Arms Race May Be Petering Out : ‘Star Wars’ Could Mean That Forces Are Locked Into Parity

The Reagan “Star Wars” program, with all its potential for accelerating the arms race, is also, paradoxically, a symptom that the contest is petering out. Which tendency prevails depends on how far the program gets.

The Star Wars approach was evident in earlier arms races. More than a quarter of a century ago, in an essay titled “Arms Race: Prerequisites and Results,” Harvard’s Samuel P. Huntington described the Strategic Defense Initiative precisely:

“States may define absolute qualitative goals, such as the erection of an impenetrable system of defenses (Maginot Line) or the possession of an ‘ultimate’ or ‘absolute’ weapon, which will render superfluous further military effort regardless of what other states may do.”

Huntington also predicted the Reagan Administration’s underlying motivation, noting:

“The formulation by a state of its armaments goal in absolute terms is more likely to reflect the desire to obscure from its rivals the true relative superiority which it wishes to achieve, or to obscure from itself the need to participate actively in the balancing process.”

Thus, as far as arms races go, Star Wars is a kind of escapist business-as-usual coupled with the political urge to pursue superiority without calling for it and to avoid arms-control agreements (“the balancing process”).

But why, in this day and age, might Star Wars be a symptom of the impending decline of the contest itself?

Because nothing less than Star Wars can reshape the strategic balance. Nothing less than Star Wars can keep the contest moving in a strategically important way.

For the weaponeers, a failed Star Wars would be a hard act to follow. After all, more offense is no substitute for defense in destabilizing the existing parity of force. Consequently, a Star Wars that is not deployed (for whatever reason) will have served mainly to expose the bankruptcy of subsequent arms procurement that is less revolutionary.

Look closely at the advice implicit in the 1982 “High Frontier” report by the father of Star Wars, Lt. Gen. Daniel O. Graham:

“The only viable approach for a new Administration to cope with growing military imbalances was to implement a basic change in U.S. grand strategy and make a ‘technological end-run on the Soviets.’ ”

Put another way, the only way to break out of an obvious parity of forces--with each superpower ready to launch 10,000 strategic weapons at the other--was to embark on a Maginot Line in the sky.

This fantastic idea is growing ever more threadbare as the estimates of the costs and potential Soviet countermeasures become more accurate. A trillion-dollar down payment on an ongoing contest is the current estimate.

Ask yourself what will happen if, as seems likely, no future President--and no future budget--can maintain the credibility of this notion. In this case, parity of effective strategic forces will, finally, have to be accepted--and with all the more persuasiveness for our having attempted this Star Wars “break-out” so starkly.

No doubt there will be additional things to discuss: mobile missiles, sea-based counterforce, anti-submarine warfare and all the rest. For young analysts growing up in the middle of the contest, it would still qualify as an ongoing arms race, with new technologies always available for discussion. But after a failed Star Wars effort, most of the world would, it seems likely, accord the contest a certain benign neglect. A growing indifference to matching the other side could be expected. And defense “scares” in such an environment would continue to decline in political significance as they have done, after all, for the last 25 years.

Of course, if the anti-ballistic-missile treaty is broken, as the Reaganites would like, the contest will get a new impetus. Fears of a Soviet defensive system will encourage U.S. offensive weaponeers, and vice versa.

Accordingly, maintaining the ABM treaty is crucial. With this treaty we could imagine entering the next century, 14 years hence, in an atmosphere of arms-race tranquility. If, on the other hand, the treaty is breached and one side (and hence both sides) lurches into missile defenses, then we can imagine, for this dynamic to work itself out, perhaps two or three more decades being added to the effective length of a virulent contest.

Those in Washington who fear the Soviet Union more in a context of detente than in a context of hostility are working diligently to break this treaty (and the SALT treaty). On the other hand, those of the arms-control persuasion, and many sensible observers of all political stripes, are working to maintain the treaty.

Huntington may have been right that a “sustained arms race is much more likely to have a peaceful ending than a bloody one.” Since this 40-year contest is already much longer than the longest of the dozen that he studied (the 26-year naval contest between England and France that started in 1840), the likelihood of war in any given year may be low. But the longer the festering sore of the contest remains unhealed, the more years it has to erupt. In any case, two or three unnecessary decades of arms race are an expensive proposition, even if the additional risks of war that they provided were nil.

Will the arms race confirm the metaphor that it is always darkest before the dawn? This is what is being currently decided in Washington.