Reflections

...arsenal in recent years—and every weapons system now on the drawing boards—is a first-strike instrument designed to deliver a surprise attack, not to deter aggression or even to retaliate against it...

...in which he urged U.S...

...It is deterrence, we are told, that has saved the world from nuclear war since 1945...

...For decades, each succeeding U.S...

...There are, in fact, forces that drive the nuclear arms race to levels where considerations of deterrence are rendered all but irrelevant...

...The American response was to develop a missile capable of hurling not just one but up to four warheads, so that even if some were intercepted, the others would be able to penetrate the Galosh defense...

...MIRV, initially based on an intelligence miscalculation, profoundly changed the character of the arms race...

...So long as the nuclear arsenals of the superpowers remain in existence, the temptation to use them will also remain...

...Instead, however, the missile equipped with multiple warheads was assigned an offensive role: It was modified so that warheads could be independently targeted...

...If we are ever to achieve real security, it will be by means of disarmament, not deterrence...

...They have a community of interest, too, with state and local officials who lust after military contracts and installations, and with the sizable segment of the work force that identifies its own economic interest with the military buildup...

...Then there are the jingoist veterans' organizations that equate arms expenditures with patriotism and the influential segments of the press that regard military appropriations as about the only justifiable Government outlays...

...The procedure never fails to achieve the desired result, eliciting funds from Congress and tacit consent from the electorate...

...Even as they proclaim their faith in deterrence as the foundation of national security, the strategy planners show by their actions that they have no confidence in deterrence to keep the peace...

...Even the empirical argument that is supposed to provide the ultimate proof of the efficacy of deterrence—the fact that there has been no nuclear war in the last thirty-eight years—will not stand up under close scrutiny: An interval of forty-three years elapsed, after all, between the last major war of the Nineteenth Century and World War I. The technology of nuclear warfare, infinitely more destructive than anything experienced in human history, cannot be contained by resort to a technique—deterrence—that has consistently failed even to prevent conventional war...

...The doctrine of deterrence also furnishes the psychological climate in which endless perpetuation of the arms race becomes politically palatable...

...Instead, it makes for an unstable deterrence that enhances the prospect of war...

...Among the most important of these forces is the technological imperative—the relentless drive among scientists and engineers to develop ever more sinister forms of weaponry...

...It is a formula for an arms race that will end only when it culminates in the ultimate catastrophe of nuclear war, though it is all done in the name of deterrence...

...missiles before they could reach their targets...

...In time, the Pentagon realized that its analysts had blundered: Galosh was not designed to fend off missiles but to protect Moscow from incursions by conventional aircraft...

...administration has followed essentially the same process, warning Congress and the public that the Soviets have caught up or are moving ahead of the United States in the number of missiles, their throw-weight, the construction of civil defense facilities, or some other critical aspect of the arms race...

...The true role of deterrence doctrine has not been to protect us from the threat of nuclear war but to prepare us for it...

...Inevitably, the Russians respond in kind, increasing their own military expenditures and adding to their own weapons stockpiles...

...arsenal...

...As the term implies, they seem to take on a life of their own, beyond the control of rational decision-making...

...A couple of months ago, in the panel discussion that followed the ABC television presentation of The Day After, Carl Sagan, the noted astronomer who has done much to increase public consciousness of the nuclear threat, suggested that deterrence may constitute the best hope for peace...

...The Soviets responded by deploying their own MIRVs, installed on SS-18s, SS-19s, and other vehicles capable of destroying most of the 1,052 land-based missiles in the U.S...

...Virtually every new weapon added to the U.S...

...officials to "make a determination of sufficiency...

...Unfortunately, that point of deterrence was reached long ago without imposing any noticeable limitation on the arms race...

...And the United States, in turn, answered the challenge first by producing a new generation of more accurate missiles (including the MX) capable of inflicting a devastating first strike, and then by developing space weapons that could "kill" Soviet satellites and destroy Soviet missiles on launch...

...The military establishment, the corporate contractors, think tanks, and universities that rely heavily on Pentagon funding all share the impulse to pursue ever more frightening weapons technology...

...Instead of resting on the assured capacity to deter, they press ever more frantically for new levels of nuclear superiority...

...An incessant barrage of official propaganda about the need to keep up with Soviet "advances" has been the key factor in persuading Americans to shoulder the enormous burden of massive military spending...

...In 1956, President Eisenhower's Secretary of the Air Force, Donald A. Quarles, wrote an article called "How Much Is Enough...

...It is a view that has long been widely shared...

...The application of deterrence doctrine has in no way eased the tensions between the superpowers...

...Confronted with growing resistance to the emplacement of U.S...

...Here is an example of how the process works: In the 1960s, U.S...

...It has not impeded but accelerated the development of ever more threatening weapons...

...Even if deterrence worked exactly as its advocates claim it does, maintaining a "stable" nuclear equilibrium, it would be a dangerous and ultimately self-defeating approach toward keeping the peace, since the doctrine institutionalizes the assumption that our national security hinges on the ability to destroy the lives of hundreds of millions of human beings, and perhaps to wipe out all human life on the planet...

...The Deterrence Myth Deterrence, the doctrine that has propelled the nuclear arms race since the 1950s, is suddenly back in high fashion as an all-purpose rationale for the incredibly dangerous course on which we are embarked...

...In the mid-1960s, Robert S. Mc-Namara, Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, coined the term "mutually assured destruction" (MAD...

...Today, that is still the basic working definition of deterrence doctrine...

...The U.S...

...Each side would be deterred, he reasoned, if it had the capability of killing 25 or 30 per cent of its opponent's people while destroying 70 per cent of enemy industrial capacity...

...missiles in Western Europe and rising awareness of the nuclear war peril here at home, politicians and pundits have been urging us to reaffirm our faith in deterrence as the key to world peace and stability...

...The chorus of praise for the notion of deterrence rises not only from the ranks of policymakers and their supporters and apologists, but also from some segments of the peace movement...

...Both superpowers have been locked in stalemate, the argument runs, each understanding that if it were to mount a first strike against the other, it would itself be vulnerable to devastating nuclear counterattack...

...A year later, these Soviet increases will be cited—and accepted—as the justification for still another upward spiral by the United States...

...As this example demonstrates, deterrence serves not as an approach toward stabilizing the arms race but as a technique for escalating it...

...Driven by intellectual curiosity or by career ambitions, the weapons designers try to anticipate what the state of their art will be in five or ten or twenty years, pressing always for new breakthroughs in deadly destructive-ness...

...Rampant weapons technology undermines the stable deterrence that the strategists claim to be seeking...

...military budget has increased from $10 billion in 1948 to $250 billion in 1984—an enormous leap even when proper allowance is made for the inflation which military spending has helped fuel...

...What he had in mind was a level of strategic weaponry that would suffice to deter any Soviet attack...

...military intelligence analysts persuaded themselves that the Galosh system the Soviets had installed around Moscow was an antiballistic missile defense capable of intercepting and destroying incoming U.S...

...McNamara, in another felicitous turn of phrase, referred to these forces as "mad momentum...

...What's more, the number of warheads could no longer be monitored with much accuracy: Missiles are readily detectable, but warheads are not...

...The rationale for multiple warheads was gone, and if the new weapons system had been scrapped at that time, the U.'S.-Soviet balance in strategic weapons would, indeed, have remained stable...

...Sidney Lens, The Progressive's Senior Editor, is the author of several books about nuclear strategy, including "The Maginot Line Syndrome: America's Hopeless Foreign Policy, "published last year by Ballin-ger'/Harper & Row...

...Thompson has called this process "addictive...

...Eventually, any substantive considerations of national security that may have existed at the outset are totally obscured...

...In order to preserve a "credible deterrent," we are told, the United States will have to forge still further ahead...

...The multiple independently targeted reentry vehicle (MIRV) could spin off its warheads at diverse targets—Kiev, Minsk, Leningrad, Moscow...

...The sum total is a massive array of political and economic power pressing feverishly for more and more money for the military...