Making Peace Work

The spirit, if not the mortar, of the Berlin Wall has crumbled, pulling down the Iron Curtain with it. President Bush and Soviet President Gorbachev have surveyed Europe from their Mediterranean summit, certified the presence of Peace in Progress and tightened the deadline for sharp cuts in both nuclear missiles and European battle forces.

Times columnist James Flanigan wrote recently that the meltdown of communism in East Europe that led to the Malta summit will have a profound effect on the world economy, comparable to”the opening of the New Worlds in the 16th Century.”

Nowhere in the United States will the implications of sweeping changes in Europe be more important than in Southern California, home of 12 of every 100 people whose jobs depend on defense-related activities.

But dodging the dislocations in defense industries and seizing the opportunities of change in Europe will require Washington to move faster than it has so far.

The President’s tentative decision to trim about $12 billion from defense next fiscal year seems not to be based on any serious guidance about future defense needs from the Pentagon. Aviation Week magazine said in a recent editorial that the Pentagon’s generals and colonels are charting future forces “with a blind eye to the sweeping changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.”

That is difficult to understand. After all, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney declares that the chances of a Soviet attack in Europe are smaller than at any time since World War II--a threat that few analysts took seriously in recent years anyway.

If it is difficult to understand, it is impossible to tolerate. Unless the Pentagon gives the White House a detailed account of the forces it needs to adapt to change soon, Bush should create a national commission and staff to do the job. A commission should be asked to analyze both military requirements and trade opportunities with the detachment of global thinkers rather than the front-line mentality that has dominated Pentagon policy for 10 years.

It should consist of creative thinkers in finance like Felix Rohatyn and former Commerce Secretary Peter G. Peterson and any, or all, of the five living former Defense secretaries. It should include leaders from the defense complex itself, leaders with the broad view of Donald R. Beall, chairman of Rockwell International, for example.

Flanigan also wrote that the United States could be a big winner in the New World of the 20th Century. But will the winners include the companies that out-built the Soviets in bombers, missiles, high-tech communications networks and other weapons during 40 years of the Cold War?

In the short term, for example, a low threat of war in Europe means a need for fewer troops.This may well mean that there is no role for a giant new C-17 troop transport now being built by McDonnell Douglas in Long Beach to airlift American infantry to Europe on short notice.

It probably means that West Germany will continue to resist deploying modernized short-range nuclear missiles. In these and other cases, would the companies that would have built the transports and modernized the missiles be the big losers in peace?

The answers to that question surely will turn up in Southern California first because it not only has more jobs at stake than other parts of the country but also is the leading region in aerospace.

The only available study of the consequences for the region of severe defense cuts concludes that massive layoffs, plant closings and collapses of defense companies are not likely. A five-year examination by the Southern California Assn. of Governments concludes that even defense rollbacks on a scale considered unthinkable a few short months ago might make life uncomfortable for some companies but probably would leave the region’s economy generally unscathed.

For Southern California, as for the rest of the nation, economists say that benefits of lower defense spending would include falling interest rates as reduced defense spending takes pressure off the federal budget and defense firms shift some of their resources into producing for the expanding global economy.

The way we see the future, Southern California need not and should not simply be grateful that the best economic projection says it will scrape through an outbreak of peace. This area has devoted 50 years providing the industrial creativity and energy that made certain that wars the nation could not avoid--first World War II and then the Cold War--worked in ways that protected Americans and their freedoms. It can make peace work, too.

But this region cannot do it alone. California can get itself ready to roll with almost any punch and to lend a hand where needed in conversion, as Assemblymen John Vasconcellos (D-Santa Clara) and Sam Farr (D-Carmel) will urge this morning. But the state cannot set its own defense policy. That must come from Washington. The President must demand straight answers immediately on how many troops, ships, tanks and planes the nation really needs in the evolving New World, and Congress must back him to the hilt. Southern California can take it from there.