Library:In "Defence" of "Star Wars"

In "Defence" of "Star Wars"
Author	Michael Parenti
Publisher	The Valley Advocate
First published	1986-01-08 Massachusetts
Type	Newspaper article

In "Defence" of "Star Wars": A noted Pentagon critic makes the Administration's case for the Strategic Defense Initiative is an opinion piece by Statesian political scientist Michael Parenti, published in The Valley Advocate on 8 January 1986.

Text

Congressional Quarterly graphic

I would like to offer a "defence" of President Reagan's proposed space-based ballistic missile defence system, the so-called "Strategic Defense Initiative" (SDI) or "Star Wars." When I say "defence" I do not mean I approve of the programme, but I wish to show why, from the Reagan Administration's perspective, the programme makes a lot of sense. The criticisms raised against Star Wars are important and, I think, quite correct. Why then are they not heeded by the Star Warriors? I believe it is because they are largely irrelevant to the administration's goals and values. Those opposed to SDI are concerned about detente, thrift in defence spending, arms ceilings, and the like, things which simply are not part of the Reagan agenda.

The critics of Star Wars note that the programme will be enormously expensive. Just the research and development stage has been described as consisting of eight components, each equivalent to or greater than the Manhattan Project. The final cost of the whole project has been estimated as high as $3 trillion, and given what we know about defence spending estimates, it might come to far more than that. But this argument is irrelevant to the concerns of SDI boosters who have never shown much concern about the crushing burdens of defence spending. If anything, the White House seems rather addicted to gargantuan military budgets and a war economy. While instituting severe cuts in domestic programmes, the President has spent more on defence in his few years in office than all the previous presidents combined since 1945. And he has been able to do this by treating money as no object, by producing budget deficits three and four times greater than President Carter's and by doubling the national debt from $900 billion to over $1.8 trillion (and most likely tripling the debt by the time he leaves office).

For decades now, federal spending has served to create more market demand, and new investment and profit-making opportunities for business. Spending the non-profit sector of the economy, e.g., human services, is seen by the business community as a step down the slippery slope to socialism. Not so with defence allocations, which can be treated like any other contract that business gets—except that military contracts are so much better, having a built-in obsolescence, a guaranteed market (the Pentagon), juicy noncompetitive bids, guaranteed cost overruns, hidden subsidies and grants, and opportunities for capital expansion that do not compete with the glutted civilian market and which provide Robber Baron profits to the large defence firms.

The SDI programme will be the biggest project this government has ever undertaken. For a sluggish, recessive economy, Star Wars will provide a whole new area of capital investment and expansion, one that is far greater than the building of the railroads in the 19th century, far greater than all the public works programmes of the New Deal and the Great Society together, and 30 to 40 times greater than the federal highway programmes of the 50s and early 60s. For those who profit greatly from such ventures, those who Mr. Reagan most faithfully represents, the enormous expense of Star Wars is one of its irresistible attractions. There are big bucks to be made in preparing the heavens for war.

Opponents of SDI make the argument that the programme won't work. Its technical problems are so staggering as to be probably insurmountable. But if we understand the nature of defence spending, we can see why technical failure is not a very weighty consideration for our military-industrial policy makers.

For the defence industry, getting there is all the fun, and if you take a long and expensive route and in fact, never quite arrive, well, nothing is lost, for it's still enormously lucrative. Pentagon history is strewn with examples of multi-billion dollar weapons systems that have performed miserably or not performed at all. This has never been sufficient reason to cut the military budget; quite the contrary, performance failure often serves as an excuse for still greater spending efforts—allegedly needed to close the dangerous "gaps" and "windows of vulnerability."

Critics note that to be an effective defence shield, Star Wars must be technologically perfect and must work the first time. No scientist in this field, including Reagan's own technical advisors, claim that a perfect astro-defence can ever be achieved. Even if the shield functioned to near perfection and could stop 95 percent of the opponent's missiles, the ones that penetrate would be sufficient to destroy our society. But this argument is relevant only if we assume that Star Wars is intended to serve as a defensive shield against a Soviet first strike—which it is not.

As Robert Bowman, former head of the Air Force advanced weapons programme (and a critic of SDI) noted, the system would "be more effective as part of a first strike than against one." Writing in Scientific American, prominent scientists Hans Bethke, Henry Kendall, Richard Garwin, and Kurt Gottfried observed that the system "could not fend off a full-scale strategic attack but might be quite effective against a weak retaliatory blow following an all-out preemptive [U.S.] strike."

In other words, as Professor Mark Solomon recently concluded, Star Wars makes sense only as a back-up shield to a U.S. first strike, able to ward off the relatively few surviving Soviet missiles that may attempt to retaliate. President Reagan himself let the cat out of the bag some months ago when he said that SDI "doesn't have to work perfectly." It is not intended to do the impossible, which is thwart a massive Soviet first strike of many thousands of missiles; it is meant to help undermine Soviet retaliatory-deterrence capacity. The aim is to brandish it as yet another component of the U.S. first-strike arsenal, giving the United States such an overbearing nuclear superiority as to allow it to extract compliance and subordination from the USSR—the indisposable dream and goal of the Reaganites.

Critics of Star Wars point out that the programme would violate the ABM treaty, making a negotiated settlement between Washington and Moscow close to impossible, and drastically escalating the arms race. All true, but again all somewhat besides the point, for the Reagan Administration has never been too concerned about the ABM treaty nor any other agreement with the Soviet Union. Nor has it ever been keen about negotiating with Moscow, having refused to do so through most of its first two years in office and since then only going through the motions with the greatest reluctance and only with the greatest public pressure.

And as for escalating the arms race, the record speaks for itself: expanding the U.S. military arsenal to an ever greater and greater size has been one of the foremost endeavours of the administration.

In the face of this record, why should we expect the President to be concerned that Star Wars might be an obstacle to a negotiated settlement? What evidence is there that he is interested in putting such limits on his policy of cold war confrontation and nuclear supremacy?

We who oppose Star Wars should persist in putting forth our arguments as vigorously as possible. There is a whole public and a whole Congress to be won over. But we must not underestimate and misinterpret Mr. Reagan and his associates. They go their way not because they fail to see the good sense of our argument but because they operate from a different set of premises and have different goals.

That they do not agree with us does not mean they are confused. They know what they are doing, even if we don't like what they do. They are not "misled" as much as they are misleading. And we should think of them less as being wrong than as wrongful. As the punchline to the old joke goes, they may be crazy but they're not stupid.