"STAR WARS": THE POLITICS OF DEFENSE
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Category I stuff they had in the theater. And I think that that's the
reason that since NSDM [National Security Decision Memoran–
dum] under Mr. Schlesinger in 1974 subsequent revisions of the
SlOP [Single Integrated Operational Plan] have increasingly focused
on this sort of thing.
ESTELLE LEONTIEF: You said who knows when a mad man in
Soviet Russia is going to come to power. The same goes for us.
GEORGE CHAPLINE: I completely disagree. One of the worst
things about the discussions about arms control and our situation
vis-a-vis the Soviet Union, is the implicit assumption that there is
some kind of equality in the political systems of the United States
and the Soviet Union. There is a very great difference between the
Soviet Union and the United States. The fundamental difference be–
tween a democracy and a country like the Soviet Union is that you
understand enormously better what the leaders are like.
WASSILY LEONTIEF: Have you read Mr. Stockman?
GEORGE CHAPLINE: You can read books like that, you can hear
all kinds of hearsay and rumour. You know what goes on practically
in the presidential bedroom. No one knows anything about the Soviet
Union.
DENNIS WRONG: I think the term "mad" was invented during
McNamara's tenure in the Department of Defense, but really it goes
back to the fifties.
It
was in the early fifties that Churchill talked of
the balance of terror, and Robert Oppenheimer talked of two scor–
pions in a bottle which is exactly the mad doctrine. But it has never
been credible, it seems to me, that the United States would retaliate
to a first strike by wiping out the Russian population. So my impres–
sion is that counterforce, as Mr. Pike mentioned, has been deployed
by the United States even earlier than he mentioned, going back
probably to the fifties, but certainly at least to McNamara's tenure.
Liberal journals are always discovering with shock that our missiles
have been aimed not at Moscow but at military bases in Siberia.
This it seemed to me makes sense, so "mad," in that sense, has never
really been the American policy fundamentally.
KAY AGENA: Mr. Pike, are you against SDI, even assuming that
the Soviets are developing their own system? There seems to me to
be something absurd about the whole discussion, because if the So–
viets are pursuing their own defensive system, I think we're crazy
not to try to develop ours. And the evidence is that they are.
JOHN PIKE:
If
IOu
look at the critical technologies that would go
into a ballistic missile defense it's very clear that the United States
