Editorials
commonweal 'WINNING' A NUCLEAR WAR? PERHAPS INSPIRED by President Carter's statement that Afghanistan represents "the most serious threat to world peace since the Second World War,'' those who...
...These arguments also partake of what McGeorge Bundy once called the "unreal world" of think-tank calculations and simulated warfare, where nuclear "exchanges" are carefully calibrated and great cities are "'taken out'' with all the abstract neatness of removing a chess piece...
...PERHAPS INSPIRED by President Carter's statement that Afghanistan represents "the most serious threat to world peace since the Second World War,'' those who whisper that we could win a nuclear war seem to be multiplying...
...BUSH: More than that—if everybody fired everything he had, you'd have more than that survive...
...At least 2.2 million people out of a population of three million would be killed in the first blast and subsequent firestorm...
...Not a single building would be left standing...
...or Soviet arsenal—would create a crater half a mile in diameter and several hundred feet deep...
...A significant party of military strategists has...
...It was based, it should be noted, on Boston's being hit with only one bomb...
...Meeting as they did just outside of Boston, the doctors and other scientists outlined the immediate and long-term effects of a nuclear war on that city...
...As Anthony Lewis of the New York Times noted, people forty miles away looking in the direction of the blast would be blinded by retinal bums...
...In keeping with this finding, at the conclusion of the symposium its organizers sent telegrams to President Carter and to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev expressing their alarm at "an international political climate that increasingly presents nuclear war as a rational possibility...
...BUSH: Yes, if you believe that there is no such thing as a winner in a nuclear exchange, that argument makes a little sense...
...The meeting was sponsored by a group of doctors, Physicians for Social Responsibility, who believe the world has tolerated the danger of nuclear weapons too long...
...Most of Boston's great hospitals would be destroyed, and of the 6,500 doctors in the area, almost 5000 would be dead and only 900 in physical condition to work...
...been toying not only with survival after nuclear war but with the "winnability" of such a war...
...That's the way you can have a winner, and the Soviet Union's planning is based on the ugly concept of a winner in a nuclear exchange...
...The degree of dangerous illusion fostered by such talk was illustrated at a two-day symposium held in Cambridge not long after Mr...
...Scheer then went on: SCHEER: Don't you reach a point with these strategic weapons where you can wipe each other out so many times and no one wants to use them or be willing to use them, that it really doesn't matter whether you're ten percent or two percent lower or higher...
...Their arguments, needless to say, are caught up in the mirror logic of all deterrence thinking (e.g., if the Soviets believe in "winnability" and we don't believe in "winnability," they may imagine a psychological advantage leading them to make threats, whereas if we, too, believe in "winnability," then . . . etc...
...in fact, in a real war a city like Boston or New York might be hit not by one but by scores of such bombs...
...Commonweal: 164...
...Bomb shelters would give no protection but would themselves become ovens and pressure cookers...
...It will take more than appeals to achieve these goals, especially since citizens in Moscow are not allowed to place similar advertisements...
...that race would likely be lost, with the probable result the creation of a primitive society where scattered bands of people competed for scarce resources...
...If doctors spent an average of fifteen minutes with each injured person and worked sixteen hours a day, it would take about three weeks for each casualty to be seen once...
...The conclusion of the symposium was unmistakable...
...Typical of those who hold such a view is Republican hopeful George Bush...
...Over and over again the participating doctors and nurses were told that to plan civil defense measures or to draw up blueprints for medical services after a nuclear attack is madness: Survivors of a nuclear attack would be in a race to create a life support system before available food and other supplies ran out...
...The theme of the symposium was easily stated: a nuclear war would have no winners and would cause far greater devastation than most Americans realize, probably destroying all 28 March 1980: 163 civilization as we know it...
...Even calculations of how to survive a nuclear war are dangerous, it was argued, in that they increase the likelihood of such a war...
...Bush's view, however startling to many citizens, is unfortunately only the tip of an iceberg...
...That sentiment was repeated in a subsequent newspaper advertisement asking all to join in an appeal for a reduction in U.S.-Soviet tensions, a ban on the use of nuclear weapons and gradual nuclear disarmament...
...SCHEER: Do you mean like five percent would survive...
...That one bomb—by no means the most powerful in either the U.S...
...The politics of disarmament are complicated and must be conducted on many fronts...
...Many of the survivors would be badly burned and otherwise wounded, and it is likely that most of those not killed quickly would eventually become casualties...
...All nations, they said, must act now to prevent World War III...
...All in all, the scenario presented at the symposium was thoroughly chilling...
...I don't believe that...
...A 20megaton bomb dropped on Boston would cause total destruction inside a circle with a radius of four miles...
...SCHEER: How do you win in a nuclear exchange...
...One of the most urgent, however, is to oppose this tendency, increasing among both strategists and politicians, to consider nuclear war a "rational possibility...
...BUSH: You have a survivability of command and control, survivability of industrial potential, protection of a percentage of your citizens, and you have a capability that inflicts more damage on the opposition than it can inflict upon you...
...Carter for knocking out of his budget the MX missile, the new manned bomber, and various naval improvements...
...all thought of winning a nuclear war is foolish, damnably so...
...Bush's interview...
...Interviewed in the Los Angeles Times by Robert Scheer, Bush first criticized Mr...
Vol. 107 • March 1980 • No. 6
