I agree about just about everything except that to pay their dues to the president to get him to consider their other recommendations they had a recommendation to deploy

100 MX missiles in Minuteman silos. There's nothing wrong with that. They are just the first missiles to be destroyed in case of a Soviet strike. Because I'm sorry. The MX is the first missile to be destroyed in case of a Soviet strike because 10 warheads can be destroyed by the explosion of a single Soviet warhead nearby. Whereas with a Minuteman 3 as target only three warheads would be destroyed. So you take your choice which would you shoot at. You should have the axe first because it's most valuable second because it's most threatening. And this is very complicated work. First.

The Scowcroft commission said that the strategic force as a whole is not vulnerable and therefore no part of it would be destroyed by the Soviet Union initiating a war. They depend primarily on the submarine large ballistic missiles. And no one suggests that there is any great threat to those right now. It is a threat of a totally different kind. It could be a tracking threat. It could be a slow attrition over a long period something that doesn't threaten the ICBMs or the bombers at all. So the submarine leg is the one which is very different from the then base legs. Now it's true the submarine launch ballistic missiles may pin down ICBMs I have published papers on that. It's true that they could catch some airplanes on the ground but we can move our airplanes if there is a real threat to interior bases in the United States. We can build.

Rocket assisted takeoff kits for strategic bombers which we have not built. We just don't believe there is a problem. If we believed there was a problem we could solve the problem in simple ways without going to whole new systems for deployment of land based missiles when the people are rather concerned that the Minuteman was vulnerable so that we had to build the max and then the Scowcroft commission says the Minuteman is invulnerable and therefore we can put the IMX where the Minuteman was. So you might worry about consistency but in my opinion the problem is not now. The problem was with the argument that Minuteman is vulnerable and something ought to be done about it. In fact what is true is that U.S.

cities and allied cities are vulnerable. And until you can change that fact whether the weapons are vulnerable or not has very little to do with the national security force. So long as there is a rational planner on the other side and here you have a whole set of people for and against Max and ICBMs all of whom assume they're rational planners. On the other side in order to deter an attack on the United States which would destroy the country you pose a threat to the survival of the Soviet Union. Not to their ICBMs but to their industry to their people to their conventional forces. And that's really all you need

if all of your strategic weapons are vulnerable. Then you can put them on launch under attack. You still have the same retaliatory capability you are driven to make decisions faster than you would like to make. And that's why the Soviet Union should not see it in their interest to render our strategic forces vulnerable. We should not see it in our interest to render their strategic forces vulnerable because we make the decision process more difficult. More hair trigger. Now if the Soviet population is not vulnerable if they had a perfect ballistic missile defence and a perfect air defense then and our population were vulnerable then it doesn't matter whether their forces are vulnerable. They could threaten the survival of the United States and it would do no good for us to say. And in return we will destroy your nuclear weapons if there are any left. So the fact of the matter the overriding influence is the vulnerability of

population and industry and not the question of vulnerable or invulnerable nuclear weapons. We weren't there. We did what should concern us is the number of Soviet warheads. Their yield and accuracy what should not concern us is how they are bundled. For instance I like to talk about a strategic future in which we have only a thousand nuclear weapons instead of the present 25000 and the Soviets have a thousand. Also my warheads would go one each on 400 ICBMs each and 50 submarines to each 100 airplanes. If the Soviets wanted to put their warheads 100 each on 10 missiles be my guest. I wouldn't mind. I think it would be very foolish for them to do so

because that would mean that 10 warheads from our stockpile could destroy a thousand and theirs. So the fact that the Soviets have 10 warheads on a single missile does not make those warheads any more of a threat. In fact less than if they were ten warheads one each in 10 missiles if one has multiple warheads and emerged missile that is considerably less useful militarily because it means that 10 targets must be selected simultaneously and that they must be within 100 miles or so of one another in order to spread out the warheads farther than that from a single missile. Takes too much fuel and reduces the number of weapons that can be carried. We need that part of. The argument that perceptions are important. It's an argument of

desperation. I remember discussing such things with Henry Kissinger and Pong. And I say if you think perceptions are important and people don't have a good perception of reality you know there is a remedy for that. We call it education. Why don't you explain to them in a coherent fashion what we believe and why we believe it. But without trying to do that you use perceptions as an argument for doing something that we should not otherwise do. And I'm against it so only when people's perceptions are immutable and they persist in it in the face of whatever we try to tell them. Should we take them into account. I can give you an example on perceptions. In 1979 Paul Nitsa had resigned from the salt to delegation and was campaigning against ratification of salt to he opposed the treaty. He said he had numerical calculations in 1985 at the end of the saw to period the Soviet Union would

have preponderance superiority over the United States in time urgent hard target kill capability. And he showed the figures to prove it. And I said you know if you worry about that and you say pundits you say that it is a political perception problem not a military problem simply by increasing the accuracy of our land based missiles and our submarine based missiles with this radio navigation system ground beacon system. We can swap the Soviet Union in a couple of years and a couple of billion dollars in that category. And after some argument he agreed the Defense Department figure was four billion dollars and four years compared with numbers like $40 billion for the next program. But he said the real reason that he opposed assault too was that it would allow the American public into a false sense of security. So he was using perceptions not trying to educate but it was our perceptions he was playing on

our fear of the Soviets concealing from us that there were things we could do to remedy the problem that he saw simply because he thought if the Americans saw this correctly they would do the wrong thing. They would be lulled into a false sense of security perception or network. Not only don't people do their job in educating the other side they actively manipulate perceptions by saying that we are vulnerable. The Soviets don't rattle their missiles. It's we who popularize whatever number of missiles too many of us think will support the programs that we want to have funded. There you go. Are they doing you're right.

Well deterrence depends on the Soviet Union believing that they will be severely injured in case they do the thing that we're trying to deter. And yet too often the administration the services the contractors argue that our capability is inadequate to deter the Soviet Union. Now they do this only to get new systems new money or whatever. But by doing so they weaken that deterrence which they are proposing to strengthen it is they that weaken deterrence is not that deterrence is inadequate is that people talk about it. They create over here a perception and it's ironic that our security depends on the Soviet Union being able to look more deeply into the reality than the American people are supposed to do. What

the Congress should have the role and new systems of ensuring that the homework has been done that the Congress itself has provided with analysis a whole spectrum of things that have been considered and a reason why one particular program has been chosen. Now you can drive on the right side of the street or the left side of the street and sometimes the administration can say We've flipped a coin and we went this way. Instead the administration deluges the Congress with propaganda. The Congress therefore tries to analyze more deeply micro-manages and then the administration tends to manipulate the Congress because it is overwhelmed that doesn't really have the competence to do this. So the role of the Congress should be to tell the administration no money at all until you provide us with real analysis and not propaganda. Silo basing has very low operating costs. It is

totally immune. If every silo has a missile in it to questions of spying finding out where the missiles are you know where they are. If the silos is spaced a mile apart or more than even a moderately hard silo like the Minuteman silo can be destroyed only one by a single accurate Soviet nuclear weapon. And so the advantage is cost and certainty. Furthermore the missiles can be very accurate. But that problem can be solved now by the ground Beacon's system. A radio aid to the inertial navigation system. So predictable survivability controllability easy command you know missiles getting lost or off the reservation. Those are the benefits associated with single warhead missiles in silos. Now the moment you put two or three or 10 warheads on your missile it becomes a relatively attractive target and you scare yourself into believing that the Soviets have

very great accuracy or reliability and they can destroy two or three or ten of your warheads for every one of theirs. But the single warhead missile inside all has the virtue that it is self-protecting because even if everything works perfectly for the Soviets takes them one warhead to destroy one of ours. Sometimes people talk about non-strict. I'm sorry sometimes people talk about non-nuclear strategic weapons for the future's long rods which flash down out of space and strike through the silo cover. Well one could do that but it's very easy to protect against that kind of attack on a silo by passive concrete and explosive to protect against nuclear weapons. You have to make sure that you stop them a couple hundred yards away. If we're going to have about the same number of warheads as the Soviets we ought to put

most of our eyes and single warhead missiles in silos in the Minuteman fields because if the Soviets were to destroy one of our missiles they would have to dedicate very likely two of their weapons to do so. They would destroy one warhead. They would have spent two maybe three. They would disarm themselves relatively to where they started. No incentive for them to strike. If there is not arms control than we might imagine that the Soviets are building as many warheads as they can. How should we base our warheads. We should have about as many warheads as the Soviet Union because there are many more uses to nuclear weapons. Not very good ones but many more than to attack our strategic forces. I would base my warheads for the most part on single warhead missiles in a small new silos in the Minuteman fields. I could put 30000 new

silos in the existing Minuteman fields and 1 mile spacing. If the Soviets aren't tired after building 30000 warheads which will cost me about as much on my small single warhead missiles as it costs them and their big multi warhead Merve missiles then I can build empty silos and have vague deception deceptive basing scheme with an empty silo for every false silo or maybe two empties and go to many tens of thousands of warheads. But in any case this is a reasonable way to go. It is not vulnerable to the Soviets or to our fear that the Soviets sometime in the future find out where relatively few launchers are moving around the public lands of the United States. The Air Force feels that they want to deploy the IMX they they've spent a lot of money and time many people's careers involved a lot of contractors in building the

max missile. So they see the midget man as the next generation which has come too soon. It has come out of the normal course of events. It is encroaching on its older brother and shortening his lifetime. In fact when I found the Minuteman missile at Boeing in January of 1983 they were very candid about its capabilities and the Air Force monitor was there at everything except its cost. And when I asked about its cost they said don't make us tell you that if you want expensive missile we can make it sound expensive if you want a cheap missile we can make it sound cheap. Why don't you price it per pound and you won't go far off. And so that's what I've been doing. But when the Scowcroft commission a couple of months later said we ought to have a small single warhead missile in a survivable basing posture air force immediately said that means a mobile missile and it will cost you 44 billion dollars for 500 warheads. It doesn't mean a mobile missile.

It means mostly a small silo based missile and it will cost you about 10 billion dollars for 1000 warheads not 44 billion for five hundred the Hardenne mobile launcher is being pushed by the Air Force for the AMEX. And that's because the IMAX is such an attractive target inside that it is not self-protecting it would would be destroyed by a much smaller number of Soviet warheads. And so it must have some way to generate enough uncertainty in its position to require many more than 10 warheads to destroy a single Amex and the Harben hardened mobile launcher hardening to 30 or 40 pounds per square inch overpressure is how it generates uncertainty in position supposedly even if the Soviets knew where the H M L was when they launched

their ICBMs 30 minutes later it could have moved maybe 15 miles or so and a single warhead could not attack it. I don't believe that. I think by the time immobile Macs were deployed we would be confident that the Soviets could buy space based sensors or by espionage or by putting a radio transmitter surreptitiously on this hardened mobile launcher be able to find out where it was in real time. And certainly one can maneuver an incoming ICBM warhead by command if you have made provision to do so accurately enough to destroy this hardened mobile launcher. So my objection to any of these systems of survivability by mobility on land is that we will worry by the time they are deployed that the Soviets can find out in real time where they are and destroy them. And that's no way to sleep well at night. You shouldn't base your security in my opinion on

hiding things in a free society. I think that the Air Force responded the Scowcroft commission report with the $44 billion for 500 warhead Minuteman proposal in order that there should not be an attractive low cost survivable alternative to the max I guess likely is if a bolt out of the blue is highly unlikely what is being done in the real Garrison is to try to deter that pulled out of the blue not to try to respond. We have plenty of ways to respond to a bolt out of the blue. We have all of the submarines we have the Minuteman which will undoubtedly survive

a real attack. We have the aircraft and so on. So it's hard to believe that the real gerus Max will deter this bolt out of the blue if it comes through irrational planning. We are no better off with the rail Garrison Amex than with no Amex at all because the problem will be the destruction of the United States and much of the weaponry conventional and nuclear which comes from that attack. The solution is not to have a few missiles left. The solution is to have enough strategic weapons so that the Soviets cannot make the mistake of attacking and thinking that they will escape scot free. I worry about the rail garrison that it is all too easy to sabotage a rail line especially in the United States. And so at the same time that the Soviets launched their attack they can detonate explosives. They can set and set off mines artillery launched mortar land

mines which will sit on the railroad track and wait until the launcher comes over it and keep the uncertainty from being generated to stop the thing dead in its tracks right there in the open. So I think that is another one of those security by mobility systems which just will not work on land in the United States. I don't understand the Kerry hard proposal yet. You know I can talk about that. You know I can talk about it. There's another proposal and that is if one needs more shelters than one has a need for warheads is to move the missile in a capsule which has most of the support equipment as was proposed for the IMAX and the multiple shelter system. And I think that's a perfectly

reasonable way to go with a single warhead missile with small vertical silos. I would redeploy the missile by helicopter and missile in its capsule might be called Carry hard. It's not really it's supposed to survive only when it is in a shelter. Mr. Gorbachev and Mr. Reagan have agreed on 50 percent and then allow all to have happened or not. What you was. The problem of mutual vulnerability of societies will not be solved

without some great social invention because it is such a powerful tool of survival that one will not give it up so long as one can hold the other society vulnerable. The problem of vulnerability of the retaliatory force can be solved by unilateral means and that is the single warhead missile silos the small submarine the small aircraft with just one or a couple of cruise missiles. Strikingly these solutions these unilateral solutions to the strategic vulnerability problem also open the way for deep reductions in strategic forces if one has an absence of defense against the strategic weapons. On the way to the target then one doesn't need more than a few hundred say a thousand which is a lot less than the 10000 strategic 25000 total weapons we have now. And so I

see that by going toward a single warhead weapons we can very quickly and at no cost achieve massive reductions with great improvement in strategic stability the 50 percent reduction of Reagan and Gorbachev can be achieved simply by taking half the weapons off each of the existing launchers. Now we can demilitarize those warheads. We can replace them with dummies. This requires a lot of cooperative inspections. This requires a lot of cooperative inspection but that's what has been agreed and is being implemented in the IMF treaty. In fact if we take all but one of the warheads off the ICBMs and the SLBM and all but two of the cruise missiles off the bombers we end up with about 2000 warheads on either side five times fewer than we have now. Beyond that we could get down to a force of 1000 warheads simply by

destroying half the launchers not half the submarines just perhaps eight of the missiles or 12 of the missiles in a 24 hour Tube Trident submarine and then we would have a thousand weapons on either side and we could run that way for 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 years. The replacement systems then would be small submarines only big enough to carry the eight warheads and missiles only big enough to carry the one. So we would die at first and then we would have a large shell with very little weight. And gradually over the years operationally we would replace the Hardshell by something which just fit the warhead. So we would end up with small single warhead missiles in silos. Eight warheads eight single warhead missiles on a little submarine 50 of those little submarines hundred airplanes with two airlines cruise missiles each of them working.

To improve stability and security both the way is clear. It depends on co-operative verification and it is Deemer. Just as moving raised the level of instability and insecurity Deemer can bring us those very same weapons down to a level where the number of launchers is the same as we have now. But the threat to the launcher on the other side is much reduced. And that's what we ought to do. We can do it very quickly. It won't cost us anything and it will open the basis for future systems. We can do it very quickly. It won't cost us anything and it will lay the basis for a future in which we could if we want reduce the number of nuclear weapons even though this 95 percent reduction that can be accomplished

in this way. If the Soviets don't reduce the number of weapons then obviously we can't reduce very much below the number they have. It's just not humanly possible to do that is a bigger problem and that is what if the French or the British or the Chinese insist on going ahead with the modernization program. They have a few hundred nuclear weapons each and they could build a thousand or 2000 that would just spoil things. The United States and the Soviet Union would not reduce to a thousand if the French have a thousand or 2000. And for that reason one has to call on the better judgment of our French friends. They could build more weapons and they will preserve a world in which there are tens of thousands of U.S. and Soviet weapons or they can urge the reduction to a

thousand each. If they reduce their own to a couple of hundred and I think that is a better future for the French and the British and the Chinese and for the Americans and the Russians as well. Just as the max in Minuteman silos didn't solve the Minuteman vulnerability problem. So the missile itself wasn't going to solve the lack of extended deterrence. People said Minuteman is not good enough. We need a more accurate missile so as to deter a Soviet attack on Western Europe. Well if it were only one target we were going to destroy it we had plenty of weapons to do it might take two warheads or three warheads. And in fact we could have improved the accuracy of the Minuteman warhead. The Soviets are deterred from doing something because they judge that after

they do it and we respond they'll be worse off for having done it. And so any weapon that we have used on conventional forces inside the Soviet Union used to destroy a dam or a marshalling yard would show the Soviet Union it's not worth pursuing a conventional attack in Western Europe. Now would we be willing to do that. Yes I would. Why wouldn't we. Because the Soviets might attack our cities. The Soviets can attack our cities any time they want and whether we attack a martialing armed with a nuclear weapon or to first use of nuclear weapons has nothing to do with that. And the accuracy of an Amex missile has nothing to do with it either. Now you have the other question as usual. Chris.

I would prefer not to have the United States as vulnerable as the Soviet Union. I would prefer to be able to cause them more damage than they can cause us. I would prefer to be able to disarm the Soviet Union rather than just to retaliate after having been struck. But the dynamics of the situation are such that if I try to achieve this superiority my situation will become worse I will become less secure even though I will make the Soviet Union still less secure and there is no merit in my opinion in making the Soviet Union totally secure. If I become quite insecure in myself I know people for instance who rather than earn more money and an absolute sense would rather earn more money than their neighbor even if it requires taking a cut in salary just so the neighbor is pushed down further. And there are people like that. I don't think it's a sensible way to behave. But perhaps

we're seeing some of that in people who want a strategic edge over the other side even though it may result in less than security for ourselves. So. The lesson to be learned from the max in my opinion has not so much to do with the emacs itself as with the weapons and government programs in general. They do not have to meet the test of the marketplace. They do not have to be competitive. You do not have truth in advertising about government programs one too many people wrap themselves in the flag of patriotism and use arguments which are not true or which conceal relevant information. But in fact our national security is impaired not improved by lies

and misrepresentations and starting programs which are going to become more costly than predicted. If I go up to somebody on the street and I say I have a gun give me $100 or I'll shoot you dead. And they catch me at it they'll put me in jail for armed robbery if I go up to somebody on the street and I say give me my hundred hundred dollars. My brother has a gun and he'll shoot you dead. They will get me for extortion. But if I go up to somebody on the street and say Give me three hundred billion dollars or the Russians will shoot you dead. I'm a great patriot and I may be invited to high office. Now if it is true that without the 300 billion dollars the Russians would shoot us dead then certainly we ought to be willing to spend it and spend it in the very best way possible. But if it is not true if this is an exaggeration then I suggest that

armed robbery or extortion are a better adjective than. Then I suggest that armed robbery or extortion are better terms than patriotism. Our system is a democracy to which we have given too little care in recent decades. It is not something that one winds up and allows to run without maintenance or adjustment. The founding fathers gave us the system and too many of us believe that it's going to take care of us in the future. What we have to do is to judge our leaders judge our people in Congress and hold them to the standard that is required to make the system work. Deterrence is an OK word and therefore it is tempting to

cast whatever it is one wants into the form of deterrence high quality deterrence as Paul NYTs put it once extended deterrence deterrence by defense which may not deter at all. Deterrence ought to be reserved in my opinion for something which is close to the ordinary meaning of the term that is to effect the mind of another side by their judgment of the outcome of a decision that they might take here or. There is an impediment to a regime of sufficiency of technology no better than it has to be costs no higher than they have to be.

And that is that the most interesting problems lie at the frontier. The frontier of accuracy the frontier of hardening the frontier of getting there quicker even though it makes no difference to the effectiveness. And there is a general lack of recognition that however much money we have we have more uses for that money than we have money so people tend not to save on programs until they see the bottom of the barrel. Instead what we ought to do is to spend as little as we can to solve a problem so that we will have more flexibility to solve other problems which have not yet come not yet been brought to the front of people's consciousness. We have many problems in national security. We have many problems in society a lot of these can be solved by playing the same talents that we have working in the military. I told Mr. Gorbachev. Early in December 19

87 about some Soviet visits physicists who visited our laboratory. One of them said that the Americans could never disarm because of the strength of the military industrial complex. So I said let's look at the fundamentals and then we'll talk about perceptions. Fundamentals are that we make all of these weapons missiles nuclear warheads and so on. And under the best of circumstances they're not going to be used under the worst. We're going to send them all to you and we won't charge you for them. Now suppose that we dis arm and disarm to a certain extent we can continue to make half missiles will use exactly those same talents under the best of circumstances. They won't be used under the worst of circumstances. They won't be used either because they won't work. We can do better. It's not beyond the mind of man or woman to do better. We can make automobiles or small computers or whatever and we can give them

to you free. It could be the same for us in manufacture and it might even do you some good. Of course we could do still better. If we look at our problems and we use those same talents to solve some of our problems. But if you believe that's too upsetting to our economy why don't you go back to either the second or the third proposal either the half missiles are the things that we ship free all over the world to solve problems that aren't being addressed right now. And Mr. Gorbachev said well I don't know that he really understood the details. He said yes we will destroy your military industrial complex by contracting with. Your first gig with.

The IMAX can be a second strike weapon only if it is survivable and if one is building a weapon for that function one has to compare it with midget man or alternatives. So some of the IMAX basing schemes fail because they weren't survivable. Others failed because they were more costly than redeployment of Minutemen. Others failed for instance dense pack since one could pin down the entire dense pack a hundred missiles with a very small number of nuclear explosions from submarine launched ballistic missiles. You had to ask how a war would start. And when you looked into the details of it the Minuteman would carry out the initial strikes retaliatory strikes and the MX's would be used only later after the Soviets had run out of submarine launch ballistic

missiles to pin it down. Now that makes no sense at all to depend on the Minuteman for retaliation so that the max could then strike later. So the problem with second strike counter-force is ultimately that first strike counter-force is easier. You may say you're building a second strike counter-force system but the other side can see that it would be much more useful to you as a first strike counter-force all then OK. The. How I guess so.

Well perhaps an analogy will help if I go up to somebody on the street and I say I have a gun. Give me a hundred dollars or I'll shoot you dead. And they catch me they'll put me in jail for armed robbery. If I go up to him and I say give me $100 or my brother will shoot you dead and they catch me they'll put me in jail for extortion. But if I say give me three hundred billion dollars or the Russians will shoot you dead. That's called patriotism and I will be elected to high office. But if you're not quite sure that the Russians will really shoot you dead then I think that extortion or armed robbery are closer to the mark than patriotism. We always left the first race war I think it was part of that.

It's necessary to think about these things and to do analyses but too often these artificial scenarios are picked up and used for decision making taken out of context stabilizing influences ignored. And the argument advanced by this system because you have this problem too often the system doesn't cure the problem. Too often the chain of reasoning is carefully cooked up in order to lead it to the desired conclusion. For instance the B-1 bomber was advocated by the Ford administration in 1975. I was proposing the large cruise missile. It turned out that their analysis was based on the assumption that it would take an airplane an hour or two hours to launch its load of cruise missiles. It takes in fact 37 seconds for the B-52 to launch its load of cruise missiles and it wasn't even built for the

purpose. But that's an example of cooking the argument because you're absolutely sure you know the right answer and you don't trust other people enough to give them the information and let them decide. Certainly the window of vulnerability. Was arranged in the window of vulnerability was primarily popularized in order to have a reason to sell the missile is not very good. The other consequence of touting the window of vulnerability was to reduce the confidence of our allies and our citizenry in deterrence. And it was presumably only because the Russians knew better that they didn't feel less deterred during that era.