"STAR WARS":
THE POLITICS OF DEFENSE
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: Dan Rose, who's your cohost tonight, has
been very active in the political and cultural life of this country and
has had a lot to do with
Partisan Review.
He will be our moderator.
DANIEL ROSE: Thank you, William. Ladies and gentlemen, this
discussion really is an exploration of what has been a basic question
thoughtful people have been struggling with since the beginning of
the atomic era.
It
really is a question of weighing the relative risks of
arms control negotiations against the relative risks of arms races, de–
fenses, and so forth . No thoughtful person will deny that either posi-
tion involves very real risks. The specific question we're discussing,
if you like it it's the "Strategic Defense Initiative," if you don't like it
it's "Star Wars. " The question is complex.
It
really breaks down into
four separate areas: technological, strategic, political, and economic.
Tonight , we have two discussants on the subject: each of them will
make an opening presentation of five to ten minutes, and since this is
a discussion rather than a debate, we will take questions from the
floor. Our first discussant, Dr. George Chapline, is a theoretical phys-
l
icist. He's head of a special experimental projects group at Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory and inventor of the x-ray laser.
GEORGE CHAPLINE: When I first heard the president's speech
about "Star Wars," I thought it was an interesting idea, but it wasn't
clear to me immediately whether it was a good idea. I thought the
technical aspects of strategic defense were quite fascinating, and I
was, myself, more than willing to think about these technical ques–
tions. But I must say that for a long time, it mattered to me whether
- if you could build a strategic defense system - it really was a good
idea. Even if it were possible, let's say, to defend the country against
ballistic missiles - and I would like to suggest, incidentally, that I
would define the Strategic Defense Initiative narrowly as a program
to develop a defense against ballistic missiles
per se-
I think that the
president's hope of making nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete
is much too optimistic, in the sense that it may be virtually impossi-
ble to negate any possible means of delivering nuclear weapons. But
I think that if one could learn to defeat ballistic missiles, that alone
would be a significant accomplishment. However, as I said, the ques-
Editor's Note: This discussion took place in New York City on May 6th, 1986.
