Living with Mega-Death

(11 of 13)
all too easy to imagine places that could become the Sarajevo of the nuclear age: Eastern Europe, where armed resistance to Soviet occupation could spread; Iran, where the U.S.S.R. might be tempted to fill the vacuum created by the collapse of Khomeini's rule; the Arabian Peninsula, where the U.S. Rapid Deployment Force and Soviet airborne units could fight over the oilfields; the Caribbean Basin, where even last week Washington believed Brezhnev was hinting at the possibility of another Cuban missile crisis.

All across the political spectrum, the problem of how to end a nuclear A war is recognized as a conundrum second in urgency and difficulty only to the challenge of avoiding the war in the first place. Some nuclear-freeze advocates argue that no matter how the war started, it would end only by burning itself out—and burning the whole world up. The Pentagon's Ikle, who made his reputation as a strategist partly on the basis of a book published eleven years ago titled Every War Must End, now admits, "War can be very difficult to stop. There is great stress on command and communication, on the structure of government, and destruction takes place very fast. This is an added deterrent to nuclear war."

Says Stanford University Physicist and Arms Control Expert Sidney Drell, "I only hope that if we could keep the nuclear threshold high and we bought time and did not panic, we could turn off a conventional war before it went nuclear. I really can't see any way to manage a nuclear war."

Harvard University's Michael Mandelbaum, author of a two-volume study on how nuclear weapons have transformed international politics, calls ending a war "the fundamental uncertainty: in order to get out of a nuclear war we would have to negotiate. In order to negotiate successfully, the national governments involved would probably have to be intact, and would have to have some means of communicating among themselves and with the other side. But one of the issues that have been debated recently is whether in fact the American national Government could survive and whether its command and control system could survive. These doubts are relevant for the Soviet Union well. The conclusion to which comes is that the best way to prevent a holocaust is to prevent any kind of nuclear war in the first place."

On that everyone agrees. Neither General David Jones, nor Thomas K. Jones, nor Richard Pipes nor Leonid Brezhnev is recommending, or even secretly hoping, that their guesses and arguments be proved by experience. Even those in the Administration who sincerely believe that the U.S., if it had to, could fight and win a nuclear war agree that the primary goal of U.S. weapons programs and policy should be preventing one.

Avoiding nuclear war depends on keeping a balance between the imperatives of American policy and various factors of international relations, particularly the U.S.-Soviet rivalry. While those international tensions cannot be eliminated, they can be, and have been in the past, kept in a state of overall equilibrium. But it is an equilibrium with an underlying paradox: by their very nature, nuclear weapons are military instruments too powerful and destructive to "solve," in any meaningful and positive sense, political problems that confront the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Yet they are also too pow erful and