CORRESPONDENCE
NUCLEAR MORALITY
Sirs:
For several reasons I can address
myself only to the two last questions
in the Winter Issue of this magazine.
They read, Number 6 : "Do you think
the advance of Communism can be
stopped without nuclear conflict?"
Number 7: "Do you think the issues
at stake in the cold war, so decisive as
to be, worth a nuclear war?" The pre–
ceding questions (Numbers 1-5) deal
predominantly with matters of political
judgement and could be answered by
me only in terms of a sparsely informed
opinion, but not of a basic conviction.
My conviction is that it is ethically
not permissible to enter a war with
the intention to use nuclear weapons
first. The ethical reason is that a war,
fought with nuclear weapons, can, by
its very nature, never attain the goal
for which it is fought. Its result is
mutual destruction and neither the
preservation of freedom nor the vic–
tory of Communism. Therefore, the
question asked under Number 7 can–
not be answered. No issue at stake is
worth a war which involves self–
destruction and in which the issues
at stake would be annihilated together
with those for whom they are issues.
It may be-this is a military judge–
ment-that the advance of Communism
could not be stopped with conventional
weapons in the present moment. This
does not mean that the West has sub–
jected itself to Communism.
It
only
means that the West has to acknow–
ledge a temporary military superiority
of the armies which fight for Com–
munism. But a temporary superiority
is not a definite one. And,
in
the long
run, the military strength of the West
is superior to that of the Communists-
Hugh MacDiarmid
"the most powerful
intellectually and
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VLADIMIR NABOKOV'S
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LOLITA
311
