Arms and the Men

...Those are not questions I'd care to bet on, but so far any such impulses have been kept under control The existing stalemate is no cause for rej racing, yet it is a lot better than any number of alternatives Mr Reagan leaves the impression that he has as subtle a grasp of weapons systems and international relations as he does of economics He is possessed by the conviction that just as social programs are inherently disreputable, spending on weapons is inherently worthy He is determined to lead from strength, and he seems to conceive of strength in the grossest terms, he knows that the Western hero, after all, wins not because he is pure but because he is ready to fight and quick on the draw The prudent answer to the Soviet advantage in Europe, surely, is to build up the West's conventional forces even as we attempt to negotiate a reduction in forces of all kinds Easier said than done—but far better than racing along a mad course and being marked down as mad by those in the zones that would be obliterated by any nuclear exchange Who are the tough-talkers in the Administration trying to frighten...

...The Kremlin is not going to knock down the Berlin Wall because of the way that Secretary Haig struts or Secretary of Defense Caspar W Weinberger thumps his war chest They can't even scare Qaddafi Innocent bystanders, however, must be forgiven for questioning the dedication of such men to arms reduction and for suspecting, at moments, that they are positively itching to fight They speak loudly and carry bigger and bigger payloads, and nobody can be really sure whom they would like to nuke To the extent that today's marchers place restraints upon them and upon the brutish old apparatchiks in the Kremlin, hail to the marchers...

...The childlike fascination with new gadgetry, the enormous cost overruns, the egregious lobbying, the col-legial relations between the brass and the ex-brass who have been promoted to the arms business, the notorious susceptibility of legislators to pressures from contractors and umons back home?these realities undermine a rational approach to weapons spending and nourish a public mistrust that may take the form of opposition even to justified programs The palsy-walsy relations among generals, Congressmen and weapons-makers would be unwholesome in any circumstances As the 1982 elections approach, lobbing defense contracts onto selected targets will become a form of tactical warfare, it will be the instant political answer to recession in places where the Administration's allies and clients need help (It is also likely to be an inflation-fighter's nightmare, as Federal dollars are poured forth without adding a jot to the stock of consumer goods) Even m a saner and less selfish world, who could blame Europeans or Americans for marching in opposition to the further expansion of nuclear weapons...

...Anyone who is not scared by such devices is a dangerous character Marches m the West do often smack of the "unilateral disarmament" delusion, which friends of the USSR and enemies of the United States have long attempted to inflict upon the wishful thinkers among us But the present movement cannot be dismissed as just another Stockholm Peace Appeal For most of the people involved, the cause is anti-nuke rather than anti-Amencan—and the Administration has been slow in awakening to the danger of permitting those terms to become synonymous The President's November address on arms reduction was welcome for its recogmtion that the anxiety over nuclear weapons is something more than a Communist conspiracy—and that it not only deserves but requires a more sympathetic response than casual remarks about dropping a nuclear bomb somewhere as an example to somebody or airy reassurances that a nuclear war mightbecontainable Our spokesmen at times seem determined to do the Soviet propagandists' work for them Arms and the Noise Makers IS IT IMPOSSIBLE for Washington to take the present stand-off as an opportunity rather than a threat...

...What message should we be sending to our representatives and to the men in Moscow and the negotiators in Geneva and the protesters in Europe...

...There is an understandable tendency among our ruling circles, as Tass likes to call them, to dismiss mass protests of all sorts as Communist-inspired, and history does offer many examples of the skill of Communists in turning large-scale movements to the service of the Kremlin Yet it is short-sighted and self-defeating to see nothing but Commumst machinations here Millions of people with no special animus toward America or affection for Russia are truly frightened Surely our strategic planners cannot be so Machiavellian that they positively want to dnve the anti-nuke multitudes into the arms of those who used the war in Vietnam as an occasion for attacking all of American policy, much of American history and many American institutions—so that the entire peace movement can then be dismissed as just another anti-American outing Should the Left succeed in diverting genuine world-wide anxiety over the surge of weapons on both sides into calls for unilateral disarmament by the West, it will be in part because Washington has proved so obdurate, so callous, so monomaniacal In particular, the Soviet advantagem conventional forces where East Europe meets West is dubious justification for nuclear escalation Is anybody in Washington crazy enough to threaten a nuclear strike in response to a Soviet move into Poland...

...There are but a few things that we can be sure of in this murky matter First, the Russians are flat all-out shameless liars, and any deal with them that does not guarantee adequate inspection is worse than no deal Second, our Administration's accounting of the nuclear balance reflects the adroitness with figures that has marked its economic prognostications When Mr Reagan offers to hold off on our new missiles if the Russians remove their existing missiles, he is doing the negotiation shuffle He is as candid about the West's nuclear assets as the Messrs Richard Allen and William Casey are about their personal assets These fellows have evidently learned the first law of accountancy Don't divulge, unless and until pressed, anything that may cause discomfort For the accountant mentality, the arms debate is a pleasure garden abloom with silos for clever concealment There are a few other facts that are clear enough for most laymen to grasp One is that for years now, East and West have possessed nuclear weapons in sufficiency to blow each other to kingdom come No matter who does the counting, it takes a remarkably sanguine temperament to maintain that any society could emerge in recognizable form from a five-second nuclear exchange The issues behind all the har-rumphing about first-strike capacity and retaliatory potential and the rest of it have less to do with the damage that the two parties are capable of inflicting on each other than with how a move by one side is likely to be "perceived" bv the other side The proposed installation ot new missiles on European soil, tor example, may shorten somewhat the timing of the devastation that we are already able to wreak on the Soviets, but their more important role is as a signal to the Kremlin of our seriousness of purpose to resist the sort of adventure which their extensive arms build-up has signaled to us And the Russians can be expected to counter with another signal of their own The danger, of course, is that someday some button-pushers, possibly color blind, will conclude that the signal is green It's a game of amateur psychoanalysis where no one can be proved wrong, even after a misperception does away with a couple of countnes Any arms system capable of being dreamed up by the weapons visionaries on either side can be justified in terms of the "perceptions" of people whom one does not trust in the first place There is no hope of "settling" questions of this sort and so they remain highly unsettling, especially when the analysts are named Haig or Brezhnev (Imagine having Alexander M Haig, Jr as your psychoanalyst) One may take pleasure in the thought that if the rulers of the Soviet Union rather than its dissidents were placed in mental institutions, the world might be a safer place But if one assumes for purposes of strategic planning that Brezhnev & Co are lunatics, then in order to compete, the West must play by the rules of lunacy—not an appealing prospect, since lunatics weigh risk in a very special manner Arms and the Handouts IF THE interested observer in the West, in favor of freedom and naturally suspicious of the Russians, could be sure that Washington's decision to spend $200 billion on weaponn grows entirely out of cool military calculation, that would at least place the action on the right stage But we have witnessed in the Administration's first year too manv instances of its readiness to gratih political and economic power brokers at the expense ot its own avowed policies and theories, not to mention social equi-ty and common sense The main ditter-ence is that giveaways like water projects and dairy supports are matters of public debate, whereas military boondoggles are hidden m the caverns of the Pentagon until somebody announces that, oops, we were a billion dollars off on that darn airplane, or that those ships we demanded yesterday will be obsolete tomorrow, shortly before they touch water The motto on all sides If this be lunacy, make the most of it Is there a department of government more wasteful of tax money or more resistant to correction than the Pentagon...

...Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Arms and the Men PITY THE citizen who tries to make sense of the data on nuclear weaponry being launched from all sides Who has more missiles, we or the Russians9 Well, that depends on how you do your counting With all those SS-4s and SS-5s and SS-20s and SSBS-2s and M-20s and Poseidons and Polarises and Pershings and CIA-knows-what-else poised or aloft or adnft somewhere, each with its particular range and payload and vulnerability, how are the world's ordinary Joes and Janes, who have trouble balancing their checkbooks, to get a reading on the balance of terror...

...Is anybody in Moscow crazy enough to start something in Germany where a full-fledged response with conventional weapons is certain...