(5 of 7)
Upsetting the Balance. Thus, the offensive potential of the U.S. atomic arsenal is staggering. But offense is by no means everything—and serious questions have been raised about the possible effect of the test ban treaty on U.S. development of an anti-missile missile system. Said Dr. Edward Teller, pioneering scientist in the development of the H-bomb, in his testimony before a Senate subcommittee last week: "The fact that an atmospheric test ban interferes with the development of our missile defense is one of the most serious objections to the proposed partial test ban. An effective defense against ballistic missiles is one of the developments which can upset the strategic balance between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. In this field the Soviet Union is at present ahead of us."
In the anti-ICBM area, there seems to be some confusion at the highest levels of the Kennedy Administration. Only three weeks ago, President Kennedy seemed to throw up his hands at the very notion that an effective defense system could be devised against enemy missiles. Said he at a press conference: "The problem of developing a defense against a missile is beyond us and beyond the Soviets technically, and I think many who work on it feel that perhaps it can never successfully be accomplished."
McNamara is not t)iat pessimistic, although he obviously entertains grave doubts about U.S. ability to develop an effective anti-missile defense system. And he certainly seems to disagree with Teller's belief that the Soviet Union is well ahead of the U.S. in that field. Said he to the Senators last week: "Any deployed system which the Soviets are likely to have in the near future will probably not be as effective, almost certainly not more effective, than the Nike-Zeus."
Ideal Intercept. But in his very next breath, McNamara noted that he considered the Nike-Zeus to be "inadequate." In fact, Nike-Zeus is a high-altitude (above 70 miles) operator which in past tests in the Kwajalein area of the Pacific has made at least seven successful intercepts of Atlas missiles. But those tests were carried out under ideal intercept conditions, with the courses of the "enemy" Atlases pretty well known beforehand. With this in mind, McNamara believes that the Nike-Zeus, having already cost the U.S. millions of dollars, is not worth the further billions of full-scale development and deployment. Instead, the U.S. is now trying to develop the Nike-X, an anti-missile missile that in many ways makes Nike-Zeus look like a Tin Lizzie. Nike-X will use a single target-finding system (compared with Zeus's antiquated multicomponent system), and it will knock down missiles at both high and low altitudes. And in McNamara's opinion, even Nike-X may not, in terms of effectiveness, be worth all the trouble.
But to McNamara, all that sort of debate is really irrelevant to the issue of the test ban treaty. Said he to the Senate group last week: "In designing an antiballistic missile system, the major factors are reaction speed, missile performance, traffic-handling capacity, capacity for decoy discrimination, resistance to blackout effects and warhead technology." Only these last two depend on atmospheric testing.