BEYOND NUCLEAR DETERRENCE

...The whole of his submarine-based missiles as well as most of his airborne missiles would escape entirely...

...Until President Reagan and Secretary Weinberger, no American statesman since then has expressed such doubts while in office although many have done so after retiring—notably Henry Kissinger and Robert McNamara...

...In fact it is now technically possible for each side to plan for carrying out a first strike against its enemy's fixed bases on land...

...But, suppose there were a ban on the modernization of nuclear weapon systems and on strategic defense together with a big cut in existing arsenals which institutionalized nuclear parity at a much lower level: could America's remaining nuclear forces continue to deter a purely conventional attack on her European allies...

...Meanwhile both sides have enormously increased the number of their nuclear weapons, especially in the ten years between 1970 and 1980...

...The International Institute of Strategic Studies says again in its latest annual survey of the military balance that Russia's conventional superiority is not sufficient to tempt her to risk an all-out conventional attack on Western Europe...

...Star Wars systems...

...NATO must have a military strategy for reducing that possibility to the minimum and for stopping the fighting without a nuclear holocaust if war should break out...

...By 1990, unless there is agreement on stopping the race, each side will have over 13,000 strategic nuclear weapons, if they observe the SALT II agreement...

...He then said that there should be regular talks between the military leaders of each nation and regular meetings at the highest levels of the Departments of Defense and State with their Soviet counterparts...

...Navy...

...The most important would be to make better use of NATO's existing reserves of trained manpower...

...Even the slightest acquaintance with the nuclear problem rams home the fact that each side is driven by fears which are the mirror image of the other's...

...And all the European governments secretly share President Mitterrand's hostility to Star Wars...

...306 Thus each side thinks it has an incentive to increase the number of its nuclear missiles so as to have too many targets for an enemy first strike to cover, or so as to be able to destroy the increasing number of enemy nuclear weapons in its own first strike...

...Already the Apilat Slingshot antitank missile can penetrate thirty inches of steel with twenty pounds of explosive at a range of 1,000 meters...

...A ban on such testing would let Mrs...

...We think it could be achieved by some fairly simple technical methods if the two sides agree on the objectives and on the cutoff points...

...And NATO's new estimates of the ready forces on both sides are much more optimistic than they used to be...

...I believe nevertheless that it is both possible 304 and necessary to carry the logic of the American statements I have quoted to a conclusion in practical policies for defense and disarmament...

...The possibility of war in Europe is there, however small...

...In 1945, it took 700 pounds of nuclear explosive to produce a kiloton explosion...

...Despite this, there have been growing doubts, not just in the unofficial peace movements but right at the heart of the NATO institutions, both about the strategies on which nuclear deterrence is based and about the role of nuclear weapons in relations between Russia and the West...

...Stupendously excessive as they are, the existing arsenals of nuclear weapons are not likely in themselves to produce a war...

...Gorbachev and his chief of staff, Akhromeyev, have both suggested in public statements that they would be prepared to permit research in laboratories providing there was a ban on observable tests...

...I believe, however, that the approach favored by NATO officials of striking deep into Eastern Europe, perhaps with very expensive and sophisticated new weapons, is inappropriate, both because it could provoke a preemptive attack and because Soviet strategy and deployment are changing so as to provide fewer targets for such Western weapons to hit...

...this would be particularly true of the U.S...

...Both sides are also producing a large arsenal of new weapons such as Cruise missiles which are designed to carry both nuclear and conven307 tional warheads...

...Donnelly, of the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, reach the same conclusion by a different route...

...Whatever the original reason for the increase in stockpiles, it has led some people on each side to shift from the idea of having nuclear weapons in order to deter a war to the idea of having nuclear weapons in order to fight a war—in which, to use the American word, their side can "prevail...

...311...

...The Roots of the Nuclear Problem NUCLEAR WEAPONS HAVE NOT PREVENTED war outside Europe, even wars in which the superpowers were involved, like the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the American war in Vietnam and the war between China, North Korea, and the United Nations in the 1950s...

...Moreover, the nuclear threshold had already been raised much higher by very substantial conventional forces of which by far the majority were provided by the European allies...

...Let me cite another idea from the speech by Secretary Weinberger on October 9, 1985...

...No doubt the miniaturization of nuclear weapons has gone further since then...

...The risk of relying on nuclear deterrence is that you might be involved in a conflict which nuclear weapons have not deterred, and to which a nuclear response is not appropriate...

...The first time a possibly ambiguous warning that missiles were on their way hit the monitor screens there would be no time for the base commander at Molesworth to consult his own president, never mind for President Reagan to consult Prime Minister Thatcher...

...On the other hand, he says he would be forced to use nuclear weapons in the first few days of a large-scale conventional war because NATO is so inferior to the Warsaw Pact in conventional forces...

...Over twenty years ago, when I became British defense secretary, NATO was committed to a "tripwire" strategy under which the first significant movement of Soviet troops across the dividing line would trigger all-out nuclear war...

...Both sides have discovered how to pack a lot of warheads into a single launcher...

...On his side, Mr...

...NATO has always believed that the real danger of war with the Warsaw Pact lies not in an attack out of the blue in Central Europe, but from the spillover of a conflict between Russia and the West in some other area, like the Middle East, or of internal fighting inside Eastern Europe, like the Berlin uprising or the invasion of Hungary...

...The job of negotiations would be to reconcile these differences...

...The Case for a Nuclear Freeze IF YOU TAKE THE RISK OF INSTABILITY seriously, by far the most important task in the field of disarmament is to stop the nuclear arms race in its tracks immediately by halting the modernization of nuclear forces...

...Britain was demobilizing...

...The first step would be a comprehensive test ban treaty which would prevent either side from testing new types of nuclear warheads...

...Nevertheless the arms race continues unabated...

...During the early post-war years, the possibility of actually dropping nuclear weapons on the Soviet Union before Russia had built up a nuclear stockpile of its own was discussed in Washington...

...THIS BRINGS US TO A PROBLEM which directly affects Britain's security...

...A first strike at present would require the explosion of at least 1,000 warheads on land, with a high probability of causing a nuclear winter...

...And this is something which the president warned his hearers very firmly against in his initial speech...

...but each side is trying to develop systems for destroying spy satellites—" Asats"—which would rob the enemy of his eyes and ears and greatly increase the chances of carrying out a surprise attack...

...NATO is likely to continue to need to possess nuclear weapons to deter nuclear attack so long as the Soviet Union possesses them...

...Then defense policies could be adjusted to minimize unnecessary fears...

...An increase of 10 percent in accuracy is equivalent to an increase of 100 percent in destructive power against a hard target...

...The insights and objectives thus described by the president and his defense secretary are very much those on which the Labour party bases its policies for defense and disarmament...

...My impression is that the Soviet leaders keep themselves far better informed...

...The third dangerous new development is the attempt to produce a comprehensive defense against strategic nuclear attack...

...All nuclear weapons should be withdrawn from a strip, say, 150 kilometers deep on both sides of the dividing line...

...What they think it may be possible to do—perhaps within ten years—is to produce some defense for most of America's land-based intercontinental missiles against a Soviet first strike, although that defense would probably be based at first on land rather than in space...

...We persuaded NATO to adopt a strategy of "flexible response" under which, if Western forces faced defeat in conventional fighting, NATO would introduce nuclear weapons in discrete steps, giving the enemy the chance at each stage to stop fighting rather than invite escalation to the next rung on the ladder which led to all-out strategic nuclear war...

...A situation in which the survival of the human race depends on the microcircuits of the computers rather than the human brain is a worrying one for anyone who knows how often computers can go wrong—the episode of the Korean airliner being one recent example...

...This would be far better than to develop expensive new weapons which may not work for deep strike against targets which may not be there...

...Other American statements appear to contemplate a nuclear war which is limited to European soil...

...It is worth noting that the allies seem less worried than the U.S...

...There is now a growing feeling among military experts that NATO must look in a different direction—towards a nonprovocative strategy of conventional deterrence which could protect NATO territory without using nuclear weapons if deterrence should fail...

...if they do not observe it, each side will have about 20,000 strategic nuclear weapons...

...Thatcher off the hook on which she unwisely impaled herself by agreeing to support Star Wars research, in the mistaken belief that it was impossible to monitor any sort of research...

...Mutual confidence is the only basis for real security in the nuclear age...

...Gorbachev has proposed that NATO and the Warsaw Pact should have such contacts...

...Star Wars is only one of the malign consequences of this rivalry...

...Recent students of Soviet strategic thinking, like C.N...

...We in the Labour party share this feeling...

...In 1954 they had a plan for dropping a thousand nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union...

...Over the last two decades, however, several factors have undermined the feasibility of flexible response...

...The U.S...

...I believe that the same insight should also be applied to defense itself...

...In such a situation nuclear deterrence is of limited value, because once the fighting has begun, deterrence has failed in its main purpose...

...The Fear of a First Strike MANY YEARS AGO Winston Churchill asked what was the point of buying more bombs simply to make the rubble bounce...

...I agree with him...

...Although at that time the Americans still had twenty times as many nuclear weapons as Russia, Christian Herter, who succeeded John Foster Dulles as America's Secretary of State, said in public that the United States would never actually use its nuclear forces against the Soviet Union unless its own survival was directly at stake...

...these alone would suffice to blow up the world several times over...

...This plan foundered when Bernard Baruch insisted it should be backed by "swift and sure punishment" for violations of the treaty...

...None of his officials working on the Star Wars project believes that...

...Air Force does not want to give up part of the strategic triad in favor of the U.S...

...In other words the nuclear deterrent was already unreliable so far as America's allies were concerned...

...Nevertheless it is difficult to believe that the post-war settlement in Europe would have survived so long without the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons...

...Gorbachev has made it absolutely clear that the Soviet Union sees no alternative but to follow suit in both defensive and offensive systems...

...This obvious fact is almost universally accepted so far as disarmament and arms control are concerned...

...Experts who have attempted this, notably Kaufman, Mearsheimer, Mako, and Cordesmann, all suggest that NATO forces could provide an effective defense against even an all-out Warsaw Pact attack if comparatively small and inexpensive changes were made in their organization, equipment deployment, and strategy...

...The third main area for action would be the exploitation of the new technologies to improve defensive weapons...

...In Britain there were powerful figures in Churchill's cabinet, some on the right wing of politics like Lord Anderson and Professor Lindemann, who tried to persuade Churchill to tell the Russians about the atomic bomb before it was used...

...We now know that the electro309 magnetic pulses emitted by nuclear explosions could make communications between the battlefield and the high command difficult if not impossible...

...As far as I know the Russians have not yet put this proposal for308 mally in the arms talks in Geneva...

...The total nuclear stockpile of the two great powers together is now over 50,000—the equivalent of well over a million Hiroshimas...

...Unfortunately, there is a tendency for the military on each side grossly to exaggerate the enemy capability because it is the best way of getting money for themselves...

...Statements by leading Americans have cast doubt on the readiness of the U.S...

...And each side can avoid the vulnerability of fixed bases on land by making its land-based missiles mobile or by putting its missiles at sea or in aircraft...

...In April 1945 America's secretary of state, James Byrnes, told Truman that the atomic bomb would allow the United States to dictate its own terms at the end of the war...

...on the contrary, he believes it would escalate very fast into a general nuclear exchange...

...Yet the United States is now committed to pursuing its Star Wars defensive program simultaneously with introducing new offensive nuclear weapons into its arsenal, such as the D5 submarine-launched missile, the MX ground-based missile, and perhaps the Midgetman mobile missile...

...Even so, it would leave undamaged sufficient enemy missiles to wreak intolerable retaliation...

...He was not taken in...

...Indeed, the Stockholm negotiations on Confidence Building Measures—which were singled out at the Geneva Summit as a field for early progress— involve mutual notification and observation of military maneuvers...

...At this very moment, fighting is going on in the Gulf between the Iraqis and Iranians which some believe has already cost a million lives...

...Six nonaligned countries, including Sweden and India, have already offered to staff such stations...

...The technical feasibility of a successful first strike may appear closer today in theory...

...No other Western European country was providing significant forces and Germany was disarmed...

...Scientists now agree that the explosion of all these nuclear weapons would produce a nuclear winter in which human life in the northern hemisphere would become extinct...

...He must also engage the interest of his prime minister and other key members of the cabinet, which is not always easy...

...Yet the American government never adopted these plans, even at a time when it had a near monopoly of nuclear weapons...

...By 1960 they had intercontinental missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and 300 nuclear bombs...

...General Rogers, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, has made it clear that he is doubtful whether the NATO governments would ever authorize any use of nuclear weapons in a European war...

...He argues that Russia is pursuing its aim in Europe by all means short of direct armed conflict, but that if war were to break out unexpectedly, Russia is determined to win quickly without using nuclear weapons "before sufficient time has elapsed for the United States to commit itself to a strategic nuclear war...

...The possibility that Star Wars may have this limited ability for defending missile sites is an incentive for the other side to increase the number of its own missiles...

...The Tories had nine in thirteen years between 1951 and 1964...

...In 1985 America had 11,000 strategic nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union 9,000...

...Each side depends for knowledge of its enemy's capacity and for early warning of attack largely on spy satellites...

...An absolute precondition of victory in a nuclear war would be the ability to destroy the enemy's retaliatory forces in a surprise attack— or "first strike...

...However, to judge the relative capability of the opposing forces in an actual war it is necessary to carry out a far more sophisticated analysis than a simple count of weapons and manpower...

...government to authorize even the first use of nuclear weapons...

...That has been the foundation of Western European security ever since...

...And since the Warsaw Pact now has parity with NATO at every level of nuclear warfare, it cannot be assumed that it would pay NATO to initiate the use of nuclear weapons at any level...

...Yalta and Potsdam divided this historic continent into two against the will of most of its peoples along a line that ran through the middle of Germany, its most powerful state...

...These elites are predominantly civilian and are under no effective political control, partly because of the enormously rapid turnover of defense ministers in most countries...

...Congress...

...All the experts including even Richard Perle, the Pentagon's prime hawk, agree that there is now effective strategic parity between the United States and the Soviet Union...

...Secretary Weinberger carried the logic of Reagan's remarks further in a speech he made on October 9, 1985: "The world has changed so profoundly since the 1950s and 1960s when most of our strategic ideas were formulated, that many of these concepts are now obsolete...

...The Joint Chiefs of Staff produced plans for attacking the Soviet Union which, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, are now available to the public...

...Andrew Hamilton, a leading American analyst, calculates that Britain could in this way double its ground combat power in Central Europe for the cost of the Trident submarine program alone...

...And he described what he saw as the Reagan administration's commitment to make conventional deterrence work...

...If at present neither Moscow nor Washington is prepared to respond to the other's invitation, Britain and Western Europe should take the lead in pressing for military discussions between the two alliances...

...NATO commanders have long been worried by the 310 presence in the front line of nuclear weapons which are inconsistent with any attempt at conventional defense and might be overrun in the first hour or so of a conflict...

...The Nuclear Arms Race Under Way WHEN THE WAR ENDED, all the Red Army needed to reach the Rhine was boots...

...it was the Russians who first put a satellite into space...

...The Soviet general opposed it on the grounds that it would provide NATO forces with "an inviolable sanctuary"—the best recommendation possible, I would have thought...

...Perhaps we can learn something from the mistakes of those early years...

...There is no evidence that NATO governments have yet agreed on any guidelines for the use of nuclear weapons under flexible response...

...Other analysts calculate that the defensive capability of NATO's existing forces could be increased some 40 percent by the preparation of defensive positions in peacetime...

...No ONE LIKE ME WHO, AFTER SIX YEARS as a soldier in war and six years as defense secretary in peace, has had the opportunity to discuss these problems with Russians and neutrals as well as with our allies can fail to conclude that security in the nuclear age will depend on working with one's political opponents as well as with one's friends...

...Indeed no one has yet suggested how it could be brought to an end once it gets under way— short of a nuclear holocaust...

...In 1948 they had a plan for dropping nuclear weapons 305 on twenty Soviet cities...

...The United States Air Force first sought to deceive public opinion on this issue as far back as Eisenhower's time by claiming that Russia had 300 ICBMs, when the Samos satellite showed it had only 60...

...about the effect of deep cuts in nuclear weapons on their own security...

...When the leaders of the United States and Britain began to realize that it might be possible to use atomic energy as the basis for a weapon, the debate at that time was in many respects rather similar to the debate surrounding President Reagan's Star Wars policy...

...Every negotiation on arms control implies a readiness by each side to limit its own defense efforts for the sake of cooperation with its opponent...

...But before long the Russians had been given the secrets of the bomb by their spies in Britain and the United States...

...He was later to admit: "The Russians don't scare easy...

...That is why Russia insists so firmly on implementing the Shultz-Gromyko agreement to prevent the arms race in space...

...The deterrent effect of nuclear weapons must have contributed to this result...

...He has also recently stated that he does not think it would be possible to keep a nuclear war in Europe limited...

...But the weapons on the way could well destabilize this situation...

...The fact that they were never approached by their Western allies on a weapon which they knew to be under development may have been one of the factors which helped to produce the cold war after 1945...

...In other words, they suffer from a mirror image of American fears of a Soviet first strike...

...In any case, there is not much point in being able to hit targets 300 miles behind the front line if the Red Army can puncture the front line and then spread out widely in West Germany...

...There has never been a period during this long, miserable story in which either side seemed likely to have a meaningful superiority over the other in the strategic nuclear field...

...In his seminal speech in March 1983 when President Reagan launched his Star Wars concept, he said: "The human spirit must be capable of rising above dealing with other nations by threatening their existence...

...Moreover, the moment either side thinks its enemy might be on the point of acquiring the capability for a first strike it may be tempted to preempt that first strike...

...In March 1983 he said: "If defensive systems were paired with offensive systems they could be viewed as fostering an aggressive policy and nobody really wants that...

...In my opinion the idea that any government would authorize a first strike even with the weapons which may soon be available, never mind with its existing weapons, is a fantasy...

...Institutional and Technological Dangers UNFORTUNATELY, NUCLEAR STRATEGY in the West today tends to be determined by tiny elites of middle-ranking bureaucrats and staff officers who have no personal experience of world war and are obsessed by esoteric theories— any civil servant or service officer who, like me, went right through the last war was forced to retire at least five years ago...

...For both these reasons it would be impossible for NATO to control escalation as flexible response requires...

...We must ask today why on earth both sides are acquiring these colossal arsenals when they could not actually use them without committing suicide...

...Then as now Washington was divided on nuclear weapons...

...This article is an attempt to explore the nuclear dilemma which faces the world forty years after the first atomic bomb was dropped at Hiroshima...

...Yet the reason for the continuing arms race is all too obvious...

...The Road to a Non-Nuclear Strategy NATO ITSELF HAS RECENTLY been discussing important changes in its conventional strategy...

...For Germany even the limited use of nuclear weapons would mean the nuclear holocaust...

...This is an area where an honest exchange of views can do nothing but good...

...Moreover, the air-land battle strategy which the American forces in Germany have adopted unilaterally involves the use of nuclear and chemical weapons as well as conventional weapons, so it is quite inconsistent with a strategy of conventional deterrence or defense...

...If there were an agreed freeze, backed by a ban on the testing of new delivery systems and a ban on all nuclear tests, then it would be much easier to attack the problem of cutting existing arsenals...

...Effective political control of nuclear strategy requires not only that the minister should work at the problem himself...

...Moreover, American scientists now suggest that the sort of space-based systems America is trying to develop could be used as easily for attack as for defense...

...This view is widely disputed...

...The United States increased the number of its strategic warheads in that decade from 4,000 to 10,000, and the Soviet Union from 1,800 to 6,000...

...Must NATO Use Nuclear Weapons First...

...In any case, if America is really worried about the vulnerability of its ICBMs, it would be cheaper simply to scrap them and follow the advice of the poet: "Put these missiles out to sea/Where the real estate is free/And they're miles away from me...

...In fact there has been no time since the end of the Second World War when Western intelligence believed that the Russians were planning to launch an all-out invasion of Western Europe...

...At the time this was at least an advance over the tripwire strategy, which Germany was reluctant to abandon...

...He specifically rejected NATO's current strategy of flexible response by saying . . . "our position on the uses of military power represents a rejection of received wisdom about limited war and gradual escalation...

...I very much hope they will...

...President Eisenhower, however, had sufficient experience to be deeply distrustful of the "military-industrial complex...

...These doubts have a long history, reaching back to the end of the Second World War...

...Secondly, many of the new missiles can hit their targets so fast that the decision on how to react to them will have to be taken not by human beings but by computers...

...The main reason why they do not take this obvious step is that American defense policy is still dominated by interservice rivalry...

...The other way to guarantee the freeze is by banning all tests of the components of new nuclear delivery systems which can be observed by so-called "national means," for example spy satellites...

...If either side detected 100 Cruise missiles on its monitors it would have to assume they were carrying nuclear warheads rather than conventional ones and react in kind, because if it waited to find out it might be dead...

...After the bomb had been used against Japan, the American Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, warned Truman: "Relations with Russia could be irretrievably embittered if we fail to approach Moscow now on limiting the bomb as an instrument of war...

...But the new weapons already under development on both sides, and in some cases already deployed, could upset that stability...

...The State Department's official pamphlet about Star Wars says that its purpose is not, as President Reagan claims, to replace the nuclear deterrent, but to strengthen or "enhance" it...

...On top of this miniaturization, the multiple independent reentry vehicles (or MIRVs) which can be packed into a single nuclear missile are quite extraordinarily accurate...

...Yet that settlement has already lasted twice as long as the 1918 settlement...

...By 1972 it took only eleven pounds for a kiloton explosion...

...Unfortunately the policies developed over the last few years in Washington, far from fulfilling these objectives, move in precisely the opposite direction...

...and he made it clear that he did not believe that peace could rest much longer on the threat of mutual suicide...

...It will be based on texts drawn from remarks by President Reagan and his Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger...

...Unfortunately, some Russians seriously believe— as President Reagan warned they might—that the purpose of Star Wars is to protect America's land-based missiles against a ragged response by the Soviet missiles which survived an American first strike...

...Indeed, if the laser weapons were used to incinerate cities, they could produce the equivalent of a nuclear winter no less than nuclear weapons...

...since 1979, they have had four in six years...

...If NATO's European reserves were organized and equipped even as well as those of neutral countries like Sweden, Switzerland, and Finland, the European allies could double their present contributions on the Central Front...

...The only man in the world who believes that Star Wars might make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete" is President Reagan himself...

...For example, the deadlock at the Geneva Summit over President Reagan's Star Wars program now threatens the world with an accelerating arms race in both offensive and defensive weapons...

...The administration has said that the period in which "defensive systems will be paired with offensive systems" may last for several decades or longer...

...New estimates by the CIA of Soviet defenses are much less frightening than they were a few years ago...

...Would it not be possible to exorcise those fears by openly exchanging knowledge of one another's defense preparations— which is largely available in any case by satellite photography and signals interception...

...Indeed, the Europeans take the prospect of another world war less seriously than the Americans—something which is already causing trouble in the U.S...

...President Reagan has often shown ignorance of the most fundamental facts on which nuclear strategy must be based...

...He refused...

...On top of that, both sides have a great number of tactical nuclear weapons...

...Another danger of Cruise missiles is that they are easily hidden—particularly at sea— and would make it much more difficult to verify a disarmament agreement...

...Scientific advances have made it possible to detect and measure nuclear tests even down to a few tons in yield, especially if you can put some of the new sensing devices in Soviet and American territory, where they could be staffed by neutrals...

...Both sides have already agreed on a 50 percent cut in existing strategic weapons, although each side's specific proposals are heavily slanted to favor its own particular interests...

...Beyond this precondition for moving to a non-nuclear strategy lie three main fields for action to make better defensive use of NATO's conventional forces—reserves, barriers, and equipment...

...In the course of it I shall try to put some flesh on the bones of the Labour party's policy for defense and disarmament...

...A year later the Acheson—Lilienthal report proposed "a plan under which no nations would make atomic bombs or the materials for them...

...So far this bizarre comedy has not had any catastrophic effects in the real world because till now the strategic nuclear balance between Russia and the USA has been invulnerable to quite large variations in their relative capability, and to big differences in the composition of their forces...

...It was issued as a pamphlet by the Fabian Society of England and is reprinted here with its kind permission.— Eds...

...510, from the Fabian Society, 11 Dartmouth St., London SW 1 H9BN, for $2 US, which includes airmail postage...

...I recently discussed with a Soviet general in Moscow General Rogers's proposal for laying pipes underground in West German territory which could be filled with an explosive slurry to create wide and deep tank traps in case of war...

...My American colleague Robert McNamara and I sought to find a strategy which would be morally more acceptable and politically more credible...

...As it was, by the end of 1946 the pattern of the cold war had set and strategic considerations dominated nuclear thinking on both sides...

...q This article is available as a pamphlet, No...

...That is why in the Labour party we so strongly support a freeze on nuclear weapons as a first step to their reduction...

...It is not surprising that many of those generals who have had responsibility for planning to fight a war in Europe have become highly skeptical of existing NATO strategy...

...they talk of the "use or lose" dilemma...

...By 1955, ten years after Hiroshima, the Russians still had only twenty nuclear bombs...

...Depending on the nature of the targets attacked, the height of the bursts, and the weather, the explosion of even a small fraction of existing weapons could have a similar result...

...Thereafter Russia's nuclear arsenal expanded very fast—in some fields faster than the Americans...

...He has complained that they appear to want him to take the fateful decision and he is rightly unwilling to assume a responsibility which must belong to governments...

...The first step would be one which already has wide support—from the Palme Commission for example...

...The United States was pulling its troops out of Europe very fast...

...We want a freeze on the testing and deployment of all new systems both offensive and defensive...

...Each of these would require some change in NATO's present tactical doctrines...

...Four years later, the United States was persuaded to extend its nuclear umbrella over Western Europe, through NATO...