The crusade he has embarked upon requires that he balance two competing messages: the U.S. must resolutely rearm to counter the Soviet threat, but it must project its peaceful intent along with its military might. Congress must be convinced that his $274 billion defense budget for fiscal 1984 ought not to be gutted. The nuclear freeze movement at home and abroad has to be countered so that the U.S. can upgrade its strategic forces and proceed with deployment of NATO missiles. And the Soviet Union needs to be persuaded that the West will not shrink from nuclear competition if its proposals for arms reductions are spurned. In a television address last week, Ronald Reagan confronted this complicated balancing act by graphically depicting what he claims is Moscow's "margin of superiority" while broaching a surprising and controversial idea for preventing nuclear war.
Reagan refused to retreat an inch in defending what is now proposed to be a $2 trillion, five-year military spending plan. Speaking just 33 minutes after the House voted to cut by more than half his proposed 10% increase in next year's Pentagon budget, the President sharply assailed the arguments of his critics as "nothing more than noise based on ignorance." Said he: "They're the same kind of talk that led the democracies to neglect their defenses in the 1930s and invited the tragedy of World War II." In order to emphasize the offensive threat posed by the Soviet Union, Reagan declassified spy-plane photographs showing Soviet activity in the Caribbean area. His charts showed the five new classes of Soviet ICBMS that have been produced since the U.S. Minuteman was deployed. He compared Moscow's missiles aimed at Europe with the lack of any NATO missiles aimed at the Soviets. And he pointed to a daunting Soviet lead in conventional weapons.
Then, in concluding his down-to-earth defense of his budget, Reagan launched the debate over U.S. military spending into an entirely different orbit. "Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers hope," he began. The President went on to suggest that America forsake the three-decade-old doctrine of deterring nuclear war through the threat of retaliation and instead pursue a defensive strategy based on space-age weaponry designed to "intercept and destroy" incoming enemy missiles. "I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace: to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete."