Tyranny of Arms

...Vietnam, as well as the recent race riots, has deepened the popular understanding of America and illuminated in new ways the ugly defects—the concentration of political power, the inability of the two-party system to respond adequately to the moral challenges of our time, and the American dependence upon violence at home and abroad...

...Reviewed by Barton J. Bernstein Before the Johnson Administration began squandering American lives and resources in Vietnam, when Russian-American discord had seemed to constitute the main threat to world peace, only a few Americans had questioned the basic postulates of the Cold War...

...The book's merit, curiously, lies in the fact that Lapp focuses most of his energy on the danger of the new weapons technology—a subject which many critics have recently overlooked, probably because of their overriding concern with the Vietnam war...

...As Lapp wisely argues, the Administration has been less than candid on this issue...

...The resulting shifts in defense strategy, though unlikely causes of war in themselves, do create new instabilities and open new opportunities for conflicts which previously seemed improbable or technically unwise...

...For some time McNamara resisted the demands for an ABM system by Pentagon chiefs and their allies in the Congress and industry, but ultimately he could no longer block their efforts...

...Lapp emphasizes that Russian intentions still seem unclear, and warns that a low-cost ($5 billion) defense system, though devised initially to anticipate a Chinese threat, will undoubtedly be improved to deal with the more sophisticated Soviet missiles...

...Lapp provides no genuine social analysis, not even any new social insights, but only the now-familiar, painful assertions which point to the web of connections between the military, industry, science, and the universities, and the unwillingness of intellectuals and plain citizens to understand their intimate participation in a weapons economy...

...Just as intervention in Vietnam was impossible until the United States adopted a more flexible strategy and expanded its tactical forces, so might nuclear war against China in the 1970's seem too dangerous unless the United States has some protection against China's nuclear missiles...

...A nation's budget tells what a society cares about and what it does not care about...

...While terror wracks the cities and racism divides the nation into enemy camps, the Government spends $30 billion annually in Vietnam but cannot find funds for programs which might bind the country's wounds at home...

...The Government has contended: 1) that the proposed ABM defense is directed against the few and crude nuclear missiles which the Chinese will probably have within a few years, and not against the Russians...

...The Russians, in turn, will move toward a stronger ABM defense and also significantly increase their production of missiles, thus seeking to assure that some of their weapons can penetrate American defenses...

...and 2) that the United States must create an ABM defense because the Russians are establishing such a defense...

...Significantly, the political in-fighting went on without the public even being aware of the issues...

...In turn, American involvement in Vietnam has provoked a re-examination of assumptions about the Cold War and compelled some to acknowledge the arrogance of American power and the fact of American imperialism—the effort to create a stable world for American economic expansion...

...Priorities are reflected in the things we spend money on," Senator J. William Fulbright has emphasized...

...In particular, he is distressed by the danger of American plans to create an anti-ballistic missile system (ABM), which threatens to escalate the arms race and raise the level of potential terror...

...deterrent is not credible and that they may be the early victims of intercontinental war—unless they can create their own ABM defenses...

...But more were fearful of the arms race, often criticizing the United States for excessive reliance upon nuclear weapons and lamenting the power of the military-industrial complex...

...Ironically, the decision by President John F. Kennedy and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara to establish the tactical forces essential to limited war is exactly what made American intervention in Vietnam seem feasible...

...Yet, rather than addressing himself to how these processes started and now operate, Lapp actually restricts most of his attention to relatively technical issues of defense strategy and then contents himself, in a final, pasted-on chapter, to stress the failure of Congress and the inability of the public to discuss intelligently and to choose wisely between competing defense systems...

...Aside from unnecessarily sparking a new Soviet-American arms race and diverting sorely needed funds from social reform at this critical time, an American ABM defense, Lapp warns, may also persuade America's allies that the U.S...

...As the 1968 election approached, he was forced to yield part way—to request funds for a small system...

...By focusing upon the international needs of the American economic system and its shaping of American ideology, critics have moved far beyond the less sophisticated notion that Russian-American antagonism was promoted largely by those domestic interests which considered the arms race essential to their own, and perhaps even the nation's, economic welfare...

...Many of these failures, asserts Ralph Lapp, a nuclear physicist and critic of the arms race, are related to "the weapons culture," and he promises (in words on the book jacket) to explain "how the tyranny of weapons technology has taken over our society, dominated our economy, and warped our sense of values...

...While these critics could not effectively halt the arms race during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, they did gain triumphs which at the time seemed major victories—the nuclear test-ban treaty and the American development of a capacity for limited war, which decreased reliance upon strategic nuclear weapons and seemed to render the "unthinkable" less possible...

...The creation of new technical possibilities, as Americans have painfully discovered, may invite new, even more dangerous actions by their Government...

...By emphasizing the American public's faith in more, rather than fewer weapons, Lapp has focused upon, but never quite analyzed, the popular attitudes which the military-industrial complex has often exploited for its own purposes...

...But the President, Lapp suggests, was unwilling to risk Republican attempts to exploit a defense gap, reminiscent of Kennedy's exploitation in 1960 of the missile "gap" which disappeared abruptly after his election...