To achieve a national policy that reflects these alternatives, we must disabuse ourselves of the belief that understanding the forces driving the arms race is beyond the comprehension of "nonexpert" citizens. Most of all, we must become convinced that, at this moment in the history of our democratic nation, it has been overtaken by the social cancer of a runaway militarism from which only widespread understanding and decisive action can save it. Only through the continuing involvement of great numbers of informed and dedicated individuals do we have any hope of regaining control of our destiny, and, in doing so, of rescuing ourselves and all of humanity from ultimate destruction. Hundreds of thousands of individuals with a vested interest in the arms race work full-time fostering it. Most people interested in halting it do so as an added, extracurricular load. It is necessary, therefore, to count on much larger numbers of citizen participants to counterbalance the influence of those with a direct stake in promoting weapons development and procurement. It is encouraging to see that increasing numbers of people realize this. Even while the government has been engaged in a vast antiSoviet campaign and a major arms buildup, there has been a rapidly expanding involvement across the country of people of differing political persuasions, religious beliefs, and work bases, in efforts to find alternate nationalsecurity measures. There is currently an explosion in the number of anti-nuclear-war groups whose strength flows from the conviction that the present course is wrong and dangerous.
Furthermore, we are witnessing the emergence of former insiders and experts whose professional loyalty to the establishment has made them reluctant, until recently, to speak out against policies with which they disagreed. Retired civilian and military officials are expressing their disagreement with the current national-defense policies and becoming vocal supporters or even leaders of anti-nuclear-war groups. Among them are former Admiral Noel Gayler, Admiral Robert Laroche, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, former Special Assistant for National Security Affairs McGeorge Bundy, and former ambassador to the Soviet Union Thomas Watson.
This is a very important development. Citizens need the information and intellectual support that experienced insiders provideŃsupport, that is, for their commonsense judgments and intuitions.
Through all media sources the daily news, animated TV diagrams, radio bulletins, panels of experts, six-column pages devoted to each newest technological breakthrough and by briefings from high-level Pentagon correspondents and scientists and technologists, we are constantly bombarded by details of fantastically elaborate and overwhelmingly powerful systems of thermonuclear weapons and counterweapons. They dominate our thinking, our actions, and our psyches . But we surely know by now that survival is not primarily a technological matter, despite the technological origins of the problem. The way out of this, I believe, is going to have to be through changes in our mode of thinking, to include issues that lie at the root of human behavior and are basically social, cultural, ethical, economic, and psychological.
The nuclear bomb stubbornly remains the terror weapon that wise men saw it to be at its birth. The default solution of the hordes of socalled experts has been to continue the arms race in the futile hope that a magic technical solution will appear. Albert Einstein once said that God would not shoot dice with the universe. Man should not play such games, either. Waiting for a technical solution is a futile gamble. We need to reevaluate our premises and rethink our concerns. We need to stop amassing nuclear destructive power.
When I talk about this subject to public groups, I am often told that it is too complicated for the average person to understand. With such a view as that,
My basic point is that no one knows how to use nuclear weapons in warfare . There are thousands of experts on technical matters and on military hardware, but on the critical issues of strategy, deterrence, war-winning, and damage effects of nuclear weapons on people, physical structures, and the environment, there are truly no experts. None. No one knows for sure about the actual field performance of missiles, their reliability, or their accuracy. Because it is impossible to test nuclear-weapons systems in realistic conditions, uncertainty about their performance in combat overrides the knowledge of the performance of individual components.
The same thing is true about many of the effects of nuclear explosions, especially their effects on the global environment. There never has been a war in which tactical or strategic nuclear weapons were used by both sides. Planners, therefore, are completely dependent on theory to support their strategies. Analysts and military officers who plan the use of conventional weapons can draw on past experience and conduct more or less realistic field exercises to test their ideas about the use of new weapons or tactics.
Because there never has been a nuclear war, or even one nuclear weapon fired at another, all plans discussed with such solemnity by so-called experts are based entirely on speculation. That is why there is so little agreement among analysts after decades of thinking, writing, and debating about nuclear strategy.
To be sure, the analysts use computer models as a substitute for real experience. But the predictions from such models are totally dependent on the assumptions - guesses - put into models by those same analysts. Such questions as the reliability of missiles when operated by soldiers instead of trained technicians, and fired by the hundreds or thousands instead of singly, or the reliability of the command and control system, the accuracy of guidance systems, certain knowledge of the location of the targets, and estimates of the target vulnerability are among the many unknowable factors. No one even has a basis for guessing about the probability of an accidental war.
Even when computers are used to design comparatively simple systems, such as electric power networks or aircraft or other computers, a certain amount of trial and error is necessary to correct for unanticipated deficiencies. But how can this technique be applied to modeling a massive nuclear war in which there can be only one trial? I doubt that anyone would agree to rerun it to take advantage of the lessons learned the first time.
The layman who argues for a nuclear freeze or a test ban or some other arms-limitation measure is frequently put down because he or she lacks secret information on the matter. There are no secrets on the vital issues that determine the momentum of the arms race. Each citizen should realize that on the critical issues of what constitutes enough, what is an adequate deterrent, whether humanity can recover from a nuclear war, and many other such questions, his or her studied judgments are as good as those of a President or a Secretary of Defense . They may even be better, since he or she is not subjected to the pressures that impinge on people in official positions . It is important for people to realize that there is no monopoly on wisdom, no special knowledge that changes the commonsense conclusion that nuclear weapons have only one purpose -- namely, to prevent their use, and that can be accomplished with a small number of secure weapons on both sides. The bombs carried by a single, modern, nuclearweapons-carrying submarine are more than enough to demolish either country.
Realization, however, is not enough. It must become informed conviction. Hopelessness can be licked. If, for example, a study group spends a few hours a week reading and listening to the arguments about the major issues and learning as much as can be known about each one before moving on, it won ' t be long before its members become sophisticated enough to understand the arcane language of the expert. The study group will build soundly based judgments about what is reasonable and what is exaggeration or untruth . At that stage the group is in a position to fission, if that expression is permissible here, and begin new groups. This process can continue until there is a critical mass of citizens to help lead our leaders in a direction that will rescue us all.
