PART III
THE POLITICS OF SURVIVAL

This stage on which we dance is filled with trap doors, shadow projections, fleeting mirages and colored curtains that rise and fall at the bidding of the [military industrial complex]. They even control the audience lights and sound system. We just dance.
—Tom Atlee, "Who Owns the Game"

Chapter Nine
What About Arms Control?

War stocks have not been hurt.
—New York Times, after the announcement of the INF treaty, 1987

In Part I we argued that the arms race has little to do with the dangers of nuclear war today. Does that mean arms control is meaningless?

Arms control is certainly not the answer to the nuclear peril, and, as currently practiced, it probably will not make us any safer at all. Nor will it achieve another oft-cited goal: saving money now wasted on redundant weapons. Arms control could deliver some security and economic benefits if it seriously took on important problems, such as conventional weapons, nuclear proliferation, doomsday weapons, preventing nuclear accidents, and redirecting the vast sums wasted on the arms race to the urgent problems of our time.

Arms control to date has not noticeably reduced the danger of nuclear war or even slowed the cavalcade of expensive new weapons systems. Its most impressive accomplishment was probably the 1963 limited test ban treaty. Although of marginal military value, this treaty was an important environmental protection and public health measure because it outlawed atmospheric test explosions of nuclear weapons. The 1970 nuclear nonproliferation treaty might have made a real difference to the nuclear threat. But "it is hard to identify instances where the treaty has had any effect in slowing the spread of nuclear weapons." "Most of the countries of concern—India, Pakistan, Brazil, Argentina, Israel, and South Africa—are not parties to the treaty," the treaty's controls over signatory states such as Iraq and Libya are weak, and the treaty not only failed to limit but actually encouraged what is arguably the most important activity promoting nuclear weapons proliferation—the

transfer of "peaceful" nuclear technology and materials to non-nuclear signatory states. The 1972 ABM treaty concerned a category of weapons, antiballistic missiles, that both superpowers judged to be useless anyway and that, despite the pretensions of Star Wars, still are useless. The two SALT treaties, concerning offensive nuclear strike forces, have not "had any significant effect on the magnitude of damage that would be expected should a nuclear war occur, and it is doubtful if either has significantly enhanced deterrence or strategic stability."^[1] They do not even appear to have constrained any major weapons programs on either side, the only clear case being the single U.S. Poseidon submarine decommissioned by the Reagan administration to remain within the SALT II limits.

In fact,

arms control treaties have traditionally spurred efforts to develop nuclear weapons that were not covered by the treaties…. One month after SALT I was signed, the [U.S.] Department of Defense requested … an additional $20 million to develop long-range cruise missiles. Prior to this request the Defense Department had not worked on the development of long-range cruise missiles for over 10 years.

Unlike the SALT treaties, the 1987 INF treaty did lead to constraints on weapons, indeed to the destruction of some already deployed. But "history may repeat itself. Plans are already being made to develop and deploy new U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe" in the wake of that treaty.^[2] INF will cause no perceptible changes in the consequences or risks of nuclear war. Neither will the much more dramatic START treaty, if successfully concluded. (We discuss both treaties later.) The American peace movement has not stopped a single new U.S. nuclear weapons system despite highly committed and courageous efforts to do so, nor has it achieved any of its more ambitious weapons-related goals, such as the comprehensive test ban or the nuclear freeze.

In this context, those seeking to avert a holocaust must confront "the possibility that many initiatives aimed at affecting arms, including arms control efforts, may be so diversionary as to be, on balance, pernicious, even though they may seem desirable from a narrow perspective."^[3] Some types of arms control, though, could bring great benefits.

The Weapons that States Really Use

Anything that makes conventional state conflict and violence more likely or promotes their escalation could be highly dangerous, for the

planet as a whole as well as for the immediate victims. For this reason, conventional weapons matter a great deal. Unlike nuclear arms, they are actually used—often—and their numbers, characteristics, and quality can make a great difference to the result. Controlling conventional weapons, particularly in the Third World, is a crucial task of our time.

Some of the most horrific incidents of this century have resulted from the unleashing of modern conventional weaponry on civilian populations. The killing in World War II of hundreds of thousands of defenseless people in Dresden, Tokyo, and other cities by high-intensity strategic bombing opened a ghastly era of mass destruction that soon shifted to the Third World. Weapons developments such as the cluster bomb, napalm, and the phosphorus bomb certainly mattered to the many thousands killed and maimed by them in places such as Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Lebanon.

Conventional weapons infusions from the United States, the USSR, and other arms exporters have made it possible for ruthless dictators to maintain power by destroying and terrorizing thousands of their own people in such places as El Salvador, Guatemala, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The great powers' use of advanced weaponry in the Third World and their promiscuous arms transfers to Third World states and movements have helped transform numerous national and regional conflicts, such as the Iran-Iraq war, from limited local disputes into high-tech carnages that draw in other states. The Third World is now the tinderbox for nuclear war; yet the superpowers and others seeking temporary political gain have been mindlessly pumping the bellows whenever they see a spark.

The Nuclear-Armed Crowd

The diffusion of nuclear as well as conventional weapons to the Third World makes conflict there even more frightening. Nuclear arms races in the Third World certainly matter even though the one between the First World and the Second no longer does. As more Third World states acquire nuclear weapons, one of the many violent conflicts there could go nuclear even if the superpowers or European nuclear powers do not get involved. Controlling proliferation is another historic task for this generation.

Like the superpowers, nuclear-armed Third World states may challenge and confront each other more carefully when a nuclear war could result—but not carefully enough to avoid periodic crises that could endanger

danger the planet. The historical record is not encouraging. Israel probably had nuclear weapons in 1973. Though Egypt and other states knew it, they still started a major war. Israel may have been a nuclear state even in 1970, which would mean that during the War of Attrition two nuclear states, Israel and the Soviet Union, briefly fought each other, as China and the Soviet Union had in 1969. (In 1985 Richard Nixon told Time magazine that at one point during the first two years of his administration the Soviet Union privately told him that it was considering a preemptive nuclear attack to destroy China's small nuclear weapons capability. This may have been a reference to the 1969 Soviet-Chinese border war. Nixon claims that he warned the Soviets that the United States might retaliate with nuclear weapons.) Nuclear arms did not make Israel too cautious to invade Lebanon in 1982, seriously provoking Soviet-backed Syrian forces there, nor did they deter Syria from engaging the invaders, and later the United States, in combat, risking an Israeli-Syrian war or worse. Argentina (soon, perhaps, to be a nuclear state itself) provoked a major nuclear power, Britain, into outright war when it seized the disputed Falklands/Malvinas islands in 1982. As Admiral Eugene Carroll observes: General "Galtieri invaded despite the fact that he was attacking the territory and citizens of a nuclear power. By this one action he demonstrated that nuclear superiority does not deter war and that fear of nuclear annihilation does not prevent fatal miscalculation." Press reports suggest that Britain may have actually issued a nuclear threat and may even have dispatched a nuclear missile submarine to the scene.^[4] Other reports, as we have seen, suggest that Israel readied jets and missiles armed with nuclear weapons in 1973 in case the Arabs proved too successful on the battlefield. The Soviet Union evidently sent a ship loaded with nuclear devices of some kind to the Egyptian port of Alexandria around the same time.^[5] Nuclear arms likewise did not prevent the 1979 China-Vietnam war (which entailed so much Soviet-Chinese tension that it could have ended in war between the two nuclear states) or direct French military intervention in the war between Chad and Libya.

The internationalization of the civilian nuclear energy industry has been the main bridge for the spread of nuclear materials and know-how to the Third World. Had "Atoms for Peace" been rejected years ago as the oxymoron it is, and had nuclear energy been abandoned, it might now be possible to keep uranium, plutonium, reactor cores, and nuclear reprocessing plants from spreading around the globe. Now the materials

and knowledge needed to make nuclear explosives are widely available.^[6]

And despite some useful efforts, the nuclear states have dealt with the problem half-heartedly at best—often putting political considerations of the moment before the critical goal of preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. The United States, for example, cut off aid to Pakistan (officially at least) in 1979 because of Pakistani nuclear activities but restored the aid shortly after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Even as Pakistan was in the process of actually crossing the nuclear threshold, it rose to become the third largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid. Over many years the United States has likewise done little to challenge major nuclear weapons activities by the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid, Israel, which reportedly has constructed a large nuclear arsenal, perfected weapons using the H-bomb principle, collaborated in nuclear weapons activities with South Africa, and even developed a ballistic missile able to reach the Soviet Union. Serious efforts to prevent the further spread of nuclear materials and knowledge could slow proliferation, and so remain essential.^[7]

But "ultimately one must expect that most nations determined to acquire … a nuclear [weapons] capability will succeed."^[8] Equally important, then, is reducing the conflict, violence, and intimidation that motivate states to seek nuclear weapons. U.S. nuclear saber-rattling, for example, apparently helped convince both the Chinese and the Indians that they should obtain their own nuclear arms. As Gordon Chang observes: "Washington's brandishing of the nuclear cudgel during the [1954–1955 Quemoy-Matsu] crisis [see Chapter 6] provoked not only potential disaster, but also a development that would later haunt the United States. Apparently, Eisenhower's threats helped convince the Chinese Communists that they needed nuclear weapons of their own. In January 1955, in the midst of the offshore crisis and under American pressure … Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-Tung) and other top Communist leaders decided to launch China's nuclear program." Raymond Garthoff observes that "the deployment of the U.S. nuclear-armed aircraft carrier task force during the [1971] Indo-Pakistani War, with its implicit threat to India, was a factor" in the Indian decision to seek nuclear weapons. "In debate in the Indian Parliament over the nuclear issue, proponents of an Indian nuclear capability repeatedly referred to the arrival of the American carrier in 1971 as a reason to attain such a capability."^[9]

Bitter conflicts have driven numerous states to seek nuclear weapons—for example, South Africa, Israel, Iraq, and Pakistan. In contrast, many technologically advanced and affluent states seem to have forsworn the nuclear option, largely because they lack external threats or expansive political ambitions—for example, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. New Zealand in fact sacrificed a mutual defense treaty with the United States to enforce a nuclear-free policy at home.

As Gary Milhollin wrote in late 1987: "World attention will soon focus on the superpower summit meeting where a minor arms control pact [the INF treaty] will be signed. In the rest of the world, which is less stable, countries will continue to make bombs they really intend to use. Perhaps it is time to shift our gaze and watch the risks that count."^[10]

The Nuclearization of Everything

What doesn't matter, then, is the nuclear arms race between the powers that already have substantial nuclear arsenals. But, as we discussed in Chapter 3, one aspect of the superpower nuclear arms race—the nuclearization of conventional fighting forces—is truly dangerous. It potentially gives to a pilot, artilleryman, or ship's captain the power to ignite a holocaust, with or without authorization, in the heat of conventional battle or crisis.

While increases or decreases in warhead megatonnage, missile accuracy, or bomber penetrability are almost meaningless in a world of mutual existential nuclear vulnerability, the insertion of thousands of nuclear weapons into the firestorm of modern conventional warfare is not. A commonsense decision to keep nuclear warheads far from areas of war and crisis would eliminate one of the most likely paths to nuclear war.

Most changes in the numbers and types of these weapons, including the introduction of the neutron bomb, seem of little importance. What matters is, first, the number of potential combat situations into which nuclear weapons are brought and, second, the ease with which they might be used. On both counts the little-noticed but accelerating nuclearization of the oceans is an example of a development in the arms race that does matter.

The new U.S. sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM), for instance, first deployed in June 1984, is being installed in large numbers (in one nuclear and two conventional versions) on attack submarines and surface

warships. The Center for Defense Information is one of the few public interest organizations to publicize the hazards.

Rear Admiral Larry Blose, Director of the Cruise Missile Project, noted in 1987 that with Tomahawk cruise missiles "the Navy is moving from 15 offensive strike platforms (aircraft carriers) to more than 195 strike platforms." The deployment of 3,994 SLCMs, of which 758 will be nuclear, by the mid-1990's on up to 198 battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and attack submarines changes the military picture at sea.

SCLMs, which, like other naval nuclear weapons, lack electronic locks, substantially widen the range of situations in which ship and sub commanders might be tempted to fire nuclear weapons.

SLCMs will be deployed on existing ships and submarines, warships designed primarily for non-nuclear warfare…. If a vessel engaged in a conventional battle is about to be destroyed, its commander may elect to use all his weapons, including his nuclear SLCMs, and thus a conventional battle could escalate to a nuclear war. Some of the SLCMs will be deployed on attack submarines with which communications are relatively poor. In critical situations, submarine commanders might believe that they do not have enough time to get authorization to launch their nuclear weapons and decide to use them. Poor judgment in such a case would result in a minor conflict escalating to a nuclear war…. In the precarious naval environment, it is unlikely that once the first nuclear salvo is fired, the conflict will be confined to the high seas. On the contrary, there is strong evidence that it is U.S. policy, in the event of a nuclear conflict beginning at sea, to escalate that conflict to an all-out nuclear war ."^[11]

U.S. land, air, and sea forces are highly nuclearized already. As of March 1983, "the nuclear armed ships of the U.S. Navy consisted of all 13 aircraft carriers, one battleship, all 28 cruisers, all 71 destroyers, 73 of 96 nuclear attack submarines, and 61 of 87 frigates." In the Air Force, numerous U.S.-based fighter interceptor squadrons are nuclear armed, as are tactical fighter wings based at home and abroad. Even Air National Guard planes are equipped to fire nuclear missiles. The Army fields a staggering arsenal of battlefield nuclear weapons, including air defense systems, land mines, and that mainstay of conventional battle, artillery, "almost all" of which "is now nuclear capable." The Marine Corps, whose main mission is foreign intervention, flies its own nuclear-armed air force and fields nuclear-capable artillery. Altogether, as of 1983, there were 722 U.S. military units certified for nuclear warfare.^[12]

Although limiting or reversing the deployment of SLCMs is important, the real need is for a thorough denuclearization of combat units in

Europe, South Korea, and elsewhere, and especially of the troops and ships of mobile interventionary forces destined to fight in future Third World hot spots. This is the most meaningful and urgent form of nuclear arms control. As we noted in Chapter 3, battlefield nuclear weapons are useless for war fighting anyway, since detonating them inescapably risks escalation to a holocaust.^[13] They should be abolished, unilaterally if necessary. If the United States wants to start or fight a nuclear war, it will have no trouble doing so at any time or place whether or not warheads are pre-positioned on the front lines of battle with bullets and rockets whizzing overhead. This is, after all, the missile age.

Amid the euphoria following the INF treaty, the United States made clear that its interest in arms control did not extend to battlefield nuclear weapons. Responding to a Warsaw Pact suggestion to limit the modernization of battlefield nuclear arms, and ultimately perhaps eliminate them, U.S. State Department spokesman Charles Redman noted that, "as a matter of policy, the United States opposes any nuclear-weapon-free zone in the NATO treaty area."^[14]

Preoccupied with big strategic nuclear weapons, peace organizations have not seriously sought to denuclearize conventional fighting forces either, though some recent initiatives concerning sea-based tactical nuclear weapons are excellent steps in the right direction. Protesters have tried to exclude nuclear-armed U.S. warships from both foreign and domestic ports, for example, and New Zealand has banned such ships entirely.^[15] In September 1987 retired Rear Admiral Gene La Rocque of the Center for Defense Information wrote a letter to the Pentagon urging the removal of nuclear weapons from American warships escorting Kuwaiti tankers in the Persian Gulf. And on June 10, 1987 (exactly two years after French secret agents sank the Greenpeace protest ship Rainbow Warrior, killing one of its crew), Greenpeace began its "Nuclear Free Seas Campaign," directed at the nuclear navies of the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China. With 650,000 members, Greenpeace U.S.A. is larger than all the other arms control, peace, and disarmament organizations combined. Interestingly, as Robert Schaeffer reports, in these other groups "the reaction to the Greenpeace campaign was cool and skeptical," in part because these groups worry, as Spurgeon Keeny, president of the Arms Control Association, puts it, that the Greenpeace campaign could "divert attention" from what the other groups continue to regard as "the main issues: SDI, the weaponization of space, the demise of the ABM Treaty and collapse of SALT II.^[16]

Although denuclearizing frontline combat units seems far and away

the most urgent priority, a more sweeping denuclearization of conventional military forces, such as that proposed by Morton Halperin, would bring additional safety. Recognizing that the threat of uncontrollable escalation renders nuclear explosives useless for actually fighting wars, Halperin argues that they "cannot be regarded as weapons and should not be placed in the hands of the military."^[17] Strategic as well as theater and tactical nuclear devices would be placed under a system of control divorced from the regular military command, thus officially separating conventional and nuclear fighting capabilities. Nuclear devices would be reserved for retaliation in case of nuclear attack on the United States. They would not be designed or deployed to fight wars. The military would be told to plan on the assumption that it will not receive permission to use nuclear weapons in any future conflict. As Halperin argues, such a policy is the only sane way to handle nuclear weapons and could reduce the risk of accident, unauthorized use, first strike, preemption, or miscalculation.

The Deadly Connection

We should reemphasize in this context that the "deadly connection" between Third World interventionism and nuclear war is not fundamentally a problem of the arms race, as many assume. Even the book that originally advanced this important concept describes it as "the possible links between the nuclear arms build-up and U.S. intervention strategies." Others also interpret it as "the relationship between U.S. intervention in the Third World and the US nuclear arms race."^[18]

The rationale for this interpretation is that new strategic U.S. firststrike weapons or new firebreak-spanning weapons carried by conventional forces could actually serve, as planners hope, as a "cover," shield," or "umbrella" for dangerous conventional interventions. But as we have seen, with only a few exceptions new weapons in fact change nothing; they cannot "cover" intervention (or anything else) any more than the existential deterrent already does. True, the planners still may hope to intimidate the Soviets and others by creating a perception that the United States is crazy enough to launch a first strike or set off neutron bombs if anyone challenges its Third World adventures. But, as we argued in Chapter 4, opposing new weapons is not a promising way to counter that strategy.

The real dangers today are intervention itself and the use of forces armed with nuclear weapons (of whatever age and type) to carry it out.

The "deadly connection" should be understood as an argument, first, for curbing conventional political and military actions that could ignite a crisis or war involving nuclear-armed powers and, second, for radically denuclearizing the forces that do the fighting.

What about Accidents?

Many assume that the continuing arms race raises the risk of an accidental nuclear war—whatever the effects of the arms race on first strike and the firebreak. This conclusion is not self-evident. Some innovations may add to the risk of accident—for example, weapons without electronic locks, such as the SLCM. But other innovations appear to lower the risk, for example, by modernizing electronic locks or by fixing other recognized problems of older systems that could lead to accidents. As noted in the Nuclear Weapons Databook (whose authors are not admirers of the Pentagon), "Development of new warheads incorporating upgraded safety, control, and security features is … a high [Pentagon] priority."^[19]

Paul Bracken suggests that the conventional view is actually backward: "The more complex the warning and control system the less the chance of an inadvertent launch, because of the disproportionate increase in the number of checks and balances designed to prevent this from occurring. Against the discrete accident, malfunction, or operator error the total system is massively redundant. The more complex, the more redundant. I believe the likelihood of nuclear war by pure technical accident is much lower today than it was twenty years ago." Interestingly, Bracken notes that almost every step toward this end was taken unilaterally by each superpower, not through the bilateral arms control process. These unheralded forms of arms control, which focus not on numbers or performance characteristics of weapons but on the command system governing them, were "a greater arms control achievement than the SALT II agreement or any likely development in the START talks." Moreover, contrary to the view that reductions in the risk of nuclear war coincide with periods of "good relations" with the Soviets (a topic that we take up later), "these gains in reducing the probability of accidental war were made during a period of very poor Soviet-American political relations."^[20]

In any case the greater threat is not a discrete technical malfunction but a compounded set of errors occurring during a crisis or war. As Bracken argues, "We approach wisdom on the subject of accidental/

inadvertent war when we consider accidents or inadvertent behavior during a tense high alert or limited war." This is only common sense, and the conclusion is obvious: "It may be best to concentrate our energy on preventing confrontations," as this book argues .^[21]

Still, reforms in weapons and command systems could reduce the risk of unintended nuclear war, though slowing or even stopping the arms race would not necessarily do that. We mentioned several important steps earlier: removing doomsday nuclear weapons from the front lines of potential battles and from the warships routinely dispatched to crisis zones; installing secure self-destruct mechanisms on ballistic missiles so they can be destroyed if launched in error; installing electronic locks on the many nuclear warheads now lacking them; outlawing destabilizing nuclear alerts designed to "send a signal" in crises; and an unconditional decision by each side never to launch nuclear weapons before confirming actual nuclear explosions from an enemy attack, and even then never to launch hastily (putting aside the question of whether to launch at all).

The Economic and Social Effects of Arms Control

As Bernard Brodie wrote in 1978, shortly before his death, "the greater utility of arms control agreements lies not in enhancing our security, which is usually beyond their power, but in helping to save both sides from wasteful expenditures."^[22] In a world beset by starvation, disease, illiteracy, and environmental devastation, it is surely obscene to spend billions on redundant missiles, bombers, and submarines.

When treated as an economic and social issue, the nuclear arms race raises serious questions and problems not normally considered when it is opposed for military reasons. If the real goal is economic reallocation, the first question is how, as a practical matter, to free up military dollars for alternative uses. Perhaps surprisingly, neither arms control nor opposition to individual weapons systems (whether nuclear or conventional) necessarily saves money. Consider the INF treaty, which unlike previous treaties actually banned weapons systems already deployed by the superpowers. A revealing article in the business section of the New York Times shortly after the superpowers announced that an INF agreement seemed imminent noted: "Whatever it does for peace, an arms control treaty may actually benefit military contractors. … war stocks have not been hurt." Military analyst Douglas Lee points out one reason:

"You don't free up any resources by taking apart things that have already been built." As the Times reported, "The military already has spent most of the $9, billion that was planned for buying Pershing 2 missiles, made by Martin Marietta, and ground-launched cruise missiles made by General Dynamics." Moreover, "now the weapons will be withdrawn from Europe, but the Pentagon only appears likely to seek more funds to buy tanks, artillery, and aircraft for the defense of Europe."^[23]

The INF agreement, like others before it, creates direct political pressure for increased "compensatory" spending on both conventional forces and other nuclear weapons—even though, in the case of the INF treaty and in almost all other cases, there is actually no real military loss to compensate for. As Nicholas Wade observes, referring to a book by former intelligence analyst Bruce Berkowitz: "Limits on arms … play the same role as does natural selection in Darwinian theory. They spur the evolution of species that are not constrained. The SALT I treaty of 1972 limited missile launchers because silos and submarines are easy to count. But the constraint spurred the evolution of missiles with multiple warheads … and cruise missiles"—both extremely costly items. The same is true of conventional arms. As the New York Times reported, "According to Joshua M. Epstein, who analyzes military budgets for the Brookings Institution, after the Reykjavik summit talks, Congressional leaders such as Representative Les Aspin, the Wisconsin Democrat who is chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, 'have consistently called for increases in conventional forces in the aftermath of any arms controls.'"^[24]

So has the military. In February 1988 the commander of American and allied forces in Europe, General John R. Galvin, "said on the record what senior officers have been saying privately … 'I would caution them [those who think arms control will save money] and everyone else that this is wrong'" because of highly expensive conventional and nuclear weapons "modernization" programs that must accompany any "arms control" treaties. As one congressional analyst said of the INF treaty, "Quite honestly, if anything there will be incentives to increase spending both on the conventional side and on the nuclear side, on other forces." Indeed, "the same companies that profited from producing the nuclear arms will profit from compensating for their withdrawal." Wolfgang Demisch, who analyzes military firms for the First Boston Corporation, pointed out that "Martin Marietta makes the Pershing 2, and the company is also a leading factor in the smart sensors

and enhanced munitions that presumably will be needed to replace it." As Demisch told the Times, the economic bottom line of nuclear arms agreements is that "the relative complacency of the Street [Wall Street] is justified. Unless you develop, on the basis of arms control, a political consensus to reduce defense spending, it won't make any difference."^[25]

That is the key point. In the United States, at least, the size of the overall military budget appears to be set politically—by making a decision to spend a given amount on the military, certainly not by adding up the costs of individual programs evaluated on their own merits. So even if money is rescued from a particular weapons program, it may well end up in another. Concerted anti-MX missile efforts by the peace movement and others helped limit MX deployment compared with what might have occurred otherwise; a great deal of money was in some sense saved but may have just been shunted to another weapons program. In fact, many in the mainstream (including Michael Dukakis during the 1988 presidential campaign) who agree with the peace movement that nuclear weapons spending should be reduced explicitly advocate the transfer of the savings to conventional military programs in Europe and elsewhere.

The straightforward way to attack the defense budget is to seek reductions in its politically established ceiling by persuading the public, and ultimately Congress, that less should be spent. But nuclear weapons spending, though huge in absolute terms, accounts for only about a quarter of the overall military budget. As Senator Sam Nunn, head of the Armed Services Committee, said during the discussion of INF, "Truth of it is, you're not going to save much money in any of these nuclear arms control discussions because the big money is not in nuclear weapons. The big money is in conventional weapons."^[26]

In any case, cutting the military budget is only half the battle. Any economic and social benefits obviously depend on what happens to the money. The popular slogan that so many children could be fed or schools built for the cost of a single submarine or bomber applies only if the money is transferred to these purposes. Guns forgone do not automatically become butter. Military savings could end up merely as a reduction in the federal deficit (perhaps not a bad result but not an example of the progressive social reallocation of spending that the peace movement advocates). Savings could be used for bad purposes. They could be wasted. Or, perhaps most probable, they could vanish without a trace into the vast federal budgetary cauldron.

Activists, then, should not try to stop U.S. nuclear weapons systems

or promote negotiated arms control treaties on the dubious grounds that the nuclear danger will then recede or on the equally dubious grounds that money will automatically be saved, or if it is saved that it will necessarily go toward better purposes. If those better purposes are to feed children, clean the air and water, or build clinics, they should be pursued directly with whatever money can be found—including the funds now wasted on superflous missiles and bombers when such funds can be clearly redirected. To take one example of a promising initiative, in 1987 the Soviet Union was among 148 countries represented at a United Nations conference on the relation between disarmament and international economic development. The Soviets proposed an international fund to channel money saved on future arms control agreements to Third World needs. Though even the sharp reductions in strategic nuclear weapons contemplated in the START negotiations would probably not lead to much if any savings (as we discuss later), at least the Soviets supported the principle that the superpowers should actually beat their nuclear swords into ploughshares. (The United States, in contrast, boycotted the U.N. conference. The United States has long insisted that arms control and economic development should not be linked and has refused to commit any money saved by future arms treaties to Third World programs.)^[27]

Savings from either the nuclear or conventional parts of the military budget would not necessarily benefit the macroeconomy any more than they would automatically go toward social needs at home or abroad. There is much debate about the economic purposes and consequences of high military spending. Some (on both the right and the left) regard it as a motor of the economy—military Keynesianism—providing a politically acceptable way for a capitalist state to inject huge sums of capital into privately owned high-technology companies and providing a guaranteed market for tremendous industrial output that might otherwise go unsold in an American economy that is steadily losing ground to Japanese, European, and even Third World producers. In this view, the arms race is driven largely by broad corporate interests, shared perhaps by workers and communities that depend on corporate prosperity for their own livelihood. Others claim that high military spending primarily benefits only the few giant corporations that build the weapons and is in fact ruining the U.S. economy—reducing employment by emphasizing capital-intensive high technology and eroding competitiveness by draining from the civilian sector the bulk of the nation's scientific

and technical brainpower and its research and development capital. But whatever the interests behind high military spending and whatever economic benefits or damage it brings, one must be skeptical of all predictions about how a smaller military budget would ultimately affect overall employment, inflation, and other macroeconomic indices. Predictions about the complex capitalist macroeconomy are notoriously unreliable, and the results would obviously depend on what is done with money diverted from the military budget.

Gordon Adams is one of the few economists to acknowledge that the effects of reducing military spending are uncertain, and he argues that they might not be as dramatic as is often assumed. A review of relevant research by Adams and D. A. Gold at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concluded that "the economic impact of military spending is only marginally different from that of other forms of federal spending. It is not uniquely inflationary, has an unclear relationship to productivity and technological development, and does not create significantly different numbers of jobs."^[28]

Macroeconomic goals, like social ones, can only be achieved if they are pursued directly—in this case by ensuring that any military savings are redirected specifically toward desired economic purposes. If they are wisely redirected, much good could probably be done. Barry Bluestone and John Havens, for example, studied the effects of a "Rebuild America" scenario: shifting thirty-five billion dollars from the military budget to infrastructure development, both physical (e.g., roads, bridges, and utilities) and human (e.g., education, health care, and social services). The results suggest that "while generalized spending on defense may not produce significantly different economic outcomes from generalized non-defense spending, the particular expenditure pattern embodied in rebuilding physical and human capital infrastructure is in fact expansionary in terms of GNP, total output, employment, and family disposable income … reducing the federal deficit while inducing more economic growth." Bluestone and Havens found that although "additions to GNP and output appear to be rather modest, the impact of the shift in spending on employment is anything but trivial. More than a quarter of a million (262,000) full-time equivalent jobs … are created."^[29] Whether true in its details or not, this kind of analysis suggests again that socially and economically motivated efforts to cut military spending, either nuclear or conventional, are meaningful only if they divert money to productive social and economic ends within a broader program

for progressive change. Savings in the abstract may bring little human benefit even if efforts to curb the arms race are successful—and that would be tragic.

The same holds at the microeconomic level. As Adams emphasizes, huge influxes of military spending create jobs and wealth for many workers and communities. Reducing this spending would doom many of these workers and communities to disaster, through new federal spending patterns might of course benefit other localities. Despite major efforts, it has not been easy to convert isolated plants or communities from military to civilian production and maintain standards of living and economic security, unless the local economy is already strong enough to absorb displaced military workers. Activists, then, should not "use the concept of economic conversion as a way out of the dilemma that stopping the arms race will deprive workers of jobs and communities of economic livelihood." Rather, as Adams argues, those genuinely concerned with economic reform should not simply oppose military spending, whether conventional or nuclear, but must "take economic issues seriously on their own terms."^[30] That means not only reducing local reliance on military spending where that can help, but also helping communities and regions plan their overall economies to meet the needs of their populations rather than the needs of corporations or the Pentagon.

Nuclear arms control, then—whether unilateral or negotiated—could help redress the arms race's disgraceful channeling of massive public funds to giant private companies (in the Soviet Union, giant state bureaucracies), freeing resources for better social and economic uses. But, as we will see in Chapter 10, significant savings will require far more radical changes than even the START treaty envisions. And we must insist on specific mechanisms to ensure that any savings really reach those in need.

The Symbolic Effects of Arms Control: The INF Treaty

Many believe that nuclear arms control agreements are historic accomplishments politically even if the military and economic impact is minor. Arms control has in fact become the main public barometer of the prospects for peace and disarmament.

Though the ultimate political consequences of the INF treaty and the START treaty negotiations are not yet certain, history suggests that the

superpowers' main interest in arms control may lie elsewhere: in public relations. The signing of the INF treaty, like others before it, did not noticeably reduce the nuclear danger, but it did lead to a spectacular political bonanza for both superpowers and for their leaders. As James G. Hershberg colorfully puts it, "In a virtuoso display of method acting, Reagan shed the role of Gary Cooper in High Noon and contracted for a surreal buddy movie with Gorbachev, in which both salved troubles on the home front by taking dramatic steps to dispel nuclear gloom and spotlight hopes for global peace."^[31]

To see the political usefulness of treaties such as INF, imagine that the central symbol of planetary security was something more realistic, say, the number of people killed by the superpowers' troops and their allies and clients around the world. In that case, the signing of the 1972 SALT treaty might have seemed unimpressive in comparison to the enormous slaughter then occurring in Vietnam and, at lower levels, elsewhere around the world. The signing of the 1987 INF treaty likewise might have seemed a modest achievement in comparison to the wholesale devastation of Afghanistan and the many other bloody Third World conflicts then fully in progress. The editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists might not have dramatically rolled back the hands of their "doomsday clock"; Gorbachev and Reagan might not have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The INF treaty prompted both responses (and when we examine the actual significance of the treaty we will see how very remarkable that is).

Arms control provides a low-cost way for both superpowers periodically to convey a commitment to reducing the nuclear danger without necessarily forgoing the violent foreign policies that in fact produce the danger. Arms treaties are mutually advantageous devices for keeping the peace movements of the twentieth century, in the East and the West, at bay. In them, the superpowers have found a remarkably efficient way to allay worldwide popular alarm about nuclear war that might otherwise lead to serious political problems for both Moscow and Washington.

Still, even resounding ideological victories do not come without risk. By using nuclear arms control to project an image of peaceableness, the superpowers invite a widening public response that they may not be fully able to control. By loudly proclaiming to be "on the road" to nuclear disarmament and world peace, they risk that their audiences may take the slogan seriously and even seek to hold them to it. An analogy is the orchestration of contrived "demonstration elections" in Third World states to project an image of true democracy even when there is

no intention of delivering it. Sometimes this works nicely, for a while at least, as in El Salvador. But in other cases, as in Haiti, it can backfire.^[32]

Disarmament and peace, like democracy, are ideals with which states like to be associated, but they must be careful to limit the unintended consequences of their public relations operations. In nuclear arms control, there is no great danger that the superpowers will lose the reins. This could change, lending arms control an important political dialectic. Yet those genuinely concerned with disarmament or peace would be naive to continue to cheerlead for the superpowers' "game of disarmament," as Alva Myrdal called it.^[33]

Consider in more detail the INF agreement. The New York Times acknowledged in a prominent editorial that "the military effect will be slight," noting (inaccurately) that "the agreement affects some 2,000 warheads in arsenals containing 25,000" (the combined superpower nuclear arsenal is actually about twice that big). The paper asserts, however, that "the political effect is enormous."^[34] Why? "When the pact is readied for signature, it will demonstrate that the two leaders have learned what it takes to get a job done together," even though the job in this case has little inherent significance. Similarly the Boston Globe editorialized that INF represents "a giant step" toward superpower cooperation. Such statements had a surreal quality at the time, as large-scale conflicts involving the superpowers and their clients continued to rage in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, and elsewhere. Using comparable logic, the family and friends of a divorcing couple might celebrate wildly because the couple finally agreed that he would get the flowery bedspreads while she kept the solid ones—even though they were viciously battling in court over the house, the dog, the bank accounts, and the children. Mary McGrory, one of the few incisive observers, described INF accurately as a "paltry accord."^[35]

In any case, the Times 's argument would logically apply to any major superpower agreement. But because the press and most other observers play into the superpowers' public relations strategies, uncritically repeating their version of events, nuclear arms agreements receive special treatment, even compared to far more significant accords. The most important military agreements of the 1980s, such as those to end the huge wars in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf—and perhaps to avert the maiming and death of hundreds of thousands of people—received less press coverage, political commentary, and praise than the INF agreement to dismantle missiles widely recognized as redundant.

In fact, the very week that the INF agreement (not yet signed) was announced, two far more significant agreements were actually signed

but went comparatively unnoticed. On September 16, 1987, the Times reported on a U.S.-Soviet pact to reduce the risk of nuclear war—not through arms control, but through the establishment of "risk reduction centers" that would enable the superpowers to communicate more effectively about missile tests and other matters that could lead to avoidable tension or war. Though no giant step away from nuclear danger, the pact could help avert conflict at some moment of great international trouble and confusion. The next day the Times reported the conclusion of the Montreal Protocol for protecting the earth's ozone layer against pollution, which Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Richard E. Benedick termed "perhaps the most historically significant international environmental treaty." Two days later, on September 19, the Times ran a huge full-width banner headline—dwarfing those of the previous two stories—announcing the agreement "in principle" on the Euromissiles.^[36]

The priorities are particularly absurd in the case of the ozone treaty. Not only the two superpowers but also over seventy nations agreed to it, and "many more—industrialized and developing countries alike—[were] expected to sign shortly and eventually ratify the agreement."^[37] It is widely considered a path-breaking success in gaining multilateral action to address severe global environmental threats. If agreements between nations are politically or symbolically important because they show that normally hostile leaders "have learned what it takes to get a job done together," then by rational standards this was surely the big news of the week, if not the year.

The same is true many times over when we consider the simpler and less speculative standard of direct humanitarian and environmental benefits. These are essentially zero for the INF treaty. But "officials of the [U.S.] Environmental Protection Agency … said the agency's computer models indicated that if the actions required by the [ozone] protocol were observed, they would avert 132 million cases of skin cancer and 27 million deaths from skin cancer that would otherwise have occurred among people born before 2075. The data also showed that about 1.5 million cases of eye cataracts would be averted." Ozone depletion may prove even more devastating by altering the earth's environment, perhaps warming the planet and disrupting the food chain, a prospect that has led scientists to issue unusually urgent warnings. Atmospheric scientist F. Sherwood Rowland states that "at this point, one cannot eliminate catastrophe as one of the possible conclusions." Nevertheless, amid prominent, detailed coverage of Senate committee hearings on the INF treaty, the Boston Globe buried the Senate Foreign

Relations Committee's unanimous approval of the Montreal Protocol on page 75, which also featured stories about a new treatment for gallstones and the birth of a rare tortoise in a zoo in Hamburg.^[38]

There are many variations on the theme of the political or symbolic benefits of arms control. The Boston Globe 's usually excellent military correspondent, Fred Kaplan, writes, "Nearly everyone acknowledges [that INF's] main impact is political…. [It is] the first treaty that actually cuts nuclear weapons." Deferring the question of whether such cuts really pave the way for nuclear disarmament, as many assume, we note that far larger cuts in nuclear weapons have quietly occurred over the history of the arms race and in political terms might be considered far more significant since they were done unilaterally, without difficult, drawn-out negotiations. According to the Nuclear Weapons Databook, in 1967 the U.S. nuclear stockpile comprised 32,000 warheads, shrinking to 26,000 by 1983. And "according to one official report [the 1984 Department of Defense Annual Report], 'the total number of megatons was four times as high in 1960 than in 1980.'"^[39] That enormous cut, rarely applauded and almost unknown, marked a step not toward a less nuclear world but toward a modern arsenal of more accurate weapons. INF is a far smaller change but likewise does not reduce the military capabilities of either side. Like the drop in total megatonnage and earlier arms agreements, the removal of the Euromissiles occurs because it represents no real loss of military capability.

One often reads that INF will reduce the superpowers' nuclear arsenals by about 5 percent, a strange way to describe weapons that did not even exist on the American side a few years ago and were deployed under the rationale that they would stimulate an arms agreement to remove them forthwith. Some weapons of the 5 percent are considered obsolete and would have been phased out soon anyway. And the INF treaty does not actually require the elimination of any nuclear destruction capability. Although intermediate-range missiles and launchers will be destroyed, the warheads carried by those missiles will not be. (As U.S. Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci told Congress, the decision to retain the warheads "basically was done at our behest.") Those warheads "can be modified to fit missiles that are not covered by the treaty," meaning that the real nuclear arsenals of the superpowers will be reduced not by 5 percent but by 0 percent.^[40]

In fact, even as the superpowers proudly announce that they are cutting their nuclear arsenals, they are actually expanding those arsenals dramatically. Take one case in point. Shortly before the announcement of the "in-principle" INF agreement, a largely unnoticed news report by

Fred Kaplan revealed that the Pentagon was quietly reactivating the B-53 nuclear bomb. Packing nine megatons, it is "the biggest, dirtiest bomb in the U.S. arsenal," six and a half times more powerful than the second largest, the B-28. Each B-53 carries over seven hundred times the destructive power of the weapon that devastated Hiroshima. Built in the 1960s, it was deemed obsolete and deactivated in the early 1980s. It "does not provide the same degree of security and safety" as newer warheads.^[41] The Air Force reportedly plans to deploy about 50 of the old behemoths on B-52 aircraft, making for a total of about 450 megatons of new destructive power.

In comparison, according to the New York Times, each of the 120 deployed Pershing II missiles (some operational and some spares) that are slated for removal under the INF agreement carries a warhead yielding between 5 and 50 kilotons; each of the 309 ground-launched cruise missiles to be scrapped under INF carries a warhead yielding 200 kilotons.^[42] The destructive power to be removed, then, totals at most 67.8 megatons. Only 8 reactivated B-53s, then, will exceed the total U.S. megatonnage to be removed under INF. The 50 B-53s will introduce into the U.S. arsenal more than six times the destructive power of the missiles to be retired in Europe.

The B-53 is just one of several U.S. nuclear warhead deployments slated for the near future. Others include 3,000 warheads on D-5 missiles, most yielding 475 kilotons each, for Trident submarines; over 500 mobile Midgetman missiles carrying 500 kilotons each; and 500 warheads on 50 MX missiles yielding between 300 and 475 kilotons each. In Europe, as Dan Plesch reports, the United States and NATO plan to dramatically upgrade their nuclear forces following the INF treaty:

The Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that "U.S. cuts under INF represent only 90 days of warhead production."^[43] As Mr. Reagan accepts wide praise for agreeing to "cut" nuclear weapons for the first time in history, a new era of rapid expansion of the U.S. and allied nuclear arsenals continues. That is a triumph of propaganda over fact.

Arms control advocates insist that INF is nevertheless symbolically significant because, even though other kinds of nuclear arms will have to await other treaties, this treaty sets a precedent by "eliminating an entire class of nuclear weapons." True, one narrow category of weapons—intermediate-range land-based nuclear missiles—will be abolished. But again on the American side this category did not even exist until several years ago. Perhaps the real precedent here is to invent new classes of weapons so they can later be abolished in politically popular arms control "breakthroughs."

More important, the missions of these missiles will not be abolished but simply reassigned to other weapons. As Diana Johnstone points out, "The Pentagon will transfer its cruise missiles to warships—in the North Atlantic, Baltic and Mediterranean (where they can be aimed to the South as well as the North)—where it meant to put them all along and where they will not draw the attention of protesting civilians." She cites a 1981 Library of Congress research report finding that cruise missiles were originally sent to Europe to save them from arms control, and that now that this goal has been accomplished the United States will follow the long-standing plan to, as British M. P. Robin Cook put it, "pepper the seas with sea-launched cruise missiles."^[44] Another medium-range weapon, known as the jet aircraft, also stands ready in Europe to deliver nuclear warheads wherever they might be needed in time of war, as do ballistic-missile submarines lurking offshore and "strategic" missiles and bombers based in the United States.

The commander of the U.S. Strategic Air Command, General John T. Chain, made no secret of American intentions in an interview with the New York Times shortly before the signing of the INF treaty. As Richard Halloran reports, Chain said that "the Joint Chiefs of Staff had asked SAC to determine what weapons could cover Soviet targets after the United States removed … ground-launched cruise missiles and … Pershing 2 ballistic missiles from Europe." Chain observed that "we

could use B-52's, which could sit on alert here in the United States." One hundred and fifty such aircraft are equipped to launch cruise missiles, with a range of 1,500 miles and high accuracy. SAC owns 1,700 of them. Chain added that FB-111 bombers (those used to attack Libya in 1986) could also fly such missions from bases in Europe or the United States. "Each of SAC's 61 FB-111's can carry 15,000 pounds of nuclear bombs at sea level at more than the speed of sound." Moreover, the targets covered by the Euromissiles "are the same types of targets that we could hold at risk from here in the United States" with intercontinental missiles. Attack submarines armed with cruise missiles, he noted, could also be used.^[45] At the outbreak of any future nuclear war, millions of Eastern and Western Europeans will not be impressed that a "whole class" of weapons previously aimed at them had been abolished when they are about to be obliterated by ready substitutes.

Getting Friendly: Arms Control And Superpower Relations

Another popular notion about the political or symbolic effects of arms agreements such as the SALT treaties and INF is that they can reduce the nuclear danger by promoting better relations between the superpowers. This idea has become so widespread that few feel the need to explicitly defend it. Two assumptions hide within the argument: (1) that better relations between the superpowers are a major factor determining the risk of nuclear war and (2) that nuclear arms agreements help establish better relations. Both premises deserve examination.

As we noted, each superpower bloc has wisely decided not to pose any direct military threat to the sovereignty of the other, knowing that to do so would probably result in the destruction of the planet. This kind of restraint does not require good relations but only an instinct for self-preservation. Since World War II superpower interventions have usually taken another form entirely—responses to local conflicts in Europe and the Third World. Such operations can and do continue in times of relatively warm cultural and diplomatic contacts between the United States and the Soviet Union. The American war in Vietnam, after all, proceeded with awful intensity despite détente because it was not directed against the Soviets in the first place. Similarly good relations with the United States would probably not have prevented the Soviet attack on Afghanistan, aimed as it was against a domestic Afghan threat to Soviet power in the country. Superpower violence in the Third World,

the main contemporary trigger for nuclear war, is quite consistent with good relations between the superpowers themselves.^[46]

Still, warm relations could make an important difference in some cases. One superpower must challenge the actions of the other to make a crisis, and détente might help discourage such challenges. But again the historical record should make us cautious about such predictions. Recall that the most dangerous nuclear confrontation since the Cuban missile crisis occurred in 1973, immediately after the June 1973 Nixon-Brezhnev Summit II, whose centerpiece, ironically, was the "Agreement Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the Prevention of Nuclear War." This was perhaps the height of détente. But the pursuit of important interests overrode any barriers to confrontation arising from détente. Nixon understood the profound limitations of détente in this regard:

I evaluated the Soviet behavior during the Mideast crisis not as an example of the failure of détente, but as an illustration of its limitations-limitations of which I had always been keenly aware…. The Soviet Union will always act in its own self-interest; and so will the United States. Détente cannot change that. All we can hope from détente is that it will minimize confrontation in marginal areas and provide, at least, alternative possibilities in the major ones.

The shocking 1973 nuclear crisis did not even prevent the occurrence of Summit III in June 1974. Nixon reports Brezhnev's "willingness to pick up the dialogue of détente where it had left off before the Mideast crisis," a willingness he shared.^[47]

In other circumstances, of course, particularly in what Nixon calls the "marginal areas," warm diplomatic relations may well discourage intervention and crisis by giving the superpowers something to lose should open conflict between them erupt. Détente may also help to resolve crises that do occur, though not necessarily. Kissinger's diplomatic access to Moscow in 1973, and the Soviets' willingness to rely on his solemn assurances, permitted him to double-cross the Russians and reignite the crisis by giving Israel permission to violate the cease-fire that he had just negotiated. In other circumstances, though, particularly in the case of an outright accident or mistake, cordial relations could help prevent a disaster by encouraging negotiations rather than military action. Moreover, détente may reduce the mutual popular paranoia that helps each superpower justify the subset of its international adventures that become publicly known and debated. To the extent that Gorbachev, for example, is perceived in the United States as a man of peace,

the American government may have a more difficult time using the Soviet threat as a pretext for Third World intervention.

Whatever happens to the U.S.-Soviet relationship, the most meaningful barometer of change is not the warmth or coolness of rhetoric but the actual behavior of both states in the political conflicts that could lead to war. Better relations do not necessarily demonstrate progress. Less militarism in the Third World would.

Whatever the importance of superpower relations, it would be surprising if nuclear arms agreements of minimal military and economic significance profoundly improved them. Indeed, "on the record … there is no reason to believe that such improvements will be of long duration."^[48] Arms treaties, like other negotiated agreements between states, particularly those between adversaries, are founded on self-interest, not trust or good will. True, any superpower agreement—not just those concerning nuclear weapons—can both reflect and promote better relations. But often they simply become another terrain of conflict and propaganda.

As Nicholas Wade writes: "The general pattern of arms accords is to cap the new weapons each side wants to build, scrap those that are obsolete, and leave problem weapons for the next agreement. That makes each new treaty harder to negotiate. Verification becomes trickier, which increases suspicions and charges of cheating, and worsens relations—just the opposite of what arms control is meant to achieve." "Wrongly designed," he adds, arms control "can spur new competition in dangerous technologies, foster accusations of cheating and speed the very tensions it seeks to avert." SALT II, for example, was initially hailed as a great leap forward for superpower relations but quickly degenerated into bitter superpower conflict—first over the U.S. Senate's failure to ratify it, later over alleged minor violations of it by both sides, and finally over the U.S. government's unilateral decision to violate it explicitly by deploying more cruise missiles than it allows. Similar conflicts developed over the ABM treaty regarding alleged cheating and the permissibility of the testing and deployment of Star Wars components. In 1986 a former chief of the U.S. delegation to SALT II and director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Ralph Earle II, wrote in Foreign Policy that "inadvertently or intentionally" the Reagan administration's "mishandling" of the nuclear treaty compliance issue "created an unnecessary and undeniable self-inflicted wound" that may do "irreparable damage" to "U.S.-Soviet relations."^[49] In retrospect, no

one could seriously claim that ABM, SALT, or SALT II led to better relations in any sustained or basic sense, though each of course played a role in the normal cycle of periodic upswings and downswings.

Did the INF treaty lead to better relations and a safer world in the meaningful sense of reduced international conflict involving the superpowers? Certainly not right away. Indeed, the period immediately surrounding INF was one of unusually great superpower militarism, with both nations engaged in their largest interventions of many years. The Soviets continued their murderous occupation of Afghanistan, complete with frequent attacks on U.S.-backed Pakistan, while the United States continued to support segments of the Afghan resistance with large quantities of weapons and other aid used for killing Soviet soldiers and for terrorist attacks in Kabul and elsewhere, including advanced anti-aircraft missiles used to down both military and civilian Afghan and Soviet planes. On the very day banner headlines hailed the INF signing in the morning papers, a barely reported UPI dispatch stated, "A diplomat quoted a senior Afghan medical officer as saying, 'more casualties were being brought into Kabul' from [the Afghan cities] Khost and Kandahar 'than at any time during the war.'" Although the Afghan situation soon changed dramatically, it had not yet done so when Gorbachev was being toasted as a new Soviet man of peace around the world. The reasons for the ultimate Soviet withdrawal can be traced not to INF, of course, but to the fortunes of the battlefield, domestic discontent, and the huge cost of the war, similar to the considerations that ultimately drove the United States from Vietnam. In and around the Persian Gulf in the immediate post-INF period, the United States continued its largest and most dangerous military intervention since the Vietnam War, undertaken despite an urgent Soviet proposal for all foreign warships to stay clear of that explosive war zone.^[50] Even as the Central American peace treaty was being enacted, the United States increased supplies to the Nicaraguan contras (who in turn widely expanded terrorist attacks against Nicaraguan civilians), continued a devastating economic embargo (even blocking a convoy of American veterans bearing medical and other humanitarian aid), and kept up an unrelenting ideological campaign against Managua. Prominent in this campaign was President Reagan's demand—found nowhere in the Central American treaty—that the Nicaraguans eject their Cuban and Soviet advisers, which would be comparable to a Soviet demand that, say, Pakistan, not known for a commitment to democracy and human rights, expel American civilian and military officials. The United States continued to support the South African regime,

which in support of the Angolan rebels it sponsors invaded Angola outright shortly after the announcement of the nuclear treaty, killing not only many Angolans but also Cubans and possibly Soviets helping to defend the country from the apartheid state. Many other cases could be cited.

Even the routine hazards of superpower militarism seemed unchanged or intensified by unusual recklessness on both sides right after the treaty. On February 12, as the U.S. Senate debated INF, two American warships—the guided-missile cruiser Yorktown and the destroyer Caron —deliberately violated Soviet territorial waters by steaming to within ten miles of the sensitive Soviet coastline on the Black Sea. President Reagan, the Pentagon said, personally ordered the provocative operation to assert the right of "innocent" passage into other nations' territorial waters under an interpretation of international law disputed by the Soviet Union. According to the New York Times, the passages were "tense" and conducted with crews "at a high state of readiness." Fortunately they were not at too high a state of readiness. Apparently determined to assert Soviet rights with their own massive weapons platforms, the Soviets warned away the American vessels; when this tactic failed, Soviet frigates assumed a collision course and rammed the U.S. warships. As military researcher William Arkin sensibly noted: "That episode might have led to something more serious. It shows that this sort of routine intelligence-gathering and routine confrontation can lead to unintended crises."^[51] The Nuclear Weapons Databook notes that all U.S. destroyers and all U.S. cruisers are equipped to carry and fire nuclear weapons. Arkin later published a study concluding that the Caron was on a spy mission, which would not qualify as permitted "innocent passage" under international law. Since 1980, Arkin added, the Caron had officially carried nuclear weapons six times. There was no way of knowing if they were on board during the ramming incident.^[52]

Within a year of the INF treaty, several important Third World peace treaties were signed and some major conflicts there showed promise of being resolved (e.g., Afghanistan, the Iran-Iraq war, and Namibia and Angola). Improved superpower relations perhaps helped in some cases, such as southern Africa, though in other conflicts, such as the gulf war, they were probably irrelevant. More important—for Afghanistan particularly—has been Gorbachev's independent desire to disengage the Soviet Union from various Third World albatrosses and turn attention to domestic reform and the building of economic bridges to Western Europe. INF played no direct role in any of these decisions.

Only time will tell if Third World conflicts posing nuclear dangers will truly wind down, if new ones will take their place, and what role, if any, the new superpower relationship will play. Unlike the last round of détente, the new round may lead to real progress toward a safer and less violent world. If, as some believe, the end of the Cold War is at hand, the nuclear danger could decrease dramatically. The measure of progress, however, will not be whether further nuclear arms treaties follow INF but what Washington and Moscow actually do in the Third World.

Start: A Fresh Start for Arms Control?

Perhaps the biggest factor in the INF treaty's popularity is the hope that it will pave the way for more dramatic arms control successes. The Boston Globe editorialized: "If it becomes the precedent for a strategic arms treaty," INF "will constitute the most substantive achievement yet" for Reagan and Gorbachev. Many hopes ride on what is widely regarded as the preeminent arms control goal of this historical period, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), to dramatically cut strategic nuclear strike forces. What is its significance? As Fred Kaplan reported in the Boston Globe, "Officials have said that the treaty … would cut long-range strategic weapons on both sides by 50 percent."^[53] But it turns out that where nuclear weapons are concerned, 50 percent does not really equal 50 percent, much as "reducing nuclear arsenals" actually meant increasing them at the time the INF treaty was signed.

In December 1987 a study published by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) reported something already understood by knowledgeable insiders: that the treaty actually under negotiation would reduce strategic weapons by only about 30 or 35 percent. Naturally a 50 percent cut sounds more dramatic and wins more political points—the main objective of the arms control exercise. START can be described this way only because of a strange "counting rule," which treats each nuclear bomber carrying only bombs and short-range attack missiles as one warhead even though it can actually deliver many. As Kaplan notes, START as currently understood "would limit each side to 6,000 strategic nuclear warheads. However, because of the counting rule, the United States could in fact end up with 9,200 warheads, since about 3,200 of those warheads—bombs and short-range attack missiles on bombers—would not be counted under the terms of the treaty."^[54] Similarly the Soviets could end up with 7,100 warheads. Such blatant

nuclear numerology causes little concern. The press continued to report START as "cutting in half " strategic arsenals even after the NRDC publicly revealed that this was not true.

In a prominent editorial at the time of the INF treaty signing, the New York Times raised the basic but rarely asked question about START: "Will it actually reduce the risks of war?" The editorialist insisted that "numbers can matter. Agreements can produce situations permitting a foe to plan a first strike." How this could happen is not explained, perhaps because it is impossible (see Chapter 2). An earlier story in the Times reported: "Reagan Administration officials have argued that an agreement on deep cuts in long-range arms would produce a more stable strategic balance because it would compel the Soviet Union to reduce its force of land-based missiles. The Administration has said that those missiles are the most suitable weapons for carrying out an attack on American missile silos." But Brent Scowcroft argues on the basis of the current American proposal that "by any of the measures commonly used, stability would be impaired."^[55]

As usual, both viewpoints are off base. The effects on stability would be ambiguous but so slight as to be undetectable. With or without START, deterrence will remain as stable or as unstable as the balance of terror makes it, because START cannot change the terror that each side would feel in starting a nuclear war. The most realistic assessment is that "reductions in levels of strategic forces by 50% or so, as have been suggested in recent Soviet and American proposals, would not necessarily make much difference in the levels of damage to be expected in the event of war. Nor is there reason to believe that such cuts, even if they involve selective reductions in 'counterforce' weapons, would necessarily make much difference in the likelihood of nuclear holocaust."^[56]

That conclusion is perhaps obvious, and it is strongly supported by a recent study by the Brookings Institution and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. That study, as we mentioned in Chapter 2, found that with current forces numbering roughly 10,000 strategic warheads on each side, neither superpower can even begin to destroy enough of its enemy's nuclear weapons in a first strike to prevent utterly devastating retaliation. Even in a crisis, then, neither side has any incentive to launch a first strike. The same would be true, the study found, if both sides reduced their forces to roughly 6,000 strategic warheads—levels that, as we saw, are somewhat lower than those actually envisioned in the START treaty.

The study considered three possible 6,000-warhead scenarios: forces

roughly similar in composition to current forces except for proportional numerical reductions across the board; forces designed for maximum invulnerability to attack; and heavily modernized forces designed for maximum ability to destroy the enemy's nuclear forces as well as for invulnerability. In each scenario, after absorbing the most devastating first-strike attack possible, either side "could readily strike" all of the 1,500–2,000 targets considered worth striking in retaliation, just as they can today.^[57]

Little would change, in fact, if the superpowers' nuclear arsenals were reduced even further, to half the levels officially envisioned in START: 3,000 strategic warheads on each side, less than one-third of current levels. Both sides would almost certainly choose such reductions to maximize the invulnerability of their remaining forces. In that case, "target coverage in [either] first strike [or] retaliation is essentially identical for both sides and equal to" that achievable with current forces. Indeed, either side would still have residual strategic forces remaining unused after attacking all worthwhile targets, even after absorbing the worst possible first strike.^[58]

Thus even if we assume. as many mainstream analysts do, that strong deterrence requires the ability to retaliate against the entire military apparatus of the enemy, START would not even begin to affect the risk of nuclear war. There simply are not enough important military targets to justify the number of weapons each side would retain even after the reductions contemplated in START. If we make the far more reasonable assumption that threatening the enemy's cities is more than sufficient to discourage a first strike, then even arms reductions to well below 3,000 warheads would not affect the risk of nuclear war, either. As Steinbruner points out, "500–2,000 warheads delivered in retaliation covers anything that might be considered a reasonable deterrent requirement under any of the prevailing opinions about that requirement."^[59] Clearly START, which would leave each side with several times that number of warheads, means little.

Would deep strategic arms cuts at least reduce the number of casualties in the event of a nuclear war? Here again, the Brookings-Lawrence Livermore study verifies common sense: "civilian damage, measured in the number of deaths, does not appear very sensitive to levels of strategic forces." Nuclear weapons are so powerful that only a few are needed to wipe out whole populations. As Spurgeon Keeny explains, only 100 one-megaton weapons (or their equivalent) could "cause some 20 million–40 million Soviet prompt fatalities, and I am sure at least

twice that many delayed fatalities from untreated casualties and secondary effects." One Trident 2 submarine carrying D-5 missiles "would have more than this amount of equivalent megatonnage on board."^[60]

In fact the study projected that smaller forces could actually kill more people than current forces. For example, a simulated first strike with a modernized force of 3,000 U.S. strategic weapons killed twice as many Soviet people as a first strike with current forces of 10,000 U.S. weapons; a simulated American retaliation following a Soviet first strike likewise killed twice as many Soviets with 3,000 modernized weapons as with 10,000 current weapons.^[61]

The reason for such disparities is that the main determinant of the amount of likely damage is not the number of available weapons but the way the weapons are targeted and, to some extent, their size . As we might expect, the Brookings-Lawrence Livermore study found that most fatalities would result from attacks on cities and that larger warheads would cause more deaths than smaller ones. Hence, "withholding attacks on [urban areas] or using lower-yield accurate weapons could do much to reduce immediate deaths."^[62] Even with those steps, of course, a major nuclear war would be a cataclysm beyond history; all predictions of casualties are largely guesswork based on studies of the comparatively small nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Still, considering the number of lives potentially at stake, we must applaud any steps to reduce the anticipated damage of a nuclear war. Even dramatic cuts in strategic nuclear arsenals, however, would not necessarily do any good. And current arms control proposals, including START, do not deal with targeting or yield, both of which are perhaps unverifiable but could of course be changed unilaterally.

As General Jones, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained to Harper's magazine: "People at both ends of the political spectrum expect too much from arms control. They tend to think the negotiations will somehow make all our problems go away…. Even if both sides scrapped 5,000 nuclear weapons tomorrow, the world would be no safer if tensions between the two countries remained the same." Perhaps inadvertently, the Boston Globe wrote the truth about the current phase of arms control in September 1987: "The superpowers have set the stage for hacking away at redundancies elsewhere in the thicket of nuclear deterrence."^[63] So why is everyone excited about reducing redundancies, which by definition are meaningless?

The important aspect of START is that, as the NRDC study reported, "all the U.S. weapon systems now in development would be allowed

to proceed." These include the Stealth bomber, the Trident II (D-5) submarine-launched missile, new cruise missiles, and a new gravity bomb, the B-83. Similarly, "almost all the Soviet weapon systems now being deployed or in development" could continue, including the SS-24 and SS-25 ICBMs, the Typhoon and Delta-4 submarines, the SS-N-20 and SS-N-23 submarine-launched missiles, the Tupolev bombers (known here as Bear and Blackjack), and the AS-15 air-launched cruise missiles. START "would also inspire a new generation of nuclear weapons. By reducing the number of missiles and warheads, START would fuel the race for super-accurate missiles with 'single-shot kill probability' systems and 'maneuvering re-entry vehicles' that could avoid missile defense systems." With fewer but far more accurate weapons, American and Soviet forces might actually pose a greater threat to each other's heavily protected targets like missile silos and command centers, and, hence, "might become even more lethal after START. "^[64] Even for those who believe such things matter, does this sound like a safer world?

It would not even be a cheaper world. As Michael Howard says of deep cuts in nuclear arsenals: "If the cuts applied to existing inventories [they would not] significantly reduce military expenditures. Size of inventories in itself bears no necessary relationship … to the cost of maintaining" the nuclear balance. Richard Halloran agreed in the New York Times in December 1987 that as long as weapons modernization proceeds, "such an arms agreement would apparently not produce much immediate financial saving because spending for costly nuclear weapons would continue." In February 1988 Halloran reported that "senior officers," including NATO chief General Galvin, concurred that neither INF nor a long-range nuclear arms treaty nor even a conventional weapons treaty would save money, because they would limit existing weapons that have already been paid for and could affect only their comparatively small operating costs.^[65]

Even the SALT II treaty placed restrictions on the technological arms race, long regarded by arms control advocates as a far more fundamental concern than the aggregate sizes of nuclear stockpiles that will remain bloated in any case. By the standards of arms controllers, then, START would be a great leap backward, not forward. General Chain, the commander of the Strategic Air Command, told Halloran in December 1987 that he would not be surprised if "we end up with some type of agreement that reduces nuclear weapons." "That's fine with me," the general cheerfully added, "as long as I have modern nuclear

weapons."^[66] That says everything you need to know about the "historic" START treaty.

What about "Minimum Deterrence"?

What about reductions far more radical than START, toward the much-discussed "minimum deterrent"—the lowest level of nuclear forces consistent with maintaining the balance of terror? Opinions differ about how low that level is—whether a few thousand, a few hundred, or a few dozen nuclear weapons—but by definition it would preserve existential deterrence. Hence, even the most radical nuclear reductions seriously proposed short of total nuclear disarmament should not greatly alter the calculations of political leaders in considering the use of nuclear weapons or taking risks during crises. All of the superpowers' weapons in excess of the minimum deterrent are redundant. Removing them changes little.

As we have seen, even the amount of destruction in the event of a nuclear war might not change much should the superpowers slash their strategic arsenals by 90 percent or more. If the remaining weapons land on cities—and with so few weapons on hand, that is probably where they would be aimed—they might kill nearly as many people as today's arsenal would if used to attack the full range of military targets. A recent National Academy of Sciences study concluded that a few hundred weapons exploded over cities would immediately kill 20 million to 40 million people in the United States and 30 million to 50 million people in the Soviet Union; a full-scale attack against 2,000 military and economic targets, the study found, would kill roughly the same number of people.^[67]

Still, if strategic arsenals were vastly reduced, a nuclear war might kill fewer people, and if the remaining weapons were not gigantic blockbusters, it would probably do much less damage to the earth's environment. From debatable assumptions, George Rathjens estimates that 90 percent cuts in 1985 strategic nuclear force levels could reduce expected fatalities in a large-scale nuclear war by a factor of two to ten.^[68] The superpowers should certainly reduce their strategic arsenals to the minimum deterrent, unilaterally if necessary, if only for the chance of sparing the planet the total destruction that tens of thousands of warheads could wreak. A minimum deterrent, moreover, would probably mean an end to nuclear war-fighting doctrines that rely on large and varied nuclear arsenals and hence an end to the dangerous misperceptions

about nuclear war those doctrines may spawn (see Chapter 4). But minimum deterrence would probably not help achieve the truly important task of our time: reducing the risk of nuclear war. Apart from banning doomsday weapons, as we discussed above, the only kind of nuclear arms control that can reduce that risk is total abolition, to which we now turn.

What about Disarmament?

Considering the historical record, the violent character of states, and human passions and fallibility, we must expect a disaster sooner or later as long as nuclear weapons exist. Nuclear disarmament is possibly the most important task in history. But we must be realistic about the obstacles to it and about the ability of arms control to bring nuclear disarmament closer.

The Reykjavik summit and the INF treaty have led many, even on the left, to suppose that American and Soviet leaders may now be ready to consider the abolition of nuclear weapons. That is a naive assumption, particularly for the United States. Even most American officials who supported INF vehemently oppose the denuclearization of Europe, a logical first step toward general nuclear disarmament. Mr. Gorbachev has made some dramatic moves, such as the unprecedented unilateral Soviet moratorium on nuclear testing. But disarmament is a different matter.

In fact all the nuclear states would regard losing their ultimate weapons as a catastrophe. Deterrence does work to a degree—not nearly enough, as we have seen, to make the world safe, but well enough to make world leaders afraid to experiment with the alternative. Nuclear weapons provide their owners with at least some protection from and power over other nations. More important, the threat of a nuclear cataclysm helps deter a third world war that, even if fought with only conventional weapons, could far exceed the destruction of World War II.

Moreover, in a world without nuclear weapons "as crises developed, would we not have something akin to the mobilization that preceded World War I, and a period of great instability as the realization of nuclear weapons capabilities seemed imminent?"^[69] The losing side would surely be tempted to make and perhaps use nuclear weapons. The fear of that might lead other states to do the same. In this one situation, a first strike might even seem appealing if one side thought it could knock out the other's production facilities or tiny, hastily produced arsenal

(e.g., Israel's 1981 strike against an Iraqi reactor). Nuclear disarmament would of course bring enormous benefits for the nuclear states, particularly considering the likely alternative: more and more states acquiring nuclear arms and the constant risk of a catastrophe that would destroy everyone. But for now at least the nuclear states prefer the devil they know to the one they don't.

American and Soviet leaders endorse nuclear disarmament in word much as they praise other popular values like democracy and human rights, even as they regularly support the opposite in Afghanistan and El Salvador, Poland and South Africa. As the worldwide disarmament movement grows in strength and visibility, world leaders will continue to claim its goal as their own. But that is just a costless exercise in nuclear-age public relations.

Even if the superpowers someday reconsider, tremendous practical obstacles would remain. There is no way to disinvent nuclear weapons. Pending methods of verification not now available or even conceivable, neither side could be certain that the other had not secretly retained some warheads or the capability of quickly producing them. With about fifty thousand superpower weapons remaining in place, neither side could gain anything by squirreling away a few dozen intermediate-range missiles after INF, despite the hysteria about verification. But if nuclear stockpiles were reduced to zero or near zero, even a few hidden warheads could provide tremendous coercive power; each can level a city.

The problem multiplies manyfold as more states join the nuclear club and others line up at the door. How could disarmament be imposed on the dozen or so nuclear and near-nuclear nations and the others that could make nuclear weapons over the next few years if they chose to? How could disarmament be verified and policed when college students can design A-bombs and nuclear materials are scattered around the globe? Who could impose disarmament on states such as Israel and South Africa—highly sophisticated, widely distrusted, and determined to retain nuclear weapons? Who would believe these states even if they did comply?

The current superpowers and other nuclear states seem unlikely to tolerate even a small risk of cheating, though the risk would of course be inconsequential compared with the risk of total planetary destruction that we now face every day. As H. D. S. Greenway observes, "Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union is going to put itself in a position of military inferiority to Israel and India."^[70]

Even those parts of the U.S. peace movement most committed to nuclear

disarmament as a present-day focus of political work are beginning to recognize these problems. In June 1987, for example, a major conference of disarmament activists met in Ringwood, New jersey, "to discuss the requirements and the plausibility of a long-term, unified campaign to eliminate all nuclear weapons worldwide…. The initial impetus for the conference was a 'Disarmament 2000' campaign proposal … focused primarily on nuclear weapons and on the mass movement building necessary to abolish nuclear weapons by the year 2000." But according to Rob Leavitt, "There was little consensus that nuclear disarmament by 2000 was possible." The participants concluded: "It is difficult to imagine that total nuclear disarmament is possible in the absence of a new world order," enjoying, among other changes, conventional disarmament and an end to military intervention.^[71]

That conclusion may be too pessimistic. A huge global mass movement (ignited, perhaps, by a nuclear accident, a small nuclear war, or some other scare) could force nuclear disarmament on the nations of the world—if it is prepared to use civil disobedience on a huge scale and to endure the terrible state violence that would likely be unleashed against it in the West, the East, and the Third World alike. Whether a powerful enough movement could be organized, and whether it could succeed, no one can know. But it is probably the only way nuclear disarmament could be achieved prior to radical political changes in the world order.

We must surely abandon the hope that arms control as we know it is a promising strategy for pursuing nuclear abolition. Many insist that arms control is at least a "step in the right direction." One bumper sticker reads: "The Freeze: Step One." The communications director of the largest U.S. antinuclear organization, SANE/Freeze, said in reference to the INF treaty, "Our slogan is 2000 down, 48,000 to go."^[72]

The metaphor is misleading, another reflection of weaponitis. The path to nuclear disarmament is not like a continuous road from here to there on which one makes gradual progress by taking step after step. It is more like a road interrupted by a vast canyon. States can indeed take gradual steps toward the edge of the canyon—the minimum deterrent. But once there they would quickly discover not only that they still faced the threat of nuclear annihilation but also that all the prior "steps in the right direction" had not brought nuclear disarmament any closer. That goal requires crossing the canyon—getting the most powerful states on a violent planet to relinquish their ultimate weapons with no guaranteed assurances that all others would do the same. That is an entirely different enterprise from junking redundant weapons that don't really matter anyway.

Deep cuts in nuclear arsenals might do some good at a purely symbolic level, suggesting that if reductions are good elimination would be even better. But the symbolism could cut both ways. Dramatic progress in arms control could in fact hurt the prospects for abolition by breeding complacency about the nuclear peril while doing nothing to undermine the real forces that motivate states to get and keep nuclear weapons.

Those forces must be confronted directly by restraining the illegitimate violence of our governments wherever we can. Considering the immense power and low moral standards of modern states, world peace will of course not come in a day. But reducing aggression and intervention by the leading states is probably a prerequisite for a long-run institutional solution to international violence, whether by means of world government, conventional disarmament, the "peace system" that some advocate, or other schemes.^[73] In the meantime, we must do what we can to make sure we survive long enough to find out.

In short, peace is the path to nuclear disarmament, not the other way around. Paradoxically, a disarmament movement working to reduce the weapons that it seeks to abolish probably cannot establish the conditions under which abolition might be possible. That requires a peace movement.

Chapter Ten
U.S. Foreign Policy and Nuclear War

Crisis management … bears a disturbing resemblance to the ancient art of alchemy…. The only good strategies are those designed to prevent crises.
—Richard Ned Lebow, Nuclear Crisis Management: A Dangerous Illusion

Nuclear arms control, as we have seen, can play only a limited role in helping to prevent nuclear war, and as currently practiced it may do no good whatsoever. Changes in foreign policy could do far more because, as Part II shows, almost all actual nuclear danger points have resulted from superpower recklessness and intervention in the Third World.

Can the World be Made Safe for Conventional State Violence?

Can we avoid nuclear danger without constraining the conventional violence that is raging around the world? It is in the interests of the superpowers that we believe so. Moscow does not want its actions in Afghanistan to go down in history as a reckless threat to humanity, just as Washington would like those concerned about nuclear war to ignore American actions in Lebanon and the Persian Gulf.

In the United States, at least, specialists pin great hopes on "crisis management." Former U.S. defense secretary Robert McNamara claims that "there is no longer any such thing as strategy, only crisis management." One of its most eminent proponents, William Ury of the Harvard Law School's Nuclear Negotiation Project, goes even further: "Thanks to fire stations and fire hydrants, emergency exits and smoke detectors, building regulations and fire drills in school, trained firefighters and their modern equipment—in short, a comprehensive fire prevention

and firefighting system—we live in relative safety. The same approach can be taken with crises…. They can be effectively stopped before they go out of control."^[1]

Can they really? Even a leader who wants to avoid escalation may not be able to do so because the opponent's actions can be difficult to control. Deterrence, based ultimately on filling the adversary with fear of nuclear war, can surely induce caution. But as Part I makes clear, its strength rests on the existential threat of mutual annihilation and cannot be greatly boosted by shifts in weapons or doctrine. The many examples we cited in Part II leave no doubt that the existential risk is often just not enough to do the job, because—to be blunt—leaders on both sides are willing to run it periodically for their purposes of the moment.

Even if more cautious and well-intentioned leaders could be found, they would be no more able than their predecessors to confidently prevent major blunders, mishaps, and miscalculations, such as the U.S. jet that blithely wandered into Soviet airspace—and onto Soviet nuclear attack warning radars—during the Cuban missile crisis. Progress can be made. But no one, not even the professors of crisis, can repeal Murphy's Law. There are no emergency exits from nuclear war, no fire hydrants to tap to put it out, no safe ways to play with matches near the oil fields of the Middle East or the massive ammunition dumps many Third World nations have become.

As a recent reminder of the many dangers, a conference on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis suggested that even a quarter century of exhaustive scholarship has not revealed the full magnitude of recklessness and foul-up during the worst nuclear crisis in history, long considered an early success for deterrence and an inspiring model of crisis management. As Seymour Hersh writes, "The risks were greater than anyone in Washington knew." For apparently President Kennedy and his aides thoroughly misinterpreted one of the most crucial incidents of the crisis—the downing of an American U-2 spy plane over Cuba at the height of the tension. Assuming that Khrushchev had ordered the attack to demonstrate Soviet resolve, the Kennedy team angrily escalated the crisis, issuing an ultimatum to the Soviets to remove their missiles or face an American invasion of Cuba. As then secretary of defense Robert McNamara said at the conference, "It seemed to me that the Soviets, who had some 40,000 troops on Cuba, would … suffer casualties and would have to respond somewhere else in the world. That carried with it the risk that nuclear weapons would

be launched." Kennedy had given the Pentagon standing orders to strike any base in Cuba that launched an attack on a U-2; his decision not to retaliate immediately "became known at the operating level in the Pentagon barely in time to prevent a planned air strike on the probable offending air defense missile site.^[2]

Newly available U.S. intelligence information, based partly on the 1964 breaking of a Soviet code in use in 1962, suggests not only that Kennedy's interpretation of the U-2 shoot-down was incorrect, but also that the whole crisis may have been far more complex and volatile than Americans had realized. Remarkably, the Soviet troops at the antiaircraft site in question may have been attacked, presumably by Cuban soldiers, the night before. Intercepts from the commander of an adjacent Soviet naval base reportedly indicate that his unit was counter-attacking and had taken casualties. Hersh writes that U.S. analysts "were unable to exclude the possibility that the SAM [antiaircraft] site … may not have been fully under Soviet control when the U-2 was shot down the next morning." No evidence of an order by Khrushchev to attack the U-2 has been found. According to Hersh, a "senior intelligence official … who was at the top of an intelligence agency in 1962" said, "We'll never know whether it was shot down by Cubans or Russians…. I doubt if even Castro knows." In 1964, Hersh asserts, the only U.S. government official who knew of the new intelligence information and understood its significance was Daniel Ellsberg, then a Rand Corporation analyst, who revealed it without citing the source in 1986.^[3]

On October 31, 1987, Ellsberg added in the New York Times that according to Khrushchev's speech writer Fyodor Burlatsky: "Khrushchev had given very strong, very precise orders that Soviet officers should make no provocation, initiate no attack in Cuba." But Castro, wrote Ellsberg, "was determined to defend the sovereignty of Cuban air space regardless of Soviet desires to avoid provoking American retaliation." Indeed, Castro told Tad Szulc in 1984: "It was we who gave the order to fire against the low-level flights…. We had simply presented our viewpoint to [the Russians], our opposition to low-level flights, and we ordered our batteries to fire on them." Robert Kennedy told Ellsberg: "If one more plane was destroyed, we would hit all the SAM's immediately, and probably the [nuclear surface-to-surface] missiles as well, and we would probably follow that with an invasion." Transcripts of White House meetings on October 27, 1962, confirm that this threat "conveyed accurately to the Russians the consensus of the White House discussions that afternoon." But when Robert Kennedy delivered the

U.S. ultimatum to the Soviets after the U-2 attack, he did not realize that "the warning was directed to the wrong party…. Mr. Khrushchev by this point had no influence over the Cuban antiaircraft artillerymen who threatened low-flying flights." Recognizing the danger of imminent catastrophe, Khrushchev gave orders to end the crisis by dismantling the Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. These orders, Ellsberg writes,

arrived in Cuba between 1 and 3 A.M. Cuban time Sunday, according to my notes from 1964. The dismantling began at 5 A.M. The race to the radio station with the Soviet announcement, which bypassed even slower diplomatic channels, came a few hours later.

It came just in time. At 9 Sunday morning, about the time Moscow Radio began its broadcast, the Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed "tentatively to schedule four low-level recon flights for late afternoon, and that aircraft would fly through any fire encountered."

Castro told Szulc: "I am absolutely certain that if the low-level flights had been resumed we would have shot down one, two, or three of these planes…. With so many batteries firing, we would have shot down some planes. I don't know whether this would have started the nuclear war."^[4]

Sergei A. Mikoyan, whose father, Anastas, was Khrushchev's special emissary to Castro, denies that a Cuban-Soviet firefight took place but agrees that Kennedy totally misinterpreted the U-2 shoot-down. Asserting that "there was no command … from the supreme commander [Khrushchev]," he said the attack was ordered by a "small commander." Though claiming to know who the officer was, he would not reveal the name or say whether the officer was Cuban or Russian. In either case, it is clear that a small planet could be destroyed by a small commander during a crisis over a small matter.

General Rafael del Pino Diaz, a Cuban officer who defected to the United States in May 1987, later told the Associated Press that Soviet officers had in fact shot down the plane without authorization from Moscow. "They wanted to provoke a confrontation," del Pino said, because they were outraged that Khrushchev had ordered Soviet ships to turn back from Cuba after the United States blockaded the island. Mikoyan added, "I do not exclude that there could be some elements from abroad" involved in fighting with Soviet antiaircraft troops in Cuba during the crisis, such as Cuban counterrevolutionaries, who, in another bizarre twist, were normally under CIA control.^[5]

The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Cuban crisis produced another revelation. Burlatsky claimed that Soviet officers overseeing the installation

of the Cuban missiles failed to follow orders that they be camouflaged. Consequently U.S. spy planes were able to take clear photos of the missiles, which otherwise might have remained secret until they were operational and probably immune to U.S. attack. Asked how such a thing could occur, Burlatsky reportedly laughed and said, "Because it was Russian style. They try to plan all our society, but Russian people usually don't plan one day in his life." If true, then like the dangerous American actions that ended the crisis, the dangerous Soviet ones that began it may have been surrounded by a web of human confusion and foul-up unlikely to yield to the "techniques" of crisis management.

Raymond Garthoff recently revealed that when the Strategic Air Command went on its unprecedented Defcon II nuclear alert, immediately after Kennedy's October 22 speech, the SAC commander in chief, General Thomas Powers, took it on himself to transmit the orders uncoded. Naturally, "Soviet communications personnel," to say nothing of the leadership, "must have been shocked suddenly to hear all the alert orders from Omaha and a steady stream of responses from bomber units reporting their attainment of alert posture, including nuclear-armed flights poised for attack on the Soviet Union." This provocative action was not ordered, or even known, by the president, the secretary of defense, or top military brass "as they so carefully calibrated and controlled action in the intensifying confrontation." Powers, it seems, "had been ordered to go on full alert, and he did so. No one had told him how to do it, so he decided to 'rub it in.'"^[6]

Khrushchev had his own problems with overzealous military men. At the end of the crisis Soviet officers opposed withdrawing the missiles. Khrushchev asked them if they could guarantee that World War III would not be the result of holding firm. They looked at Khrushchev, he said, "as though I was out of my mind or, what was worse, a traitor." Khrushchev told journalist Norman Cousins: "I said to myself, 'To hell with these maniacs.'"^[7] We can only hope that the maniacs on both sides do not get more of a hearing the next time around.

In 1987 Garthoff revealed perhaps the most bizarre and dangerous incident of the whole affair. It could make any would-be crisis manager consider early retirement. Immediately after President Kennedy's dramatic speech opening the crisis on October 22, the Soviets arrested an American and British spy, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky of Soviet military intelligence. Garthoff, then in government, was personally responsible for evaluating Penkovsky's information and at that time was told the

following story in strict confidence by a CIA officer who helped manage Penkovsky's operations.

Apparently the CIA had given the highly placed spy several coded signals to use over the telephone in case of emergency. They didn't bargain for what they got: "When he was being arrested, at his apartment, he had time to send a telephonic signal—but chose to use the signal for an imminent Soviet attack!" "When he was about to go down," Garthoff speculates, "he evidently decided to play Samson and bring the temple down on everyone else as well." Normally, of course, "such an attempt would have been feckless. But October 22, 1962 was not a normal day," the president of the United States having just launched the worst Soviet-American crisis in history, complete with unprecedented—and public—preparations for nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. The president and his aides were watching closely for signs of how the Soviets would react. As the usually reserved Garthoff observes:

What if Colonel Penkovsky's farewell signal had been taken seriously? The United States might well have then undertaken some further action (such as Defcon 1) that Moscow could have construed as preparation for immediate hostilities. The President's speech on Cuba might then have been seen, in suspicious Moscow intelligence, military, and even political circles, as a feint to cover American mobilization for a first strike. Soviet military doctrine in 1962 called for Soviet preemption if there was a positive indication that the United States was preparing imminently and irrevocably for a first strike. SAC doctrine also called for preemption if a Soviet attack was imminent…. The risk and danger to both sides could have been extreme, and catastrophe cannot be excluded.

Fortunately Penkovsky's "Western intelligence handlers, at the operational level, after weighing a dilemma of great responsibility, decided not to credit Penkovsky's final signal and suppressed it. Not even the higher reaches of the CIA were informed of Penkovsky's provocative farewell."^[8]

Academics and politicians rarely acknowledge the severe limitations of crisis management, perhaps because the implication—that crises must be prevented by restraining state violence—is not politically palatable. An exception is political scientist and longtime student of international crisis Richard Ned Lebow:

Crisis management in the United States bears a disturbing resemblance to the ancient art of alchemy. Alchemists of old sought to transmute base elements into gold by simple chemistry and magical incantation. They failed because

their quest was based on a false premise; elements cannot be transmuted by chemical processes…. Government officials, and many academic researchers, have embarked upon a similarly fruitless quest for the secret keys to nuclear crisis management. Convinced, as were the alchemists before them, that their goal is attainable, they search for the modern day equivalent of the philosopher's stone: the organizational structures and decision-making techniques that will transmute the dark specter of nuclear destruction into the glitter of national security. Once again, the task is hopeless…. Like transmutation, crisis stability is theoretically possible, but for the foreseeable future it lies beyond the power of political alchemists.^[9]

Rather than blundering into crises under such illusions, "leaders must show more profile and less courage," Lebow continues. "They must be less concerned with 'winning' and more concerned with controlling crises, because the principal danger is no longer that the adversary will get his way but that one or both of the protagonists will set in motion a chain of events that will lead to an undesired and catastrophic war." Yet

political leaders and their advisors still give every indication of believing that crisis management consists of controllable and reversible steps up a ladder of escalation, steps taken to moderate an adversary's behavior. Even as well known a "dove" as Edmund Muskie, who played the president in a nationally televised crisis game in 1983, demonstrated his willingness to threaten the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons and, presumably, to carry through on the threat if necessary. This is precisely the kind of behavior which, whether by accident or design, increases the likelihood of war.^[10]

Lebow believes that "the … most important objective of policies aimed at war prevention must be to try to prevent acute crises altogether …. There is unlikely to be any such thing as good nuclear crisis management. The only good strategies are those designed to prevent crises."^[11]

One reason for the tendency to ignore Lebow's warning is the widespread feeling that, whatever the dangers of political conflict and war, they cannot be eliminated for the foreseeable future. True, peaceful coexistence among nationalities, races, states, and classes is still inconceivable. There is little hope that the leading states will renounce violence as a means to maintain and extend their political power wherever they feel it can succeed.

But neither nuclear arms nor war—which together produce the nuclear threat—is likely to disappear soon. The only sensible question to ask is whether chipping away at them can make a difference to the danger. Incremental steps toward the abolition of nuclear weapons, as we have emphasized, are almost meaningless considering the absolute destructive

potential and uncontrollability of those that remain. The same is not true of efforts to prevent war and other forms of conventional political violence. Successful incremental steps in this direction matter a great deal—both to those who would have been maimed and killed and to the rest of us, who are thereby spared one more occasion on which events could slip out of hand and terminate civilization. Today George Kennan's proposed 50 percent across-the-board cut in nuclear arms would mean little. A 50 percent cut in superpower military intervention and nuclear risk taking in the Third World might save the planet and would certainly save many lives.

The long-term visions of a nonnuclear world and of a world beyond war should not be cast aside. Ultimately they may be the only chance for planetary survival, and they are certainly the only chance for a decent way of life. But we must accept that neither goal can be reached easily or rapidly, and that they may never be reached. We must take what steps we can to reduce the nuclear threat now. Otherwise there may be no long run to worry about.

Foreign Policy: The Real Battleground of the Nuclear Issue

One conclusion at least should be uncontroversial: reducing the risk of nuclear war requires that states take that risk into account when planning foreign policy much more than they have so far. In democracies such as the United States, that means serious public debate about the nuclear risks of government actions around the world. Considering the stakes, one would expect front-page newspaper stories, prominent statements by the president and other politicians, debate in scholarly journals, prime-time television coverage, and so on. With few exceptions, these now appear only in the most extreme cases, such as the 1962 and 1973 crises, and then only after a crisis has already erupted.

Anyone unwilling to accept the need for such debate must deny either the nuclear risks of Third World intervention or the necessity of publicly debating those risks in a democracy. An editor at the Boston Globe, for example, told one of the authors that there is "zero risk" of nuclear war arising from regional conflicts and U.S. military interventions outside of Europe, Japan, and the Middle East. Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon did not entertain such happy illusions. Some risk is surely entailed when U.S. marines go to Lebanon in the aftermath of an invasion and fighting between U.S. and Soviet client

states, when U.S. jets bomb Libya, a Soviet client, or when a huge U.S armada intervenes in a complex Persian Gulf war on the Soviet Union's doorstep. Certainly if the Soviets committed large forces on the U.S. doorstep, say, in the Gulf of Mexico, few here would doubt the dangers.

Others may acknowledge the risk but justifiably fear that openly debating it would hobble foreign policy by reducing public support for U.S. military intervention. The "serious war scare" that Nixon sought to avoid through secrecy in (among others) the 1970 Cuban crisis could sweep the country in future Third World operations should the dangers become widely known.^[12] The general population evidently lacks the stomach for its leaders' nuclear risk taking. Surely in a democracy the proper role of such risk taking in foreign policy is not something for a handful of officials to decide in secret.

That is the minimalist message of our book: even those who admire American foreign policy should have the honesty to think about its nuclear risks and to debate them openly. Those who still support or condone potentially dangerous military actions, such as the 1987–1988 Persian Gulf intervention, should openly say why they are willing to run the gamble and why the United States or any other state has the right to run even small risks of nuclear war to further its foreign policy of the moment.

The Ultimate Environmental Impact Statement

A small first step might be to take a cue from the environmental movement, extending the application of environmental impact statements to the evaluation of foreign and military policy. If the environmental impact of power plants and dams deserves to be weighed in advance, then the risk factors for nuclear war—the ultimate environmental catastrophe—certainly do too.

If done with an honest appreciation of how easily things can go wrong, such statements could raise serious questions about the dozens of ongoing U.S. Third World operations, including outright military interventions (e.g., the Persian Gulf), "secret" wars (e.g., Afghanistan, Cambodia, Angola), proxy wars (e.g., Nicaragua), the military backing of states engaged in civil or extraterritorial wars or military occupations (e.g., El Salvador, Israel, Chad), and many covert actions at lower levels of violence. Such evaluations would surely be speculative and open to interpretation, but given the record and the stakes, shouldn't we in a democracy consider and debate them?

Why Does the United States Roll the Nuclear Dice?

Moving beyond the obvious need for debate about nuclear risk taking, we must ask what this risk taking is all about. Our discussion will focus on the role of the United States. Though it certainly does not cause all international conflict and violence, it contributes often enough, through its foreign policy, through arms transfers, through direct military intervention, and through its vast network of Third World client states, many highly despotic and violent.^[13] More to the point, Americans can influence their own government more than any other, particularly because it is a democracy with opportunities for public influence over foreign policy. Criticizing the Soviets is easy but usually ineffectual. Doing so while ignoring American actions is hypocritical. No one would listen to a wife beater who denounced his neighbor for the same crime. Even if the United States were responsible for only 1 percent of the political conflict and violence that could flare into nuclear war, the first moral duty of concerned Americans would be to understand and oppose their own nation's contribution to the problem.

The historical record shows that the American contribution to the nuclear threat has come mostly from intentional political choices, not intellectual error or ignorance. Despite the myth and confusion about the sources of nuclear risk documented throughout this book, American leaders have generally understood, crudely at least, the hazards accompanying their conduct of foreign policy. As the memoirs cited in Part II reveal, they have been well aware that their more reckless foreign adventures could flare into nuclear confrontation. They are simply willing to run the risk, and in some cases actually want to do so to intimidate enemies.

This behavior gives the lie to the common notion that everyone is against nuclear war. Certainly every sane person would prefer that nuclear war not occur. But many are willing, and on occasion eager, to run significant risks of nuclear war to advance the goals of the state to which they pledge loyalty. This is the real political difference between those who are truly committed to avoiding nuclear danger and those who are not—the false difference being whether or not one supports the MX missile or the nuclear freeze. Mainstream American politicians, both Republicans and Democrats, do not mind rolling the nuclear dice over militarily meaningless missiles in Cuba, a beaten and surrounded Egyptian army, or a few Kuwaiti tankers. That, in the real world, makes them nuclear hawks, whatever their views on Star Wars and the START

treaty. Authentic nuclear doves, rare among the American political elite, do not regard periodically endangering the planet as a legitimate way to pursue American objectives in the world.

Even national self-defense would not justify the killing of millions of innocents any more than an individual citizen has the right to spray machine-gun fire indiscriminately into a crowd to protect himself from a mugger. In any case, no nuclear state has faced a serious foreign threat to its physical or political survival except for nuclear war.^[14] A policy of strict self-defense would have avoided every nuclear crisis—including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which the United States incinerated well after the war in Europe was over and Japanese offensive military power had been destroyed.

If self-defense has not been the motive for nuclear risk taking, then what has? The question has political importance: if the goals turned out to be extraordinarily noble, some would deem the risks justifiable (although the generations whose future was permanently risked might not agree). In addition to self-defense, U.S. military operations are commonly justified as either (1) humanitarian missions for democracy, freedom, human rights, or other lofty moral goals or (2) necessary, if sometimes unpleasant, rescue operations to save weak peoples from Soviet aggression or expansionism. Taking these in turn, let us see if they account for the most significant instances of U.S. nuclear risk taking since the Cuban missile crisis.

Moral considerations certainly played no great role, as they rarely do in the conduct of powerful states. In 1967, during the Six-Day War, the most dangerous incidents followed Soviet threats to intervene after Israeli forces posed a threat first to the Egyptian heartland and then, far more seriously, to the capital of Syria. Regardless of one's views of Arab versus Israeli responsibility for the war itself (an issue we cannot take up here), johnson's provocative military actions seem far out of proportion to any legitimate political purpose, particularly given his belief that they involved significant nuclear risks. By the standards of modern international affairs, it would be hard to question the legitimacy of superpower efforts to deter an attack on the capital of an ally by invading enemy forces, particularly when the invading forces are violating a cease-fire agreement. According to Wells, Rusk and Johnson both believed that Israeli actions "gave Moscow a 'legitimate' reason for intervention."^[15]

In 1973 the Arab states started the war. Again if we abstract away from the political issues, the circumstances of superpower confrontation were remarkably similar: after Israel (having turned the tables) struck

deep into Arab territory, the Soviet Union told the United States that it "could not be indifferent to threats to Damascus." Later, after the Israelis violated a cease-fire agreement, the Soviets threatened to intervene if Israel continued its destruction of the Egyptian Third Army, in the process posing "a potential threat to Cairo itself." Kissinger acknowledged that the Soviets "could not possibly hold still while a cease-fire they had cosponsored was turned into a trap for a client state." At the time Kissinger reportedly said: "My God, the Russians will think that I have double-crossed them. And in their shoes, who wouldn't?" In fact, "if [Kissinger] had communicated the importance of an immediate cease-fire to Tel Aviv, the [nuclear] crisis never would have occurred."^[16] Nevertheless, the U.S. alerted its nuclear weapons worldwide and prepared airborne troops for a ground intervention that could have led to the first (and possibly final) major U.S.-Soviet combat of the nuclear age. Kissinger was not concerned that he had actually authorized Israeli cease-fire violations while in Tel Aviv (see Chapter 6); that he almost certainly could have compelled the Israelis to halt their attacks sooner, thereby ending the crisis; or that the United States had previously refused Sadat's request for joint superpower intervention to stop the fighting.

Moral considerations certainly did not influence the Nixon-Kissinger "tilt toward Pakistan" in the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war, a policy described elsewhere as "tilting toward massacre." As Kalb and Kalb put it, "The United States found itself siding with a corrupt Pakistani dictatorship against the world's most populous democracy." In what one commentator described as "the most massive calculated savagery that has been visited on a civil population in recent times," the Pakistani government brutally suppressed dissent by East Pakistani Bengalis, 98 percent of whom had voted for autonomy in the free elections held in December 1970. Moreover, Pakistan dragged India into the conflict by bombing eight Indian airfields around West Pakistan and rolling armored columns into Indian Kashmir. Kissinger acknowledges in his memoirs that "Pakistan had unquestionably acted unwisely, brutally, and even immorally"—somewhat of an understatement considering that an estimated one million East Pakistani civilians were killed during the civil war, many by West Pakistani atrocities. McConnell and Calhoun agree that "from the beginning of the crisis in March, the U.S. was painfully aware of the poor moral position in which the Pakistanis had put themselves and their supporter." Yet for them, as for Kissinger, morality was not the point: "The Pakistanis had to be saved from themselves." The Bengalis, however, were not to be saved from the Pakistanis.^[17]

Regarding the 1970 War of Attrition crisis too, Kissinger explicitly

called attention to some ethical difficulties of U.S. actions: "Our agencies blamed Israel for the tension along the Suez Canal, arguing—not without evidence—that Israel had provoked the Soviet reaction by its deep penetration raids," which again posed a threat to the Egyptian heartland and capital. George agrees that "many U.S. officials tended to the view that Israeli belligerence had provoked Soviet intervention. Besides, it dawned on American policymakers that they could not really object to direct Soviet assistance limited to preventing the collapse of its Egyptian ally." Yet the Nixon administration had "condoned, if it did not tacitly support," the Israeli deep penetration attacks. Kissinger "took pleasure in anticipating that the Israeli air raids would demonstrate to the Egyptian leader that his superpower ally could not render effective assistance and that this lesson would lead Nasser eventually to contemplate a rapprochement with the United States."^[18]

Jordan's Black September crisis of the same year may seem an exception to the rule, since Syrian armor reportedly crossed the frontier into Jordan to fight alongside the Palestinians resisting King Hussein's efforts to use the Jordanian Army to expel them. Arguably, any direct Israeli or U.S. intervention would have been to protect the Jordanian government from an invader. But, as we saw, the Syrian "invasion" may have been an Israeli fabrication. The United States did not know what was going on. Many believed that reports of the Syrian intervention were only a "pretext" for the involvement of U.S. or Israeli forces.^[19] Whatever one's view of this complex crisis, it was not an obvious case of unprovoked outside aggression resisted by a superpower protector.

To mention one recent example, in the U.S. Persian Gulf intervention of 1987–1988 U.S. warships defended shipping against attacks by one of the combatants, Iran, while ignoring many attacks on commercial ships and even an American warship by the other, Iraq. Iraq happens to have started both the war—by invading Iran in 1980—and the practice of attacking tankers (not to mention the use of chemical weapons on civilians); it attacked far more ships than Iran and caused many more casualties among seamen. Again, unsurprisingly, politics rather than morality was the motive for violence that could escalate in unpredictable ways in a sensitive region near the USSR.

In addition to moral justifications, the standard rationale for U.S. nuclear risk taking and military intervention in general is that it has been necessary to prevent global Soviet aggression. It is clear, however, that U.S. nuclear risk taking in the most serious crises since 1962 has not been in response to Soviet efforts to "expand" or even to instigate Soviet

allies to do so. The Soviets have certainly acted aggressively and brutally, for example, in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and particularly Afghanistan. But they have usually been careful to avoid expansive actions beyond their border regions that could lead to superpower crisis and nuclear confrontation—within limits working to prevent such crises even at considerable political cost and, if unsuccessful, to de-escalate and contain them. This pattern of course implies nothing benign about the Soviet dictatorship beyond a rational desire to avoid planetary incineration.

Secretly moving nuclear arms to Cuba in 1962 after Kennedy had said that he would not permit it was a reckless Soviet provocation that could have led to nuclear war—a major exception to Soviet nuclear caution. Referring to comparable U.S. deployments in Turkey and elsewhere on the periphery of the Soviet Union, however, Khrushchev notes in his memoir that he was "doing nothing more than giving [the Americans] a little of their own medicine."^[20] And once the crisis ignited, as Kaplan emphasizes, unlike Washington, "the Kremlin refrained from provocative military activities. Moscow even allowed Soviet submarines joining Russian freighters en route to Cuba to suffer U.S. Navy harassment…. The only really provocative military action directed against the United States during the crisis was the shooting down over Cuba of a U-2 aircraft by a SAM missile," which, as we have seen, may not have been the work of the Soviet leadership at all.^[21]

In neither 1967 nor 1973 did the Soviets appear to encourage an Arab-Israeli war, though like the United States they provided weapons. Under complex circumstances Israel, not the Soviet-backed Arab states, started the 1967 war.^[22] And the Soviets strictly limited their threat of intervention to the defense of their allies' capitals—not an aggressive or expansionist aim, whatever one's judgment of it. As Anthony Wells notes:

The course of the war showed … that the Russian commitment [to Arab clients] did not extend to the territorial integrity of the Arab countries but only to "the vital centers and existing regimes of its sponsored states." … Thus, while the seizure of the Sinai did indeed produce a Soviet threat to intervene, the Soviets dropped that threat when the Israelis stopped at the Suez Canal. The threat to intervene was raised again—intensively—when the Syrian forces collapsed as the Israelis stormed the Golan Heights on June 9, a collapse that left the road to Damascus virtually undefended.

As President Johnson was no doubt aware, the attack on the Golan Heights violated an agreed cease-fire. And, as Jabber and Kolkowicz note, "the Soviet Union refrained from any demonstration of force….

For the most part, the Soviet eskadra [of naval forces]—the only instrument available to the Russians for the regional projection of military power between June 5 and 10, 1967—behaved as if no Middle East war were under way." With the exception of one incident of harassment of an American ship, "Soviet naval behavior seems, in fact, to have been deliberately orchestrated to reassure the United States that the Mediterranean Squadron did not intend to take part in the crisis." "A few minor adjustments in routine procedures" by the Soviets "were negligible compared with the extensive American use of naval forces during the war."^[23]

Commenting on the 1973 Arab attack, Stephen Roberts notes: "Arab testimony suggests that, in 1971 and 1972 at least, Moscow did not want its clients to go to war; and even in 1973, when the U.S.S.R. resumed arms supply, its central motive may have been not to incite war but to maintain some influence over a policy of war already resolved upon by Egypt regardless of the availability of Soviet assistance." Sadat, one should remember, had expelled most Soviet advisers from Egypt in 1972. George points out that "as many specialists on Soviet policy in the Middle East have recognized, Soviet leaders tried for several years to discourage Sadat from resorting to force. Although important facts remain obscure and unverified, it appears that at first the Soviets did withhold military equipment and supplies deemed necessary by Sadat for a major Arab attack. The Soviets also counseled Sadat to seek his objectives through diplomacy rather than force. Kissinger was quite aware of the Soviets' actions at the time." According to Bruce Porter, not one to overlook Soviet aggressiveness, "The historical record argues that the Soviet leadership did not want the October war." He quotes Sadat that "the U.S.S.R. persisted in the view that a military battle must be ruled out and that the question must await a peaceful conference." He also supports Sadat's claim that the Soviets were not even informed about the plans for war until October 3, and not about the details until October 4, two days before the attack. Interestingly, according to George, the Soviet Union's decision "reflected its expectation that the Arab states would suffer another quick defeat if they attacked Israel. In that event the Soviet Union would be faced once again, as in 1967 and 1970, with the difficult task of bailing the Arabs out, thereby risking a military confrontation with Israeli forces if not also with the United States." Not a bad call.^[24]

The Soviets actually warned the United States that Sadat might attack if rapid diplomatic progress were not made. As George notes, at the June 1973 summit Brezhnev "hammered at" Nixon about the danger

and delivered more warnings through other channels; "but as so often happens, the recipient of the warning did not regard it as credible."^[25] Immediately after learning that an Arab attack was forthcoming, Moscow quickly retreated from the impending trouble, evacuating Soviet advisers and their dependents from Egypt and Syria and sending major elements of its Mediterranean squadron out to sea. "To the Arabs, these measures conveyed the unmistakable message that Moscow was washing its hands of the entire affair." As Porter notes, even after the war broke out the Soviets evidently tried to end it quickly. He cites evidence that "Moscow made a serious effort to contain the conflict in its first four days, before concluding that a military supply bridge would be necessary." And he observes, "The Soviet Union made cautious and calculated responses to U.S. actions throughout the conflict. There is every evidence to indicate that the Kremlin wanted to contain the conflict and to avoid an overt confrontation with Washington."^[26]

Referring to the 1970 Black September crisis, Abram Shulsky notes that "the Soviets had much to lose and relatively little to gain." King Hussein "was somewhat sheltered by a temporary alliance he had made with Nasser, who remained the chief Soviet client in the Middle East." Shulsky found it "difficult to determine the extent of the Soviet role in the original Syrian decision to invade Jordan."^[27] William Quandt writes that "although the Soviet Union has not revealed much about its role in the Jordanian crisis, it did not seem to feel that any major Soviet interests were at stake. Washington's view that the U.S.S.R. was intimately involved in the Syrian intervention is certainly an exaggeration." Indeed, "as early as September 18 the U.S.S.R. had reportedly sent Nixon a moderate message that it would not intervene and that it would restrain Syria…. All in all, the U.S.S.R. must have felt the United States was deliberately overreacting by placing a large share of the blame on it." Quandt also reports an interview in which "a high-ranking Jordanian official" claimed that "the Jordanians learned after the crisis that the U.S.S.R. did try to restrain the Syrians and urged them to withdraw their forces." Similarly, Mahmoud Riad, then the Egyptian foreign minister, ridicules Kissinger's claims of deep Soviet involvement: "The only role played by the U.S.S.R. during the events of Jordan, as proved by its communications with us in Egypt and by its contacts with the Syrians and Iraqis, was to urge the containment of the crisis rather than accelerate it."^[28]

As George Breslauer observes of other events that year, "The Soviets neither instigated nor encouraged Nasser's launching of the War of Attrition.

According to Heikal, in May 1969, Soviet leaders 'begged Nasser to use every effort to halt the "war of attrition" across the Suez Canal.'" Ultimately the Soviet military role was large but, as in other crises, defensive; its purpose was, as Dismukes observes, to "salvage a key client in extremis ." As a result of the Israeli deep penetration air raids, the Soviets became "concerned with the security of Egypt's vital center—and perhaps even the survival of the Nasser regime itself." Indeed, since "Israeli politicians … spoke of their intention to bring Egypt to its knees and to topple the Nasser regime," one can hardly accuse the Soviets of expansionism for executing "the earlier Soviet decision to defend Egypt against Israeli saturation bombing." They "made some efforts to persuade the United States to curb the Israeli deep penetration air operations" and warned that they would "see to it" that the Arab states could defend their territory. Many U.S. officials "felt that Israel [had] brought on the Soviet response by a reckless bombing campaign and irresponsible rhetoric aimed at the Nasser regime's existence."^[29]

Initially the Soviets were extremely careful to intervene only for direct defense of the Egyptian interior and even then to avoid initiating combat.

They had deployed interceptor aircraft from their air defense forces not ground attack aircraft that could directly threaten the Israelis in the Sinai…. Their flight operations showed extraordinary circumspection. In the initial period they did not threaten, much less attack, Israeli aircraft intruding deep into Egyptian airspace…. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that at this early stage Soviet pilots were under orders that, at a minimum, prevented them from firing unless fired upon and may well have directed them to avoid contact with Israeli aircraft entirely…. The Soviets unquestionably hoped that their objectives—the first and controlling of which was the restoration of the security of the Egyptian heartland—could be achieved without combat.

Later, after withering Israeli air attacks, the Soviets moved antiaircraft batteries up to defend the Canal zone and, as we described in Chapter 6, Soviet-Israeli combat developed. But the Soviets did not threaten Israeli territory.^[30]

The Soviets apparently did not encourage the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war either. According to McConnell and Calhoun, "all the evidence suggested that Moscow did not want war and repeatedly cautioned the Indians against launching one." Once hostilities were in progress, "it … seems unlikely that Moscow wanted to stage a demonstration of support for India against Pakistan, let alone actually intervene on Delhi's behalf…. The U.S.S.R. had no incentive to intervene. Rather, her

great fear was of possible intervention by other outsiders, and she wanted to avoid taking steps that would help others justify their involvement."^[31] Hall asserts that "in private conversations with Indian officials, Soviet officials tirelessly advocated military nonintervention in the civil war." As Garthoff notes, "Virtually no Western (or Pakistani) historian now, or political analyst at the time, would characterize India as having been a proxy for the Soviet Union. Nor would students of Soviet policy." And "there is … no evidence that the Soviets had at any time pushed the Indians toward aggrandizement or military action"—a view the U.S. State Department and the CIA shared at the time."^[32]

The Real Politics of Nuclear War and Peace

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that U.S. leaders have run calculated nuclear risks not for self-defense, high moral principles, or the protection of weak countries from the Soviets, but to further U.S. power—to shore up friendly despots engaged in internal massacres in Jordan and Pakistan, to prevent the Soviets from defending the capitals of their own friendly despots in Egypt and Syria, and to twice seek hazy psychopolitical gain over militarily irrelevant weapons in Cuba. These crises were not isolated or idiosyncratic. They grew from long-standing U.S. foreign policies that if unchanged will probably continue to imperil the planet.

The decisions to rush to the aid of King Hussein and General Kahn, for example, did not spring from love of these men or admiration for the massacres they were presiding over, but from the key roles assigned to Jordan and Pakistan in American plans for the Middle East and Asia. The United States might run similar risks today in support of Hussein or the late General Zia's successor in Pakistan. Pakistanis still worry about "a repetition of 1971."^[33] Everyone worries about another Middle East war that could engulf King Hussein.^[34]

Americans concerned about the nuclear peril can stop studying the details of the arms race and begin learning about the history, character, and driving forces of their government's political and military role in the world, large topics we cannot take up here. They will want to ask at least two basic questions that would be at the heart of a reasonable inquiry by Americans into the politics of nuclear war and peace: (1) To what degree has the United States been responsible for the international tensions and conflicts that could have led to nuclear war? and (2) Were

the goals and results of hazardous U.S. actions worth the terrible risks? Such an inquiry may lead to unpleasant realizations—not only that this country has often used and promoted violence and instability in the Third World's many potential nuclear tinderboxes, but also that with few exceptions U.S. behavior in the Third World has no more been motivated by self-defense, altruism, or Soviet "containment" than it was in the crises discussed in this book.

The United States has consistently acted in the nuclear age much as leading states did in the prenuclear one (including states with significant elements of internal democracy, such as ancient Athens and imperial Britain): seeking wealth and power wherever possible, a process requiring much violence, sometimes against big-power competitors but usually against indigenous populations. Formerly the inevitable military disasters of great powers—the fall of ancient Rome, the British defeat by American revolutionaries, the Ottoman collapse in the First World War, the defeat of Nazi Germany in the second—might ravage an empire or, in the last case, a continent and more. Today it could destroy the planet. What threatens the world today is not nuclear weapons per se—the nuclear danger would be small, though real, if nuclear states pursued peaceful foreign policies—but an ancient pattern of aggressive political behavior mindlessly carried forward by the United States, the Soviet Union, and others into the nuclear era.

As illustrations of the motives, character, and consequences of post-World War II U.S. intervention in the Third World, briefly consider two cases now largely forgotten by all but participants and academic specialists: the American installation of client governments by force in the Dominican Republic and Guatemala. In 1965, shortly after the supposedly sobering shock of the 1962 Cuban crisis, the United States invaded the Dominican Republic to defeat a "populist uprising," led by constitutionalist military officers, that had "widespread popular support." The U.S. force ultimately comprised 23,000 troops, with several thousand more waiting offshore with a Navy task force "almost half as large as the one then engaged in a full-scale war in Vietnam." This massive intervention—"almost universally opposed around the world" and "in direct defiance of international law"—did not occasion a superpower standoff because the Soviets did not interfere. In the standard view, "the prospect that the USSR would have committed itself to the protection of a radical government in the Dominican Republic, in the face of a firm U.S. threat to take military action to prevent a new Cuba [sic ], must be considered as nil." But "it is of course easier to be confident

of such an assessment in retrospect, for the USSR did in fact remain on the sidelines throughout the crisis."^[35]

Again the United States faced no conceivable security threat from the tiny country, intervened on the side of the opponents (not the supporters) of human rights and democracy, and was opposing communist expansionism only in propaganda. According to the Wall Street Journal 's Philip Geyelin, who had access to official records and cables, within the first day of the rebellion "the Santo Domingo [U.S.] Embassy had clearly cast its lot with the 'loyalist' military cabal and against the rebellion's original aim: The return of [elected president] Juan Bosch." U.S. officials evidently encouraged the bombing and shelling of Santo Domingo itself, actions that led to "widespread hatred" of the Air Force commander, Wessin. Bosch was no Communist, but the United States had become "increasingly disenchanted with [his] nationalism; with his determination to engage in substantial social reform measures, which alienated Dominican businessmen, landowners, and the Catholic church; and, most important, with his refusal to crack down on radical groups." As for the quality of U.S. motives for military intervention, Slater cites the desire to maintain "a general position of predominance throughout the Central American Caribbean area," to protect "U.S. prestige and credibility around the world" and, "psychologically," the U.S. role in Vietnam, to protect President Johnson's domestic political fortunes, and to safeguard the careers of lower-level foreign policy specialists in the U.S. government fearful of being charged with "losing" the Dominican Republic.^[36]

The U.S. ambassador, John Bartlow Martin, had earlier been "informed by the CIA that there were 'not more than one hundred well-trained, fully-committed, and fully-disciplined' Dominican communists" and that they were split between Moscow- and Peking-oriented factions. "Martin was convinced that the communists, weak and divided as they were, did not constitute a threat to the government." Indeed, "there was no organized communist or leftist guerrilla movement." As Barnet notes, "The threat was not that the communists had taken over [the rebellion] but that events were out of control and might lead to a nationalist, anti-U.S. regime that could look to Castro or to Moscow for help. As Slater emphasizes, "A genuinely indigenous revolution was in fact a far cry from international Communist aggression," and even if successful "would in fact almost certainly be independent of Moscow, Peking, or Havana."^[37]

Ambassador Martin unilaterally established an interim government

under Antonio Imbert, a leader of "known opportunism, predilection for power, and widespread unpopularity in the Dominican Republic." "Predictably enough, Imbert immediately set out to form a military dictatorship and to destroy the constitutionalists and any other opposition, imprisoning, torturing, and even murdering hundreds of Dominicans." The actions of the Dominican police and military have been accurately described as "terrorism," and "although the Johnson administration had proclaimed as one of the principal reasons for the intervention the need to save lives in a bloody civil war, most of the estimated 3,000 Dominican deaths occurred after the intervention, some of them in clashes between the constitutionalists and U.S. troops and the rest at the hands of a Dominican military that the United States had rescued from probable annihilation in April and thereafter helped protect and rebuild." In May, in one particularly brutal operation the United States supported, Imbert's troops engaged in a "brutal slaughter of hundreds of constitutionalists and innocent civilians," even though "the constitutionalists were helpless anyway in the face of 23,000 American troops and a rebuilt Dominican police and military, and they knew it." Slater comments, "In such circumstances, to have taken lives deliberately in exchange for slight political advantage was morally questionable, to put it as mildly as possible." He concludes that "a decade later there is very little democracy in the Dominican Republic. The country is not a 'showcase' of anything." Indeed, Amnesty International reported that in the early 1970s an average of one person "disappeared" in the country each day, while the infamous La Banda death squad was "openly tolerated and supported by the National Police."^[38]

In another "morally questionable" Third World operation, the United States intervened in Guatemala in 1954 to topple the government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, who had won democratic elections in 1951 with nearly twice as many votes as all the other candidates combined. Like Bosch, Arbenz was certainly not a Communist but a mild social reformer, and there was no serious "communist threat" in the country. Indeed, "there were perhaps as many as three thousand Communist-party members or active sympathizers in a country of three million," and most "were scarcely under the discipline of Moscow," with the leadership "split between Moscow-oriented and nationalist factions." Guatemala "was receiving no aid from the Soviet Union [and] indeed had [no] relationship with the communist bloc."^[39] But trying to relieve the crushing poverty and despair among the vast bulk of the peasant population, Arbenz incurred the wrath of the United States by a modest

program of land and social reform, including the expropriation of several hundred thousand acres of uncultivated land owned by United Fruit Company (which owned much of the country). Arbenz offered to compensate United Fruit at exactly the value the company had claimed for the land in tax statements to the Guatemalan government, but the company refused.

Instead, the CIA arranged for a coup, which, as Stephen Schlesinger observes from U.S. government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, "was conceived of and run at the highest levels of the American Government in closest cahoots with the United Fruit Company and under the overall direction of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, backed by President Eisenhower." The CIA established bases for an invasion force in Honduras and Nicaragua led by a Guatemalan colonel named Castillo Armas. When the attack began, American pilots bombed Guatemala City. In case anyone should doubt the official U.S. role in this adventure, at one point the American ambassador, John Peurifoy, "strapped a .45 to his belt and began to lead the operation." The ambassador's plane later flew Colonel Armas to the capital to assume leadership of the country, which he did, by jailing thousands of political prisoners, destroying the labor movement (killing over two hundred union leaders), abolishing the secret ballot, and disenfranchising the "illiterate masses," 70 percent of the population.^[40]

Even though the Soviet Union's main response to the coup was to ask the United Nations to dispatch a peacekeeping force, the United States dramatically flew nuclear-armed heavy bombers from the Strategic Air Command to Nicaragua, presumably to signal its commitment to the success of the operation in the unlikely event of Soviet interference.^[41] Once again, the planners were well aware that even the "safest" operations have wider dangers.

Guatemala quickly became one of the most violent and miserable countries in the world, with tens of thousands murdered and "disappeared" by the government and allied right-wing organizations, and hundreds of thousands dead of malnutrition and avoidable disease. "Death squad murders averaged almost ten a day through the first half of the 1970's," and as Amnesty International noted, "it is invariably reported in the Guatemalan press that [death squad victims] show signs of having been tortured and mutilated before death." In the early 1980s, the Boston Globe reported that the Guatemalan army and police turned the nation into "the hemisphere's heart of darkness," with comparisons to "the Uganda of Idi Amin or the Cambodia of Pol Pot." At the time of

the 1987–1988 Arias peace plan for Central America, although all nations in the region were obliged to release political prisoners, Guatemala could not comply: since the U.S.-backed coup that plunged the little nation from an experiment in democracy into unending terror in 1954, "the thousands abducted had all been killed."^[42]

If these are the sorts of "interests" for which the United States frequently intervenes, then no gut-wrenching moral choices are necessary to choose between safeguarding the planet from nuclear war and safeguarding it from conventional aggression and exploitation. We can and must do both by opposing the militarism of the United States and, to the extent we can, of the Soviet Union and others.

The Functions of Weaponitis and the Politics of Survival

Weaponitis persists, while the real sources of nuclear peril are ignored, partly because of an error in thought—the incorrect diagnosis of the arms race as the main danger of the nuclear age. The error, however, is useful; weaponitis serves important interests of the parties to the nuclear debate.

Weaponitis most obviously benefits those who profit from the continual arms buildup it legitimates: the huge defense corporations that build the weapons, the military bureaucracies that buy and control them, and the professional military strategists and intellectuals who make their livings and their reputations by rationalizing and planning the arms race. To acknowledge that the arms race no longer matters to the security and power of the United States would be bad business for military contractors and bad politics for the military. Corporate executives want to increase, not undermine, the market for their products, just as military officers want to command more, not fewer, nuclear weapons systems and new ones rather than old ones.

Similarly, to dominate the nuclear debate after existential deterrence took hold in the 1950s, the experts on throw weight, hard target kill capability, and the like had to make it appear that such matters continued to be important. They erected an imposing edifice of deterrence theory and related historical lore that only the specialists can fully master and that makes the details of the hardware seem vitally important. Looking at the nuclear problem from a different, more political, point of view would cede the issue to other intellectual approaches—and to other intellectuals.

Moreover, if intellectuals in government, private think tanks such as the Rand Corporation, and academia want to stay friendly with the powers that be and remain on their lucrative contract lists, they must frame inquiry into the nuclear issue, like other issues, in an ideologically acceptable manner. Weaponitis does the job nicely, even when disagreements about technical details emerge within the paradigm. Denouncing, say, road-mobile ICBMs in favor of rail-mobile ones may at worst annoy government officials holding a different view. Denouncing American foreign policy, beyond narrow limits, can get one blacklisted.

For the government itself, and for those who support the essentials of its long-standing, bipartisan foreign policy, weaponitis has an irresistible virtue: in a society deeply alarmed by the possibility of nuclear war, it diverts attention from Third World U.S. military interventionism and toward the far less important nuclear arms competition. Arms control plays a particularly important role in this process, as we noted in Chapter 9. It is a widely popular, seemingly progressive, and highly visible activity that the state can use to show its commitment to reducing the nuclear danger. The executive branch manages the negotiation process and the information flow about it. The Soviets can be blamed for problems even when the Americans are balking. Years can be spent working out treaties on minor issues such as the Euromissiles, with tremendous public relations bonanzas at the end if the efforts succeed. And all the while Soviet and American leaders can bomb Third World countries, support unstable dictatorships, arm belligerents, pursue foreign policy as usual, and still receive relatively good press on the nuclear question because of their "commitment to arms control." This manipulation cleverly coopts the peace movement's critique of the arms race into a slick government public relations tool. It is an effective way to manage an issue that could explode into serious popular dissent and unrest if the public grasped where the real hazards lie.

For American politicians, particularly in the large political center, arms control is a uniquely comfortable politics. It provides a popular, nearly risk-free agenda for "addressing" the nuclear problem. Liberal arms control supporters earn much political support this way, even from progressives, while countenancing and sometimes actively encouraging military interventions in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Cambodia, and the Persian Gulf in a time of enormous public concern about war and peace.

The downside of weaponitis for the politicians is an occasional peace movement victory, perhaps the scaling back or someday even the cancellation

of a weapons system, and a few arms control treaties concluded under public pressure. In most cases the actual result is programs to build enormously costly nuclear systems with a cleaner political bill of health, such as the purportedly stabilizing Midgetman missile to "replace" the MXs not built, or the variety of conventional and nuclear arms destined to "compensate" for the Euromissiles banned under INF. These are all small potatoes. They do not greatly affect American foreign policy or American power in the world.

The real threat of the anti-nuclear war movement has always been that it might politicize and encourage a mass revolt against American militarism in the Third World. This could well occur if the U.S. population realized that the victims include not only Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, Lebanese, Libyans, Grenadans, Angolans, and so on, but potentially themselves and their families as well. As long as concerned citizens busy themselves with learning MX missile throw weights and Pershing II flight times, demonstrating at nuclear weapons bases, and pressuring Congress about Star Wars, this threat is coopted.

These functions of weaponitis have not gone completely unnoticed within the anti-nuclear weapons movement. Activist Tom Atlee observes that weapons systems and arms control proposals—technically complex and easily multiplied year after year—are ideal for keeping the opposition busily ineffective. He asks, "Could it be that our friends in the Military Industrial Complex Establishment (let's call them MICE, shall we?) long ago figured out how to keep us (in the peace movement) hopping around on their playing field, dutifully following their game plan—without us realizing we were being manipulated?" The method is simple. "The MICE entice us into debates about weapons systems…. The catch is that even when we 'win' one of these debates, the MICE always come up with new weapons systems … for us to argue about. And since it takes the American public months or years just to figure out what each debate is about, the MICE have plenty of time to start a new development before the old one runs out of steam. So we never catch up to the MICE…. It is their game and they rig it in their favor."

Writing in mid-1986, Atlee catalogs some of the recent acts of this political drama. "To counter our predeployment opposition to Euromissiles, the MICE came up with the zero/zero [theater nuclear forces arms control proposal] option…. Brilliantly the MICE framed the debate—and we obliged, arguing the faults of zero/zero." After the Soviets rejected it and walked out of the talks, "we peace people, without realizing what a trap we were walking into, tried to make 'Reagan's lack of

[arms control] talks' an election issue. Reagan let the issue blossom and then invited the Soviets back to talk. Perfect: if they agreed, he'd be a peacemaker; if they turned him down, that just proved they were the bad guys. And so it goes."

Similarly, "let's suppose that the MX is, at this point, nothing more than a decoy. Let's suppose that the MICE know the MX is a losing proposition—but also know that by holding it up and shaking it, they can get us to shoot at it, thus absorbing our energy." Then comes the next act: Star Wars. "Right on cue, we are flocking to the microphones and mimeograph machines and, backed by panels of impressive scientists, we're telling how it can't work without even noticing that the MICE have led us into another canyon ambush."

Atlee is aware that "our whole focus on arms control ties us into the MICE's game plan." He notes a Washington Post report that Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle "favors talking to the Soviets, in part because negotiations help maintain political support for military spending in the West." These talks simply become another forum for enticing the peace movement into endless (and largely ineffective) antiweapons campaigns. Atlee concludes: "This stage on which we dance is filled with trap doors, shadow projections, fleeting mirages and colored curtains that rise and fall at the bidding of the MICE. They even control the audience lights and sound system. We just dance."^[43]

The peace movement obligingly dances in part because of a sincere belief that the weapons matter, but also, one must admit, because it too enjoys definite functions of weaponitis. The same depoliticization of the nuclear issue that shields the state and mainstream politicians from criticism of America's behavior in the world offers similar advantages to an opposition movement seeking wide public support, including that of the elites.

Each new nuclear monster such as MX is a fat easy target. Large segments of the population, the media, and the Congress can be mobilized against these monsters. Funds can be raised; elections can be affected. The nuclear freeze drew the support of three-quarters of the population and the U.S. House of Representatives. The idea that bloated nuclear arsenals must be reduced is attractive and saleable; in many circles the arms race is now a dirty word.

Changing strategy to highlight political questions about American foreign policy, many fear, might undermine a remarkably comfortable position for an opposition mass movement in American politics—meaning fewer members, less money, less favorable press. Attracting support

for the movement, some activists told us, is the necessary first step in galvanizing public opposition to the nuclear threat. If weapons are powerful mobilizing symbols, they are also a valid strategy for opposing nuclear war. Many believe that giving up a focus on weapons would mean abandoning the entire effort to avert a cataclysm. As one European peace researcher and activist told us in response to the argument that the weapons themselves do not much matter, "You are analytically correct, but politically I am not so sure."

That seems an unrealistic fear. The real triumph of the anti-nuclear war movement was awakening people to the nuclear danger by relentlessly showing how destructive nuclear war would be. That educational task could have been accomplished without promoting the theory that the nuclear danger comes chiefly from the arms race. This "weapons strategy" was a political choice. The American people could have understood and acted on the "nuclear war is unwinnable and must never be fought" message even if they had not been bombarded as well by the "arms race is the problem" message.

Continuation of the weapons strategy by those who understand the near-irrelevance of the arms race would amount to a calculated deception—something no democratic movement should tolerate and few activists would support. It is unconscionable to cause people to fear that they and their children face grave new dangers when the first MX missiles are deployed or when arms talks break off without an agreement. There are surely enough real problems to worry about today without terrifying people about false ones. It would be better for the movement in the long run to mobilize fewer people around the real issues than more around the false ones—if that is the choice.

And it may not be. Insisting on the falsehood that the arms race is the problem could actually damage the peace movement's ability to mobilize populations in the long run regardless of how the political battles over weapons systems turn out.

A major movement victory such as the freeze—literally the end of the arms race—could destroy public concern through complacency even though the risk of nuclear war would not change. It has happened before. As Carl Conetta observes of the first big phase of American anti-nuclear war popular organizing, in the late 1950s, "The 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty effectively ended that movement." He worries that the second phase, which began in 1980, may suffer a similar fate: "Today, peace activists are claiming the recent U.S.-Soviet INF agreement as a movement victory. But does this victory, like the Partial Test Ban before

it, mean that the disarmament movement will enter a long period of quiescence?" Similarly, historian Paul Boyer notes that before the 1963 treaty and, to a lesser extent the 1972 SALT I treaty, "there was enormous public concern about testing and nuclear war, but afterwards there was an immediate decline in public concern about these issues. Much the same thing may happen in the wake of an INF treaty," which could "take the wind out of the sails of the peace movement."^[44] By periodically "just saying yes" to central but inconsequential movement demands about weapons, the state can easily unbalance its adversaries without conceding anything of importance.

Major antiweapons campaigns will probably continue to fail, however, as they usually have in the past, because of the many powerful interests supporting the arms race. In this case too the movement risks demobilization—through despair—as in the European peace movement after the defeat of massive campaigns to prevent the deployment of the Euromissiles and in the American one after the failure to achieve the bilateral freeze or to defeat even one new weapons system. As Michael Howard writes:

It cannot be wise to encourage the belief that security lies only in the achievement of an unattainable goal or in the conclusion of agreements which, even if they could be reached, would do little or nothing in themselves to produce a more peaceful world. These false expectations engender unnecessary and debilitating fears, fears which find expression in such phrases as "the next round of arms talks will provide the last opportunity for mankind to get the arms race under control," or that failure to achieve a "breakthrough" will be catastrophic…. The higher the expectations aroused by governments responding to (or exploiting) public opinion, the greater will be the disappointment when they are not fulfilled, the more bitter will be the mutual recrimination, and the worse the international climate as a result.^[45]

True, many businesspeople, professionals, workers, and others in the American political mainstream might defect from the movement if it criticized American foreign policy rather than American missile policy. One former activist with Physicians for Social Responsibility told us that when he tried to turn the organization's attention to more political issues, he was informed that the doctors who supported the group financially would not tolerate the change. The neurosurgeons and cardiologists were happy to oppose the arms race, but not American actions in El Salvador and Lebanon. A politicized peace movement might find a less friendly reception in Congress, the press, and liberal foundations as well; the already highly political parts of the peace movement, notably those opposing U.S. intervention in Central America, certainly do.

That is not surprising, nor is it a valid reason for preserving weaponitis. A movement that opposes the aggressive foreign policies of the nuclear states will inevitably face greater hostility than one working for politically respectable goals such as arms control. That is simply the price of not accepting the establishment's invitation to dance.

If basic changes do not occur, history suggests that we may be heading for disaster. But there is also reason for hope. With large numbers of people alarmed about the nuclear peril in the United States and around the world, the nuclear powers could find that their populations will no longer permit them to endanger everyone in pursuit of power and wealth.

An organized movement able to call millions into the streets could seriously inhibit the reckless state actions that have long constituted the prime threat to human survival. What Scott Sagan derisively calls the "noise" of domestic opposition could rise to painful levels. During the next tense Third World crisis, citizens can ensure that John Foster Dulles was correct to worry that "a negative public opinion" might prevent national leaders from using nuclear weapons. We can transform the universal fear of nuclear war into the public revolt against brinksmanship that so haunted Richard Nixon.^[46] We can ensure that leaders are not free of public pressure when plotting aggression, intervention, and adventurism throughout the world. These are the real challenges for democracy in the nuclear age.