US reviews Soviet military strength

Anyone who lived in inland Lancashire 50 years ago and who's still alive will not, I think, ever forget a scene that would be quite normal in a dream but was, in life, bizarre in the extreme.

Imagine a small crowd of shabby men in caps, shovelling in a mill yard. Nothing bizarre in that. It was simply a tragic fact of life among the cotton workers of Lancashire in the bad slump of the 1920s. These dour, silent men were not only out of work, they were having the fact rubbed in in the cruellest way by the ceremony going on in the yard. There was an auctioneer, or maybe just the supervisor of a sale already concluded. The mills were being stripped of their machinery which was being sold off to a small group of small, trim, neat men of a breed, an appearance, I don't believe anybody in Lancashire had ever seen before. Lancashire was going under the hammer to the Japanese.

In those days, the Japanese were so alien, so exotic that we never dreamed of them as competitors in anything but silks, maybe, and it would be years before we offhandedly used the word 'shoddy' about Japanese manufactures. In the 1920s, that word was reserved for American products. The Americans with their cheap fountain pens and mineral drinks and shirts with collars attached – an abomination that my father could not bring himself to adopt in all his 86 years.

Well, it took only 20 years for the phrase 'American shoddy' to vanish from English usage. By the late Forties, British businessmen and manufacturers and industrialists were pouring into the United States to sit at the feet of Americans, to learn what was called 'American know-how', to learn, apply the knowledge and fuel the great British export drive.

We haven't heard of American know-how for quite a few years and I thought of the 1920s scene in mill-town Lancashire early this year when an equally strange ceremony was performed in Detroit. The big shots – the directors, engineers, managers – of the American automobile industry were assembled in an auditorium and sat, almost like a class of sheepish, but inquisitive schoolboys, waiting for the appearance of the new headmaster. He duly appeared. He was a trim, small, neat man. He was a Japanese. He'd come to America to instruct the tycoons of Detroit in how to manufacture and sell automobiles and how to meld management and labour in the running of their factories.

This scene was, in all essentials, repeated this week in a hotel in a Boston suburb. Two hundred New England manufacturing executives were the audience. They came to hear how Japanese productivity had increased by ten per cent in the past ten years against America's two per cent. They were reminded that Japan has few raw materials and no energy of its own. They were told by the head of an international accounting firm that the Japanese had done something that Americans must learn to do – to take an existing technology, improve on it and make a better finished product.

He turned the knife in the wound by remarking that the technology that would have to be imported, re-imported, was that of production techniques which the Japanese had borrowed from America after the Second War and then refined on. After the talk, the humble 200 repaired to the workshops to take a crash course in, of all things, management techniques, the old American specialty. No operating decision, they were told, is ever made in Japan by top management. It's done by committees of managers, foremen and workers, whether it's about production or inventory policy. In this way, they were told, the adversarial relationship between labour and management is eliminated.

Well, to add a final blow to the humiliation of this seminar, the Secretary of Commerce on Wednesday announced that the low productivity of American industry was no fault of the workers. American management, said the Secretary of Commerce, is dumb, fat and happy. So much for peacetime industry.

This week Mr Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense, made public a booklet, a rather fat booklet of 99 pages entitled 'Soviet Military Power' which is a review with maps, charts, drawings, photographs of new and old weapons and the like. Mr Weinberger says it's not meant to scare people beyond, presumably, the point where this administration believes we need to be scared. It has been a long time in the making and, evidently, it's an attempt to appease the fears of some of the president's critics, both at home and abroad, that he's a belligerent president whose determination to strengthen America's defences will provoke a new and more dangerous arms race.

Fifty reporters who cover the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation in Brussels gathered there to watch a satellite telecast of the press conference in Washington, in which Mr Weinberger went over the main points of the booklet. Apart from its domestic circulation among members of Congress, the armed forces and the press, the booklet has been sent to the governments of the Western allies and to Japan and it's being translated into German, French, Spanish, Italian and Japanese.

Its main aim is to document the administration's contention that, in the secretary's words, 'We are witnessing the continuing growth of Soviet military power at a pace that shows no signs of slackening in the future'. As a dramatic example of something it's assumed most Americans are unaware of, Mr Weinberger superimposed on a map of Washington the outline of a Soviet tank and freight car factory which, if it had actually been built in Washington, would reach the two miles from the Lincoln Memorial to Capitol Hill.

Whatever its intention, the booklet is certainly enough to scare the layman and for those of us who find ourselves, from time to time, bogged down in this vast and complicated Soviet/American argument, the temptation is almost irresistible to welcome the protests of administration critics. One of them, not to be thought of as a partisan critic, is an official of a research organisation that is the American counterpart of the British International Institute for Strategic Studies. He said, almost before Mr Weinberger had put down his pointer, that the booklet was distorted and biased and that an equally impressive booklet might be put together on the military power of NATO.

Of course, this may soothe us but it doesn't help much. There are many eloquent and informed critics of American nuclear policy here at home and we hear from all of them as much as we hear and see the protest marches, vigils and speeches of European critics of a great range of political and religious stripes, critics from Scotland and Denmark, down to Italy.

One of the problems of assessing a balance of truth between the official White House line and the Kremlin line is the fact that the American case on any policy, foreign or domestic, must always sound dubious because its critics and dissenters are given free rein to have their say, whereas the Russian case seems to have no Russian critics at home, simply because all dissent and protest can be put down at the source.

By an obvious association, this difficulty recalls a talk I did about a month ago which reported and pondered on the 1979 decision of the NATO powers to deploy long-range, ground-launched cruise missiles and the Pershing medium-range missiles in Europe, which is meant to be done in 1983. I need hardly add, to a European audience especially, the reminder that the plan has aroused huge opposition throughout Europe.

I said something then that needs to be amended in the way I said it. I said that the Russians already had large numbers of their own missiles in Europe while the NATO powers were waiting for theirs. The word 'missile' was too broad and vague. What I meant to say was that whereas the Soviet Union already has ground-based medium-range missiles capable of reaching all the main European cities of the NATO allies, NATO is waiting till 1983 for the equivalent answer, namely, ground-based missiles of medium range which can similarly penetrate the Soviet Union. I don't think there's any dispute about the fact that NATO's present ground-based short-range missiles can reach Warsaw, for instance, but not Moscow.

But even in making this point, we are doing something that both the American and Russian governments are continually doing, namely isolating one item in which one or the other is superior and advertising it as a sign of warmongering. The Russians, for instance, like to stress the fact that, so far, NATO has more nuclear warheads than they do which can be delivered by long-range bombers. The Americans retort with warnings about the Russians' forthcoming SS-22s. To strike a true balance, you'd have to consider strategic weapons and short-range and medium-range missiles and all the weapons that can be fired by both sides from bombers, silos, submarines and, now, by mini-subs.

Well, in going over the thrust and counter-thrust of this endless argument about relative military superiority, I've often wished – yearned – that we might have an objective report from some really disinterested body, like, say, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in the way that we used to be able to take as proven the annual findings of Jane's Fighting Ships.

Well, a couple of weeks ago, the Institute came through. Its conclusion for us is not cheerful but it seems, at least, to be fairer, less bloodshot than either the official Russian or American arguments. It concludes that, contrary to the impassioned contention of Washington and Moscow, neither side has violated the provisions of the second SALT agreement, that we ought to be profoundly sceptical of the notion that nuclear war can be limited, but it also ends by saying that the balance of nuclear forces moves more and more in favour of the Soviet Union.

For the time being, I think we'll leave it there.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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