Murray Gell-Mann talks about anti-ballistic missile (ABM) defense.

Gell-Mann:

But the following summer, the summer of 1962, I spent in Berkeley, largely working on a JASON study. By that time JASON had gotten importantly involved in looking at projects for anti-ballistic missile defense. That was sponsored mostly by ARPA, and many of the problems that people were interested in were connected with technical aspects of ABM. I quickly zeroed in, though, on the fundamental question, for my own interest, of why one should have an ABM defense, and whether one should have an ABM defense. I spent the summer interviewing a great number of people — military officers, civilian scientists, officers or officials of the Department of Defense and so on — about US strategy, especially connected with the use of strategic nuclear weapons, and the relevance to all of that of the project to try to develop a partial anti-ballistic missile defense. Some of the same issues, in fact most of the same issues, are still relevant today.

Aaserud:

Was it largely on your own that you went out and had these interviews?

Gell-Mann:

No. It was natural to do it. I mean, all the people were coming through Berkeley as part of this program, and so I talked with a lot of people. They weren’t formal interviews. I just talked with a great number of people, and was able then to put together a talk which I gave at the end of the summer, outlining what I thought were just about all the principal issues relevant to the development and potential deployment of an ABM system. And the conclusions were very negative, that is, that it would drastically reduce our security, and that we would be much better off if both the United States and the Soviet Union refrained from deploying significant ABM systems. Of course, we knew that the Soviet Union was working on such things, and the question was, could both countries somehow — either by unilateral action on both sides, or by means of some kind of treaty — renounce it. The arguments of course are familiar, having to do with the fact that such systems could be overwhelmed. They could be gotten around in all sorts of ways, so that the ideal of a force shield — a science fiction force shield — protecting the population was impossible to achieve. What would happen with the partial defense that might be possible was that, first of all, it would greatly destabilize the competition in procurement of strategic arms, including offensive weapons, penetration aids and so forth and so on. But also, it would greatly increase the instability in case of crisis — the mutual incentive to engage in a counterforce first strike, in the event of a crisis. And that is of course very serious, because it threatens seriously to increase the probability of nuclear war, of a catastrophic nuclear war.