88
DENNIS H. WRONG
case in point. How many people, even among top policy-makers, can
persist in coolly regarding a
civil
defense program as a mere show to
persuade the Russians of our firmness of intention? We have to make
the Russians believe that our responses are at the very least un–
predictable, but we appear able to do so only by creating a situation
in which they really become unpredictable and spread confusion.
The situation of the Soviet leaders is probably not so very different,
despite their more highly centralized control over their society.
I doubt whether the Soviet leaders would unleash a nuclear first
strike or take any military action of any kind against a vital Western
interest so long as we retained the capacity to kill millions of Russians
in a single blow, even
if
our retaliatory destructive capacity fell be–
hind theirs with the result that nuclear war would mean total death
for us and no more than terrible injury to them. I may be mistaken
in
this
belief, but at the present time the only balance between risks
I am able to strike in my own mind is to favor an end to the weapons
race without American abandonment of the nuclear deterrent, even
if
the capabilities of the deterrent should as a result become less
absolute and below Russian capabilities. We can begin by ceasing all
testing, preparing to dismantle part of our military and industrial
nuclear establishment and continuing to work for a general nuclear
disarmament agreement.
It is hard for anyone under forty whose entire intellectual history
does not predate the Second World War to assess the effects of the
cold war on political thought and speculation. My immediate re–
action, in opposition to what the editors' question seems to suggest,
is to say that political thought and and speculation have been greatly
stimulated and have become far less parochial than at any time since
the beginning of
this
century, even though our sense of political
possibility has clearly contracted. The effort to understand totalitarian–
ism, and the light it has appeared to shed-though sometimes re–
flected too luridly--even on the fairly remote past, has added a new
dimension to political thought. We have only begun to explore the
politics of economic development and the new kinds of interaction
between nationalism and its social and cultural setting in the rising
non-Western nations. Were the 1930's so rich in political
thought
as
distinct from action and ideological affirmation?
Yet speculation about possibilties within Western society today
