The Democrats Your Record Is Not Reassuring

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James Schlesinger has dealt with national security for every President since Dwight Eisenhower. He was CIA director and Secretary of Defense in the Nixon and Ford Administrations, then Energy Secretary for Jimmy Carter.

DEAR GOVERNOR DUKAKIS:

While congratulating you on your nomination, many of us who have worked for the nation's security in Democratic and Republican Administrations feel trepidation about your views -- and, more important, your instincts -- on crucial defense issues. All that we have to go on are your actions as Governor and your statements in the campaign.

As chief executive of Massachusetts, you have had an opportunity to affect the national-security policy of the country as a whole, and your record is not reassuring. You have steadily prevented Massachusetts' participation in the Ground Wave Emergency Network, a communications system designed to transmit warnings or presidential orders to the Strategic Air Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command if the nation were under nuclear attack. Of 56 intended GWEN sites around the country, 52 have now been completed. Only your state and Rhode Island continue as holdouts. This Massachusetts gap in the national-warning system is particularly disquieting since the primary radar installation for detecting a submarine-launched missile attack is located on Cape Cod.

In your 1986 letter to the Air Force objecting to the placement of GWEN in Massachusetts, you suggested that having such a communications system might encourage the "mistaken belief that nuclear war can be kept under control once it begins" and thereby "make national leaders more inclined to let one begin." Governor, what deters war is the completeness and integrity of the U.S. deterrent, and secure communications enhance our deterrent. Yet you seem to suggest that the way to deter war is to be unprepared to respond.

In a matter less consequential but perhaps equally indicative, in your ten years as Governor you have declined all invitations to visit Hanscom Air Force Base, the premier military facility in Massachusetts and the home of the Air Force's Electronic Systems Division. Four ESD commanders have invited you. Accepting such invitations is the normal political practice, and other Massachusetts officials have regularly done so. Your unwillingness to visit Hanscom has led many of us to wonder whether you are viscerally antimilitary.

Your campaign statements to date have done little to dissipate such concerns. You have explicitly opposed America's latest intercontinental ballistic missile, the MX; plans for a small, single-warhead mobile ICBM, the Midgetman; the B-1 and Stealth bombers. You have also urged a ban on all missile test flights. You have indicated that you would terminate or radically reduce the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).