I’m sure you realize that this is the effect that the Communist system has upon all of its subjects, the sense of the worthlessness of the human soul. They are masterminds at breaking the will and the spirit of men and nations. I say it’s time for the United States to link arms control agreements to human rights reform in and out of the Soviet Union! [12-second applause]
If Gorbachev is a reformer let him prove it with actions, not words. In the meantime, America, let’s get on with defending ourselves against the Soviets and make sure that Afghanistan’s fate does not become our own. Americans don’t even know the threat of Soviet defenses or the sorry state of our defense. A 1982 poll showed that 65 percent of Americans were not “aware that the U.S now has no means of defending itself from incoming ballistic missiles.” Eighty-six percent said “if the U.S. had the capability of changing this situation by deploying an anti-ballistic missile defense,” they would favor it.
Many Americans think that Ronald Reagan’s SDI program is taking care of our defense problem. In fact, it hasn’t even put a dent in it. All Reagan did is to start a research program. In his March 23, 1983 speech which launched the initiative, he said, “I am directing a comprehensive and intensive effort to define a long-term research and development program to begin to achieve our ultimate goal of eliminating the threat posed by strategic nuclear missiles.” Reagan is not planning on deploying anything in his term of office. And when the START treaty is made public we may find that any future president’s right to deploy anything has been bargained away.
Reagan’s program has focused on long-term, high-technology systems to the detriment of the systems that have already been invented and are ready to deploy. Work on strategic defense had been going on in the United States for a long time before Reagan gave his speech. Following are just a few of the systems we could deploy starting immediately if we had a president with the courage to sign the right document.
The most important thing to do right away is to defend our missile silos since those are what the Soviets target. If we defend them, it would most likely discourage a first strike since almost all of our ICBMs would remain intact, ready to retaliate.
The easiest to deploy is the GAU-8 Gatling-type 30-millimeter machine gun already developed by General Electric. According to Gen. Daniel Graham of High Frontier, an organization promoting near-term deployment of strategic defense, “the GAU-8 has been tested, with astonishing results, against a simulated Soviet reentry vehicle.” A reentry vehicle is the part of an ICBM which reenters the atmosphere carrying the warhead. Graham continues, “If one slug from this gun hits a reentry vehicle at any spot, it destroys it. A pair of these guns firing at a reentry vehicle provides an almost one-hundred percent assurance of destruction.” This system could defend our ICBM silos for a cost of $10 billion. That’s a price tag of forty bucks a person to save America!
What’s your self-worth, America? Is there any price you’re willing to pay to save yourself? By starting out right now with GAU-8 guns we would lower the degree of confidence the Soviets have in pulling off a first strike. And that is significant because it would alter their perceptions. Any defense we put up could mean the difference between war and peace and between freedom and slavery.
After we quickly deployed the GAU-8 guns we could deploy more sophisticated ground-based systems that could protect ICBM fields, military bases and even cities. HEDI, the High Endoatmospheric Defense Interceptor, is a non-nuclear, heat-seeking missile which intercepts warheads after they reenter the atmosphere. It can be incorporated into a small, mobile defense for cities and military bases. ERIS, the Exoatmospheric Reentry Vehicle Interceptor Subsystem, could defend much of North America from a single site. The cost for ERIS is $32 billion and the cost for HEDI is $18 billion.
At the same time we could begin deploying a space-based defense. The most promising space-based system is called “Brilliant Pebbles.” It would consist of thousands of small, non-nuclear missiles about three feet long and weighing about five pounds which would orbit the earth and spring into action upon detecting the launch of an ICBM. They would home in on the ICBM and knock a hole in it solely by kinetic energy. The missile would disintegrate.
Another space-based system that has been proposed is the Space-Based Interceptor (SBI). It would consist of a series of satellites ringing the globe which carry “smart rocks,” rockets with a homing device and/or a gun which fires a cloud of pellets into the path of the ICBM. Brilliant Pebbles are superior to SBI in that they are cheaper and each “pebble” would be autonomous and not dependent on satellites for instructions.
The cost for Brilliant Pebbles? About $100,000 per “pebble”–and that includes launch into orbit. A system of 100,000 pebbles in orbit would cost only about $10 billion. The total system of GAU-8 machine guns, ERIS, HEDI and Brilliant Pebbles would cost about $85 billion–a pittance when you consider that Americans spend $100 billion a year buying “recreational” drugs!
Going over the facts and figures of our defense and what needs to be done and the logic of our posture today, researching and studying what we have and what we don’t have and what the Soviets have, what you are left with after you consider all the angles is that you honestly wonder in your heart how the Lord is going to divinely intervene to save us when we have nothing in hand through which the heavenly host can anchor their protection in a physical way.
It goes along with “the Lord helps those who help themselves.” Short of the miraculous or apocalyptic event (which we shouldn’t count on) in the face of an oncoming enemy as formidable as this, what real deterrence does America have today that could possibly be the instrument of the alchemy of divine intervention?…
Strategic defense is, my friends, to put it bluntly, dead in the water. If any systems are put up they will most likely be too little too late. The string of failures in our space program from 1985 to 1987 as well as the lack of a heavy-duty booster has caused a 10-year delay in the putting up of a space-based strategic defense. That’s right, ten years’ delay.
And we strongly suspect that this string of failures was sabotage. The Soviets are at war with the United States of America and sabotage is another aspect of their strategy that our government appears to be ignoring. At least, if they suspect it, they’re not telling us!…
Although Reagan continues to give lip service to SDI he has clearly bought the Soviet line. He said on March 14, 1988, that the United States will “continue to research SDI, to develop and test it. And as it becomes ready we will deploy it.” He knows very well that we have systems ready or nearly ready to deploy. General Graham met with him on April 12 and told him that “all we’re waiting for is a decision to deploy.”
Furthermore both the United States and Soviet versions of the START agreement contain provisions for abiding by the ABM Treaty. The Soviets want both sides to commit not to withdraw from the ABM Treaty for 10 years; the U.S. proposal is for an unspecified period of time to be negotiated. Agreeing to abide by the ABM Treaty when the Soviets have torn it to shreds is tantamount to treason! And that’s just what our President is committing–treason–by his refusal to break that ABM Treaty with the Soviets who have broken that treaty again and again. Thus President Reagan has bound the nation, hence the world, to a Soviet takeover….
Last year I said that the United States could have a three-layer defense system, composed of ERIS, HEDI, and a space-based kinetic-kill vehicle that would be 93 percent effective against a full-scale ICBM attack in place by 1994 and that it would cost $121 billion. But this was only if Reagan gave the go-ahead to deploy last year. And we all know he didn’t….
The third layer of our strategic defense, consisting of either Brilliant Pebbles or the Space-Based Interceptor program has been pushed even farther into the future since our space program does not have enough lift capacity to put thousands of satellites in space. The Pentagon’s current answer to the problem is the Advanced Launch System (ALS). ALS is a heavy-lift booster being discussed which will not be operational until 1998. It’s too late! America--you’re too late!
We could build a heavy-lift booster now if we wanted to. The discontinued Saturn 5 would work just fine. But the Pentagon wants to create a whole new system. If current trends continue we can say good-bye to a space-based defense system. Last year Congress issued a directive to the SDIO which prohibited funds for either full-scale engineering development or deployment of kinetic kill vehicles….
To understand the beast (the genetically engineered beast of the International Capitalist/Communist Conspiracy) we have to consider Reagan’s other arms control achievement, the INF Treaty ratified by our Senate on May 27. Not only is the treaty conceptually and strategically flawed, but it has more holes in it than a fishnet. And it would be a bad idea even if it were leakproof.
The INF agreement is being presented as a step towards a safer world. But it gives the Soviets an unequal advantage and thus is likely to trigger a Soviet invasion of Europe and with it a global war. The Soviets are giving up 650 SS-20 missiles, as well as 1,121 other intermediate-range missiles, mostly old and obsolete. The United States is removing 380 brand-new Pershing IIs, 309 ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMs) and 170 older Pershing IAs.
The Reagan administration claims that since an entire class of nuclear weapons has been eliminated, the chance of nuclear war has been reduced. That’s just like saying that if we eliminate all the .22-caliber rifles in the world less people will get shot.
The Soviets still have 553 bombers devoted to Europe. And they have 1,400 ICBMs and nearly 1,000 SLBMs which can hit Hamburg as easily as New York. Furthermore, in giving up the SS-20 the Soviets were only giving up an outdated missile they couldn’t use since its warheads were so large that fallout would drift back onto Soviet territory if they launched a strike on Europe.
But the missiles we are removing threaten military targets in the Soviet Union. They were the only weapons we possessed that could take out Soviet command centers in 10 to 12 minutes. They directly threatened Soviet territory. And that’s why the Soviets were so anxious to get rid of them. They were no threat to the Soviet population. It was their command centers, their military targets that could be knocked out. These missiles have deterred the Soviets from crossing Europe in a land war ever since they’ve been in place.
The Pershings IIs and IAs and the GLCMs were all that prevented the Soviet conventional forces from concentrating along the border to invade Europe. The Warsaw Pact outnumbers NATO three to one in tanks and artillery and they can take Europe in a matter of days or weeks. Rather than spend the money to match the Soviet armies, since 1945 NATO has chosen to rely on nuclear weapons. Therefore once U.S. intermediate-range nuclear forces are removed there will be nothing to deter a Soviet invasion of Europe….
The United States has practically no offensive C/B capability and little defensive capability. President Nixon nixed U.S. C/B warfare programs in the early 1970s in the interest of détente, and our recently begun modernization program doesn’t even begin to address the problem.
All in all, the INF Treaty will leave the Soviets with a decisive advantage in conventional, chemical, biological and nuclear forces even if they don’t cheat on the agreement. There are any number of ways they could cheat but they don’t even have to since we left a number of questions unresolved.
First of all, no American has ever even seen a Soviet SS-20. We’ve only seen a Soviet-supplied photograph. How can we really tell if they’re cheating?…Gaffney notes that the Soviets could easily continue to deploy SS-20s in the same manner as they deployed the SS-16s which were outlawed under SALT II. They deployed them in garages or other hidden shelters….National security expert James Hackett asks, “Why ban SS-20s when Moscow is building SS-25s that can strike the same targets? The small mobile missiles covered by this agreement can be hidden or camouflaged and not be seen by satellites.” …
What makes Reagan and the Senate think that a piece of paper will solve our problems with the Soviets? Not only have the Soviets broken every arms control agreement that they have ever signed with us, but they have also had a peace agreement with nearly every country they have ever invaded….
There’s something psychologically wrong with the West. Watching this happen year in, year out, we see that every succeeding nation has fallen for it. And now the government of the United States of America has fallen for it….
START will have an even worse effect on our submarine and bomber forces. It cuts them in half but does nothing about the Soviet defensive forces designed to defeat them. START will cut the American force of ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) from 37 to about 18. Only 10 or 11 will be at sea at any one time. But the Soviets will still have 270 attack submarines with which to destroy the SSBN force.
START will cut the American bomber force of 290 planes in half but will do nothing about 2,000 dedicated strategic defense interceptor aircraft, 7,000 strategic air defense radars and 9,000 Soviet SAMs deployed to stop them. Furthermore the Soviet civil defense system and ABM system will instantaneously become twice as effective because they will need to defend against only half as many U.S. weapons.
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