tbray@mprvaxa (11/21/83)
The following are (hopefully) *serious* answers to Mr. Craver's questions
to disarmament proponents (I am one).
Q. I would like to know why the possibility of nuclear war has suddenly
become such a "hot" issue...
A. Good question. I see three big reasons for the increased urgency of
late.
The first is the loss of momentum in the arms-control negotiations.
Up to and through the early 70's, arms control had all sorts of problems
and setbacks, but there was measurable forward progress - the Test-Ban
treaties, the ABM treaty, the SALT treaties, etc. The last few
years, though, there has been a lot more tough talk, an accelerated
pace of weapons development and deployment, and actual retrograde motion
in the the arms negotiation process.
The second is more technical. It is perceived that a lot of the
newer technologies - the fancy tactical nukes, the hard-to-verify and
(in the near future) hard-to-stop cruise technology, and the neutron
bomb, significantly lower the nuclear threshold and increase the danger
of starting something.
The third is political. The current leadership in both superpowers
seems, (at least to non-Americans) not only intransigent and bloody-minded,
but actually quite ignorant and uninformed about geopolitical realities.
>From where I sit, the Reagan foreign policy in Latin America and Southeast
Asia just seems out and out dumb as well as dangerous. The same could be
said of the Soviets - whatever they may have gained in Afghanistan, at
major cost to world peace, they have certainly lost on balance in both
military and polictical capital.
Q. If our superiority over Russia prevented a nuclear war all these years,
why should we think that parity or inferiority will work better?
A. It is my impression that most experts in nuclear weapons technology
and contemporary military stragegy (outside the White House and Republican
party) would argue that the United States currently has a heavy qualitative
and strategic advantage over the Soviets. This is true in terms of the
quality of weaponry, the degree of technical sophistication, the
basing locations, and particularly in terms of invulnerability to
counterforce attack. The US submarine force is essentially invulnerable,
while the Soviet force has to sneak out via the Bering, the Iceland
straight, the Baltic, or the Sea of Japan, all of which straights are
heavily surveilled by the US. The US, in fact, can and does track all
Soviet submarines which are out of Soviet territorial waters. For
clear-eyed and nonpolitical information concerning these questions,
I highly recommend the series of articles in Scientific American over
the last few years.
Q. It seems to me that it is the existance of nuclear arms that has prevented
another World War, between NATO and the USSR. Suppose that we managed nuclear
disarmament - how would this war be prevented? (Note: this is not an
endorsement of the MAD philosophy.)
A. It seems to me that MAD might in fact be valid in the short term,
if the level of risk were squeezed down from its currently unacceptably
high level. It also seems to me that if, in the long run, we can't work
out a superior alternative to MAD, maybe we deserve to wipe ourselves out.
Q. And once such a war got started, what would prevent both sides from
re-building nukes and throwing them as fast as they built them?
A. There would be nobody left to build and throw.
Q. It also seems to me that "building down" would leave us in a similar
condition to where we were 30 or so years ago, except that we'd be
at parity with the USSR. If we no longer have enough bombs to drive
the human race to extinction, a nuclear war becomes an "acceptable risk".
A. You are in fact explicitly promoting MAD with this argument. I think
we are over the "acceptable risk" level by a factor of about 1000, and
would cheerfully accept a cut in armament levels by a factor of a mere
100 or 500 in the short term.
Tim Bray ...decvax!microsoft!ubc-vision!mprvaxa!tbray