GEORGE F. CHAPLINE
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deploy strategic defenses fully before an insane political leader
comes to power .
Let us now turn to the question of how the Soviet Union would
respond to a unilateral deployment of strategic defenses by the
United States. Critics of the SDI and the Soviet leaders themselves
both claim that the Soviet Union will respond by increasing their of–
fensive forces. Of course, this challenge to the SDI is credible only if
the Soviet Union actually could overcome our strategic defense sys–
tem by increasing its offensive forces. This presumes, among other
things , that the United States could not respond to a build-up in of–
fensive forces by slightly increasing its defenses. It should be kept in
mind in this connection that in the present era of large budget
deficits it seems unlikely that the United States Congress would
fund, much less authorize deployment of, a strategic defense system
unless it were highly cost-effective. This means simply that the cost
of the defensive system is significantly less than the cost of the offen–
sive missiles it is intended to destroy.
An example of a cost-effective strategic defense system would
be a constellation of one hundred x-ray laser satellites placed in high
altitude earth orbits so as to make them invulnerable to preemptive
attack.
If
each satellite could attack thirty or more missiles during
their boost phase, then the defense would almost certainly be cost–
effective. An ICBM with multiple nuclear warheads costs approxi–
mately one hundred million dollars . Thus if an x-ray laser satellite
could be built for less than three hundred million dollars - which
seems very likely - the defense would enjoy at least a ten to one cost
advantage. With a ten to one cost advantage the Soviet Union could
not afford to overcome the defensive system by increasing its offen–
sive forces . Indeed, the United States alone would easily be able to
counter any conceivable buildup in offensive ballistic missiles, in–
cluding, for example, the extreme case in which the entire industrial
capacity of the Soviet Union were devoted to producing ICBMs.
It would appear that a cost-effective ballistic missile defense
system would in fact render ICBMs obsolete . This does not mean
that all means of delivering nuclear weapons would be denied to a
determined aggressor. But it does mean that the most threatening and
precarious aspect of the nuclear standoff between the Soviet Bloc
and the Western democracies would be alleviated .
It
is almost cer–
tainly true - and this was the main point of President Reagan's
March 1983 speech - that the world would be better off if ICBMs
didn't exist.
One difference between unilateral deployment of strategic de-
