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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (June 26, 1986)
Page 2/The BattahorvThuraday, June 26, 1966 Opinion Star Wars: Reagan's dream, America's nightmare Karl r Olirn^y^r Last week we had a visit from our old buddy Phil Gramm. Phil had a gift for us — a multi-million dollar gift. All Phil wants in re turn is for some of us to play Scar Wars with him. Gramm and Lt. Gen. James Abra- hamson. head of the Strategic Defense Initiative program, came to Texas A&M to look us over and see if we have any thing to offer Star Wars. Currently AJcM is getting $12.5 million from the government for defense research with only $200,000 of that going for SD1 re search. That figure could increase by several million dollars if AfcM does get a grant. Last year the Pentagon’s SD1 budget was $28 million. This year Congress granted $96 million for SD1 research. Next year President Reagan wants $167 million The Defense Department has been using that money to increase fund ing for university research. Last year $14 million was spent on college cam puses. This year that figure probably will excede $50 million. Gramm wants Texas schools to get a larger slice of this expensive pie. Although colleges will be getting tons of money, not everyone is fond of the source. Nationwide more than 3,700 full-time faculty members and 2,800 graduate students at more than 100 uni versities have pledged not to accept SDI research funds. Fifteen Nobel laureates, including Sheldon L. Glashow and Li nus C. Pauling, also have refused to work on SDI. At AfcM nearly 70 profes sors have signed a petition that savs they want no part of SDI. A&M President Frank E. Vandiver wasn’t too thrilled with faculty opposi tion to SDI research. When there are millions of dollars involved it’s easy to see which way someone in Vandiver’s position would go. But there are several moral, ethical and philosophic reasons for opposition to University involve ment the SDI program that outweigh any amount of money. The purpose of a university is to teach and learn. A project such as SDI would bring about new knowledge in many different areas, but there could be a problem with spreading that knowl edge With a program such as SDI there could be problems with whether new in formation turned up through research is classified or can be shared with the rest of the world. There also could be problems with security clearances for faculty members and others working on the SDI program There is a significant number of fac ulty and graduate students from other countries at this school. It is doubtful that the government would want a school crawling with foreigners to be in volved with lop secret SDI research. Gen. Abrahamson says that most of the research done at universities will not be classified and that security restictkms would be minimal. This is the same gov ernment that not too long ago tried to stop a newspaper from running a story that showed how one could make an atomic bomb. The government felt that this was a leak of top secret information even though the newspaper received all its information by researching articles and books in a public library. Our gov ernment loves to keep secrets. SDI research could interfere with other research at this school. A&M has limited facilities and equipment. Some other projects might not get the chance for research and experimentation if lab oratories and equipment are tied up with SDI programs. When it comes time to make a decision on whether a govern ment-funded SDI research experiment or a non-defense oriented, purely aca demic experiment that’s not being paid for should be performed, it’s obvious which way the school will go. Most scientists agree that SDI will not work without major advancements in laser, computer, radar and other tech nology. It is best to destroy incoming missiles during the boost phase, the time between launch and when the missile enters space. The biggest problem with hitting a missile during the first stage its flight is that the boost phase of the Sovi et’s current ICQ^s lasts 5 minutes —not much time for a rational decision when the future of the world is at stake. To make matters worse the Soviets aren’t far away from developing a missile sys- Blaming it on the Fed John Curmlff AP analyst Frustrated by the economy’s re fusal to accommo date their rosy forecasts, the folks in the financial and securities business are waiting these days for the Federal Reserve to act. They say the Fed can fix things quickly with a cut in the discount rate, which is a basic interest rate that, in the ory anyway, eventually influences just about all other interest rates. It also would, they contend, spur the lackadaisical economy to perform more in line with the forecasts issued earlier this year that foresaw the economy per forming more vigorously from the sum mer through the fall. That’s still the forecast of many econ omists in banks, brokerage houses, aca demia. government and corporate of fices. But some of them are beginning to hedge, wondering where the evidence is to support their hopes. tern with a boost phase of only 50 sec onds. Due to the curve of the earth it is im possible for a ground-based sensoring device to detect a missile during its boost phase. A space-based sensoring device probably would be able to detect a mis sile as soon as it is launched, but such a device probably would be knocked out in the first stages of war. It might be possible to destroy a mis sile during the 20 minutes it takes to make its flight through space. During this phase the missile releases the war heads that are aimed at U.S. targets and thousands of scraps of reflective metal that act as decoys. At this point it is im possible to tell which “target” is a war head or which is a decoy. Twenty min utes is not much time to sort through all the mess and destroy the actual war heads that are heading toward the United States. As a last resort it might be possible to destroy incoming missiles during the two minutes it takes them to re-enter the atmosphere and strike their targets. If the Soviets were to jam our radar by triggenng nuclear blasts in the sky or outfit their warheads with wings that would allow the warheads to take eva sive action, it would make things even more difficult for our side. If even one warhead gets through our defenses more than a million lives could be lost. Even if all the bugs were worked Out of the system, SDI would offer no de fense against cruise missiles, submarine- launched missiles, bombs dropped from airplanes or any other type of weapon that doesn’t leave Earth’s atmosphere The outrageous costs of SDI is an other reason to oppose the program. The ’80s have been a decade of budget cuts. Reagan constandy is trying his best to cut billions of dollars out of the fed eral budget. Isn’t it funny that the man who wants to cut funds for education, welfare, medical care, the arts and hun dreds of social programs because he feels the money is being wasted, already has spent nearly $300 million dollars and wants to spend millions more on a system that probably won’t work any way? The basic idea behind the SDI pro gram is escalation. SDI is supposed to keep us safe from war. but it actually puts us in danger of war. If, by some fantastic achievement, we developed a system that could stop in coming nuclear weapons, what good would it do? Given the current trends in foreign relations the next logical step for the Soviets would be to develop an anti-SDI system. It wouldn’t be hard. Then we would have to develop an anti- anti-SDI system. Then the Soviets would have to develop an anti-anti-anti- SDI system. Then we would have to de velop an anti-anti-anti-anti-SDI system. Then the Soviets would have to ... . You get the idea. Someday one of the countries would be forced to cal) the other’s thermonuclear bluff. In the face of criticism Reagan and other SDI supporters have defended this billion dollar plan as an idealistic dream that we should research and make come true. Some of us have an other idealistic dream — a dream of peace. A peace that relies on trust and love instead of lasers and computers. One dream is considerably less expen sive than the other. Karl Pallmeyer u a aeauor Jounaliam major and a columnist for The Battal- Rather than blaming themselves for being too optimistic, however, a lot of these forecasters are blaming the Fed for not doing more to lower interest rates. The fact is the ecodomy seems to be caught in cross-currents, and not all of them can be identified. Consumer confidence is relatively high, but retail sales are dull. Business people generally are viewed as optimistic but, based on the decline in capital spending, they aren’t supporting their thoughts with their money. Housing is popularly^ depicted as be ing in a boom period, but housing starts and building permits fell in May. Payroll employment rose slightly in May, but the jobless rate did too. Even automobile production was off. Manufacturing, which built America, shows some of the worst numbers. Industrial production fell in May. Ca pacity utilization rates in the same month fell to 78.6 percent, the lowest since December 1983. New orders for durable goods and machine tools fell in April. And business inventories rose. Looking over the economic scene, forecasters find almost nothing that ex cites them — no current that seems likely to break the way out of the dol drums and justify the optimism that they already have sold to clients. Therefore, the pressure on the Fed. The Fed, however, has problems of its own. Big problems. High on the list is the value of the U.S. dollar in international trade. The dollar's value has been falling from an unprecedented high, and it is no secret that the Fed would like to keep this de cline from getting out of hand. A drop in interest rates might satisfy some domestic industries, but it also could make the dollar less attractive to foreign investors, thus worsening the U.S. balance of pay menu position. Besides, the Fed is concerned that there could be too much money already circulating in the U.S. economy, and chairman Paul Vokker has indicated he is concerned that such a situation could re-ignite high inflation. John Cunniff la a buaineaa analyst for The Aaaociated Presa. ABM treaty’s hypnotic spell cost U.S. strategic progress / William FT ^uckjj^r EDI TOR S NOTE: This is the third in a three-part series on the ABM treaty. All the argu ments with hair on their chest point to the advis ability of ditching the ABM treaty. Briefly reviewed, they are: 1. Ever since 1972, the Soviet Union has been engaged aggressively in self protection, in violation of the idea of as sured vulnerabilitv 2. Ever since 1972 — up until Presi dent Reagan's initiation of the Strategic Defense Initiative — the United States has been inert, allowing a complete dis sipation of iu defensive potential. 3. The Soviet Union has violated the treaty (by building iu radar site at Kras noyarsk in Siberia). 4. Our scientists should be free to chart, or to rechart, a space-shield re search program unencumbered by any of the prohibitions, fancied or real, im posed by the ABM treaty. It would all appear to be clear-cut, but there is a mystique that surrounds treaties with the Soviet Union that touch on arms, and even people wonderfully situated to remark the deterioration in our position since signing the ABM treaty have become choirboys in the dis armament chorus. The best example of this is Ambassador Gerard Smith, who did much of the negotiating at the time the treaty was signed Although he served public notice on the Soviet Union, at the direction of the Nixon administration, that any prolon gation of the ABM treaty, five years down the road, probably would not har monize with U.S. interests, just recently he was writing nervously and sarcasti cally in the Washington Post deploring any consideration of repealing the treaty he had said probably should be repealed if progress was not being made in the reduction of strategic weapons back when the ABM treaty was signed. And where there is Gerard Smith, there is bound to be Paul Wamke not far be hind, and then Robert McNamara and the whole disarmament lobby that ap pears to be afraid of everything save the mounting power of the Soviet Union a) to bring off a first strike and b) to de fend itself against retaliation. Now it generally is supposed that if the moment should come when Gen. James Abrahamson, who is in charge of the SDI program, should approach the president, in the company of Caspar Weinberger, and say we have reached a point beyond which we simply can’t travel so long as ABM is still on the books — then at that point, Reagan would proceed to repeal the treaty. But there are difficulties here. The first is that the longer we go without re pealing it, the more it will rise in sym bolic importance, making it harder and harder to annul. Who is talking now about deploying the neutron bomb? Or about repealing the Helsinki Accords? Yet the arguments for the neutron bomb are as valid now as they were when the arguments for its deployment were made to Jimmy Carter. And the Helsinki pact is no longer anything but an excuse for us to meet in a European capital for the purpose of reminding the Soviet Union that it has not lived up to iu obligations. A waste of time. Not only would Reagan find it harder in 1988 to repeal the treaty than he’d find it to do now, following, say, a rip- snorung speech on Soviet violations of the same treaty, he ought to consider this: The choice may not be his. The Strategic Defense Initiative is a program that will take many years to explore fully, let alone deploy. The time is bound to come when we will need to test, and this we can’t do under the pre vailing reading of the ABM treaty. Rea gan's successor may be a Democrat pledged to “respect all our disarmament treaties" (I can near it now). And — who knows? — it might be a Republican, ma neuvered during the campaign into pledging to keep the ABM treaty alive. Certainly there would be shrieks of pain if we abandoned the ABM treaty. If you get hooked on a placebo, you are going to have withdrawal symptoms when they take away that placebo. But the ABM treaty is worse merely than a placebo. Under iu hypnotic spell we have lost years during which we might gradually have dug our way out of the mutual assured destruction that contin ues to serve as the spinal column of our deterrent posture. Those who look on the ABM treaty as an instrument that contains the Soviet Union are (or should be) struck dumb by the mere mention of Krasnoyarsk, an almost exhibitionistic violation of the treaty by the Russians. Yet the superstition survives that we should never renounce a treaty that a) is made with the Soviet Union and b) deals with arms. But Ronald Reagan is a genuine leader. And he should now free us from that grave strategic millstone around our neck. Carrrlgnt I9M, Uairmrsol Pimm aymUra-