TELL ME FIRST ABOUT THE OFFICE. WHAT IS IT AND WHAT DOES IT DO?

The Office of Technology Assessment is one of four analytical support agencies for the United States Congress. It deals with technology. There is the Congressional Budget Office, which deals with the budget; the General Accounting Office, which audits Government expenditures; and the Library of Congress' Congressional Research Service, which does research for individual members of Congress about things they're interested in. So it's a way of getting expert advice into the Congressional process.

NOW, THE REPORT THAT YOU DID IN 1984, HOW DID THAT COME ABOUT? HOW DID YOUR PARTICIPATION COME ABOUT?

Soon after the President gave his famous March 1983 speech, I was asked by the Office of Technology Assessment to undertake a technical inquiry into the prospects, for a defensive shield over the United States. I had worked in the Administration, I was familiar with programs underway in the Defense Department. I had worked with these technologies for quite along time, so I was familiar with them. But at that time, I was out of government and, therefore, had the independence that is required to do an independent report for Congress, which is bipartisan. So I was asked soon after the speech was given, and it took me somewhere around a year to prepare that report. And I prepared it by going around to all of the laboratories and companies and experts who were working on it, learning what they were doing; thinking about it; doing my own calculations and estimates; and, finally, writing up the report, which was issued early in 1984.

AS A SUMMARY, HOW WOULD YOU -- SO YOU BEGAN RIGHT AFTER THE SPEECH IN '83?

Yes. I began just a few months after the President's speech. And this was the first report that -- technical report, on so-called "Star Wars" that was completed.

IF YOU HAD TO SUMMARIZE YOUR CONCLUSIONS IN A BRIEF STATEMENT, HOW WOULD YOU DO THAT?

Well, my first judgment, printed at the end of the report, was that the prospects for a perfect or near-perfect missile defense were so remote, technically, that that idea just didn't belong in the middle of public debate or public expectation about missile defense. So the gist of it was that missile defense is an important subject to pay attention to, the technologies are important, but forget about perfect defense of population. That's not in the cards. That's so remote that we don't -- not even any point in addressing it now.

NOW, FEW SUPPORTERS OF SDI TODAY, WITH THE POSSIBLE EXCEPTION OF THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE AND THE PRESIDENT, REALLY ARGUE THAT IT IS WAS EVER INTENDED TO BE A COMPREHENSIVE DEFENSE.

That's right. The Defense Department has since maintained that the President never intended for the Defense to be a perfect defense of people or, really, to defend people at all. But that was certainly the impression the President had given initially in his speech. That was the impression we all got; that was the impression the public got. And I certainly can't understand the vehemence with which the Department of Defense opposed reports that drew that conclusion, unless they had it in the back of their minds at that time that that was the goal of SDI.

DID YOU SUBMIT THE REPORT TO DOD BEFORE GIVING IT TO CONGRESS, OR DID YOU GET HOW DID YOU GET THEIR INPUT?

I submitted it to the Department of Defense for a security review, so that it could be published in unclassified form, because it was based upon access to all manner of classified information. It was reviewed by OTA, not by the Department of Defense. OTA is a Congressional agency, so it got its own technical review. But, certainly, it was submitted to other experts far their technical comment -- as a check on me, which is appropriate -- before it was published.

WHAT DOES OTA DO WITH IT? THEY GET THIS BIG DOCUMENT. WHAT HAPPENS THEN?

They printed the document. It was released in some Congressional hearings over the SDI, and it came to the Strategic Defense Organization, that was then getting underway, as an uncomfortable report because it called into question the match—up between the technologies that they were working on and the vision that the President had enunciated. And I don't think that they had, in their own minds, yet worked out the relationship between that vision and what they're doing.

WHAT WAS THEIR REACTION?

Their reaction was to -- was a hostile one, initially. First, there were -- and I don't necessarily suppose that it was General Abramson or the people running the program that do this, but there are always people around who will take the cue. One tack was to charge that the report was somehow; politically motivated. That didn't work because I was not affiliated with either political party; I had actually worked for the Reagan Administration. A second one was that there were security violations. That didn't work because the report had been cleared by the Department of Defense. The third tack was that the report contained technical mistakes. There was, for example, a charge that the number of satellites you needed to defend was proportional to the square root of the number of Soviet missiles, the so-called "Square Root Rule," and they told me that I hadn't appreciated the Square Root Rule. And I looked into this, and asked how they found this Square Root Rule; where did it come from, because it wasn't at all consistent with what I had calculated. And it turns out that, to get the Square Root Rule they had assumed that the Soviet missiles were spread uniformly throughout the entire globe, rather than being in the Soviet Union, and the defensive satellites were on the ground and not in space at all. That's how you get the Square Root Rule, so I was a little puzzled by that.

WERE YOU SURPRISED AT THE REACTION?

I was, because I knew that my -- the only judgment I really made, which was that the prospects for perfect or near-perfect defense were ignorably remote, I knew to be a consensus judgment of technical people in that field. So I knew it was not, among technical people who understood ballistic missile defense, I knew that it was not a controversial judgment. So I didn't expect that the publication of the report would elicit any reaction at all from the Defense Department.

BUT THERE WAS A LOT OF SUPPORT WITHIN THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY, WAS THERE NOT, FOR THE PRESIDENT'S INITIATIVE?

Oh, there certainly was support for -- and always will be support and, in my view, should be support for a research program on ballistic missile defense. That's fine. But there aren't -- but technical people don't like to make extravagant claims for the success or promise of their programs. So I think it's fine to do research on this subject. Everyone I know who's responsible is in favor of that. But it's very different from saying, "Yes, I'm in favor of doing research," and saying, "Yes, I believe that we will somehow, with technology, defend ourselves against nuclear attack." I wish that were true. But, unfortunately, that's not technical reality.

THE PRESIDENT SEEMS TO BE SAYING THAT EVEN IF THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE TODAY, THAT THE TIME WILL COME, WITH AMERICAN INGENUITY -- AND AFTER ALL, WE'VE SEEN REMARKABLE THINGS HAPPEN, TECHNOLOGICALLY, THAT WE NEVER COULD HAVE ANTICIPATED A HUNDRED YEARS AGO, THAT IN TIME -- THAT WHAT WE'RE DOING NOW IS MAKING THE FIRST TENTATIVE STEPS TOWARD A TIME WHEN SUCH A DEFENSE WOULD BE CREDIBLE.

Well, it's true that technology gets better and better, but the problem with that is that technology works for the Russians as well as for us. So as our defense technology gets better, which it certainly will, their offensive technology will also get better. So it's a race between technology in the service of offense and technology in the service of defense, and we don't know how that will turn out. Maybe the offense will win. But it certainly doesn't look now like the defense is going to win or win so thoroughly that the Soviets won't be able to get some number of nuclear warheads through a defense.

IS THERE SOMETHING ABOUT THE NATURE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS THAT MAKES THEM LESS EASILY DEFENDED AGAINST, OR MAYBE EVEN IMPOSSIBLE TO DEFEND AGAINST?

A Well, nuclear weapons are small, cheap and enormously destructive, and it's those three things that make it hard to erect a defense. They're cheap; that means that the offense can always just increase their number to overwhelm the defense. They're small, which means that it's easy to introduce them into another country. You don't have to send them on a missile; you can send them in an airplane. You can mail them. You can sneak them into the country in a bale of marijuana, for example; someone could sneak a warhead into the United States. And they are cheap, which means that one can afford to proliferate them even -- and the defense, on its part, can afford to keep building itself up and building itself up.

IT'S MY IMPRESSION THAT ORDINARY PEOPLE WERE ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT THE PRESIDENT'S VISION. DO YOU THINK THAT'S TRUE AND--

Sure.

--IF IT IS, WHAT WOULD ONE SAY TO THEM ABOUT THAT?

Well, the President held out the hope that we all have, which is that we could defend ourselves against a Soviet attack. We don't have to depend upon the sanity or the goodwill of people we don't understand, and don't even like, to make sure that we aren't blown to bits. That's a very appealing concept, and virtually no one would object to that. The concept is fine. What is not fine is implying to the public that that solution to the nuclear puzzle is almost at hand. To me, it's a little bit like the war on cancer. Everybody is in favor of looking for a cure for cancer; no one is against cures, or pro-cancer. On the other hand, I'm not going to begin behaving today as if the cure for cancer is at hand, or is going to be here 10 years or 20 years from now. I'm not going to start smoking. I'm not that sure. So I'm not against looking for a cure for cancer, but I think it would be very irresponsible for our medical authorities to assure us that a cure was on the way and, on that basis, to allow us not to take care of our health.

THERE ALSO SEEMS SOMETHING KIND OF -- I MEAN IT IS ALMOST LIKE REAGAN TOOK THE MORAL HIGH GROUND, IN A WAY; AND THE ADMINISTRATION DID, TOO, ISN'T IT. I MEAN THERE'S SOMETHING--

There's the appeal of being able to defend yourself, particularly against a country as politically unpalatable to Americans as the Soviet Union. That idea is so attractive that no one seriously opposes it. But there's a difference to technical people between the attractiveness of a vision and the hard technical realities. I wish we had a formula for perfect defense against nuclear weapons. I think only a fool would oppose that. On the other hand, we have to live in the world that's given us; and the world that's given us is, the Soviet Union can blow us up if they want to, and I don't know anything we can do about that. That's the hard reality.

YOU'VE BEEN CAREFUL TO SAY THAT SDI, AS A COMPREHENSIVE DEFENSE, IS IMPOSSIBLE. BUT WHAT ABOUT A LESSER AIM? WHAT ABOUT THE AIM OF DEFENDING A SIGNIFICANT NUMBER OF MILITARY OBJECTIVES, OR WHATEVER?

Yeah. Another aim for missile defense and a much more realistic aim than defending people, is to defend military targets. Now, you say, "Who would want to defend military targets if we can't defend people?" Well, if you consider that the purpose of a Soviet attack is probably going to be less to kill people than to destroy America military assets, perhaps a defense of those assets would discourage the attack. That's the logic behind defending military targets, and I think that that's a compelling logic. I realize that it doesn't appeal to people very much; they want themselves defended. And, yet, I think there's some logic in defending in military targets. We could, for example, defend our missile silos in the Midwest, and that would be a modest step towards stability, if it were done right. Unfortunately, to do that job, defend silos, you don't need space-based defenses. You don't, need the systems that are prominent in the SDI. They are not well suited to defense against military targets. The President has also said that defense of those missile silos is not the purpose of his SDI. He reacts very strongly to the suggestion that SDI is the defense of silos. So I take the President's word of silo defense, which, as I say, has a certain logic, does not appeal to the President.

IS THERE ANY REASON, THOUGH, "NOT TO ENGAGE IN AN AGGRESSIVE EFFORT TO TRY TO FIND SPACE-BASED DEFENSES? I MEAN DOES IT DO ANY HARM?

No. On the whole, it doesn't do any harm to do a research program and, in fact, I think most, people are in favor of a research program. It wouldn't even do terrible harm to deploy a system that didn't, work. It would he a waste of money, and I think it would be a shame to do that. There would be many shattered hopes, but it wouldn't start World War Three to build it. It's just not wise to build a system' that, doesn't do very much. To do a research program, that's fine. One has to remember, in building a research program or crafting a research program, that we have other needs as well in our national defense. We need our conventional forces to remain strong. We need our intelligence capabilities to remain strong. So we have many other military needs, as well as needs for civilian research, in our society. And so one needs to balance the SDI against our other technical needs, and if it looks like, right now, the prospects for SDI to bear fruit as a population defense, are very remote, why then one needs to look at the other things that one could do with the same amount of money and technical talent. But, in principle, there is no objection at all to us running a research program in missile defense. We should; we always have, and we always will.

MIGHTN'T WE BE LEARNING THINGS THAT TWENTY, FIFTY AND MAYBE EVEN A HUNDRED YEARS DOWN THE PIKE WILL SERVE US WELL AS A DEFENSE AGAINST, NUCLEAR WEAPONS?

Quite possibly. And, in fact, most of the technologies that are part of the SDI today were under investigation before the President's speech, and would still be under investigation -- we just wouldn't call them SDI. We would say, for example, that the eyes and ears of the defensive system that are now being studied under SDI, they would have been studied and called "warning sensors" or "intelligence sensors." And so the same general technologies would have been under investigation anyway. And the question of whether they will contribute to other things besides missile defense, like intelligence capability and other military missions, is a very real question. Someday they may contribute to defense, as well.

HAS SDI HAD A MAJOR IMPACT ON THOSE OTHER -- ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF THOSE? HAS IT BEEN ACCELERATED?

No. I think it's been a mixed story. Some programs that were -- that originally had other purposes and that were collected together to make the SDI, have gained by being associated with SDI. Their budgets have gone up. Other programs -- sometimes very valuable programs—have suffered by virtue of being associated with SDI. And so it's a mixed story. For example, the Air Force's program to investigate our future warning sensors for warning of attack was moved in from the Air Force into SDI at the time SDI was established, and those sensors were turned to the mission of ballistic missile defense rather than warning. Well, that means that they, from the point of view of warning, those technologies may not be undergoing the best kind of development that they could for the mission of warning. So it's not necessarily true that all the technologies that were gathered into SDI will bear more technical fruit because of the SDI than they would have without the SDI. I think that's very mixed.

WHAT ABOUT THE AMOUNT OF MONEY BEING SPENT ON THE PROGRAM? WOULD YOU HAZARD A GUESS, IT THERE HAD NOT BEEN AN SDI, WHERE -- WOULD THE DOLLAR FIGURES BE ABOUT THE SAME?

I don't know exactly, because it means playing a history that never was, starting back in 1983, pretending the President had not given the speech, and asking how much would we be spending on all the technologies that are now under SDI if there had been no SDI. But my guess is it would not be that different, the amount of money that we would be spending in total. One of the reasons is that gathering all this technology into SDI has created a fat target for Congress, and so these programs have been subjected to scrutiny on Capitol Hill that they probably would not have been subjected to had there been no SDI. Second, by emphasizing space-based missile defense rather than warning, or air defense, or intelligence, or all the other purposes to which the same technologies could be directed, we have, to some extent, diverted these technologies from other courses that might have been fruitful for them. And so however you manage the technology, you pay a price. And I don't think it's clear that one can make a simple statement that SDI has benefited the technologies. Some, it has helped; some, it has, undoubtedly, hindered. I don't think it has done any great harm. I don't think it's done any great help. This is all at the margin.

ONE OF THE BIG INNOVATIONS, AS I UNDERSTAND IT, FOR SDI -- I MEAN FOR AN ABM DEFENSE, SDI, WAS THE NOTION THAT WE WOULD GO TO A SERIES OF LAYERS OF DEFENSE, RATHER THAN SIMPLY A GROUND BASE, SINGLE OPPORTUNITY IN THAT MINUTE AND A HALF OR SO AT THE END, THAT NOW WE'VE GOT -- THIS WAS DESIGNED AS THE BIG, BIG BREAKTHROUGH. FIRST, WHY DON'T YOU COMMENT ON THAT GENERALLY?

Yeah. The idea was to intercept ballistic missiles coming from the Soviet Union to the United States in each of the three phases of their flight. The flight takes about half an hour. It begins when the rocket blasts off in the Soviet Union. And the rocket motor burns for a few minutes, three to five minutes. That's the boost phase. Then the warheads coast through space for another 20 minutes or so, and then they reenter the atmosphere of the United States and hit their targets. So you have the boost phase, the mid-course phase when they're flying through space, and the reentry phase when they reenter the atmosphere. The defenses before SDI that were mainly under investigation in the United States were defenses to intercept the individual warheads in the reentry phase, the last phase; and to a lesser extent, in the mid-course phase, toward the end of the mid-course phase. The new element in SDI is the attempt to intercept the Soviet rocket while it's still burning, over the Soviet Union. Now, obviously, this is an idea that people have had since there were rockets. So for 40 years, people have thought about this. Why? Because to intercept a rocket over the Soviet Union, you have to put the weapon somewhere around the Soviet Union or in the Soviet Union. Well, they're not going to allow you to deploy your defense in their country; so the only way to do it is to do it from space. And hovering over enemy territory in space is not a very comfortable place from which to mount your defense. Much more comfortable to mount your defense from your own territory, where you can build anything you want, deploy anything you want; but then you can only intercept the warheads in reentry. So the boost phase has a theoretical attractiveness, but some practical limitations or difficulties.

WERE THERE ANY TECHNOLOGICAL BREAKTHROUGHS OR THOUGHTS THAT MADE THE IDEA OF KEEPING SOMETHING IN POSITION OVER THE SOVIET UNION MORE ATTRACTIVE THAN IT HAD BEEN IN THE PAST?

No. Just the general notion that as the years go by, it becomes easier to put equipment in space, and that equipment gets more sophisticated. That's the good news. The bad news is that for the very same reason, technological progress, it becomes easier for the Soviets to shoot down or bypass U.S. satellites in space. And I think that in our emphasis on the boost phase, we have been too focused on the fact that we could build better satellites than we could 20 and 30 years ago, and not as focused as we should have been on the equal fact that the Soviets can build anti-satellites and various devices for fooling and destroying our defense better than they could 30 years ago. So technology has aided both sides, and the balance is probably not that different from the way it was years ago.

ARE YOU SUGGESTING HERE THAT THERE -- I MEAN IS THERE AN EQUATION BETWEEN DEFENSE VERSUS OFFENSE WHEN IT COMES TO THIS KIND OF STUFF?

Not in any necessary way that you can derive from equations. It just is a fact that many of the same technologies that are good for shooting down Russian boosters are also good, in Russian hands, at shooting down American defensive satellites. For example, laser or particle beams in space which we're developing to shoot down Soviet boosters, if they were placed in orbit by the Soviets near our defensive satellites might attack our satellites, burn them up or destroy them before they ever had a chance to go into action. So the very same technology, a laser or a particle beam, works for the defense and also works for the offense. And so one can't say that technological progress is good for defenses it is also good for offense, and there is a complex balancing game that is always going on.

WHEN WE FIRST DEVELOPED THE ATOMIC BOMB, WE GOT AN ENORMOUS TECHNOLOGICAL LEAP AHEAD OF THE SOVIETS -- OF COURSE, THEY WEREN'T OUR ENEMY THEN -- WHICH WE USED AGAINST THE SOVIETS. BUT ISN'T IT CONCEIVABLE THAT WITH AMERICA'S ENORMOUS TECHNOLOGICAL EXPERTISE, ITS WEALTH AS A COUNTRY, ITS FAMILIARITY AND ABILITY TO DEAL TECHNICALLY, THAT WE CAN MAKE A SIMILAR LEAP WHEN IT COMES TO DEFENSIVE WEAPONS THAT WOULD SIMPLY PUT US 10, 15, 20 YEARS AHEAD OF THE SOVIETS?

Well, we are ahead of the Soviets in technology. They've been following us for 40 years. But remember that nuclear weapons are enormously powerful, cheap and small. To defend against them doesn't require us to be just a little bit ahead; we would have to be way, way ahead of the Soviets in order for our defensive technology to so thoroughly defeat their offensive technology that they couldn't get any or many nuclear warheads through. So the standard of nuclear defense is a very demanding one, and it's not good enough to be just a little ahead of the other guy. You've got to be way ahead. For example, the British in World War II won the battle of Britain against Hitler's air force, not with a perfect defense, but with a defense that just shot down a few planes every time the Germans came to bomb Britain. Since it took many, many, many plane loads of bombs to destroy London, the Germans had to keep coming back and coming back, even if the British destroyed just a few German planes on every flight, they would eventually wipe out the German Air Force, which is what they did. Now, with nuclear weapons, it's a whole new ball game, and only takes that first wave of bombers to destroy a country. So the British, in World War II, if the Germans had had nuclear weapons, would have had to have been much better than they were to have defeated the Germans. So nuclear weapons just make the job of defense very, very difficult, unfortunately.

IS THERE SOME LEVEL OF DEFENSE THAT WOULD MAKE SENSE? IN OTHER WORDS, IS IT FIFTEEN PERCENT, TWENTY PERCENT, FIFTY PERCENT, SEVENTY PERCENT LESS THAN A PERFECT DEFENSE THAT WOULD, IN FACT, ALLOW A COUNTRY TO SURVIVE AND CONTINUE TO FUNCTION, AND PERHAPS EVEN RETALIATE AND DEFEAT AN ENEMY IN THE CASE OF A NUCLEAR WAR?

Well, it's difficult to define what victory would be when we're talking about thousands of nuclear warheads detonating on both countries. It's more fruitful, and most people talk not of winning the war once it begins, but of avoiding the war in the first place. And the question is, can defenses play a role; even defenses that aren't good enough to protect the country if war comes, can they play a role in discouraging the attacker from attacking? And there, I think there is a theoretical, perhaps, or granted case, but some case that, can be made that defenses, properly designed and cooperatively deployed, could play a role in making it even clearer than it is now that nuclear war is a bad proposition for both countries. For example, you might say to yourself, "the Soviets -- why would they attack the United States in the first place?" Well, maybe because they have taken leave of their senses; there's not going to be anything we can do about that. But if they hope, by attacking us with nuclear weapons, to destroy our military forces and, thereafter, be able to conquer Europe or keep us out of their hair, perhaps we could make their attack on our military forces either impractical to achieve or so uncertain that they couldn't be sure that a military attack would work. A number of people have raised that prospect, and I think there is something to that. To make those theoretical concepts stand up, you still need a pretty good defense. So a ten or fifteen percent defense still would allow the Soviets to attack, with reasonable confidence, the U.S. military machine. So I think you've come far from causing the Soviets to cease, cease thinking or their nuclear weapons as good weapons to attack U.S. military forces with when you've deployed a thin shield like that. A shield has to be pretty thick for a counter—military defense, even.

WOULD YOU HAZARD A STATISTICAL -- WOULD YOU QUANTIFY THAT? WOULD YOU HAZARD A QUANTIFICATION OF THREAT, IN TERMS OF--

Well, I would say that, for example, a defense of our missile silos, and a Soviet defense of their silos, if they wish to, that was reasonably inexpensive, that was not so easily overwhelmed that, the only effective deploying it was to cause the Soviets to build up their forces and overwhelm it. Defensive silos of that kind, I think, is widely agreed, to he stabilizing if both sides deployed them. The problem is that both sides have found other ways of protecting their nuclear retaliatory forces from destruction, and they have not turned to missile defense. But it certainly is part of the bag of tricks that both have to defend their retaliatory forces. They have not resorted to this element in their bag of tricks yet, but they might some day. So there's an example of a case in which ballistic missile defense might be a good thing. And I think we always ought to keep a mind open, that even though we don't have any technological prospect of defending ourselves in a meaningful way, or our society, against nuclear attack, that limited missile defenses or for specialized purposes might play a role in maintaining the peace. I realize that that's the kind of thing that only people who spend a lot time -- maybe too much time -- thinking about this business can appreciate or want, or say they appreciate, and it doesn't have much public appeal. But it's, theoretically, an attractive concept in some ways, and there are members of the Administration for whom the appeal of SDI is this theoretical prospect, and not the shield for people.

I'VE STRAYED FROM WHAT I WANTED TO BEGIN WITH, AND THAT WAS THE STEP-BY—STEP LAYER DEFENSE THING. LET ME GO BACK TO THAT, IF I CAN. YOU MENTIONED, IN TERMS OF THE BOOST PHASE, THAT THE ONE THING YOU HAVE MENTIONED SO FAR IS THE VULNERABILITY OF THE SATELLITES THAT WOULD BE ORBITING ABOVE THE SOVIET UNION. LET'S PRESUME THAT THOSE COULD BE HARDENED OR PROTECTED IN SOME WAY; ARE THERE OTHER PROBLEMS?

Well, in addition to the vulnerability of the defensive satellites, boost-phase defense faces a number of other potential Soviet countermeasures, so-called; things the Soviets could do to frustrate a US boost-phase defense. For example, they could shorten the period of boost phase by making their rocket burn faster. That gives our defense simply less time to act and makes it less efficient. They could increase the number of their boosters, which would cause us to increase the number of satellites. Now, satellites cost a lot more than boosters; we're going to go broke building satellites before they go broke building boosters. They can clump all of their boosters together in one place so that only the satellites over that one part of the Soviet Union can participate in the defense, and they can overwhelm, in that small area of sky, our defense. They can harden their satellites; that is, protect—-sorry, their boosters -- They can harden their boosters, which means putting shielding on the outside, for example, to protect them against damage. So there are many things -- the Soviets can do to fool, disrupt, trick, destroy the defense. There's a whole bag of tricks on their side, and we need to worry about them and make sure that we can defeat all of those countermeasures with our own counter countermeasures before we can have confidence that by building a defense we're not wasting our money.

WOULD YOU -- I'D LIKE YOU TO GO OVER ONE THING AGAIN, BECAUSE IT STRUCK ME AS YOU WERE TALKING THAT WHAT YOU'RE SAYING IN TERMS OF THEM CLUMPING THEIR RESOURCES TOGETHER OR EVEN FOCUSING, IS ALL YOU WOULD HAVE TO DO IS PUNCH A HOLE THROUGH THIS DEFENSE, AND YOU'RE OUT; RIGHT?

You can punch a hole through the defense, either by launching up some rockets that attack the defensive satellites and destroy the ones that are overhead the Soviet missile silo fields, or you can launch all the Soviet missiles through one part of the U.S. defensive shield; in effect, punch through the shield, and then once the -- and locally, overwhelm the defense in one region of the sky. Both of those tactics are well known in warfare. They are certainly well known to the Soviets and to the United States, and we have to worry about them.

NOW, IN THE SECOND PHASE, THE MID-COURSE PHASE, THOSE -- MANY OF THOSE PROBLEMS DON'T EXIST; THAT IS, YOU DON'T HAVE TO HAVE YOUR SATELLITES ORBITING OVER THE SOVIET UNION. GROUND-BASED DEFENSES BECOME MUCH MORE USABLE, AND YOU HAVE A MUCH, MUCH LONGER PERIOD OF TIME TO ATTACK.

Exactly right. Defense in the mid-course has many advantages relative to boost-phase defense. I can be conducted from our homeland. Since the mid-course phase lasts about twenty minutes, the defense has lots of time to plan its moves. So that's the good news. The bad news, as there always is, in mid-course defense is that the warheads are passing through empty space. And it turns out that it's very easy to make lightweight decoy warheads that look just like real, warheads and that fly just like real warheads through the emptiness of space. And so we have to worry that the Soviets will shoot thousands of warheads, which they have, but accompany those thousands of warheads with hundreds of thousands of dummy warheads or decoys. We can't afford to build an interceptor for every dummy warhead the Soviets build; so by building decoys, they make it impossible for our mid—course defenses to work.

BUT DON'T SOME OF THE NEW, EXOTIC TECHNOLOGIES, LIKE THE NEUTRAL PARTICLE BEAM WEAPON, DISCRIMINATE BETWEEN THE DENSITY OF A—-

There are some exotic, yet unproven ideas for discriminating warheads from decoys. But at the moment, it looks like they are themselves so expensive that they may be as expensive as simply shooting at all the decoys. So it's not enough to find a way to discriminate decoys from warheads; this method of doing that has to be cheaper than the thing you're trying to avoid doing, which is shooting down all the decoys.

WELL, THE COST QUESTION, LET ME JUST PUT IT THIS WAY.

Missile defense is not like going to the moon, for example, where year by year your ability to get -- go the moon cheaply and safely increases, because technology gets better and better. But the moon doesn't get better and better at evading you or shooting back at you or doing any thing. It's different when you're competing against the Russians. Their, their technology gets better at the same time your technology is getting better. So you're competing with an intelligent, dynamic opponent, another human being; not with an inert, celestial body, as you were with the moon. Now, imagine if the moon didn't want us to visit them in 1969. The moon had shot at our little lunar module as it was landing, or fooled its sensor so that it didn't know where it was, or switched off their lights so that the moon -- the astronauts couldn't see where they were going. Well, we wouldn't have arrived there in 1969. We may still not have gone to the moon, if the moon didn't want us to come there. So it's very different to compete against inert, unchanging, unhostile nature, on the one hand, and to compete against another person's technology, as we are in the Soviet Union. And so for that reason, technology gets better for the Russians to get through our defense, gets better for us to build the defense. And one can't say that we'll ever get so much better in our technology than they are in theirs, that we'll be able to defend ourselves perfectly against nuclear weapons.

WHAT IF WE BOTH SHIFTED OUR STRATEGIES? WHAT IF WE BOTH MADE A DECISION -- HOWEVER WE MADE THAT DECISION, COVERTLY OR JUST OVERTLY -- JUST DECIDED TO SHIFT OUR EMPHASIS FROM OFFENSE TO DEFENSE? WE KIND OF MADE A COMMON PACT THAT WE WOULD TRY TO DEFEND OURSELVES. WOULD THAT MAKE A DEFENSE MORE CREDIBLE? ...IF, INSTEAD OF TRYING TO COUNTER THESE, IF WE BOTH DECIDED ON A DEFENSE -- IF WE ACCEPTED THE IDEA, BOTH SUPER POWERS OR ALL THE SUPER POWERS, THAT DEFENSE WAS SOMEHOW MORALLY AND INHERENTLY BETTER THAN OFFENSE, AND THEN SET OUT TO DO THAT, WOULD THAT -- WHERE WOULD THAT TAKE US?

Well, from the technical point of view, missile defense becomes much, much easier if the other side is not trying to compete with you, but is trying to cooperate, and the Soviets are not building more missiles, they're not building anti-satellites to attack our satellites. If they agree not to try to get through our defense, we can eventually build a defense that, can intercept all of their missiles. But the key is that they not be trying. It may be a better world if both sides, instead of building defenses that the other side tries to overwhelm, agree to limit the offenses so that the defenses, so to speak, stand a chance against, the offenses. Many people favor that. It certainly has a logic to it. That is, in effect, the rational behind the proposal, deep cuts proposal, that the Reagan Administration has made, that both sides reduce drastically their offensive arsenals.

LET ME GO BACK TO SPECIFICS AGAIN, EVEN THOUGH I THINK THEY ARE CLEAR. I THINK WE'VE MADE THE ARGUMENT. BUT WHAT ABOUT THE -- WHAT ABOUT LAND-BASED ASSETS THAT DON'T DEPEND UPON SPACE-BASED ASSETS? ARE THEY LESS VULNERABLE TO SOVIET COUNTER MEASURES?

Every defensive phase has its measures, counter measures, complicated game. Ground-based defenses do have the advantages that they are farther from the Soviet Union, based farther from the Soviet Union and, therefore, harder for the Soviets to destroy. If the Soviets could destroy the defense, then they'd -- after that, they'd have a free shot. So ground-based defenses are easier to keep alive through the war. Ground-based defenses, on the other hand, have some disadvantages. In general, if you build a defensive base in New York, you can only defend the New York area or the East Coast. They don't have nationwide coverage, and so you have to build lots of bases all over. People don't want to have bases. You have to build lots of interceptor missiles, because the Soviets have lots of warheads. And so ground-based defense, these later layers themselves, have their difficulties. And that's why people have hoped that by building all three kinds of layers, one could somehow eventually create enough barriers to the offensive missile, that maybe that would work.

YOU KNOW THE TROUBLE WITH YOUR ARGUMENT? IT'S DEPRESSING. I MEAN I'M SITTING HERE LISTENING TO WHAT YOU'RE SAYING. YOU'RE SAYING WE CAN'T DEFEND OURSELVES, AND IT'S MAKING ME FEEL -- I MEAN IT'S HARD TO ACCEPT. I MEAN I DON'T THINK PEOPLE WANT TO ACCEPT THAT.

Oh, there's nothing worse and nothing more unacceptable than the notion that we are vulnerable to destruction by the Soviet Union, a country that is politically that unpalatable to Americans. It's terrible; and that's why we all wish so much that we could use our own technology to make that no longer true, to shoot down all the Russian missiles. And it's a sad fact that we can't. It's a little bit like we're all going to die unless somebody finds something that we don't expect them to find in our lifetime, which is a cure for death. It's one of those miserable facts. But I think to... reach out and embrace something that's, for now, only a hope is just not realistic. I don't think we can afford wishful thinking when we're staring down the barrel of thousands and thousands of Russian nuclear warheads. We have to be more clear-eyed than that.

TWENTY YEARS FROM NOW WHEN THE BOOKS ARE WRITTEN ABOUT THIS ERA, THE REAGAN YEARS, WHAT'S -- WHAT ARE PEOPLE GOING TO REMEMBER MOST ABOUT THIS STRATEGIC ARMS RACE?

I think people will remember a President who was sincerely disturbed, as all Presidents, I think, are by their responsibilities for the security of this country, and their absolute helplessness to physically defend the country against nuclear attack. In that sense, everyone's heart goes out to President Reagan because of his frustration with the nuclear dilemma. I think people will also remember that for the first time in the nuclear age, a President has held out to the American people the hope that we can do something about this all by ourselves, with some reasonable probability of success within a reasonable time. Other Presidents have not done that because they didn't feel, that that was a true hope that they could hold out, and they didn't want to give the American people a false hope. I think that that hope is still a false hope and we'll remember it as a fond hope, but a false hope.

DOES THAT MEAN THAT WE'RE BACK, THAT WE'RE STUCK WITH MUTUAL ASSURED DESTRUCTION? IS THAT A FAIR WAY TO PUT THAT?

For the moment, we are stuck with mutual assured destruction as a technological fact. We're not stuck with it if, for some reason -- I'm not a political person -- but the two sides decide to reduce their offensive forces. So it's clear that humankind doesn't have to live in a state of mutual terror. We can't do anything about that state with technology, but it isn't necessary that we continue to have arsenals as big. And, in fact, President Reagan has begun the process of reducing the arsenals in size. So that is possible. A defense using technology against nuclear weapons is, unfortunately, not in the cards.

YOU KIND OF ANSWERED THIS IN THAT LAST, BUT I WANT TO MAKE IT EVEN CLEARER BECAUSE I THINK, HERE'S AN ADMINISTRATION THAT CAME TO POWER, I THINK AS YOU PUT IT, WANTING TO GO IT ALONE, LOOKING FOR A TECHNOLOGICAL SOLUTION; NOW MOVING TO THE CONFERENCE TABLE TO -- BACK TO WHAT AMERICAN PRESIDENTS IN THE PAST HAVE RELIED ON, WHICH IS POLITICS AND NEGOTIATION. AND I WONDER WHETHER IT'S A, WHETHER IT'S A DELAYING TACTIC SO HE CAN CONTINUE TO DEVELOP SDI OR WHETHER IT'S A GENUINE, REALLY A SHIFT IN POLICY.

We're all observers, at a remove, of the President. And I certainly don't presume to know his thinking, but I think that he wants to be remembered as a President who gave this hope a try. And I think he will be remembered as a President who gave this hope a try. I think he will also be remembered as a President who was not as comfortable giving other hopes a try, hopes like reducing the offensive arsenals rather than building up the defensive arsenals. And so I think he will be remembered for a strong wish to do something fundamental about the nuclear predicament. I don't think he will be remembered for realistic thinking about the prospects for technology to change that predicament very soon, in a very fundamental way.

I THINK WE'RE DONE, BUT I HAVE ONE MORE QUESTION. I'M SORRY TO JUMP BACK AND FORTH FROM SPECIFIC TO GENERAL, BUT IT IS JUST THE WAY MY MIND IS WORKING TODAY. BUT I THINK YOU OUGHT TO MAKE A COMMENT ON THE COMMAND AND CONTROL, THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. I THINK THAT'S THE ONE THING WE'VE LEFT OUT OF THIS, KIND OF THE TECHNOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT.

Okay. Obviously, if one builds a three-layered defense, with lots of satellites and lots of eyes and ears, missiles on the ground, airplanes and rockets of all kinds flying around, one has a very complex system, with hundreds of individual components. A complex system like that requires a very sophisticated nervous system to make sure all the parts work together and to make sure that the defense never acts unless it's authorized to act. That is, without a doubt, a very challenging aspect of building a Star Wars, so-called type of defense. There are some who believe it is the most challenging aspect. I'm not sure of that myself, but it is certainly a challenging aspect.