Superpower Smoke Signals

Messages about budgets, bombs and civil defense

A hot line links the White House to the Kremlin for nearly instantaneous communication. But the two superpowers often prefer to conduct their strategic discourse by less direct means. Such an exchange seems to have been under way last week, when both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. took a number of actions or made statements bearing on the balance of nuclear power. Exactly what, if anything, they were saying to each other was unclear.

The most surprising development was the disclosure that the Soviets had, in the past month or so, delivered 20 MIG-23 Flogger jets to Cuba. One version of this plane can deliver nuclear weapons. If this is the model now in Havana's hands, the U.S.S.R. has seriously violated the 1962 Kennedy-Khrushchev agreement that ended the Cuban missile crisis. The Soviet leader pledged not to give Cuba offensive weapons.

Washington responded cautiously.

Jimmy Carter merely ordered resumption of high-altitude SR-71 reconnaissance flights over Cuba; he had stopped these missions after taking office because they had irritated Cuba's Fidel Castro. From the SR-71 's photos, experts will be able to determine whether Cuba's Floggers can carry a nuclear payload. Meanwhile, a group of U.S. Senators visiting Moscow asked Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin about the MiG-23s, noting that their presence in Cuba might hurt the chances of the Senate's ratifying a strategic arms limitation treaty. Kosygin snapped at his visitors that he "didn't need a lecture" on the U.S. political system and that the planes were only defensive weapons.

The following day, the Senators met with Soviet Communist Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev. During a 50-minute monologue, the aging leader ritually declared that the Soviet Union is interested in peace. He then added that both he and Carter had such power that in "just a couple of minutes [we could] let the missiles fly." If the U.S. ever did, he warned, "we can still destroy the U.S."

This friendly host then surprised his guests by disclosing that the U.S.S.R. had tested a neutron warhead "many years ago [but] never started production." U.S. experts agree that the Soviets have the ability to develop such a weapon, but there is no way to confirm tests because they would have been held underground. The Carter Administration is still considering whether the U.S. will produce neutron warheads; they could provide NATO with a devastating defense against Soviet tank attacks. It is perhaps for this reason that Moscow has been waging a worldwide propaganda campaign against U.S. development of the weapon. Brezhnev also discussed the strategic arms talks. Complaining about U.S. critics of SALT, he told the Senators that, while he was willing to meet Carter any time and any place, he could not do so until there would be "a new SALT agreement we could sign."

Carter, too, appeared to have SALT'S critics in mind last week. The Administration disclosed a number of actions that seemed intended both to woo hawks in Congress, who are worried by the continued Soviet military buildup, and perhaps to send a message to Moscow. The Pentagon announced that it is asking for $500 million in its 1979 budget to develop an advanced Trident submarine-launched missile and the controversial land-based MX intercontinental ballistic missile. The MX will be mobile, making it less vulnerable to surprise attack; one possible version could be launched from underground. The Administration also confirmed that, although Carter will cut the budgets of some social programs to fight inflation, he will boost defense outlays next year to about $124 billion, in part to add muscle to NATO. After adjusting for inflation, that is a 3% increase over this year's Pentagon spending.

Perhaps the most important development last week was the disclosure that the U.S. is about to embark on a new civil defense drive. The Administration will ask Congress to authorize a five-year program that would cost about $1.5 billion. The program's goal is to save in a nuclear attack at least 146 million Americans; without the new measures, officials figure that only 80 million to 90 million of the nation's 218 million citizens would survive. Explained Bardyl Tirana, director of the Defense Civil Preparedness Agency: "We have got to face the fact that we have very little to protect us against nuclear attack."

Unlike the civil defense plan of earlier years, the Carter scheme will not involve building costly shelters. Instead the "crisis relocation program" will stress evacuation from population centers to the countryside. In the New York City area, planners have begun identifying upstate counties that have buildings suitable for sheltering evacuees.

Anyone accustomed to fighting rush-hour traffic in the nation's big cities could be forgiven for finding the new program naive, if not downright farcical. But the Administration does not envision an instant urban exodus upon receiving a warning of approaching enemy missiles. The evacuation, rather, would be ordered if international tensions mounted so threateningly that an attack seemed likely within a few days. Even so, emptying the congested Boston-Washington corridor would be chaotic. Conceded Caspar Kasparian, a regional field office director for the agency: "We're not talking about anything practical. The name of the game is not practical but survival."

A main reason that Carter is now giving civil defense higher priority is the growing concern in the Administration about the U.S.S.R.'s ambitious efforts to protect its citizens. The Pentagon estimates that the Soviets have spent $65 billion on civil defense in the past decade, compared with $900 million for the U.S. The Soviet system relies heavily on bomb shelters and mass evacuation of cities.

Some American experts fear that a widening U.S.-Soviet civil defense gap could give Kremlin leaders heightened confidence in their country's survivability in the event of a nuclear counterattack. If this prompts them to take tougher stands in future diplomatic confrontations with Washington, then the strategic discourse between the superpowers, unlike that of last week, would be all too clear, direct--and ominous.

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