ULTIMATE TERRORISM

...The United States has about 3,000 of these weapons in submarines deployed off the Soviet coast...

...When a man with a gun threatens to shoot the passengers of an airplane unless some prisoners are released or a ransom is paid, we call that terrorism...

...President Carter has called for an annual 3 per cent increase in military appropriations above the inflation rate, which means that in the next decade American taxpayers will be spending , about $1.8 trillion on preparations for war...

...So after thirty-five years of nuclear terrorism — the conventional term is "balance of terror" — the American people, the Russian people, and the hundreds of millions of potential victims of nuclear war in other countries are far worse off than they were when it all began...

...military units on standby alert in what he called "the most ominous big-power test of will and nerve since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962...

...That kind of world cannot be designed or created in the context of an all-out arms race...

...If our radar is again confused by a flock of geese, as it has been in the past, the Strategic Air Command may start World War III out of an excess of caution...

...The Ford Administration predicted that more than double that number would have nuclear weapons by the end of the century...

...Both superpowers are poised at a new stage of the arms race that ' promises to make the world of « the 1970s look, in retrospect, like a Quaker village...

...The trapped sensation of being on an uncontrollable course is clearly reflected in the memoirs of all the participants in the fateful week of the Cuban missile crisis...

...If they want war, we might as well have it now as later...

...Conversion legislation already is before Congress in various forms...

...The peril arises not so much from the numbers of new weapons being stockpiled but from their character...

...But everyone who contemplates the future depends on historical analogies from simpler times and falls into the trap of thinking about stockpiles of city-destroying bombs as if they were protection: If only we have enough of them, we will be safe...

...Civilians have always been casualties of war, but for the first time the defenseless are to be the military's prime targets...

...millions of workers whose jobs depend upon the system of nuclear terrorism...

...To make the world appreciably safer in a purely physical sense, we would have to dismantle about 95 per cent of the nuclear stockpiles, so great is the overkill capacity already accumulated...

...We could do it in two ways...

...When decision-makers play war games, they are always in control of their "options," but in the real world the President and his advisers are likely to be operating without sleep and under extreme pressure...

...The major churches — including President Carter's denomination, the Southern Baptists — have issued strong statements condemning the arms race...

...wrote later that "everyone agreed that the Soviet blockade of West Berlin would have to be countered first by a western thrust along the Autobahn...

...warrior intellectuals who deal in threats and count on wars...

...Any of the above crises could have resulted in nuclear war had the Russians reacted differently, or had the President not rejected military advice...

...scientists and engineers hired to look for the "technological breakthrough'' that can finally provide "security...

...The nuclear arsenal contains thousands of weapons more than fifty times the size of the Hiroshima bomb, designed to incinerate or poison the population of any large city...

...The Pentagon persists in its efforts to make nuclear weapons "relevant" to local wars and to make them "small" enough — like the neutron bomb — to be used as "conventional" arms...

...Hundreds of millions of defenseless men, women, and children in the Soviet Union and the United States have no control whatever over the decisions of their leaders to go to war...

...Like slavery, it is a system that has outlasted its time...

...The burden of disarmament cannot be imposed on the workers in military plants or, for that matter, on the members of the armed forces, the missile salesmen, the producers of poison gas, or the hundreds of thousands of others who earn their daily bread from the arms race...

...But in the atmosphere of an intensifying and seemingly hopeless arms race, the choice may appear to be one between war now and war later...

...Far more than their ancestors (most of which are still around), the new weapons are specifically - designed to fight and win a nuclear war...

...But everything has changed...

...What would that kind of process look like...

...Why, then, does the arms race continue...

...How did it happen...

...The Soviet Union has somewhat fewer, but the killing power on both sides is so enormous that, despite the professional alarmism of the military in both countries, the difference is without military or political significance...

...Nothing would more clearly signal the intentions of this country to reverse the arms race...

...We can find no security in a world hell-bent on the proliferation of nuclear weaponry...

...Most of this money is for "conventional forces" — the people, ships, and planes that project U.S...

...And it need not be...

...Twenty years ago, thousands marched to protest atmospheric nuclear testing because people feared that strontium-90 was contaminating their children's milk...

...The Soviet leaders have sacrificed the hopes of their people by choosing to divert scarce resources to building a formidable nuclear war machine...

...I don't mean to say that we'd have used those great big things and destroyed cities, but we would use them enough to win and we, of course, would have tried to keep them on military targets, not civil targets...

...When the Joint Chiefs of Staff told Lyndon Johnson it would take more than half a million men at least five years to pacify Vietnam, he stormed out of the room — but he ended up sending them there, in stages...

...The only secret to the atomic bomb is the actual number such countries as Israel, Egypt, South Africa, and Taiwan may have...

...When we have spent the next $1.8 trillion that the Pentagon plans to have us spend over the next decade, we will have no more security than we have now...

...This could be done in many ways — percentage cuts, budget cuts, limitations on numbers of weapons...

...Official statements of the Government confirm as much, and anyone who cares to ponder the effects of a single weapon exploded over a city cannot help concluding that even a "small" nuclear war would be a catastrophe beyond imagination...

...The steady Soviet build-up also continues...

...the nuclear defense of Khe Sanh, a besieged Marine base then in imminent danger of being overrun...

...There is no defense...

...Thirty-five nations possess nuclear weapons or can acquire them within months...

...We do not know whether the Soviets would accept the challenge, although they have repeatedly said they would: They have never been pressed to accept a simple, clear program of arms reduction because the United States has never been prepared to offer or accept one...

...At its height, Nikita Khrushchev sent a hysterical cable comparing himself and Kennedy to two men on a tightrope...

...military power, their national security managers are now much more likely to think like their U.S...

...We all agreed in the end," Robert F. Kennedy said afterward, "that if the Russians were ready to go to nuclear war over Cuba, they were ready to go to nuclear war, and that was that...

...There is no hope of reversing the arms race until the American people reject the myths of "national security," regain contact with reality, and reinstate the question of nuclear terrorism as a political and moral issue...

...The first step would be to call a halt to the forward momentum of the arms race...

...It would be a world in which we could begin to address human needs...

...There is no shortage of fissionable material...

...When these occur, we will not always be able to count on the Soviets to back down...

...The threat to keep killing hostages ended World War II in a matter of days...

...Ultimate terrorism Security for none in a world bristling with nuclear weapons Richard Barnet The era of nuclear terrorism began with an attack without warning on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki...

...The turmoil in Southern Africa, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the internal struggles of strategic Iran, and potential crises in many other places around the world provide the makings of new U.S.-Soviet confrontations...

...But the absence of intent provides no assurance that it will not happen...

...Or we could declare our own three-year moratorium on production and deployment of new weapons...

...In that context, striking first may look like the only rational course...

...forces in Vietnam, convened "a small secret group" in Saigon to "study...

...Fortunately, thinking is beginning to catch up with the technology we have created...

...It is reassuring to know that the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the Minority Leader will be preserved for the first post-attack legislative session, while 140 million of the rest of us are dead...

...retaliatory attack...

...The United States has spurned these proposals, but they deserve serious negotiations as a test of Soviet sincerity — and of our own...

...Not a single missile has been destroyed, weapons stockpiles on both sides have continued to grow, but most of us accepted the notion that the "experts" are in control and will find a way to keep the jobs and prestige associated with the arms race — and to keep the peace at the same time...

...Albert Einstein, who persuaded President Franklin D. Roosevelt to build the atom bomb and regretted it for the rest of his life, had the answer...

...There is a secret "A" list of important people to be whisked to a bunker in the Maryland hills in the event of nuclear war...

...According to estimates of the National Security Council, 140 million Americans would probably die within days after a full-scale Soviet nuclear attack, and more than 100 million Russians would die in a U.S...

...In 1968, General William C. Westmoreland, commander of the U.S...

...One rationale for our accumulation of overkill capacity beyond any point conceivably required to deter an attack on the United States is that the nuclear threat can keep hostile political forces around the world in check...

...Seeing no alternative, they have managed to match every major technological development of the United States, and they proclaim their intention to keep matching us in the future...

...Whatever the morality, the threat of taking nuclear hostages was an effective instrument of U.S...

...President Kennedy thought the risks of nuclear war were considerable and that such a war would produce "150 million fatalities in the first eighteen hours...

...Some labor leaders have begun to demand that workers in military production be given the chance to produce goods that will support an economy of life rather than an economy of death...

...But despite the fact that the United States long ago ran out of large Soviet population centers and major military installations that could be added to the target list, our Government continues to turn out three nuclear weapons a day...

...After spending almost $2 trillion on the military since 1945, the United States has much less security than it had at the end of World War II...

...As land-based missiles become more vulnerable to attack the response is not, as one might have supposed, to abandon them and rely on much less vulnerable submarine-launched missiles...

...Such a situation makes both sides extremely nervous and provides the impetus for hair-trigger responses and desperate searches for technological breakthroughs that might finally promise victory in the nuclear age...

...In the recent years of droning SALT negotiations, public complacency has set in...

...Military planners interpret the deployment of counterforce weapons as evidence of an intention to strike first, since such weapons have no use unless they are used first...

...In the summer of 1961, the Kennedy Administration seriously contemplated the use of nuclear weapons in the Berlin crisis...

...There is a private market for nuclear weapons just as there has been for all other kinds of weapons...

...What made it dissipate its unique power and security in a generation and a half...

...To bring our thinking in touch with reality, we must see the age of nuclear terrorism for what it is — a sharp break with all of the past...

...A certifiable madman like Idi Amin of Uganda can get a bomb and set himself up in the nuclear terror game...

...No rational leader would choose nuclear war over peace...

...He said he "didn't feel very good about it," since he couldn't take his wife, but he had a "duty" to save himself for his country...

...we will not always be able to count on the Soviets to back down' Off," in the October 1978 issue of The Progressive...

...If the United States builds 300 new mobile M-X missiles (at a cost of $25 billion) it will, theoretically, have the capability by the mid 1980s to knock out 90 per cent of the Soviet land-based missiles — even after a Soviet surprise attack...

...There is no victory...

...We cannot otherwise get from here to there because we are prisoners of our history...

...in March 1961, according to President Kennedy's closest aide, Theodore Sorenson, a majority of the Joint Chiefs "appeared to favor the use of tactical nuclear weapons on the ground" in Laos: "If massive Red troops were then mobilized, nuclear bombings would be threatened and, if necessary, carried out...

...But it is futile to think seriously of going from a world of nuclear terrorism to a world of "zero nuclear weapons" — the only kind of world that provides a reasonable long-run chance for human survival — without first stopping the race we began...

...A second step in the process of arms reduction would be to foreswear the use of nuclear weapons as an instrument of national policy...

...The present agreement banning nuclear testing in the atmosphere was negotiated as a ratification of a moratorium instituted unilaterally and independently by both sides...

...Neither the Kaiser nor any other national leader bargained in 1914 for the devastation of World War I. Hitler did not have the denouement of World War II in mind when he attacked Poland in 1939...

...At the time of the 1962 missile crisis, the United States initiated a blockade of Cuba and prepared for invasion, knowing that there were substantial risks of escalation that could lead to nuclear war...

...Almost 20,000 people demonstrated for disarmament last spring at the United Nations...

...and Soviet leaders which caused them to pull back from the brink of war on these occasions will prevail in all future circumstances...

...The Pentagon regularly provides Congress with equally frightening scenarios of what the Soviets could do...

...with parts available from a local hardware store...

...counterparts: "We can't afford to back down and be exposed as a pitiful, helpless giant...

...One member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Kennedy recalled, "argued that we could use nuclear weapons, on the basis that our adversaries would use theirs against us in an attack...

...Although he recognized "the controversial nature of the subject," the field commander who ran the war for so many years still believes that "the use of a few small tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam — or even the threat of them — might have brought the war to an end...

...And it will still have 6,000 city-busting warheads left to drop on the Soviet Union...

...One place to focus arms reduction efforts is in Europe, which remains a nuclear tinderbox...

...The fear is real...

...Powerful political and economic forces support the arms race in both the United States and the Soviet Union: millions of bureaucrats in and out of military uniform who go to their offices every day to build nuclear weapons or to plan nuclear war...

...Those days are gone...

...For the present, however, the practitioners of nuclear terrorism are concentrated in Washington and Moscow...

...The President should establish a White House commission to begin the planning process now...

...Such a move would create a negotiating atmosphere in which a successful agreement with the Soviets would become more likely...

...As Presidents become weaker — we have not had a two-term President since Eisenhower — they are likely to find it difficult to resist unanimous military advice — especially if the country is awash in hawkish propaganda and no peace movement exists to offer resistance...

...Russians old enough to remember the incredible destruction of their country in World War II have a better intimation of the catastrophe towards which we are drifting...

...Having achieved rough parity with U.S...

...When leaders threaten millions of deaths — and every nuclear weapon targeted on an enemy city is just such a threat — we call it strategy...

...But nuclear weapons of all sorts are becoming standard equipment throughout these forces, too...

...a Princeton undergraduate designed a bomb that could be built Richard Barnet is a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D. C. His most recent book is "The Giants: Russia and America, "published by Simon and Schuster...

...Today, terrorism merely begets more terrorism...

...their remarkable record of restraint in crisis — even in those crises they provoke — reflects the relative military weakness they suffered in the past...

...Now, every American is a hostage and a target, and so is every Russian...

...This does not mean that scholars and dreamers should not try to design such a world...

...If the Soviets then intervened, we should be prepared to accept the possibility of general war...

...See the article, "The Day the Bomb Went...

...power in the days when America had a monopoly or near-monopoly on nuclear weapons...

...We must expect they will soon be in the hands of terrorist groups and criminal syndicates — anyone with ready cash and a strong motive to terrorize others...

...If the United Nations were to install lie detectors in the Oval Office and the Kremlin and test each day for secret intentions to start a nuclear war, our leaders and their leaders would doubtless pass with flying colors...

...Questions about verification of arms reduction agreements will inevitably be raised, but such questions are usually self-serving...

...Hubert Humphrey had a reservation in the VIP bunker when he was Vice President...

...then both sides would come to their senses and reestablish some sort of post-attack detente...

...The United States has some 25,000 nuclear weapons in all — most of them small and distributed as standard equipment throughout the armed forces...

...At the dawn of the nuclear age he declared, "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our way of thinking...

...There is no reason to be confident that the inhibitions of U.S...

...The only people who will have a decent chance to survive a nuclear war will be the war-makers themselves...

...Mankind must put an end to the arms race or the arms race will put an end to man," John F. Kennedy said, and every other recent President has echoed his words...

...U.S.-Soviet arms negotiations have failed because they began from the premise that the nuclear arms race should be controlled rather than ended — but imposing limits on one nuclear missile system inescapably invites the development of others...

...There are infinite possibilities for haggling over technical details, and such haggling has become a minor industry in itself...

...The United States emerged from World War II as the preeminent nation of modern times — rich, powerful, and ascendant...

...It will take an intellectual leap to recognize that nuclear terrorism is a system to be abolished, not one to be tinkered with...

...On entering the White House in 1953, he later disclosed, former President Eisenhower "let it be known that if there was not going to be an armistice [in Korea] we were not going to be bound by the kind of weapons that we would use...

...the Joint Chiefs advised Eisenhower that Quemoy and Matsu, two islands off the coast of China, could not be held without using nuclear weapons, and such an option was seriously considered by the National Security Council...

...1 The Soviets will spend comparable amounts...

...If we are to believe H.R...

...But we must choose to provide money for these needs and we must do the necessary planning so that workers who cease to make bombs can be employed in useful work...

...contractors unwilling to forego easy profits...

...According to former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, 100 such weapons would kill thirty-seven million Soviet citizens and destroy almost two-thirds of Soviet industry, so there is no way the Soviet Union could "win" a nuclear war even in the unlikely event that it could destroy all our land-based missiles and airplanes in a surprise attack...

...But undergirding the entire military-industrial complex are the myths that can kill us — that peace requires preparation for war, that leaders are too sensible to start a war in a world armed to the teeth, and that the more terrible the weapons, the more sensible the leaders will be...

...IfOn October 25, 1973, President Nixon put all U.S...

...Haldeman's memoirs, the massive anti-war demonstrations in Washington were a major factor in dissuading Nixon from issuing a nuclear threat against Vietnam in 1970...

...But there was disagreement between those, like General Norstad [Supreme Commander of NATO], who wanted the probe in order to create a situation where the West could use nuclear weapons, and those, like Kennedy and McNamara, who wanted the probe in order to postpone that situation...

...the Soviets might respond by striking a missile complex in North Dakota...

...A third step would be to begin the actual process of reduction...

...significant amounts have already been diverted from "peaceful'1 reactors...

...Most people on the planet have no notion of what a nuclear war would be like...

...But their energies are not yet focused on ways of making that happen...

...Americans have not experienced a war of any kind on this continent in more than a century...

...Here, too, the Soviets have proposed such an agreement — and here, too, the United States continues to cling stubbornly to its "first use" option: the right to use nuclear weapons first at times and places of its own choosing...

...we will almost certainly have less, for the world will have become even more dangerous than it is today...

...Improved accuracy of guidance systems and advanced computers foster the illusion of "controlled nuclear warfare.'' According to this improbable scenario, the United States might, under extreme provocation, "take out" a Soviet land-based missile...

...Throughout the country more and more people fear for their future, or their children's, unless a way is found to bring the arms race under control...

...Once again a peace movement is taking form...

...The Soviets have on several occasions proposed a treaty to ban all new weapons systems...

...The bomb hangs over South Africa, the ultimate instrument of terror by which the leaders of five million whites may hope to maintain their shaky control over fifteen million blacks...

...and Soviet war machines and that in the United States, at least — we don't know much about Soviet planning — the use of such weapons has been considered or proposed at the highest levels: ¶In 1954, according to former French Foreign Minister Georges Bidault, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles offered "one or more atomic bombs to be dropped on Communist Chinese territory near the Indochina border" and two atomic bombs for use against the Viet Minh at Dienbienphu...

...There is no secret...

...A crucial fourth step that must accompany the others is economic conversion...

...But the only hope of reversing the arms race is to make it clear that both sides intend to stop and to begin a genuine process of arms reduction...

...There are urgent national needs — housing, transportation, delivery of health care — that require far more jobs than are provided by military production...

...Any step that conveys a serious intention to disarm and persuade the other side that a process of disarmament is actually under way is a genuine bargaining chip...

...And while everyone agreed that we might eventually have to go on to nuclear war, there was disagreement between those who favored a single definite salvo against the Soviet Union and those who favored careful and discriminate attack...

...Though the alert was widely viewed in the United States as a political ploy to divert public attention from the Watergate scandal, the placing of nuclear forces in an advanced state of readiness was precisely the sort of situation that could invite a preemptive strike...

...The way to begin is to shut down the assembly line — to stop all development, production, and deployment of new nuclear weapons...

...It is time to begin creating some new history...

...power overseas...

...There is no place to hide...

...According to the 1977 Strategic Survey of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London research organization with close ties to military and intelligence circles, the "greater theoretical ability to fight a strategic nuclear war at controlled levels may increase pressure to launch a preemptive counterforce strike in a crisis" — that is, a surprise attack might "prevent" the other side from making war...

...So we might as well have the showdown then as six months later...

...Rather, the response is to consider digging hundreds of expensive holes to confuse the enemy, and to adopt "launch on warning" strategies...

...Nuclear terrorism, like slavery in the last century, is an evil system that cries out for abolition...

...A world without nuclear weapons would be a world in which nations share a wholly different concept of security ^— a world with recognized limits on national sovereignty and recognized authority for international bodies...

...we could declare our own three-year moratorium on production and deployment' It is quite possible to devise arms reduction arrangements which do not give any significant advantage to either side, although it is virtually impossible to satisfy generals who look upon arms agreements not as an alternative to the arms race but as a way of perpetuating it...

...IfGeneral Douglas MacArthur proposed using nuclear weapons in Korea...

...If you're drafted and you have to go to war," he told a reporter, "you can't take momma...

...Presidential Assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr...

...A move toward real arms reduction on the part of the United States and the Soviet Union would give us much more security than we now have — at a fraction of the cost...

...The fact is that nuclear weapons are now integrated into every phase of the U.S...