The Nation: The Pornography of Bomb

We will not be able to regulate nuclear weapons around the world in 1999 any better than we can control the Saturday-night special, heroin, or pornography today.

—Harvard's Thomas Schelling

This is the chilling conclusion of a symposium in the November issue of Harvard Magazine. In it, five arms-control experts judge that some nuclear wars are likely to occur before this century's end. The five are: Schelling, a professor of political economy; Biochemist Paul Doty, head of Harvard's Science in International Affairs program; Physicist Richard Garwin; Chemist George Kistiakowsky, a former executive of the Manhattan Project; and M.I.T. Political Scientist George Rathjens, formerly a special assistant to the director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

The participants expect that nuclear war will strike as a direct result of bombs spreading around the world like an "epidemic disease"; that no current disarmament policy can curb the spread; and that a quasi-dictatorial world government may be the only way to extinguish all risks of war. The proliferation of "peaceful" nuclear power only aggravates the danger because, as Rathjens writes, "by the end of the century there will be several thousand reactors around the world, each producing enough material to build a weapon a week."

A false sense of confidence may be fatal, warns Doty: "We now have a period of relative public confidence that nuclear war is not imminent. We are apt to lose the vision of how absolutely catastrophic nuclear war is." While there is no foolproof solution, the authors variously argue that the U.S. should greatly intensify its disarmament efforts, restrict its sales of nuclear reactors to unstable countries, and do its best to lift up poor societies.