The overriding issue

...I would also be very happy if our environmentalists and consumer advocates, such as Ralph Nader, called for removal of the tariff from Japanese automobiles, because the import of Toyotas and the like for others than the well-to-do would reduce our consumption of vanishing fossil fuels...

...Even a relatively small number of nuclear weapons, now available in such overwhelming quantities for the major nuclear powers, is enough to make MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) a credible deterrent to anyone who believes in Murphy's Law: namely, that if anything can go wrong, it will...

...But I feel constrained to point out that all during the '70s, the U.S...

...Much of the alleged strength of the Warsaw Pact troops is not directed at Western Europe (where, incidentally, most responsible leaders favor SALT II) but at the populations of these Warsaw Pact "allies...

...But SALT II remains of such overriding symbolic importance that failure to ratify it, I believe, would unravel what little fabric of international comity there exists...

...No nukes" now refers, in contrast, to the relatively minor dangers of nuclear power plants, which offer environmentalists an easy avenue of attack against corporate villains, such as utility companies...

...Students, to the extent that they have political concerns, focus on civilian nuclear power, which poses a minor hazard compared to the planet-destroying potential of nuclear weapons...

...I am in favor of the draft, or at the very least registration for the draft, to show that we are prepared if need be to defend ourselves by conventional means, since I do not believe this country sufficiently disciplined for the kind of active nonviolent defense that the late Martin Luther King Jr...

...They used the term "nukes" to refer to these allegedly minor nuclear weapons...

...and with his readiness to send to Vietnam first advisers, then counter-insurgency troops...

...Under conditions of free trade with most-favored-nation status and a greater American willingness to recognize that we must live on the same planet with this major nuclear power, as they must live with us, the danger of nuclear confrontation is lessened...

...It also forced the present stalemate within Israel between the fanatical proponents of expansion and the very large number of Israelis who would be prepared to trade land for an assured peace, if they could secure a government capable of negotiating such an arrangement or even interested in it...

...The partial Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1963, at the height of the anti-nuclear weapons movement in the U.S...

...Students and public figures may attack us ideologically, and indeed understandably envy us, while imitating some of the features of our materialistic society that many educated Americans would consider our least attractive ones...

...We must be grateful to Johnson and Nixon and Kissinger for exercising prudent restraint in this respect, whatever else we may think of them...

...Instead, a non-adversary state, namely Lebanon, has been shattered, and the lack of inventiveness and imagination, as well as magnanimity, not among all Israelis, but among those in power, in effect helped prepare the ground for the 1973 war...

...Yet I find it absurd for people to make the self-confirming prophecy that American defense and American power have become unduly weakened (whatever our inability to interfere all over the world in the old gunboat-diplomacy style...

...practiced...

...Judged in these terms, the decade just ended was a terrible one...

...But every serious physicist with whom I have spoken believes that even the most serious damage that might have resulted at Three Mile Island, for example, would be a local disaster but not a calamity for the planet comparable to a major 23 May 1980: 299 nuclear exchange...

...The U.S...

...Pakistan appears to be expanding its nuclear potential...

...is not built on increased nuclear weapons, or the MX missile that President Carter has had to promise to the Right in the hope, which may turn out to be in vain, of eventually passing the SALT II treaty...

...To the dismay of an internationalist like myself, nationalism has proven to be the strongest force in the world—a surprise and disappointment also to Marxists...

...If we can get through the next few years and maintain a modest national comity without xenophobia, there are many grounds for hope, and we must work for these, whatever our moments, whether self-indulgent or prophetic, of despair...

...ri HESE LINES were written before the Russian divisions Tmoved into Afghanistan, triggering an explosion of hawkish sentiment in the U.S...

...was growing more truculent, more xenophobic, more cut off from the rest of the world...

...Countries such as Libya and Iraq would see no need to exercise restraint in the quest for nuclear weapons if the Soviet Union and the United States cannot agree to do so...

...Rather than threatening them, we must learn more about them and have more contact with them...

...Israel and Japan evidently have nuclear weapons or at least the means to build them...

...There are undoubted hazards in the civilian use of nuclear power, especially in disposal of nuclear wastes...

...The basic strength and well-being of the U.S...

...If we take the trouble to notice, we see that the Soviet Union faces a restless internal population, no longer numerically dominated by the Great Russian ethnic group...

...Hence, I opposed from the outset the human rights doctrine of President Jimmy Carter (and the many people who have taken a similar position which can so easily, avoiding moral relativism, flatter ethnocentric Americans), in spite of my full recognition of the terrible conditions of life in the Soviet Union (though far less terrible than in the Stalin era), because it threatens the SALT II treaty and hopes for peace...

...Even more important to our national well-being is the rebuilding of the railroads, which obviously we should undertake, rather than building more bombers when we already have ample means of delivery of nuclear weapons (through our strategic triad of manned intercontinental bombers, ICBMs, and missile-launching submarines...

...I concede, of course, that this is a one-sided picture...

...Since nuclear catastrophe has not occurred, it does not seem to be a salient issue for most young, politically involved people...

...it faces potential dissension, especially from its Moslem minorities, who have ties with a Moslem world in nationalist ferment...

...TO HEAR Americans at the SALT II congressional hearings discuss the possibilities of a first strike—in which, as one put it, we could incinerate the Soviet Union—is terrifying...

...Many American Zionists, with notable exceptions in academic life and elsewhere, have been captives of the party line of the Israeli government in power...

...My opposition to our involvement in Vietnam was strong from the start, even though I recognized that Kennedy's initial enterprise there was defended by administration intellectuals as an effort, in part, to get away from the inflexible Dulles doctrine of massive retaliation...

...there are other issues...

...To humiliate the Soviet Union and to gamble on the character of Brezhnev's successor would also be especially destabilizing at a time when the threat of nuclear proliferation is intensifying...

...Such talk is terrifying in part because it makes the Soviet Union, which already feels itself sufficiently threatened from within and without, a more dangerous adversary...

...Fighting for the development of the hydrogen bomb (a single one of which made a flattened wasteland of the Eniwetok Island test site in the Pacific), the Cold Warriors, who engineered the ouster of articulate H-bomb opponent J. Robert Oppenheimer from the American nuclear program, sought to erase the distinction between large conventional weapons and small nuclear ones (so-called tactical nuclear weapons...

...Endemic instability there was aggravated when the Israelis, who had the chance for magnanimity after the six-day war of 1967, failed to take advantage of that opportunity to create an atmosphere of relatively benign feeling in the region by showing a willingness to trade occupied lands and the people in them for peace and secure boundaries...

...I thought we should save our threats for serious international matters, and not spend them on domestic matters within Russia...

...The specter of nuclear war lay behind my own anxiety concerning Vietnam, an anxiety that originated in 1954 when the United States failed to sign the Geneva Accords and our foreign policy was dominated by the self-righteousness and Cold War outlook of John Foster Dulles...

...The majority of people who have come of age politically since then, especially today's college students, seem not to have had nightmares about nuclear destruction...

...policy-makers, voices began to be heard calling for (as one Air Force general put it) bombing North Vietnam back into the Stone Age, and the danger that nuclear weapons might be used grew accordingly...

...I judge all policies, foreign and domestic—and in the United States the two cannot be disentangled—in terms of the degree to which they increase or decrease the vulnerability of humankind to destruction through the proliferation of nuclear weapons and a nuclear war...

...Yet we are still a vital country...

...As long as this remains so, we must be ready to defend our interests by domestic measures that will strengthen our economy through conservation and the civilian use of nuclear power as an interim measure until we can develop still safer sources of energy (else we shall fight a Commonweal: 300 class war between the privileged who want amenities and the less privileged who would also like amenities but who want first of all jobs and heat...

...Much can improve in the world, including its regard for human rights (which can be promoted through quiet diplomacy, as has been the case in protecting some dissidents in Yugoslavia and even in Chile), without humbling the Soviet Union or heightening its leaders' fear of internal upheaval...

...I do not see the '70s as a period of greater conservatism among the educated, as many believe, but as one of greater cynicism and also greater tolerance— tolerance for egocentricity and a pornography of violence, but also tolerance for minority groups and for women in previously white-male-dominated positions...

...Today, seeing the slogan "no nukes" on the bumper stickers of the cars driven by the educated elite at selective colleges, I am reminded of the struggle to maintain the vital distinction between merely dreadful conventional weapons, of the type that needlessly destroyed Dresden and Tokyo, and nuclear weapons that threaten the long-term destruction of life as we know it...

...remains a model for much of the world...

...I have followed the single thread of nuclear weapons, attaching some other themes to that thread to suggest a bleak view of the last decade...

...23 May 1980: 301...

...My fears were heightened when President John F. Kennedy came into office with his fallacious talk of a "missile gap" (at a time when the Soviet Union had less than half a dozen ICBMs capable of striking the U.S...

...In fact, the Middle East has been perhaps the main source of possible danger of nuclear confrontation between the superpowers...

...Such nightmares were common, indeed almost universal, among sensitive undergraduates in the 1960s...

...This new departure required a showing that the U.S could fight and win a counter-insurgency war without resort to nuclear weapons...

...and elsewhere...

...But as the involvement grew and success eluded U.S...

...It might even bring the Chinese and the Soviet Union back together again, for we are not the only ones who can play the "China card...

...Russia faces, too, the unquiet "people's democracies...

...The '70s were also a period, worldwide, of both intense nationalism and intense ethnic chauvinism, and of dangers of fragmentation not totally absent from these United States...

...I feared both the possibility of nuclear conflict and the consequences of the actual intervention, which came to involve the use of the frightful "conventional" weapons of biological warfare...

...If we can live through the next years of nuclear weapons peril, and the dangers within this country of civil strife—what I sometimes think of as traffic-jam, litigious democracy—I can envisage benign futures (which some wings of the women's movements foreshadow in their combination of an interest in nurturing the oncoming population of children with tough-minded realism about contemporary affairs...

...The point is not to minimize the hazards of peaceful use of nuclear power, but to emphasize that a far greater danger is being all but ignored...

...The U.S . is in general not in retreat...

...Those truly concerned with disarmament on the Left also attack the treaty, finding it much too limited in scope...

...it faces an economy less productive than ours...