Despite the implosion of the Soviet empire, there is a better than even chance that the United States will launch a vast expansion and modernization of the American strategic defense arsenal this year.
The Bush administration still wants the most expensive bomber in history, designed to fly undetected into Soviet air-space, and it has struck a bargain with key congressional leaders to begin a vast new national defense against Soviet missiles.Those systems, which will cost upwards of $100 billion, were designed, proposed and put to a vote before last month's aborted coup that is radically transforming the Soviet Union.
In addition, billions of dollars are expected to be appropriated in coming weeks to beef up the military deployments against the Soviets - including a new submarine, a new fighter and five kinds of intercontinental ballistic missiles to hit Soviet targets.
The rationale set forth for all these weapons before the coup attempt was that the Soviet Union, despite its loss of eastern Europe and the surge of democratic reforms, was still a formidable adversary whose leadership at any moment could be deposed. Now that the coup has failed and democratic reformers are even more solidly in control, President Bush and the Pentagon say the Soviets are unstable and fractious. Unidentified White House sources are said to be suspicious of Russian leader Boris Yeltsin.
The way that instability is a threat to the United States seems to change from day to day. As August ended, with Soviet republics declaring independence one by one, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney warned that "we'll have to deal not with one Soviet nuclear arsenal, but with an arsenal that's controlled perhaps by different republics."
Within days, however, it became clear that just the opposite was happening. Yeltsin announced that the Soviets were planning to move their land-based strategic missiles inside the Russian Republic and out of the Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
"As the weeks and months go along we're not going to be oblivious to what's going on in the Soviet Union, but, at the same time, I don't think it's the right way to run the defense budget to sort of read the morning news developments out of the Soviet Union and then sort of make little entries into the defense budget to adjust to that day's news the way you would manage a stock portfolio by reading the daily stock quotations," said Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams.
A House majority has already voted to kill the B-2 bomber and stop deployment of the Strategic Defense Initiative. The Senate, however, has done just the opposite - and the matter as well as other differences will have to be settled in conference.
While the outcome of those two weapon systems is in doubt, there is not much reason to suppose there will be any dramatic change to recognize what Soviet scholar George Kennan has called a development every bit as important as the 1917 Russian revolution.