Overkill and Understatement

...They carry a burden of knowledge which keeps them constantly on edge, and makes them both contemptuous and fearful of the people at large...

...The highest civilian officials, even if briefed fully, found themselves functioning publicly within the narrow limits of security clearance...

...Thus, the clash between the peaceminded and the guardians of our ar senal becomes merely verbal, manipulative...

...As we compound our nuclear equation, and trap ourselves in the paranoid rationality of strategic debate, the Soviet Union seems to have stripped itself, for economic, and who knows what other reasons, to a minimal deterrent designed, theoretically, to destroy America once, by focusing a small number of multi-megaton weapons on our major population centers...

...The point is that the capacity to destroy the homeland of the other is considered the real basis for deterrence...

...The most primitive cultures have been able to create the forms that discharged this central human task in the past, and we must hope that it can be done again...

...But military and political leaders view such a reduction as an impossibly radical disarmament proposal...

...All human, including psychic, energy has always been ambivalent...

...Within five years, the United States will have hardened into a vast thermonuclear missile base...

...That is why the mere physical banning of the bomb cannot destroy the possibility of misusing the energies which created it in the first place...

...This Soviet trend has been apparent for several years...

...And they talk to them because there is no one else to talk to...

...A single megaton nuclear bomb is fifty times more powerful than the weapon which destroyed Hiroshima, killing an estimated 100,000 people...

...Peace will demand the self-transformation of our society...

...Modern political man must learn to confront and live with personal ambivalence and social ambiguity...

...But first, what are the facts...

...A proportionate cut back in the deliverable megatonnage would be about 99...

...But it will be recalled that Eisenhower denied the existence of a missile gap almost from the beginning, and, also reiterated on many occasions the more than adequate armament at the disposal of the United States...

...Certainly, the human race must learn to live with nuclear energy...

...The typical military argument—the more weapons the less chance of war —is, historically viewed, sheer nonsense, even though, in another sense, no substantial precedent for our present situation exists...

...While we are in the business of producing 2,000 strategic missiles, the Soviets seem ready to rest content with 75 to 200 invulnerables* (in silos and submarines), and it is unlikely that these will be augmented, although we may be sure they will be replaced as the need arises...

...In the absence of a national dialogue, the official strategists increasingly lose touch with reality...

...We are doing this against our flabby good intentions as a nation and in gruesome contrast to the middle class surfaces of our lives...

...And it should also be clear, that in this era of collective bureaucracies, when the power of decision rests in a few hands, the individual analogy is more a description than a metaphor...

...In 1958-1960, while we were building 1600 intercontinental bombers, the Russians built less than 200, and apparently plan, now, to stop...

...By 1968, we shall have at our disposal 950 Minuteman missiles, dispersed in hardened sites throughout the country, each with a thermonuclear warhead of one megaton (equivalent to one million tons of TNT...

...In recent months there has been some indication that a critical battle between the military and the civilian sectors of the government is being waged...

...The question remains: who found it useful to permit the American people to be misled...

...It also strengthens the belief that the Joint Chiefs have been responsible for misinformation and misinterpretation for many years...

...What accounts for these incommensurate frames of reference between the official scientists, law makers, and other representatives of the people on the one hand, and the anxiety-bound, apathetic citizen, on the other...

...The "overkill" capacity has been known to the experts outside of classified government sources for about three years...

...On such healthy suspicion our future now depends...

...it can be used for good or evil...

...When we add our intercontinental Atlas and Titan missiles to this projected force, and discounting our strategic bombers, our theoretically deliverable, strategic nuclear capacity reaches more than 25,000 megatons, probably 10 times that of Russia's...

...Obviously, it seems safer to too many official minds to play the falsely secure nuclear game than to take the social, economic and political risks involved in encouraging revolutionary change throughout the world, even when the need is understood...

...Americans have always distrusted the military professional, and this must now be extended to his mirror image—the civilian militarist...

...could be obliterated, the reduction would be more than 90...

...The sudden firing of the Chief of the Navy, and the, in all probability, terminal one-year appointment of the Air Force fire-eater Curtis LeMay, seem to support the view that even this "hard-nosed" administration is appalled by the insatiable martial appetite of the military chiefs...

...Of course, the managed fear of a missile gap had probably been generated by the initial Soviet success in launching satellites...

...Thus, our Polaris and Minuteman ICBMs alone would have the power to destroy, 800 times over, the 140 Soviet cities that have a population of 100,000 or more...

...that is a revolutionary issue for all Americans...

...STANLEY DIAMOND HEY, K. and K...

...McNamara has been seriously reconsidering our strategic commitments and has indicated, in congressional hearings early this year, the impracticality of the usual Rand Corporation assumptions...

...First, the Washington-Rand Corporation-Pentagon atmosphere inflates the abstractions of international murder in the absence of proven alternatives...

...It raises the hackles to recall that long before the origin of formal political sociolo gy, Plato wrote that democracy habitually degenerated into dictatorship because of the failure of individual responsibility, and a correlated contempt for the public by elected officeholders...

...It will be recalled that in Eisenhower's statements, and in his farewell address, he still restricted himself from quoting facts and figures...

...strategic strength, otherwise, we would have to weigh NATO, etc., in the balance...

...nor is the end in sight...

...That is our ultimate, haunting problem...

...This arsenal has been conceived without the consent, and without the knowledge, of the American people...

...Clearly, he is well on the way to creating a paranoid world for himself, taut with the probability of provocation, and he is almost certainly going to kill someone, someday...

...And the most reasonable answer is—the Joint Chiefs of Staff...

...even the one-tenth of one percent of the public that is considered well informed has only recently become aware of the Pentagon's outrageous frame of reference...

...While an under-informed citizenry goes about its usual business, the military establishment has developed, and plans to continue developing, a strategic atomic force, the dimensions of which are beyond the arithmetical reckoning of the daily market place...

...More dangerously, as our nuclear armaments escalate, the probability of using them grows exponentially...

...and it would, indeed, at one fell swoop, encompass the first, second, and most of the third phase of the Administration's disarmament program...

...But the first order on the agenda is to inform the American people about the reality of overkill, and the dangers of understatement and misstatement in the highest quarters of our country today...

...The Russians are pouring an estimated $1 million a day in aid to Castro...

...Should the present trend continue, we shall, before the decade passes, have turned ourselves into a social dinosaur—grotesque, useless and stupid in our defensive posture...

...A man stocks his home with hand grenades, rifles, pistols, perhaps a sub-machine gun, etc., in the name of protecting his family from enemies in the neighborhood...

...The information gap, exemplified in military matters but ramifying through all aspects of our polity, reflects the increasing bureaucratization of knowledge, and the further consolidation of a power elite...

...This information gap has been created by the overclassification and inaccessibility of information in a government which is spending half its domestic, and threequarters of its international, energies on military or military-related undertakings...

...By that time, 656 Polaris missiles, of equal destructive capacity, will have become operational...

...Pertinently, after Kennedy took office, the missile gap issue disappeared...

...L.C...

...2 millions a day, three-quarters of a billion per year, might go a long way in buliding up Indian steel production...

...The President still has a chance at achieving the substance of greatness, rather than merely chasing its shadow, if he can break out of his narcissistic preoccupation with profiles and images and goes to the people, by-passing special interests, and asks for their support in the internal struggle for peace...

...His energy-absorbing defensive build-up becomes merely the other side of an increasingly touchy and aggressive mood...

...Presumably, as President, Eisenhower knew what Kennedy was to learn, and this helps explain, further, the somber warning given the nation by Eisenhower in his farewell address, which outranks in importance anything that any high official of the Government has stated since...

...The missile gap myth was rooted in the Republican sponsored Coolidge report, issued in 1959, on the basis of information solicited from "responsible" sources in Washington...

...Herman Kahn is "Herman...

...They were the only body consistently aware of the most strictly classified data on both Russian and American nuclear arsenals...

...Why don't both sides stop throwing good money down the drain and jointly invest it in something worthwhile...

...We must rid ourselves of the abstract war garners and the official servants of the people who have become their masters, and who threaten us with destruction...

...More specifically, it has become evident to the peace-inclined in Washington that apart from the special economic interests, and they include labor, corporate and local governmental authorities, pressing Congress for the appropriation of funds in support of defense contracts, there has been a systematic distortion about our military potential...

...One does not wish to indulge in such abstract inevitabilities, since they slight history, but it would be easy to view our problems today in Plato's perspective, to which, by the way, his beneficently totalitarian Republic was conceived as the cure...

...There are, I think, several factors...

...in the end it is even friendly...

...Secondly, the magnetic circuit of the nuclear debate in Washington sooner or later draws all sides into its radius...

...An individual analogy may be useful here...

...Here we are concerned with comparative Soviet-U.S...

...This will be accomplished by using only a fraction of our armament production capacity...

...it had been a useful bit of political ammunition but, putting it charitably, it proved upon closer inspection to be a dud and was discarded...

...The United States pays Diem more than $1 million as his daily retainer...

...The dimensions of our build-up can be readily understood if we realize that our Polaris and Minuteman systems today are roughly 8 times that needed to destroy the 25 largest cities of the Soviet Union, with a population of 28 million people, without any help from the Air Force, or the Atlas and Titan systems...

...The Lapps, the Szilards, the handful of people in the Disarmament Agency, or on the staffs of a few well-intentioned congressmen, at the Peace Research Institute, or at SANE, find themselves talking to their more official opposite numbers within a frame of reference that has been freezing for at least a decade...

...The gap between the public at large and the nuclear technicians is not one of the civilian intelligence, of the capacity to comprehend, but of military intelligence, of the technical withholding, slanting, or obscuring of facts, either directly or indirectly, and I shall say more about this below...

...These two weapons systems contain 1606 megatons of destruction, exceeding 7 tons of TNT, for each Russian man, woman and child...

...And the result is that even the most well meaning and intelligent Washington-centered peace experts are growing skeptical about the possibility of educating the public in the near future...

...Nor was there ever any missile gap...

...While Russia apparently decides on a minimal deterrent, we waste our time and brains in war gaming and associated vested interests...

...The presidency was designed to belong to the people, and this issue is likely to be the final test of the viability of that idea...

...We are in the position of this man, creating step by cumulative step, economically, socially, and politically, our own need and possibility of homicide...

...The sinister ramifications of our nuclear build-up are clear—first, the national energies are being dissipated...

...Yet, to most ordinary people, the capacity to destroy 28 million people in 25 cities in 25 minutes, must be an incomparable enormity...

...Or, what is almost the same, withheld essential information from them...

...In other words, were we to make a step toward the recovery of our sanity, and, by a parity agreement, cut back our present strategic force to the point where, let us say, only the major 25 Soviet cities • Not including the intermediate range missiles and other Soviet nuclear weapons, which are capable of reaching and being used in Europe...

...But the capacity itself has existed for at least a decade...