A Plea for Nuclear Balance

Soviet Dissident Andrei Sakharov joins the debate

He is confined to the drab, provincial city of Gorky, suffers from a heart condition for which the Soviet government has refused the treatment he requests, and had to stage a hunger strike 18 months ago to win permission for his daughter-in-law to leave the U.S.S.R. and join her husband in the U.S. But despite his internal exile and straitened circumstances, Physicist Andrei Sakharov, 62, wrote and somehow conveyed to American Physicist Sidney Drell a long open letter detailing his views on control of the nuclear weapons he once helped the Kremlin to develop.

As published in the current issue of the American journal Foreign Affairs, it should make a valuable—and valorous—contribution to nuclear discussions. It presents the kind of balanced and unexpected assessment that upsets and surprises many people who argue from fixed positions in the U.S. nuclear debate. Long a champion of arms control, he dismays supporters of the nuclear-freeze movement by saying in effect not yet, not now. Long a critic of new weapons systems, he confounds opponents of the MX by reluctantly finding it needed, at least for now. Lest the Reagan Administration take too much comfort from that, he pleads the urgency of serious arms negotiations.

Balance indeed is the keynote of Sakharov's stand. With impressive bravery, he condemns his government for its excessive buildup in both conventional and nuclear weapons and for aggressive actions like the invasion of Afghanistan. While expressing deep sympathy for the peace movement in the West, he chides "many of those participating" because they assail NATO's plans to install U.S. intermediate-range missiles in Western Europe and "entirely ignore" the deployment of Soviet missiles that prompted those plans. He is equally forceful in portraying as highly dangerous NATO'S strategy of relying on tactical nuclear weapons to deter Communist aggression in Europe. In Sakharov's view, the firing of a single nuclear weapon of any size anywhere would be all too likely to lead to all-out war. He urges a big Western buildup in conventional arms to offset present Soviet superiority and end the West's tacit dependence on nuclear weapons to close the conventional gap, while gloomily questioning: "Will the West's politicians be able to carry out such a restructuring?"

In particular, Sakharov insists that nuclear arms reductions, which he considers supremely important, should be used to preserve or restore "parity" at all levels of nuclear weaponry: tactical, "regional" and intercontinental. The reason: an aggressor who had an advantage in one category of weapons might be tempted to try nuclear blackmail, and "there would be little cause for joy if, ultimately, the aggressor's hopes proved false and the aggressor country perished along with the rest of mankind." Thus, Sakharov regretfully rejects the idea of a nuclear freeze because it would leave the Soviet Union with a huge lead in heavy land-based missiles.