BEST45CAL
03-09-2001, 10:29 AM
by ROBERT BURNS
AP Military Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A decision by the Soviet Union to scale back its missile defense plans in the mid-1960s probably reflected a calculation that such defenses could be overwhelmed in a U.S. attack, according to a CIA report made public Friday.
The CIA analysis, dated August 1970, echoes arguments heard in today's debate about the wisdom of building a U.S. national missile defense, namely, whether it could be defeated easily and whether deployment would prompt other nations to increase their arsenal of offensive missiles.
The 1970 report, stamped ''top secret'' but made public as part of a declassification project, said the last of eight missile interceptor launch sites around Moscow became operational early that year. It said the Soviets originally planned to build 16 missile defense sites but work on some was suspended or canceled in 1964 and in 1967.
''This cutback in deployment was probably based on the recognition that the system could be defeated by a determined attack using tactics of either saturation (more attacking missiles than the defenses could handle simultaneously) or exhaustion (more total attacking missiles than defensive missiles),'' it said.
The missile defense system that the Clinton administration was pursuing -- and that President Bush is considering expanding -- was designed to defend against an extremely limited missile attack from a so-called rogue nation such as North Korea or Iran rather than a large-scale attack by Russia. Even so, questions about its effectiveness are raised by critics who argue that it would not be worth the estimated $60 billion price tag.
The declassified CIA report shows that the spy agency paid close attention to Moscow's missile defense efforts. The report estimated that the Soviets invested the equivalent of $1.5 billion between 1961 and 1969 on missile defenses around Moscow, not counting the cost of research and development.
In 1972 the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, which prohibited deployment of a national missile defense but permitted a more limited version like the one around Moscow. The Bush administration has indicated it might choose to withdraw from the treaty.
A map and a photograph showing what the CIA called the disposition of the Moscow missile defense system and a typical missile interceptor launch site were removed from the declassified report.
The material is among 19,000 pages of formerly secret CIA reports on a wide variety of subjects released Friday in conjunction with a conference at Princeton University on the CIA's analysis of the Soviet Union from 1947 to 1991, the year the U.S.S.R. dissolved.
CIA Director George Tenet told the conference that the documents represent the largest trove of intelligence analysis on any single country ever released, and he said more Cold War-era CIA analysis would be released in the next couple of years.
The reports released Friday show how the Central Intelligence Agency struggled to understand Soviet leaders' intentions, not just in the military field but also on economic, social, political and foreign policy fronts.
Prior to the start of U-2 spy flights over Soviet territory in the mid-1950s and later the use of satellites to monitor the Soviet military, the CIA had little factual basis on which to judge war dangers.
''We have no reliable inside intelligence on thinking in the Kremlin,'' a top-secret 1953 report stated. By the 1970s, however, the CIA was confidently advising the White House that the Soviet leadership was not planning a ''bolt out of the blue'' attack on the United States or Europe.
Some critics accuse the CIA of having failed to foresee the downfall of the Soviet Union, and there remains an unresolved debate over whether President Reagan's large military buildup in the early 1980s -- and his emphasis on a ''Star Wars'' defense -- pushed the U.S.S.R. over the economic brink and hastened its demise.
As it turned out, the Soviets did not mount a large-scale program to counter or match ''Star Wars.'' Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev tried to get Reagan to agree at an October 1986 summit in Iceland to scrap the program in exchange for eliminating all ballistic missiles, but Reagan refused.
AP Military Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A decision by the Soviet Union to scale back its missile defense plans in the mid-1960s probably reflected a calculation that such defenses could be overwhelmed in a U.S. attack, according to a CIA report made public Friday.
The CIA analysis, dated August 1970, echoes arguments heard in today's debate about the wisdom of building a U.S. national missile defense, namely, whether it could be defeated easily and whether deployment would prompt other nations to increase their arsenal of offensive missiles.
The 1970 report, stamped ''top secret'' but made public as part of a declassification project, said the last of eight missile interceptor launch sites around Moscow became operational early that year. It said the Soviets originally planned to build 16 missile defense sites but work on some was suspended or canceled in 1964 and in 1967.
''This cutback in deployment was probably based on the recognition that the system could be defeated by a determined attack using tactics of either saturation (more attacking missiles than the defenses could handle simultaneously) or exhaustion (more total attacking missiles than defensive missiles),'' it said.
The missile defense system that the Clinton administration was pursuing -- and that President Bush is considering expanding -- was designed to defend against an extremely limited missile attack from a so-called rogue nation such as North Korea or Iran rather than a large-scale attack by Russia. Even so, questions about its effectiveness are raised by critics who argue that it would not be worth the estimated $60 billion price tag.
The declassified CIA report shows that the spy agency paid close attention to Moscow's missile defense efforts. The report estimated that the Soviets invested the equivalent of $1.5 billion between 1961 and 1969 on missile defenses around Moscow, not counting the cost of research and development.
In 1972 the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, which prohibited deployment of a national missile defense but permitted a more limited version like the one around Moscow. The Bush administration has indicated it might choose to withdraw from the treaty.
A map and a photograph showing what the CIA called the disposition of the Moscow missile defense system and a typical missile interceptor launch site were removed from the declassified report.
The material is among 19,000 pages of formerly secret CIA reports on a wide variety of subjects released Friday in conjunction with a conference at Princeton University on the CIA's analysis of the Soviet Union from 1947 to 1991, the year the U.S.S.R. dissolved.
CIA Director George Tenet told the conference that the documents represent the largest trove of intelligence analysis on any single country ever released, and he said more Cold War-era CIA analysis would be released in the next couple of years.
The reports released Friday show how the Central Intelligence Agency struggled to understand Soviet leaders' intentions, not just in the military field but also on economic, social, political and foreign policy fronts.
Prior to the start of U-2 spy flights over Soviet territory in the mid-1950s and later the use of satellites to monitor the Soviet military, the CIA had little factual basis on which to judge war dangers.
''We have no reliable inside intelligence on thinking in the Kremlin,'' a top-secret 1953 report stated. By the 1970s, however, the CIA was confidently advising the White House that the Soviet leadership was not planning a ''bolt out of the blue'' attack on the United States or Europe.
Some critics accuse the CIA of having failed to foresee the downfall of the Soviet Union, and there remains an unresolved debate over whether President Reagan's large military buildup in the early 1980s -- and his emphasis on a ''Star Wars'' defense -- pushed the U.S.S.R. over the economic brink and hastened its demise.
As it turned out, the Soviets did not mount a large-scale program to counter or match ''Star Wars.'' Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev tried to get Reagan to agree at an October 1986 summit in Iceland to scrap the program in exchange for eliminating all ballistic missiles, but Reagan refused.