The proliferation problem

...The point of this review of both strategic and moral arguments is essentially to declare the terms of both debates dated in 1991...

...Neither "stumbling" nor "falling" quite captured the problem: nuclear forces of enormous power and complexity were maintained at hair-trigger readiness, while all agreed that their use would be insane...

...they are not fecund but sterile...

...WORLD WATCH J. Bryan Hehir THE PROLIFERATION PROBLEM A NEW PEACE TO WIN t's over...

...The fundamental reason for the demise of the nuclear danger was not any of the carefully calibrated arms control treaties of the last three decades, but the sweeping political change in the Soviet bloc from / 1989-91...

...What caused the collapse...

...Bush should take up Mr...

...and both sides ought to pursue the simpler road of coordinated unilateral reductions to drastically reduce their arsenals, as the National Academy of Science recently recommended...

...The fact that even after these steps are taken, nuclear warheads will still exist highlights the character of the 1990s: The nuclear danger as we have known it is over, but nuclear weapons still exist...

...From Paul Ramsey in the 1960s to the U.S...

...The second stage of setting the agenda for the 1990s involves developing a view of the world capable of ordering the issues after the cold war...

...But it's time to review one's premises and revise predictions...

...Great Britain has begun to experience a racial crisis (chickens coming home to roost, I say) not unlike that experienced by Americans during the early years of the civil rights movement...

...In response to this political change, the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE) was concluded and signed in 1991...

...The nuclear terror, which shaped so much of the politics and strategy, as well as the literature and moral analysis of the last fifty years, is gone...

...The premise of the nuclear age was that fundamental political change in the East-West confrontation was either impossible or at least improbable...

...As the Thomas hearings demonstrated, our own foundational principles are becoming more elusive as they become more necessary...

...Even though much "cleaning up" will follow, it is useful in October 1991, twenty-nine years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, to simply declare the nuclear danger as we have known it to be over...

...Hence, the rational objective was to control the strategic relationship in ways which reduced the chance of stumbling into nuclear war in a crisis or falling victim to a nuclear accident...

...In many ways the treaties--from the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963 through the START agreements signed in 1991have been modest in their efforts to prevent nuclear war...

...The significance of the political changes of the last two years is that they offer the opportunity to move beyond managing the danger...

...The phenomenon is not recent...

...The old terms, EastWest/North-South simply don't capture the complexity of the issues...

...Could one claim that such conscious planning could coexist with stated fears about stumbling and falling...

...Indeed, the demise of the U.S.-Soviet danger and the remaining nuclear weapons simply point to the more central problems of the 1990s...

...A few things that have happened recently made me think about how odd we are in the world...

...The Senate ought to consent without too much advice on START and CFE...

...On purely strategic grounds this "margin of rationality" stretched the notion of what was reasonable...

...Arguing against them, on the grounds that they either missed the complexity of the nuclear danger, or they would in fact raise the likelihood of nuclear use by delegitimizing nuclear deterrence, has been, in my view, a valid and necessary but not terribly satisfying enterprise...

...That danger--a world of many nuclear (or chemical and biological) states--is less cosmic in its scope than the one which has just passed, but it is more complex in its content...

...Skin color has always been important to people like Enoch Powell and his younger brothers, the skinheads, and in France to neo-Fascists...

...The permanent paradox of the nuclear era was the conviction that only by being consciously prepared to commit an irrational act could one rationally control the nuclear competition...

...we have not yet found reason to conclude that any political economy committed to these truths might find in them a duty to provide bread, work, and a humanizing education to all its people...

...We continue to affirm, but unreflectively, every person's inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...

...In the 1990s, because other forms of nuclear danger will be far more probable, they are now more important...

...r i OF SEVERAL MINDS John Garvey ALONE WITH OUR RIGHTS AMERICA IS GETI'ING HARDER TO FIND merica is stranger than we think, more varied and wonderful and potentially dangerous...

...it is not a truth whereon to build...

...Nuclear weapons still exist by the thousands but they do not and will not carry the threat to human life and survival which they have for the last two generations...

...At one level it almost doesn't exist, or exists in an attenuated and weird way, one that isn't a common understanding or sensibility so much as it is a passivity before our peculiarly empty brand of politics and our having placed commerce at the center of everything...

...Germany worries about its racial purity in the face of migrant Turks, and a neo-Nazi movement is on the rise...

...The unification of Germany removed the prime political stake in the European theater...

...Other kinds of nuclear danger may be more probable, but they are not more important...

...I've written before that our only common culture is made up of law and television, and I'm afraid I still think that's true--but there are other things that we can see about America by comparison with other places...

...PAUL SRACIC Paul Sracic, a doctoral candidate at Rutgers University, is currently at work on a dissertation which examines the beliefs and role conceptions of Catholic judges...

...Catholic bishops in the 1980s, the effort to encompass nuclear strategy in the moral universe was a taxing task...

...We should take a moment prayerfully to be grateful and then move on to the issues of the 1990s...

...Senate has yet to ratify START or CFE, and the BushGorbachev initiatives need to be implemented, but it is hard to believe any of these issues could revive the old version of the nuclear question...

...States ran the risk of stumbling or falling because the risk of being strategically vulnerable or politically intimidated by one's 598: Commonweal adversary seemed greater...

...A narrowly conceived margin of "rationality" was the foundation of an irrational arms competition...

...The clarity of calls for condemnation of the entire nuclear enterprise was tempting in its internal coherence...

...The South's interest in planetary bargains has always been understandably more focused on economic issues than strategic questions...

...More recently, President George Bush's remarkable address of September 27, and the equally significant response of President Mikhail Gorbachev, ordering withdrawal of tactical nuclear weapons in the European theater completed what CFE began...

...Today, pointing to the collapse of the Soviet system does nothing to solve the problems of poverty and unemployment (for example) in our own...

...The field of players expands dramatically and the issues about which many of the players are concerned go beyond controlling weapons...

...The political change in U.S.-Soviet relationships, the transformation of the map and politics of Europe, and the combined results of the START and the CFE treaties, along with the Bush-Gorbachev decisions are enough to render the previous arguments moot...

...I am not talking so much about our national politics (if that means Bush, or who the Democrats might run for president, or the administration's foreign or domestic policy) but a culture that is in so many ways unlike any other...

...In his preface to Danger and Survival, McGeorge Bundy explained his decision to focus upon the U.S.-Soviet relationship rather than other nuclear threats in this way: "This book by contrast is about danger and survival on a planetary scale...

...But in other ways they have been a substantial contribution to the challenge of managing the nuclear danger...

...They can be defined in two stages...

...In moral terms the tension was that much worse...

...Neither the authors nor their audiences were ever content with the conclusions...

...Thirty years ago, John Courtney Murray argued that the only "truth" upon which there was consensus in the United States was that communism was bad...

...The passing comment about negotiated treaties made above is not meant to denigrate the role they have played since the 1950s...

...First, the nuclear question will shift from its superpower fixation to the systemic problem of proliferation...

...I need to admit at the outset that I never thought I would say that in my lifetime...

...But that perception is purely negative...

...It is true that the U.S...

...It is to counter that danger that the proposals to drastically reduce nuclear forces on both sides is directed...

...As Mr...

...If we are to serve as any sort of model for emerging nations and lead a new world order, we must again discuss seriously and reason rightly about whether any truths really are self-evident, what they are, and what they demand of us...

...The treaties were the precise but precarious effort made to mediate between "danger and survival...

...The need for different ideas as well as different policies arises because the nuclear danger has dissipated...

...the meaning of the German question has changed from who will control Germany to what a united Germany will be and do as part of a united Europe...

...But these occasional, ad hoc attempts to discover a broad public philosophy do little more than demonstrate our own confusion and lack of consensus...

...The engagement of the South in a planetary bargain about proliferation will surely spill over into issues which have nothing to do with nuclear (or chemical or biological) weapons...

...The likely sources of proliferation tie neither in the East nor the West but in the South...

...National identity is important in Europe in ways Americans have never seriously encountered, because 25 October 1991:599...

...The failed coup and consequent collapse of the Soviet Union as a viable political entity climaxed the two years of change...

...Bush's address recognized, the nuclear danger from the Soviet Union now has been transformed from that of a conscious policy against the United States to the danger of chaos--an unplanned, unauthorized use of nuclear weapons...

...Gorbachev's proposal for a test ban...

...The revolution of 1989 in Eastern Europe ended the Warsaw Pact as a viable strategic threat and transformed the strategic challenge which NATO had been designed to counter...

...A combination of political and strategic choices, often driven by wider and deeper forces, has transformed the story of Danger and Survival (Random House), as McGeorge Bundy entitled his history of the nuclear age...

...Engaging the South in the proliferation question will and should open other necessary planetary bargains about debt, development, and the environment...

...Europe, fight now, is going through a profound crisis with "foreign workers"-some of whom have been there for more than one generation and would not be called foreign in countries which did not still define themselves primarily in racial terms...