Reagan for the Defense

(Editor's note: Following are excerpts from an article published in TIME magazine on April 4, 1983.)

The crusade Ronald Reagan has embarked upon requires that he balance two competing messages: the U.S. must resolutely rearm to counter the Soviet threat, but it must project its peaceful intent along with its military might. Congress must be convinced that his $274 billion defense budget for fiscal 1984 ought not to be gutted. The nuclear freeze movement at home and abroad has to be countered so that the U.S. can upgrade its strategic forces and proceed with deployment of NATO missiles. And the Soviet Union needs to be persuaded that the West will not shrink from nuclear competition if its proposals for arms reductions are spurned. In a television address last week, Reagan confronted this complicated balancing act by graphically depicting what he claims is Moscow's "margin of superiority" while broaching a surprising and controversial idea for preventing nuclear war.

Reagan refused to retreat an inch in defending what is now proposed to be a $2 trillion, five-year military spending plan. Speaking just 33 minutes after the House voted to cut by more than half his proposed 10 percent increase in next year's Pentagon budget, the President sharply assailed the arguments of his critics as "nothing more than noise based on ignorance." Said he: "They're the same kind of talk that led the democracies to neglect their defenses in the 1930s and invited the tragedy of World War II." In order to emphasize the offensive threat posed by the Soviet Union, Reagan declassified spy-plane photographs showing Soviet activity in the Caribbean area. His charts showed the five new classes of Soviet ICBMs that have been produced since the U.S. Minuteman was deployed. He compared Moscow's missiles aimed at Europe with the lack of any NATO missiles aimed at the Soviets. And he pointed to a daunting Soviet lead in conventional weapons.

Then, in concluding his down-to-earth defense of his budget, Reagan launched the debate over U.S. military spending into an entirely different orbit. "Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers hope," he began. The President went on to suggest that America forsake the three-decade-old doctrine of deterring nuclear war through the threat of retaliation and instead pursue a defensive strategy based on space-age weaponry designed to "intercept and destroy" incoming enemy missiles. "I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace: to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete."

Reagan's video-game vision of satellites and other weapons that might some day zap enemy missiles with lasers or particle beams and the drama surrounding his unexpected announcement were partly a political ploy to change the context of the debate over defense spending. But if his space-age plan proceeds, or even if the suggestion of a shift in strategy is taken seriously, the implications are staggering. Indeed, as Reagan said, "we are launching an effort which holds the promise of changing the course of human history." Not since 1972, when the antiballistic missile (ABM) treaty was signed as part of the SALT I accords, has the U.S. or U.S.S.R. actively taken steps to set up a defense against nuclear attack.

Embarking on an effort to build shields rather than swords was a characteristic Reagan gesture -- a clear and simple assertion from his gut challenging the accepted wisdom that defensive systems are "destabilizing." His notion that missiles could be knocked out in space had a wistful though dangerous appeal; it suggested that the nation could be defended without earthly sacrifice and bloodshed.

As with many of the President's uncomplicated-sounding proposals, the idea of space-age missile defenses masks a swarm of complexities. It raises the specter of an arms race in space, which ultimately could be more expensive and dangerous than the one taking place on Earth. In a prompt and strong reaction, Soviet Leader Yuri Andropov personally warned: "Should this conception be converted into reality, this would actually open the floodgates of a runaway race of all types of strategic arms, both offensive and defensive." Even more ominous, the development of a missile defense system could undermine the very foundation of strategic stability, namely, the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), which has often been modified, but never abandoned. Under this concept each side is deterred from using its weapons by the fear of cataclysmic retaliation.

The White House reported an outpouring of supportive calls and telegrams after the speech (80 percent out of 2,800 in favor). Said Senior Adviser Michael Deaver: "He has had the most favorable response to any speech since he was elected President." But editorial reaction from around the country was more skeptical. The Atlanta Constitution, which labeled Reagan's characterization of the Soviet threat as "huckstering misimpressions," said that by "raising the remote possibility of a sci-fi defense against Soviet missiles, he risked destabilizing the U.S.-Soviet military balance -- already dangerously tenuous." The Chicago Sun Times called the speech "an appalling disservice."

There was some feeling, however, that Reagan's challenge to a system of deterrence that is based on the threat of mutual destruction could be a welcome element in the debate over nuclear policy. "Reagan now suggests that we slowly start investigating whether in the next century technology may offer a solution to our security that does not rest on the prospect of mass and mutual death," noted the Washington Post. "It is the product of Ronald Reagan's peculiar knack for asking an obvious question, one that has moral as well as political dimensions and one that the experts had assumed had been answered, or found unanswerable, or found not worth asking, long ago."

Moscow's response was far less generous. For the second time since coming to power, Andropov chose to respond personally to a U.S. initiative through an interview with Pravda. He began by conceding that part of what Reagan said was correct: "True, the Soviet Union did strengthen its defense capability. Faced with feverish U.S. efforts to establish military bases near Soviet territory, to develop ever new types of nuclear and other weapons, the U.S.S.R. was compelled to do so." But then he struck back, saying of his American counterpart: "He tells a deliberate lie asserting that the Soviet Union does not observe its own moratorium on the deployment of medium-range missiles [in Europe]." When he addressed Reagan's idea of space-age defensive ABMs, Andropov became heated. "It is a bid to disarm the Soviet Union in the face of the U.S. nuclear threat," he said. The relation between offensive and defensive weapons cannot be severed, he argued. "It is time Washington stopped devising one option after another in search of the best ways of unleashing nuclear war in the hope of winning it. Engaging in this is not just irresponsible, it is insane."