Live broadcast of the Minnesota meeting are sponsored by the Twin Cities based law firm of Oppenheimer wolf in Donnelly in recognition of its 100th year anniversary. Good afternoon. My name is Joan Higginbotham and I'm president of the League of Women Voters of Minnesota and a member of the board of directors of the Minnesota meeting, and I'd like to welcome you here today. This is the second speech in a two-part series on the Strategic Defense Initiative. We would like to also welcome our viewer our listeners on the radio network. This broadcast is being broadcast live throughout the Upper Midwest through the sponsorship of the law firm of oppenheim werewolf. And Donnelly. The next Minnesota meeting program will be held on December 22nd at the st. Paul Hotel and at that meeting we will be hearing from Henry Cisneros the mayor of San Antonio, Texas. Today's speaker is dr. Richard Garwin. He is an IBM fellow at the Thomas J Watson Research Center a research fellow at Harvard and an Adjunct professor of physics at Cornell and Columbia universities today. Dr. Garland Garland. Garwin will speak to us on the subject of the Strategic Defense Initiative and he will discuss why he feels it is a threat to the United States security following his address. Dr. Garland will welcome questions from the audience at this time. It's my pleasure to introduce to you. Dr. Richard Garwin. Thank you. I'm very pleased to be here and look forward to answering your questions three years ago, March 1983 president Regan and his famous television speech revealed what he now calls his dream of a defense against strategic ballistic missiles, which would render nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete. He understood both the problem and he had a clear view of the solution. Although deterrence of nuclear war by threat of retaliation had worked and would continue to work the US and its allies deserve better than to base their security on the threat of destruction of another Society. So the president wanted a defense which was so good that we could give up our own nuclear weapons. It wasn't a matter of the Russians getting there first and rendering our deterrence by threat of retaliation impossible. It was this dream of giving up nuclear weapons. He recognized he said quote if defensive systems are paired with offensive systems. They can be viewed as fostering an aggressive policy and no one wants that close quote and he indicated that he would share this defensive military technology with the Soviet Union. So they would have an effective defense at the same time as the West if they didn't achieve it themselves. We'll see what has become of that promise. What was the origin of the president's dream in a formal statement of September 1985 John bardeen physicist with two Nobel prizes one for the theory of superconductivity and one for the invention of the transistor stated that President Reagan prepared his speech with no prior consultation with technical experts in the Pentagon concerned with with research in this area. Bardeen was a member of the White House science council at the time of the Star Wars speech soon after the president's speech though unprepared as it was a group of 50 scientists and Engineers under the leadership of dr. James Fletcher the defensive technology study team began a four-month study to learn whether it was feasible to achieve the president's dream and at the same time a group of seven political scientist under Fred Hoffman the future strategic security study began a parallel parallel investigation by October these two studies were done the Fletcher committee judging that eventually a robust effective defensive system could be built but said that its feasibility and Effectiveness and cost would depend on limiting Soviet offensive forces by arms control or other means the Hoffman study. Both of these appointed by the government was skeptical that a highly effective defense could be obtained, but They were enthusiastic about the benefits of a near-term even 50% effective defense against strategic ballistic missiles. Now, this contrast has been papered over by the administration with the dream of a perfect defense being what you are offered. But what is being worked on is not that at all but it is only a defense which will defend military targets. I debated General Abramson the head of the SDI organization Special Assistant Lieutenant Colonel Pete Worden at Johns Hopkins University April 9 of this year, and I asked him how he would know that they had been successful in their 10 years 70 billion dollar research program to be complete sometime in the early 1990s with the aid of a color slide prepared by the SDI organization. He explained that right now the Soviets can destroy 6,000 military Targets in the United States and if the defense research could show how to reduce that number to 3,000 than the SDI organization would count itself as a success. When I asked how about the cities with their population and Industry the Abramson Special Assistant said that the Soviets would see no military benefit in attacking US cities so they wouldn't try and so we don't have to defend these cities. Nothing could be farther from the president's dream of a defense so good that our security is based on what we do ourselves our defense not on the threat of retaliation operating on the minds of the leaders in the Kremlin. Well, the Fletcher committee proposed a layered defense for or seven layers to destroy strategic ballistic missiles in boost phase as they're being launched from their silos are submarines and come up through the atmosphere post boost mid-course with the Warheads at decoys falling through space and terminal as well. It was only a research program which by the 1990s would provide the information on which one could base a future judgment as to whether to build such a defense. Well, what are the goals of this defense? It's not that I doubt the ability of the US industry and our allies to spend seventy billion dollars in 10 years, but these funds are not delivered from another planet. They're taken not only from the defense budget for but from the Defence research and development budget, which is a much smaller element and they're taken from us in taxes or fees or in loans which may or may not be repaid. What are the possible goals three possible goals of Defense systems resulting from the SDI program are the president's dream a defense so good that us and Allied security would not depend on the decision of the Soviet Union to avoid nuclear war and which would give which would allow us to give up our nuclear weapons for retaliation. Second a defense which would deny the Soviet Union confidence in achieving military goals by nuclear attack. So they would be deterred from such attack not by threat of retaliation, but because the benefits would not be worth the expenditure and third a defense which would improve the survival of the Thousand silos in which u.s. Minuteman missiles are deployed and thus strengthen deterrence by threat of retaliation. Well, the first goal the president's dream has in fact been rejected as infeasible by those working on the program and the SDI organization ridicules people who suggest that this was ever a valid goal. This is very different from the White House staff right after the Star Wars speech of 1983 who characterize those who advocated continued deterrence of nuclear war by threat of retaliation as bloodthirsty and lacking in imagination. The Fletcher committee emphasized as did Doctor Fletcher in the fall of 1984 that the effectiveness of the system would depend on an enormous and error free computer program of the order of 10 million lines of code, but in recent months the leaders of the SDI organization and their supporters have been ridiculing critics of the SDI forever taking seriously this requirement, which was stated by the organizers of the SDI. In fact, it was not the critics but Dr. Fletcher who himself who stated both the necessity and feasibility of 10 million line error free programs. And when I bought that brought this up in debate in November 1985, the general abramson's Special Assistant. He said that he confessed some guilt. He wrote much of the material that I cited and software Engineers have said that the Special Assistant must have been crazy or drunk when he wrote those statements. He said I was probably both he said about himself But this Perfect Defense, which if it also extended to cruise missiles trawlers and the like would allow us to bend and our own abandon. Our own nuclear weapons is not being sought not being sought because it can't be achieved because we don't know how to destroy 10,000 or 30 thousand nuclear warheads and millions of look-alike decoys with the effectiveness required to keep a few from landing on targets over here. This is a very different program very different problem from the building of the atomic bomb or the hydrogen bomb, which I helped or the Apollo program to go to the moon and come back safely within a decade in those cases. Nobody was changing the laws of nature. The moon wasn't shooting back or jumping out of the way. In this case if we want to nullify the Soviet nuclear weapons, which they've spent hundreds of billions of dollars in building. They're not likely to like that and they will oppose by all. Sybil means the three most effective means for opposing layered defense where the supporters of Star Wars say boost phase intercept is critical is with space mines next to the defensive satellites satellites would cost billions of dollars would be held at risk by space mines floating right next to them always within lethal radius ready to explode on radio command or when tampered with a space mine which cost a few million dollars that would negate a defensive satellite which cost a few billion dollars taking this into account Paul Nitsa. The President's chief Arms Control advisor in a speech in February 1985 to the world affairs Council in Philadelphia stated his two principles that a defense worthy of consideration would have to be adequately survivable and cost effective at the margin. Adequately survivable. He said if it was not to provoke an attack cost-effective at the margin if it was not to be overwhelmed by an arms race, which we couldn't afford because it would be cheaper for the Soviets to overwhelm the system than for us to expand it. These two criteria were signed into policy by President Reagan in National Security decision directive number 172, but Casper Weinberger our secretary of defense and general Abramson say, they're not bound by that. They think that if we had an affordable defensive system, that would be good enough and they don't realize or at least they don't accept the argument that unless it is cheaper to build the defense than to overwhelm. It it is no defense at all. But only an invitation to the other side to expand its offensive weapons. Similarly. The government has retreated. In fact never accepted the president's leadership in Sharing defensive technology with the Soviet Union in a debate September 23rd in Dallas. One of the defense Representatives was asked by a questioner in the audience how they were going to share defensive military technology when they wouldn't allow personal computers to be shipped to the Soviet Union. And the spokesperson from the defense department said well, we were going to share the benefits of defensive technology. He hadn't said that he said we were going to share it defensive technology, but he had misspoken because the okay phrase now is the benefits of Technology. It is devaluing Soviet nuclear weapons not rendering them impotent and obsolete. This is a kind of Newspeak George Orwell missed only by two years from 1984. It's really 1986. What does sharing the benefits of defensive technology mean? Well, it means in the days of slavery when we had some wealthy plantation owners that the slaves received not the wealth, but the benefits of the wealth they had housing and they had food but they didn't have freedom and the Soviet Union looks at this as skanz. Just as Caspar Weinberger says, he would regard a Soviet SDI as the worst strategic nightmare he could imagine Well space mines are one key reason why such defense is cannot be achieved because they must be up there in space in order to destroy the missiles in the few minutes of boost phase. Some people Edward Teller known as the father of the hydrogen bomb has emphasized although a strong supporter of Strategic Defense that it would be foolish to base a defense in space because it is terribly costly to put up and can be shot down in advance of an attack. He proposes keeping these defenses on the ground powerful x-ray lasers powered by nuclear explosions could be popped up in a few minutes and could attack the missiles in boost phase half a world away. But in fact, you cannot pop up fast enough from u.s. Territory or even from submarines the Soviets see this, I believe as an augmentation of a first-strike capability, they make no sense of a system which has all this confusion attendant to it, which is claimed to be a defense of the United States against a Soviet First Strike. They see it fit much better as augmentation of a u.s. Strike and they read a demonic logic into this where we don't waste weapons by having them all over the world ready to strike silos in the southern Atlantic Ocean where there aren't any but are held on the ground until it is time for the u.s. First strike against Soviet silos. That's how the Soviets see it. It all makes good logical sense to them. It doesn't make physical sense because the systems can be defeated by the space mines against the space deployed systems, but by fast burn boosters missiles, which Don't Take 5 minutes to go through their acquisition of speed to fall a quarter world away, but do this in less than a minute studies done for the Fletcher Committee in summer 1983 indicate that one can build individual single Warhead missiles for 11 million dollars each in a batch of a thousand and operate them for 10 years, which would eliminate the capability for Boost bass intercept from most The defensive weapons and make it much more difficult and costly from the few that would remain. Well, if we cannot achieve defense so good that we would give up our own nuclear weapons, which was the only reason the president Advanced his dream. How about the third goal to contribute to the survivability of our retaliatory forest? And so to strengthen deterrence rather than to replace it, but this is entirely feasible. In fact, the Army has had developed a system which would do this with nuclear-armed interceptors the scowcroft commission of January 1983. Every one of its members appointed by President Reagan to look at the overall US security posture recommended that vulnerability of this portion of the retaliatory Force. First of all did not in any way impair deterrence by threat of retaliation, but second in the long term could be eliminated not by defense, which they didn't Advocate but by a small single Warhead Midget Man missile in a survivable basing posture. Fact it should be deployed in silos where to destroy a single Warhead would take the Soviets two or three warheads and would disarm themselves. But small single Warhead missiles and small submarines to replace the Trident and Poseidons which carry 200 Warheads each were the recommendations of the scowcroft commission. But if you want to defend the Minutemen silos, you don't have to wait 10 years for the end of a research program and 10 years for deployment. You could do it in three or four years. Why don't we do it and why didn't the scowcroft commission recommended because right now the US and the Soviet Union are bound by the 1972 ABM Treaty in which we agreed with one another not to build an effective defense of the country and not to build more than 100 interceptors which cannot then really prevent an attack by the 10,000 strategic weapons, which we now have Defending minute man cannot be done within the ABM Treaty. It would free the Soviet Union to build a not very good Nationwide defense which we would then have to counter by expanding or modifying our strategic offensive Force so not worth while how about the middle goal. This complicated one of denying the Soviets confidence in the military gains of an attack with nuclear weapons. And so did to deter their attack. Well, January 12 1984. I debated Fred Hoffman at UCLA and I asked him to give just one example of an attack which would take place in the absence of a 50% effective defense which would be deterred by a 50% effective defense. He said that if there were a large-scale conventional war in Europe and the US were loading military resupply in the four ports that we have for such purposes the Soviets could achieve their highest foreign policy. By sending over for nuclear warheads to destroy those four ports. Thus beginning nuclear war by a strategic attack on the United States. But if we had a 50% effective defensive system the Soviets couldn't count on achieving this goal. And so they wouldn't try he said but I asked why the Soviets couldn't allow for Warheads to fall two of them on the average would be intercepted two of them would go off and then they would send over half an hour later two more to replace the ones that had failed on the average a 8 Warheads would be required to destroy those four ports. His answer was that the u.s. President would retaliate with nuclear weapons? And therefore the Soviets wouldn't even try but they are deterred by the threat of retaliation not by lack of confidence in success and why the u.s. President would retaliate against four ports destroyed with for nuclear explosions from eight nuclear warheads and not for ports. / for nuclear explosions from for nuclear warheads. Nobody has ever explained to me. Two other reasons for SDI are Advanced by quote realists because quote who don't believe that we can do any of the aforesaid goals, but they say suppose Libya gets and ICBM, which they'll buy from the Germans. They'll steal a nuclear weapon and hold Minneapolis hostage. Well, that's why we have a CIA with covert action capability. There would be cheers World round in destroying a Libyan missile. But even if we wanted to live dangerously and let it be fired we could destroy it in space thousands of miles away by means of our Minutemen to 450 of them with nuclear weapons. Finally people. Say suppose the Soviet Union calls Up On The Hotline and says, we're very sorry six of our missiles Got Away by accident and within 30 minutes, they will land in New York Boston San Francisco Washington and Minneapolis. We really are very sorry. This is a terrible accident, please send us the bill. And there's nothing we can do about that. That's absolutely right. There's nothing we can do about that now, but if you worry about it, then we can do something about it in one year not in 20 years that thing we can do about it. You saw unfortunately demonstrated January 1986 in the Challenger disaster when after the spacecraft broke up the two solid rocket boosters were still firing perhaps endangering populated areas and the range safety officer Center radio command to each of them and encrypted word which destroyed them with a small explosive charge which is carried on every test missile in the US the Soviet Union, France China and Great Britain. So all we need to do is to leave these command destruct links on the operational missiles. Of course keep the secret word really Secret. Now what should we do is to teach it defense the only alternative to a expanding arms race. No and you saw in Iceland where Gorbachev and President Reagan reinforced their their agreement on reducing 50% and strategic Warheads in a few years agreed going much farther than I would go either on the elimination of all strategic ballistic missiles in 10 years or all strategic weapons in 10 years or all nuclear warheads in 10 years you name it but a far less radical proposal is one which I have been advocating for the last 10 years or so and that is after the reduction to 50 percent in one year within the next five years we go down to 2,000 Warheads on either side from the present 25,000 nuclear weapons and within 10 years to a thousand Warheads on either side. I don't care how the Soviets based their thousand Warheads. They could have them all in one big missile if they wanted to. But that wouldn't be very desirable from their point of view. We should Base hours in 400 single Warhead Midget Man missiles in silos in the present Minutemen fields. We should have 400 single Warhead missiles carried 82 a submarine in 50 small submarines. We should have 200 air-launched cruise missiles on 100 bombers to each instead of twelve or Twenty or thirty two these bombers and those of course in France and the and England and China who see their security involved in increasing their Warheads from a few hundred to a thousand or two thousand should see clearly that if they do that they will stand in the way of the reduction from 50,000 to 2000 Warheads in the world. So I think they could be persuaded that increasing irrevocably there were hidden numbers would prevent these massive reductions and would not be in the interest of their security. Well, in any case the president's dream of Defense substituting for deterrence by threat of retaliation and the administration's unwarranted commitment to a larger component of Defense in the future impair the prospects for improving security or even maintaining it at the present level. And this is nowhere more clear than in the events at Iceland a few weeks ago. Thank you. Thank you. Dr. Garland. I'm sure many of you have questions and we'll be happy to take them at this time. Dr. Garland you talk about the SDI as having sprung from the president's brow. And on 1983. Dr. Jonas made the point a couple of weeks ago that that research had been going on for a long time that the main difference post 83 and 383 wasn't we have modest increase in the in the research Budget on Strategic Defense. Would you comment on that as somebody who's been involved in it for a long time? Yes, those two statements are totally consistent. The president didn't know of the research that had been going on as I indicated from John bardeen. He hadn't asked a very interesting article by Frank Grimes in November 1985 San Jose Mercury News goes back and ask the White House staff of March 1983 what role they played and they said their purpose was primarily to keep this concept out of the hands of the bureaucracy. Which would have killed it. So it was an enormous surprise the president's speech to the Secretary of State to the Secretary of Defense to the deputy secretaries of defense and two who heard about it only that day or the day before indeed. I've worked on these defenses against ballistic missiles since 1952 since before we had offensive ballistic missiles and there are many things that one can do there were proposed satellite based systems in the 1950s. They have the same problems that we have. Now the Soviets have been thinking about and working on these systems. They have a defensive system deployed around Moscow limited by the ABM Treaty to fewer than 100 interceptors just as we had one deployed at Grand Forks North Dakota with precisely one hundred interceptors in 1975-1976. The problem is one cannot find a proper role for a defense against ballistic missiles since nuclear weapons are so powerful. In destroying people and cities Bill Perry the under Secretary of Defense in the Carter Administration has characterized the prospect for SDI as follows that the president's dream is desirable but not feasible and I think everybody agrees with that and the kinds of defense's that are feasible are not desirable. I indicated one kind the defensive Minuteman silos where it just costs a lot more than alternate modes of ensuring survivability and we lose in a non-fiscal fashion. We lose because the Soviets would then be free to build a defensive system of Their Own. The technology that we will learn to manipulate in the SDI program can be used more readily to defeat these defenses every single one of the Technologies, which is being worked on neutral particle beams. X-ray lasers, space-based lasers is more effective at destroying the Strategic Defense of the other side. So if we did share these defenses or the Soviets got one of their own it would not be effective against the missile forces which could be modified as I've indicated but it would be effective against the defenses of the other side. And that's why according to Paul nitze and policy rejected by Casper Weinberger and general Abramson. We should not even consider deploying such a system. Now in the original discussions and much testimony about the SDI much was made of the fact that this isn't this is only a research program and that's why it's compatible with our undertaking in the 1972 ABM Treaty but more recently for instance in a speech by President Reagan August 6th 1986. He says I'll just leave you with this thought once again when the time has come and the research is complete. Yes, we're going to deploy. So now we have a research program with a commitment to deploy when we were assured for years that this was only a research program and that the Congress and future presidents would have would be able to make the Judgment as to whether we would deploy My question I'm sure is going to require a lot of speculation and it's more pointed towards the political aspects. But what are the prospects for STI given the current state of affairs with the Iran situation President Reagan? Well, I think that the current events justify a position which I've taken for some years that this is really a case of the emperor having no clothes as in the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale and yet without clothes he still has a fine public relations and propaganda activity which get us to admire the color and the fit of the clothes but there isn't any basis for this idea. It was the president's dream as Bill Perry says if it were possible, it would be a good idea but you don't make National policy from a dream. So I hope that these unfortunate current happenings will allow people to make up their own mind. We'll give the folks in Congress and injection of courage to look at these things and will eliminate that wonderful lever that the president has and saying don't tie my hands if you limit in any way these defense Programs and many defense programs are good and underfunded. I will not be able to negotiate reductions. He had his opportunity to negotiate reductions with mr. Gorbachev and it failed on because of his commitment to SDI. If SDI won't work, why does Gorbachev get so worked up about it? Why doesn't he just let us spend ourselves to death. The SDI won't work to prepare to protect us against a Soviet first strike. And I think the reason that they are so worked up is that they will have to do something to counter it. They will have to modify their offensive forces and I don't think the general secretary Gorbachev has a lot of confidence in his ability to hold the line against the military industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about in his parting speech. So not only would the Soviets make those low-cost few percent modifications in their offensive forces the fast burn boosters the anti-satellite weapons to destroy an SDI, but their offensive oriented people would expand the number of warheads and their defensive oriented people their scientists and technologists would would Arguments that there's something there at the if the Americans spend all this money on it we ought to spend money to and so he sees an offense defense arms race course when the Soviets expand their offensive forces. We will not be left behind now some people want an arms race with the Soviet Union. In fact, the Reagan Administration came to office on the promise to dismantle all existing Arms Control agreements with the Soviet Union and they've had difficulty in doing that. We just violated intentionally the salt to treaty this last week by deploying the hundred thirty first B-52 bomber equipped with air-launched cruise missiles. So the outcome of this arms race would not be more security for us. Nobody can imagine eliminating the Soviet retaliatory threat, but it would be to spend the Soviet Union into the ground. A fundraising letter, which I saw in 1980 in support of the Reagan candidacy said that our candidate is committed to a three-point program first to build arms to disarm the Soviet Union second to get the political benefit from everyone knowing that we have this capability and third to destroy the Soviet Union economically if they fight back that is if they modify their weapons so that they cannot be disarmed at the time. I thought that the Soviets would laugh all the way to the bank simply saying that they would put their weapons on launched under attack so they could not be destroyed and thus disarmed. Well the SDI logically feels that loophole there Soviets. If you believed the story would be faced with the decision either to keep their weapons in the ground and allow them to be destroyed by a us for a strike or to launch them and have them come up against the Strategic Defense. So this charade which is being played to the world. It's something that mr. Gorbachev doesn't like and he finds it difficult. I supposed to carry his arguments just as I find it difficult over here since 1981 to stem the tide against space-based Strategic Defense, which won't work now Henry Kissinger in a meeting in Atlanta in April 1985 organized by ex-presidents Ford and Carter made the point very strongly. He said for the life of me. I don't see how the critics of SDI can be right that it is both ineffective and destabilizing nevermind personal questions about mr. Gorbachev. How can it be both ineffective and destabilizing? But he was stating a theorem really that egg system cannot be both ineffective and destabilizing. So I thought of one which I told the audience there if one goes down the street to a toy store and buys a plastic hand gun puts it in one's pocket and then walks down the street further until one finds two policemen talking to one another fully armed pulls the handgun out of the pocket and points it at one of the policemen then you will be very likely shot. If not dead, but wounded having found a system which is both ineffective and destabilizing. And that's the problem here. It is a foolish system. It can be readily countered a Soviet SDI would be countered by a small program which we've had for many years a fifth of a billion dollar per year instead of the six point six billion dollars requested for the coming year by the administration that's penetration aids for the offensive Force. Sir, my question gets to your opinion on the extent to which the public debate has been affected by public relations kinds of consideration and maybe even orchestrated or influenced by groups like The Heritage Foundation and I'm just thinking now about you're saying very strongly that it won't work. A lot of other scientists were back in 1983, but we've had three years of debate and I dare say that the the average person if you ask them probably thinks that the scientific Community is very supportive of this this project. So can you comment on those concerns? Thank you. I think the problem lies not so much with private organizations. But with the government there is no truth in advertising law which binds the government as it binds individuals and Industry and commerce. There was a paper written kind of think piece or I call it a scheme piece for High Frontier or Heritage Foundation and it lays out the schema for resting the debate from the peace movement having the president proposed ballistic missile defense as disarmament. And in fact identifies people who could be called upon to speak in favour of bmd to counter those who are opposed and lays out the goal of rendering ballistic missile defense irreversible in the second Reagan administration. That is destroying the ABM Treaty. That's a primary goal Richard Perle in the defense department would be very pleased as would Caspar Weinberger with the elimination of the ABM Treaty and the SDI would have fulfilled its function for those people. The SDI organization has often said that only a few vocal scientists are opposed to this and who knows what their political leanings are which governments they serve and so on. So egg poll was organized by the Cornell University Institute for social and economic research a poll of the members of the National Academy of Sciences who are by no means expert on Strategic Defense, but they're at least as intelligent as the average person and they know a little bit more about some part of science. 634 of these are in physical mathematical and Engineering sciences and they received the questionnaires 70-some percent answered 54 percent said they were strongly opposed to the SDI program 25% more said they were opposed and only ten percent support or strongly support the program. How about the odds of whether an SDI system is likely to be survivable and cost effective at the margin within 25 years 55 percent felt the odds are extremely poor a further 25 percent felt the prospects are poor 85% said the scientific review has not played a sufficiently important role in the SDI program and 60% felt that the program should receive less than 1.5 billion dollars a year instead of the sort of seven billion dollar average proposed for 10 years and the 3.5 billion dollars which has been voted this year. So I think that There's the question of where your man in the street woman in the street scientist stands on SDI. There has been also a lot of misrepresentation which comes directly from the top for instance in President Reagan's August 6th 1986 briefing on the SDI. He quoted Arthur C Clarke who gave us not only the idea of geostationary communications satellites, but also 2001 A Space Odyssey. He said President Reagan said, there are three stages of reaction to any new idea as Arthur C Clarke a brilliant writer with a fine scientific mind once noted first. It's crazy. Don't waste my time second. It's possible but not worth doing and finally I always said it was a good idea. So that's the end of President Reagan quoting Arthur C Clarke, but ever since 1983 within days after the president Star Wars speech and as recently as November 13 1986 in his nehru memorial address Arthur c-- Clark has invade against the SDI. He thinks it's a foolish program. He says it can be easily. Overcome any quotes himself from 1945 that the only use of nuclear weapons is to threaten destruction if they are used his the Arthur C Clarke narrow Memorial address was titled Star Wars and Star piece. And these are alternatives in Clarks view Star Wars is not the way to start piece. My question deals with our relations with our allies primarily with NATO. I happen to be in Brussels about a year ago. And at that time I talked with the United States officials at NATO and they were trying then to control the damage that had been done with the president's speech in March of 1983. This was September of 1985 and they still didn't feel that they had been able to explain to our allies exactly what number one the SDI was and number two what it meant for them. Now more than a year later. I see the same kinds of things happening. Could you care to comment on that, please? I was at a meeting outside of London shortly after the president's speech. I had published a paper in the bulletin of the atomic scientists in 1981 on Space weapons pointing out what would happen if one side or the other deployed these weapons in space and in fact in September 1982, I testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the hazards of weapons in space. I commented that the Soviet Union had Advanced a draft treaty banning anti-satellite weapons in August 1981. And the United States hadn't responded to that and suggested that even a private group could mark up the Soviet treaty so that it would suit us and send it back in order to get the Soviet Union to advance a more suitable treaty in May 1983. I helped present to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a draft treaty supported by the union of concerned scientists and sure enough in August 1983. The Soviet Union came back to the United Nations with a draft which Incorporated our changes, so that was progress. Now at a meeting outside of London shortly after the president's speech. I was I sat next to a representative of the state department who was also having very hard going trying to explain all these mutually inconsistent goals and mechanisms of the president's program unknown to anybody else and on Research, there were no answers at that time and I characterized his job as as analogous to the person who follows the parade follows the elephants with a shovel down the street after the parade. Now this Administration has stolen my metaphor and Don Regan has characterized himself as a very effective shovel Brigade, but really somebody should do something about those elephants and not rely on shovels. Doctor Garwin 1988 will be a presidential election year. If you could Envision a debate between the two main contenders one being for SDI the other being against SDI, and you were to advise the individual against SDI. How would you advise that that person project a very complex issue to the American public so that in the vote in 1988, they can make an effective Choice relative to this very complex issue. I guess I would say that the money which we are spending will not buy us defense of population and society that we will be left with the Reliance on nuclear weapons that this money is being wasted according to the best Judgment of the military and civilian experts in the Pentagon who have been muzzled by the Secretary of Defense that this program will destroy the limitation on Soviet arms, both offensive and defensive and is not in the u.s. Security interest and finally that it was just an error by the president with the best of intentions in mistaking his dream for reality and we ought to give it up. We should have given it up perhaps by 1988. We will give it up in the sense that we will go back to laboratory research and see whether whether General Secretary Gorbachev was serious and proposing. massive reductions even the elimination of strategic weapons in 10 years I would say finally that the other part of our Dean's paper in 1985 pointed out the problem with assuming that the SDI is going to revitalize industrial America. He said that in the 1960s when the US was concentrating its best minds and Investments on the Apollo program and other technological spectaculars with great success. Technically, we did go to the moon and came back safely. The Japanese were concentrating on consumer and Industrial Technology and Manufacturing and in a word began to eat our lunch. So this is not a program to build new capabilities new industrial and technological capabilities. It is accompanied by all kinds of barriers to the transfer of information and will injure both the defense and the civilian sector One of the comments that we see more and more in the newspapers and this is a justification for SDI. Is that the Soviets are in fact making significant military expenditures on the same program. Thus the logic that we need to do the same thing in order to keep up or stay ahead. Could you comment on on that that argument? Yes this argument crept in in 1983 when it was proposed that we have a one and a half billion dollar program for SDI and was said the Soviets were spending about the same amount and now the Soviets are said to be spending about the same amount or much more than we are spending with no increase in the Soviet program since then there is Ultimate confusion in this field the CIA in some unclassified testimony of June 26 1985 said that the Soviet spend roughly equal amounts on strategic offense and Strategic Defense altogether about 20 percent of their budget, so they spend about 30 billion dollars a year according to the CIA. Strategic Defense we spend very little we spend probably five billion dollars a year, but this Thirty billion dollars includes the operation of all of the Soviet air defense sites some 10,000 Radars and 10,000 interceptors the upgrading of air defense the operation of the Moscow ABM and it's upgrading their civil defense program with shelters for all of the leadership and maybe some millions of citizens. We spend almost nothing on such things. In fact Soviet expenditures on the SDI, like research these Advanced research is probably less than ours and is certainly less effective the CIA characterizes their approach to working on lasers in the Soviet Union as differing from ours. They spend about the same amount of money, but we move from one thing to another as we give up those laser systems, which proved to be unsuitable for Strategic Defense Soviets. Never give them up they keep on working. Spending valuable money and and brainpower on them. Finally The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the under secretary of defense for research and Engineering the last few years have published lists of 20 key Technologies of importance in Strategic Defense. Routinely the United States is ahead of the Soviet Union in 16 of these the Soviet Union is ahead of the United States in none of them and we're on a par in for but this on apart for instance is in rocket propulsion in heavy lift capacity where the United States in the 1960s had the Saturn V booster which launched the Apollo missions to the moon. The only attempt at the Soviets made at such a large launch vehicle blew up on the pad in 1969 destroying some 60 of their top civilian and Military leadership and sure eventually the Soviets will have a heavy lift vehicle like ours, but Will not imperil our security. So President Reagan, of course did not say we have to get cracking on Strategic Defense or the Soviets will negate our retaliatory capability. He said deterrence by threat of retaliation works and will continue to work Jerry Jonas said in October 84 that when the Fletcher committee got together, they saw all kinds of problems with our defensive system that the president hadn't identified and they were working on those. Well who elected them to prescribe a program to solve problems, which have never been identified as serious and to present that solution under the guise of rendering nuclear weapons weapons impotent and obsolete. Dr. Garwin what in your estimation is the probability of nuclear war in the next 10 to 20 years before a Star Wars anti-missile system could be deployed and secondly how would that equation be changed if we do deploy and anti-missile system. I think the probability of nuclear war is some 50% in the next 20 years and that's not that it will happen on a bolt out of the blue. It will happen because of some terrible crisis because of some foolish program like Star Wars. So if they Star Wars system were to be deployed and nobody knows what it looks like. I think that is likely to provoke war in peacetime. Not necessarily nuclear war now General Abramson as head of the SDI is willing to entertain questions and analyses about the survivability of the defensive system after it is totally installed. So obviously if you have a defensive system, which can handle mm simultaneous launches of missiles bearing nuclear weapons, it can handle a few directed against itself. But General Abrams and is not willing to consider the vulnerability of a system as it begins to be deployed and if the Soviets Forward to a system which will be effective when it is fully deployed. They have no choice but to use anti-satellite weapons to attack it as it goes up a brand new way of provoking conflict probably nuclear conflict between the u.s. And the Soviet Union. Given a concern on this subject. What do you suggest that we do to let our voices be heard. I think you should demand from your representatives in Congress and preferably from the White House a clear explanation in one page of the goals and Analysis of the feasibility of the SDI program and you should be ready to demand that the SDI program be eliminated. I think the analogy is a company which goes bankrupt is put in receivership. You don't lose everything for instance if Lockheed had been denied its government guaranteed loan during the Nixon Administration. We would not as claimed have lost the satellite building capability of Lockheed and the submarine launched missile building capability of Lockheed. The company would have been reorganized the airplane building part would have been sold off to somebody at a low price and the other portions would have continued healthier than ever before similarly the All amount of good work in the SDI would be sent with budget by the person in charge by the receiver to the other parts of the defense department and we would be back in an era of Greater truth and security. So that's what I would propose to do is to declare the SDI bankrupt and go about our real business of defense and Technology. Thank you. Dr. Garwin for being with us today. I would like to on behalf of the Minnesota meeting present you with something, which I think is especially appropriate and view of our subject matter. It's the Minnesota meeting peace pipe. And it has been created by Minnesota artist Robert Rose bear and the peace pipe symbolizes for the Native American the sacred bond between the everyday world and the world of the spirit and for us here today. It is a reminder of the fragility of human bonds and the importance of maintaining them in order to maintain peace. Thank you for coming today. Thank you to all of you for being in our audience and we hope to see you again at the next Minnesota meeting on December 22nd.