Weapons and Hope

...As citizens of the twentieth century, we have all been marked by the memories and experiences of World War I and World War II...

...Such a defensive system could make sense only in a world in which the level of nuclear armaments had been brought down much lower than is presently the case...

...James F. McCue THOSE who ignore history are condemned to repeat it — a familiar adage, but one which is not immediately serviceable...

...Dyson does not suppose that this can come about...

...Everyone who has addressed the issue of nuclear weapons has learned something from the political and military history of the twentieth century, but the lessons to be learned from it all are contradictory...

...It is a mark of Dyson's individualism that he is quite willing to adopt positions that are automatically viewed with suspicion by most of those who favor a reduction in the American nuclear arsenal...

...The general program is that we are simultaneously to seek substantial reductions in the nuclear arsenals of both super powers, at the same time that we pursue very actively research and development of defensive weapons systems that could make use of non-nuclear means of destroying incoming missiles...

...Freeman Dyson — physicist, consultant to the Defense Department, gravely concerned human being — is clearly a World War I person...

...We draw the parable for our time from these very different sources...

...For history teaches a variety of lessons...

...The second group is much more haunted by images of the late 1930s, indeed by the entire inter-war era in which war was made inevitable by a combination of unprecedented villainy on one side and fear-inspired self-deception on the other...

...As he views the world, or the relationship between the super-powers, it is not some Hitleresque Soviet villainy that threatens us, but the massiveness and complex inter-relatedness of our military systems, in a world in which we can count on a deep irrationality and unpredictability in human affairs...

...but it seems to be the case that the deep and growing disagreement about the way toward peace in the closing years of the twentieth century is between World War I people and World War II people...

...Dyson, in a book that is part memoir, part reflection on what one might take to be totally unrelated bits of history, part prescription, manages to take seriously both the weapons, their sponsors, and the possibility of persuading the latter to get rid of the former...

...or one argues for a substantially larger or a substantially smaller version of the status quo...

...He is even willing to argue on behalf of fallout shelters under some circumstances, a view that is unlikely to be well received by what one would expect would be the book's natural constituency...

...The first group sees the world threatened principally by a system of military hardware and conventions that threatens at any moment to break loose from human control and destroy the entire civilization that has created it...

...In general, Dyson's argument is that we should shift our nuclear strategy from deterrence to defense, and in the process eliminate the necessity of nuclear weapons...

...Weapons and Hope is a refreshingly idiosyncratic book on a subject which, judging from the literature, seems able to evoke only a few stock responses: either one demonstrates the folly (or better the moral cretinism) of nuclear weapons and their sponsors, hoping that like ancient Jericho their defending walls will come crashing down at the trumpet sound...

...In this view, human villainy — however abundant it may in fact be — is really irrelevant to the principal issue, which is how both parties are to get out from under the common threat of a military system which neither of them separately is able to control...