bills@persci.UUCP (07/04/85)
The following is excerpted from an article in the Sunday, June 31, Seattle Times (apparently by Ernest Conine of the LA Times). It is being posted to initiate thoughtful discussions on the topic, at the risk of being flamed. Passages considered unimportant are deleted, for brevity. No (conscious) attempt to alter the essence of the article has been made. If you are interested in more, it is recommended that you check this copy of the Seattle Times or recent issues of the LA Times. It may have also been printed in other regional papers. You might also want to check out the "current" issue of "Foreign Affairs". ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Don't mail me flames, I'm not interested in them. These may not be my opinions. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- For 35 years, Albert Wohlstetter, one of the country's leading strategic thinkers, has been advising Washington on what kinds of strategy and forces are best calculated to avoid nuclear war without joining the "better-Red-than- dead" club. The LA-based analyst has been a major intellectual force behind the effort to avoid the spread of nuclear weapons, the drive to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons by developiong non-nuclear weapons to do the same jobs, and the development of safeguards to prevent unauthorized use of nuclear weapons. The nature of Wohlstetter's advice to the Reagan administration remains private, but in the current issue of "Foreign Affairs" he makes an intriguing contribution to the ongoing dialogue about "nuclear winter". [..brief description of nuclear winter...] Wohlstetter does not really challenge the conclusion that enough nuclear warheads aimed at enough highly flammable targets might indeed put the world into a deep freeze. His quarrel is with the marriage between nuclear-winter theorists and those who believe that the only way to avoid nuclear war is to keep alive the threat of global annihilation through the deliberate targeting of civilian populations. Like the U.S Catholic bishops in their report two years ago, the Californian finds the threat to exterminate tens of millions of civilians morally repugnant. In the upside-down intellectual climate of our time, however, those who favor a nuclear deterrent based solely on the threat of mass extermination are frequently looked upon as the good guys, while those who want to limit the potential horror are accused of scheming to make nuclear war thinkable. Under the doctrine of mutual-assured destruction (MAD) that emerged during the 1960s, this country supposedly would respond to even a limited use by the Soviet Union with all-out nuclear retaliation against Soviet cities. (Actually, most American nuclear weapons are aimed at military targets rather than Soviet population centers, and have been since the dawn of the missile age. Soviet military literature suggests that the same is true of the other side.) In recent years, some influential folk [...] want to deprive the American president of any means of retaliation other than a massive blow against Soviet cities - a step that would guarantee the wholesale destruction of America in return. The goal is deterrence, but if deterrence failed it would leave our president only two choices: surrender or national suicide. To [...these...] folk, the emergence of nuclear-winter theory is like manna from heaven. They reason that a country tempted to use nuclear weapons would be deterred not only bby the prospect of massive retaliation but by the likelihood of extinction from its own weapons. However, as Wohlsetter convincingly points out, there are some very dangerous holes in such logic. To begin with, if American political leaders were known to believe in nuclear winter but the Soviets didn't, there is an abvious danger that the Kremlin would not be deterred from using nuclear weapons. In the more probable case that Soviet leaders come to take nuclear winter seriously, it is still unlikely that they would react in the way that this country's nuclear-winter enthusiasts like to think. Most military analysts agree that a massive surprise nuclear attack - with hundreds of combustible cities in the fireball areas - is the least probable beginning of nuclear war, with or without the threat of nuclear winter. Such a conflict is much more likely to begin with selective nuclear attacks (against troop staging areas, airfields or the like) in order to avoid defeat in a conventional war. As Wohlstetter observes, the Soviets could design an attack that would avoid nuclear winter by using relatively small but accurate nuclear weapons, including earth penetrators, that can destroy military targets while stirring up far less smoke and dust (and killing far fewer people) than the large, indiscriminate weapons favored by MAD extremists. Furthermore, the temptation to risk such an attack would be greater if the American president's only choices were surrender or massive retaliation, with the attendant risk of nuclear winter, than if he had available discriminate weapons of his own. To Wohlstetter, the logic is inescapable that a good supply of non-nuclear "smart" bombs and small but militarily effective nuclear warheads offers the best hope of avoiding nuclear war of any dimension. [...] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- This is a test. This is only a test. In a real emer<SCREEEEE......