Letter to Members of Congress (3 January 1994)

Next step — Surrender?!

The "denuclearization" of our defense posture is evidence either of treason, if those responsible know what they are doing, or of madness, if they do not.

Although it is the fashion now to dismiss Russia as no threat to the United States, let us consider the following facts:

• Russia is reported to be developing both a new ICBM and a new SLBM.
• Whatever the situation with Russia's tactical nuclear weapons, there is exactly zero evidence that the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces (SRF) are not under someone's positive control, in readiness for coordinated launch.
• The Russian political situation is unstable; the next coup attempt, or the one after that, may succeed.
• According to newspaper accounts, the men of the SRF voted overwhelmingly for Zhirinovsky's party; no one should doubt that, if they received their coded orders, they would launch.
• Russian military doctrine always held that a nuclear war was potentially winnable; there is no tangible indication that this belief has been abandoned among Russia's military leaders, all of whom received their professional formation under the old regime.

And now let us consider the situation on our side:

• Our bombers are off alert, which means that every last one would be destroyed by a sudden first strike. The same holds true for some of our land-based missiles.
• We have shut down our only reactor capable of producing tritium, which is necessary for proper warhead functioning and which needs to be replaced every several years because of its short half-life.
• Clinton's Secretary of Energy has kicked off a campaign to slander, demoralize, and trash the "nuclear weapons complex."
• There has been discussion of doing away with the Blue-Gold manning scheme for our ballistic missile submarines, allegedly to save money; this would cut in half the number of SLBM's at sea and available for retaliatory strike.
• Our ICBM's are now to be targeted at the ocean, thus ensuring that minutes or hours would be lost before they could be launched and giving the Russians assurance that they would still be in their vulnerable silos when a first strike hit.
• The attentive reader of the press can now note the start of a propaganda campaign to abandon even the option of launch on warning and to make it physically impossible for our military commanders to generate a retaliatory strike.
• Once taken, such measures are all but irreversible, if only because "renuclearization" and a return to heightened alert status will be almost impossible in today's political and financial climate; in addition, of course, years wasted while our weapons industry infrastructure wastes away cannot be recovered.
• Our draft-dodging, military-hating, and pathologically deceitful President has never explained what he was doing in Moscow in his student days or what he talked about with the Chairman of the KGB when he visited Moscow again before the start of his election campaign. Was he there to reassure the KGB of his continuing loyalty to them?

Nations, it has been said, have no permanent friends, only permanent interests. Writing one and a half centuries ago, Alexis de Tocqueville, on the basis of what amounted to geopolitical considerations, predicted that America and Russia would someday be rivals. When his prophecy came true, ideological factors merely made more acute a rivalry which was historically inevitable in any case. Although America is now drifting hard left, while Russia drifts back to the Great Russian chauvinism of earlier times, there has been and can be no change to the underlying basis of American-Russian rivalry. During our own War Between the States, some thought that the United States were finished as a world power; history has proven their short-sightedness. Similarly short-sighted are those who think that Russia, which has had its "times of trouble" before, is finished forever as a superpower because of its current difficulties.

To take Yeltsin for a real friend is grossly imprudent. To count on the benevolence of his generals, who "made their bones" in Afghanistan, is simply idiotic. To bet on the good intentions of Yeltsin's successors for the next ten or twenty years is certifiably insane.

Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat: whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad. It may be that the SRF will be God's instrument to punish us for abortion, promiscuity, the indecency that passes for entertainment today, the de facto establishment of secular humanism as our national religion, and so on. In the meantime, however, we will have a duty before both God and country to do what we can for our country's defense.

It may be too much to expect that today's average "Congress-critter" will care more about his country than about his re-election. Perhaps, however, there are still some "Congress-critters" who care almost as much about their country as about their place at the public trough and who can be persuaded to take an interest in stopping the reckless destruction of our defenses. If your committee assignments do not allow you to play an active role in this matter, please feel free to share the contents of this letter with colleagues who are in a better position.

In your response, if any, please indicate what you actually intend to do. I am not stupid enough to be fobbed off with a letter which, while explaining how you "share my concerns," promises either nothing, or more of the same, or the direct opposite of what I am urging.

[Signed under the name Stefan Zachartowicz.]

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