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abhorrence of nuclear war, and it is the politicians who can restrain
the military men who can restrain the R&D technicians who, as
Solly Zuckerman contends in
Nuclear Illusion and Reality,
are most
susceptible to the technological mesmerization that accelerates the
arms race.
This, it seems to me , is an unanswerable justification for
activities promoting nuclear disarmament. One cannot simply
declare, as some like Edward Luttwak come close to doing, that
antinuclear activists in their ignorance and innocence ought to shut
up, go home and leave nuclear policy to the authorities and the
experts like Luttwak who advise them.
If
nuclear war has been a
sufficiently terrifying prospect to have deterred the leaders of the
superpowers for nearly forty years, it is too much to expect that the
citizens of a democracy will take a vow of silence when it comes to
expressing their fears on so vital a matter. That our adversary denies
this freedom to its subjects is scarcely germane , for the contrast is
precisely what makes "better red than dead" an unacceptable, even
odious, premise on which to base our foreign policy-however
self-evident it might become should the zero hour of total destruction
actually impend.
Yet it does not follow that specific proposals around which
nuclear disarmament campaigns rally-freeze, no first use ,
zero-option, opposition to particular offensive or defensive weapons
or to their deployment-should be immune to critical rejection if
they are meaningless, dangerous, or technically and militarily
impractical. Nor are we obliged to treat the apocalyptic visions and
language of antinuclear tractarians as sacrosanct for keeping before
us the horrible prospect that we must never forget if, at the same
time, they serve to distract us from a host of lesser dangers that are
lesser only in falling short of the ultimate disaster of unrestricted
nuclear war.
Such a disaster would truly be ultimate if it resulted in the
extinction of the species. This, and virtually this alone, is what
Jonathan Schell asks us to contemplate in his book
The Fate of the
Earth,
which, after its original three-part publication in the
New
Yorker,
became almost instantly a scriptural text for the current peace
movement with demonstrations and even organized protest groups
adopting its title to name themselves. The first and longest part of
the book paints a vivid, thoroughly detailed picture of total
devastation, drawing on everything from reports by Hiroshima
survivors to a wide variety of scientific estimates ranging from
