"STAR WARS": THE POLITICS OF DEFENSE
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advantage, without any defensive system. But SDI creates the op–
portunity for greatly decreasing offensive nuclear weapons.
If
you
had a defensive system, then both sides could greatly decrease their
nuclear weapons and feel relatively secure, at least, vis-a-vis attacks
from ballistic missile systems.
BARRY BELGOROD: One last point.
If
we are so technologically
superior to the Russians, in stealth bomber technology, in submarine
targeting - targeting of submarine based missiles and the like - why
is our second-strike capability so lousy?
JOHN PIKE: Are you talking about our second-strike capability be–
ing weak, now, or in the 1990s?
BARRY BELGOROD: The present.
JOHN PIKE: It's not weak right now. No, I was referring to our
second-strike capability being weak two or three decades from now,
when both sides had symmetrically leaky forces. Today, we've run
out of things to blow up. Today we have targeted every named geo–
graphical feature in the Soviet Union.
EDITH KURZWEIL: We haven't blown up anything.
BARRY BELGOROD: I guess I'll have to quote you in your New
York Academy of Sciences lecture, that we have a significant portion
of our nuclear forces in relatively invulnerable vehicles , which are
our submarines, so we
defacto
have a leaky defense, of sorts, against
a first-strike capability. Do we not?
JOHN PIKE: The question of the leaky defenses is the asymmetry
between first strike and second strike, and mutual vulnerability of
the systems and the mutual vulnerability of the forces .
BARRY BELGOROD: But our second strike forces are relatively
invulnerable as they stand now, correct?
HAROLD BRODKEY: "Invulnerable" is a dangerous term. Re–
cently, Daniel Ford, in his book
The Button,
wrote that he had gone
to the NORAD Cavern in Colorado, and there the general in charge
told him that in an attack he would call the White House on a hot
line . Ford asked him to demonstrate. The general picked up his
phone and couldn't get it to work. Later, after investigating, he told
Ford that it was a regular AT&T line and that he'd forgotten to dial
long distance. Ford points out that the computers that run the warn–
ing system wear out, they're old, they're always being repaired, and
a number of them are always down. Part of what Chapline may be
saying, it seems to me, is that the situation is so bad that going ahead
offers more hope at this stage than previously .
