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PARTISAN REVIEW
remains highly
unlikely
that either would yield to a temptation imply–
ing such tremendous risks - all the more so as neither su perpower is
governed by men sharing Hitler's mad belief that he must win the
world now or never. But it is no longer logically
impossible ,
as it was
in the past.
This double uncertainty, implied both in the reduced credi–
bility of "extended deterrence" and in a nuclear arms race in a situa–
tion of unstable balance, explains why, all over the free nations of
the Western world, both expert groups and peace movements have
begun to urge efforts to reduce or altogether abandon the depen–
dence of security on nuclear weapons. In West Germany, where this
dependence was mainly on
foreign
nuclear weapons, but had been
viewed with equanimity as long as it seemed to promise total secur–
ity, the uncertainty has destroyed the former equanimity of many
people, and fear of a nuclear holocaust has taken its place .
It
follows that the decisive motive of the German peace move–
ment is stark fear. This does not imply that it is selfish: in most cases
it is a moral fear for one's fellows as well, including the enemy - as
the great influence of the movement in the churches underlines. But
it does make for an irrational attitude toward the problem. I said that ex–
pert groups and peace movements in a number of Western countries
are looking for ways to reduce dependence on nuclear weapons for
basically the same reasons: but none of the expert groups and by no
means all the peace movements favor unilateral renunciation of nu–
clear weapons, as the German (and the British) peace movement
does: those others are guided more by sober political analysis and
less by irrational fear .
II.
One factor that has helped the West German peace movement
to become both as strong and as irrational as it is has been a failure
of political education, particularly of the young generation, about
the nature and roots of the East-West conflict in the course of the
past decade. On the whole, detente in the form of West German
Ostpolitik under the socio-liberal coalition governments of Willy
Brandt and Helmut Schmidt has been a remarkable success - so
much so that the more conservative government of Helmut Kohl is
working hard to continue that policy despite the cooling of overall
