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

The Race to Destruction
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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chip in Geneva to achieve substantial reductions in the Soviet nuclear
arsenal”; a curious formulation, given the standing Soviet offer of
substantial mutual reductions if the militarization of space is avoided.
NATO officials are concerned that the US is “losing the propaganda war
in Western Europe,” a development with domestic implications that
concern them. US NATO commander Bernard Rogers “agreed in an
interview that the West is losing the battle for public support to
Moscow.” Apart from the PR aspect, NATO officials are concerned that
preparations to deploy SDI might tempt the Soviet Union to a
preemptive first strike, also reiterating the common observation that SDI
will drive the USSR to large-scale missile construction to overwhelm it,
not armaments reduction. 29
National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane stated a few days later
that testing and development of anti-missile lasers and other such
systems is “approved and authorized” under the ABM treaty of 1972,
offering a “new interpretation” of the subject, and a dangerous one,
which would serve the “more ambitious goal” of removing “all
constraints on the nuclear arms race,” Anthony Lewis observes. 30 A
flurry of protest led to Administration retraction, but this is unlikely to be
the last effort to stretch the sense of existing treaties to accommodate
SDI.
The US has opposed across-the-board reductions, preferring to focus
on land-based missiles, on which the USSR primarily relies, while they
constitute only a part of the US triad of land-naval-air nuclear forces.
Throughout, the US has feigned surprise that the USSR placed “a
greater reliance on the land-based missiles” (Reagan) and therefore
rejected US proposals designed to reduce them while leaving the US
with its enormous advantages in the other two legs of the triad.
Reporting on the Reagan-Mondale TV debate where Reagan made these
pronouncements, stating that he had only recently learned that most