"STAR WARS": THE POLITICS OF DEFENSE
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tions are capable of doing incredibly stupid things. And I think that
it is an unarguable political reality in this country that the American
political system will not permit significant strategic asymmetries to
develop between the United States and the Soviet Union . So if the
Soviets do continue with an extensive development program of bal–
listic missile defense, and if they do start doing more and more
things that look like ballistic missile defense , I think that regardless
of what the strategic or military merits of going ahead with ballistic
missiles defense would be, it would be politically impossible for the
United States not to go ahead with development and deployment of
ballistic missile defense .
BARRY BELGOROD: Don't we lose our technological lead by
waiting?
JOHN PIKE: On the contrary, we freeze our technological lead by
starting prototype development. As soon as we go into development
that is when we lose our technological lead .
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: That's doubletalk.
BARRY BELGOROD: I've been involved in some high tech proj–
ects also , and there's a big, big time gap between research and
development. You can have all the numbers on paper, but there's
always a lot of little factors that you have to figure in order to get
something practical.
JOHN PIKE : Right, what's the question?
BARRY BELGOROD: It seems quite obvious that if we're going to
wait to see some tangible evidence of Soviet development or deploy–
ment of their system, we've already lost some of our lead. You said
that all nuclear weapons are now either in the Soviet Union or tar–
geted on the Soviet Union . Therefore it seems quite obvious that the
Soviet Union has no choice but to have some sort of antiballistic
missile defense .
JOHN PIKE: The question is whether the scope of that ballistic
missile defense is such that we need to pay any attention to it. The
existing Moscow system, or an upgrade to it- I don't know that any–
body is terribly concerned about it.
BARRY BELGOROD:
It
seems to me that just is an enormous
time-lag that you're advocating.
JOHN PIKE : The ABM treaty today limits the Soviets to deploying
one hundred operational interceptors around Moscow and fifteen
test interceptors at Sary Shagan test facility. Those components are
very clearly identifiable components .
If
the Soviets were to deploy
any of those components outside of these two permitted areas, I
