LETTERS
U-2 Repercussions Editors: In the Summer 1960 issue, on p. 813, you introduce a writer as a "professional student of American military affairs." I wonder about this "student's"...
...that again is elementary...
...Mr...
...He mixes counterforce strategy with second strike deterrence...
...So far, the State has merely expedited exploitation...
...How can we cut it...
...I carefully planned the trip by visiting a State unemployment office in Detroit...
...Two other points...
...K. visits SAC bases...
...Nor does he seem to know that "overflight rights" have been offered to them precisely because the U.S...
...and seeing our traffic jams, congested industrial areas and general unpreparedness, he must really have been frightened by so many signs of offensive intentions...
...Its mission was obtaining information as to radar installations, etc., a necessary step in planning a second strike against a prepared enemy...
...I still refuse to become an informer for Mr...
...Since the city men were inexperienced at picking, they earned even less than the lowest...
...The migrants were kept "in their place"—in dilapidated chicken coops and leaky tents...
...It is hardly surprising that this confused expert also advocates "certain types of rearmament" instead of disarmament and control...
...But American tourists do not visit SUSAC bases any more than Mr...
...In other words, the U-2 was looking for first strike targets, not second strike targets, to repeat my original point...
...It is perhaps ironical that the young Negroes went further north to confront the type of life which their parents had fled from in the south...
...If you would like to help, please contact the committee at the address below...
...American military thinking, as represented by the "Bulletin of Atomic Scientists," says the answer is in having sufficient hardware for a formidable counter-blow even if a Soviet "first strike" should be devastating...
...Our own lack of a defensive system to protect our strike force makes precisely this point...
...It was not that they were so poor...
...U-2 Repercussions Editors: In the Summer 1960 issue, on p. 813, you introduce a writer as a "professional student of American military affairs...
...Khrushchev...
...That may well be, but once the people are hired, what then...
...The agent said that there was only one family...
...Far from inconsistent, rearmament is simply a means to a more stabilized world, one which I believe both of us want, for it would be a world in which the U-2 would not need to fly, and armed planes would not need to sit on the runways as an invitation to accident...
...Pachter intimates, I think, that Khrushchev could see from his trip that we were not truly offensively minded...
...In the next few days they would see people who were really povertystricken...
...The U-2 was looking for military targets, essentially...
...I happened to be in the farm labor Office at Traverse City when a group of Detroiters walked in...
...Pachter—like many others, to be sure—says about targeting is, I fear, wide of the mark...
...That is why General Power has been so firm on the need for an Air Borne Alert, i.e...
...today it is difficult for the Americans to obtain the information which the Soviet Embassy in Washington can get for a few dollars from the Government Printing Office...
...We obviously are erring in a very vicious circle here...
...Far from accepting Eisenhower's "open skies" plan, Khrushchev refuses to legalize reconnaissance and prefers the status quo...
...But what Mr...
...Before launching an attack, a commander must take protective measures...
...His imprisonment climaxes six years of persecution by N.H...
...To conclude from this that it must be planning an offensive, is like reasoning that the ancient Babylonians must have known wireless telegraphy since the archeologists have not found any wires yet...
...To conclude from the reconnaissance of possible targets that "it was not preparing for a second but primarily for a first strike" is not military science but an attempt at mind reading...
...A second strike force does need a defensive structure quite as much as an accompanying offensive structure...
...Targeting was (the U-2's) mission" exclaims your "professional student" with raised hands, as though he had never heard of the most ordinary defense preparations...
...Unlike the typical migrants, the city men had come up alone, leaving their families behind...
...He ignores the fact that the Russians—rightly—have rejected the "open skies" offer...
...Unless one condemns every defense effort, one should not condemn his artillery to fire blindly...
...I have seldom seen such bitter and lonely people...
...Most of the unemployed workers who went up north became field hands for the first time in their lives...
...De Gregory, a 46-year-old factory worker, was taken to Boscawen Jail, where Dr...
...would learn more from such flights than the Russians...
...I heard several complaints about the surly Detroit pickers...
...These men were just not used to this type of run-around...
...The conclusions which he drew from the U-2 incident were quite different, but your professional student has not even touched upon them...
...There were dozens of men lined up for the same purpose, most of whom were young, unemployed Negroes...
...He drew a complicated map showing them how to get there...
...The men asked if there were any Negroes in Traverse City who might put them up for the night...
...In a statement issued just before he was jailed, De Gregory said, "The state has shown once more that it is stronger than the individual...
...In fact, the attitudes of the northern residents toward the Mexican and Negro migrants are quite similar to the rural, southern white mentality...
...Your "professional student" might have considered—it is in an early chapter of Clausewitz—that effective defense must be conducted offensively, i.e., the defender must be able to hit at the enemy's offensive positions...
...Maybe it would have been better if the State agents had not been so helpful...
...Finally, Mr...
...We are very fortunate to know that Mr...
...The De Gregory Defense Committee is working to let people know about New Hampshire's contempt for civil liberty that has put these men in jail, and to raise funds for appealing the littlepublicized De Gregory case to the higher courts...
...The workers from Detroit posed new problems for the farmers...
...The office was just closing...
...Attorney General Louis Wyman, who holds the position of oneman investigating committee...
...To come up, at the end of an unsubstantiated diatribe, with Dulles's and Eisenhower's discredited plan, is a curious conclusion for a "dissenting" voice...
...Since there were two carloads of men, they decided to drive on to the farm...
...Conditions in these northern areas were not unlike those which Mr...
...HENRY PACHTER "PROFESSIONAL STUDENT" replies: Mr...
...In the brochure which the secretary had given us in Detroit, it stated that the farm labor offices facilitated the hiring of thousands of migrant workers every summer...
...But it has also demonstrated that it is powerless to compel an individual to commit an indecent act...
...A first strike force, however, does not need a defensive structure as an accompaniment, except over target...
...Your Help Wanted Editors: There are now two political prisoners behind bars in New Hampshire...
...one which can survive an enemy first strike...
...reconnaissance is just as essential to defense as to attack...
...never takes any measures to protect its citizens against a Soviet strike...
...They were shocked by the housing conditions, and most of them drove back south after a few days, more broke than when they had started...
...Willard Uphaus has been imprisoned since last December for invoking the First Amendment...
...Obviously that means counter-offensive...
...The logic is too crabby even for your "professional student" to assume responsibility for it...
...I go to jail with a clear conscience...
...The agent told the men that the nearest job was thirty miles away...
...Wyman—to help him slander people I know to be completely innocent of any wrongdoing...
...Both men were sentenced for indeterminate terms of at least one year, and the Attorney General has already stated that he hopes to start proceedings against them all over again at the end of their year terms...
...Believe me, things look different when one sees the plane on the end of the runway ready to go after the target a mere twenty minutes away...
...On June 28, Hugo De Gregory was jailed for refusing to answer questions in New Hampshire's "subversive investigation...
...Pre-emptive, in contrast to preventive war, is defined as the first blow which you get in just in the nick of time after having concluded that the enemy is about to do the same thing to you...
...Pachter would agree that with the SAMOS "spy satellite" coming up the time is ripe to rethink the open skies proposal once more, and to rethink it in rather broader terms than before...
...Fights were frequent...
...Traveling around the U.S...
...One cannot just wait to catch the missiles...
...The Detroiters griped more than the regulars...
...Your "professional student" however observes that "the U.S...
...Hence that they must be and and can be stopped by physical, diplomatic and propagandistic means...
...Some Soviet military sources, quoted by Dinerstein and Garthoff, indeed have concluded that the answer to this can only be a "pre-emptive war" by the Soviet forces...
...I wonder about this "student's" qualifications...
...Otherwise he would not suggest that, as a gesture of friendliness, we offer them such a change...
...Pachter is apparently not as yet fully aware of the possibilities of a restabilized world if we go rapidly to an invulnerable second strike capability with a force of Polaris, Air Borne Alert, hardened and mobile Minuteman missiles...
...PRISCILLA DI GIOVANNI, treasurer De Gregory Defense Committee Box 103, Hanover Street Station Boston 13, Mass...
...And coming home, his "professional students of American military affairs" then must have told him that the U.S., being totally vulnerable to a first Soviet strike, cannot defend itself except by striking the first blow...
...To date we do not have the invulnerable second strike capability that we need, and it is precisely this fact which makes our force structure primarily first strike oriented, an inadequate deterrent over the years ahead...
...Pachter's remark that defensive weapons cannot be distinguished from offensive weapons is half-true...
...The secretaries gave us elaborate maps and charts which described when and where the various fruits and vegetables would be harvested...
...Wages rates were quoted, but this was piece-work and who knew what 2.5 cents per pound for green beans meant...
...The first must have been that high-flying reconnaissance planes with modern optical equipment indeed are a formidable, but frail instrument of reconnaissance...
...Of course, anyone concerned with defense must look for targets...
...We already know where Moscow is...
...To say that "the U-2 looked more like an offensive than a defensive instrument" is just nonsense...
...Khrushchev's advisers are better professional students of American military affairs, or else he really might have launched a pre-emptive war...
...In less technical language this means that there is little point in aiming at enemy military targets once the weapons stationed on these targets have flown, while there is still a point in hitting his cities, and letting him know that we can and wiII hit them to destroy his will to launch the preemptive war...
...Migratory Labor Editors: Herbert Hill's fine study of migrant farm labor DISSENT, Summer 1960] calls to mind a trip which I took into northern Michigan during the summer harvest of 1958...
...This kind of rearmament may well do as much to lessen world tensions as many forms of disarmament and arms control...
...The "deterrent" evidently is not the ability to strike first but the ability to make the first strike too risky for the other side...
...Poor Khrushchev...
...The auto shops in Detroit are not exactly the Earthly Paradise, but they do provide the workers with some vague notion of a decent wage, and there is the UAW...
...Everyone should know that defensive weapons cannot be distinguished from offensive weapons...
...I feel sure that Mr...
...e.g., going into a Blitz offensive, he must beware of the counterstrike and hence prepare air raid shelters...
...he rather attributes it to Mr...
...Parenthetically, the case of the RB-47 was quite different...
...Hill portrayed in his article...
...But it is precisely this "open skies" plan which your expert offers as his ideal Your "professional student" apparently does not know that the present arrangement suits the Russians and that any change of the status quo in reconnaissance relations could only be to their disadvantage...
...Actually, I received 1.7 cents when I picked or the equivalent of 60 cents an hour for back-breaking work...
...American tourists can visit the USSR, and come to similar conclusions...
Vol. 7 • September 1960 • No. 4
