Dr. John S. Foster Jr.. Director of Defense Research and Engineering, addressed a group of Washington reporters last week on what he sees as a burgeoning threat to the U.S. posed by Soviet strategic weapons deployment and a high level of weapons research. He spoke as the Senate entered another round of debate over military spending and deployment of an anti-ballistic missile system. Last week the U.S. also formally presented the Russians with a plan for mutual limitations on both ABM and offensive missile systems (TIME, July 20). Thus Foster described as "extremely important" the maintenance of the Pentagon's credibility with the Congress and the American people. He posed the matter to newsmen partially as "a challenge to you folks" and said, "I'd welcome any suggestions." TIME Senior Correspondent John L. Steele, who was present, has a few suggestions.
Dear Dr. Foster:
The German poet Goethe once said: "I can promise to be frank; I cannot promise to be impartial." That's not a bad guideline for officials who seek, as you do, to maintain credibility in areas of extreme controversy, and credibility itself, I think, implies a certain completeness — or a symmetry — in dealing with the data upon which arguments are based. Perhaps I can illustrate this best by using some of the things you said, and didn't say, in your remarks.
You produced a scale model of the Soviet S59 missile to illustrate your point that "the worrisome thing is that it's very large" and carries a payload "something like ten times" that of the considerably smaller U.S. Minuteman. What you said was undeniably true. Their missile can carry a 25-megaton warhead; or, if eventually tipped with in dependently targeted re-entry vehicles, it could carry three warheads of five megatons each. Our Minuteman carries a one-megaton warhead, or, as with the new Minuteman III, three warheads of lesser power.
But there was a good deal more to this apparent U.S. shortfall. The Soviet missiles are designed for totally different purposes than ours. Defense Secretary Laird has said repeatedly that the logical reason for Soviet development of their huge weapon is to strike first at the U.S., and to strike at our Minuteman silos below the ground. Hardened silos require a huge weight of explosives for their destruction.
By contrast, our Minuteman is designed for no such first-strike function. It exists for retaliatory strikes on "soft" tar gets such as Soviet cities. Given this purpose, the Minuteman is hardly small; with its accuracy, it is capable of destroying on a one-for-one basis — one missile, one city.