The way out is forward

...Negotiating focuses the attention of national leaders on what arms can do, since no ruler would surrender his authority to decide such matters...

...The only way out is forward...

...We cannot go back...

...Clearly, international agreements which might free of us of these two things would be a mighty achievement...

...We know how to build bombs...

...According to a Los Alamos scientist I talked to last spring, Carson Mark, it is a small jump from fission weapons to fusion weapons, and the main barrier to the building of fission weapons is industrial, not scientific...

...We cannot go back...

...Nothing will happen," he said...

...This is the theory of deterrence...

...It explains why we can dare to have weapons we can't dare to use...

...In the event it could not be maintained...

...When Howard Morland attempted to publish the "secret" of the H-bomb in The Progressive two years ago the government went to court to stop him...

...Of fear of war itself-the resort to arms as the outcome of a political crisis which cannot be resolved diplomatically-I have never found the least trace...

...we need not dwell on that...

...Or so I have read...

...Like the Egyptians, the Americans have made an attempt to guard certain forms of scientific knowledge...

...But we have not got much choice...

...We're thirty-five years into the age of nuclear weapons, more and better all the time, no sign of Soviet-American amity, what will happen...

...A great deal has happened...

...We speak of "getting rid" of the bomb as if they might all be disassembled, the fissionable material buried in a salt dome, production facilities at Rocky Flats and Pantex turned into bird preserves, the technicians all sent out to teach or design toasters, the planes and missiles re-armed with conventional weapons, and the world returned to the status quo ante-say, 1939...

...The hope may be farfetched or illusory, but it's better than dreaming of simpler times, or standing still waiting for nothing to happen forever...

...Morland did not know the full "secret.'' He had managed to figure out only a version of it, a notion of it, a suggestion of it...

...Attempts to write a global constitution do not seem to get very far, and all seem to require a kind of policing force which sounds very much like an army...

...It tends to narrow differences, since even failures to agree generally do not fail by much...

...Despite the government's claims, Morland did not reveal the "secret...

...It took me a long time to grasp this principle, and I suspect others find a similar difficulty...

...There are many ways hostilities between the United States and the Soviet Union might begin, but very few ways they might end without recourse to nuclear weapons...

...But in a truer sense the battle had been lost years before...

...we must go on developing new warheads and delivery systems as technology allows...

...Nothing...

...But we got to talking about defense policy and the Soviet threat and where Reagan would finally decide to put the MX and I took the opportunity to ask him the question I try to ask everybody I run across in the defense community: how is it all going to turn out...

...Nothing...

...We must live with the knowledge from now on...

...This fact tells us something important...

...The Buck Rogers pushbutton warfare feared in 1945 is approaching reality and the Reagan administration's renewed emphasis on command, control, communications, and intelligence (in effect, the wiring) will make centrally-controlled nuclear warfare a genuine possibility...

...We have had no big war since 1945 but the arms race has been far from stable...

...Things were done as they had always been done, but woodenly, with frequent shortcuts...

...There is no reason whatever to expect we shall get them, but they would be a marked improvement over the present situation, when the talk in Washington is all of more and better...

...The great achievements of early Egyptian mathematicians - geometry, an estimate of the Great Year deduced from the procession of the equinoxes, even rudimentary forms of algebra - had so decayed they had to be reinvented or discovered by later thinkers, the Greeks among them...

...If we got rid of all those warheads, and the others in Europe as well, we would free ourselves of two things-the knowledge, which has been sinking into the human mind since 1945 like a stone into the sea, that any day might be our last...

...There are two difficulties with the theory of deterrence and the permanent stand-off...

...Japan, for two centuries, gave up gunpowder and returned to the Samurai sword...

...Perhaps men can't forget things once they have been truly learned...

...New technology-in the use of laser and charged-particle beams, in antisubmarine warfare, in depressed trajectory missiles-threatens the safety of weapons on which deterrence depends...

...Nuclear weapons have brought something new into the world-a threat posed by arms so vast it undermines the last claims of war as a rational means of defense- This requires some new arrangement of the affairs of nations-a statement deliberately vague because I can't quite see what it is to be...

...When hostilities began in 1914 it was for largely technical military reasons having to do with the scale and rapidity of mobilization...

...Weapons have grown steadily more accurate and versatile...

...We will just go on as we are...

...This explains some wars-World War II, perhaps- but not others, and certainly not the First World War, which was also preceded by a long period of arms innovation, military buildup, international rivalry, and recurrent crises...

...The rest could all be fired on the opening day of a war...

...Why can't we-leaving aside for the moment the reluctance to do so of the White House, the Congress and the Pentagon-give up the bomb...

...The origins of things had been forgotten, and even their meaning was dim...

...When the Manhattan Project got under way in August, 1942, the men who ran it had no clear idea how a bomb might be designed, and had never been able to manufacture even a gram of fissionable material...

...The second difficulty with deterrence theory is that it depends on a notion of war as a rational act of aggrandizement, something which can be prevented by fear of the consequences...

...One is the rule that in history nothing never happens...

...Military officers, civilian think-tank strategists, National Security Council staffers, even arms negotiators all share it...

...Perhaps it is...

...It reminds military men that peace is their goal, or at least requires them to say so in public...

...Nothing will happen...

...This would be unusual, but not unprecedented...

...The military offers another solution to the problem posed by nuclear weapons-standing still...

...We won't get rid of nuclear weapons, we won't settle our differences, we won't go to war...

...Bomb design is easy...

...Limiting the numbers of weapons, or the development of new ones, is useful and helpful...

...This is an all but universal view in Washington...

...We will just go on as we are, matching developments in the technology of weapons delivery, indefinitely...

...It is the knowledge which takes time to acquire, not the building of hardware...

...It allows nations to decide security questions on an ad hoc basis, one at a time, in the light of the moment...

...Formal learning was confined to a priestly class which guarded it jealously - so jealously, in fact, that the guardians themselves had lost their command of the ancient sciences...

...Soon we could produce roughly a bomb a week...

...By this I mean we have got to find some way of freeing ourselves from the danger of war itself, the one thing which is generally accepted as being impossible...

...and the danger, in the event of war, that the firing of nuclear weapons might rapidly escalate in a panicky spasm of fear that it was now or never...

...It encourages people to think security depends on agreements, not on threats of violence...

...Fear of the consequences- the existence of a deterrent-may ensure we won'tembark on war deliberately, for gain, but it cannot guarantee war won't happen to us...

...But even more importantly, agreement-on arms or any other substantial matter of mutual interest-establishes a working climate of trust and cooperation...

...But it is important to understand what such an act of renunciation would achieve, and what it would not...

...Not quite still, of course...

...The principles of nuclear physics had become the common possession of mankind...

...I'd known him in California in 1957 when he was ten or twelve...

...This was a very broad claim...

...But so long as we are dangerously armed, and cannot be disarmed, and potential enemies know it, then war is extremely unlikely...

...The very scale and capacity of weaponry has become a source of tension and conflict...

...Another bomb buff who had figured out elements of the "secret" published his own version while Morland was still under injunction and the government dropped its case...

...We can't stand still...

...This wasn't an interview, but a chance meeting...

...In theory, at least, this is something we might do, and it is certainly something we ought to do...

...The government argued that none of that mattered...

...It reduces the amount of hardware which might be available in the opening stage of a war...

...The result, of course, would be catastrophic...

...the production of fissionable material is an immense undertaking...

...What we need is not a new army, but some way to be independent, to be different, even to be hostile, without recourse to arms...

...The only route forward I can see is through arms negotiations, but negotiations with a somewhat different emphasis...

...Perhaps it isn't really true...

...THOMAS POWERSn forever...

...In Washington the primary source of anxiety, which always runs high, is that the threat posed by our nuclear arms will come undone-that a defense might be found (generally considered to be remote), or that the other side will develop a capacity to disarm us in a . surprise attack (generally thought to be around the corner...

...For these reasons it seems to me that deterrence is only a stopgap, not a solution...

...At the moment the United States and the Soviet Union have about fifteen thousand strategic nuclear warheads pointed at each other, at least a third of which could be delivered in thirty minutes by missile...

...The Russians, the British, the French, and the Chinese had all figured out how to make thermonuclear weapons on their own...

...A few weeks...

...Under the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 not just privileged knowledge, but the ideas themselves, the very principles of nature involved in bomb technology were "born secret...

...Fear of other people's armies is what defines the situation as it is right now...

...But such agreements could not really free us of the threat of nuclear war...

...Nevertheless, the first bomb was detonated in July, 1945, just three years later...

...But perhaps most important of all, it provides hope of a way out...

...A couple of weeks ago I met an Air Force officer whose current assignment is tactical intelligence, which he does not like...

...he only demonstrated that it was already widely known...

...He'd rather fly...

...THOMAS POWERS...

...We shall always know...

...We cannot forget how to make nuclear weapons...

...Morland had never worked for the government, had never signed a secrecy oath, was not even a scientist...

...he found a decadent society, exhausted by time and the troubles of history, going through ancient motions by rote...

...In both Washington and Moscow, in fact, it is assumed that war means nuclear war, if not on the opening day, then shortly thereafter...

...Kilograms were required...

...If Germany had held out another six months it might have been obliterated.How long would it take to build nuclear weapons now, starting from scratch...

...It channels debate toward the language of justice, equity, and fairness...