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This article is aimed at nonexperts on nuclear war. That means everybody including those supposedly in on the secrets, because there never has been a true nuclear war of the sort the United States and the Soviet Union have been equipped to fight for the last 25 years, and there is no way to rehearse one. Yet all of us nonexperts, in or out of the nuclear weapons establishment, keep talking about a nuclear war as if we knew how to fight one. How one longs for what one nineteenth-century hymn writer called the "still, small voice of calm." We seem absolutely trapped in a delusional system that grips us more year by year. It is a form of slavery that we must set on a course toward extinction. In a stirring message to Congress on December 1, 1862, Abraham Lincoln wrote, "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves." Lincoln's advice is strikingly relevant for today. The issues of slavery and freedom had the same desperate meaning for those times as nuclear weapons have for ours. Disenthrall ourselves we must, not from old dogmas, but from new ones - the consequence of a 40-year search to find security in the nuclear age. My message is that piling up weapons erodes security rather than builds it. This idea might seem to go against the grain of a strong feeling that we all share - a passionate loyalty to the continuation of the United States as a land of freedom and equality. It does not. I am talking about the preservation of that freedom. My involvement at many levels with military-technical matters since the beginning of the atomic age convinces me that we must take the first steps in moving ourselves from the brink of annihilation by discarding several notions that are deeply etched in our collective mind. As difficult and unpopular a task as this may be, it represents the ultimate test of dedication to our American ideals. Only by rethinking the assumptions, the dogmas, underlying the American attitudes about the arms race can we hope to find a way to end it. I want to concentrate on four points that, if widely understood, would give the people of the United States the courage to demand that their government treat the efforts to halt the arms race with serious intent, rather than as a public-relations exercise, as is now the case. |
First, we must understand the extent to which the United States has been running an arms race with itself and, in the process, become a military culture, a society in which an arms race is accepted as a way of life. In our reaction to the many things Americans and western Europeans fear, misunderstand, and dislike about the Soviet Union, we have built a monster nuclear trap that has ensnared everyone. Second, we must understand that there is no military use for nuclear weapons, and that the steady development and accumulation of them increases the danger of ultimate disaster. The only sound role for nuclear weapons is as a deterrent to their use by others. A very few nuclear weapons, certain of delivery, constitute a powerful deterrent. Third, there are many safe alternatives to the present military policy of achieving security through an all-out nuclear-arms race. Finally, and most important of all, there is no need for expertise or secret knowledge to understand the principal issues of the arms race. Every citizen can be knowledgeable and confident enough to insist on a voice in critical military decisions. It is not an exaggeration to say that our most vigorous arms racing is done with ourselves. President Dwight Eisenhower warned in 1961 about the growing influence of the military-industrial complex inoursociety. We didn'theedthe warning. The voice of the military-industrial complex has grown even more powerful. Eisenhower's message reflected his frustration at his inability to control the combined impact of pressures from the military, industry, Congress, journalists, and veterans' organizations to buy more weapons, and against his own efforts to seek accommodations with the Russians. As a member of the President's Science Advisory Committee, I saw first-hand how individuals from government and industrial suppliers of the military collaborated with members of Congress to defeat Eisenhower's efforts. Civilians, not members of the military forces, dominated in this game. The need for a free hand to develop the neutron bomb, the promise of the peaceful uses of nuclear explosions, |