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the most articulate of the critics, such as Michael Howard, insist that
some response must be made to the Soviet nuclear build-up in
Europe. The movements in the streets-and now in the British
Labor party and among an increasing number of the German Social
Democrats-have not advocated strengthening conventional forces
as an alternative to the double decision but have attacked the basic
premises of the Western alliance: that there really is a Soviet threat,
that the United States and Western Europe share fundamental
values and political institutions , that there is a fundamental
difference between American presence in Western Europe and
Soviet control of Eastern Europe, that Europe without American
support would succumb eventually to Soviet domination . In short,
the antinuclear groups and their intellectual spokesmen are not only
antinuclear: they are antidefense . There seems to be little interest in
Western Europe in raising the nuclear threshold by increasing
conventional forces, especially given the current economic crisis. A
reading of the left-wing journals from Britain and West Germany
makes it clear that many young and sophisticated intellectuals
simply do not believe the Soviet threat is anything more than
Ronald Reagan ' s nightmare and that it is his nightmares that are
the central problem.
It is one thing for those coming of age politically today to dispel
the reality of Soviet power.
It
is quite another for intellectuals who
lived through the 1960s-and had time to reflect on their experience
in the 1970s-to do so. How can they blind themselves to the
dictatorial and utterly ruthless character of the Soviet Union and its
complete indifference to any moral considerations or to world
opinion, or to the living standards of its own people , which can be
subordinated to the most extensive military build-up?
This is not to deny that the West needs a coherent strategy that
coordinates diplomatic, political, military, economic, social, and
ideological considerations in dealing with the Soviet Union. But the
only leverage the West can exert on such a regime to reduce the
number of its missiles is the counterthreat of its own missiles,
combined with the power of Western public opinion . Unless the
Soviets are confronted with such a counterforce, they have no reason
to bargain in good faith in arms-control negotiations in Geneva. The
objective effect, if not subjective intention, of the West European
disarmers is to deprive the West of its only leverage on the Soviets to
remove their
SS~20s.
No wonder that the Soviets are so deeply
