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gram. Over and beyond what may be down the road over the next
twenty or thirty, or maybe fifty years, there are immediate political
benefits from this research program.
DANIEL ROSE: Would you like to respond, Mr. Pike? Assuming
for the moment that the discussion is not about deployment; the dis–
cussion is about the research , which incidentally, as best we can tell,
the Soviet Union is actively engaged in.
JOHN PIKE: There are three different levels of activity that are
prospectively under discussion here. One of them is a research pro–
gram, and the other end of the continuum is a program of deploy–
ment, and between them is development and testing. Research ,
normally, consists of people in white lab coats in laboratories with
oscilloscopes and test tubes and that sort of thing. Deployment is ob–
viously to have thousands of rockets out in the field . Development is
the process whereby you move from research to deployment. The thing
that is novel about the president's program, the thing that is costing
so much money, that is going to get us into trouble with the ABM
treaty in a couple of years, that is so different about what we have
been doing for the last three years as opposed to what we were doing
prior to the time, is that we have moved from simply a research pro–
gram into a development program. Now clearly if you think that we
ought to deploy defenses , then we ought to start developing. On the
other hand, if you haven't been able to figure out what the political
utility would be of deploying a defense, then clearly there isn't much
point in developing that defense. Regardless of what you think of the
political utility of deployment or development, I think the case for
doing research is a very cogent one . When skeptics of the SDI stand
up and say, "This is a countermeasure we think would be effective
against some proposed weapon," that usually is the result of research
that has actually been done. You have some hard technical data to
draw on. We need to do research to find what is not feasible , and
what also is not feasible for the Soviets. We also need to do research
to find out what we do need to worry about, so that we can design
countermeasures to what the Soviets ought to be doing. Fortunately,
the SDI budget is neatly divided into the research and the develop–
ment part of the budget. They've asked for 4.8 billion dollars this
year, of which two billion is for research, 2.8 billion for development
- I would say give them the two billion dollar research budget , but
not the development budget.
DANIEL ROSE: Thank you. Now we'll throw the subject open to
discussion from the floor.
