What You're Not Supposed to Know about the Arms Race

Early on the Morning of July 27, 1960, I was participating in a classroom exercise at the First Marine Division's ABC (Atomic, Biological and Chemical Warfare) School at Camp Pendleton, California. My job that morning was to plot the theoretical destruction of a city by a nuclear warhead. In this case, the city chosen for the exercise was Chicago. There was some irony in that: Chicago was the city where I had been born and raised and where my parents still lived.

Instruction in nuclear warfare is designed to give the clear impression that nuclear weapons are sensible and controllable devices--just arrows in the quiver, each one marked for a logical target.

For the exercise, I had been handed maps, special grids, charts, meteorological data and other classified information. In determining how to nuke Chicago, we were to calculate such variables as wind direction, temperature, cloud cover, potential military targets, kill ratios, and so on. We had plastic overlays with concentric circles on them that showed how far blast damage would occur and how much radiation would spread depending on local conditions and the size of the warhead.

I calculated that for a single one-megaton (continued on page 204)Arms Race(continued from page 139) bomb exploding on the ground, the area of burnout (total destruction) extended about 2.6 miles from ground zero in all directions, and that radiation damage could occur within hundreds of square miles. An air burst would increase the area of burnout to about 60 square miles.

On that July morning, just as I stuck a pin into the map and decided on an air burst at 10,000 feet over the Loop, I was told to report to the commanding officer's headquarters. There was an emergency telephone call for me.

I took the call and learned that my father had died a few minutes before from a heart attack while seated at his desk at the Chicago Title and Trust Company in Chicago's Loop. My father was 56 years old, a staunch Republican who would have voted for Richard Nixon that following November despite the missile gap that Senator John F. Kennedy was declaring.

I carried the news of my father's death with me like the Marine I was trying to be, but the peculiar conjunction of that morning's forces--death and nuclear weapons--has been vigorously linked in my imagination ever since.

•

There's a 30-minute film called The SALT Syndrome that's been shown on TV stations all across the U. S. the past couple of years. It has also been available for private showings. Financed through a $5,000,000 fund-raising campaign by a group called the American Security Council (A.S.C.), The SALT Syndrome can't exactly be called a documentary--it interrupts itself several times to ask for contributions, for example. But whatever else it may be, it is a very effective movie, well written and well produced, and its attack on the strategic-arms-limitation treaties probably has had a lot to do with the negative public opinion of those treaties in recent months.

The SALT Syndrome argues for a strategic doctrine that it calls "peace through strength." That concept is based on the argument that the U. S. is in terrible shape militarily, that we need a massive arms build-up and that we must regain superiority over the Russians.

The pictures and words in the film will scare the hell out of you. The Russians, it is reported, spend three times what the U. S. spends on strategic arms. Not since Hitler's Germany, we learn, have we seen such a rapid build-up of arms by a foreign power. At the same time, there are pictures of various proposed weapons systems being X'd out of our lives. We hear that this process of "unilateral disarmament" has been going on since the early Sixties, when Robert McNamara was Secretary of Defense.

The SALT Syndrome alleges that the Soviets have a six-to-one advantage over us in missile firepower, a three-to-one advantage in attack submarines, a 93-to-41 superiority in all types of ballistic-missile submarines. Their Delta-class submarine has a ballistic missile with a range of 5500 nautical miles, a range, we are told, that is 3000 miles greater than that of any of our sub-launched ballistic missiles. We see a Russian missile launch, tensing up during the countdown while the film's narrator speaks of our own "clear military inferiority."

General Alexander Haig comes on camera and describes previous defense policies as "immoral, self-defeating and devastating."

Henry Kissinger testifies that "rarely in history has a nation so passively accepted such a radical change in the military balance."

Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, former Chief of Naval Operations and now on the Texaco board of directors, says, "We're already behind," and suggests that "we must accept either disaster through weakness and disarmament or peace through strength."

William Clements, a former Deputy Secretary of Defense and now governor of Texas, declares that the U.S.S.R. spent 104 billion dollars more on strategic weapons in the previous decade than did the U. S. Senator Henry Jackson calls SALT II "appeasement in its purest form."

The film ends with a plea for contributions to the American Security Council Foundation to aid it in distributing the film. Admiral Moorer reports that more than 1600 flag and general officers, now retired, have signed a statement asking the Senate to reject SALT II. And as the final images fade, we're left with some nagging questions: Just how close are all those Russian missiles--and how soon will they rain down on an undefended, unsuspecting America?

•

But wait. If you haven't taken your M-l out of Cosmoline and retreated to your basement, you should know that there is some expert opinion in this country that runs contrary to the pessimistic message of The SALT Syndrome. The film had a lot of money behind it and played to a huge crowd (it was, for example, shown an average of 16 times a day in South Dakota during last year's campaign to knock off George McGovern). But that does not mean it presents an accurate picture of our defense posture. The American Security Council contributed to the shaping of Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign; eight of its officers were on his Defense Advisory Board, and among A.S.C. sponsors you will find such well-known names as Clare Booth Luce and James Angleton. But not even that makes the film invulnerable to criticism.

Admiral Moorer, it is comforting to remember, is not the only admiral in this sea of information about our present defense capabilities. There is another one, Admiral Gene La Rocque. He does not agree that we are behind the Soviet Union. He thinks The SALT Syndrome is a misleading and inaccurate film and that arms control is necessary for survival. La Rocque retired from the U. S. Navy in 1972 and started a citizens' watchdog agency called the Center for Defense Information (C.D.I.).

"I think the center is unique in a number of ways," he says, "and it has been from the year I started it. For one thing, we don't take any Government money. For another, we have no active-duty military people on our staff. Brookings, for example, does take Government funding and does have active-duty military people on board. The A.S.C. people have no published budget; they have secret funding. But our books are open to anyone. So I think we are, by definition, more open and independent than those other institutions."

C.D.I. was born, in a sense, when the admiral's military career came to a standstill. "You could use a polite term for it and say I was being laterally transferred," La Rocque says. "But it was clear to me by the early Seventies that I was out of the Navy's flight plan."

And how did that happen to the man who in 1965 was selected admiral first among those in his grade--ahead of the Annapolis hot-shots and all the other favored sons?

"Well," La Rocque says, laughing--he reminds you a little of Jason Robards, Jr., in both features and voice--"it wasn't easy. Actually, I started out with the best job a young admiral could have, as assistant director of the Strategic Plans Division in the Chief of Naval Operations' office. Paul Nitze, then Secretary of the Navy, was a man ahead of his time, and in 1966 he put me in charge of a team that was to examine the Vietnam war. The question was, 'What should the U. S. do?'

"There were ten admirals and one brigadier general on the team, and it was astonishing how little we knew. No one had read the French on their Vietnam experience, for example. We looked at all the options for completing that war. It became obvious that we were wasting kids without really knowing why. There were no real goals. And that was what I told General [William] Westmorel and 'You're spending $90,000,000 a day,' I told him, 'and you don't really know why.'

"And that was the essence of the verbal report we carried back to the Secretary of the Navy. 'We can't tell you what to do, because we don't know what you want,' we said." La Rocque laughs again. "Nobody wanted that report. There was never any name attached to it and it was never published. That's when the 'lateral transfers' began. I stayed in the same Plans Division, and technically you could call it a promotion when I was made director of Pan-American Affairs. But it was simply movement on one level.

"By the time they made me director of the Inter-American Defense College, I knew I would soon leave the Navy. There was no future in it for me. So I started a file for something I thought I'd call the Eisenhower Institute. I was very affected by Eisenhower and his warnings about the military-industrial complex. I thought Ike was right, and I wanted to start an organization that believed in a strong national defense but that stood as a watchdog over the excesses.

"The people in the Fund for Peace, the umbrella organization that the center works under, began talking to me before I retired from active duty. Morris Abram and I had dinner at Averell Harriman's house, but I don't think those people really trusted me at first. You know--I was still in uniform, on duty.

"I went and talked to Admiral [Elmo] Zumwalt about leaving the Service. He made it clear there'd be a good job for me if I stayed in but that he couldn't promise me what my life would be like if I left the Navy. I went ahead and decided to get out."

La Rocque had been trained in that hard-nosed American can-do attitude that had led him up the ladder in the Navy, and once he made up his mind to start C.D.I., there was no stopping him. He had already hired David Johnson as his assistant (still with him, Johnson is director of research) and lined up some foundation money and some seed money from the Fund for Peace.

Today C.D.I. is run out of a building owned by Stewart Mott. La Rocque pays $32,000 a year in rent, raises his own funds from private contributions and has an annual operating budget of $400,000. The building is actually a converted house, something like a brownstone, nestled in a narrow triangle of land on Maryland Avenue between the Supreme Court and the new Senate Office Building. The offices are small, the conditions crowded. It is a humble place by Washington standards.

The admiral's credentials as a practical military analyst are impeccable. He is a watchdog of the Pentagon who just happens to have spent seven years in the Pentagon. While he was there, he was awarded a Legion of Merit for his performance as a strategic planner. La Rocque served both in the office of the Chief of Naval Operations and with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

During his 31 years in the Navy, he served about 16 years at sea. He commanded his first destroyer escort at the age of 27. His other sea commands included two cruiser-destroyer flotillas in the Atlantic and a task group in the Mediterranean. His last ship command was of the guided-missile cruiser Providence in the Pacific. That cruiser carried nuclear weapons.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Gene La Rocque was an ensign on board the U.S.S. Macdonough. He spent the next four years participating in 13 major naval engagements in the Pacific. He was awarded the Bronze Star and the Commendation Medal for action against the enemy. His professional experience also includes three years of service on the faculty of the Naval War College, three years of staff work with Admiral Arleigh Burke, temporary command of the aircraft carrier Saratoga (unusual for a "black shoe"--nonaviator--officer) and command of Task Group 60.2 in the Sixth Fleet.

"When I went into the Navy, there were no nuclear weapons," La Rocque says. "Then we made a quantum jump, and by 1960, when I was helping put the Polaris program together, I realized we had them all and that the Russians were developing a nuclear capacity, too. It was a whole new ball game. Clause-witz' dictum--'War is a continuation of policy by other means'--was out. Nuclear war simply was not a sensible option.

"I'm for a strong U. S. military position in this world. I haven't changed. I'm for discipline in the Services. Listen; in 1965, I threw a young Annapolis guy off my cruiser when he questioned the need for the nuclear missiles we were carrying. There's no place inside the (continued on page 218)Arms Race(continued from page 206) military for these kinds of questions to be debated in any active way. The changes have to come from outside.

"We've institutionalized the military in this country. A lot of people feel comfortable with the military solution to a problem. But we've got some 50,000 nuclear warheads ready to go between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. alone. And I suggest that war is not and cannot be the solution. There simply will be no winners in a nuclear war."

•

As The SALT Syndrome was touring the country, the Center for Defense Information released a detailed rebuttal to it, quoting from the findings of a Government interagency task force that included representatives of the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Defense Department. Here are some of the major points.

• The U. S. is not at a strategic disadvantage to the Soviets.

• The B-52 bomber is not obsolete, as The SALT Syndrome claims. "While the aircraft design is relatively old, the weapons and avionics of the B-52 are quite modern and are being further improved.... The bombers will continue to be effective launch platforms for cruise missiles into the Nineties."

• The SALT Syndrome claims that the number of U. S. strategic missiles was frozen at the 1967 level. But the introduction of MIRV (multiple independent re-entry vehicle) "accounts for the fact that since 1967 the total number of warheads in the U. S. inventory has more than doubled."

• The film asserts that the Soviets enjoy a three-to-one advantage over the U. S. in attack submarines: "True in terms of number of ships, but our attack submarine force is vastly more capable than the Soviet force, which relies more heavily on diesel subs than ours does. The over-all U. S. antisubmarine warfare (A.S.W.) capability is far ahead of Soviet A.S.W."

• The charge made in The SALT Syndrome that the Soviets enjoy an almost five-to-one advantage when all types of active combat ships are counted is "absurd." The claim conceals major force differences. For example, the U. S. has 13 heavy-aircraft carriers; the Soviets have two light-aircraft carriers, which are equipped with less capable aircraft.

• The film claims that the U.S.S.R. has a six-to-one advantage over the U. S. in missile firepower because of the larger size of its missiles. But "the U. S. has nearly twice as many nuclear weapons on its total force than does the U.S.S.R."

The list goes on, but let's take a look at that last point: missile size. This one example shows how easy it is to make the situation sound gloomy, when, in fact, it is not. "A six-to-one advantage in missile size?" you ask. "Their missiles are bigger than our missiles?"

But missiles, like snakes, aren't necessarily poisonous in proportion to their size. The air-launch cruise missile we are developing and deploying isn't very big, perhaps 20 feet long, yet it can carry a powerful hydrogen warhead and fly below Russian radar and read the terrain and deliver the warhead with what they call house-address accuracy; that is, it can be programmed to land at a specific spot on any given city block.

"Comparing the sizes of U. S. and Soviet missiles is like comparing the sizes of our calculators," says La Rocque. "Bigger doesn't mean better. We build our missiles smaller because our technology is more advanced. Our ICBMs have miniaturized, computerized guidance packages, more efficient rocket engines, thinner but more effective heat shields, greater accuracy and more compact, efficient hydrogen weapons."

The SALT Syndrome undoubtedly has convinced a lot of people that we are in terrible shape--and that we need to spend billions in order to improve our position against the Soviets. But neutral observers who know the arms-control field will tell you that the interagency task force was accurate in labeling the film misleading and rhetorical. Sometimes it seems that we want to believe the worst, that we cling to dark interpretations of our national defense posture. We'll listen to anyone who says we're in trouble, long before we'll believe the person who says things aren't all that bad.

But La Rocque and his colleagues think it's time for us to hear--and believe--the other side of our defense situation. To that end, C.D.I. has also made a film on the subject. It's called War Without Winners and, in it, La Rocque offers some new information that translates into a cosmic good-news, bad-news joke:

Each of our strategic submarines can destroy 160 Soviet cities. And each of our new Trident submarines will be able to destroy more than 240 Soviet cities. No one can say we are not very powerful militarily.

Now, it's very difficult and somewhat embarrassing for military men to accept the fact that we have no defense against Soviet missiles and Soviets have no defense against our missiles. We can destroy the Soviet Union even though they destroy us first. There are no winners in a nuclear war.

The fact of the matter is that we in the United States Navy can keep firing nuclear weapons at the Soviet Union from our submarines for about three months. So even if the Soviets were able to move their people out of the cities, and I don't think they can ... we would lob nuclear shells at the Soviet Union, thousands of them, for at least three months.

We keep more than 3000 nuclear weapons right off their coast at all times. The Soviets keep about 300 nuclear weapons off our coast. Our submarines, which are constantly on station around the Soviet Union ... are ready at an instant's notice to start this three-month attack.

War Without Winners is a good film, directed by Haskell Wexler. It's influential when seen. But whereas The SALT Syndrome played on more than 1100 TV stations, War Without Winners has been aired on about 200. The center didn't have $5,000,000 to buy TV time. It didn't have the political-action committees and expensive organizational talent that the A.S.C. had. It couldn't saturate the market or play an average of 16 times a day in South Dakota.

Widespread distribution--whether of bread or wine or propaganda--takes money, and money is most plentiful in the pockets of the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about. We taxpayers fund the defense industry. Our dollars--a trillion and a half over the next five years--go to those who support and profit from defense, not to those who would control it. As a people, we have yet to understand how much clout, air time, advertising, column space, lobbying, opinion research and influence defense-industry money will buy.

Former Ambassador to Russia George F. Kennan wrote recently of "a dreadful militarization of the entire East-West relationship" and suggested that "governments in this modern world have not yet learned how to create and cultivate great military establishments, particularly those that include weapons of mass destruction, without becoming the servants rather than the masters of what they have created."

Kennan concludes that this perverted master-servant relationship must be set right, and says of the U. S. and the U.S.S.R.: "Both sides must learn to accept the fact that only in the reduction, not in the multiplication, of existing monstrous arsenals can the true security of any nation be found." Viewing the increasing momentum in the arms race, Kennan appraises the current status of the world: "Not for 30 years ... has there been so high a degree of misunderstanding, of suspicion, of bewilderment and of sheer military fear."

Part of what makes people like La Rocque and Kennan so valuable is their willingness to think long, hard and openly about some things most of us would rather put out of our minds--such as the modest estimate that the U.S., the U.S.S.R. and others have enough destructive nuclear firepower to destroy every city in the world several times over, some 15,000,000 kilotons in all arsenals. The atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima had a destructive force equivalent to 15 kilotons.

•

It would be difficult to label General Bertram Gorwitz anything but a patriot: Tough, loyal, smart, he served as C.D.I.'s deputy director for six years, until his retirement just as this issue was going to press. But in his time there, Gorwitz put his stamp on the center; his sensibility and his concerns are reflected in those of the place itself.

Gorwitz served on active duty in the U. S. Army from 1941 to 1974, rising from private to brigadier general. Twenty-two of those years were on parachute duty. He participated in more than 600 parachute jumps, from World War Two and the 82nd Airborne Division through Korea, Lebanon (he parachuted into Beirut during the 1958 crisis) and Vietnam (as commander of the 23rd Infantry Division). As if those credentials don't make him tough enough, Gorwitz was also an instructor and staff officer in the Special Forces. That was back in the middle of the Fifties, before the Green Berets got all that publicity. His academic credentials can stand toe to toe with his military credits: a B.S. from the University of Maryland, an M.S. from George Washington University and extensive graduate work at Johns Hopkins.

Gorwitz isn't a large man, and his appearance is deceptively mild. When he speaks, it is with respect toward thinking he does not agree with.

"The conservatives in this country are not the enemy," he says. "They are good people. Sincere. Patriotic. At the present time, they're better organized than we are and they have more money." He talks about the growth and changes in his own thinking. "I took an advanced-management course at Harvard in 1967, and during that year, I used to sit around the campus and listen to the kids talk. They were protesting the Vietnam war, and so were their professors. I could take the kids all right, but the professors really made me mad. I used to argue with them when they brought the war up in class. But I could feel myself starting to turn.

"I went to Korea in 1968. I'd served there twice before, once as a captain in command of a parachute artillery battery during the Korean War, then as a battalion commander, and on this last tour I was corps artillery commander.

"We had a brigade on line in Korea, ready to meet any invasion. I knew that I didn't like the way the South Korean government worked, and I knew that if Kim II Sung decided to come south, our American brigade would be the first troops he met. In short, it was an inflexible position. That made me very uncomfortable. We essentially had no alternatives. I proposed to the corps C.O. that the division be moved south so we would have a choice--and so we would have time to think about that choice. He didn't take my advice, by the way.

"Then, in 1971, I went back to Vietnam and soon took over as C.O. of the Americal Division. I was concerned about how badly the war was going. I went to the hospital every night to pin Purple Hearts on the wounded. I had a year of that, and every time I looked at those brave men, I had to ask myself, How does this war affect the security of the U.S.A.? I wrote letters. I talked to people. I probably made myself unpopular. And I got sent back to the States. Then to NATO in Italy. I finally retired in 1974.

"I had a chance to join up with a defense-related industry, but I knew about the center and I signed up as the admiral's deputy in 1975. I'm not a peacenik or a disarmer. I have two sons in the Army. I believe the military Services need the best people this country can offer. But I also think we've got to have more debate, more open-mindedness in these questions of war and peace. And let me tell you: The junior officers in America's Armed Services are asking real questions these days. They're considering both sides of the debate."

Gorwitz focuses on one last tactical point: "The U. S. has never renounced the first use of nuclear weapons. Do you realize that? We still retain the right to launch a first strike. So when we announce programs like the MX missile, it creates paranoia in certain parts of the world."

As the interview is ending, the general seems to have one more thing he wants to say. "During my first tour in Korea, during the Korean War, I was given a mission to parachute into North Korea to stop a train that was filled with American POWs. While my men were loading up, an Army chaplain by the name of Jimmy Shelton was going around looking for a place on a plane so that he could go in with us. He bugged and bugged me for a seat on an aircraft. I finally bumped a guy to let Jimmy on.

"Well, it was a difficult operation. There was a storm that delayed our take-off, and when we finally got over the drop zone, it was late afternoon. We had four 105 howitzers that were supposed to be dropped by chute, but only two came down and only one was serviceable. One howitzer to support a whole battalion behind enemy lines! And to top it off, one of the pilots came in too low after some of my men had jumped and ran through a whole stack of paratroopers in the air, cutting their main chutes right off of them.

"Still, we managed to handle everything. The guys who lost their chutes pulled their reserve chutes at 700 feet and made it down. The one howitzer fired so rapidly that we had to water down the tube to keep it from overheating.

"But when we got to the train, we found that it had been stopped in a tunnel and the American POWs had been hauled out and slaughtered right there before we could get to them. They had been in terrible shape, too; vermin-infested and starved.

"So there we were, taking a lot of incoming artillery and trapped behind enemy lines and having no prisoners to save anymore. Through all of this, I noticed that Jimmy Shelton was walking around as calmly as anyone I'd ever seen, patting men on the back and literally creating light in the middle of all that darkness. About three the next morning, there in a rice paddy in North Korea, 19 of my men and I were baptized into the Protestant faith by Jimmy Shelton."

So add this to General Bertram Gorwitz' extraordinary credentials: In his time, he has been president of Toastmasters International, a district chairman of the Boy Scouts of America, a little-league baseball official and a Protestant lay minister. Not an easy man to stereotype.

•

Since 1972, the Center for Defense Information has published a magazine, The Defense Monitor. Most of what C.D.I. has to say to the world is included in the Monitor and runs contrary to claims that the Russians are ahead of us, that we must spend trillions to catch up with them, that arms-limitation agreements are not adequate or verifiable and that nuclear war is a valid option, bearable and winnable.

Last year, one issue of the Monitor made the following points:

• A study of trends of Soviet influence in the 155 countries of the world since World War Two "does not support perceptions of consistent Soviet advances and devastating U. S. setbacks."

• Of the 155 countries in the world today, the U.S.S.R. has significant influence in only 19.

• Soviet setbacks in China, Indonesia, Egypt, India and Iraq dwarf marginal Soviet advances in lesser countries.

• Soviet influence in the world reached its high point in 1958; by 1979, the Soviets were influencing only six percent of the world population.

• The balance of world power rests heavily in favor of the U. S.

To illustrate the last point, the Monitor published a chart based in part on a recent book, World Power Trends, by former CIA official Dr. Ray Cline. Using a combination of demographic, geographic, economic and military factors, Dr. Cline developed a system of "power ratings" for 78 countries (the remaining 77 were assumed to have no power). Based on Cline's ratings, the Monitor concluded that the U.S. and pro-Western countries had a total power rating of 1800--as opposed to the U.S.S.R.'s 556.

The June 1980 issue of the Monitor contains an article called "American Strength, Soviet Weakness." It features a box score of Four Major Military Indicators that just might rattle the popular perception that the U.S.S.R. is a monolithic and overwhelming force.

In the area of strategic nuclear weapons, anti-Soviet countries (NATO and China) lead the U.S.S.R. by 10,500 to 7000. In one year's military spending (1979), the anti-Soviet countries outspent the U.S.S.R. 265 to 175 billion dollars. The anti-Soviet countries have 9,500,000 military personnel compared with the Soviet's 4,800,000. And the anti-Soviet countries have 445 major surface ships compared with 235 for the Soviets.

The Monitor states boldly: "The U. S. and its allies are superior to the Soviet Union in all elements of national power, including most important military factors. Even utilizing the CIA's questionable methodology for comparing military budgets (which assumes that the Soviets pay as much as the U. S. does for soldiers and weapons), combined NATO military spending has exceeded that of the Warsaw Pact for many years."

Wait a minute. That bears repeating: According to C.D.I., NATO has been outspending the Warsaw Pact for many years. That fact is so unknown that you could win a lot of drinks by betting on it in a bar--either here or in Europe.

Other measures of the arms race? As reported by C.D.I., we are ahead of the Soviets in total strategic nuclear weapons, in numbers of long-range bombers and in nuclear weapons aboard submarines. As of 1980, we had about 5000 nuclear weapons on board our strategic submarines, while the Soviets had about 1500. We are behind the Soviets in land-based ICBMs, but, according to C.D.I., "fixed, land-based systems are becoming vulnerable and obsolete."

C.D.I. also has some interesting things to say about the trillion-and-a-half-dollar defense budget we Americans will probably be frightened into funding over the next five years. Here's how it runs:

1982 222 billion dollars

1983 255 billion dollars

1984 289 billion dollars

1985 327 billion dollars

1986 368 billion dollars

TOTAL 1461 trillion dollars

"There are far too many extremely costly programs in the military budget today," says the Monitor. "We cannot simultaneously acquire a vast new arsenal of nuclear weapons, expand costly forces for defending countries in Europe and Asia, add to substantial forces for rapid intervention everywhere in the world, enlarge a very expensive Navy for deployment on all the world's oceans, develop new weapons which are always better than Soviet weapons and keep existing forces at a high level of readiness and training. Something has to give."

No question about it. The Defense Monitor makes fascinating reading to anyone who is trying to understand military defense issues. The Monitor's record from 1972 to the present shows that it took on issues before they were in the public eye: the Trident submarine in 1972, the B-l bomber in 1973, the cruise missile in 1976, the MX missile in 1977. In those same years, it alerted its readers to future problems that would stem from U. S. development and deployment of MIRV technology, warning that MIRV offered only a temporary advantage to the U. S. and that the arms race would, by definition, be escalated (i.e., the Russians would obviously be forced to catch up with us).

In 1975, the Monitor pointed to the danger of arms sales in the Persian Gulf countries, particularly Iran, and warned that the U. S. was in a dangerous position by being too closely tied to regimes like that of the shah. And in that same year, and again in 1980, the Monitor analyzed the growing military uses of space, especially the antisatellite programs being worked on by both superpowers.

The staff at the center has consistently produced material in the Monitor that refutes simplistic and aggressive thinking. A senior editor of The Washington Post put it this way: "The admiral's outfit is pretty damned solid. I haven't seen any of their basic research attacked."

Even William Colby, former director of the CIA, has a few kind words: "The Center for Defense Information plays a vital role in Washington policy circles," he says. "With many voices promoting their favored weapons and forces, its objective and independent analysis provides fact and figure in true proportion. Its publications and presentations carry its message to those seeking real defense at reasonable cost."

•

When John Buchanan talks about his days flying jet attack aircraft in the U. S. Marines, he doesn't use his hands as much as most pilots do. He speaks calmly, modestly, the way a trucker might describe a night drive on a break at a truck stop. Buchanan looks a little bit like a trucker. Or a farmer. He's 6'2", 200 pounds, and his voice carries the South in it, remnant of a childhood in Florida and high school at Columbia Military Academy in Tennessee and the University of Virginia.

He was in the Marine Corps for 22 years, ending up as a lieutenant colonel. But a lot of things happened in those 22 years and Buchanan finally decided to pack up his seabag and retire. While he was taking his last physical exam, a fellow officer showed him a copy of C.D.I.'s Monitor. He arranged for an interview with Admiral La Rocque and joined the center last year.

Buchanan is representative of many of the people at C.D.I. He is not antimilitary. "I love the Marines," he says. "They're fine men." He has earned a certain right to love the Corps. For example, he won the Distinguished Flying Cross for action over Con Thien, Vietnam, in 1967. D.F.C.s are hard to come by.

"We were up north of the DMZ," Buchanan recalls. "It was a night hop, north of Con Thien, flying A-4s [jet attack aircraft]. An Army spotter plane saw some rocket fire coming out of the mountains. We were carrying napalm and a dozen 250-pound bombs. Dick Jacobs, my wingman, rolled over and went in first. I thought I saw him go down and I heard the spotter on the radio saying, 'Dash-One, pull out!' and I saw a huge ball of fire on the ground.

"I assumed Dick had bought the farm. But I just went in. I mean, it's what I'd been trained to do. I remember the tracer fire coming up at me like a stream of water. I managed to hit the rocket site and head on back home, and damned if I didn't see Dick Jacobs limping along at 20,000 feet, so I escorted him back and then landed myself."

Buchanan flew hundreds of combat missions during 1967 and 1968 in Vietnam. He was there for Tet. In one of those small, ironic moments that make history come alive, he tells about the time he fired under a helicopter that he later heard was carrying Bobby Kennedy. "It was an emergency mission," Buchanan says, "a cloudy day up north, and we'd gotten a call to go into Hué in support of the Marines, the first air-combat mission over that city for us. We went out over the ocean east of Hué and then came in at about 100 feet. We had Zuni rockets. R.F.K. was up there learning about the war at precisely the wrong time. We probably rocketed within 50 meters of his chopper. I thought we'd get chewed out for coming so close, but when we got back, they loaded us up with CS gas [tear gas] and sent us right back into action. Hué turned out to be one hell of a battle, of course, and no matter how you argue it, the Fifth Marines got mauled. After Phu Bai, the Fifth Marines were given two or three months guarding roads, that sort of thing. But the institution of the war just kept grinding on."

As Buchanan talks, the simplicity of his language belies the complexity of his thinking. This is a man who has had to assimilate a million contradictory experiences. The questions he is asking himself are significant: "You know," he says, "I think of myself as a patriotic man. I still get choked up on the Marine Corps birthday. I used to stand there in my dress blues and they'd read that list of battles--Belleau Wood, Tarawa, Chosan Reservoir, Khe Sanh--and I felt damned proud to be a Marine. But that doesn't mean that I think the Armed Services should dictate our national policies.

"One of my jobs here at the center is to study the concept of a rapid-deployment force. That's the combined force of Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force who would be asked to strike fast if necessary in places like the Middle East. And I've got all sorts of questions about the viability of that concept: What is a 'vital interest' and what does 'intervention' mean and if you intervene, do you do it on a cultural and economic level as well as a military level? And if we develop an R.D.F., does that mean we'll automatically use it?"

Buchanan uses phrases that might have made John Wayne grimace. He talks of "the interdependence of humanity," of "paradigms," "perceptions and imagery," and he constantly goes back to the question of how aggression occurs, how it begins, what the factors are in an aggressive situation.

"What can really get to me," he says, "is the difference between public and private argument. The R.D.F. is always publicly discussed in grandiose terms. But the guys I know, my friends, the retired Marines in the defense industry who stand to benefit professionally from the establishment of an R.D.F., just laugh when I bring up tactical-strategic questions in private. 'Look,' they tell me, 'it's money in the bank for us. It's a license to steal. We can write our own ticket.' And that's scary. You start to wonder how many other programs are being boosted for similar reasons."

•

If you are a citizen trying to make sense out of things, the Center for Defense Information is not a bad place to hang your hat for a while, if only to get another side of the story. After all, you've been through missile gaps and bomber gaps and Red scares. You've been warned, taxed, cajoled, taxed again. For the past three decades, you've lived with the threat of nuclear war, sometimes vague, sometimes specific.

C.D.I. is not a perfect place. Spend several days there and you will run across the normal pressures, conflicts, jealousies. It is not the only organization in Washington working for arms control, either. But it does have some unique and experienced individuals on its staff, not all of them military, and it does have a track record that speaks for itself. Most important of all, it does give us some facts and figures and thoughts to counterbalance films such as The SALT Syndrome.

"One of the great myths being perpetrated on the American public is the story that the Soviet Union is ahead of the United States in military nuclear technology," says C.D.I. board member Dr. Herbert Scoville, former deputy director for science and technology at the CIA. "This is just plain nonsense. The U. S. has always been ahead of the Soviet Union. But you would never hear this, because the myth of U. S. inferiority is being spread to try to panic the public in the United States.

"Spending money does not produce security. The average taxpayer is led to believe that the more money he spends for our weapons, the more secure he is. But he's actually getting less secure. The taxpayer is being raked off on this deal for the benefit of a very few corporations and individuals, and, in the meantime, he's increasing the risk that he is going to be wiped off the face of the earth."

Incredibly, Dr. Scoville's suggestion that nuclear war would destroy us is still met with derision in certain quarters. "You talk about the end of the world if you had a nuclear exchange," says retired Army Lieutenant General Daniel O. Graham. "Now, that is science-fiction bunk. And it's perfectly provable by science as to what would really happen. If you count how many casualties would occur on both sides, and so forth, it should put the United States, in terms of its population, agriculture and industry, back to somewhere around 1925 to 1932, depending upon what you think the destruction would be. But that is not the end of the world. You're not going to destroy the world by having a nuclear war."

Perhaps General Graham should be reminded that in case of nuclear war between the two countries, there would be an estimated 253,000,000 deaths in the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. (not including the rest of Europe). And if those numbers don't mean much to the general, he should be informed, for comparison, that we Americans have lost a total of 1,000,000 people in all our wars from the Civil War through Vietnam. Does he really think we're prepared to lose 140,000,000 citizens in World War Three?

Or maybe the general should read Nigel Calder's excellent book Nuclear Nightmares, wherein Calder reports: "The most probable kind of nuclear war ... is one in which both sides simply smash each other as rapidly as they can.... Five hundred million dead around the Northern Hemisphere seems a conservative estimate for all the exchanges. And those are just what war-gainers call the 'prompt' casualties.... Many more will die in the aftermath, from the long-term effects of untreated burns, wounds and radiation sickness, and as a result of the disruption of civilized life."

Calder goes on to describe "the incalculable effect on the climate of so many nuclear weapons, and the destruction of much of the earth's ozone layer by the huge quantities of nitrogen oxides produced in the explosions." He concludes: "No one can really begin to guess what the combined and cumulative effects of physical damage, fire, atomic radiation, fatal sunburn and climatic changes will be, or predict their consequences for crops, farm animals, wildlife and human life all around the world."

Speaking at the 1979 annual meeting of the Arms Control Association, Senator Joseph R. Biden of Delaware had this to say:

We meet at a time when arms control has fallen under simultaneous siege by two rival armies. One has attacked from the right, the other stands to the left. The main thrust has come from the right.

How has the rightist attack on SALT been so effective? As a politician, I find its powerful appeal explicable only by reference to a marked shift in the American political climate over the past decade. When the SALT process began, America was essentially self-confident. The intervening decade, however, has produced a deeply disturbing sense of American vulnerability in the world. Just as defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal were undercutting the faith of Americans in the efficacy of their Government, a host of fundamentally challenging problems rapidly emerged: chronic inflation, rising foreign competition, a declining currency, a series of environmental alarms and--most ominously--a steadily increasing dependence on unreliable foreign resources. An aura of jeopardy arose. Inevitably, such dramatic changes in national mood find political expression, and not always in a logical way.

Thus it is that I believe SALT has become a lightning rod for a good deal of the country's current anxiety. In a time of complexity, politicians and pundits do not find it easy to placate the public desire for solutions. It thereby becomes intellectually and politically tempting to focus constituent anger on our familiar adversary, the Soviet Union, and, even more specifically, on a target such as SALT.

If we are to succeed with arms control, I know of no other way than to continue to carry the message to the American people that arms limitation, when properly conceived and implemented, can contribute effectively to the security of this nation.

Three months before he was killed by a terrorist bomb in August of 1979, one month before his 79th birthday, Lord Mountbatten made a plea for arms control that was later published in The Defense Monitor. "In the event of a nuclear war," Mountbatten said, "there will be no survivors--all will be obliterated. And nuclear devastation is not science fiction--it is a matter of fact.

"I regret enormously the delays which the Americans and Russians have experienced in reaching a SALT II agreement for the limitation of even one major class of nuclear weapons.... I regret even more the fact that opposition to reaching any agreement is becoming so powerful in the United States. What can their motives be?

"As a military man who has given half a century of active service, I say in all sincerity that the nuclear-arms race has no military purpose. Wars cannot be fought with nuclear weapons.

"There are powerful voices around the world who still give credence to the old Roman precept--if you desire peace, prepare for war. This is absolute nuclear nonsense and, I repeat, it is a disastrous misconception to believe that by increasing the total uncertainty, one increases one's own certainty.

"The world now stands on the brink of the final abyss. Let us all resolve to take all possible practical steps to ensure that we do not, through our own folly, go over the edge."

" 'There were ten admirals and one brigadier general, and it was astonishing how little we knew.'"