Star Wars: suicide or survival?

ACCORDING TO Alun Chalfont--chairman of the House of Lords All-Party Defense Group and the European Atlantic Group; former army officer of twenty years' experience; former Minister of State at the Foreign Office; from 1961 to 1964 defense correspondent of the London Times; author of several books--President Reagan's "Star Wars" speech of March 23, 1983, was "something much more than a new approach to nuclear deterrence; it was a signpost to a completely new approach to the strategic doctrines upon which Western defense and security are based." The President's Strategic Defense Initiative, Lord Chalfont believes, provides as well the catalyst for "an entirely new approach, in the period between now and the end of the century, to the central political and ideological confrontation: that between the Soviet Union and its allies on the on ehand and the United States and its allies on the other." In his latest book, Star Wars: Suicide or Survival? (Little, Brown, $16.95), published in England last year and in this country in the spring of 1986, he dilates upon these propositions in what is, to my knowledge, the most comprehensive, most persuasive, and quite simply the best exposition of SDI extant.

"To put it mildly," Lord Chalfont Observes.

"Star Wars" has had a bad press. In considering this phenomenon it is important to establish a frame of reference by means of a brief resume of the Strategic Defense Initiative, since it is clear that some of the arguments advanced against the idea can be explained only by the existence of a serious misunderstanding of what is actually is. Only then is it possible to examine some of the more substantive objections to SDI and to test their validity, and perhaps to advance the proposition that SDI is a concept which deserves a much more sympathetic reaction than has so far been evident--especially in Western Europe.

In a concise 138 pages (plus appendices) he accomplishes this and more in a limpid and at times elegant prose that belies the technical and political complexity of the subject.

As Chalfont notes, the most bizarre aspect of the anti-SDI coalition has been the enthusiasm with which it has rallied round the concept of mutual assured destruction: "Faced with a strategic theory which offered survival as an alternative to suicide, [the enemies of SDI evinced] a strange disinclination to abandon the familiar certainties to annihilation." For the program of Star Wars is essentially a plan to alter the nature of nuclear deterrence by shiftint it from the present offensive basis to a defensive one, whereby the emphasis lies on saving lives rather than avenging them; the ultimate goal being, in Lord Chalfont's words, "to devise a system of deterrence at substantially lower levels so that, in the dreadful event that deterrence should fail, the result would not be nuclear annihilation." Under the misapprehension (honest in some cases, in others disingenuous or actually dishonest) that the aim of SDI is to do away with deterrence altogether, Star Wars' opponents have advanced a wide array of arguments for the program's abandonment: that it is "provocative" to the Soviets; that it is in contravention of existing arms-control treaties; that it represents an escalation of the nuclear-arms race; that it would have a destabilizing, and perhaps even destructive, effect on the Western Alliance; that it is, in some vague, unspecified pantheistic sense, an insult to the Firmament; that it is, finally, an absurd science-fiction scenario that quite simply cannot work. Chapter by chapter, Chalfont refutes these challenges to conclude that "The Strategic Defense Initiative is too important and too complicated to be assailed with arguments derived from discredited strategic doctrines and based upon outmoded habits of strategic thought."

Of course Star Wars is "provocative" to Moscow, Chalfont argues: The Soviets have done a great deal of research in space-based defensive systems themselves and are reluctant to lose their advantage, which retains no guarantee under treaty; there being nothing in the ABM Treaty of 1972, the Outer Space Treaty of 1976, or the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons of 1968 to prohibit research in anti-ballistic missile defense. As a non-nuclear defense system directed at nuclear weaponry, SDI can hardly be said to represent an accleration of the nuclear-arms race; while the identical technology is applicable to the NATO defense forces in ways that can reduce the likelihood of the deployment of tractical nuclear weapons in Europe and, by replacing the Allied strategy of graduated response with more effective one, actually enhance the Alliance. Of the eight thousand pieces of hardware currently in orbit, the vast preponderance serve military interests. As for the argument that SDI can never provide the U.S. with a leak-proof carapace, that has never been the intention of its advocates. "The theory of the Strategic Defense Initiative is that if it were possible to devise a defensive system capable of destroying a substantial proportion of incoming ballistic missiles (say, 50 per cent or more) this would have a significant effect on the nature of deterrence."