Living With the Bomb

...Two recent volumes, Michael Mandelbaum's The Nuclear Revolution: International Politics Before and After Hiroshima (Cambridge University Press, 283 pp., $29.95) and Jim Garrison's The Plutonium Culture: From Hiroshima to Harrisburg(Continuum, 275 pp.,$14.95) take up many of the most troubling questions of the nuclear age...

...Dread may be something we all have to live with...

...Some, like Argentina and South Africa, are among the most retrograde regimes on earth...

...in The Nuclear Revolution, he examines the impact of nuclear weapons on international politics through a series of essays on such topics as chemical warfare, relations with nato, the arms race, and the balance of power...

...As Mandelbaum takes care to demonstrate in both of his books, disarmament simply is not possible so long as states continue to exercise national sovereignty...

...A number of them, like Israel and Taiwan, face questions of national survival...

...The second is the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (mad), whose principles were first laid down during the Kennedy Administration and have remained the basis of American strategic policy...

...To be sure...

...Because land missiles are more accurate than submarine-launched weapons as well as more readily available for use, and because the Soviets place greater reliance on land-based ICBMs than we do, they also have superior weapons-reliability...

...The thrust of Mandelbaum's remarks on chemical warfare and nuclear proliferation is the same: the situation is not as bad as it seems, or at least it could be worse...

...But it will be Mandelbaum, or someone with the ability to think like him, who works the problem of nuclear terrorism through to a satisfactory conclusion...

...superiority are gone, probably forever...

...nuclear strategy since the era of John F. Kennedy and Robert S. McNamara...

...to those whose thinking on the subject begins and ends with the notion that nuclear weapons are an undiluted curse, some of Mandelbaum's observations will come as a shock and a surprise...

...and deterrence, the assurance each side has that it could, under any circumstances including nuclear devastation, blow up the other side...

...All other political issues pale in the nuclear light...

...Unlike debates over tax cuts or the environment, strategic arms controversies are literally matters of life and death, too important to be left to the generals, and any book that enlightens us on these issues is perforce a valuable contribution to public discussion...

...The ransom note contained a diagram of a bomb and an explanation that the fissionable material necessary for its construction had been stolen from Atomic Energy Commission shipments...

...Mandelbaum convincingly shows that without the prudence induced by the certainty of total destruction, an armed conflict between the superpowers might well have broken out by now, escalating into a war more horrible than anything World Wars I and II might have prepared us for...

...He recognizes the dangers as well as anyone...

...In 1967, we had a five-to-one lead in warheads...

...It was he, not Mandelbaum, who provided the story of the Orlando blackmailer...

...By using non-nuclear energy and loving each other...

...he does not so much "think about the unthinkable" as scream about it...

...Similarly, a nuclear arms race may be a fact of modern life, but unlike earlier arms races-say between England and Germany in the late 19th century-it has had a stabilizing rather than a destabilizing effect on international relations...

...That system depended on two things-prudence, a tacit understanding between the U.S...

...From Hiroshima to Harrisburg, describes the path he believes the world must retreat from, and the sooner the better...

...Some experts tell us that the resolutions of the 1962 Cuban missile cri-sisandthe 1973 YomKippur War were achieved in large measure because of our arms advantage...

...Or reflect on this: Nuclear proliferation is no longer a theoretical problem but a rapidly approaching reality, scarcely slowed by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty...

...Because experts considered the diagram "workable" and the AEC could not be sure that none of its material was missing, city officials were on the verge of paying up, when they caught the blackmailer...

...Others, Iraq and Pakistan for example, have long-standing and dangerous feuds with neighbors...

...Yet the days of overwhelming U.S...

...It can be highly recommended to anyone eager to understand the foundations of the nightmarish era we live in...

...World War III is not...

...Assuming there is one...

...Chemical and bacteriological weapons are less efficient than nuclear arms, hence their development has been relatively restrained, yet in the absence of atomic arsenals there is no telling what the Pentagon and the Politburo might decide to grow in a test tube...

...Garrison is against everything nuclear: The subtitle of his work...

...The peace of the Cold War is less shaky, not more, becauseof nuclear weapons...

...A few, notably Colonel Muammar Qaddafi's Libya, are just plain crazy...

...There, Mandelbaum argued that despite the anarchy of international affairs and the ongoing certainty that clouds U.S.-Soviet relations, the two superpowers had managed to develop a system for living with the Bomb...

...What he has to say is invariably stimulating and instructive...

...If the prospect of a nuclear-armed Qaddafi is alarming, more terrifying still is the awareness that a period of nuclear blackmail by small groups or individuals may soon be upon us...

...by 1985, the USSR's total will just about equal ours...

...He turned out to be a 14-year-old honors student whose knowledge of nuclear weapons came from what he was able to read in public sources...

...Many of these newcomers may have itchier trigger-fingers than the club members...

...Consider the following: The United States has never had to face the Soviet Union during a serious confrontation without holding a commanding lead in strategic arms...

...Thinking, as Mandelbaum understands, must begin from the reality of nuclear weapons, not from the hope of disarmament and world peace...

...And if Mandelbaum is less explicit about the other policy alternative open to us, nuclear superiority, he clearly thinks that it, too, is unworkable...

...Mandelbaum has not "stopped worrying and learned to love the Bomb...

...Since 1945, the more nuclear weapons each has accumulated, the less likely, on the whole, it has seemed that either would use them...

...and the USSR that they must not engage in a direct test of arms...

...Apart from the subject matter, though, they could hardly be less alike...

...Proliferation may make the task of managing their rivalry more difficult, but it will be the same task that has been theirs since 1945, which will not be the case if and when another country obtains enough nuclear might to match theirs...

...Before 1914, the more ships Britain and Germany built the more likely it seemed to each other that the other would use them to advance its own and subvert the other's interests...

...Security is defined in such a way that both the United States and the Soviet Union can achieve it...

...In his earlier study, Mandelbaum traced the historical development of strategic policy...

...Indeed, while he shies away from specific policy recommendations, his emphasis on mad suggests that he is a "dove" in the current debate over whether to replace deterrence with an expensive new weapons program that would permit a more flexible policy response...

...Mutually Assured Destruction may be a nerve-wracking way of conducting business, but its acronym notwithstanding, it is the sanest course available...

...Even now, the Kremlin has the ability to wipe out 90 per cent of our land-based missiles, a fact that has sent a tremor through the American community of strategic thinkers and may have set the stage for the most profound change in U .S...

...Garrison writes with greater urgency than Mandelbaum as he describes every real and conceivable horror of the nuclear age...

...Much of what Garrison has to say, especially about the dangers of nuclear power, is informative, but his arguments are undercut by his failure to fit hope to facts rather than facts to hope...

...According to certain measures, they have already outdistanced us: they have bigger bombs and missiles, thus more explosive power and more throw-weight...

...The Mandelbaum is cool, thoughtful and analytic, based on careful study and a keen sense of history...

...The Nuclear Revolution reiterates and extends the theme of an earlier Mandelbaum study, The Nuclear Question: The United States and Nuclear Weapons, 1946-1976, published two years ago...

...Garrison's work, on the other hand, is shrill and tendentious, an emotional outpouring masquerading as reasoned examination...

...Several are not especially stable...

...At least 18 countries are knocking at the door of the nuclear club that currently includes the U. S., the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, China, and India...

...If Jim Garrison had read Mandelbaum and learned this, he might not have written his own book...

...complacency...

...Strategic arms, he explains, have had positive consequences together with their obvious negative ones...

...Perhaps it is already here: In 1970, a blackmailer threatened to blow up Orlando, Florida, with a hydrogen bomb unless he received $1 million...

...Since the late '60s the Soviets have been spending approximately twice as much as the United States on nuclear weapons...

...Mandelbaum's approach is merely to accept that the genie has been let out of the bottle and nothing will get him back in again...

...As for nuclear proliferation, although it is unquestionably a grave problem, so overwhelming is the strength of the two superpowers that the strategic system they have evolved will not be challenged in the forseeable future...