I was surprised that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee should be agitated -- shocked -- that U.S. policymakers had made decisions to spend billions on weapons systems on the basis of false estimates of Soviet capabilities provided by Soviet double agents {front page, Nov. 1}.
Such exaggeration was much more often the consequence of the "normal" efforts by the armed services to obtain funding for particular military hardware or of pressure from military and civilian policymakers for a general military build-up. It was not ordinarily a blowback effect from U.S. covert activities.
Nor has Congress been unaware of such exaggeration. For example, a 1993 U.S. General Accounting Office report to Congress found that from President Carter onward, U.S. administrations had regularly overestimated Soviet capabilities when making the case for modernization of U.S. strategic nuclear forces.
The alarmist effects of such overestimates were often greatly amplified by fantastic mythical threat scenarios developed by civilian strategists. Such scenarios were typically based upon an assumption that the Soviets were willing to take extremely high risks of their own destruction in order to gain some kind of military or political advantage. The "window of vulnerability" idea, popular during the Reagan administration, was the last in a long line of such notions.
Then there is the question of why the Soviets should be giving us information that apparently exaggerated their military capabilities. Why did they feed our paranoia? Did they seek to force what they saw as a threatening America into backing off? Or were they (improbably) trying to spend us into bankruptcy, thus ironically pursuing a strategy that was exactly parallel to what some claim was the secret Reagan strategy for winning the Cold War? ROBERT H. JOHNSON Washington The writer served on the National Security Council staff from 1951 to 1962 and the State Department's Policy Planning Council from 1962 to 1967.
