Report prepared for New Jersey State Legislators
1982
In 1982, several anti-war and anti-nuclear groups proposed a nuclear arms moratorium or `freeze’ resolution for placement on the November ballots as a referendum. My home state of New Jersey was one of the states in which the `freeze’ advocates were most active. The following report was prepared for New Jersey Senate and Assembly members, who were scheduled to vote on whether or not to approve the measure for ballot placement. `Freeze’ referenda proved popular that year for several reasons: in the 1980 presidential election campaign, Ronald Reagan was painted as a warmonger, and a certain percentage of those who made that claim believed their own polemics; there had also been several books and one televised film depicting the devastation that a large-scale nuclear war would cause; finally, in an off-year Congressional election, left-of-center political operatives saw advantage in placing such a measure on the ballot, as it would increase the numbers of voters sympathetic to their candidates.
INTRODUCTION
According to representatives of the New Jersey Coalition for a Nuclear Arms Freeze, United States Senator Mark O. Hatfield stated “most eloquently the basis of the concerns and convictions that motivate us.” In a letter written in March of 1981, Senator Hatfield wrote, in part, “It is only on the basis of a nuclear moratorium that we can begin to reduce the arsenals of both sides and to convince other nations of the world to adopt a moratorium on nuclear proliferation.”
Perhaps because it is clear that the likes of Colonel Khaddafi and the Ayatollah Khomeini would not necessarily agree to forego nuclear arms merely because the superpowers agree to restrain themselves, the nuclear non-proliferation aspect of the argument has not received much play. The principal rationale is the hope of ending the U. S.-Soviet nuclear arms race.
In New Jersey, the campaign has focused on S-1080 and A-799, bills that would place the issue of a nuclear arms moratorium on the November ballot as a public question. This report analyzes the language of these identical bills, concluding that the proposal as it stands is unworkable and misleading to the public. The report includes a proposal for an alternative bill.
PARAGRAPHS 1 AND 2
“WHEREAS, The continued escalation of the nuclear arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States exacerbates the ominous threat of nuclear war between those nations; and
“WHEREAS, Our national security is thereby reduced, not increased;”
The language is imprecise. The acceleration of an arms race in and of itself neither “exacerbates” nor lessens the possibility of war. War usually occurs after one adversary calculated that he has achieved militarily significant advantage. The Soviet Union is rarely at a loss for reasons to exploit an advantage, military or otherwise. But it has to achieve a militarily significant advantage over the United States in nuclear arms.
The current American arms buildup aims at assuring that the Soviets fail to achieve any such advantage. In FY 1964, we spent $25.6 billion on strategic forces; in FY 1983, the Reagan Administration plans to spend $23.1 billion–less than half of the 1964 amount, as measured in constant dollars. While our real spending on strategic forces has declined in the last decade-and-a-half, Soviet spending has increased. In the period 1976-1980 alone, the Soviets deployed four new intercontinental ballistic missiles, the Backfire bomber, and the SS-20 missile; they developed four more ICBMs and a missile-carrying submarine. In 1956, the Soviets had 625 land-based and submarine-based missiles. By 1980, they had 1,398 land-based missiles and 1,003 submarine-based missiles. Today, they have a total of 2,2798 to our 1,944. Although the United States retained the lead in nuclear warheads during this period, we went from a 2-1 advantage in missile “payload” to a disadvantage of 3.385 million pounds to the Soviets’ 11.75 million pounds. Fortunately, our superior technology enables us to build more accurate missiles, which decreases the disadvantage in firepower. The extent to which it decreases that disadvantage is a matter of controversy among technical experts.
The point of citing these facts is not revive the perennial question, “Who’s ahead?” but to show that our security was not threatened by our strategic arms buildup–which, in practical terms, barely existed in the last decade–but in the Soviet buildup. Not an arms race but Soviet power threatens the peace of the world.
PARAGRAPH 3
“WHEREAS, nuclear arms escalation imposes a tremendous strain upon the human and financial resources of the United States government, lessening the availability of those resources to meet domestic social goals;”
While the cost of strategic nuclear arms is substantial, it does not impose “a tremendous burden” upon our resources. According to figures published recently in the New York Times, the Reagan Administration proposes an FY 1983 defense budge of $257.5 billion; of this, we would spend $23.1 billion for strategic forces. In FY 1984, we are scheduled to spend $30.3 of $284.7 billion; in FY 1985, $33.2 of $330.9 billion. The bulk of U. S. defense funding goes to general purpose forces, personnel, and maintenance.
Inasmuch as the federal budget deficit for FY 1983 is estimated to be in the neighborhood of $100 billion, the elimination of all strategic spending for the next three years would not even cover the deficit for one year. To tell our people that these savings could be used for social programs is to make them a promise we simply cannot keep.
Nor do we have any guarantee that we could use any of this money for relief of budget deficits. If the Soviets halt nuclear weapons production, testing, and deployment, they might very well increase other military spending by an equal amount. This would require us to spend more money on so-called conventional forces–a more expensive proposition for us than for them because we pay our troops far more than they pay theirs (this, even allowing for the fact that their troop strength considerably exceeds ours.)
As for the human resources expended in developing, deploying, and maintaining our nuclear arms, the same argument holds. We have no guarantee that Soviet cutbacks in one area would not yield Soviet increases in other areas. This would mean greater manpower requirements for the United States, not lesser ones.
PARAGRAPH 4
“WHEREAS, A mutual United States-Soviet `freeze’ on further testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons has been advanced by prominent political, scientific and religious leaders as an effective method of arresting the continued development of the nuclear danger;”
The overwhelming majority of these “prominent leaders” are longtime advocates of a minimalist U. S. defense strategy. Such men as Richard Barnet, Harvey Cox, Richard Falk, and John Kenneth Galbraith are well known to academic specialists in the field. This is not an ideologically balanced mixture, by any means.
An immediate nuclear arms moratorium, called for in the proposed public question, is not an effective way to arrest the nuclear danger because it has no basis in the economic or political reality of the Soviet Union.
According to the Carter Administration’s Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, William R. Perry, the Soviets outspent us by $240 billion on military items during the 1970s. Yet the total output of the Soviet economy remained much smaller than ours. The percentage of their GNP spent on the military rose from an estimated 11-13% in the period 1965-1978, when their economy was doing relatively well, to 12-14% in 1979, to 13-15% in today’s hard times. American military spending fell from 8% of the GNP in 1956, a time of prosperity, to 5.&% in 1981. This is the reverse of the Soviet sacrifice. The Reagan Administration proposes to raise the percentage closer to the 1964 level over the next five years.
For this reason, halting any aspect of the military buildup, including the buildup in strategic nuclear arms, would force the Soviets to throw the economy into far severer dislocations than we would have to do. What appears as a perfectly symmetrical proposal actually demands far more of them for the balance of the decade.
Proponents of the moratorium will reply that this would improve their economic strength in the long run. This is true, insofar as Soviet rulers conceive of their country’s economic interests as consumer-oriented. But they do not.
The Soviet rulers view consumer economics with distaste. As the Polish crisis reminds us, they quite reasonably regard an economic system that exalts the desires of the people over the military and political aims of the Communist Party as a threat to their power. Once the consumer becomes sovereign, the government hears no end of grumbling–as Americans know. Repeated Soviet fulminations against `bourgeois life’ and `Western decadence’ hardly spring from a sense of morality outraged; `President’ Brezhnev and his comrades enjoy the use of country dachas, caviar, Robert Trent Jones golf courses, and numerous other oligarchic amenities. Such pronouncements issue from Politburo recognition that money is power, and that money in the hands of the people is power in the hands of the people. Safer to let them eat cabbage.
It is also well worth noting that an immediate `freeze’ would leave the Soviets unable to respond to any future nuclear arms buildup by the Communist Chinese. The latter have never even consented to halt above-ground testing of nuclear weapons; they are highly unlikely to `freeze’ their stockpiles at current levels merely because the Soviets and the Americans agree to do so. Indeed, they might well regard this as an excellent opportunity to catch up.
In sum, this paragraph fails to consider the proposal from the Soviet point of view. It is unrealistic for that reason.
PARAGRAPH 5
“WHEREAS, There is an urgent need to create broader public awareness of the specter of nuclear holocaust and to provide a means whereby the concerns of New Jersey’s citizens may be communicated to our national policymakers:”
This final “Whereas” clause is perhaps the most disturbing of all. If we are to put a matter of national defense on the New Jersey ballot as a public question, the last thing we need is a campaign of scare tactics. Yet that is exactly what the bill invites. Instead of an appeal to fear, we need an appeal to courage. For the fact is that “the specter of nuclear holocaust” cannot loom very large as long as the Soviets have no reason to suppose that they could gain anything by initiating one. This has been true throughout the last three decades and remains true today.
Vivid and grisly descriptions of the effects of nuclear radiation do not help us to maintain the kind of calm and rational public mood that gives our arms negotiators the backing they need. Panic and hysteria do not conduce to the sober conduct of foreign policy–particularly when Soviet negotiators feel no similar pressures.
THE PROBLEM OF VERIFIABILITY
The public question calls for a “verifiable” moratorium. Unfortunately, this is physically impossible. The New York Times editorial of March 21, 1982 notes that “There is no way to verify a ban on missile production without the intrusive on-site inspection that Moscow has always rejected. Nor is there any known way to locate concealed stocks of warheads.” Obviously, the Soviets or the United States could manufacture such warheads and store them in underground shelters near the launching sites without fear of detection. Spy satellites do not have x-ray eyes.
It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of this point. If the bill passes in its present form, the public will be voting on a public question that is worded in a misleading way. If we are to have such referenda, it is the Legislature’s responsibility to frame the questions in such a way that the publican vote for something that is, at least, technologically feasible.
ANOTHER CHOICE
The call for an immediate nuclear arms `freeze’ and a dedication of monies saved to “human needs and services” has no relation to economic, military, or political reality in the contemporary world. This is why we should hesitate to advocate referenda on issues of national defense; a superficially attractive proposal may have serious liabilities that are difficult to communicate effectively in this age of mass electronic information media. A battle of slogans will not do.
As an alternative to the current bill, we respectfully suggest the following language:
WHEREAS, The Carter Administration proposed a mutual reduction in strategic nuclear arms during the course of the SALT II negotiations; and
WHEREAS, the 1980 Republican Platform pledged that “A Republican Administration will continue to seek to negotiate arms reductions in Soviet strategic weapons”; and
WHEREAS, the hope of mutual nuclear arms reductions animates all men and women of good will, regardless of party affiliation; now therefore
BE IT ENACTED by the Senate and the General Assembly of the State of New Jersey that the President of the United States is hereby memorialized to press ahead with negotiation that would gradually, mutually, and verifiably limit and reduce the stockpiles of nuclear launchers in the United States and the Soviet Union.
2016 NOTE: The last phrase, calling for the limitation of nuclear “launchers,” addresses the verifiability issue. Nuclear warheads are very hard to track because they are not very large; the strategic launchers–long-range missiles, submarines, and aircraft–are larger and much easier to detect by technological means.
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