EDITORIAL
DISARMAMENT AND SURVIVAL At quick glance the Carter administration's defense budget for fiscal '79 is gratifying. It is almost $4 billion lower than that sought by Defense Secretary Brown, and...
...This will take place in New York and be timed to coincide with the UN Special Session on Disarmament scheduled for May 23-June 23...
...They are perhaps summed up best by Jane Sharp, a James Warburg Fellow at Harvard...
...Included among Mobilization concerns will also be the proliferation of nuclear power plants and the hazards they present to human life...
...People go about their affairs as if their life-and-death interests were in unimpeachable hands...
...Conversely, where the United States is engaged in international diplomacy aimed at formally codified agreements, the President seems to be conducting business as usual...
...If this comes about, 1978 will be a year to mark...
...None of the objectives will be fully realizable during '78, but this does not mean that constructive emphases cannot be brought to each of the topics, with large impact on public opinion and perhaps even on the White House itself...
...The '79 defense budget becomes, in sum, another puzzling entry in the log on administration attitudes on military spending and priorities...
...The Carter record glistens with fine sentiments and, in fairness, not all of it is Commonweal: 35 mere sheen...
...This is a jump that advances the military budget well towards the $170 billion figure projected for 1982 by the administration's own Office of Management and Budget...
...But nowhere near all...
...Where no official negotiations are in progress," she wrote in a recent issue of Arms Control Today, "the emphasis has been on the virtue of unilateral restraint as an example to others...
...fleet...
...Among other things, it will necessitate curtailments for all the armed branches...
...This stance has since been altered to make certain SALT agreements likely...
...The wonder in all of this is the complacency of the general public...
...A portion of this increase can be attributed to the high inflation inflicted on the economy by radical developments in cost-control factors, notably those traceable to oil-producing countries...
...as if the policy-makers will automatically arrive at judgments that will serve the common good...
...At $126 billion, however, the 1979 military budget is still bloated and unconscionably dominative of national fiscal priorities...
...And so far as the curtailments are concerned —well they translate only to a slightly smaller slice of a fat and juicy pie...
...Hence the 79 military budget...
...However this welcome flexibility is offset by insistence on the development of the cruise missile and the neutron bomb, and by the threat of the deployment of new destabilizing strategic systems, such as the M-X, a first-strike counterforce weapon which some feel could jolt the Soviets into first-strike postures of their own...
...Happily this complacency will be disturbed in 1978 by a nationwide coalition of religious, peace, environmental and community groups concerned that while cities decay, while the environment deteriorates, while millions go unemployed and millions more suffer social neglect, there is money aplenty for murderous bombs and weapons systems...
...It is almost $4 billion lower than that sought by Defense Secretary Brown, and seemingly economical...
...It hardly requires an accounting expert to see that military spending is growing at a rate that considerably exceeds inflation...
...A pastoral letter issued by the Mobilization's Religious Task Force itemizes four objectives for '78: zero nuclear weapons, ban nuclear power, stop the arms race, fund human needs...
...Joined under the name Mobilization for Survival, the coalition plans a series of study days, worship services, vigils and demonstrations aimed at dramatizing the holiness of life and peace, and will sponsor in June a major religious convocation for human survival...
...The '79 budget sets military spending at yet another astronomical level, and represents an increase of $15 billion for the first two years of the Carter term...
...For the Navy, for instance, the cutback means 15 new ships instead of 20, hardly a hardship loss given the strength of the U.S...
...The decisions on the B-l bomber, on the reduction of military presence in South Korea, on the control of nuclear fuels so as to limit nuclear-bomb convertibility—these are strong, positive steps...
...So is the plan to cut arms sales to third-world countries, all of whom need technology, goods and butter infinitely more than they need the obsolescent arms we sell them while we ourselves move on to more sophisticated weapons and delivery systems...
...But while there are initiatives to commend, there is much to criticize in the Carter approach to arms control, beginning with the initial SALT negotiating stance, described in some circles as more designed to satisfy Senator Jackson and the Committee on the Present Danger than to move towards a mutually acceptable agreement with the USSR...
...Given the history of ages, it is a naive presumption...
...Paradoxes in the Carter administration approach to arms control and international military stability are thus numerous...
...Trimming of the nation's military budget was one of the seductive promises of the Carter presidential campaign, but the budget for fiscal '79 raises the troubling question whether much has really changed...
Vol. 105 • January 1978 • No. 2
