REFLECTIONS

...The Soviet Union would dismantle almost four times as many warheads—a total of 1,320—on medium-range missiles in Eastern Europe...

...Past arms-control treaties have done no more than impose ceilings on numbers of weapons...

...Once most of the radioactive debris was contained within the ground, once the mushroom-cloud images disappeared from newspaper front pages and television screens, public anxiety was eased and the bombmakers were free to conduct business as usual...

...their nearness and visibility may be the spur we need to bestir ourselves to action...

...The United States could and doubtless would beef up its air-launched and sea-launched cruise-missile forces in Europe...

...Over the next three to five years, the United States would dismantle 316 nuclear warheads on its freshly deployed ground-launched cruise and Pershing II missiles in Britain and Western Europe, as well as seventy-two American-controlled warheads on West German Pershing missiles...

...In the light of these technological realities, the muzzling of a few hundred medium-range missiles in Europe is about as relevant to today's nuclear-arms threat as the melting down of a wagonload of Napoleonic cannonballs would be...

...But the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 turned out to be no such thing...

...Then a series of events stirred a revival of deep concern about the arms race...

...The movement declined again to some extent after rallies and blockades failed to prevent deployment of the first cruise and Pershing missiles in 1983, but it has remained a major force and continues to focus on the politically sensitive Euromissiles...

...He should not be let off the hook by coming up with such a worthless bauble as the Euromissile deal...

...Instead of ending the nuclear arms race or even bringing it under control, the treaty set the stage for the expansion that continues to this day...

...What's more, American and Soviet strategists could easily assign the tasks and targets of the current Euromissiles to other weapons systems not affected by the agreement...

...Some even call it a victory for the peace movement, and cite these reasons: 11 Though the number of warheads to be disposed of is relatively small, the elimination of any warheads by mutual agreement is a breakthrough...

...The public pressure that forced the superpowers to the negotiating table in 1963 arose not only from concern over fallout— particularly over the poisoning of infants by their mothers' irradiated milk—but also from fear of the Bomb itself, culminating in the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war...

...Just as the disappearance of the mushroom cloud helped dismantle an active anti-bomb movement twenty-four years ago, the phasing out of the Euromissiles (while replacing them with less visible nuclear systems) could propagate a dangerous and wholly unjustified sense of security...

...Similarly, nuclear war-fighting technology has reached the stage in 1987 where the number of weapons on line is of less and less significance...

...Today, a single warhead can match the capabilities of a dozen warheads produced two decades ago...

...That doesn't mean insisting on the abolition of all nuclear weapons at one fell swoop—an impossible goal that ignores the power of the vast constituency that props up the arms race...

...and Soviet bombmakers believed they could abandon atmospheric and oceanic testing (which produced adverse environmental and political side effects) without jeopardizing the momentum of weapons development...

...The European peace movement lay relatively dormant for more than a decade while thousands upon thousands of nuclear weapons were quietly introduced without protest as part of the "modernization" of NATO forces...

...This would also have the desirable side effect of eliminating nuclear power...

...First, in 1977, came the Carter Administration's attempt to deploy the neutron bomb, the answer to the Pentagon's long quest for "enhanced-radiation" warheads that would kill Soviet soldiers while minimizing collateral property damage...

...Senate...

...Despite such grave shortcomings, the Euromissile deal is being hailed in many quarters as a great leap forward in the peace process...

...In 1979, NATO decided to deploy the new Euromissiles, ostensibly to counter Soviet deployment of medium-range missiles but actually to place on line for the first time a revolutionary new weapons system, the cruise missile—a pilotless, ground-hugging, electronically guided aircraft with a computer in its nose and a nuclear warhead in its belly...

...The key question is no longer how many nuclear weapons a superpower possesses, but how "smart" they are...

...11 Though only Europe is immediately affected, the agreement could revive the long-stalled strategic arms limitation talks, perhaps leading to a new SALT treaty...

...As it turned out, underground testing actually fueled the arms race, since it was cheaper and could be done more secretly than testing in the open air...

...But it does mean a serious search for airtight undertakings to curb or eliminate all nuclear-weapons production...

...From those discussions emerged an agreement to ban nuclear-bomb tests in the atmosphere and in the oceans...

...Already there is hopeful talk of a reduction in strategic forces—one that would cut deeper than the agreement signed in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter and Chairman Leonid Brezhnev but never ratified by the U.S...

...In 1963, because of advances in the technology of underground nuclear-weapons testing, U.S...

...Weapons tests that foul the atmosphere or cruise and Pershing convoys that rumble through the fields of Europe serve as reminders of the continuing danger of nuclear holocaust...

...nuclear-weapons establishment is the only obstacle to the early signing of a comprehensive test-ban treaty that would plug the loophole left in 1963...

...The pact was widely hailed at the time as the beginning of the end of the nuclear arms race...

...In response to the adverse reaction, Carter held up deployment of the neutron bomb, then went ahead with it when the hubbub died down...

...Aroused by the new missiles and further provoked by the Reagan Administration's bellicose rhetoric, people in Britain and Western Europe began to mount massive demonstrations and protests that helped rekindle peace activism in the United States and elsewhere...

...It merely sent the weapons tests underground, removing them from public sight and thereby dissipating the public pressure on the bombmakers...

...of battlefield nuclear weapons controlled by the superpowers...

...And with the introduction of Star Wars research at a cost now approaching $4 billion a year—more than the United States was spending on all nuclear-warhead production just a few years ago—the nuclear arms race is on the threshold of space-based technological breakthroughs that could render current strategic delivery systems (and strategic arms reductions) obsolete...

...The field testing of nuclear devices was then, and largely remains today, the indispensable component of any nuclear-weapons development program, so the political opposition to testing presented a serious challenge to the weapons establishment...

...In the absence of a comprehensive approach that promises real cutbacks in the superpowers' arsenals and offers the prospect of true nuclear disarmament, it would be better to retain the present dirty, outmoded systems...

...It was a cheaper and more efficient way of waging nuclear war...

...That hard lesson is worth recalling now, in light of the euphoric reaction to an impending agreement on elimination of intermediate-range nuclear forces from Europe...

...the Soviets could readily designate European targets for some of their intercontinental missiles based in Asia and now aimed at the United States...

...Transferring the tests to underground caverns was preferable, from the bomb-makers' perspective, to halting them altogether, and it proved to be the means of deflating the peace movement...

...K The Euromissile agreement rolls back the nuclear-force structure in Europe to the level of the late 1970s, before NATO decided to deploy cruise and Pershing II missiles in response to what the alliance called a Warsaw Pact nuclear buildup...

...A comparable political dynamic is at work today, especially in Britain and Western Europe...

...Instead of settling for partial solutions that ignore technological realities, the public should insist that the superpowers pursue a comprehensive approach...

...Even more decisive steps toward nuclear disarmament could come through comprehensive, verifiable agreements to ban the manufacture of warheads and their components as well as the processing of nuclear materials...

...The stubborn resistance of the U.S...

...The world's yearnings for a relaxation of tensions and Mikhail Gorbachev's vigorous peace agenda have brought enormous pressure to bear on President Reagan to produce a persuasive peace plan before the end of his Administration...

...The rollback, it is argued, will diminish nuclear tensions in Europe and eventually allow the continent to become a nuclear-free zone...

...One such approach, readily verifiable, is a total ban on the testing of all nuclear weapons...

...The proposed agreement has some obvious limitations: Only about 4 per cent of the world's nuclear arsenal would be affected, and even with the withdrawal of all the medium-range Euromissiles, Europe still would be seeded with thousands Samuel H. Day Jr., a member of The Progressive's Editorial Advisory Board, is with Nukewatch, a peace organization in Madison, Wisconsin...

...Europeans recoiled from the notion of a weapon that placed a higher premium on physical property than on human life...

...Through the late 1950s and early 1960s, these concerns mounted and fused into a worldwide political force that gathered new momentum with each nuclear detonation over Nevada, Central Asia, or the Western Pacific...

...For reasons that are both technological and political, the high hopes swirling around the pending agreement are likely to end in disappointment and frustration, just as the expectations for the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty did a quarter of a century ago...