"STAR WARS": THE POLITICS OF DEFENSE
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Soviet Union would be able to destroy the missiles that we have in
place on the ground within the United States.
JOHN PIKE: Right.
PETER SHAW: That would then leave us with the retaliation of
our sea-based missiles and bombers. And the problem with that is
that the sea-based missiles do not have the accuracy of the land–
based missiles. Therefore the response that we have at the present
time is only to use the sea-based missile to destroy Russian cities in
response to an attack that would be a limited attack on our missiles.
That puts us in a position of having to make a decision to destroy
many people with very little military benefit from it, and it's rather
doubtful that we would choose to make that response. Now, what
the defensive missiles promise to do for us is to make that attack on
the land-based missiles less successful than it now promises to be .
If
we can do that then we are always in a position, theoretically, to
return that first-strike attack with a similar attack on Russian
missiles. So that one of the great points of the SDI, of putting in
these defenses, is to enable us to have less than a total all-out terror
response to a first-strike attack by the Soviets.
JOHN PIKE: You've gotten a couple of arguments a little confused
here. One of them is the "window of vulnerability," and the second is
the argument that was floating around about ten or twelve years ago
which was why we needed improved counterforce capabilities on
sea-based forces. And we've got that now in Trident
I.
Trident I is
an extremely discriminating weapon. The argument that you were
making about the inability of our sea-based forces to go after
anything other than urban-industrial targets was predicated on the
notion that the only thing we had deployed was Poseidon which was
very explicitly deployed as a countervaluing weapon. Trident I has
an accuracy that compares very favorably with Minuteman III, and
it's a very discriminating weapon. You're talking about weapons that
have inaccuracies that are measured in hundreds of feet and lethal
radii that are measured in several miles. The question of whether
one more city block or one more parking lot is inside the lethal
radius isn't the issue. That might have been an argument that could
have been made ten or fifteen years ago when all we had was Polaris
or Poseidon. But the notion that the sea-based force is capable only
of conducting a city-busting campaign is basically an obsolete argu–
ment because that no longer is the strategic characteristic of the
forces we have deployed. The reason that one might properly be
concerned about the vulnerability of our land-based forces is that
