Living with Mega-Death

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destructive for one superpower to relinquish as long as its rival has them. Therefore, insofar as the nation's suddenly heightened fear of nuclear war might ever get converted into pressure for unilateral disarmament, so much the worse.

But the current groundswell could have the beneficial effect of nudging the Administration to ward a more moderate set of defense and arms-control policies than it has espoused to date. The pendulum of official thinking about nuclear weapons has swung from one side to the other in recent years, and it needs to be brought back to the center. The Reaganauts, in their overreaction to the perceived naivete of their Carterite predecessors, have concentrated in their rhetoric and military programs on war fighting at the expense of deterrence, rearmament at the expense of arms control. Most policymakers in the Administration acknowledge that war fighting makes sense (and rather shaky sense at that) only as an extension of deterrence #151; deterrence by other means, as Clausewitz might have put it. In its rearmament pro gram, however, the Administration has concentrated too much on the development of more big-ticket nuclear weapons and not enough on building up conventional forces. If America's conventional defenses were stronger, they would constitute a more credible deterrent to Soviet aggression, thereby reducing U.S. reli ance on a nuclear last resort. A case can be made that the politically difficult decision of reinstituting the draft would do more to strengthen American defense posture—and hence to diminish the danger of war—than the MX supermissile and the B-l bomber programs combined.

Some of Reagan's advisers acknowledge, grudgingly, that what they call "real" arms control is as indispensable to national security as improvements in defense programs, since arms control can set rules of the road for both sides and thus lessen the chances of a collision. But they have had as much difficulty, and demonstrated as much ambivalence, in their quest for "real" arms control as in their ludicrously meandering search for an MX basing plan. The SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) process contributed modestly, marginally, but still significantly to the avoidance of nuclear war. Reagan has in effect suspended that process. He has promised, but not yet presented, what he says will be an improved substitute with the goal of deep cuts, primarily on the Soviet side, and with a new acronym, START (for Strategic Arms Reduction Talks). By seeking reductions while refusing to ask the Senate to ratify the limitations that have already been achieved, he risks making the best the enemy of the good.

Ironically, so does someone like Jonathan Schell, who dismissingly compares SALT to an aspirin administered to a patient with a terminal disease. While Schell's analysis of the potential danger of nuclear war is compelling, his prescription—general and complete disarmament and world government—is far too Utopian. And his thesis that the world is doomed if it does not take his advice is hardly helpful, since the world is almost certainly not going to take his advice.

This does not mean nuclear war is inevitable. A danger, yes—probably an increasing danger, given the deterioration in U.S.-Soviet relations. Yet even if those relations get much worse than they now are, the superpowers' mutual