It is not very difficult to see this sort of weirdly wishful thinking embodied in General Johnson's case for the ABM. He lists six "results of adding an effective ballistic-missile defense to our offensive strategic forces," of which three are highly suggestive:

It should produce a war-waging posture that should permit war termination under conditions favorable to the United States.

It should permit the United States to use general-purpose forces in limited situations with more freedom of action than does the present policy. The Soviets would have to act with more care in supporting wars of national liberation and in pushing world revolution, or in employing direct conventional military pressures.

Should over-all deterrence fail, it would give the President the option of a flexible response rather than a spasm response, as the nation would not lie naked to the Soviet attack. Our weapons would have more chance of survival for use as needed.

There is omimous urgency between these lines.

The other reason, which Senator McGovern only barely suggests (I suppose there are certain things that one just doesn't speak of) is that there are a number of corporations that want to see the ABM--the heavy system, of course--built. Building machine guns, bullets, even helicopters doesn't help them much. The Pentagon has a pretty good idea of what things like that should cost; there's not much room for padding the contract with research and development expenses. Besides, such weapons are actually used, so they really do have to work. If the ABM doesn't work, it's not likely than the Pentagon will be sending a representative out to Seattle to ask Bowing for the money back.

The existence of these defense contractors, and the powerful lobbies they maintain, is of course the result of previous defense spending. By consistently allocating such a large proportion of our nation's resources to weapons of war, we have structurally distorted both our economy and our political system. The more money we give the defense contractors, the greater will be their power to demand future expenditures. And it is beginning to appear that the accelerating tendency implied by that analysis is coming into play with full force.

This structural distortion must be eliminated, and the ABM seems like the best place to being. For if we succeed, as Senator McGovern says, "in building a theoretically airtight defense structure but in the process create the kind of allocation of resources that neglects our most acute internal, domestic problem, we may discover that we have built a shield around a value system that is no longer worth protecting."