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PARTISAN REVIEW
And so I think that the real questions posed by the SDI are: do
we
think it is something that would be interesting and useful to have; and
how long do we think we can hang onto it; and is all of this process
going to be worth it? One way to conceptualize what the SDI is doing
is that the goal is to turn back the nuclear clock. President Reagan
has this vision that somehow or other we're going to turn back the
nuclear clock to some time in 1944 and essentially disinvent nuclear
weapons. I think realistically that the SDI, in concatenation with all
this other stuff we're doing, all these other damage limitation capa–
bilities that we're developing, and asymmetries between Soviet and
American damage limitation capabilities, does hold open the prospect
of turning back the nuclear clock to some time in the 1950s. A situa–
tion where we could incinerate the Soviet Union, and they might be
able to tear off an arm and a leg, but we'd be here and they wouldn't.
And the question is, did we really find that condition to be comfort–
able and useful in the 1950s_Are we going to be able to stay in 1952,
or is history going to repeat and are we going to just keep drifting
back into the sixties when the whole thing stabilizes. I think that that
is what the real debate is about here .
BARRY BELGOROD: But isn't that very educational for the Rus–
sians? That takes us back to what this gentleman told us: when we
had gross superiority over the Russians and didn't use it.
JOHN PIKE: Of course we did. All the time. We rattled our rockets
like crazy back then. The point is not to incinerate Russia . The point
is to get the Soviets to back down in some crisis far short of actually
using the things, to keep them from escalating. That's how we kicked
the Soviets out of Cuba.
BARRY BELGOROD: To get them to come to the bargaining table
and really talk business with us.
JOHN PIKE: But the administration doesn't want them to do that,
the administration wants to win the arms race.
EDITH KURZWEIL: No we don't.
DANIEL ROSE: Mr. Pike, with all due respect, this is not a "Star
Wars" discussion, this is a discussion ofyour geopolitical views which
is not relevant for the moment. Are there other questions?
GEORGE CHAPLINE : No one responded to the point Bernard
Grossman raised about whether or not deploying a defensive system
would create a motivation for greatly reducing offensive nuclear weap–
ons . In fact we have the motivation now to decrease offensive nucle;ir
weapons in the sense that the person who strikes first
now
has a great
