No Hideout
Scheer, Robert
No Hideout WITH ENOUGH SHOVELS: REAGAN, BUSH & NUCLEAR WAR by Robert Scheer Random House. 285 pp. $14.95. Originally, Robert Scheer, a reporter for The Los Angeles Times, intended to cover the...
...The Reagan Administration's addiction to heated Cold War polemic and its drive to regain U.S...
...And all the while weapons strategy lumbers along, trying to keep up with the breakneck pace of technological advance...
...Scheer nimbly deals with all of these matters, only to make the mistake of overplaying the extent to which Reagan's policies mark a sharp break with the past...
...After an excruciating evening with Jones and his ruminations on the wonders of dirt, Scheer muses that "what startles me most is how easily Jones seems to make the subject of mass death almost boring...
...Bush is not the only one to garrote himself with his own rhetorical rope...
...Scheer's outstanding contribution is to have collated hard evidence of the madness behind Reagan's nuclear policy...
...Scheer pays only token homage to this historical perspective because he is intent on his thesis of "Reagan, Bush & Nuclear War," the implication of which is that we can regain control over the nuclear war machine by throwing these particular scoundrels out...
...nuclear policy...
...the United States develops new weapons sytems to overcome those the Soviets will hypotheti-cally develop to counter systems we haven't even deployed yet...
...Originally, Robert Scheer, a reporter for The Los Angeles Times, intended to cover the political phenomenon that is Ronald Reagan...
...The nuclear Neanderthalism that comes thrdugh in the findings of that investigation—With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush & Nuclear War—doesn't shout for attention so much as scream bloody murder...
...Scheer's book is a damning indictment of an Administration that has inherited the most complex and destructive technology for mass murder in all history, but that has yet to demonstrate anything more than the most primitive grasp of the political, military, and scientific realities that by urgent necessity must constrain the bomb's use...
...Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle dismisses the European antinuclear movement as a ploy of church leaders who hope to augment their flocks by harping on the theme of nuclear apocalypse...
...Team B gave birth to the Committee on the Present Danger, which has stocked the Reagan Cabinet with so many Strangeloves...
...nuclear superiority—a condition of the last Cold War—have been widely reported...
...David C. Morrison (David C Morrison is a research analyst at the Center for Defense Information in Washington, D. C He has written on nuclear issues for The New York Times, Inquiry, Commonweal, and other publications...
...Neither comic nor boring are three chapters at the heart of the book in which Scheer describes how the most paranoid possible faction of "experts" came to control U.S...
...Recently resigned arms control chief Eugene Rostow, in supporting the notion of survivable nuclear war, points out that "Japan, after all, not only survived but flourished after the nuclear attack...
...But, he writes, "the Reaganites' attitudes towards the Soviets and nuclear war came on early to shout out for further investigation...
...What makes the current situation so dangerous is that hardline ideologues have come into power at the most unstable stage of this evolutionary process...
...The passages serve as a fresh reminder of how little two years as President have done to mature our commander-in-chiefs Manichean approach to foreign affairs...
...Scheer has the reporter's priceless gift for prompting his subjects into bluntly speaking their minds...
...The future Vice President was moved to complain to The Los Angeles Times about "Scheer's vicious questions...
...In a series of remarkable interviews with candidate Reagan, his naive and simplistic Reader's Digest world-view shines through a thicket of garbled syntax and apocryphal anecdotes...
...This is the most concise and accessible explanation to date of the Team B caper, the bloodless foreign and military policy coup in 1976, when CIA Director George Bush gave over the task of assessing the Soviet threat to an outside coterie of cold warriors...
...Would that it were so simple...
...His format, like that of our "nuclear deterrent," is a triad—equal parts text, extensive notes, and raw interviews—giving readers the welcome option of delving as deep as they wish into the twisted intricacies of nukethink...
...Jones, the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense whose primitive civil defense fantasies gave Scheer's book its title...
...The Committee, in turn, dreamed up the mythical "window of vulnerability," used it to kill SALT II, and is now invoking the notion to whip up support for Reagan's $222 billion bid for nuclear "superiority...
...If any discussion of nuclear war can boast of comic passages, the levity in With Enough Shovels accompanies interviews with T.K...
...The nuclear arms race has long run by itself, with an internal logic of its own...
...To the extent that the United States can be said to have ever possessed a coherent nuclear strategy, for the last twenty years it has been the counterforce, "war-fighting" strategy that began with Robert McNa-mara's "damage limitation" and extended through the "countervailing strategy" enunciated in President Carter's watershed Presidential Directive 59...
...This talent has given the Reaganites no little grief, beginning in 1980 when Scheer elicited then-Presidential candidate George Bush's opinion that nuclear war is winnable...
Vol. 47 • March 1983 • No. 3
