"STAR WARS": THE POLITICS OF DEFENSE
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ing to be faced with either doing not much, or firing hundreds and
hundreds of warheads , even though that may not be a city-busting
campaign . That is why people like Walt Slocombe and James Schles–
inger are so violently opposed to the Strategic Defense Initiative : over
the last ten or fifteen years, they have been crafting this extended
deterrence, flexible response strategy . They have been very con–
cerned about the vulnerability of our ICBMs because they want to
be able to execute these small attacks. And the problem with ex–
ecuting them on the Soviet Union is not how many warheads there
are in North Dakota, it's how many warheads we have over
Sverdlovsk. And American ballistic missile defense may significantly
increase the number of surviving ICBM warheads that we have in
North Dakota. But Soviet ballistic missile defense is going to totally
eliminate the number of warheads we can put over the Soviet Union
in a small attack . The cure is worse than the disease . Because the
whole reason that one would be concerned about ICBM vulnerability
is because of its contribution to our ability to launch small attacks on
the Soviet Union . And Soviet ballistic missile defense is going to
totally negate our ability to launch small attacks on the Soviets, long
before American ballistic missile defense is going to negate Soviet
ability to take out our ICBMs .
PETER SHAW: I didn't understand the last ten minutes of your an-
swer.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: Neither did
I.
JOHN PIKE: Part of the problem is, frankly , the extreme gap be–
tween the way we really do nuclear policy and the way everybody
thinks we do nuclear policy. I've heard a lot of discussion here this
evening about our policy of mutual assured destruction . We have
never had a policy of mutual assured destruction. We have had a
policy of flexible targeting and launching small attacks on the Soviet
Union since 1967 . And I would really be surprised if there were
more than one or two people in this room that had even heard of
such a thing.
EDITH KURZWEIL: There's just one very simple question I don't
quite get.
If
we have these possibilities of picking out little targets,
aren't we assuming that the Soviets aren't going to launch a large
nuclear attack? Are they just going to sit there and have us pick off
little targets?
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: What do we gain by picking off little tar–
gets?
EDITH KURZWEIL: Is it possible to do that?
