Nuclear Countdown

The overriding issue for me since 1945 has been control of nuclear weapons. All issues, foreign and domestic--and in the United States the two cannot be disentangled--are judged by me in terms of the degree to which they contribute to increasing or decreasing the vulnerability of humankind to destruction both of its people and of its means of subsistence through a nuclear exchange and the increased proliferation of nuclear weapons. Judged in these terms, the 1970s were a terrible decade.

The partial Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1963, the weight of the anti-nuclear weapons movement in the United States (and also in the United Kingdom and elsewhere). The majority of people who came of political age since that time, including the current editors of the Crimson and those to whom they speak among their fellow undergraduates, have not had nightmares about nuclear destruction--nightmares common among standard, in the early 1960s. Since nuclear catastrophe has not occurred, it is not a salient issue for most younger politically concerned individuals.

In the fight in favor of the hydrogen bomb (a single specimen of which completely flattened the island of Eniwetok in the Pacific and renendered it an uninhabitable, flat desert), Cold-War-oriented advocates of the hydrogen bomb sought to erase the distinction between large conventional weapons and small nuclear ones, so-called tactical nuclear weapons, by use of the cute term "nukes" to refer to these allegedly minor nuclear weapons. Today to see the sign "no nukes" on the bumper stickers of Volkswagens and other cars driven by the educated elite at Harvard and elsewhere, brings back memories of that era of seeking to maintain the vital distinction between merely dreadful conventional weapons (which needlessly destroyed Dresden and fire-bombed Tokyo) and nuclear weapons capable through radiation as well as direct damage of the long-term destruction of life as we know it.

"No nukes" now refers to what are in contrast the relatively minor dangers of nuclear power plants which offer environmentalist groups easy targets to attack corporate villains such as public utilities. There are undoubted hazards in nuclear power, especially on the question of the disposal of nuclear wastes, but no serious physicist with whom I have discussed the issue (I spent several weeks at Oak Ridge in making myself less of an amateur on this issue) believes that even the most serious damage that, for example, might have resulted at Three Mile Island would be a calamity comparable to a major nuclear exchange. Even a relatively small number of nuclear weapons now available in such overwhelming numbers is enough to make Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) a deterrent to anyone who believes in Murphy's Law: that if anything can go wrong, it will. To hear Americans at the Salt II hearings discuss the possibilities of a first strike in which, as one put it, we could incinerate the Soviet Union, is terrifying.

Such talk is terrifying in part because the Soviet Union already feels itself sufficiently threatened from within and without. It has become a more dangerous adversary than it would under conditions of free trade under most-favored-nation status and greater American willingness to recognize that we must live on the same planet with this major nuclear power as they must live with us. Hence, I have opposed the human rights doctrine of President Jimmy Carter form the very outset despite my full recognition of the terrible conditions of life in the Soviet Union, though far less terrible than in Stalin's era so that we know more about them and have more contact. Dissidents are allowed to leave, rather than being executed. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union faces a restless internal population, even less productive than we Americans, notably in agriculture; it faces possible dissension of its Moslem and other minorities which grow in numbers in the way growing, but more dangerously as it is allied with Moslem nationalism elsewhere. It faces the restless "people's democracies," and much of the alleged strength of the Warsaw Pact troops is not directed at Western Europe, most of whose responsible leaders favor the Salt II Treaty, but it is aimed to control increasingly or intermittently restless populations of these Warsaw Pact "allies."

For me, much can improve in the world, including human rights (which can be dealt with through quiet diplomacy as has been the case in protecting some of the dissidents in Yugoslavia and even in Chile) without the public humiliation and fear of internal explosion in what is still largely a passive population no longer numerically dominated by the Great Russian sector of the population. To humiliate the Soviet Union and to take chances on whoever may be the successor to Brezhnev is extraordinarily destabilizing at a time when Pakistan appears to be expanding its nuclear potential, when Israel and even Japan evidently have nuclear weapons or at least the potential of building these, and which I think even of countries such as Libya and Iraq which would see no need to exercise restraint if the Soviet Union cannot agree on minimal restraint.

Indeed, the seventies have been the period where the Middle East has been perhaps the main source of possible danger through a conceivable nuclear confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States. Endemic instability there was heightened when the Israelis, who had the chance for magnaminity after the Six Day War of 1967, might possibly have created an atmosphere of relatively benign feeling, not only vis-a-vis Egypt, but also vis-a-vis other adversary Arab states, by being willing to trade occupied land and the people in them for peace and secure boundaries. In stead, a non-adversary state, namely Lebanon, has been shattered, and the lack of inventiveness and imagination as well as magnanimity among Israelis in power in effect helped prepare the ground for the 1973 war. The stalemate within Israel now rests between the fanatical proponents of expansion and the very large number of Israelis who would be willing to trade land for an assured peace if they could secure a government capable of negotiating such a peace or even interested in it. Many American Zionists, with notable exceptions on the Harvard faculty and elsewhere, have been captives of party line of the Israeli government in power. As another consequence we see the heightened tension between some blacks and some American Jews for whom Israel and Southern Africa are symbols of international conflict, refracted from domestic politics and reflecting back upon the politics.

Indeed, I would say that during the seventies, the United States has grown more truculent, more xenophobic, and more cut off from the rest of the world--though it is by no means the nation in defeat or retreat many claim it to be. On the contrary, as the sale of bluejeans and jazz and rock and other popular records indicates, it is a model for much of the rest of the world which may attack us ideologically and envy us while imitating some of the features of our society which many educated Americans would consider our least attractive ones.

The basic strength and well-being of the United States is not being built on increased nuclear weapons, or the MX missile which President Carter has had to promise in the hope--which may turn out to be in vain--of assuring the passage of a treaty which those truly concerned with disarmament on the Left attack as much too limited in scope. It is now of such overriding symbolic importance, however, that its defeat in the Senate would seem to me to unravel what little fabric of international comity there exists, and possibly to force the Chinese and the Soviet Union back together again, for we are not the only ones who can play the "China card." I am in favor of a draft, or at the very least registration for the draft, to show that we are prepared if need be to defend ourselves by conventional weapons, since I do not believe this country sufficiently disciplined for the kind of active non-violent defense which professor Gene Sharp of the Center for International Affairs has brilliantly described in his writings.

To the dismay of an internationalist like myself, nationalism has proven to be the strongest force in the world--a surprise and disappointment also to Marxists. As long as this remains so, we must be prepared to defend our interests by domestic measures that will strengthen our economy through conservation, the use of nuclear power as an interim measure until we can develop still safer sources of energy (or else we shall fight a class war between the educated who want amenities and the less-educated who would also like amenities but who want first of all jobs and heat). I would be very happy if our environmentalists and consumer advocates, such as Ralph Nader, called for a removal of the tariff from Japanese automobiles, for the import of Toyotas by others than the well-to-do the import reduce our consumption of vanishing fossil fuels. Even more important is the rebuilding of our railroads rather than building more bombers when we already have ample means of delivery of nuclear weapons through our tripartite system.

I have followed the single thread of nuclear weapons and attached some other strands to that thread to suggest a bleak view of the 70s. This would be a one-sided picture for me personally, since I can think of more than one issue at a time. The 70s have also seen what I regard as the mot significant cultural development of the decade: namely, the women's movements in all their variety and, at times, short-sighted over-confidence leading to backlash. The women's movements have affected not only the upper educated strata, but have filtered into the rest of the society and have, of course, affected men as well as women, and perhaps in some respects, more than women--not to speak of the children. If we can live through the next years of nuclear weapons peril, and the dangers within this country of civil strife--what I sometimes think of as traffic jam litigious democracy--I can envisage benign futures which some wings of the women's movement foreshadow with their combined interest in nurturing the oncoming population of children and tough-minded realism about contemporary affairs.

Contrary to what many think, I do not see the 70s as a period of greater conservatism among the educated, but of greater cynicism and mistrust, and also greater toleration-including tolerance for egocentricity and a pornography of violence--but also tolerance for minority groups and for women.

The 70s are also a period, worldwide, both of intense nationalism and intense ethnic chauvinism, and the dangers of fragmentation which are not totally absent from these United States. Yet we are still a vital country, the intellectual and artistic capital of the would, and if we can get through the next years and maintain a modest comity of nationality without xenophobia, there are many grounds for hope. We must work for these, whatever our moments of despair, whether self-indulgent or prophetic.

David Riesman '31 is Ford Professor of Social Sciences.