Battle of the Booklets

Moscow tries for parity in the arms propaganda race

Lavishly illustrated with four-color photographs, vivid maps and authoritative-looking charts, the glossy 78-page booklet could well have been produced on Madison Avenue. Instead it came from Moscow's stolid Military Publishing House. Whence the Threat to Peace is the Soviet Union's rejoinder to the Reagan Administration's slick 99-page analysis, released last September, of Moscow's strategic and conventional arms buildup. Many of the claims made in the Soviet booklet are false, but the production represents a quantum leap in Moscow's mastery of military propaganda.

Whence the Threat aims to show that the U.S. and its "bellicose partners" are upsetting the global military balance and seeking the means to start a nuclear war. The claim is nonsense, but the Soviets make skillful use of statements by Ronald Reagan and Secretary of State Alexander Haig, and of unclassified Western military data, to get their spurious message across.

Moscow's pamphlet is organized along roughly the same lines as its American inspiration: it is almost the same size (8 in. by 10 in.) and has a sequence of chapters assessing U.S. military capabilities and the East-West balance. It is replete with statistics culled from Western sources; the Soviets almost never reveal their own military data. In one respect, Whence the Threat is even superior to its U.S. counterpart: the Soviets were able to print actual photographs, which are readily available, of such new American weapons as the B-1 strategic bomber and the M-1 battle tank. The U.S. booklet, Soviet Military Power, used artists' renderings of satellite photographs of Soviet weapons. The Soviet effort contains many distortions and a few outright lies. The total strength of the U.S. armed forces is listed at "close to 3 million servicemen," when in fact it is 2,049,100. The Soviets say that there are more than 7,000 tactical nuclear warheads in Western Europe; there are about 6,000. It is claimed, correctly, that the U.S. defense budget rose 13% between 1978 and 1980. But Moscow's pamphlet does not mention that for the two previous years U.S. defense spending rose a mere 3%, and it did not grow at all in the mid-1970s.

The key failing of the Soviet document, which was also a weakness of the Reagan Administration's effort, is that it does not address U.S. and Soviet forces in comparative terms. Thus much is said about the U.S.'s Ohio class Trident submarine, but nothing about the U.S.S.R.'s new Typhoon equivalent; much about the B-1 bomber, but nothing about a new Soviet strategic bomber under development. The Soviets term the U.S. space shuttle a "space attack system," but omit mention of their own orbiting "killer" satellite.

Perhaps the most startling charge in the booklet is that "the Pentagon's strategic plans focus on striking the first, pre-emptive blow" in a nuclear war. The exact opposite is true. This assertion is followed by the claim that the U.S. wants to "evade destructive retaliation" by fighting a "limited nuclear war in Europe." Soviet military capabilities, on the other hand, are described as "of a strictly defensive nature." No one who knows the true military statistics will take the Soviet pamphlet seriously, but that is beside the point. The purpose is to deceive the unknowing. And for that, concedes one Western diplomat in Moscow, Whence the Threat to Peace is "a damned good piece of propaganda."

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