Arguments Against MADness

By Strobe Talbott

THE ABOLITION by Jonathan Schell; Knopf; 173 pages; $11.95

WEAPONS AND HOPE by Freeman Dyson; Harper & Row; 334 pages; $17.95

There are now approximately 50,000 nuclear weapons. They have brought the world to a state of critical mass: the detonation of one bomb or warhead could touch off a chain reaction leading to the extinction of the human race. For a fact of life--the existence of those weapons--to be so bound up with the possibility of the death of the planet is an affront to reason and conscience alike.

Some of the best minds of the age have tried to rationalize their way around this ghastly paradox: the reliance of the human race for its safety on the instruments of its own destruction.

The leaders of the U.S. have made a policy of that paradox. It is called deterrence: if our enemy believes we will use our nukes against him, he will not use his against us. The Kremlin operates on a similar principle.

The superpowers hold pistols to each other's heads; they forgo large-scale defenses to make their suicide pact more credible, but they continue to proliferate and refine their offensive weapons. In so doing they put their arsenals on hair trigger; the danger grows that in a crisis or an accident, one or both fingers could twitch.

Many thinkers have recoiled from the logic underlying such a precarious peace. Instead of reconciling themselves to the existence of nuclear weapons, they call for their elimination, often in quasi-religious terms. But they have yet to come up with plausible proposals about how to achieve salvation.

New Yorker Writer Jonathan Schell sets out from the moralist camp and Physicist Freeman Dyson from the rationalist camp in search of common ground.

Both see the current balance of terror--"offense-dominated nuclear deterrence"--as the moral equivalent of slavery and call for its abolition. Hence the 19th century resonance of Schell's title, The Abolition, and Dyson's description of the nuclear arsenal in Weapons and Hope as "a manifestly evil institution deeply embedded in the structure of our society." Hence also the common weakness in their arguments: slavery, whatever it may have meant to the economy and social order of nations, had little to do with their security; nuclear weapons, however perverse the argument for having them, are intimately connected with national security.

Both books first appeared as lengthy serializations in The New Yorker at the beginning of the year. Schell's is a sequel to his 1982 bestseller The Fate of the Earth. That work received widespread praise for its passionate, sometimes overwrought meditation on the madness of mutual assured destruction (MAD). Schell argued that the apocalyptic nature of nuclear war had rendered obsolete not only war itself but the concept of national sovereignty. He called on the superpowers to eliminate nuclear weapons and to "reinvent politics" by creating a world government loosely based on the pacifist ideals of Mahatma Gandhi. His message was ultimately defeatist: unless the world took his vaguely defined and wildly Utopian advice, it was doomed.

In his new book, Schell moderates his repudiation of nuclear deterrence, conceding that it is "probably the least obnoxious and most sensible doctrine consistent with the absurd situation of possessing the arsenals." But he still believes the absurdity is eradicable. "When a person or a society or, as in this case, a whole planet is embarked on a self-destructive and ultimately suicidal course," he argues, "the first order of business is a decision to reverse course." To set matters right, nations may keep their sovereignty after all, along with the knowledge of how to make nuclear weapons. They must, however, abolish their entire stockpiles; to deter war, they should rely on a combination of conventional, i.e., nonnuclear, offenses and defenses; if one side violated the nuclear abolition agreement, the standoff in conventional offensive arms and the protection afforded by defensive ones would buy enough time for the other side to build nuclear weapons of its own. The essence of deterrence would remain intact, but now the opponents' nuclear pistols would be in their holsters rather than cocked at each other's temples.

In the real world, nuclear weapons have become the ultimate symbol and substance of power, particularly for the Soviet Union. Schell treats this fact of life like the existence of the arsenal itself: it is unacceptable, and it must give way to the humanistic imperative of stamping out evil; the Soviets must join in what Schell calls "preemptive repentance" for what he considers the original sin of Alamogordo and Hiroshima. If international politics were susceptible to such highmindedness, there would be no U.S.S.R. at all.

Dyson is no less scathing than Schell in his indictment of deterrence as it is now practiced. "No matter how my weapons are aimed," he says, "I have no way to count the lives that I might save by striking first. The only way I can be sure of saving lives is not to strike at all." Like Schell, Dyson wants to see considerably more reliance on nonnuclear defenses, so that the United States would say to the Soviet Union, "We maintain the ability to damage you as badly as you can damage us, but we prefer our own protection to your destruction." But the physicist has no messianic, all-or-nothing vision of a planet of plowshares. He quietly, logically advocates a more realistic posture known technically as "parity plus damage-limiting." In Dyson's simplified lexicon this is defined as "live and let live." The Soviet Union and the U.S. would move toward the ideal of regarding hydrogen bombs "only as bargaining chips to be negotiated away as rapidly as possible." This, he admits, is "a compromise concept," but it may "achieve a decisive turning away from dependence on nuclear weapons."

Dyson's book envisions what would certainly be an improvement on the doctrine of MAD. But the nukes, less obtrusive and less likely to go off in a crisis, still glower in the background, diminished but not abolished. After such a sweeping critique of the present situation, Dyson's blueprint for the future seems a bit anticlimactic. But even this shortcoming gives the book significance.

For Dyson's arguments provide an object lesson in the limits of how far pure reason, even when driven by conscience, can go toward the elimination of nuclear weapons.

In the end, both books demonstrate that an escape from mankind's suicide threat remains elusive, a goal that we might, in our wisdom, approach, but never, in our state of sin, achieve.

--By Strobe Talbott

Excerpts

Through the balance of terror, we all come to hold a dagger to the hearts of those nearest and dearest to us as well as to threaten those far away . . . The parent threatens the child, the lover the lover, the friend the friend, the citizen the citizen. Our acceptance of nuclear weapons is in that sense a default of parenthood, of love, of friendship, of citizenship . . . And in making a 'conscious choice' to lift the nuclear peril we resolve to escape this pervasive corruption of our lives. We resolve to clear the air of the smell of burning flesh. --The Abolition

The success of negotiation and moral indignation in bringing about nuclear disarmament will also depend upon technical factors. We will have a far better chance of achieving nuclear disarmament if the weapons to be discarded are generally perceived to be not only immoral and dangerous but also obsolescent. An intelligently conducted arms race, leaving nuclear technology further and further behind, could help mightily to sweep nuclear weapons into the dustbin of history. --Weapons and Hope