Reply to Richard Perle 7/13/00
NY Times Op-Ed Article

Have long admired your views and media commentary (since the Reagan era) and thanks for your 7/13 Times Op-Ed. Rather than be discouraged by a gleeful, uncomprehending and agenda-laden media's "told you so" myopia on SDI, Missile Defense advocates can, as you demonstrate, make hay from this recent "failure."

Your India/Pakistani scenario foresees a time when nuclear aggressions isn't just theoretically unfeasible, but practically impossible. As few SDI opponents recognize or understand, it's not necessary to shoot down all the missiles - rather it is just the uncertainty of WHICH missiles might be shot down that befuddles war planners to the point where they do throw up their hands and declare, "we can't do it."

President Reagan understood this reasoning to the hilt, as did Soviet war-planners and leaders, who could foresee that the theoretical first-strike capability of their mighty SS-18 missiles continuously erodes when confronting even flimsy BMDs.

The opponents who deride SDI/BMD as a "Star Wars" fantasy also maintain an inherent contradiction: Is SDI a pie-in-the-sky unreachable science-fiction fantasy? Or is such an impossible-to-build never-to-exist system a destabilizing arms race catalyst? It can't be both, yet SDI opponents use both arguments freely and interchangeably. This contradiction is seldom exploited by SDI proponents, but in any kind of debate, just asking that question would be very effective. Please feel free to use this reasoning in future Op-Eds!

It is discouraging to see today's 60's generation of leaders holding fast to the MAD doctrine which, though undesirable, served the purpose of keeping gigantic American/Soviet nuclear arsenals in check. Today's smaller threats can't "support" a MAD solution and adherence to that doctrine is as illogical as allowing the '72 ABM treaty to dictate year 2000 defense postures.

How many times in history have their been "ultimate weapons?" The crossbow, the battleship, the aircraft carrier - all superceded as sovereign states looking after the supreme national interest of self-defense discovered counter- and counter-countermeasures to an existing threat. The nuclear-tipped ICBM is surely mankind's most fearsome penultimate weapon.

Yet it too will become obsolete as technological evolution marches on. The threat of SDI cancelled the "Doomsday" threatened during the Cold War; a genuine SDI can as you describe make smaller nuclear events "obsolete" too.

And no one likes to admit it, but one can only hope that in a national security emergency, America's National Command Authorities will forego using 'bullet-on-bullet" kill scenarios, and instead arm any extant interceptors - even Aegis-based - with nuclear warheads, which we can be certain will make target proximity and decoys a non-issue. One can only hope.