Ensuring Strategic Stability in the Past and Present:

Some smart representatives of the U.S. scientific-technical community convinced Reagan that thetask could be accomplished by means of sufficiently large investments and concentrations of effortby U.S. scientists and engineers. Reagan had strongly believed in that that notion until such timeas it proved to be false in practice.The distinguished Hungarian-born American physicist Edward Teller, father of the hydrogenbomb, at one point managed to convince Reagan that one of his brainchildren—the nuclearpoweredX-ray laser—could radically change the technological basis of the anti-missile defensesystem. Teller speculated that, judging from openly available publications, Soviet scientists formany years had been far ahead of U.S. scientists in X-ray laser development. (Teller emphasizedthat such materials had not been published in the USSR since 1977.) 69It should be noted that right after Reagan put forward the Strategic Defense Initiative, it was opposedby many distinguished U.S. scientists, including those who had been involved in the developmentof the U.S. thermonuclear weapons program along with Teller. The American scientists(in particular, the Federation of American Scientists, the United States National Academy ofSciences, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment)carried out a large number of serious research activities dedicated to the problems of antimissiledefense and strategic nuclear weapons. The research included a large number of calculationsand technical details, which in turn were actively discussed at public and closed sessions ofthe special-purpose committees of both chambers of the U.S. Congress.Such a distinguished representative of the American national security establishment as Paul Nitzeconstantly insisted that the missile defense system must meet the cost-effectiveness criterion (asmentioned above, this criterion was first introduced in the public administration practice by RobertMcNamara). In other words, the system should be cheaper than the offensive weapons it wasdesigned to neutralize. Originally, Nitze raised the issue of missile defense in that context back inthe 1960s, during the first great missile debates. At that time, the so-called “Nitze Criteria” wereformulated and adopted by the majority of Washington politicians, technocrats and bureaucrats. 70In 1985, the Nitze Criteria were formalized in National Security Decision Directive #172, andtheir adoption played an important role in the destiny of the SDI program.Teller and lobbyists of other technologies for combat space stations ultimately failed to prove thatthe systems based on such technologies would meet the Nitze Criteria.History shows that in most cases, including Russia, the reaction to the threat was symmetric, 71which was more convenient both psychologically and intellectually. Search for asymmetric response-actionsalways requires greater intellectual strain, deeper and broader professional knowledge,and more creativity. Symmetric reaction to the emerging challenge and threat is better andmore naturally perceived by the overwhelming majority of the people. Distinguished militarystrategists, of course, searched for possible asymmetric responses either empirically or, which iseven better, theoretically.One of the most prominent theoreticians and practical experts of asymmetric actions, ancientChinese warlord and military strategist Sun Tzu (600–500 B.C.), stated that it was important towin without fighting and that it was necessary to engage in a battle only if it came to a pinch. Inhis treatise on the art of war, a careful reader would find a number of unorthodox stratagems,38Ensuring Strategic Stability in the Past and Present: Theoretical and Applied Questions