A Glimpse of the 70s

Whatever the immediate demands of Viet Nam, the U.S. cannot afford to ignore the ever-changing nature of the wars that it may face a decade hence. Last week, in an unusually frank exposition of American strategy for the 1970s, Secretary of Defense McNamara discussed the potential threats and the retaliatory measures that dominate Pentagon planning.

Despite the explosion of two atomic devices in Red China, McNamara told a House Armed Services Subcommittee, Peking will not pose a nuclear threat to the U.S. until some time after 1975. Even then, he said, its small but "highly visible" force of ballistic missiles will be chiefly a political weapon, "designed to undermine our military prestige and the credibility of any guarantee which we might offer to friendly countries." To counter even this limited threat, McNamara said that the U.S. could set up a "light" anti-missile missile system--as opposed to the "heavy" system that would be necessary to block more numerous and more sophisticated Russian missiles--for $10.5 billion (in current dollars). The Russians, with the chilling ability to kill 50 million Americans, however, will really remain the greater danger.

In his first testimony of the new session, McNamara was spared the predicted barrage of congressional brickbats. One of the few salvos came from Subcommittee Chairman F. Edward Hebert, who asked if the Defense Secretary were not himself weakening the U.S. deterrent by an overreliance on missiles. No, said McNamara: by the time the B-58s and older-model B-52s are scrapped, the U.S. will still have 255 late-model B-52s and 210 of the planned FB-111s--plus 1,000 Minutemen and 54 Titan II missiles in hardened sites, and 656 Polaris missiles in 41 floating platforms. One-fifth of this force, said McNamara, could rain "assured destruction" on both Russia and China--even if the other four-fifths were knocked out by a surprise attack.

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