For a Non-nuclear Future

...Although American leaders have long "demonized" their Soviet counterparts, Ronald Reagan has used such a tactic to an unprecedented degree, Kennan says, creating a foreign policy dominated by "intellectual primitiv-ism...

...The early papers in The Nuclear Delusion reveal Kennan's foresight in anticipating the effects of a nuclear weapons buildup...

...For a generation, the Soviets and the Americans have been amassing these geno-cidal weapons, against all claims of sanity or morality...

...When one of these enemy nations tested its own atomic bomb in 1949, however, American leaders maintained that it must have been the devil and his spies who bestowed this power on atheistic communists...

...As early as 1950, when the United States had approximately a thousand warheads and the Soviets had only a handful, Kennan was questioning the wisdom of placing these weapons at the heart of our foreign and military policy...

...Lifton and Falk's joint study, Indefensible Weapons, assesses the impact of nu-clearism" on our lives...

...The call for a nuclear freeze during the November elections was one important sign of this shift in consciousness...

...The authors define nuclearism as the "psychological, political, and military dependence on nuclear weapons...

...301 pp...

...In their conclusion, Falk and Lifton write, "We require a politics, as well as an imagery, of transformation...

...Kennan presents a number of concrete plans for halting and reversing the arms race...

...The first half of Indefensible Weapons delineates how life with the bomb has inflicted upon us a "sense of radical future-lessness...

...But outside the capital, faith in nuclear weapons is diminishing...

...Look how our allies snapped to attention, he said, how our enemies cowered beneath the divine gift...

...Our faith in biological, spiritual, and cultural continuity has been shaken, Lifton says, disrupting marriage, parenthood, worklife, and art...

...In 1954, when the United States alone had the capability to hurl massive numbers of warheads at overseas targets, he called for the Government to adopt a policy of no first-strike usage...

...INDEFENSIBLE WEAPONS: THE POLITICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL CASE AGAINST NUCLEARISM by Robert Jay Lifton and Richard Falk Basic Books...

...In his later papers, Kennan decries "the terrible militarization of outlook" which characterizes U.S.-Soviet relations in the post-World War II period...

...Rather, he believes we must grapple with and face up to the prospect of annihilation beforehand in order to forestall the apocalypse...

...Scott Sanders is a novelist and essayist who teaches literature at Indiana University...

...6.95 paperback...

...Government's failure to take decisive steps to end the arms race in the years when it still held a commanding lead, the United States now finds itself confronted, for the first time, by an adversary whose nuclear arsenal rivals its own, Kennan explains...

...The weapons are a product of human imagination, and human imagination is capable of getting rid of them," he says...

...Lifton contends that most of us, unable to contemplate the full extent of the dangers posed by nuclear weapons, keep fear at bay through "psychic numbing...

...Nuclearism has fostered a cult of secrecy...

...Following Lifton's analysis of "what the bombs are doing to us psychologically and spiritually," Falk, in the second half of Indefensible Weapons, examines what the bombs have done to us politically...

...Needless to say, such advice was ignored...

...Falk, like Kennan, recommends various sensible initiatives to halt the arms race, but he further insists that we must eventually challenge and transform the "war system" itself, together with the system of competing sovereign states on which it rests...

...15.50 hardcover...

...increased the power of the Presidency, especially its warmaking powers, to monarchial proportions...

...His studies of Hiroshima survivors give Lifton little hope for our ability to cope with a nuclear holocaust after it occurs...

...Two of the best of these are The Nuclear Delusion by George Kennan and Indefensible Weapons by Robert Jay Lifton and Richard Falk...

...Although nuclear bombs have not been used in warfare since 1945, the authors assert that these weapons have nevertheless spread their "malignant influence...

...Those who have been claiming since the 1950s that the arms race could be "won," nevertheless adhere unswervingly to their faith, urging the United States to continue building weapons...

...Largely because of the U.S...

...In Indefensible Weapons we being to glimpse that new politics, that liberating image of a non-nuclear future...

...In Kennan's essays, speeches, and policy statements from 1950 to 1982, he studies "the great differences in historical experience and political tradition" that divide the two countries, concluding that such differences can not be resolved, in the nuclear age, by military means...

...By impairing our imagination of the future," Lifton writes, "the bombs enter into all the crevices of our existence...

...In Washington, nuclear weapons continue to be the official religion...

...The growth of the freeze movement is reflected by the publishing industry and by the recent rush of antinuclear books...

...distorted our economy and our universities, and generally eroded the same democratic institutions which the weapons supposedly protect...

...George Kennan, former ambassador to the Soviet Union and expert on U.S.-Soviet relations, analyzes the nuclear arms race as one aspect of the rivalry between the two most powerful nations, the United States and the Soviet Union...

...by Scott Sanders After the atomic bomb was dropped in Hiroshima in 1945, President Truman gave thanks that God had placed such an awesome instrument in American hands...

...Coming from a man who understands the historical dynamics of this suicidal U.S.-Soviet rivalry, these proposals— and the whole of The Nuclear Delusion—deserve our close consideration...