LETTERS: RUSSIANS CAN'T TRUST CLINTON

To the editor:

Russia will be foolish, indeed, if she takes President Clinton at his word that the United States' development of a dependable missile defense system -- in the unlikely event that it occurs -- poses no threat to her. Reason it out: Who is more likely to use his sword: the swordsman who has a shield, or the swordsman who has none?

For a short period after World War II, we possessed nuclear weapons, and the Soviet Union did not. Owing to their huge superiority over conventional weapons, the only ones the Soviet Union possessed at the time, it could be said that one adversary, the United States, had a sword, and the other, the Soviet Union, had a penknife. That we have not used nuclear weapons after Nagasaki is only due to the fact that the Soviet Union caught up in nukes before the United States could produce them en masse. If the Soviets had not developed its own nuclear arsenal, I do not doubt for a second that we would have eventually nuked them, with or without a pretest. There was, after all, a barely stifled sentiment on the part of some U.S. politicians and generals that, with the war nearly won, we should have double-crossed the Soviet Union and let them and the Germans annihilate each other. How moral.

Even as recently as George Wallace's run for the presidency, his running mate, Gen. Curtis Lemay, advocated nuking North Vietnam "back to the Stone Age."

One other thing, Various right-wing commentators have been giving the president a lot of grief regarding his supposed proposal to share missile defense technology with Russia. I do not take the proposal seriously. But, just for argument's sake, if I did, it should be borne in mind that President Reagan made the same proposal back when the Strategic Defense Initiative was still called High Frontier. My sources are my on recollection and the book, "Star Warriors."

DONN S. MILLER

Tamms, Ill.