CONGRESSIONAL RECORD -- SENATE

April 3, 1969

Page 8631

THE ANTI-BALLISTIC-MISSILE CONTROVERSY

Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, over the past weeks I have listened with increasing concern to the controversy about the administration's proposal for the Safeguard anti-ballistic-missile system.

The American people are deeply troubled that tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union have come to this new turn. They are disturbed by the competition for more and more deadly weapons of destruction. They are distressed by any step to intensify the nuclear arms race and weaken the prospect of relief from the threat of nuclear war.

 

The administration's ABM proposal represents quantum changes in the weaponry on which the precarious balance of mutual deterrence rests. It represents a major commitment of resources, away from other vitally important national objectives. Its bargain price tag is made suspect by all our experience in weapons building and by the system's own built-in momentum toward a new arms spiral.

The administration's proposal must withstand exhaustive scrutiny before this Nation can accept its enormous risks. We must demand careful evaluation of the Safeguard system -- of its premises, its effectiveness, and its likely consequences -- before the recommendations of the President and his advisers can be accepted as a national decision.

The burden of judgment is on the Congress. We are hearing testimony from the administration before the Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees. We have also heard ringing denunciations from distinguished scientists and other experts familiar with the range of considerations bearing on the decision to construct and deploy an anti-ballistic missile system.

In the weeks ahead, the Congress will have to determine whether an ABM is needed, whether it will work, and whether it will contribute in a useful way to American security. Only when these questions are resolved can the Congress decide whether we should go forward with an ABM program.

I have grave reservations about the merits of the Safeguard System. The administration's proposal has raised more doubts than it has cured. I had hoped, before the President made his announcement, that the opportunity he took to review the ABM program would yield a prudent, soundly premised decision, representing the best judgment of the Nation. But the administration's case to date has been utterly unconvincing, shedding not light but shadow on the most fundamental aspects of the program.

Mr. President, any decision to embark on such an important and risky course as the Safeguard program must satisfy four primary considerations. I offer these considerations now as the principal areas on which the Senate must base its best judgment in meeting its responsibilities to the American people.

First, we must know what is really proposed to be done within the so-called Safeguard program. To date, the intimations of what is intended have been confusing, contradictory, and ambiguous.

This year, Congress is asked to approve a start on two defense points at Minuteman bases in Montana and North Dakota. But we are also told that an additional 10 sites around the country, including one at Washington, D.C., are involved in the "program."

The President, in his announcement to the Nation, March 14, carefully stressed his options to restrict the Safeguard system according to the results of continuing reviews of the state of technology, intelligence, and arms control negotiations. But Under Secretary Packard's presentations have paid lip service to the President's restricted concept. Mr. Packard justified the program primarily in terms of full deployment and its potentialities for redeployment to meet evolving threats.

The difference appears to be more than one of shades of meaning. It arises against a background of shifting positions by the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the military "requirement" for an ABM, and changing intelligence evaluations as to the nature of the Sino-Soviet threat. Thus far, those positions and evaluations seem to coincide more with the domestic political climate than with the real world of international security.

What lies in the poke that the Congress is now asked to buy? Is it two batteries of Safeguard, 12 or many, many more in a steady evolution toward the thick ABM system which sends shivers down the spine of everyone concerned with the survival of mankind?

By underwriting a policy of "rolling options" -- only one face of which the President revealed in his announcement -- would the Congress place itself and the country in a position where the administration has unbridled discretion to "reorient" safeguard at will according to any suitable pretext? Nothing in the record to date reassures me on this point.

Mr. President, these are questions to which the Congress must find answers. These are the questions which may mark the difference between the quick and the dead.

Second, the Congress must determine whether the safeguard system is needed at this time.

We have heard considerable testimony from the administration about the growing Soviet threat to our retaliatory forces. The administration's judgment is based, in very large part, on the dotted lines on its charts, which project a steady deterioration in the security of our deterrent during the first half of the 1970's.

Any such projection of reciprocal actions is somewhat arbitrary, resting on the wisdom that goes into its assumptions. It cannot be accepted at face value. Before we can determine whether these assumptions should be accepted as a basis for decision, the premises of the administration's forecasts must be closely tested. To the extent these projections rest on classified information, these bases cannot be publicly explored. But the Senate must satisfy itself that the intelligence formulations and projections of options available to the United States to counter anticipated Soviet actions have been soundly formulated.

Mr. President, enough is known about the underpinnings of the administration's promotional package to make its reliability dubious. The central villain in the administration's piece is the Soviets' SS-9 missile, which is cast in the role of a deadly first-strike weapon. We know, however, that the SS-9 can serve a perfectly straightforward purpose in the Soviets' nuclear mix as a "city busting" retaliatory weapon, ideally suited to the destruction of very large urban areas, of which the United States has quite a number. We know that the SS-9, regardless of its warhead capability, would have to overcome severe problems of accuracy and be available in very large numbers before any nation in the position of the Soviet Union would stake its very existence on the ability of a weapon to serve effectively as a first-strike weapon -- the role in which it is cast by our military publicists.

Grave doubt has arisen about the credibility of these projections. They are by no means universally accepted by the experts in a position to sift the evidence relied on by the administration. Before we could agree that the Safeguard is needed at this time, we would have to have a soundly constructed trustworthy justification on which to base our judgment. We have yet to see such a justification.

Third, we must also have confidence that the Safeguard will do the job for which it is designed, principally the protection of a significant core of our retaliatory force.

The administration has stressed that the Safeguard system will work, and it would have us stake billions of dollars on that optimistic forecast. That claim can only be thoroughly tested -- within the limits of human ability to predict -- by access to information we cannot openly discuss.

However, the Senate has heard from experts, who have carefully reviewed the program, that Safeguard buys only marginal retaliatory protection in the face of the many capabilities of the offense to overcome an ABM defense.

I am particularly struck by the vulnerability of the system's missile-site radar -- MSR -- to destruction that would cripple the entire system.

The advocates of Safeguard say that dispersal of Minuteman is not enough to insure security of the force; to provide this security, they ask for an active ABM defense. But Safeguard rests on the functioning of the MSR to provide guidance and control for terminal interception, and to serve this role, the MSR must be above ground and unshielded, making it a prime target for an enemy strike.

How many missiles it will take to knock out the MSR is an unknown quantity, but it is obvious that a concentrated first-wave attack could blind an entire Safeguard battery and leave Minuteman virtually as unprotected as they would have been without an ABM.

This kind of protection strikes me as a very dubious investment.

Finally, Mr. President, we must be concerned about the likely consequences of a Safeguard deployment, both in weapons development and in the progress of arms control negotiations.

Secretary Laird refers to Safeguard as a "building block for peace," painting the system as not being provocative -- a judgment that strikes me as illogical and illusory.

Envision, if you will, the following scenario of a likely Soviet reaction: Soviet generals appear before Messrs. Brezhnev and Kosygin and others to discuss the American Safeguard deployment, replete with extensive charts and other briefing aids. Their charts show the rate of predicted American ABM deployment between 1969 and 1973 rising from zero to two sites, and then sharply rising to a level six times greater in the next 2-year time period. A dotted extension rises thereafter to a level marked "First-Strike Capability" at some future year.

The Soviet generals note that the Safeguard system is seriously overdesigned for the defensive purposes stated by the Americans, in that Safeguard utilizes components -- the MSR and the high-velocity Sprint -- designed for distant terminal interception appropriate to protect cities far in excess of the close-in requirements appropriate for protecting the hardened Minuteman. They conclude that Safeguard is a building-block to a first-strike system.

Harkening back to the dangers of their country's unpreparedness at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, the generals express considerable alarm and request immediate authority to counteract the intensified "threat" which, they say, the United States is commencing to build.

Mr. President, we can fairly assume that such a scene will have taken place in the Kremlin not long after Safeguard deployment is begun. Can we, with confidence, therefore, conclude that Safeguard will be received as calmly as the administration suggests? Or must we conclude that Safeguard, resting as it does on the premise of an intensifying arms race, will be a prophecy that fulfills itself -- at grave risk to all mankind?

It is altogether possible, on the other hand, that the administration is not, in fact, taken in by its own reassurance as to Soviet reactions. It may be that the Safeguard proposal is intended as a blunt challenge to the Soviets to come to the bargaining table and negotiate over strategic weapons, or else the United States will heat up the arms race, counting on our superior technology to protect us if negotiations fail. I cannot believe that this kind of bluster would have any rational justification, and I must caution the Senate and the country that such diplomacy is the very essence of provocation.

In this connection, I must note with some concern that the arms limitation negotiations, to which the United States and the Soviet Union are both committed, have not yet begun, although Secretary Rogers' assurance that the administration would soon be ready is indeed gratifying.

Mr. President, these four considerations about Safeguard -- what is intended, why is it needed, how effective it would be, and what results it would produce for American security -- are the tests to which the proposal must be put.

From the work of our committees and the debates in the Senate must come the answers. As any lawyer knows in making his case, the proponent of an argument has the burden of proof. In the ABM case, the administration must carry the burden of proof in the four areas I have outlined. In this vital area, the burden of proof requires thorough and prudent judgment, not presumptive reliance on cliche and illusion.

As of today, Mr. President, the administration has not borne its burden of proof.