Anti-Anti-ABM

In the late 1940s, as a vehemently anti-Communist Congressman, Richard Nixon charged that then Secretary of State Dean Acheson suffered from "a form of pinkeye toward the Communist threat in the U.S." Twenty years have changed both men, and last week Acheson turned up to help Nixon in the President's battle to win congressional approval of the Administration's Safeguard anti-ballistic-missile system. Democrat Acheson, along with former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Nitze and Albert Wohlstetter, a nuclear-war strategist at the University of Chicago, announced that they were forming a bipartisan group of scientists, professors and former public officials called the Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy.

The Acheson committee is designed to counterbalance the alliance of professors that, under the auspices of Nixon's foremost Democratic rival, Senator Edward Kennedy, recently issued a 340-page report critical of the ABM. In a letter introducing the committee, Acheson denied that its intent was to plead for high defense budgets, explaining that it sought merely to foster "balanced debate" on such issues as ABM. However, he left no doubt as to where the committee would stand on the ABM. Charging that the opposition proposed a "one-sided United States moratorium" on defense-missile systems, he ridiculed this as a method for achieving arms-control negotiations.

The fate of the anti-ballistic-missile system is currently touch and go, with 49 Senators declaring their opposition to it, 47 for, and four undecided. Last week Dr. John Foster, the Defense Department's research and engineering director and a chief ABM evangelist, warned: "Intentions of a potential enemy are a secret he can easily keep. We do not have a crystal ball; yet in order to deter nuclear war in the future, we must decide on future weapons now."

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