Every president since Truman has said that there is no security in the arms race, but no president has acted as if he believed it. Today the United States has a stockpile of more than 9,000 weapons deliverable at intercontinental distances (with thousands more deliverable at forward bases surrounding the Soviet Union); the Soviet Union has about 3,500. Ten years ago Secretary of Defense MacNamara pointed out that 100 nuclear weapons landing on Soviet cities would destroy half their population and about two thirds of their industrial capacity.
Once again the hawks and Russophobes are staging a rerun of the “bomber gap” of the 1950s and the “missile gap” of the early 1960s. The Russians, they claim, are seeking superiority in nuclear weapons. They are making massive civil defense preparations. They are seeking a “war winning capability” which they will use to intimidate us all into becoming Brezhnevite communists or continuing to sell them grain at bargain prices. To replace us as Number One, Paul Nitze and his friends argue, the depraved leaders in the Kremlin will willingly suffer ten to twenty million casualties. After all, that is what happened to them in World War II, and look where they are today!
That view of the world spells death, either sudden death for millions of Americans or the slower death of American democracy--and probably both. Sober assessors such as George Rathjens of MIT and Thomas Schelling of Harvard, some of whom dismissed such talk 15 years ago as irresponsible, now say that a nuclear war is “inevitable” by 1999. The Stockholm Institute for Peace Research, which carries on the most comprehensive and thorough analysis of the nuclear arms race, comes to similar conclusions. The reasons for pessimism are obvious: if the Soviets build a new weapons system, then the United States must follow suit. But the Soviets can, if they wish, match and thus neutralize every such effort on our part. In a world where 20 or more nations will also have nuclear weapons, the “mad momentum” of the arms race, as MacNamara called it, invites catastrophe.
In the last bomb shelter scare in 1961, Edward Teller claimed that 99% of the U.S. population could be saved. (His assumption was that everyone would dig a hole in the backyard and keep any neighbor foolish enough not to have built his own out at gunpoint.) The United States Employment Service issued a pamphlet entitled “How to Find a Job in the Post-Attack Environment.” On the cover was a friendly bureaucrat behind a desk. The applicant was filling out a form. In the background, a mushroom cloud was just beginning to disperse.
In the world of nuclear strategy, satire is impossible. The culmination of Dr. Strangelove, a 1964 movie spoofing the nuclear arms race, is a hysterical warning about the “mine shaft gap” which will allow the Soviet Union to save more of its population in a war than the U.S. Eight years after the film was made, a Congressional committee was treated to a briefing on the mine shaft gap.
The Soviet population is even more concentrated than the population of the U.S. Any hope of reducing casualties to “only” 10 or 20 million would require a massive evacuation program, impossible in vast areas of the Soviet Union because of the climate. The program would take, if U.S. Office of Civil Defense studies are to be believed, about 20% of the adult population to run it. I once participated in the preparation of some grizzly statistics in the Department of Defense on how many would die in various “scenarios” of a nuclear attack. There are so many unknown factors (fallout, disease, panic, the wind) in such calculations that only a certified madman would deliberately start a war against a country with a hundred bombs, no matter how many he had himself.
McGeorge Bundy, National Security Advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, said long after leaving office that no sane leader of any country, whatever his ideology, would deliberately risk the loss of even one of his major cities. (It would have been nice if he had said it while in the White House, but it is characteristic of national security managers that they “get religion,” as they call it, when they lay down their burdens.) If the Soviet leaders are too depraved to be deterred by 9,000 bombs, each of which is many times the force of the “fat man” that laid waste to Hiroshima, then it is unlikely that 9,000 more will bring them to their senses.
We can shadow box with the fantasies produced by the Pentagon or we can look coldly at what the Russians have been doing and why. Since the mid-1960s the Soviet Union has been engaged in a campaign to catch up to the United States. Until the last few years, despite the Pentagon propaganda about various gaps, they were all in our favor. Khrushchev tried to substitute bluster for a military buildup, the expense of which he hoped to avoid. His policy of confrontation by bluff failed spectacularly in the Cuban missile crisis. He was forced from office and the buildup began.
We have taught the Soviets what it means to be a great power in the nuclear age, and they have learned their lessons well. We can count on them to continue to build up their missiles if we do not come to an agreement for a radical reduction on both sides. The SALT agreements, even if they are achieved, invite a qualitative arms race which is highly destabilizing in itself and, because of the pressure to build new weapons systems, not likely to last. Munitions makers have been spectacularly successful all over the world in selling something close to Detroit’s annual trade-in for the family car.
In a world in which millions are starving, energy sources are being rapidly exhausted. The contamination of the basic life support systems, air and water, is reaching the danger point. We heed a fundamentally new concept of individual, community, and national security and what constitutes the most basic threats to it. We cannot expect the Russians to be any more intelligent about the arms race that we have been. We are still the fat boy in the canoe, as Dean Rusk used to say, and we have great influence to set the terms of coexistence. If we continue to believe that rings of foreign bases, aircraft carriers prowling exotic waters, and a steady stream of advanced weapons will help us sleep better at night, then we must assume that the Russians will project their power in similar ways, developing more and more accelerated bureaucratic momentum.
On the other hand, the Soviets are on record as favoring a whole variety of disarmament proposals, stopping future weapons production, agreeing to limit use of nuclear weapons to retaliation only, and banning bases in the Indian Ocean. They have powerful economic reasons for cutting their military spending, but they also have powerful domestic political forces for continuing the arms race.
It is undoubtedly simplistic to talk about “hawk” and “dove” factions in the Kremlin. The military appears to be under effective control of the Party, but the Soviet leaders are prudent men who react to the environment in which they are placed. U.S. leaders for most of the last generation greeted Soviet demands for recognition as an equal power with the question, “How many missiles do you have?” When they answered, “A few more than you do,” Nixon and Kissinger were ready to make some agreements on matters that had been at an impasse for years--Berlin, the German borders, arms control. Why should not Russian politicians conclude that a few more missiles will make the U.S. even more respectful and perhaps lead to a few more agreements?
It is in the interest of the people of the United States to demilitarize the confused and anachronistic competition with the Soviet Union. It is difficult to remember exactly what the fight is about. It is not about human rights, although the issue has been used to score some debating points. It is not about ideology; the ideologies of advanced capitalism and bureaucratic socialism look increasingly unattractive and irrelevant to most of the people of the world who are struggling toward development. It is the Soviet Union, not the United States, which seems to be surrounded by hostile communist countries.
If it is a fight for prestige, the winner will be the one who develops a model for the successful functioning of an advanced industrial society which can exist in harmony with nature. Thirty years ago the clear winner appeared to be American democracy. But that lead has been squandered as America has borrowed from the enemy in order to fight it: secret, centralized government, political police, “dirty tricks,” and tolerance of the civil society’s decay.
It is by no means clear that those who are in the business of deciding what the national interest is can shake off old habits of mind. The level of official craziness seems to be rising. Elsewhere in this issue, Richard McSorley talks of making, stockpiling, and using nuclear weapons as a sin. If the protection of human rights is to have any meaning at all, then these activities should also be understood as a crime--a crime against humanity in the sense of the Nuremberg judgment of the Nazi holocaust.
We can no longer afford to indulge the monstrous fantasies of crackpot rationalists who have power over the lives of this and future generations. It is ironic that twenty years ago the experts wrote complacent articles and tens of thousands marched in the streets against the bomb. Today some of the same experts predict nuclear war in our children’s time and the streets are silent.
Richard J. Barnet was a founder and co-director of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. when this article appeared. During the Kennedy administration he was an arms control advisor in the State Department. His most recent book was Global Reach, a study of the power of multinational corporations. He attended the Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C.
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