Capitol Ideas/The Costs of Arms Control
Bethell, Tom
so that Americans from every walk of life can sit back and enjoy. In August we relived Woodstock, very little being made of its unappetizing aftermath: drug addiction, venereal...
...By innuendo, Time and Newsweek managed to present Reagan as the real threat to peace (with his "failure to talk peace," with his "recurrent image as a diplomatic gunslinger," etc...
...wilt always enjoy a technological lead in an arms race with a slave society--but only if we do not tie our own technical hands with self-defeating "accords...
...The prologue to that book, ostensibly by Khrushchev, is thought to have been written by Talbott himself, and the manuscript, of uncertain provenance, may have been passed on to Western hands by the KGB agent, Victor Louis...
...they simply weigh in on the State Department side...
...This distinction is the analytical key that There is a tenacious myth in America that says Catholics are stupid, ignorant, and superstitious...
...Savio derelict and forgotten...
...Bear in mind the distinction between quantity and quality and you can hold your own, indeed win any discussion, with an arms controller...
...Now I find they likewise blur the distinction between changes in, and numbers of, weapons (quality and quantities...
...Liberals are forever saying how nice it would be to live in a nuclear-free world...
...And we do find just such disadvantageous tradeoffs under discussion right now...
...Who is this Strobe Talbott, Time magazine writer, "the nation's most respected author in this field" according to his admirer Walter Mondale...
...a compromise, by virtue of its ability to threaten a more burdensome cost...
...Orthodox Catholics have newspapers, quarterly journals, family magazines, and clergy magazines, but they have no "literary" Our contributors include the best orthodox Catholicism has to offer: Francis Canavan S.J., Christopher Derrick, Joseph Fessio S.J., Paul H. Hallett, James Hitchcock, Msgr...
...In the summer of 1969, at the age of 21, he worked in Time's Moscow bureau, and soon thereafter collated and translated Khrushchev's memoirs...
...and again no mention slipped out about the malign results, in this case the damage done a great university...
...And this: The expiration of SALT II (unratified) next year "could lead to a vast increase in the world supply of nuclear warheads...
...Well you are only young once, and the sight of Mr...
...This was followed by: The Reagan administration also has tangible reasons for wanting arms negotiations, apart from the imperatives of presidential politicking...
...foreign policy has been won by the militaristically minded...
...God knows where they all ended up, but I never pass a middle-aged bag lady or her male equivalent without thinking of the bright ones of the 1960s...
...The union would have gone on strike, and instead of losing something tolerably small, GM would have lost something intolerably large (namely, total production...
...Two of these were cover stories...
...UAW, we have a real and purposeful negotiation...
...And if you can hit it in space with a laser beam (this is what they mean by "Star Wars"), then nuclear missiles are a thing of the past...
...1 O0.00 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1984 13...
...Truth be known those who serve up these nostalgic commemorations are hugely selfindulgent, and it ought not to escape commentary that precisely this sort of 100 percent American self-indulgence is what ultimately sank the Free Speech Movement, leaving Mr...
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...hd, 383p $16.95 THE MARKET FOR LIBERTY by Morris & Linda Tannehill This provocative book projects a totally free society without government and shows how liberty', justice and peace can be maintained by means of the free market The new edition contains an introduction by Doug Casey who says, "This book changed my life" hd, 169p $14.95 40TH ANNIVERSARY AUTOGRAPHED EDITION THE ROAD TO SERFDOM by EA...
...Along with the other radical fly-bynighters he was boomed as a prodigy populating "the brightest generation in our history...
...Begun in the fall of 1964 as a popular protest against officious university bureaucrats, the Free Speech Movement soon fell under the control of Stalinists and Trotskyists...
...The Soviets are not a separate side...
...Criticizes Nozick, Rand, Rothbard and others: connects libertarianism with the classical liberalism of John Locke...
...The European allies are almost desperate for arms talks...
...Gromyko complained at one point, "The tug of war between the groups that determine U.S...
...The picture that the newsweekly team of scribes seeks to create in our mind ( " o n r u s h i n g t e c h n o l o g y , " "burgeoning arsenals") is one of two children playing with chemistry sets and coming up with ever more volatile and dangerous mixtures: Unless they are restrained by a third party, they will blow us all up...
...But orthodox Catholics have nothing comparable in the field...
...These are all self-imposed costs, of course...
...My interest in the arcane topic was aroused by two nearly simultaneous and unrelated events: the arrival at the White House of Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, who fulfills the classic definition of a diplomat (someone who goes abroad to lie for his country...
...Each commemoration is going to be served up in a warm bath of nostalgia as commemorations of the Glenn Miller Orchestra might be served up in nostalgia...
...We find it said that such a technological development is potentially "destabilizing," because in the words of Newsweek: " I f Moscow believed Washington was close to neutralizing the Soviet threat, it might be provoked into launching a preemptive strike of its own...
...Naturally within a few fleeting years all these geniuses had vanished from center stage...
...Subscribe today...
...In order to find an answer to this simple question, I decided to enter the arms control debate at the most popular or "high school" level, as it were--the level at which it is presented to us by Time and Newsweek...
...This excellent article, the best I have read on arms control, has been reprinted by the Committee for the Free Worldjn New York...
...Help us explode old myths and prejudices...
...If UAW hadn't shown up for talks once the old contract expired, GM would presumably have been free to hire nonunion workers...
...Hayek A limited edition of 200 individually numbered books, personally signed by F.A...
...just as you only need understand the idea of tax rates on additional income to understand supply-side economics...
...The key point here is that, while the U.S...
...Do I hear groans...
...Savio weeping in Sproul Plaza last month over some has-been singer who was a wow twenty years ago reminded me that youth is not only a time for sowing wild oats but also for preparing for adulthood...
...Atom bombs can be and are being dismantled...
...on the other side the more realistic Defense Department "hawks...
...After all, it's said, there aren't even enough intelligent orthodox Catholics to support a decent journal of opinion...
...This is a covert axiom of arms controllers, and it is false...
...Onrushing technology has outdated or outflanked nearly all of the agreements that were reached, so painstakingly, during the first generation of arms control...
...Newsweek told us that "sources in Moscow were acknowledging that arms talks are a necessity," expressing the cost that we are imposing on them, and that "the Soviet military has begun to lobby for the resumption of negotiations" (ditto...
...Last month it was Berkeley's Free Speech Movement...
...Star Wars"] as a bargaining chip to be traded away, or significantly restricted, in the course o f negotiating reductions in nuclear arms of all sorts...
...As has become the custom with the resurrected heroes of that decade, Mr...
...But their lack of enthusiasm for defensive, nonnuclear weapons that would neutralize nuclear ones raises doubts about their sincerity...
...Its demonstrations against university life were repeated all over the country, as was the movement's collapse into hedonism and anarchy...
...It is dull, I know, and I promise to do my best...
...is a real economic power, the Soviet Union is a slave society, with a nuclear-derived capacity to cow the rest of the world and little else...
...For a brief and brassy hour he had a place on the national scene...
...ating tidbits in this indispensable guide to the life and work of this powerful and controversial woman...
...Well, the NEW OXFORD REVIEW has arrived on the scene to dispel those falsehoods...
...Their quantities (increasingly unverifiable in any event) are to be traded for our quality (to be scrupulously monitored by our State Department types...
...Today those who spent the 1960s intelligently preparing for the future are stepping forward even as the erstwhile radicals continue staggering about, wondering where Ronald Reagan came from and why so few Americans listen to the Beatles...
...Jastrow's key point is that new weapons soon will be so accurate that they need not be nuclear...
...hd, 384p $17.95 LIBERALISM AT WIT'S END: The Libertarian Revolt Against the Modern State by Stephen L. Newman The first lucid and comprehensive critique of modern libertarianism...
...Who are these unnamed State Department people...
...hd, 192p $19.95 THE EARLY AYN RAND: A Selection from Her Unpublished Fiction ed...
...He did not take credit for any of the social problems that grew ever worse in the 1970s...
...That the vast majority of Americans today do not give the first hoot about the 1960s counterculture seems not to matter...
...Varnado, and Paul C. Vitz...
...New technology "soon will make the traditional, beancounting approach to arms control simply unworkable . . . . If the arsenals are to be kept within bounds, there will have to be a revolution in arms control thinking to match the one that is taking place in military technology...
...The question is: What cost does the Soviet Union threaten to impose on the U.S...
...And now, despite treaties to the contrary, the nuclear arms race is on the verge of leaping from earth into outerspace...
...According to Time: "Some people in the State Department would indeed like to use S.D.I...
...Let us ask ourselves this simple question: Why did GM enter into it...
...unlocks the great morass of data about weaponry in general, atomic weapons included...
...In fact, new weapons technology has several important advantages: It renders old weapons obsolete, so that they no longer have to be stockpiled...
...In August we relived Woodstock, very little being made of its unappetizing aftermath: drug addiction, venereal disease, petty criminality...
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...if we do not enter into arms control negotiations with them...
...Negative but fair: sure to be controversial...
...The spine is inlaid with 22-carat gold The books are cased in by hand and contain genuine silk moire end sheets...
...Hayek, and bound in rich, burnt sienna top-grain cowhide...
...Danger is imputed to the weapons themselves, and the more advanceci the weapons become the more dange}ous they are...
...Moreover, there is a prejudice among modernist Catholics that those Catholics who really believe in the Bible, the creeds, tradition, and the Church are intellectually feeble...
...Notice, by the way, that in his interview with Dusko Doder of the Washington Post, Konstantin Chernenko, the Soviet "leader," urged that "the nuclear powers freeze quantitatively and qualitatively all nuclear weapons...
...But therein I found no straightforward statement of Soviet-imposed cost...
...But it's important, too...
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...The Soviets do not enter into the picture at all...
...At the time of Gromyko's visit articles were published in both magazines in each of two issues (cover date, October 1 and 8)--four articles in all...
...Bear in mind that it ended up agreeing to certain provisions it would rather have sidestepped: establishing a job security fund, and so on...
...Newsweek is on shaky factual ground in asserting that arsenals are "burgeoning...
...NATO's fragile unity could crack if Reagan appears to be dragging his feet...
...with intro and notes by Leonard Peikoff This delightful volume includes not only unpublis2hed bxcerpts from The Fountainhead and We The Living but short stories like Tire Husband I Bought and Good Copy, plays and movies - Red Pawn, Ideal and Think Twice...
...George A. Kelly, James Likoudis, Ralph Mclnerny, John T. Noonan Jr., Kevin Perrotta, James J. Thompson Jr., S.L...
...What I am trying to establish here is the underlying basis for negotiations in general...
...On one side are the appeasement-oriented State Department doves and their media parrots...
...but their veiled appeasement tells us where the liberals really think the danger lies...
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...One must be on the alert, then, for any attempt to mislead the United States into signing an agreement that would trade away our quality f o r their quantity...
...Perhaps we should take a closer look at Master Talbott and his writings in a later issue...
...Congress also is applying pressure...
...12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1984 The reason, I suspect, is that a "Star Wars" defense is a highly unwelcome prospect for the Soviet Union, although the etiquette of ddtente which Time and Newsweek live by would prevent them from saying any such thing...
...Savio last month associated himself with all the virtuous deeds that supposedly followed...
...As a free society, the U.S...
...The answer, of course, is that GM had much more to lose if it had not entered into negotiation...
...The topic is arms Control...
...Nor did he explain why, if he and his friends were so successful, we have heard so little from them these last 20 years...
...And here the comparative disadvantage of free societies is that they will always contain in their midst renegades and Soviet apologists, militantly suspicious of.their own country and willing to blow the whistle the minute they suspect their governments aren't abiding by self-imposed restrictions...
...If nuclear weapons are subtracted from the world, we are left with only one superpower...
...Arms control strikes me as being a sham from beginning to end...
...Likewise, of course, GM threatened UAW with an equally severe cost...
...These are mindless statements, betraying the greatest error of dovish sentiment about arms control: the failure to distinguish between the quantitative accumulation of weapons, and qualitative changes in them...
...Instead of asking whether it can "work," we should be asking who is promoting it, other than Soviet generals (understandably...
...This is as clear a statement of appeasement as one can-find: I f the Soviets fear that they might not be able to destroy us next year, then they might try to destroy us right away...
...Arms control negotiations" based on such a rationale are really negotiations with ourselves...
...Thus the UAW extracted from GM Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...You see, we believe that orthodox Catholics need a high-grade magazine that really speaks to the mind as well as the heart, that speaks Truth with clarity, verve, and style...
...W e l l , what...
...if Reagan wants money for his pet weapons projects, such as the MX or his "Star Wars" missile-defense system, he will have to give arms control the old college try...
...As Robert Jastrow pointed out in Commentary recently: "Nuclear weapons in the American arsenal are now one-seventh their size 25 years ago, and the total megatonnage of our~trsenal is one-quarter what it was then...
...hd, 130p $25.00 THE SPIRIT OF ENTERPRISE by George Gilder [n vivid, unforgettable portraits, Gilder dramatizes the impact of enterprise on the development of new businesses and technologies He presents the entrepreneur as prime mover of economic growth...
...Soon the revolutionary types found themselves being seduced by the drug culture and the idiots of sexual utopia...
...If you can hit the actual missile in a silo, TNT will do the job...
...Newsweek noted, for example, that critics of "Star Wars" say it "would violate previous treaties"--a good argument against treaties, not against Star Wars...
...So let's buy a little more peace by not defending ourselves too well...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1984 II The nearest thing to a Sovietimposed justification for arms control that I could find was this in Newsweek: "Nuclear weapons are far more numerous, more powerful and more accurate now than when the process began...
...Now back to Gromyko and arms control...
...and the General Motors-United Auto Workers negotiations over a new contract for the labor union...
...You negotiate with your adversary, and arrive at a compromise, when the other side has the capacity to impose a cost greater than your negotiated concession...
...The tough ideologues of the left began by manipulating the zomMes of the already established drug culture, but the America of the 1960s was not the Moscow of the last Czar...
...The abovementioned magazines are distinguished and influential trend-setters, and the time has come to give them some serious competition...
...In these 26 pages of copy (13 for each magazine) I would presumably find the answer...
...While most of his fellow students were at class preparing for the future he was leading demonstrations and getting arrestedmonce the gifted orator was jugged for biting a cop on the leg...
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...Now, in the case of GM vs...
...In time, the becalmed ideologues wandered into the cults and the personal growth therapies--though I have known some who became excellent shyster lawyers and shady businessmen...
...For several years now Time and Newsweek have persistently blurred the distinction between tax rates and revenues (prices and quantities...
...Probably the real reason why arms controllers d o n ' t like the new technology,(miniaturization, in particular) is that it makes their job so much harder, indeed threatens to leave them unemployed...
...I mean, if you can put a missile down the Kremlin chimney, it doesn't have to be nuclear, does it...
...The liberal Protestants have their Christian Century, the Evangelicals have their Christianity Today, the liberal Catholics have their Commonweal, and the Jews have their Commentary...
...F.A...
Vol. 17 • December 1984 • No. 12
