Living with Mega-Death

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The American atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki hastened the end of World War II but left all nations terrified by what would happen if these weapons—to say nothing of their immensely more powerful successors, hydrogen bombs—were ever again used in anger. In the 1950s it was common for American children to practice air raid drills at school, climbing under their desks while instructors coached them not to look out the window at the fireball if it came. Many went home and saw the fireballs in their dreams. When the Soviet Union installed nuclear missiles on Cuba in 1962, instead of hiding under their desks, children filed into school chapels and prayed that John F. Kennedy would be vindicated in his decision to face down Nikita Khrushchev. Again, giant mushroom clouds grew only in dreams.

In the '60s and '70s, both sides increased their nuclear firepower by several orders of magnitude. It was a classic vicious spiral. Neither nation wanted to be on the losing side of an overkill gap. Wildly excessive, not to mention expensive, programs were justified on both sides in the interests of preserving a "balance of terror." Nonetheless, the nightmare of actual war receded somewhat into the subconscious of civilization. Partly because of the scare that Kennedy and Khrushchev had given the world over Cuba, the U.S. and the Soviet Union buckled down to the serious pursuit of agreements that would diminish the chances of nuclear war. With only modest successes and numerous stalls and setbacks, that effort continued in earnest until late in the Carter Administration, when it became clear that the Senate would reject the SALT 11 treaty that Carter and Brezhnev had signed.

Since then, the possibility of nuclear war has asserted itself with renewed urgency. The Soviet Union is in large measure responsible for much of this new alarm. By proliferating missile warheads to hundreds of times what the U.S.S.R. possessed when Kennedy and Khrushchev stood eyeball-to-eyeball at the brink two decades ago, Brezhnev and his comrades have aroused suspicions that they are looking to the day when the Kremlin can avenge that humiliation and pursue political and military advantages at the expense of American and Western interests. In recent months the Soviets have treated the resumption of arms-control talks in Geneva primarily as an opportunity to score propaganda points by advancing highly self-serving, largely spurious proposals for a moratorium on new missiles in Europe. This plan, if adopted, would leave them with a brand-new generation of rockets that they have nearly finished deploying, while preventing NATO from modernizing its older forces in order to redress the balance.

In the poker game of new weapons programs that is always taking place alongside the negotiating table, the Soviets seem to be upping the ante. When Brezhnev last week reiterated, and slightly refined, the moratorium proposal, he also issued a vague warning of major new Soviet deployments directly threatening the continental U.S. To Western ears, it sounded as though Brezhnev was hinting that the U.S.S.R. might put Soviet missiles back on Cuba. That would violate the Kennedy-Khrushchev agreement that ended the 1962 crisis, and raise the specter of a new, potentially even more serious confrontation in the next couple of