Living with Mega-Death

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high-price items in the Reagan defense budget. Yet the fact remains that EMP is still something of a mystery, and the scientific data about it are sparse. Nevertheless, General Jones is in the business of preparing for the worst. Prudence requires taking measures to protect against what might happen, thus diminishing the chances that it ever will. That is the essence of deterrence.

Another example of the uncertainty that pervades the whole issue of nuclear war is central to the thesis of Jonathan Schell's forceful and controversial new book The Fate of the Earth. Schell argues that multiple detonations of thermonuclear weapons would, almost literally, blow the roof off the earth. That is, the explosions would blast away the ozone layer that serves as a protective filter against ultraviolet rays. Any life that survived the war might be blinded by those rays. Maybe. The scientific community is divided on the question of what would happen to the ozone layer. The Arms Control and Disarmament Agency says it has no idea.

No one denies that nuclear war would be horrible. But would it be so horrible that the mere contemplation of fighting such a war is irresponsible, immoral, even lunatic? Yes, says Schell in his book, and a similar sentiment seems to be driving many of the antinuclear activists in both Europe and the U.S. They argue that to treat nuclear war as a viable option, even as a last resort, is to increase the chances that it will occur. They also believe that the fundamental uncertainty about what would actually happen in a war strengthens their case: better to err on the side of worst-case predictions than to underestimate the peril, and then learn the hard way that the pessimists were right. Last December, Pope John Paul II sent a delegation of scientists to try to per suade Reagan and Brezhnev that nuclear war would be too calamitous even to consider unleashing.

Diametrically opposing that view are self-styled "realists" who feel that the prospect of nuclear war is an ugly but inescapable fact of life. Nuclear weapons exist; therefore there must be preparations—and precautions—in case they are ever used. To pretend otherwise is ostrichlike. Worse, to regard U.S. nuclear weapons as untouchable, and plans for fighting a nuclear war as unconscionable, would be to expose the U.S., at the very least, to blackmail by the U.S.S.R.—and possibly to actual attack. If the Soviets became convinced that revulsion against, and rejection of, nuclear war had virtually become the policy of the U.S., they might be tempted to strike. With a closed society, and a thoroughly militarized one as well, the Soviet Union's leaders do not worry about any potentially divisive and paralyzing national debates on the vital questions of the day.

These "realists" (as opposed to those they consider the antinuclear "emotionalists") are represented within the Administration by people like Richard Pipes of the National Security Council staff, who has argued that a nuclear war would be like an amputation—traumatic but not necessarily fatal; or like Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Thomas K. Jones, who asserts that with its current defensive measures, the Soviet Union could rebuild its prewar gross national product within two to four years after a nuclear conflict; or like Colin Gray, a consultant to the State and Defense