Julius Caesar catapulted a first generation, stone-tipped, surface-to-surface ballistic missile in a counterforce attack against the hardened defenses of Alesia, in Gaul, in 52 B.C. The maximum effective range was about 50 meters and both the apogee and the accuracy, unfortunately, were about the same.
The fall of Alesia and the capture of the Gallic chieftain Vercingetorix virtually ended the seven-year-long Gallic Wars.
On the long march back to Rome and new glory, Caesar would weigh the strength and weakness of his catapulta.
But what of the defeated Vercingetorix? Made to sit like a dog at the feet of Caesar, what thoughts must have passed through the mind of this leader of genius who had rallied all Gaul, whose scorched earth policy had come so close to driving all Romans from Gaul? What might he have thought of the catapulta as, his armies routed, his cities destroyed, he was dragged in chains back to Rome for public humiliation? How might he have averted the terrible hardships of the siege? How might he have halted the rain of missiles on his walls?
Sometime during the few years remaining to him, the answer must have come.
In 1945 A.D., a mushroom cloud of red dust over Alama- gordo ushered in a new concept of vast superiority of the offensive weapon. The atomic and hydrogen bombs, soon molded into the intercontinental ballistic missile, raised destructive potential to unprecedented heights.
Scientists, strategists, and scholars freely proclaimed that no longer could there be a defense. And for almost two decades the words seemed prophetically true. People fell into the habit of assuming that the offensive supremacy was permanent.
Yet, like all previous military history, nuclear warfare at last appears to be developing into a cyclical struggle between the offense and the defense, the sword and the shield. The invulnerable missile is just now generating its counter, the antiballistic missile.
The Soviet Union first initiated a missile defense system, generally conceded to be because “Russians are traditionally defense minded.”
The Soviet doctrine emphasizes the long war almost exclusively. Future war is visualized as differing with the past in severity but not in essence. Soviet military thinkers think of nuclear war in traditional terms. Whether initiated by a Napoleon, a Hitler or a “power-mad imperialist clique,” they see war as again beginning with a devastating offense, but this offense will not destroy the people nor end the war. After absorbing terrible losses in the initial offensive, both sides will continue to resist with whatever they have left. After a long and brutish campaign, the traditional strategy of attrition and endurance will prevail. The superior will and discipline of the Russian people, aided by their unique geographic isolation, will prevail as they prevailed in 1812 and 1945.
The Napoleon-Hitler syndrome, the deeply ingrained defensive-mindedness of the Russian people, is only a partial element underlying the Soviet urge to build their missile defense system, crude and ineffective as it is often alleged to be.
Previously the United States, for complex reasons, had built and operated the various distant early warning defenses to counter a very modest Soviet capability in manned nuclear bombers. At a cost eventually reaching a billion dollars, the first elements of the warning line had become operational in 1957, just a few weeks before Sputnik raised all eyes heavenward in contemplation of an entirely new dimension of warfare.
Perhaps as early as 1959 and in the face of a then-existing U. S. nuclear missile capability against Russia not wholly unlike that of China today, the Soviet Union began erecting a primitive missile defense system around Leningrad. By 1961, Khrushchev was able to boast that his Soviet antimissiles could hit a fly in the sky. The U. S. capability by then was considerably more than fly-size, but American public debate over a “missile gap may have encouraged Khrushchev more than his own scientists and technicians.
The United States indulged in a decade- long public debate, not always relevant to the issue, before reaching its own decision 1,1 September 1967 to build a five-billion-dollar “thin” ballistic missile defense system.
The American plan has potential implications, on the nation and on a great part of the planet, far beyond any previously associated with a new weapon system. Technological, scientific, economic, and political fallout could change the national way of life and the very pillars upon which our democratic process rests. Because of the gravity of the further decisions yet to be made, it is vital that the issues be placed in the clearest possible perspective. Discussion of the military considerations, therefore, should be precede by a look at those related technical, politic3 and perhaps psychological factors so deep1/ imbedded in this particular decision process
First of all, the technical factors are far yond merely “hitting a bullet with a bulled, or even, as the Defense Secretary Robert McNamara stated, “choosing among thousands the one that is the real bullet as opposed to the false bullets.” Necessary is the destruction of vast salvoes of missiles hurling through space at five miles per second, and equipped with glamorous aids to ensure successful penetration of enemy defenses. Where in the past an attrition mechanism such as an antisubmarine or air defense barrier was successful if it destroyed only 10 percent of the launch vehicles, but the missile itself, where even 90 per cent success is inadequate to prevent wholly unacceptable losses. If only a single missile penetrates the defenses I can cost millions of lives. So vast and difficult are the technical problems that virtually every important scientific and technical advisor to the administration has recommended against an antimissile system. A defensive system to be even marginally effective against a heavy attack would be hideously expensive. And no defense system in sight can do anything but make the attack more expensive. The Secretary of Defense spoke of the futility in spending “$4 billion, $40 billion or $400 billion—and at the ending of all the spending —to be relatively at the same point of balance on the security scale that we are now” Departing from his script in the San Francisco address in which he announced the Administration plan, he added, “I know of nothing we could do today that would waste more of our resources and add more to our risks.”
A defensive system such as the announced plan, despite statements to the contrary, achieves its major effectiveness when supplemented by a massive nationwide civil defense program. The cost of such a program is comparable with the cost of the antimissile system itself, such a civil defense. Such a civil defense program would require extensive participation in quasi-military activities in peace and war. These exercises could hardly be organized and conducted as normal peacetime routine, year in and year out, without profound effects on the domestic political balance if not on the American political system as a whole. Only a very few years ago, when U.S- Soviet more strained than today, a fallout shelter campaign was proposed but unequivocally rejected by the American populace. Their attitude can hardly be expected now to evolve as one of enthusiasm.
Domestic political and economic factors exert enormous pressures on the decision makers. Prominent news analysts, such as James Reston, have challenged the White House decision as aimed not at the military security of the nation but at the political security of the Administration. Contrary to earlier Administration policy, the Congress had repeatedly appropriated funds for certain items in an antimissile system dating back to the Eisenhower years. Legislators, too, appear to be buying immunity from attack by their constituents as well as by the enemy. But prior to 1967, these funds had not been obligated. When the Administration lost a number of seats in the 1966 Congressional elections, however, a post-election postmortem was held by the President in Johnson City. The resultant announcement by the President on domestic issues was overshadowed by the Defense Secretary’s statement that we would probably build an antimissile system—a course of action on which both before and since, he has expressed a considerable lack of enthusiasm. According to The New York Times, a high Administration official at that time reportedly stated that the President “could be crucified politically . . . for sitting on his hands while the Russians provide a defense for their people.”
The enormity of the economic influence on the policymakers is not difficult to understand. The 28 major contractors involved in the planned defense system have installations in home states of 84 per cent of the Senators and 40 per cent of the Congressional districts. If the 3,000 lesser contractors are added, it is clear that very few legislators and no office in the Federal government is free of involvement in strong cross-pressures in making its decision. Yet this is the American system of competitive free enterprise, of competing free ideas. The motives converge and interact throughout the decision process. This is the path toward reaching a consensus in a free democratic society. To modernize the language of an earlier era, Americans want neither annihilation nor taxation without representation.
Having reached a decision to build the “thin” defense, domestic political, psychological, and economic influences can be expected to exert further pressures to expand the system to a “heavy” defense. The Joint Chiefs of Staff have already made this recommendation. A former special assistant to the Secretary of Defense has questioned publicly whether it is really possible to resist the pressures to expand the new system. Yet the “heavy” defense, in turn, directly affects the strategic balance with the Soviet Union on the one hand, raising far-reaching possibilities of a newly destabilized armaments competition. On the other are equally serious questions of co-operation with our allies, who are perhaps unprotected by the “thin” system and unable financially to construct their own system of antimissile defenses.
Considerations such as these may have been the major elements in deciding to go ahead with the “thin” defense against the possibility of a Chinese nuclear attack, a defense specifically stated to be not against the Soviet Union. The decision to build a $5-billion defense against a nation currently without an intercontinental missile capability rather than against the nation with 500 to a thousand missiles already targeted on the United States, requires further examination. Not the least of the complications is the fact that Chinese missiles may overfly the Soviet Union en route to U. S. targets, which certainly poses a variety of interesting possibilities for all contestants.
It is true that the “thin” system can provide a desirable safeguard against the “rash and injudicious attack” stated to be within the Chinese capability perhaps by the mid-1970s. The “thin” system takes into consideration an irrational act by a potential enemy and adds protection against the improbable but possible accidental launch of an intercontinental missile by any of the nuclear powers. This in itself is a greater advantage than may be inferred. An accidental launch should not be confused with a random launch. Missiles maintained constantly “on target” can be launched accidentally but hardly randomly. An accidental launch is a missile on target, therefore, unplanned, but promising a major disaster and a grave provocation for heavy retaliatory strikes. The antimissile defense would largely avoid the need for dependence on an instant communication, command, and control system with the launching power and all other nuclear powers.
Senators Henry M. Jackson, Joseph S- Clark, Jr., and John O. Pastore among other critics of the “thin shield,” however, claim that it offers no defense against the most likely means of attack available to the Chinese. It alleged that submerged submarines off our West Coast could deliver low trajectory missiles inside our radar screen, just as the Israel' Air Force sneaked through the Egypt'3'1 radar defenses. Massive underwater, multiple megaton blasts of “dirty” bombs off our West Coast could capitalize on prevailing winds to sweep a cloud of deadly radio-activity at least to the Mississippi River. Bombs could be carried into our harbors by shrimp or tuna boats or perhaps into our cities by car rental agencies.
To these claims one must conclude that'' we place any faith in the doctrine of deterrence if deterrence “works,” it must be assumed that the Chinese cannot be foolish1 enough to risk total devastation of the- country by launching such an attack on the United States. The same argument can be made against the claim that the thin defend would offer no security to Alaska, for e*‘ ample, if it were to lie beyond our screen 3,1 hence be most vulnerable to a Chinese threat’ Whether or not Alaska is specifically protected one must assume that if deterrence can prevent an attack at the heart of U. S. cities or installations, it will prevent the attack on the outskirts, with or without a specific defense against such a threat. In essence, China is either deterred or she is not deterred; there is no partial state lying somewhere between.
This leads us to further consideration of1 military factors so deeply intertwined in the1 antimissile problem. Not the least of these is the strategic consideration of what kind of a nuclear war one envisions. A very high percentage of our military and civilian strategists are firmly convinced that one nuclear explosion will result in so-called escalation to total war.
Far too many people today recognize no intermediate steps between initiation and total response. Far too many would be hard pressed to give any rationale whatsoever on bow to break off nuclear war at any level once it had started. We have no concept other than Capitulation by the “other side” and even that may come too late. Since he, too, has the Power of obliteration, it may not come at all. One mushroom cloud brings on the total nuclear exchange and for what follows you can read all about it in the Book of Genesis.
The U. S. system is “oriented against a Chinese attack,” yet Chinese and Soviet missiles against the United States, we have seen, approach from the same sector. Both Chinese and Soviet missiles overfly the Arctic, Canada, and our northern frontier. That the system is “oriented against China,” therefore is largely a semantic term. The reliability against China is much higher than against the Soviet Union, but this is only because the threat from China is much less. The same defense system operates against both countries, Dut a massive enlargement would be necessary to gain a comparable effectiveness against the Soviet Union.
Further, the proposed system claims to be effective against the threat of some 50 missiles which the Chinese are expected to have by the mid-1970s. But this effectiveness almost necessarily assumes that the Chinese would use missiles as if no anti-missile defense existed. On the surface it appears to suggest that the Chinese would make no change in targeting after the U.S system is deployed. Only in this manner would the defense achieve the effectiveness advertised. Would the Chinese in fact plan an attack on the United States, however, it is difficult to imagine that the “thin” defense would have no effect on their planning. When a nation has a force of relatively few missiles, the only logical strategy would be to target cities rather than military organizations.
for the Chinese or Russians than equivalent increases in the defense for the United States. This we have already seen is the logic on which only a “thin” defense is economically justifiable in the first place and on which the heavy defense against the Soviet level of capability appears pointless and wasteful of our resources. The two clear alternatives available to the Chinese, therefore, are either to adhere to whatever timetable was originally assumed and to target fewer cities, or to delay the time-table sufficiently only to produce the additional sophistication or the additional number of missiles to overcome our defense. In neither case is it remotely likely that the Chinese would cease manufacture of missiles upon achieving the minimum force of which we see them capable by mid-1970. The “thin” defense, therefore, operates strategically as a means largely of prolonging our nuclear monopoly with respect to China.
The logical conclusion is that the potential threats from both China and the Soviet Union are essentially the same, differing only in degree, perhaps only in time frame. Since even a total defense could hardly be over 80 per cent effective, New York, Chicago, or Washington, for instance, can enjoy no fulsome security from our defense capability against either a Soviet or Chinese attack; for insufficient priority a San Francisco or a Fort Worth may be spared the Chinese attack. The “thin” system, in short, seems limited to defense, although a useful one, against only the accidental, foolhardy or irrational attack. Against the threat toward which it is specifically oriented, its usefulness is marginal and transitory.
The issue can hardly be as categoric as it has been publicly stated, a question of being considered provocative against China and not against the Soviet Union. The thousands of U. S. offensive missiles now zeroed in on the the Soviet Union should have already established whatever degree of provocation is involved. This is why the Russians had no observable reaction to the announced U. S. plan. The danger is provocation of a new arms race, not provocation of attack. How could a defense be considered provocative when such an awesome offense was already poised and targeted with aircraft, submarines and land-based missile forces on continuous round-the-clock alert?
The late Major General Nikolai Talenski, articulate Soviet commentator on nuclear strategy, argued that a missile defense is not provocative:
“Only the side which intends to use its means of attack for aggressive purposes can wish to slow down the creation and improvement of anti-missile defense systems. For the peace-loving states, anti-missile systems are a means of building up their security . . . the creation of an effective antimissile missile system enables the state to make its defenses dependent chiefly on its own capabilities, not only on mutual deterrence, that is, on the good will of the other side.” Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin, at a London press conference last February, was even more to the point: “The system that warns of attack is not a factor in the arms race.” The gloomy result which can hardly be evaded, however, is that the radars and anti-missile sites of the fixed defenses themselves become additional targets
"The underlying fear in European capitals . . . is now to
see . . . a reversion of the United States toward isolationism.”
of the first offensive attack. In a counterforce strategy this is axiomatic; it is only a little less so in any other strategy.
For considerations such as these, European and other experts consider the “China- oriented” anti-missile plan to be merely the first step toward a massive system against the Soviet Union, a system which, in Mr. McNamara’s own words, would be “no adequate shield at all—but rather a strong inducement for the Soviets to vastly increase their own offensive forces. The result would be only a mutually offsetting expenditure of about $40 billion each for the Soviet Union and the United States without any gain in security) because each nation’s offense could penetrate the other’s defense.”
The underlying fear in European capital whose security for two decades lay under the umbrella of the American strategic nuclear capability, is now to see an apparent weakening in U. S. faith in deterrence. They see a reversion of the United States toward isolationism leaving themselves relatively vulnerable and undefended against the seven or eight hundred Soviet intermediate range ballistic missiles targeted on Western Europe Europe’s close, crowded cities and nearness to the Soviet Union—with corresponding1, shorter times of flight—makes the technological problem far more difficult and the ability to defend far less. The conclusion seems n1 escapable that the proposed system, whether it is posed by the Chinese or the Soviet threat, is at best only a partial answer to very difficult problem.
One major strategic factor has been omitted almost totally in the foregoing, however. This is the extra-territorial element of the sea and outer space itself. The sea is the element America is so fortunate and the Soviet so disfavored. It is on and in the sea that much of our answer may be found. With a land area far smaller and an industrial concentration far greater than that of the Soviet Union was only natural that we moved our Polaris forces out to sea. The vast ocean areas granted near invulnerability in their depths and r moved from the continent the hail of counter fire which fixed installations on land must inevitably have drawn to the heartland Even though the technological problems are vastly greater, we must first look to the sea relative invulnerability of our strategy defenses as well as our offenses. The vast free seas are available to all, yet open to the control of any. The oceanic moats are the great natural defenses of the United States, and it is seaward the country must look for its 1 defense effort.
Defenses based at sea have mobility to move to threatened areas depending upon changing political circumstances in any part of the globe. Defenses based at sea reduce the motivation to surprise attack, no matter how irrational. Defenses based at sea constitute defense in depth which is militarily infeasible to challenge. Defenses based at sea can more likely intercept enemy missiles before they deploy multiple warheads, decoys, and other penetration aids, and therefore can greatly reduce the number of incoming targets which must be handled by the terminal defenses on land. Because of the relative invulnerability, defenses based at sea are far less provocative of a new arms race. Defenses based at sea do not themselves become the target of the first enemy offensive. Defenses based at sea can be moved into strategic positions to protect allies and neutral countries from nuclear blackmail by China or the Soviet Union. Lastly, defenses based at sea can be developed with Allies and neutrals for the mutual security of both and could therefore save not only what is left of the unity of our Atlantic alliance but also reinvigorate our alliances in new, co-operative defense agreements.
In illustration of the last point, let us consider the case of Japan. Now rising to great power status in Asia, Japan is once again attracted by its open sea frontiers and the reestablishment of its world maritime position. Its rapidly increasing stature may stimulate a desire for the status symbol of a modern great nation, possession of nuclear weapons. The deep psychological scars from Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the drain on Japanese economy are both strong constraints against a nuclear program, yet Japan’s natural enemy on the China mainland and the factor of national prestige, so important to the Japanese, will operate in the opposite direction. Because of Japan’s island position, its close proximity to the nuclear threat from both China and Russia, its densely concentrated population and industry and its deep national abhorrence of another devastation by nuclear weapons, it may be that whatever natural desire the Japanese have to produce a nuclear weapon could be sublimated in a nuclear antimissile defense system. Japan can make one of the best technical and political cases of any country for deploying an antimissile system. There would seem to be considerable reason to believe that a regional, sea-based security system could fill that need, and further, that such a system could be developed in co-operation with the United States.
It is well known that the U. S. Navy is currently very much interested in a sea-based antimissile system. Early reactions from industry have been highly encouraging. Sea- based defense units can sweep the cone of fire from China and the Soviet Union. Additional units, to increase the coverage, could be stationed off China, in the Japan Sea, the North Pacific, and the Mediterranean. Should political circumstances indicate, the units could be shifted strategically or tactically—or technically, such as against a fractional orbital launch—for greater effectiveness. The attractiveness of such a concept is obvious. The advantages of the sea-based system already show promise of being as far-reaching for strategic defense as the Polaris submarine now serves for strategic offense. Using a combination of both surface vessels and submarines, the system would achieve the capability of polar operations through Arctic ice when required and of near indefinite durability on station in the free seas as a normal routine.
This is not to suggest that defense against a sophisticated missile attack, sea or land based or from space itself, is just around the corner. Quite the contrary. Vast technological problems are still a very long way from solution. Militarily, for a very long time to come, there will be no possibility of wholly defending any target against a determined nuclear attack. In fact, with or without the best possible defense, nobody can win a nuclear war in any meaningful sense. Even though the emphasis once again is shifting toward the defense, technology limits the currently visualized systems to an attrition mechanism which would be potentially effective against an unsophisticated or haphazard attack but ineffective against any other, and very expensive in either case. Because of the cost in national resources and, potentially, on the individual freedom of the American people, the issue is heavily tinged with both politics and economics at every turn. America is a long way from achieving a missile defense capability other than through continued faith in deterrence itself. This faith is hardly misplaced. Yet vast technological and political change allows no blind reliance on any concept without hard scrutiny as to its continued relevance in the emerging world, the world as it is. One’s horizons cannot be limited to his land frontiers. One’s glance must contemplate both the distant seas and the encompassing heavens lest his grasp truly exceed his reach.
Currently, the only real defense in a nuclear war is not to fight one.
The 20th century Caesars of nuclear warfare have devised their deadly efficient catapults to storm the defensive walls of any enemy city. The defenders now realize, as Vercingetorix was made to know, how inefficient and penetrable are their stoutest barricades. Only too clear is the thin range of safety they can hope to assure the populace. As the enemy catapults are being assembled the latter-day Alesian defenders belatedly see, as Vercingetorix must finally have seen, the weal' ness of defenses located wholly within the land perimeters, within the cities and villages themselves- As with the beleaguered tribes of Gaul—with the threat so near at hand—we must raise our eyes to look beyond the walls and to visualize how real security might be achieved by capitalizing on the broad moats beyond the walls. The inherent defense capability in their friendly waters may prevent the missiles from ever reaching the last ditch defenses on land. Whether against ancient Rome of modern Cathay, the outer defense perimeters must lie far beyond the land itself. The potential ad' vantages which the sea offers in the way of military invulnerability, political stability, and diplomatic harmony appear to be unsurpassed.