SENDING IN THE MACHINES
Stone, I. F.
Sending in the Machines Soon we will have no say BY I.F. STONE T| he clouds are gathering. Our / planet has never been in greater peril. Time is running out for the human race. From its first day...
...Why did you get me out of bed at five o'clock in the morning...
...That means total dependence on the computer...
...The atomic bomb was, after all, supposed to be the perfect weapon, and it gave us nuclear superiority for quite a while...
...Today the Russians have nuclear superiority over all other people except us—and what good does it do them...
...And when it's over, there will be few survivors left to wonder whether it was a Canadian goose or a real ICBM heading one way or the other that set off the great conflagration...
...In the nuclear age, space war means transporting heaven to hell...
...But the most immediate danger is that unless we freeze the nuclear arms race very soon, both superpowers will lose control...
...There'll be no time for sober reflection...
...Senate investigators have identified dozens of instances in which false alarms set our computers into motion...
...Somehow, we must begin enjoying the differences within the human family instead of nursing anachronistic hatreds...
...We're told that the time in which one of the new wonder weapons would do its work is 260 seconds—40 seconds less than five minutes...
...They are suffering in Afghanistan the same kind of impotence and humiliation we suffered in Vietnam...
...Somehow, we must begin thinking of ourselves as a family on this small planet we inhabit...
...our inability to control it, undermined American security and made it possible for someone to destroy our country in the span of a few hours...
...When World War II ended, we were blessed with an impregnable position...
...Stone on April 10 at the Ford Hall Forum in Boston...
...What if an oil refinery catches fire somewhere in Russia and the flash is mistaken for an ICBM launch...
...How did we lose our impregnable position...
...Our own technology, and This article is adapted from remarks delivered by LF...
...The real race, the real ideological conflict, is between those who can think in terms of human welfare and those who are trapped by ancient homicidal psychoses...
...What the perfect weapon will do is end our ability to control our own destiny...
...The Administration hasn't the slightest interest in arms control, in disarmament, or in peace...
...First we developed the atomic bomb, then the hydrogen bomb, then the ICBM to jump the oceans...
...Under space war conditions, any of them might set off the final conflict...
...Somehow, we must get the message across that the nuclear arms race doesn't increase security...
...Their nuclear might doesn't help them, just as ours didn't help us...
...It will be too late then to consult Congress, or to use the hotline between Washington and Moscow...
...After only one or two more technological steps, life-and-death decisions will be out of human hands...
...We had peaceful, unarmed, unfortified borders with Canada and Mexico...
...It means we will use our satanic intelligence to penetrate the heavens with a fire more destructive than all the fires of the Inferno...
...And they don't know how to get out of it, just as we didn't know how to get out of Vietnam...
...Nobody could attack us...
...And that made it possible, of course, for an enemy to jump the oceans too, carrying the bomb in the opposite direction...
...But we had two huge moats—on one side the Pacific, on the other the Atlantic...
...There won't even be time for Reagan to ask Ed Meese, "What's going on...
...that it is, in fact, the basic menace to world security...
...But the problem of peace is not a technological problem, and it cannot be solved by developing a "perfect" weapon...
...When the Pershing II missiles are installed in Europe, and when the Russians respond by stationing their missile submarines off our Atlantic and Pacific shores, as they have threatened to do, it will take only eight or ten minutes (or less) for either superpower to destroy the other...
...The British used to boast that the English Channel was a moat that protected them from Continental rivalries and ambitions...
...And now Ronald Reagan has opened up a whole new dimension of warfare in space...
...It has been itching for war from the beginning, inflaming ancient hatreds, fulminating about attacking Cuba, and waging a secret war in Central America behind the backs of Congress and in violation of the law...
...There's very little time left to mobilize in behalf of the broader vision that alone can save the planet...
...He says we will develop the "perfect" weapon...
...We lost it because of the efforts of our own scientists and engineers working in our own laboratories...
...We Americans have achieved great technological successes, and we tend to believe that every problem must have a technological solution...
...From its first day in office, the Reagan Administration has been conditioning the American people for a world showdown...
...Constitutional guarantees will become meaningless, the President of the United States and the Soviet Politburo will be equally helpless, and basic judgments will be made by computers...
...When an ICBM is launched on one side of the Earth, the other side must detect the flash of light, locate the missile, track its speed, chart its vector, and let loose a beam to hit it before it gets very far—all in those 260 seconds...
...It was during that period of nuclear superiority that the United States started getting kicked around, started losing wars—first in Korea, then in Vietnam...
Vol. 47 • May 1983 • No. 6
