Planning for the unthinkable
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington Hospital administrators across the country recently received a request from the Pentagon, asking them to set aside 50,000 beds for combat casualties. (These beds are over and above the thousands already available to the military in its own extensive hospital system.) The letter said in part: 'Because of technical advances in weaponry and the great mobility of armies today, a future large-scale war overseas will probably begin and end very rapidly and produce casualties at a higher rate than any other war in history. The quickened pace and high intensity may not allow time to build the necessary military medical support system here in the United States to care for all the casualties returning in the early stages of the conflict. .. The anticipated patient load would very quickly exceed the capabilities of both veterans' administration and military systems.'
A telephone call from a Boston Globe reporter to Lt. Cmdr. William Lambert, deputy director of the civilian-military contingency hospital system, elicited a denial that nuclear war is being planned, but then the officer seemed to deny his own denial: 'We don't know how to go about planning for a large-scale war using tactical nuclear weapons. If you're going to use those weapons, the casualty rate is going to be so staggering that it defies rational planning.' Commander Lambert's remarks follow the pattern of his superiors on the subject. Both the President and his secretary of defence begin by saying, 'Oh, no, not now, not never.' And then there is the pause and the 'however if ....' Give these men credit. They can't lie. They're readying for nuclear war, they're not afraid of it and they're not going to kid us about it. They believe in what they are doing too much to dissemble; only yellow bellies shrink back from letting the invisible high energy particle enter their flesh for their country.
Indeed, the ability of the United States army to fight a non-nuclear war in Europe is already questionable. For years it has relied, to a greater or lesser degree, on the atomic artillery shell. In theory, at least, the cannons can fire ordinary ammunition so that any war isn't automatically atomic, but that will change when the 'enhanced radiation device' or neutron bomb is incorporated into the American military arsenal.
The bomb, as Caspar Weinberger repeatedly points out, isn't a bomb. It is to be used as an anti-tank and infantry supPort weapon, something that once upon a time the army had relied on helicopters to do. They were to supply the close-in fire Power which the foot soldiers would need against massed Russian armour. But slow, unmanoeuverable, unreliable, fragile, nightmarishly complicated and unable to carry enough armour to protect themselves, the helicopters cannot get the job done. It is easier to shoot down a US army helicopter with a rifle than to disable a jeep.
The army does have an expensive postVietnam helicopter coming along, but it has the same deficiencies as its predecessors. The inherent .characteristics, as Jimmy Carter's Iranian rescue mission emphasises, make it a very limited purpose contrivance. So, for its primary anti-tank and infantry support weapon, the army would be far better off with a good, heavily armoured, highly maneouverable, fixed-wing airplane, but it can't have one. The Pentagon protocol for each of the services prohibits the army from owning and operating a fixedwing aircraft weighing more than the lightest of light reconaissance planes.
The air force, however, has a marvellously effective infantry support plane, the A-10, which destroys 60 per cent of the tanks it shoots at on the first pass around. Unlike the army's helicopters, the A-10 is highly manoeuverable and therefore can evade ground fire and, because it is heavily armoured, hitting it doesn't knock it out of the air. Its drawback, aside from being inexpensive to make and simple to repair, is that it is a naive weapon in a time when generals love sophisticated ones. It is a poor, simple minded thing with, ye gods, a propeller. It is neither exotic nor 21st century in looks. With its gosling wings and stubby nose, it is rather more 19th century, and the air force hates it for being the plain, useful tool it is. Ergo, Weinberger has ordered the end of A-10 production. So the army, deserted by the airforce, stuck with its useless helicopter fleet, needs the neutron device to stop the Russian tank attack. Without any effective substitute weapon, any serious conflict in the east will be atomic from day one.
And the atomic refitting of the army is going on now. Getting under way are other projects which these calm, blue-eyed men expect to change the character of longrange missile warfare from a crude, massively reactive explosive spasm to an insane game to be played for weeks at a time by generals buried in subterranean war rooms.
As matters stand now, our communications with our missile-carrying submarines around the world, as well as our intercontinental warfare bases in the homeland, are vulnerable to being disabled by the Russians. Thanks to electromagnetic pulse, a giant 'spike' of energy released by the detonation of a hydrogen bomb in the upper atmosphere, all radio and telephone communication can be knocked out. We actually did this to ourselves some years ago in Hawaii when we touched off a big test firecracker in the Pacific. To protect ourselves from this 'pulse' the Reagan Administration has come up with another set of letters — ELF. At a price of no less than 10 billion dollars it is designing an extremely low frequency communications system that is invulnerable to energy 'spikes' and will permit maintenance of communication so that all missiles don't have to be sent off at once. The guys will be able to sit around their command bunkers picking out today's city to be obliterated, much the way that Nancy Reagan picks out patterns for china tableware. The ELF, the malevolent familiar of atomic war, has confirmed the Administration in its conviction that it can have limited strategic nuclear war.
The decision to go ahead with the MX programme will give the President about 10,000 more nuclear shots for him to aim and fire. Unhappily there is no shortage of radioactive ammunition to put in the tips of these new missiles. Man's helpmate, technology, has perfected new and easier ways of taking spent fuel from commercial nuclear electric generating plants and extracting bomb-grade plutonium out of it. The motto is: 'turn on a light, help make a bomb'. Just as the distinction between conventional and nuclear war is being erased, so the division between the peaceful and the military use of the atom is so fine only professionally trained hair-splitters can make it.
Still to be perfected, but being worked on, is a system of weapons that would destroy Russian ICBMs before they could hit the United States. (Sorry, Europe, we're not working on anything like that to protect you.) This includes the 'directed energy' weapons shot 26,000 miles from satellites in deep space. That's still in the future. Today's truth is, as the President's stoutest editorial voice, the Wall Street Journal, said recently: 'The fact that Western Europe is on the front line is not Mr Reagan's fault but the function of history, geography and Soviet imperialist designs. And it is indeed conceivable that if the Soviets launched an invasion into Europe the NATO forces would employ tactical weapons to stop them.'
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