Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, July 8, 1990                   TAG: 9007100436
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: D2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

ENVIRONMENT/ PUTTING UP A MILITARY GUARD?

It's unlikely, however, that the Army or other U.S. military services ever contemplated putting their personnel to monitoring the environment. That's the proposal of Sam Nunn, D-Ga., who heads the Senate Armed Services Committee. He has an intriguing idea.

Nunn is probably the most knowledgeable person in Congress about military matters. He is rightly considered a friend of the services. But he also believes in matching needs to resources, rather than simply giving the military more of everything. And he can perceive the need for change.

Nunn's latest proposal has two goals. One is to retain the national-security research setup at the Defense and Energy departments and the Central Intelligence Agency; it could prove useful despite the dwindling Soviet threat.

The other goal is to refocus the efforts of this research establishment to what he describes as an increasing menace to national security caused by environmental degradation.

Nunn would have military aircraft, ships, submarines and satellites collect information on global climate and air and water quality. Some of this work could be done coincident with patrols and other missions. Some data already gathered, and usually kept secret, would be shared with non-military scientists and researchers: for example, measurements of the thickness of polar ice.

Civilian researchers also would have access to the powerful data-processing facilities of the Pentagon and Energy Department. And those agencies could divert money and equipment from some military programs into developing energy technology for civilian use. Overseeing all this new activity would be a Defense Environmental Research Council.

For the most part, if environmental research is the goal, government funds would be more efficiently spent on efforts whose first, not ancillary, mission is the environment. A lot of that money can and should be diverted from military programs that are no longer needed. Certainly, Nunn's proposal would be unhelpful if it provided make-work projects to keep military research types busy and to keep money flowing to the Defense Department.

Nevertheless, his idea nicely draws from a shifting conception of national security. The environment has not been one of Nunn's concerns. But he can appreciate what some others have been warning for a long while: that the wastes and poisons humans are putting into the environment pose dangers to the nation's life-support systems and its economic power.

They are like an enemy sapping our strength from within. They also have the potential to create enormous conflicts among nations. Pollution and environmental damage don't respect national boundaries. They are, in short, a threat to national security, no less than a heavily armed human adversary.

Not only America, of course, is so threatened. Economic problems are eating away the foundations of the Soviet bloc and the U.S.S.R. itself. Those problems have been exacerbated by communism's carelessness with the environment. And there is Chernobyl.

Nature will absorb only so much punishment before striking back. Eastern Europeans can testify to that. To cope with environmental problems, we need all the information we can get. If the military services can become a useful adjunct to that effort, let them.