The Public Policy

...that second, has numerous, discriminate uses, yielding a whole range of options between total response and total inaction, and thus a more believeable, realistic, and hence effective deterrent...

...The only problem with this little thesis is that it is simply not true...

...But some people thought the ads were a bit much, even considering the individual they were directed against...

...For example, strategic spending, (corrected for inflation and expressed in 1974 dollars), has declined from levels that three times exceeded $19 billion a year in the period between 1956 and 1961 to a current level of about $6.77 billion...

...In this situation, the gut-level fear of holocaust and the sentimental longing for a world without the bomb represents little more than an effort to escape reality, and can hardly be the foundation for an intelligent nuclear policy...

...Wohlstetter points out, neither spending on strategic weaponry nor the relative destructiveness of our strategic force has expanded in the last decade...

...And perhaps we should even have followed the suggestion of that lover of peace, Bertrand Russell, and threatened the Soviets with nuclear weapons back when we had a monopoly on them...

...Rather, it is that the oft-cited bugaboo of advancing technology, far fromescalating the dangers of a holocaust, has again had precisely an opposite effect...

...Now if they can only get beyond telling us over and over again how dreadful it is that bombs are really here, the nation might get on with the business of making our strategic force so effective and so stable that we never have to use it...

...One of these featured a little girl of about seven, walking through a field and counting aloud as she picked petals off a daisy...

...Little of this, however, receives recognition in the popular stereotype, which insists on viewing nuclear policy in terms of some mythical golden age, past or future, devoid of nuclear weapons...

...And the final irony is that the liberals really should be in there pitching the other way on this one...

...Well, needless to say, this was vivid stuff (indeed, although I was only thirteen years old when this was beaming over the nation's airwaves, I retain perfectly clear pictures of both commercials...

...For once, we really do have a situation where science and technology and "rationality," that holy troika the liberals keep urging us to apply to all the "social problems" they are forever discovering, can actually make a difference toward improving our lot...

...A similar development emerges when one moves from counting dollars to measuring destructive power, as Prof...

...After all, it takes only 100 warheads to kill 100 million people, and by the time the interim SALT agreement ends in 1977, we'll have 9700 warheads and the Russians will own 4000 (Newsweek, July 8, 1974, p. 24...

...On the contrary, it is the best route available for developing a strategic force that first, is more secure, and hence less vulnerable to a "first strike" aimed at destroying it...

...And it is all so silly, since each superpower can blow the others off the map several times over...

...Indeed, things have come to such a pass that even if we aim our bombs at enemy missiles instead of enemy cities (which, in simplified form, is part of Defense Secretary Schlesinger's current strategy), we only make things worse...

...Of course, Goldwater went down inflames so badly that it's hard to sort out exactly how much each of the various "issues" of that year contributed to the outcome...

...When each of these technologies were developed, according to Prof...

...This in turn made it possible to put them in rockets more easily protected by blast shelters or in constantly moving submarines...

...Racing With the Left to Armageddon WHEN BARRY GOLDWATER ran against Lyndon Johnson for the Presidency in 1964, the Democrats decided to capitalize on the Republican nominee's opposition to the Administration's Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (and his supposed "trigger-happiness" in general) by running a pair of rather infamous television advertisements on the topic...

...And in terms of "equivalent megatonnage" (EMT), i.e., the area on which the U.S...

...Indeed, this belief is so familiar and so widely accepted that in most stories, be they about SALT or ABM's or whatever, it is usually just incorporated by reference as the common denominator of shared thinking that must underlie any discussion of nuclear weaponry among intelligent men...

...It should in turn be apparent that each of these developments serves only to enhance the chances for stability in a nuclear world...

...And by and large, the Democrats did a good job of making Goldwater look like the fellow who might do just that...

...As Prof...

...An attempt simply to stop or slow this technology would have reduced the survivability of deterrent forces and therefore diminished international stability...

...The number of offensive and defensive warheads peaked in 1964 at a level about 30 percent higher than that of 1972, which in turn was about equal to the number of warheads we had in 1960...

...Wohlstetter: development of fusion weapons as replacements for the earlier fission models, and improvements in the speed, size, and targetting abilities of ballistic missiles...

...Nevertheless, it is pretty clear that in projecting a general image of Goldwater as some kind of foolish nuclear gunslinger with an A-bomb in his holster, hollering "draw" across the ocean to his Russian counterpart, the press and the Democratic Party helped swell the margin of defeat considerably...

...So after a little gentle chiding from some basically friendly sources (Time, for example, thought the ads were worth a little homily on dirty campaign tactics), these one-minute vignettes on "the child in the nuclear age" left the air...

...But none of this is relevant now, for the simple fact is that there are nuclear weapons, and all the major powers possess them...

...The terror is intensified by the competition in this area among the major powers, leading to a situation where the "Russians want 'parity,' and we will blow up the world, or at least go to the brink, before letting them have it" (Nation, July 20, 1974, p. 34...

...It is possible, in fact, that the particular commercials discussed above were so crass that they actually backfired and cost the Democrats a few votes...

...But the sort of gut-level horror that the tasteless TV ads of 1964 were directed at persists as the bottom line of any discussion of nuclear armament...

...When she reached ten, a man's voice joined hers and began to count backwards to zero, at which point an explosion was heard and the screen dissolved into a giant mushroom cloud...

...For this gives the idea of using nuclear weapons "a terrifying respectability," the "tragic irony" of which is that it "serves only to increase the odds that [nuclear holocaust] might occur" (Progressive, June 1974, pp...

...Recently, Professor Albert Wohlstetter of the University of Chicago took the trouble to document this in an article entitled "Clocking the Strategic Arms Race" that appeared in the September 24, 1974 edition of the Wall Street Journal...

...The most significant development, however, is not the mere facts of decline outlined above...

...The other sixty-second spot featured a young child eating an ice cream cone, while a gentle woman's voice informed the youngster that there was "something called Carbon-14" that could float down from the sky and turn the lad's ice cream into a killer...

...Ever since the first atomic bomb, we are told, "the proliferation of nuclear weapons has terrified the better part of the world" (Newsweek, July 8, 1974, p. 43...

...Wohlstetter, it was feared they would "inevitably" increase the dangers of nuclear war...

...Instead, they "opened up new opportunities to increase the stability of the force...

...And the ultimate villain of the arms race, "the main problem," is the "rapid burst of technological advances" (Newsweek, July 8, 1974, p. 24), forcing us ever farther down an increasingly expensive and frightening road, using up precious resources just to keep pace with the competition, and all the while bringing us closer and closer to blowing the earth to bits...

...In the background, a voice-over explained how all this related to the Arizona Senator's strategic thinking...

...Any publication worth its salt will go tothe mat on this topic...

...10-11...

...It is true that the national media, no longer haunted by the specter of a Goldwater Presidency, have taken to portraying the Senator as a likeable and honorable (if somewhat eccentric) old gentleman, and have not bothered to find a replacement for him as the personal embodiment of nuclear irresponsibility...

...The only difference is that this "horror factor" is now expressed in a more generalized, less ad hominem fashion—the most common example of which is the regular hand-wringing, at periodic intervals, over something called "the spiraling nuclear arms race...

...And did you know, she continued, that there is a man who wants to be President of the United States who thinks we should keep testing the bombs that put this foul substance in the atmosphere...

...The total explosive energy yield (megatonnage) of our strategic stockpile has declined from a peak in the early 1960s of roughly two-and-onehalf times the 1972 amount to a level that is approximately equivalent to what we possessed in 1956...

...In short, technology need not be (and in fact, has not been) devoted merely to increasing destructiveness, to getting "a bigger bang for the buck...

...strategic force could inflict structural damage, nuclear destructiveness has been halved since its peak in 1960, with a concomitant decline in potential fallout...

...Wohlstetter demonstrates in several ways...

...Which, unless we all come to our senses and put a stop to it, is precisely what will happen...

...Indeed, precisely the opposite has occurred...

...In the last thirteen years, spending in this field has declined at an average annual rate of about 8 percent...

...Consider, for example, two of the major technological advancements discussed by Prof...

...The point of all this is not so much to resurrect memories of the 1964 campaign as it is to illustrate a certain mind-set that continues to predominate public discourse on nuclear weapons in this country...

...Perhaps the world was a more pleasant place before the atomic bomb (although the immediate historical prelude to the bomb's development tends to cast doubt on such a view...

...After all, if there is one person that Americans don't want in the White House, it's the man who's going to start that putative holocaust known as World War III...

...The principal effect of fusion technology was not so much to make weapons higher in yield, but to make low and medium-yield weapons smaller, lighter, and cheaper...

...and that finally, is more subject to discrete political control, and hence more an instrument than a determinant of policy...

...And it even involves government spending...

...In a nutshell, then, we are told that the "spiraling arms race," expecially with technological development, causes higher spending, produces more destructive weaponry that is less subject to control, and hence further undermines what little stability remains on the international scene...