"STAR WARS": THE POLITICS OF DEFENSE
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the system. So if you're interested in closing the window of vulner–
ability, clearly Midgetman would be the weapon of choice. Well , we
could use ballistic missile defenses to defend against a terrorist attack.
But I have difficulty imagining that a terrorist would try to deliver
his one nuclear weapon in the one way that we could deal with it. It's
far more likely that they'd wrap the hydrogen bomb in a bale of mar–
ijuana and fly it across the Mexican border. We could guard against
an accidental launch, but we could do that equally well by rewiring a
few of our Minuteman II ICBMs to intercept the occasional stray
missile. We really haven't had very many stray missiles flying around
in the last forty years. Less-than-perfect defenses are going to fuel
the offensive arms races as both sides add more offensive weapons to
keep those defenses from becoming effective . They're going to make
arms control impossible , because in that type of environment what is
there to agree on , except the fact that both sides are going to be build–
ing as fast as they can? It would increase the risk of nuclear war, be–
cause leaky defenses are going to be much more effective in defending
against small retaliatory attacks than against massive first strikes.
Both sides then would recognize that they would have a great deal of
incentive to strike first in a time of crisis, and so both would be very
concerned that they'd get in the first blow. These weapons are going
to be extremely expensive: tens of billions of dollars to develop, hun–
dreds of billions of dollars to deploy. And it's ironic that some of the
most promising and certainly some of the most intriguing weapons
that are being developed to make nuclear weapons go away are in fact
nuclear weapons themselves . And George has, I must say in all
candor, done some very excellent work in developing these systems.
Thank you.
DANIEL ROSE: Thank you. One of the problems of this subject,
for the general public - even for informed lay people - is that, unlike
our discussants tonight who are moderate and reasonable individuals,
the issue is normally discussed in rather simplistic terms with gross
exaggerations on both sides. President Reagan is the easiest target,
not only in his hyperbole of perfection, but also in such off-the-top–
of-the-head ideas as offering to share the technology . Since the tech–
nology is going to be in the computers, not in the throw material,
and the computers have applications that go so vastly beyond it , no
one is going to want to share those things . On the other hand, in the
real world, we have to face the fact that there is no sharp line between
the technology for antiballistic missiles and for antisatellite missiles ,
and that the Russians are doing active research in those fields. This
