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Soviet Ambitions and the Lure of Western Technology
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12214 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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2 / 1987 |
3,086 Words |
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Jan Sejna and Joseph D. Douglass, Jr.
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During his explanation of the wide-ranging benefits of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), President Reagan stated that the United States was willing to share the technology with the Soviets, an offer that was without precedent. This, he said, would mean greater security for both sides and would lead eventually to significant reductions in nuclear arms. Accordingly, it is surprising how little attention the news media has directed to this aspect of the president's program, and it is even more surprising how the Soviets turned aside the president's offer, notwithstanding their long-term and extensive efforts to obtain such technological know-how from the West.
Soviet response to Reagan's offer for a unilateral exchange of technological information has amounted to a frontal assault on SDI. Since the president first presented his plan for a space-based defensive shield in 1983, negotiations between the two superpowers on strategic arms reductions have hinged on the issue of U.S. deployment of SDI. At the mini-summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October, Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev proposed an initiative calling for massive cuts in ballistic missiles if the United States agreed to confine SDI to laboratory research.
Regan told reporters as he was boarding Air Force One after the conclusion of his meeting with the Soviet leader in Reykjavik that Gorbachev demanded a "10-year delay in the deployment of SDI in exchange for the complete elimination of all ballistic missiles from the respective arsenals of both nations.
"The General Secretary said he would consider our offer only if we restricted all work on SDI to laboratory research," Reagan said, "which would have killed our defensive shield."
A closer look at Soviet long-term ambitions and the methods they have devised to realize these goals go a long way toward explaining why the Soviets have taken this seemingly paradoxical stand.
Soviet reluctance to accept an apparently no-strings-attached offer is more easily understood when viewed in the light of what "peaceful relations" means to the Soviets. The reality of Soviet technological development is a constant game of catch-up with the West. Early on, Soviet planners realized that they were losing the development race, and they have spent the last 30 years refining an aggressive strategy that serves the purpose of procuring the needed technology that the Soviets themselves have proven incapable of producing. Substantial protons of Moscow's vast espionage capabilities have been channeled toward surreptitiously buying, and if that method fails, stealing Western technology.
In this context, the 10-year grace period Gorbachev offered in exchange for missile cuts undoubtedly represents the amount of time the Soviets need to steal American SDI technology and catch up to the United States in space-based, antiballistic missile research.
Soviet interests in obtaining Western technology extend back to the years immediately following the revolution of 1917. In large measure, the New Economic Plan introduced by Vladimir Lemin in 1921 was a deception designed to convince the West that Marxist ideology was not a lethal threat and that all the West had to do was help the Soviet Union out financially and technically
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