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least have a material base, one enters an even more abstract and
cerebral realm of tortuous calculations that amount to imaginings of
imaginings: what the enemy thinks we think they think that we think
and so on, almost but not quite in infinite regress. R. D . Laing's
psychic "knots" are grotesquely magnified on a collective scale . A
better analogy perhaps is the old Jewish joke about two merchants,
one of whom berates the other for telling him truthfully that he is
going to Minsk though intending to deceive nonetheless because he
knows his listener will assume he is lying and is really going to Pinsk.
In this hall of distorted echoes questions are pondered, such as
whether construction of fallout shelters and plans for evacuating
cities mean
a.
planned first strike and protection against a retaliatory
second strike . Or are such measures meant to reinforce deterrence of
the other side's first strike by showing a determination to avoid
losses so great as to make senseless a revengeful second strike? Just
about anything done by the United States or the Soviet Union
bearing on the possibility of nuclear war is open to multiple
interpretations by the strategic planners on both sides.
Nuclear disarmament movements inevitably enter into these
abstruse equations. They always confront the nearly insuperable
problem that, though they demand the disarmament of both
superpowers, their appeals reach and are able to influence only the
peoples of the West. They are vulnerable therefore to the charge,
whether advanced in good faith or bad, of risking the weakening of
American power to the advantage of the Soviet Union. Yet so awful
is the prospect of nuclear war that such movements are bound to
arise in a democracy whenever the international climate darkens,
the arms race intensifies, and our leaders indulge (like the Reagan
administration) in bellicose language.
But antinuclear protest is not only inevitable, it is also desirable
as a reminder to our leaders that their fellow citizens, to whom they
are accountable, continue to give top priority to the avoidance of
nuclear war. (I am referring, of course, to protest that is not pro–
Soviet, pacifist, or willing to countenance surrender or unilateral
disarmament as the surest road to peace.) There is always a danger
that politicians and military men will fall into the habit of thinking of
nuclear weapons as different only in degree from others, or that they
will become too entranced by the computer abstractions of strategic
planning and forget their remoteness from the world of action.
Politicians must answer to a public opinion that shouts its fear and
