Relatively small nuclear arsenals that can serve no militarily useful purpose would indeed go to the heart of destroying NATO strategy and the western alliance as we currently know it.

The kind of deterrence that Dick Garwin has been talking about is deterrence that could not serve our overseas interests. It so happens that for reasons of geography the United States has a residual limited first use requirement placed upon its strategic nuclear force to provide compensation for the missing conventional tactics, forces, placed around Eurasia to withstand Soviet attack.

Nuclear mines in place, or similar ideas, are not the kind of nuclear forces that we could threaten credibly to employ in order to support our overseas security interests as required in the flexible response doctrine of NATO MC-14/3 of 1967, which still happens to be the authoritative document.

Successive U.S. Governments of both parties have believed that credible, or not incredible, war fighting options, with no guarantee that nuclear war could indeed be waged with flexibility, nonetheless threats that speak to Soviet anxieties which would have some military effectiveness against the Soviet ability to wage war, go to the heart of what deterrence is about.

NSDM-242 in the Nixon administration, PD-59 of the Carter administration, NSDD-13 of the Reagan administration, stress the fact we really need to target those kinds of Soviet assets. If we cannot do much damage to the Soviet homeland-if we do not believe we can and they do not believe we can-how then do we fulfill our alliance obligations?

How do we discourage Soviet intervention? That is an interesting question.

It is several decades away from policy matters that concern us today, but it is a valid concern.

I would like to endorse what Dick Garwin said earlier about the value of thinking. For a long time we have had adequate time to get our policy act together, to consider what residual role we may wish to assign to offensive forces, to consider how to go about putting together near-term and far-term arms control strategy.

I think there is a need for a more coherent policy story to be presented. Certainly thinking is a lot cheaper than developing, testing, and deploying. I think we have time to do it. The business is well underway.

I have considerable fundamental differences with Richard Garwin as to the theory of deterrence, what is feasible and what is not. The notion of the Soviet Union sitting back and acquiescing in strategic balance is not the Soviet Union we know. It is not the Soviet Union with the Russian history they have behind it.

The Soviets have an inalienable commitment to the protection of their homeland. The idea of Soviet acquiescence in our ability to inflict minimal, but nevertheless substantial damage on people, is a very un-Soviet concept.

Dick Garwin's idea might be appropriate if we were dealing with a rather different adversary. The Soviet Union we know today is not the Soviet Union that is going to acquiesce in Dick Garwin's vision of a more stable future.

Dr. GARWIN. Maybe we should find out more about the Soviet Union in another hearing. My thousand weapons are fully capable of striking Soviet Army divisions and would be used that way in the first place. Senator WILSON. I, for one, will be delighted to have a second session. I think we will probably have many more.

You have been generous with your time this morning. I thank you on behalf of all my colleagues.

Thank you. The subcommittee is adjourned.

[Whereupon, at 1:13 p.m., the subcommittee adjourned, subject to the call of the Chair.]