LET'S GO BACK TO MARCH 23RD, 1983. I'D LIKE YOU TO RECALL WHEN YOU HEARD THE SPEECH, KIND OF IN A STORY SENSE, WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST REACTION?

My first reaction when I heard the speech was that the President was acting out a wish that every president entering the White House has; namely, to do something better than deterrence, something better than living a mutual hostages. But that this time he was carrying it a bit further, or he had the cart before the horse, let me put it that way. Because he made a claim, and expressed a vision, without first having had the opportunity to think seriously with a scientist what the physical realities were. Every president, when he goes into the White House says, "I got to do something better than living as a hostage." In all history, we've had governments defending our vital interests. It's only in the nuclear age where the destructive power of weapons has increased by a million or more, that we've come to this condition that we live in that we don't have a way of defending our vital interests. And no president feels comfortable, people don't feel comfortable. It violates your basic human instinct to defend yourself. But in previous administrations, ever since Eisenhower and the beginning of the nuclear age, presidents have had their advisors, their science advisors, study the issue and come to a reluctant but realistic conclusion that there was no way to defend our nation, our national society, in this age when you have many nuclear weapons. And that's how we got the ABM Treaty of 1972. I think it's totally proper for the President, President Reagan or anyone else to say, "Can't we do better?" and to challenge his scientists. But here we got sort of a vision and a call to render these weapons obsolete before a study was done to indicate what the realities were, and that there were limitations. So I was worried that the President thought that one could achieve this total defense, but the basis for that didn't exist. You can't coerce the laws of nature by your policy wishes. And it seemed to me he was trying to do that, and I was worried that the discipline that comes when you first study the problem. Then Nixon came in saying, "I want to do better," but then he said in his famous 1969 speech, "Reluctantly, against all my basic instincts, I've come to the conclusion we can't do it." And so I was worried, because once the President puts his weight behind a claim or a goal, it's very difficult to come in and say, "No, Mr. President, you're wrong." I consider that the failure of a science advisory apparatus, that the President was out on a limb making claims and being followed by his Secretary of Defense and other senior administration officials, even with more enthusiasm. And I believed that the technical realities were incommensurate with that hope.

YOU'VE KIND OF ANSWERED THIS, BUT LET ME ASK IT ANOTHER WAY, SLIGHTLY. IT'S GOING TO SOUND MORE NAÏVE THAN IT IS. WEREN'T THERE A SERIES OF SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHROUGHS IN THE MID 1970S THAT MADE THE IDEA OF DEFENSE MORE CREDIBLE THAN IT HAD BEEN IN THE PAST?

Absolutely. There was technological progress in directed energy beams, lasers, high power beams focused like precise, narrow searchlights. Data handling, be able to handle the mega bits of information you would need to handle in short time, transmitting it over large distances. Sensors of great sensitivity. There were, and it was absolutely proper to ask for a detailed review. Now that one has had technology developing from the '72 ABM treaty ratification date to '83, what can we do? I think that is the proper question to ask, to have a scrubbing of the ideas, to look and then to come to some conclusion based upon a realistic scientific analysis what we can do and what we can't do. And so I think had the President started by saying, "Would there have been these breakthroughs, let us once again examine the assumptions which led to the ABM treaty"; namely, that technically there was no way to defend a nation against destruction given the terrible destructive power of nuclear warheads. So I think it's proper. I think every president's going to do that. Here, what happened was the claims, the vision, the optimism, got out of touch with reality and tried to drive a political process instead of having the political process recognize the technical condition; namely, then in a world heavily armed with nuclear weapons, the only way to prevent destruction of your nation is by not having a nuclear war. And to recognize the technical realities that if you don't restrain the offenses, qualitatively and quantitatively, the prospect of building a nationwide defense are nil.

WE'LL GET TO THAT AGAIN. I WANT TO GET TO THAT A LITTLE BIT. I WANT TO ASK YOU A LITTLE BIT, I DON'T KNOW HOW TO ASK THIS QUESTION. MUTUAL ASSURED DESTRUCTION IS A TERRIBLY DIFFICULT CONCEPT, EVEN FOR A VERY INTELLIGENT PERSON TO INTERNALIZE AND FEEL GOOD ABOUT.

Mutual assured destruction, I prefer to call it mutual assured deterrence, is a very difficult concept. It violates the most basic human instinct to defend your family, to defend your interests. It violates history because history has always had governments trying to defend their vital interests and defense and offensive played with each other to get the ascendancy. So it's without historical precedent, it violates human instinct and it's a dangerous condition to live in, especially when you have growing numbers of nuclear nations. And therefore it's natural to long for more and to try and find whether technically you can achieve it. And so it's just my technical judgment, and let me say I'm a physicist and my technical judgment extends to the limit of my ability to see where technology's going. And let me say that's, say, to the end of this century, 15 years or so. It's my technical judgment, as far as I can see, that there's no prospect for a nationwide defense, or an effective defense, without restraints on the offense. That what we require of a defense in the nuclear age to be effective is such a high standard of performance that it's unrealistic. A defense won the Battle of Britain in World War II when the RAF, the Royal Air Force, succeeded in destroying one out of ten German airplanes per sortie. London could recover from the fires, it was terrible, but they could recover from the fires. Meanwhile, the loss rate to the German Air Force exceeded their ability to replace their losses. Because if you lose one out of ten per raid, at the end of ten raids, you have little more than a third of your air force left. But it's changed now. If you want a defense that's effective, it's got to be basically the hundred percent effective. Once the first bomb lands on London or San Francisco, that's the end of the city. And so you require a higher standard of performance of a defense than ever before in history. And I think that has made the change that has said we're going to live as mutual hostages in this world as long as we have nuclear weapons. President Eisenhower, I think, understood this very well even at the dawn of the thermal nuclear age when he said, and if I recall correctly it was 1956 during his presidency, that war used to be the battle until the exhaustion of your enemy and his surrender. But now, it's really becoming unacceptable because it's become a matter of destruction of the enemy and suicide. Basically, you can't prevent destruction to yourself. And I think it violates our instincts, and we keep trying to do better and I think it's appropriate to see what technology offers. But it's my judgment that the path to a safer world, or a better condition that mutual assured deterrence is going to be paved predominantly by political progress. Technology will have a role, and I cannot say blankly that there's no role for defense in the future. But as long as we have a world with the large number of nuclear weapons we have now, I don't see either building an effective defense to survive the use of these weapons, nor do I see making the deterrence more stable. The danger of nuclear weapons, predominantly, is not just that you accumulate them but you might use them. And to minimize the risk of nuclear conflict, you want to remove misunderstanding, mistrust, and you want to remove any notion that you might gain something by initiating their use. It has to be absolutely clear that there can be no conceivable, rational reason to initiate their use. And so you have to ask yourself, if you have some defense, a partially effective defense, does that help you realize the futility of using these weapons? Or might it lure you to use them? And I think it's my judgment that if you have an imperfect defense, you might think that with the mixture of a sword and a shield that in a crisis, in a crisis situation, perhaps you should strike first with your nuclear weapons because your shield, even though it's imperfect, might be relatively more effective protecting you against a retaliatory attack which will be of reduced intensity and somewhat more poorly coordinated if you've struck first and done some damage to your opponent than that shield could be effective if you were the subject of the first strike. So the mix of sword and shield could make, in the words of Sakharov in 1967 when his words were only written in the Samizdat because the Soviet government then didn't agree with it. Andrei Sakharov said that when you have the mixture of the sword and shield, you can give the madmen or the nuclear war fighters the notion that maybe they can use the weapons and count on the shield for some protection. Put another way, if you have a leaky umbrella, it may do you more good when you go out in a drizzle than in a full downpour. And so you may think that with a partially protective defense in a time of crisis, of extreme urgency, strike first because your shield will be relatively more effective. I think any sane person would never initiate the use of nuclear weapons. I think the only purpose of nuclear weapons is to deter their use by a would-be attacker. And I think that the path to safer world is to help work a political regime with less distrust and less possibility for misunderstanding and to make absolutely clear by the way we deploy our weapons that we will have an effective retaliatory capability even if we're struck first. And therefore, following the Scowcroft report, I think that paying attention to having highly survivable command and control structures, highly survivable retaliatory forces, is the first order of business for maintaining an effective deterrent.

LET ME EXTRACT THREE QUESTIONS FROM THAT. ONE, LOOKING WAY DOWN THE ROAD IN THE FUTURE, IS THERE ANY REASON TO BELIEVE THAT EVENTUALLY, NOT IN THE NEAR TERM, BUT EVENTUALLY WE COULD HAVE A DEFENSE THAT WOULD, IN ESSENCE, RENDER NUCLEAR WEAPONS OBSOLETE BECAUSE IT MAYBE NOT 100 PERCENT, BUT SUFFICIENTLY?

I can't answer that question. I can only say what I see to the limit of the technology I can extrapolate to, which is like, say, to the end of the century. That is why I believe it's appropriate, it's essential, for this country to have a good research program in the technology strategic defense so that if there is some technological breakthrough that I cannot anticipate, we're prepared to capitalize on it in our own protection. Or, so that we're prepared should the Russians break out. I think what's going on in the lab, what's going on research, is the kind of activity you can't closely monitor. I think it's appropriate to try and build a safer world by that mixture of technology and politics. That's what the ABM Treaty of 1972 was written and carefully crafted to allow us to do. We were doing it before the President's speech. Maybe we have a better program by organizing it under the SDI umbrella, although there's also a risk that if that program is not well managed or if it's directed prematurely for demonstrations or sleazy stunts, as I like to call them, instead of good, solid research, you get a worse program even though you're spending more money. Also, we recognize the Russians have such a program. And so I think that's the nature of the competition; a good research program, be prepared to take advantage of technological developments which might make some defense, together with arms control, a safer world. There may be a better world out there; let's hope so. Research, consistent with the ABM Treaty, is sensible from my point of view. But I would not give up the ABM Treaty. I would not give up deterrence until, or unless, I know that there's something better to replace it by. That's why I endorse the research program consistent with the ABM Treaty. And by ABM Treaty, I mean the only ABM Treaty that I understand, the one that was negotiated, the one that was ratified, the one that was obeyed by this country up until 1985. And I think this redefinition or broadening of the interpretation doesn't really stand up to rigorous scrutiny. And what's more, I don't even think it's in US national interest, either, because for two reasons. One is if the Russians adopt a broad interpretation, they're going to be doing a lot of activities which are going to make me concerned about whether they're getting ready to break out with a defense system which won't contribute to stability. And for another reason. I think that for the next decade, or again the end of my technological vision, we don't need a reinterpretation of the treaty. The gap between what we understand now, the gap between the technology that we can deliver now, and what would be required for an ABM system is so great, the understanding we have to gain is still so deep that I think a good, broad research program consistent with the treaty is the best program for the United States. Premature promotion to demonstrations is terrific on the TV news, the network news, but it's generally when done prematurely, a squandering of your resources and a lowering of the quality of your program.

(BACKGROUND DISCUSSION)

I can add gratuitously a statement to that if you want. It seems to me that, I'm going to wait until I get the thought right. People who adopt my what is often called conservative attitude on this are often called naysayers, scientists who don't believe that science can solve the problems. I will defend myself against that charge. I am not a naysayer, I'm a technological optimist. I believe that when technology and science are given a challenge and the resources, and the resources, they will generally surmount them. I never doubted that we would put a man on the moon. Here in the ABM battle, we're not talking about man against nature, which is a technological challenge. We're talking about man against man because whatever the defense can do, you have to worry what are the countermeasures that the offense can come up with that may be easier, less expensive to achieve to nullify the defense? In other words, putting a man on the moon was a technical problem because the moon didn't object to being landed on. But if the Russians don't want to lose their deterrent, their countermeasures are available as ours are against the Soviet defense to make sure that the defense doesn't work. So this is not a matter of technological nay-saying, this is a matter of being realistic in the competition between man against man and recognizing that because of their awesome destructive potential, the odds favor the offense over the defense.

OKAY, THIS IS THE HOW MANY NUCLEAR WEAPONS QUESTION?

Nobody knows what will happen when the first thermonuclear bomb is dropped in anger. There's been a lot of talk about limited use of nuclear weapons, limited use only against military targets, not against civilian targets, having reduced casualties. And indeed, one can do calculations; drop one megaton either air burst or ground burst, certain wind conditions, and calculate casualties. One thing you have to, I'll start again. When one considers the use of nuclear weapons, it is possible to say consider one megaton or ten megatons dropped on military targets, calculate based on the assumption of weather patterns, whether the bombs are air burst or surface burst, what the radioactive fallout will be. And one can calculate from known properties of an explosion the blast, the heat, what the casualty levels will be. And one can be led to suggest that limited nuclear war fighting might be a practical possibility. The thing you have to understand, it seems to me, is that when you're living in a world with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, the shock of the first use of a nuclear weapon in anger is going to be so great that it's really very difficult to extrapolate, or predict, how humans will react because once a nuclear weapon is used, the opponent may decide that perhaps two nuclear weapons were used and to use two back. And in the haze of conflict, the pressure, the tension with weapons only seconds or minutes away, how one will control a nuclear conflict so that the targets are only military so that the number of weapons used is very limited and then how we'll terminate it, no one knows that at all. We have no experience. The former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States, General Davey Jones, once said the least likely outcome of the use of nuclear weapons is it being limited to just nuclear targets. I think that's the problem. It's clear if there's a conflict, whether the weapons that have been used are nuclear or non-nuclear. There's a clear fire break. But once you cross the fire break, once you initiate nuclear weapon use, how you will limit the escalation up the ladder to more and more, how you will terminate, we don't know that. And the risk is great and the level of destruction that can be achieved is so enormous that I think it's unthinkable. I think it's just unthinkable. I reject totally the notion of limited nuclear war. In fact, I would say the notion of usable, militarily usable nuclear weapons, is, to my mind, a horrible notion. It's a subversive notion. Nuclear weapons have one and only one purpose in this world, to my mind, that's to deter their use by an opponent. They are not weapons of direct military value because of the enormous destructive potential that may result from their initiation.

IT'S INTERESTING. YOU'RE ALMOST SAYING THEY'RE MORE POLITICALLY IMPORTANT THAN THEY ARE MILITARILY?

I think they are, I think they are. I think they have no direct, direct, military value. They're there for deterrence and I think that is their only use. I think it is important for us to develop our conventional forces and our foreign policy so that we meet our national interests and we prepare to meet them with conventional weapons. Now, I'm not calling for getting rid of nuclear weapons, because I don't know how to do it in practice, particularly in a world where we still have adversary nations like we have today. I'm not even calling for no first use because part of deterrence is the threat of their use. What I am saying is that we should have a policy and forces that don't rely on early first use. And otherwise, I can't do better with the logical ambiguities and the tortured logic, I should say, of deterrence than the American Catholic Bishops did in their pastoral letter of 1983 when they talked about the horror of nuclear weapon use and then said that nuclear deterrence is not acceptable as an end in itself. But, if one is using time and the opportunity to work gradually for nuclear disarmament, it's a morally acceptable policy. And I think that is a logical problem that one just cannot break away from. We have weapons that threat destruction of civilians by the millions, innocent civilians, a level we've never before had in history and it's immoral, it's dangerous. But what else can we do as long as we have these weapons? What else can we do? They're there to deter someone else from using it while by political means we work in a steady way through arms control like we have been doing this past year between US and Soviet Union to try and reduce the weapons, remove certain categories, hopefully, remove the, reduce the strategic weapons by a half and build a better, more constructive political dialogue which reduces the risk that they'll ever be used. And I must say that the Reykjavik's mini summit which has often been called a failure by many people, to my mind had a very important achievement. Let's not focus on whether they said let's get rid of all weapons and whether that's realistic or not. That didn't happen, and that's probably for the moment pretty good that it didn't. But what the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union did, the leaders of the two societies, which have some 97 percent or so of the weapons in the world, what they did was they put on the agenda for the people of the world to address the issue of substantially, if not drastically, reducing those weapons. We didn't have that better. Before, talk about reductions of nuclear weapons, of significant reductions, was confined pretty much to seminars at academic research institutes or public peace rallies. But now you have the leaders, the governments, setting a goal that's realistic; namely within this year to cut the number in half of strategic weapons and have achieved now the removal of an entire class of weapons in Europe. I think that there's reason for optimism.

I WANT TO TAKE YOU BACK TO 1984 NOW FOR A MINUTE. AND WHAT I WANT TO GO BACK TO IS, YOU MAY NOT BE FAMILIAR WITH THIS INTIMATELY, BUT LET ME ASK, WHEN THE FLETCHER PANEL MAKES ITS RECOMMENDATIONS, AND THE HOFFMAN PANEL, ESSENTIALLY IT SEEMS THEY'RE CALLING FOR THE RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM THAT YOU'RE SUPPORTING. WHAT I'M ASKING IS WHAT WAS YOUR REACTION TO THOSE RECOMMENDATIONS AND LET'S BEGIN THERE?

My immediate reaction to the Fletcher report, and it came in two stages. First, I read the public version, then I became familiar with the total classified version, was that it weighted more toward the research opportunities without at the same time giving equal weight to the countermeasures. And I think that there was a disbalance, both in the public presentation, in fact more in the public presentation, than in the report. In the public presentation, we heard about new directed energy weapons and electromagnetic ray guns and all these technological goodies. We didn't hear, we didn't have a serious presentation of the kinds of countermeasures that could neutralize them. And so I thought the debate that grew out of that, the way it was presented, it's not the fault of the Fletcher panel, it's the fault really of the system that presented it in the broad sense, led to somewhat of a disbalance and sort of sum notion that technology really offered more of a possibility than many of us thought. It took the critics, the opponents on the outside, to come up with the various countermeasures. And I think that what was needed was a balanced discussion. This is what one can do, these are the countermeasures, because that is the way the debate was handled before. Reminds you that the first ABM system deployed in this world in the middle 1960s was deployed by the Russians around Moscow. And that there was then a President Science Advisory Committee and a working mechanism which looked in detail at these questions. I was part of it then and we said, "What are the countermeasures? And how do you jam that defensive system? How do you overpower it or attack it or destroy it?" And it turned out the best thing was just to make more warheads. That's how the multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles were developed. Rather than jamming with decoys just have lots of weapons. And so the effect of the countermeasures in that case was to multiply the number of nuclear warheads in the world. Sure, it reduced the mega tonnage because there were smaller warheads. But in terms of their destructive potential, if used, it did not by any means lower that when the number of warheads was multiplied by the MIRV. It's an example of, A, how important it is to understand the countermeasures. That certainly was the most counterproductive thing the Russians ever did, by beginning to deploy that ABM system without thinking through what the countermeasures might do and thereby generating MIRVs. It also showed the danger of technology being thought of as a solution to a problem without considering the political and strategic and arms control framework. Because at the end of the MIRVing, first of all, we got the ABM Treaty which said you didn't need the MIRV, but having started the MIRVs, we never stopped them. And at the end of this process of starting with the ABM not having an arms control regime in place was that there were about four or five times as many warheads in the world as when we started. And the world did not become safer. In fact, the so-called window of vulnerability was opened when we perceived that the large number of Soviet ICBM accurate MIRVs threatened our land-based deterrent, the land based component of our deterrent, the minuteman force. So that shows a danger of just moving ahead with technology without the proper arms control framework in place.

ALTHOUGH THE NUMBER OF WARHEADS INCREASED, AM I CORRECT THAT THE TONNAGE OF EXPLOSIVES ARE REDUCED?

The mega tonnage was reduced, but in terms of causing destruction or causing casualties, that did not go down because the difference between having, say, a one megaton or ten megaton bomb land on a city isn't that many in the casualties. I mean, you've done so much damage. In fact, several one-megaton bombs will cause more casualties than one ten-megaton bomb. So it's more complicated than just the mega tonnage. It's a mix of the number of warheads and the mega tonnage and I think no one would say that the world was safer at the end of MIRVing when you had this prospect that one missile which became a hydra headed monster with many warheads, could now threaten to destroy a large number of silos of the retaliatory missiles and their silos and open the window of vulnerability, so-called.

THERE WAS AN INITIAL REACTION TO THE PRESIDENT'S SPEECH, STAR WARS OF CONGRESS, ET CETERA, ET CETERA. BUT THE FIRST SYSTEMATIC REVIEW OF THE PRESIDENT'S PLAN, I BELIEVE, WAS THE OFFICE OF TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT REPORT THAT CAME OUT IN MAY OR SO OF '84. WOULD YOU HAVE A COMMENT UPON THAT REPORT AND ITS FINDINGS?

Well yes, I should tell you I'm an interested party because I was on the review committee for that report. And I thought that that report was an excellent report.

WOULD YOU TELL US FIRST, TELL US ABOUT THAT REVIEW. THAT WAS THE REVIEW COMMITTEE APPOINTED BY OTA IN RESPONSE TO ABRAHAMSON'S, JUST TELL US A LITTLE BIT ABOUT THAT, JUST TELL US...

Yeah, after the President's...

I'M SORRY, I STEPPED ON YOUR LINE. YOU'RE GOOD.

After the President's speech, there were a number of academic and private organizations that undertook studies and did an analysis. But the first one that had full access to all government information, classified information, was one that the Congressional Office of Technology was tasked to do by the Congress. And there, they had analysts who did it, but there was a review panel, a group of informed citizens that were invited by OTA and I was a member of it. We were a board of criticism, a sounding board, went over the drafts, interacted with the staff. But they report the report, and it's their report. And their report gave what I thought was a superb analysis of the different technologies, the countermeasures, and the distance still to go. In other words, the gulf between individual technologies and then operating system against countermeasures. I thought that was a very good report. In fact, since then the American Physical Society undertook a superb technical study on just the technology of directed energy weapons. I take a certain pride in that because I was president of the Society during the course of that study and I think that, again, did an absolutely superb analysis with full access to classified information of the individual technologies and an assessment of how much improvement in each one was needed before it could have a weapons capability to be effective in a defense.

I KNOW THAT THERE ARE A LOT OF TECHNOLOGIES AND I HAVE A NICE DETAILED REPORT FROM ASH CARTER ON THE OTA REPORT. BUT I WONDER IF YOU COULD TAKE US THROUGH SOME OF THE APS CONCLUSIONS, KIND OF TECHNOLOGY BY TECHNOLOGY. I'M PARTICULARLY INTERESTED IN THE TWO VERSIONS OF THE FREE ELECTRON LASER BECAUSE THEY, AND ALSO ON THE NEUTRAL PARTICLE BEAM. THAT MAY BE ENOUGH, BUT DO THOSE IN JUST LITTLE...

Well, the APS, the American Physical Society study, looked at the free electron laser both by means of induction accelerators and by means of traveling wave accelerators, and showed, gave an estimate of what kinds of powers have been achieved, what kinds of wavelength regions have been explored and how many orders of magnitude of powers of ten still had to be demonstrated before one could think of a ground based free electron laser with the capability of destroying, I say, a booster by having its beam shot up through the atmosphere and bounced off of mirrors onto the rising booster. It also pointed out that the knowledge about sending high powered pulses, or waves, through the atmosphere and correcting for the turbulence which defocuses the beam, there's still information to be gained there that we don't have in hand. But it showed that there was a lot of technology ahead. Also on the neutral particle beam, the study did not talk about systems but it did raise the kinds of issues that a systems application would take, would require. For example, if you have the free electron laser and you have to shoot the beam off of a mirror in space, a relay mirror onto a mission mirror, you have to figure out how those mirrors themselves won't be vulnerable to being destroyed by the enemy by shining, by burning them with their own laser light or by shooting them down. And likewise with the neutral particle beam that would be spaced based. You have to here understand how a large accelerator in space will operate unattended continuously in contrast to the experience we have with our accelerators in high energy physics here on Earth where you have to attend to them all the time and they don't always work. You have to, especially when you turn them on, tune them carefully, and then you have to worry about the backgrounds will be there to mask the signature that the neutral particle beam creates when it runs into a warhead. So there are these system questions raised, but as far as specific technologies are concerned, what the American Physical Society report said was this is the kind of optics that have been achieved, this is the kind of current that's been achieved, or brightness of the laser. And these are the powers of ten and it made an assessment of how difficult it would be to accomplish those powers of ten. The bottom line judgment was that a good research program would have to work for about a decade or more before you would be able to know whether those technologies were at the point where they could be thought of as being then put together into some kind of architecture into an overall system. Or, I really should say super system. When you're talking about many thousands of elements operating over thousands of kilometers distance and transmitting so many megabits of energy, mega bites of energy, back and forth. It's what one calls a super system and it's going to have to operate, by the way, the first time it's used under realistic conditions because it's very hard to simulate all the conditions, that will be, all the forces and the environment that it'll be operating in once the war starts, namely when nuclear explosions are going off.

AS YOU KNOW, PRO-SDI SCIENTISTS USING PRESUMABLY THE SAME DATA CAME TO QUITE DIFFERENT CONCLUSIONS. THERE'S A DIFFERENCE IN BETWEEN WHAT YOUR... WHAT SDI SAID THIS WOULD MEAN. LET'S TAKE, FOR EXAMPLE, THE SURVIVABILITY OF MIRRORS IN SPACE. THE SDI SCIENTIST TOLD ME JUST THE OTHER DAY, "I WISH I COULD TELL YOU THE CLASSIFIED INFORMATION. BUT BELIEVE ME, THOSE THINGS ARE MUCH EASIER TO HIDE AND MAINTAIN THAN YOU THINK."

Yeah. It's a well-known ploy when you're dealing with military systems and you don't have a real argument to say, "If you knew what I knew, then you'd agree with me." Now, sometimes that argument may be true, but it's often abused. And so, all I can say is that I don't accept that argument. Now, it's very difficult for a layman, when he hears scientists disagreeing, to know what to believe. The American Physical Society tried very hard to contribute to helping people understand this issue by putting together a panel headed by two senior scientists, one a Nobel Prize winner, one a research director at Bell Labs, 16 scientists, some from government laboratories, one in the military, some from academia, not scientists who have taken strong positions one way or the other who worked very hard for several years and came up with a unanimous report. And they published their arguments. Now, others have attacked their report and they have responded. And so A, there is a record now, an unclassified report based upon full access to classified information which has come to a judgment that's going to be about a decade before you'll know whether the technologies are there to build a system. I don't know how to do better than that. A layman or citizens, we look at a politician and we say, "Why do we believe one and not the other?" It's a very difficult challenge of citizenship. You have to look at the track record, you have to look at the quality of the argument. It's hard to be an informed citizen in this game and there's no easy answer. But the American Physical Society, I think, made a great contribution by taking a non-doctrinaire panel of experts from all fields and showing that. Now, coming to conclusions, that it did. The arguments about what will operate in space unattended, it is absolutely true that you can have satellites operating for years in space. But, whether you can have accelerators, particle accelerators operating continuously and unattended in space, we have no experience with that. That's part of a research program. It's wrong to say you can't do it. It's wrong to say you can do it. A research program that builds the technology base together with experience, with operating a very complex system, we operate the telephone system, but the telephone system operates successfully because the minute you run into a problem, in goes the repair crew to fix it. How would the telephone system operate for a long time if you didn't have diagnostics and immediate access the minute you have a small breakdown? That's a different problem. But that's what you're asking of this system in space. I don't know that you can't build that computer logic and battle management capability. All I know is in many ways it's beyond anything we have experience with. So let's not say absolute yes or no. My position is a research program that continues to try and answer questions identifies the most difficult questions, tries to answer them and equally well tries to pose the countermeasures that you will have to face with such a system. As far as the pro–SDI-ers are concerned, I find it very interesting to follow their logic. The minute the President's speech was made, I heard the pro SDIers saying, "Let's go put lasers in space, let's go put lasers in space. We can't do the high frontier space based interceptors, that's too limited." Then I found next, "No, let's not put lasers in space, they're vulnerable. They're too costly and they're vulnerable. They don't meet the two criteria known as the Nitze criteria named for Ambassador Paul Nitze, the chief advisor to the administration on arms control of survivability and cost effectiveness at the margin. They've got to be ground based. So then the ground based free electron laser or excimer laser before it, and the pop up system, the nuclear pumped x-ray, became the game. Now we know those are years away. What are we doing? We're back to the high frontier concept of space-based interceptors and chemical lasers again. And these people have gone around the barn. Just look at the consistency of their logic. What's changed? Nothing has changed except that they have realized how much more difficult the technologies they originally touted were. Well, let's get together a research program, let's find out what can happen. The opponents, so-called opponents of which I call myself one, we have not changed. We have said consistently a research program consistent with the ABM Treaty which we're not willing to give up because we're going to require arms control as well as technology to make a safer world, is the way to go. A treaty consistent research program. How much money you spend? Well, that's a very complicated problem of national priorities. We were spending $1.4 or some so billion on this whole complex of activities before this program. When you looked at the five year defense buildup projected by the Carter Administration, you could see us moving up to closer to $2 billion in this whole area of space, space satellites for verification, for early warning, and what not. If we were spending now at the $3 billion level, I would say that's a very good program. We're spending at the $3.9 billion level, that's probably more than we can wisely spend. But the issue is not that. The issue is whether we're going to lose the ABM Treaty, lose the restraints that it imposes both on Russian programs and ours, lose its contribution to stability by making clear, helping make clear, that there's no use of nuclear weapons that make sense when we don't yet have answers to the technology questions that will tell us that there's something better to replace it by.

WHAT YOU'RE SAYING ABOUT THE TECHNOLOGY, AS I HEAR IT AND TELL ME IF I'M WRONG, IS THAT WE SIMPLY DON'T KNOW ENOUGH YET. AND WE NEED TO HAVE RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, BUT IT'S TOO EARLY TO SAY WHAT WE CAN PREDICT TECHNOLOGICALLY SPEAKING?

I believe that it's too early to predict technologically whether we can build an effective nationwide defense or even what it would look like. Yes, and therefore I believe that, I certainly believe that any early deployment option is not in our national interest. It would be a waste of money, it would cost us the treaty on very simple grounds. The early deployment concept, which would be space based interceptors would require, you can count that they require so many millions of pounds in space that there's no realistic prospect of putting it up, there's no realistic prospect to making that system less expensive than the anti-satellite weapons that could shoot it down. Until one has the technology that would make space based interceptors weigh at least a factor of 20 or more less than they do now, the system to my mind makes no sense. And in fact, probably the whole idea of early deployment, as far as I can see, is strictly motivated by ideological and political reasons. I remember in January of this year, 1987, the Attorney General to the Yale Club in Washington, D.C. was quoted as saying that we have to get on with that in order to prevent they program from being tampered with by future administrations. That's not good technical planning, that's not a research program. That's an ideologically driven move which would cost us the ABM Treaty and lead to an enormous waste of money.

LET'S LOOK AT A FEW OF THOSE OTHER IDEOLOGICAL OR POLITICAL PURPOSES OF SDI. WOULD YOU AGREE THAT THE PRESIDENT'S INSISTENCE ON SDI AND OUR VIGOROUS PROSECUTION OF IT THAT BROUGHT THE SOVIETS TO THE NEGOTIATING TABLE THIS LAST MONTH?

I wouldn't disagree. I don't know. I just don't know. One can argue that there were a number of reasons for the Russians to come back to the negotiating table including the failure of their policy when they walked out to prevent NATO from accepting the INF forces. But whether this helped or not, I just don't know. I can't debate that one. All I can say is let's use the fact that now they're at the negotiating table and we are working in a constructive way that it seems to me clearly in our interest, clearly in our interest, to achieve a regime where 50 percent of the strategic warheads are removed from the face of the Earth and all we do by agreeing to obey the ABM Treaty is admit there is no technology available for early deployment and that we are free to continue a robust research program. I was talking via public satellite at a conference here at Stanford this weekend, a symposium in connection with our centennial with Evgeny Velikov, the chief advisor to General Secretary Gorbachev, and he was absolutely explicit under questioning. The present SDI program of the United States at the 3.9 billion level carried out within the strictures of the ABM Treaty is completely consistent, in his view, with the 50 percent reduction of strategic forces. I consider that a marvelous deal. We get rid of the main counterforce threat against us if we have the right mix of forces that are being drawn down, which is what's being negotiated at START and apparently rather successfully. We are able to carry on what I consider from a purely technical point of view the right SDI research program because I consider for the coming decade that the ABM Treaty, the ABM Treaty that we've known so far, puts no harmful technical burden on the program that makes sense for us to do. And so whether or not the SDI got the Russians back to the negotiating table, let's not allow it to be a barrier to really substantial historic progress toward a safer world.

DR. DRELL, WE'RE A POWERFUL, RICH NATION. WE HAVE WONDERFUL SCIENTISTS, WE'RE TERRIFIC IN COMPUTERS AND SENSORS AND COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY, THE STUFF THAT SDI IS MADE OF. SOVIETS ARE A POORER NATION, DOESN'T IT MAKE A LOT OF SENSE TO GO INTO SDI BECAUSE IT'S OUR STRONG SUIT ATTACKING THEIR STRONG SUIT AND IT'S A PLACE WHERE WE CAN JUST REALLY WHIP THEM?

Well, we've said that before and every time we thought there was a technological breakthrough that was going to put us ahead of the Russians, we found that they got there shortly after we did. We're not smarter than the Russians. If they're determined, they have excellent scientists and technologists and if they're determined in their national security to do something, they will do it. They did it with MIRVs, which we thought we're technologically sweet and we had the advantage, and we ended up with a less safe world. I think in a world with nuclear weapons, we have to ask a more broad question than just trying to drive technically ahead, which in the past we have failed. You have to ask what is the mix of diplomatic and technical moves that'll make the world safer? And to my mind, the fundamental assumption is that the safest world is the one in which the deterrent position has a stability based upon a clear understanding on both sides that there is no conceivable advantage to initiating the use of nuclear weapons. We should have a vigorous research program. I think the strength of the United States vis-à-vis the Soviet Union is our economy. It's our values. We don't want to compromise our values, our principles, our constitution. No one would ever suggest that. I think our overall economic health is important. And I think it's wrong to suggest that you look to military systems for technological leadership. Our technological health, our standard of living also depends on how we handle the high technology challenge, say, from Western Europe and Japan in particular. And that is not driven by military systems. So it would be wrong to suggest that SDI is the way to have the most advanced technology. In fact, our economy seems to be suffering a slower growth rate as our relative to our western European and Japanese neighbors as they have been able to spend less on defense than we have. So it's a bigger problem. I think it's one dimensional and erroneous to say let's stick it to them with military technology.

WHAT ABOUT THE ARGUMENT THAT AN EARLY DEPLOYED SYSTEM, EVEN IF IT CAN ONLY INTERCEPT AS LITTLE AS 16 PERCENT OF THE INCOMING MISSILES, WOULD NONETHELESS CREATE SUCH A MARGIN OF UNCERTAINTY IN THE SOVIETS THEY WOULD BE DETERRED FROM ATTACKING?

Well, I think already the Soviets are deterred from attacking by the sheer knowledge that they're committing suicide were they to attack. I don't know what more deterrence you need. But if you say that we're going to put some SDI up there, what about responding by saying but suppose the Russians spend the same amount and they put more offense up there? You see, the argument that you've given me is the same argument that the Russians may have used when they started the ABM system around Moscow. They said, "Well, we'll protect Moscow against some level of attack." But what they found was the United States MIRVed and we multiplied the number of our warheads, and Moscow is no safer than it was without that ABM system. It's just that we have many more warheads, now the Russians have many more warheads and the world is not safer than it was beforehand. So we have an example. We have another example. The Russians build an air defense system, which according to the United States defense policy statement this year, the one put out by the Secretary of Defense, is costing him more than $3 to maintain for every dollar we spend on our strategic air command bomber force to make sure we can penetrate it with cruise missiles. Has the world become safer because we've taken off big bombs on our strategic bombers and have put thousands of cruise missiles on it? I don't think so. Have the Russians gained against us by that air defense system in security? No, they have spent $3 to every one we have spent and they're still totally vulnerable. In fact, maybe the reason for the air defense system has to do with other countries. But seen in the U.S./Soviet standoff, they have not in any way made themselves more secure. They've just wasted a lot of money and they have seen a threat in the strategic air command in the United States which now has thousands, not hundreds, of bombs, nuclear bombs facing it. So I think we have a couple of examples where that logic has failed. That's why Paul Nitze was so insistent that before you go ahead with anything, you must demonstrate that it's survivable and cost effective at the margin. If it's not survivable, it becomes a target itself for attack and instability. If it's not cost effective at the margin, you just end up wasting more money than the Russians would be wasting to neutralize it. And that's the argument in my mind against early deployment. There is no concept to my technical understanding, I've looked at this, which means the Nitze criteria. We would just be sending a lot of money up there and the Russians would have very easy ways to counter it, either by faster burn boosters or just direct ascent, nuclear tipped anti-satellite weapons which require much less energy to destroy the threat.

THIS IS A POLITICAL QUESTION. I DON'T KNOW IF YOU WANT TO ANSWER THIS OR NOT. IT'S STRIKING TO ME THAT WE HAVE HAD DURING THE REAGAN DAYS PROBABLY THE MOST CONSERVATIVE PRESIDENCY IN RECENT MEMORY. EXTRAORDINARILY HOSTILE SOVIET RHETORIC, ANTI-SOVIET RHETORIC. NOW AT THE END OF HIS ADMINISTRATION WE SEE ALMOST A COMING FULL CIRCLE WHERE HE HAS REACHED AN ACCOMMODATION WITH THE SOVIETS. DO YOU HAVE A COMMENT ON THAT?

Well, again, it's just an example of... it helps restore my faith in leaders of all political stripes. I think the President probably has had more time to think of what it really would mean to ever press a nuclear button. I think the President has found in the new Soviet leadership someone he feels he can do business with. But he's come to grips, it seems to me, in a way which I welcome with the realities of his responsibilities here. Now, what it's taken to do that, whether it was a defense build up, whether he's looking for his place in history, whether it's Gorbachev's style and rhetoric, I don't know. But I do think that with the INF treaty and now with the prospect of 50 percent cuts in strategic forces, and they grand compromise with the Russians saying they have protected the ABM Treaty and the Americans saying we've protected our SDI research program, which I hope is in the offing, I think we have reasons to be optimistic that we've come through a rather difficult political time and we're on the right track, the track of talking seriously and recognizing that a serious political dialogue, a serious problem solving attitude toward the compliance issues, whether it has been treaty violation or not and to working out our differences, is the way to the future. And the technology cannot lead the way. Technology may have a role to play, but the path to a safer future, I believe, is paved 90 percent or more of the way by diplomacy, not by technology. I'm optimistic.

I DON'T WANT TO MAKE THIS QUESTION PERSONAL TO DR. TELLER, BECAUSE WE DIDN'T DO THIS ON TAPE. BUT I KNOW IT'S SOMETHING THAT'S SAID ABOUT FOLKS LIKE YOU A LOT, BUT THEN THAT'S WHY I'M QUOTING HERE. I ASKED HIM, I SAID WHO'S THE BEST OF THE CRITICS OF SDI? AND HE SAID, "I DON'T KNOW, WHO DO YOU THINK?" AND I SAID, "WELL, PEOPLE TELL ME SID DRELL." HE SAYS, "YOU KNOW, SID DRELL ONLY HAS ONE PROBLEM; HE TRUSTS THE RUSSIANS." THAT'S THE QUESTION I WANT TO ASK YOU, NOT IN REFERENCE TO DR. TELLER BUT BECAUSE IT'S FREQUENTLY SAID, "I DON'T CARE, WHATEVER YOU DO, YOU CAN'T TRUST THE RUSSIANS." HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH THAT IN THE ARMS CONTROL?

Arms control treaties...

SORRY, I THINK YOU STEPPED ON MY LINE.

All right. Arms control treaties are not based upon trust. The first word of arms control is verification. And I think it's quite essential that we understand that in a world where we have two societies that don't trust one another, the kinds of treaties, the kinds of agreements we're talking about, are those that we can verify sufficiently well so that we can be confident that the degree that they may not be being adhered to, the degree they may be being violated, cannot threaten our national security. I think it's been a great development in the INF negotiations this year, the new means of verification are available to us, not just the national technical means or spy satellites, but also the cooperative measures on site challenge inspection. I think that method will become increasingly important as we're dealing with, say, cruise missiles which may be nuclear or non nuclear or smaller systems more widely deployed. Trust is not the issue. Of course we want to improve diplomatic relations. We want to live in a world where we realize the United States and Soviet Union, whether we like each other or not, are going to survive together or die together. But you don't start arms control by saying, "Let's trust the Russians."

OKAY. I THINK THIS MAY BE MY FINAL QUESTION, I'M NOT SURE. FIFTY YEARS FROM NOW, HISTORIANS ARE WRITING A HISTORY BOOK OF THE NUCLEAR AGE, THE REAGAN YEARS HAVE A PARAGRAPH OR TWO PARAGRAPHS AND PART OF THAT IS ABOUT HIS CONTRIBUTION, OR LACK OF CONTRIBUTION, TO OUR WHOLE STANCE VIS-A-VIS THE SOVIETS. WHAT ARE THEY GOING TO SAY ABOUT THIS ADMINISTRATION'S CONTRIBUTION OR LACK OF IT?

I think it's too early to predict with any confidence what the history books 50 years from now will say about the Reagan Administration, the Carter Administration or any administration. Each one in one way or another has tried to make a step of progress. Each one of these steps is but one step in a process that has to continue. If the Reagan Administration manages to bring home a START treaty with 50 percent reductions, together with the grand compromise on maintaining the ABM Treaty but continuing SDI research, and add that to this first treating on INF, then I think the history books will be kindly disposed because they will have accomplished quite a bit. And they will earn the right to be kindly thought of in this area. It'll be supremely ironic that a president who campaigned against arms control, who campaigned against SALT II as a fatally flawed treaty who adhered to it almost completely, not quite, for most of his time and then came home with a very major treaty, has switched this way, it just shows how you can't predict things politically, why you have to keep your guard up at all times, why you have to take advantage of the opportunities when they come. In this moment, they came in the form of a leader in the Russian scene who at this moment looks like he is bringing Russia into the 20th century, and a much more cooperative partner in this dangerous world we live in. So timing and luck are an important part of it, too. And so, I just hope, I hope, that the history books will be kindly. In fact, I hope that there will be history books 50 years from now because for another 50 years, we will have coexisted with these terrible nuclear weapons and not gotten ourselves into that holocaust which may mean that there will be no history books.

I DO HAVE ANOTHER QUESTION. I WANT TO PUT MY MIND BACK EARLIER IN THE ADMINISTRATION BECAUSE AS YOU WERE SPEAKING I WAS REMINDED OF THIS. I THINK ONE OF THE THINGS THAT I FELT AS A CITIZEN LISTENING TO THE PRESIDENT'S FIRST THREE OR FOUR YEARS WAS, MAYBE THE FIRST FOUR YEARS, WAS THAT WHAT HE WAS REALLY LOOKING FOR WAS SOMETHING THAT I COULD UNDERSTAND, WHICH WAS CAN'T WE FIND A SOLUTION TO THIS TERRIBLE PROBLEM WHICH DOES NOT REQUIRE US TO MAKE DEALS WITH THE ENEMY? BUT WHY CAN'T WE ONCE AGAIN GO IT ALONE? CAN'T AMERICA STAND UP BY ITSELF AND PROTECT ITSELF?

I think that there was an effort to define the problem of America's security and well being in unilateral terms. Then there was a way of trying to define it by saying what's good for us is bad for them. It's sort of like a zero sum game. I think today, we've reached a point where you find both the President and General Secretary Gorbachev saying that you can't view the world that way in terms of what's good for us at the expense of the other. It's not a zero sum game, it's got to be to our mutual benefit. Because we're living in a world where if the United States and the Soviet Union have a go at it, and get to war, it's not going to be the winner and the loser, it's going to be two losers. And so the winning hand is the one which says that we don't have any war.

DO YOU HAVE ANYTHING YOU WANT TO SAY THAT I HAVEN'T ASKED YOU ABOUT?

I can't think of anything. I'll think of it tomorrow.

THANK YOU VERY MUCH.