
                 MOSCOW'S BIGGER STAR WARS DRIVE
 Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev recently intensified his propaganda campaign against President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, decrying  it  as a "voracious monster" and "fundamentally inhumane."  Accusing the U.S. of an "arrogance of power", he said: "Many  people everywhere are legitimately wondering why, by virtue of what right, should the whole world be held hostage to the SDI." "What we  need," he said, "is Star Peace and not Star Wars."

  What  Mr. Gorbachev didn't say, of course, is that strategic defense has long been an essential part of Soviet military doctrine and that Russian scientists have been devising ballistic missile defenses for more than 20 years. In fact, according to the  Central  Intelligence Agency,  the  Soviets  have  outspent  the U.S. on strategic defense since 1976 by a factor of 15 to 1.

  The significance of what the Soviets appear to be up to is  that  it reflects  a  deliberate  shift from deterrence, on which the nuclear balance of power has rested, to a war-fighting capability.  This  is the very thing they accuse President Reagan of doing with SDI.

  As  early  as  1962,  Marshal  V.D. Sokolovskiy defined in "Military Strategy" the aim of Soviet strategic defenses: "They have the  task of  creating  an  invincible  system  for  the defense of the entire country. While, in the  last  war,  it  was  sufficient  to  destroy 15%-20%  of  the  attacking  air  operation,  now it is necessary to assure, essentially, 100% destruction of all attacking airplanes and missiles."

  COUNTERBALANCE' POSSIBLE
  Gen. Nikolai Talensky, a member of the Soviet  Academy  of  Sciences and  former  editor  of  the  Soviet General Staff journal "Military Thought,"  added  in  1965   that   is   was   quite   possible   to "counterbalance  the  absolute  weapons  of  attack."  He  said that "powerful deterrent forces  and  an  effective  antimissile  defense system,  when  taken  together, substantially increase the stability of mutual deterrence."

  This view was reaffirmed shortly after the  Soviet  Union  and  U.S signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 1972. Then-Defense Minister  Andrei  Grechko  told the Soviet Presidium that the treaty "places no limitations whatsoever on the conducting of research  and experimental  work directed towards solving the problem of defending the country from nuclear missile strikes." More recently, of course, the Soviets have insisted upon a much narrower interpretation of the treaty in order to stymie U.S. research and development. At the same time, they maintain that their own ABM  efforts  don't  in  any  way violate the accord.

  The  Soviets  have  spent  heavily  on  strategic defenses since the early 1960s. The CIA says that  "over  the  last  two  decades,  the Soviet  Union  has spent roughly as much on defense as it has on its massive offensive forces." This includes building a  "city  under  a city"  in  Moscow  to  protect  tens  of thousands of key political, scientific and military personnel.  Secret  underground  rail  lines have  even been constructed to evacuate the Moscow elite far outside the city, the CIA believes.

  Acccording  to  Defense  Department  and   CIA   estimates,   Soviet expenditures  on strategic nuclear defenses--apart from antiaircraft and civil defense--have averaged $15 billion to $20 billion or  more a  year  since  1970,  dwarfing  America's  investment even with the Reagan SDI program. And  this  Russian  work  has  gone  far  beyond laboratory research and experimentation.

  The Soviet Union has the world's only operational  ABM  system,  the only   operational  anti-satellite  (ASAT)  killers,  and  the  only operational ground-based lasers  aimed  at  blinding  satellites  in space  and  perhaps capable of knocking out incoming missiles. Soon, the Soviets could "break out" of the ABM  Treaty  and  switch  on  a battle-management network of radars and interceptors covering all of the  vital  territory of the U.S.S.R. Such "territorial" defense, it should be noted, was what the ABM Treaty, for better or  worse,  was intended to preclude.

  Since 1978, the Soviets have been upgrading their ABM system  around Moscow,  installing  new  tracking  and battle-management radars and modernizing its missile interceptors at its 100 launch sites.  In  a gross  violation  of  the  100- missile limit in the ABM Treaty, the Soviets' silo-based launchers are reloadable and reloads  have  been tested.  U.S.  intelligence  officials  expect  the system to become fully operational next year.

  More significant, the Soviets are building a widespread  network  of highly  sophisticated  radars  able not only to track enemy warheads but also  to  guide  ABM  interceptors  to  destroy  these  incoming weapons. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger said last week that the U.S.  has  spotted  three  new  Soviet  radars  under  construction, bringing to 12 the  total  number  that  appear  to  be  part  of  a nationwide  defense  system.  The  radars  are  similar  to one near Krasnoyarsk in south-central Asia; that radar in particular has been cited as a major violation of the ABM Treaty.  The  accord  requires that all radars be on borders and face outward (merely warning of an attack). But the Krasnoyarsk radar is oriented inward, covering some 2,500  miles  of  Soviet territory including key missile fields, and would  be  useful  in  resisting  a  strike.  "These  radars,"   Mr Weinberger   said,  "are  essential  components  of  any  large  ABM deployment."

  The Soviets are also developing components of a new ABM system  that allow  them  to construct individual ABM sites in a matter of months rather than years, according to  a  Defense  Department  report.  It estimates  that  such  mobile  or component ABM systems could by the early 1990s be quickly deployed to strengthen Moscow's  defenses  or guard key areas in the western U.S.S.R. and east of the Urals.

  The  Soviets  have  also  developed  new surface-to-air missiles and tested them in an ABM-mode  using  their  sophisticated  air-defense radars. Moreover, the Russians are designing kinetic-energy weapons, which  use the high-speed collision of heavy metal particles such as tungsten to kill an incoming warhead.

  "Taken together, all of  the  Soviet  Union's  ABM  and  ABM-related activities  are  more  significant--and  more  ominous--than any one considered individually," the Defense Department  report  concludes "Cumulatively,  they  suggest  that the U.S.S.R. may be preparing to deploy rapdily an ABM defense of its national territory, contrary to the provisions of the ABM Treaty."

  American critics of  SDI  contend  that  the  concern  about  Soviet strategic  defense  is  overblown.  They  say  that the Soviet radar systems and surface-to-air missiles are most likely intended to stop enemy  aircraft  rather  than  ballistic  missiles,  and  thus   are permitted under the ABM Treaty. Further, opponents of the Reagan SDI program maintain that the Soviets really aren't capable of deploying a  Star  Wars  defense of their own. The Center for Defense Informa- tion, for instance, says that the Soviets aren't "competitive"  with the  U.S. in space-based defense technologies. It adds, "Claims that the Soviets might beat us into space with an SDI of  their  own  are vastly  overstated  and  do not justify the current U.S. development program."
 
  But senior  Soviet  scientists  have  gone  far  beyond  radars  and anti-ballistic  missiles  to  expand  strategic  defenses  using new directed-energy technologies such  as  lasers,  particle  beams  and microwaves.  These  type  of  weapons  cripple the delicate internal mechanisms of booster rockets and nuclear warheads. According to the CIA, Russia has devoted far greater resources to this work than  the U.S.  over  the  past  decade  or more. Indeed, the Soviet directed- energy program is led by Yevgeniy Velikhov, a vice president of  the Soviet  Academy  of  Sciences  and  deputy director of the Kurchatov Atomic Energy Institute. He is also chief  science  advisor  to  Mr Gorbachev, whom he has known since their days in college together.

  "In  directed  energy technologies, the Soviets are in a comparable, or highly competitive, position with respect to the United  States," the  CIA  says.  "In  laser  technologies,  there  is  an  essential equivalence, though the Soviets are pursuing some  types  of  lasers which  the  U.S.  has  either  abandoned  or has ignored for weapons applications. In  particle  beam  and  microwave  technologies,  the Soviets may have the edge over the U.S. in some important areas."

  Indeed,  even  the  Defense Department admits that "much of the U.S understanding of how particle beams could  be  made  into  practical defensive  weapons  is  based  on  Soviet work conducted in the late 1960s and early 1970s." And the CIA adds that some of these  Russian designs for beam weapons are "superior to those of the West."

  The Soviets have already begun to develop  and  test  laser  weapons They  have  built "over a half dozen" major R&D laser facilities and test ranges, with  an  estimated  10,000  scientists  and  engineers associated  with  the  laser-weapons  program,  says  the CIA. A U.S reconnaissance satellite  recently  spotted  two  more  large  laser facilities  being  built on mountaintops near the Soviet-Afghanistan border. Some analysts believe that these laser sites may be used  to attack  U.S.  satellites  and  could  be  upgraded with new tracking radars to knock out ballistic missiles.

  DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN
  The  Soviet political leadership and such scientists as Mr. Velikhov deny any of this advanced Soviet SDI work. They  maintain  that  all Russian  efforts  are  only  "point defenses" around Moscow or other work permitted by the ABM Treaty.

  Meanwhile, Moscow  has  pursued  an  aggressive  disinformation  and propaganda  campaign against Mr. Reagan's SDI program. The U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency has detailed these Soviet efforts  in a new report. It says that the Soviet Union has prevented an "honest dialogue" on SDI "by refusing even to acknowledge that it is engaged in  researching  advanced strategic defense technologies. The Soviet position cannot be taken seriously. Indeed, it  must  be  understood for what it is--a cynical tactic to avoid accountability and to gain a unilaterial advantage over the United States."

  Moscow  takes seriously the potential for stragegic defense. Kremlin pronouncements to the contrary are only an attempt to kill off  U.S SDI  development  while the Soviet Union gets ready to field its own multilayered stratigic defense network.
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  From The Wall Street Journal, article by William Kucewicz

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