Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

The Race to Destruction
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
283
“at much lower cost and technical risk,” without affecting deterrent
capacity (“since only a fraction of our nuclear arsenal can cause
unacceptable damage to the Soviet Union”), and with no problems of
verifiability. 23 There is no evidence that this option has been seriously
considered, and we may assume with some confidence that it will not
be.
Essentially the same argument holds with regard to a nuclear test
ban, which would over time “affect the very high level of stockpile
confidence required for a nation contemplating a ‘first strike’ strategy”
without significantly affecting the “lesser degree of confidence required
for retaliation against attack.” Administration officials concede that this
is a “weak link in their position” of opposition to a ban. 24 Possibly other
forms of testing could confirm warhead reliability, but confirmation of
missile reliability requires actual testing. These issues, and the fact that
they are not being seriously discussed—or, as far as we know, seriously
considered—suggest that the alleged goals of SDI are fraudulent and
that security concerns are not what motivate this program.
A further reason to doubt that the alleged goals are intended seriously
is that a state possessing such a system could hardly trust it to prevent
unacceptable damage from a first strike. James Fletcher, who headed
the panel that recommended proceeding with the SDI program,
commented that it poses what is “clearly one of the largest software
problems ever tackled, requiring an enormous and error-free program on
the order of ten million lines of code.” “By the fifteenth or sixteenth
general nuclear war, we’d probably get the bugs out,” Bracken
comments. 25 Few people acquainted with computers and software will
question this judgment. The only conceivable (semi-rational) military
purpose of such a system would be to facilitate a first strike, in the hope
(hardly to be taken very seriously by rational planners) that it might
provide protection against a retaliatory strike. The state lacking this