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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one proponent, a laser expert, says its elements have the capacity to
“take an industrialized country back to an 18th-century level in 30
minutes,” quite apart from its potential use as a defensive shield
supporting a first strike. Robert Bowman, president of the Institute for
Space and Security Studies and former director of “Star Wars” programs
for the Air Force, adds that these are “not purely defensive systems.
They’re not even primarily defensive systems,” any more than the
battleship New Jersey, cruising the Mediterranean, is a defensive
weapon. “They are capable of attacking anything in the no-man’s land of
space, and possibly even within the sovereign territory of other nations.”
The US has “‘won’ the race to deploy every new weapon, from nukes to
MIRVs,” he comments, “but the end result has been a net decrease in
our security when the Soviets have inevitably matched us, producing a
more dangerous stalemate.” Former chief SALT negotiator Gerald Smith
comments that “if the Soviets announced that their goal was to make
American missiles ‘impotent and obsolete’,” we would increase our
missile force; they will respond the same way. The SDI dooms arms
control, he comments, reiterating a plausible and widely-held view. 33
The International Institute of Strategic Studies in London describes
SDI as a dangerous risk to peace, noting that “even if strategic defences
were to prove feasible, they could damage stability rather than
strengthen it.” In fact, the system is more dangerous if it appears to be
effective. The congressional Office of Technology Assessment concurs
that SDI might make nuclear war more likely, encouraging the USSR to
increase its nuclear attack forces and threatening “the entire arms
control process.” It advised that the best course for the US would be “to
seek a treaty limiting the testing of such space weapons,” the Times
reports: to rephrase in more accurate terms, deemed improper, the best
course would be to accept the Soviet proposals to this effect. The study
also concluded that if both the US and USSR possessed such systems