Second-Strike Power?

Three accredited private investigators of U.S. defenses nailed a bright red danger signal to the Pentagon's highest mast this week. The signal: "The military position of the United States has declined in the short span of 15 years from one of unchallenged security to that of a nation both open and vulnerable to direct and devastating attack." The investigators, operating on a grant from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: Paul H. Nitzer onetime chief policy planner (1950-53) for Democratic Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Military Pundit James E. King Jr., and Director Arnold Wolfers of the Johns Hopkins University Washington Center of Foreign Policy Research. While their report followed the doom-criers' pattern of giving the Communists a monopoly on perfection and the U.S. a monopoly on faults, it nonetheless added up to a tough-minded analysis of U.S. defense problems, here and to come.

Russia's drive into missile technology, the committee warned, seems likely to give the enemy the world's first comprehensive missile arm. Result: "the greatest danger to its security that the United States has ever faced," in the form of a missile gap in the early 1960s. "There is as yet no active defense against an intercontinental ballistic missile in flight," warned the report, or any yet in sight. The report also found present liquid-fueled U.S. ICBMs to be wanting. Recommendation: "a most strenuous effort" behind solid-fuel missiles, e.g., the Air Force's Minuteman and the Navy's Polaris.

If the U.S. agreed to total disarmament, the report went on, Communists could gain world supremacy through easy-to-conceal production of relatively few weapons. But the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. could profitably agree on strategic forces "limited to retaliatory systems capable of surviving a first strike, though insufficient for employment in a first strike." If neither side built enough arms to wipe out the other's retaliatory power, argued the report, the world might reach a "high degree of nuclear stability," a real stalemate rather than one favoring the Russians over the next decade.

But even a sound disarmament treaty and a U.S. retaliatory force able to deliver the second strike would offer no permanent security in an age of weapons revolution. The only safety lies in getting ahead and staying ahead of the Russians.

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