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.