The Price Must Be Paid

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Excerpts from Andrei Sakharov's open letter to American Physicist Sidney Drell:

On the danger: All-out nuclear war [could] cause man to be destroyed as a biological species and could even cause the annihilation of life on earth. If the "nuclear threshold" is crossed, i.e., if any country uses a nuclear weapon even on a limited scale, the further course of events would be difficult to control and the most probable result would be swift escalation. It is relatively unimportant how the "nuclear threshold" is crossed—as a result of a preventive nuclear strike or in the course of a war fought with conventional weapons, when a country is threatened with defeat, or simply as a result of an accident. In view of the above, nuclear weapons only make sense as a means of deterring nuclear aggression by a potential enemy. Nuclear weapons cannot be viewed as a means of restraining aggression carried out by means of conventional weapons.

On conventional arms: For a long time, the West has not been relying on its "conventional" armed forces as a means sufficient for repelling a potential aggressor. [In contrast] the U.S.S.R. and the other countries of the socialist camp have armies with great numerical strength and are rearming them intensively, sparing no resources. [So] it is necessary to restore parity in the field of conventional weapons [and that] is only possible by investing large resources and by an essential change in the psychological atmosphere in the West. In the final analysis this is necessary to prevent nuclear war, and war in general.

On a nuclear freeze: Precisely because an all-out nuclear war means collective suicide, we can imagine that a potential aggressor might count on a lack of resolve on the part of the country under attack to take the step leading to that suicide, i.e., it could count on its victim capitulating for the sake of saving what could be saved. There must be a strategic parity of nuclear forces so that neither side will venture to embark on a limited or regional nuclear war. Of course I realize that in attempting not to lag behind a potential enemy in any way, we condemn ourselves to an arms race that is tragic. But the main danger is slipping into an all-out nuclear war. If the probability of such an outcome could be reduced at the cost of another ten or 15 years of the arms race, then perhaps that price must be paid while, at the same time, diplomatic, economic, ideological, political, cultural and social efforts are made to prevent a war.