WHO LEADS THE ARMS RACE? By FRED WEIR For more than 30 years, an ever-intensifying global arms race has been the central fact of human existence. At every turn, we in the West have been told that the development of new weapons systems, military strategies and massive arms buildups on our side have been necessitated by ‘“‘unprecedented”’ threats to our security from the USSR. In every single case it has later become clear that it was “‘our’’ side which had developed the advanced sys- tems and deployed the superior numbers, while the Soviets struggled to catch up. This ‘‘action-reaction”’ cycle has characterized every major phase of the arms race up to the present day. The classic cases of this are the bomber and missile ‘“‘gaps’’ of the 1950s and the 1960s. In 1953, President Eisenhower attempted to slash $5- billion from the budget of the U.S. Air Force, on the grounds that that service was already large enough, and provided an adequate nuclear deterrent to any conceiv- able Soviet threat. The response was immediate and massive, and it set the pace for a train of events which have become all too familiar to a cold-war weary North American public. — Aggrieved Air Force pouerals took their case to the media. They hinted at treachery in the highest levels of government, and painted pictures of huge fleets of Soviet intercontinental bombers poised to strike a helpless North America. Powerful lobbies, funded by a startling range of U.S. industry twisted arms in Washington while ‘Project Alert’ and ‘‘Strategy for Survival”’ rallies or- ganized by right-wing politicians across the U.S. created a semblance of popular pressure for rearmament ‘‘to meet the Soviet menace.” “Clearly there is no basis for the myth of the military weakness or passivity of the United States. It must be bluntly stated. The United States has led the nuclear arms race from the beginning, and all indications are that it will continue to _ dosoin the future, The U.S. leads in developing and produc- ing new delivery systems and in the numbers of nuclear weapons for every aspect of warfare.” — Rear Admiral Gene R. La Roque USN (Ret.), at UN disarmament conference June 17, 1980. Leaving aside the vital fact that the Soviets clearly never had any intention of attacking America, and that during this entire period they argued for the concept of “*peaceful co-existence’’, there never existed any credi- ble Soviet bomber force which might have spawned a legitimate fear on the part of Americans. The record clearly shows that at no time did the Soviets ever have more, or better, intercontinental bombers than did the U.S. Throughout the 1950s, American air defence capa- bilities were far more than sufficient to have dealt with the 150 or so propeller-driven Tu-95 “‘Bear’’ bombers that the USSR maintained as a strategic force. In the 1960s, with the advent of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), the Soviets abandoned the strategic bomber almost altogether, diverting most of their AMERICAN CHALLENGES SOVIET RESPONSES 5.000 Pf r 4 i f é dit 2323¢ i ‘‘Bear’’ aircraft to maritime reconnaissance and patrol duties. Nevertheless, two consequences of the ‘‘bomber gap” are still with us. The first is the Strategic Air Command (SAC), created when Eisenhower lost his skirmish with the Air Force. To this day SAC absorbs billions of dollars annually to maintain its force of 380 B-52 and FB-111 strategic bombers against the USSR. Since the 50s, the Soviets have been forced to construct elaborate air defences throughout the country, in their case to counter a real threat, posed by SAC. Although the Soviet Union has not produced a new long-range bomber for more than 25 years, there is every indication that the U.S. will be spending $56-billion over the next “decade to procure some 250 new B-1 intercontinental bombers for SAC. “Let us not confuse the question by blaming it all on our Soviet adversaries . .. we must remember that it has been we Americans who, at almost every step of the road have taken the lead in the development of (nuclear) weaponry. It was we who first produced and tested such a device; we who were the first to raise its destructiveness to a new level with the hydro- gen bomb; we who introduced the multiple warhead; we who have declined every proposal for the renunciation of the principle of ‘first use’; and we alone, so help us God, who have used the weapon in anger against others, and against tens of thousands of helpless noncombatants at that.”’ — George F. Kennan, New York Review, July 16, 1981. Then there is the North American Air Defence Com- mand (NORAD). Created in 1957 to link early-warning systems with air-defence interceptots, NORAD has grown rather than diminished with the disappearing Soviet bomber ‘‘threat’’. The lumbering old ‘‘Bear”’ bombers remaining in Soviet service could practically be handled by a few beagles in Sopwith Camels, yet Canada is spending almost $5-billion for new F-18 fighters — largely for the NORAD role — and hundreds of millions to upgrade the DEW and Pinetree early-warning lines. * Again, in the early 1960s, the Pentagon claimed, with attending media hype, that the USSR had develoyed an early and massive lead in intercontinental ballistic mis- siles. In his book, TheWarfare State, Fred Cook de- scribes the ‘“‘panic’’: ‘We had been ensivaging some 500 to 1,000 nuclear- tipped long-range missiles crouched on Russian launch- ing pads, waiting for the push ofa button; but actually the Soviet Union had no more than 50 such monsters, per- haps even fewer. ‘**We on the other hand, had 48 Atlas ICBMs in posi- tion and some 80 Polaris missiles aboard five nuclear- powered submarines roaming the seas . . . we had at least "? a 2 to 1 missile gap over Russia! Once again, regardless of the actual balance and heed- less of real possibilities for arms control, pressure from the military-industrial complex, aided by right-wing agitators and a dutifully hysterical media, forced huge allocations for the expansion of America’s strategic ar- senal. The result has been an enormous U.S. lead in strategic nuclear weapons which the Soviets have strug- - gled for nearly 20 years to catch up with. In the early 1970s it appeared that the Soviets might be closing the gap in strategic weapons — if not in numbers or quality, at least in the ability to inflict ‘‘unacceptable damage’’. The U.S. then introduced the MIRV — multi- ple independently-targeted warheads — on its land and submarine-based missiles, a development the Soviets have barely begun to catch up with today. Now the Pentagon has adopted the concept of ‘‘limited nuclear war’ which is more than an idea, it is a whole new targetting strategy which will result in an enormous in- crease in the numbers of warheads deployed. In each case, the Soviets have been left far behind, forced to evaluate and respond to a whole new set of circumstances. In each case the Pentagon has manipu- “Incredibly, the main function of NORAD ostensibly remains to guard against Soviet bomber attack into the 1990s. It comprises a very small and unimportant link in NATO's newer ICBM warning systems. Recently some attempts have been made to justify NORAD by claiming that the new Soviet Backfire” medium-range bomber, currently deployed in small numbers in the European theatre, might be capable of attacking North America. When pres- sed, however, NORAD spokesmen admit that the only way ‘‘Back- fires’ might reach North America would be on one-way suicide missions, hardly a practical military exercise. -— only to realize they were largely worthless.” Soviet TU-95 “‘Bear’’ bomber, once the backbone of a! intercontinental fleet, today has been converted to mé i time reconnaissance and patrol duties. The U.S. mal tains 380 B-52 and F-111 strategic bombers and is spen@ ing $56-billion on the new B-1 strike force. lated a phantom ‘‘Soviet threat’’ to re-assert its 0 i massive strategic superiority. 7 Jeremy Stone, scientist and author of a number 0! books on the arms race writes: 4 ‘‘What is this Defence Department pattern? It is one of undermining the Soviets’ deterrent while complaini { , “The hucksters of security gaps have been with us years. In the early 1950s we were told of a ‘bomber gap’. later learned it was a myth, but nonetheless we beefed up B-47 and B-52 forces. From 1957 to 1961 there were leaks secret studies pointing to a ‘missile gap’. It was also am but nonetheless we vastly expanded the deployment Minuteman missiles. In the 1960s there were civil defe and ABM ‘gaps’, and we launched programs in those a — George McGovern, in the Progressive, May 1977. that they may in the future undermine ours. ... Department invariably exaggerates the Soviet’thre obtain public and Congressional support for weap that will undermine the Soviet deterrent. This means permanent arms race.” Today, with strategic arms limitation talks thorougi repudiated by the Reagan administration, the Uni States has launched the biggest-ever drive for acros' the-board military supremacy. Not surprisingly, Soviet ‘‘threat’’ has grown in direct proportion to a Pentagon’s buildup plans. ; As George McGovern has observed, the ‘“‘gaps”’ doubling up. “In an era of multiple warheads’’, ¥ writes, ‘someone, I suppose has perceived the need wy ‘multiple gaps’.’” Now we have a spending gap, a nav! gap, a laser gap, a manpower gap, a new civil defe gap, a ‘throwweight’ gap, a theatre missile gap . The world is held hostage to these claims. Only awareness of both the history and the substance be this rhetoric will enable people — all of us — to find t zh means to prevent what may well be the final round @ u) arms-race escalation, or anything else for that mattef: Main References: Aldridge, Robert: The Counterforce Syndrome Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, 1978 Cook, Fred: The Warfare State Collier Books, New York, 1967 PO Fulbright, Senator William J., et al: American Militarism 1970 Viking Press, New York, 1969 Green, William: The World's Fighting Planes, Macdonald & Co., London, 1964 Lens, Sidney: The Day Before Doomsday Doubleday & Co., New York, 1977 McGovern, George: ‘The Russians are Coming — Again” Progressive magazine, May 1977 Scientific American: Progress in Arms Control? readings from Scientific America, W.H. Freeman & Co., San Fra cisco, 1979. Fred Weir, author of the 1980 pamphlet, The Arn Menace, is a history graduate who has travelled wid in eastern and western Europe and the Middle East.