Saved from the brink

SAVED FROM THE BRINK

RONALD REAGAN's faith in his own insights is a continuing inspiration, and I will happily contribute to any monument that would memorialize the chief of these, for instance: ON THIS PODIUM ON MARCH 23, 1983, PRESIDENT RONALD WILSON REAGAN ANNOUNCED HIS STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE, WHICH LED TO LIFTING THE THREAT OF NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST THAT TORMENTED MANKIND DURING MUCH OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.

Mr. Reagan saved the day at Reykjavik by acting on that insight, but it was a very narrow miss, and the circumstances of the ocasion have hugely enhanced the resources of the enemy, foreign and domestic. Yes, foreign and domestic.

Foreign because it should now be clear that the Soviet Union's obsessive fear of our Space Shield was behind the high drama of its proposals. Mind you, they were, in the end, empty proposals, but they were enough to dazzle minds parched for synthetic disarmament. The Soviet Union was going to eliminate intermediate-range nuclear weapons from Europe, in return for the United States' doing the same thing. Wow. Then the Soviet Union would reduce its strategic nuclear inventory by 50 per cent, and so would we. Double wow. And then by the end of the century, or perhaps earlier--who knows?--there would be a total elimination of nuclear bombs: and all of that, the result of a single meeting in Iceland. Sort of renews one's faith in the deliberative process, does it not?

Ronald Reagan would then have returned to the United States to answer a few questions. Among them: How would we in fact police the elimination of theater weapons by the Soviet Union? Given that these are mobile, exactly how would we find a hundred or two in the event that the Soviet Union followed its customary practice of cheating on treaties? What would "verifiable" mean? You could make a deal with a haystack giving you full rights to verify its agreement not to husband a needle, and you would have the agreement, but the haystack is pretty safe with its needle.

And the Soviet Union's strategic missiles are reduced by one-half. Reduced, to use round numbers, to five thousand. These are the intercontinental missiles, the ones that can pop El Paso, Texas, if told to do so. Question: How is Paris, France, or Florence, Italy, left safer by the apparent absence of the smaller, theater weapons? A missile capable of soaring 9,500 miles to its target can surely be directed to go a mere 950 miles to a closer target. Presumably the only argument against using it for such purposes would be the waste of gas, an extravagance the Soviet Union might be willing to put up with, in a tense situation.

Question: If indeed we are going to strip Western Europe of all nuclear weapons, what is it we would propose to do in the event that the Soviet army marched west into the area in which we have 16 American divisions? By what means would we propose to defend them? By firing nuclear warheads from Omaha, Nebraska? And since this is unlikely, what would be the effect on Western European politics of the apparent de-linking of America's nuclear umbrella from its little nuclear parasols within Western Europe?

And then, of course, the major question, the only question. What reason have we to believe that, on that critical open future date, the Soviet Union would actually agree to move across the apocalyptic threshold, defined as the point beyond which its entire remaining nuclear force would cease to threaten the entire United States? What evidence is there that it has ever crossed the mind of Gorbachev, or of any known likely successor to Gorbachev, so to emasculate Soviet nuclear power?

But hear now the peacenikery. Already, sundry U.S. senators have said that Ronald Reagan has missed the greatest opportunity since the Congress of Vienna to bring peace in our time. And the Social Democrats in Europe will raise a clamor alongside which the fight against the deployment of the Pershings and the cruise missiles was nothing. Their demand is horribly easy to formulate: Kill SDI. And the domestic enemies of the best opportunity the world will ever have to seek out at once freedom and independence, together with the elimination of the practical threat of nuclear confrontation, will go after Ronald Reagan, to kill SDI. They will fight him on the seas and oceans, in the air and on the beaches, they will fight him in the fields and in the streets and in the hills. They will never surrender. Ronald Reagan is beleaguered as he was never beleaguered before Reykjavik.

And only he, backed by the American people, can get us back on course. That course is the development of SDI.

COPYRIGHT 1986 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning