"It Is Absurd"

Coming to the Defense Department from Detroit, where details on next year's models are kept as secret as SAC war plans, Ford Motor Co. President Robert McNamara naturally thought that news is what the public relations staff sees fit to tell reporters. But Detroit is not Washington, and a defense establishment that spends $40 billion of the taxpayers' money each year must necessarily allow a considerable degree of public scrutiny. That lesson is one that Defense Secretary McNamara is still trying to learn.

Last week the Senate Armed Services Committee released the transcript of a closed April hearing at which McNamara outlined his vision of how the press should handle military news. "Why should we tell Russia," he said, "that the Zeus [antimissile missile] developments may not be satisfactory? What we ought to be saying is that we have the most perfect anti-ICBM system that the human mind will ever devise. Instead, the public domain is already full of statements that the Zeus may not be satisfactory; that it has deficiencies. I think it is absurd to release that kind of information to the public."

Speaking of absurdities, McNamara's statement was a classic. The Defense Department that he heads will have spent nearly $900 million on the Nike-Zeus system development without getting a single model installed and ready to fire. Not until early next year will the Army undertake its first anti-missile shots at its Kwajalein launching site (see SCIENCE); final trials are not scheduled until late 1962. Until then, no one will know whether Zeus is as perfect as McNamara wants the Russians to think it is--or as deficient as they must suspect.

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