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foreign policies-if not always the societies-of the United States
and the Soviet Union are equally to blame for bringing the world to
the nuclear precipice and that therefore Europe must follow a third
way.
In England, the Great Equation has found its most articulate
exponent in E.P. Thompson, the well-known social historian.
Thompson's argument, in brief, states the following . Both the
United States and the Soviet Union are being driven forward by a
"logic of exterminism," which is pushing the world to certain
nuclear catastrophe through the action-reaction cycle of the arms
race . The arms race has transformed the societies of both the Soviet
Union and the United States into enormous military complexes,
each of which needs the other to justify its own military budgets and
to insure social control. Anti-imperialism in the East and
anticommunism in the West suppress democracy and socialism
effectively on both sides of the cold war. The cold war also serves a
"universal and profound human need," which Thompson calls
"bonding by exclusion" : we find our collective identity through fear
of the Other. The cold war becomes a habit , an "addiction"
completely removed from its explicit justifications. The Atlantic
alliance, formed at a moment of American strength and European
weakness, has outlived its usefulness and is now merely an
obfuscation for American hegemony over Western Europe, just as
the Warsaw Pact represents Soviet domination over Eastern Europe.
Thompson's political program follows directly from this
analysis. Dissolve the blocs. Demand a "nuclear-free zone from
Poland to Portugal." Develop a new European identity freed from
"born-again Christians and still-born Marxists. " Though the
disarmament movement must begin in the West, its example will be
contagious and spread to the Warsaw Pact countries . Without the
excuse of imperialist encirclement, politics and civil society will
reemerge in Eastern Europe. But even if peace movements do not
emerge in the East, the disarmament movement in the West must
continue its opposition to the NATO double decision and advocate
unilateral nuclear disarmament. Whatever the political differences
between the superpowers may be, they are insignificant compared to
the alternative of extermination . The central problem is not the
melodrama of the Soviet threat but the cold war itself leading
possibly to nuclear war.
As an analysis of nuclear strategy this is rather thin. It is not
