Shelving the Safeguard

Next to the Viet Nam War itself, nothing stirred popular passions more in the late 1960s than the national debate over a massive investment in an anti-ballistic missile, better known as the ABM. Shouting "No bombs in the backyard!" mothers, scholars and other citizens marched in protest against Lyndon Johnson's plan to install nuclear-tipped Sentinel ABMs at twelve sites around the country. The furor went on even after Richard Nixon changed the ABM'S name to Safeguard and scaled down the project to a "thin" shield protecting only a few cities from attack by iCBMs. The issue began to fade after the U.S. and the Soviet Union agreed, in the 1972 accord on strategic arms limitation, to limit themselves to just two ABM installations apiece.

Now the ABM itself seems about to disappear. After the SALT agreement, the Pentagon began work on a Safeguard site near Grand Forks, N. Dak., but Congress decided that a second installation at Washington, D.C., was not worth the cost. Last year, Nixon and Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev reduced the ABM limit to one site each.

Now it turns out that the Safeguard is simply not up to stopping the Soviet SS-19, a new missile that is able to steer a maddeningly serpentine course toward a target. Thus when the House recently acted on an Army request for $85.3 million for operating the completed Grand Forks site for a year, it voted instead to provide $45.3 million to close up the $5.7 billion installation for good.

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