From a launch site deep in Kazakhstan near the Aral Sea, two giant Soviet rockets streaked 4,500 miles to a target area some 850 miles northwest of Midway in the Pacific late last month. It was Russia's first full-range test of its SS-19 intercontinental ballistic missile. Like the U.S. Minuteman III, it carries multiple nuclear warheads aimed at separate targets. To U.S. military strategists in the Pentagon, the successful Soviet firings were fresh confirmation that for all the genuine gains of detente, the arms race between the world's premier superpowers is still very much alive.
The Russian missile advances had been expected since the latest shots followed a series of shorter-range tests of two other new missiles on a range ending on the Kamchatka peninsula in eastern Siberia last spring and summer. Nonetheless, one of their chief consequences will be to focus this year's debate in Congress over the defense budget on the question: Is the U.S. falling behind the Soviet Union militarily? Arsenals of experts are likely to be rolled out to argue both sides of the highly complex question. But there is no dispute about the fact that while the U.S. was fighting the expensive and inconclusive Viet Nam War, the Russians were spending lavishly to improve their stores of nuclear and conventional weapons. Their armed forces are now larger than those of the U.S. and, particularly in the case of the Soviet navy, often equipped with newer hardware. More important, the continuing Russian effort, together with the ceilings imposed on U.S. arms levels in the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT I) with Moscow, leads analysts to fear that in the mid-1980s the Soviets might finally overtake the U.S.
To Americans, such a prospect can only be profoundly unsettling. It was reflected in the applause for President Nixon's declaration in his State of the Union message: "We must never allow America to become the second strongest nation in the world." But how that pledge can be guaranteed is yet to be determined, and it depends as much on the Soviet Union as on the U.S. Congress and President. Both Moscow and Washington now seem poised at the beginning of another round in the nuclear arms race that could cost billions of rubles and dollars. The new round seems likely to be prevented only if the two countries decide to accept a measure of military parity, negotiate permanent limits to their nuclear armaments, and learn to accept a nuclear balance in which there is no first among equals.
Two Goals. The man in charge of the U.S. military response to the new Russian challenge is James Rodney Schlesinger, 45, who was sworn in as Secretary of Defense last July 2. By profession an economist and military strategist, the tall, pipe-smoking Schlesinger demonstrated deft and tough skills in administration and problem solving in his previous jobs as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and director of the Central Intelligence Agency (see box page 16). At the Pentagon, he has set two goals for himself: 1) to overcome the legacy of the Viet Nam War, which has left the services top-heavy with brass, depressed in morale and saddled with a so far faltering volunteer system as a replacement for the draft; and 2) to enable the American armed forces to meet the new Soviet weapons threat.
The second goal has an odd, atavistic ring to