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Actually, as Zuckerman and others have pointed out, even a
"surgical" first strike by either side would kill something like ten or
twenty million people, for it would at a minimum necessarily
include destruction of the command centers in the capital cities of
Moscow and Washington . American strategic planners have
themselves long doubted the deterrent credibility of a pure MAD
strategy even without assuming, as Schell does, a totally
annihilating first strike. That is why for years before Reagan took
office American missiles have been aimed at Soviet missile bases and
military installations as well as at the "countervalue" targets of
cities and industrial sites . Curiously, antinuclear protesters-that is,
those who do not advocate outright unilateral disarmament-seem
to be the only true believers in MAD: periodically, they have
denounced supposed changes in policy on discovering the actual
targeting of American missiles; a few have gone so far as to claim
that counterforce targeting in itself indicates a planned first strike or,
at the very least, is bound to tempt hawkish leaders like those of the
Reagan administration to consider such a strike. Expressions of
alarm have been particularly clamorous in the past three years since
Carter' s Presidential Directive 59 and the Reagan administration's
declared policy of preparing to fight a nuclear war consisting of a
protracted series of nuclear exchanges between the superpowers.
Administration officials have insisted to the contrary that
preparations to fight and win a nuclear war are intended only to
strengthen deterrence . Yet the Minsk-Pinsk ploys involved are
chilling. Moreover, their statements have been disturbingly
ambiguous, as demonstrated by Theodore Draper, who has also
dissected the casuistry and bad logic of Schell's case against
deterrence
per se.
Draper, like Zuckerman, favors a policy of
"minimum deterrence" that would stop or decisively slow down the
nuclear arms race while requiring greater investment in "conven–
tional" military forces, most notably in Europe .
But this would scarcely satisfy Schell , who will settle for
nothing less than a total transformation in the form of a world-state
that abolishes not only nuclear weapons but war itself. He concedes
that the fear of nuclear war has , in effect, already eliminated any
possible resort by the superpowers to war against each other, but
passes lightly over this in proposing his total solution to the
threatened total destruction he has described. Antinuclear partisans
are, in my experience , peculiarly insensitive to the contention that
nuclear weapons have protected us for more than a generation from
