tuesday, September 1, 1981 daily nebraskan Page5
Defense dollars . , .
Continued from Page 4
the hardware it needs without knowing just what it needs
it for or how it serves the national interest.
It's not even possible to demonstrate that the countless
trillions we've spent on defense since World War II has
been money well spent, except to point out that, so far,
we haven't been attacked.
It's like the way the old folk used to prove the efficacy
of asafetida bags worn around the neck as a polio preven
tative: the kid hasn't got polio, has he?
The easiest thing is to do what most Americans have
been doing: accede to the demands for incomprehensible
new weapons systems, the best that American technology
can dream up, even when you doubt that it will ever be
used.
Think about the refinements in nuclear weaponry since
the relatively crude little A-bombs were dropped on Hiro
shima and Nagasaki. Whole generations of improvements
have come and passed into obsolescence without ever
having been used.
We get so wrapped up in questions like JFK's alleged
missile gap we forget that, gap or no gap, we've never used
the missiles. The odds seem overwhelming that we never
will.
And even if, through some tragic error, we found our
selves using them, the questions remain: What's wrong
with the old ones our leaders used to tell us were capable
of wiping out us? Will the clever new missiles wipe them
out more effectively? Kill them a hundred times instead
of a mere dozen?
Incidentally, the administration tells us we've got
another missile gap. The Russians have 2,010 ICBMs and
we've got only 2,000 - a fact that means nothing unless
you also consider that we have twice the number of
metropolitan areas as the USSR.
The experts say these things aren't the issue. The issue
is deterrence: military credibility. If we stop developing
new weapons, if we stop impoverishing ourselves with de
fense appropriations, the Soviets will read it as a sign of
weakness and loss of military will
The Soviet experts say the same thing as they spend
themselves into bankruptcy. We both are obliged to
remain strong - and not just strong but stronger than
each other - because everybody knows that weakness in
vites aggression.
But does it? Does all the- stockpiling of evermore sophi
sticated weapons really make us safer from enemy attack?
Was Iraq safer because it was believed to be developing
nuclear capability?
If the Israelis are to be believed, the attack on Baghdad
came precisely because Iraq was thought to be getting
stronger.
The whole question of defense spending seems to have
very little to do with defense. Since no one in authority
really expects war on a global scale any more - for the
simple reason that everybody understands that such a war
would be unwinnable by either side - both U.S. and
Soviet militarists have reduced military preparedness to a
board game, a sort of missile-rattling Monopoly played
with real dollars and rubles.
The point, if you think of it this way, is not what the
money buys but how freely it is spent. Both sides dream
up new and nightmarish weapons, not because it expects
to use them, but because each new zillion-dollar outlay
moves one side or the other temporarily ahead in the
game.
Is it naive to hope that somebody - perhaps us - will
decide that the game is silly and simply refuse to play any
more? And if it happened, would anyone (aside from
those involved in the manufacture of armaments) feel less
safe?
(c) Washington Post Co.
yTN IV a 5Tuar? mag.
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