Word: nuclear
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...country as a whole, and your record is not reassuring. You have steadily prevented Massachusetts' participation in the Ground Wave Emergency Network, a communications system designed to transmit warnings or presidential orders to the Strategic Air Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command if the nation were under nuclear attack. Of 56 intended GWEN sites around the country, 52 have now been completed. Only your state and Rhode Island continue as holdouts. This Massachusetts gap in the national-warning system is particularly disquieting since the primary radar installation for detecting a submarine-launched missile attack is located on Cape...
...your 1986 letter to the Air Force objecting to the placement of GWEN in Massachusetts, you suggested that having such a communications system might encourage the "mistaken belief that nuclear war can be kept under control once it begins" and thereby "make national leaders more inclined to let one begin." Governor, what deters war is the completeness and integrity of the U.S. deterrent, and secure communications enhance our deterrent. Yet you seem to suggest that the way to deter war is to be unprepared to respond...
...curtail our strategic programs, as you have suggested, would remove much of the Soviet Union's military incentive for compromise and thus destroy much of America's leverage in negotiations. In recent months, as you have moved toward the political center, you have acknowledged the continued necessity for nuclear deterrence and have indicated that, despite your opposition to the MX and Midgetman, you are not necessarily against a new ICBM in principle. Yet you will find that any new missile program is impossible unless you back off from your commitment to a missile test-flight ban. We cannot have...
Quite simply, nuclear weapons and nuclear strategy hold NATO together. Our European allies will view with alarm any statement that seems to weaken the nuclear element of the deterrent. They will be especially disturbed by any repetition of your remarks to the Atlantic Council on June 14 that NATO must be up "to the challenge of fighting -- and winning" a conventional war. The Europeans are interested not in fighting but in deterring a war. They would not want as an American President anyone who believes that conventional war is somehow fightable and winnable -- therefore acceptable...
...published on July 3, you have trivialized the problem. A more realistic estimate would be tens of billions of dollars a year. Strengthening NATO's ability to deter war should not be simply an afterthought for a politician who may have painted himself into a corner by opposing strategic nuclear programs; a true conventional defense initiative will require additional expenditures roughly on the order of the Strategic Defense Initiative itself. As you seek to become the leader of the free world and our Commander in Chief, many of us hope that you will acquire a better feel for these complexities...