TO BREAK OFF THE MOMENTUM OF THE NUCLEAR ARMS RACE

Everyone understands that nuclear weapons are the most deadly things ever invented by man. If they were ever to be used, the chances are overwhelming that they would be used in great numbers. And that would mean the slaughter of innocents in the hundreds of millions, the end of Western civilization, perhaps even the end of a livable world.

What many Americans do not understand is that there is no sensible military use for any of the three categories of nuclear weapons - strategic (of intercontinental range), or theater (capable of reaching targets within one theater of military operations) or tactical (designed, like atomic cannon, for battle-field use). I say this as a military man, a former commander in chief of all United States forces in the Pacific, an aviator and mariner, soldier and intelligence officer of 46 years' experience.

In the battles I saw and the military strategy I helped carry out, the means employed bore a reasonable relation to the ends in view. But now the nuclear forces of the United States and of the Soviet Union have become so large and so threatening that there is no conceivable military objective worth the risk of nuclear war. This truth offers us a way out. There are specific ways in which we and the Russians can reduce the now very real risk of nuclear conflict. We and they can renounce first use of nuclear weapons. We and they can redeploy tactical weapons beyond each other's range. Together, we can freeze nuclear-weapons activity just where it is, as a prelude to cutting back. Most especially, we and the Russians can agree on massive cuts in our nuclear arsenals.

There are fancy theories current about controlled nuclear exchanges and bloodless, chess-like calculations between opponents in the middle of nuclear war. People who think like that do not understand nuclear weapons, and they do not understand war. Real war is not like these complicated tit-for-tat imaginings. There is little knowledge of what is going on, and less communication. There is blood and terror and agony. We cannot deal with war a thousand times more terrible than any we have ever seen in some bloodless, analytic fashion. To kiss off nuclear war in this abstract way makes it more likely, for we and the Russians may convince each other that we have aggressive plans that we do not in fact have.

Both the Soviet and the American Governments have repeatedly expressed their wish to reach agreements reducing the risk of nuclear apocalypse. But President Reagan's campaign pledge to commence strategic arms limitations talks ''immediately'' upon taking office has not been honored. The pacific statements of the Soviet leader, Leonid I. Brezhnev, are compromised by the continuing buildup of Soviet nuclear arms and the not-so-veiled threats of Soviet counteraction if agreement is not reached. The only nuclear arms-control game in town now is the negotiation in Geneva on so-called medium-range weapons in the European theater. But the news from the negotiating table seems to rehearse the same tired old arguments that have gotten us nowhere in the past. What's the problem?

In all our negotiations, past and present, both we and the Russians have been hung up on the following three issues:

1. What is fair and equal? Neither side will stand still for unilateral disarmament, nor should it. But we Americans talk about equal effectiveness in terms of weapons systems, while the Russians talk about equal security, and the way they define their security needs is unacceptable to us.

2. What is verifiable? We are tremendously concerned about the potential for Russian cheating. They are equally concerned that our proposals for inspection inside the Soviet Union might be a cover for espionage.

3. How do you classify weapons, and what weapons do you count? For example, is the Russian Backfire bomber capable of intercontinental range, as our military contend, or is it a medium-range aircraft, as the Russians insist? Do you count as ''strategic'' those long-range weapons that cross oceans (our idea) or any weapons that can reach Soviet soil no matter where they start from (their idea)?

These built-in difficulties were the principal reasons the United States Senate refused to ratify the SALT II nuclear-arms limitation treaty signed by President Carter and Mr. Brezhnev in Vienna in June 1979. And they are still bedeviling the current talks in Geneva. What can we do to get negotiations moving again?

When I joined the Army as a kid, the old sarge had a hell of a time getting us slew-foot recruits to march in some decent semblance of order. Once in a while, when things got out of hand, he would order: ''Fall out and fall in again!'' That's what we have to do with arms-control talks. Time is running out. We need a fresh approach.

On the occasion of receiving the Albert Einstein Peace Prize in Washington in May 1981, George F. Kennan, the distinguished Soviet affairs scholar and former Ambassador to the Soviet Union, put forward a proposal that goes to the heart of the problem. Kennan proposed an immediate 50 percent across-the-board reduction in American and Soviet nuclear weapons, ''without further wrangling among the experts.'' Eloquently, he spoke a simple and profound truth: ''There is no issue at stake in our political relations with the Soviet Union, no hope, no fear, nothing to which we aspire, nothing we would like to avoid, which could conceivably be worth a nuclear war.''

His suggestion has had a strong impact. A Gallup Poll last December showed three out of four Americans backing the idea. There is compelling evidence that public opinion in Western Europe and Japan is strongly in favor of such an approach, and the same appears to be true of public sentiment in the third world. Yet our policy makers in Washington do not seem to have grasped the proposal's extraordinary promise. They tend to dismiss the notion as simplistic, or impractical, or impossible to negotiate. Some even see danger in any deep cuts, arguing that they might arouse false hopes, or offer opportunities for Soviet propaganda, or tend to destabilize the precarious balance. There is even some flavor of N.I.H. (Not Invented Here) that is many a bureaucrat's instinctive reaction to new ideas in his field.

Yet all these concerns are misplaced. Deep cuts are practical. They can be negotiated, simply because they are in the best interests of both parties. They can be designed to have a stabilizing effect and reduce the risk of nuclear war. Solutions are available to all obstacles, real or imaginary. Einstein once said that ''everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.'' Kennan's proposal is pretty close to that ideal; the trick now is how to go about it. Let us take a leaf from Grover Cleveland, who said: ''The way to begin is to begin.'' The way to get rid of nuclear weapons is to get rid of nuclear weapons.

Here is the idea. We look for a solution that is fair, that we can verify and that does not get us into fruitless arguments about how different kinds of weapons should be classified. To do this, we have to look at security requirements, the politics of negotiations and the nature of nuclear weapons. Taking these factors into consideration, we find there is a way to bring about arms reduction that satisfies essential concerns on all three counts.

Let each side turn in an equal number of explosive nuclear devices. Let each side choose the weapons it wishes to turn in, whether missile warheads, bombs or artillery shells. Each weapon would count the same - as one device.

This proposal has some major advantages. A nuclear device is uniquely identifiable and can be counted without error when turned in; thus, there is full verification without intrusive inspection in either country. Since each side chooses the weapons it wishes to turn in, there can be no problem about what is fair. And since all explosive fission devices count equally, we have no arguments about how the weapons should be classified. Self-interest will make each side turn in its more vulnerable weapons. This is good. As we now stand, both the United States and the Soviet Union have relatively vulnerable land-based strategic missiles, mounted in fixed silos. It would be logical for both sides to start giving up these weapons, while retaining their less vulnerable strategic bombers and virtually invulnerable nuclear-armed submarines. In this way, the temptation of either side to fire first in time of crisis, lest it lose its weapons to an enemy who attacks first, will be reduced. The ''hair trigger'' character of the nuclear forces, the most dangerous aspect of the present situation, will be eliminated.

Similarly, the missiles on each side that are the more threatening to the adversary's fixed silos -such as the highly accurate, highyield, multiwarhead Soviet SS-18 and the equally formidable projected American MX - will tend to lose value. They will be deprived of their ''counterforce'' targets - the land-based strategic missile force of the other side, which they now threaten with destruction in a pre-emptive first strike. If deep enough cuts are made, the strategies of both sides are likely to revert to reliance on the relatively invulnerable components of their strategic forces. Crisis stability will be improved, and the chances of accidental or unauthorized firing will be greatly reduced.

To whom do we and the Russians hand over these weapons? Probably to a joint Soviet-American commission established for the purpose; perhaps a third party can be brought in as referee.

What do you do with the devices? Convert them, under safeguard, to nuclear power for civilian purposes. Uranium 235, one of the elements of nuclear weaponry, can be diluted with the plentiful isotope uranium 238 to a level of concentration suitable for nuclear energy but not for bombs. Plutonium, another such element, can be burned directly in a nuclear power reactor. We can start by each turning in a relatively small number of weapons - say 50 - to test the system and establish confidence. From there, we should proceed on an agreed schedule to a very large reduction - say 10,000 devices each. Again, the idea is to compel each side to choose to retain only a small number of weapons in a strategic reserve.

How will this or some similar proposal satisfy the basic concerns enumerated above? Let us look first at security. America's primary security need is that the United States, its allies and the free world not be conquered, coerced or threatened by the military forces of the Soviet Union and its proxies. Historically, we have relied partly on the deterrent role of nuclear weapons to contain aggression employing conventional arms. The military doctrines of the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization still plug the usefulness of nuclear force against a conventional Soviet attack. But now, with the Soviet Union's strategic forces roughly equal to ours, these doctrines are obsolete. Kennan and three other former senior American officials - Robert S. McNamara, McGeorge Bundy and Gerard C. Smith - hit the nail on the head in their recent article in Foreign Affairs urging retreat from our strategy of defending Europe by first use of nuclear weapons: ''Deterrence cannot be safely based forever on a doctrine which more and more looks to the people of the alliance like either a bluff or a suicide pact.'' There is growing recognition that the game is not worth the candle. The security of the United States and its allies must be protected in ways other than with nuclear weapons.

Yet our European allies are torn by conflicting impulses. Their governments, as well as important segments of the political opposition and of public opinion, want the United States to be married to the defense of Europe not only by conventional force but by the threat of nuclear retaliation. Hence, the original demand by European leaders for the deployment of American medium-range weapons in Western Europe. At the same time, Europeans entertain the entirely reasonable wish not to be the nuclear battlefield of the giant powers. This wish finds expression in popular demonstrations against deployment of the new American missiles. Current United States policy also has violently conflicting elements. On the one hand, Presidential Directive 59, issued by Jimmy Carter in 1980, still implies readiness to fight and win a limited nuclear war - as do many previous and subsequent official statements. There is still a green light - and an enormous appropriation - for development of the MX missile, even though the best brains in the country cannot figure out a sensible way to provide it with an invulnerable base. The B-1 bomber program bids fair to waste as much money on an obsolete means of weapons delivery as would be required to modernize, in many respects, the entire United States Army. And the so-called neutron weapon is still in the works, even though it is a battlefield weapon not so different from other nuclear weapons and is clearly regarded by the Russians as offensive and not defensive in nature.

On the other hand, President Reagan himself has expressed a desire for deep cuts. He has also proposed a ''zero option'' for Europe -no American medium-range weapons in Europe capable of reaching Soviet territory and no Soviet weapons aimed specifically at Western Europe. He has spoken of the overriding need for strategic nuclear talks, though at other times he and his aides have conditioned negotiations on better Soviet behavior. In any event, the overwhelming logic of the situation, the political imperative being created by the growing revulsion against nuclear arms, dictates movement toward real and deep reductions. There are two major political problems yet to be overcome.

First, the primitives in American politics will not be satisfied with anything less than the unattainable -American nuclear ''superiority.'' Why is this unattainable? In the real world, ''superiority'' has no meaning. We and Russia are like two riverboat gamblers sitting across a green table, each with a gun pointed at the other's belly and each gun on hair trigger. The size of the guns doesn't make much difference; if either weapon is used, both gamblers are dead. In the same way, the size of the nuclear forces makes little difference. States of readiness, targeting decisions, even which way the wind is blowing (carrying nuclear fallout), make a greater difference than a thousand extra missiles on either side. Moreover, even if having more missiles than Moscow did give us ''superiority,'' the Russians would not stand still for it. They have said they won't, and we had better believe them, for in their controlled society they can put into weapons whatever resources they choose. So the argument that we have to attain ''superiority'' before we can negotiate - an argument still being made in some Administration circles - just won't wash. We are not ''inferior'' in any meaningful sense, and we are not going to become ''superior,'' no matter how much we ratchet up the nuclear arms race.

The second major political problem in the United States is the notion that we can punish the Soviet Union for its misdeeds - many of them very real - by withholding nuclear arms talks. We cannot use nuclear arms talks as a stick or carrot to make Moscow behave. And if we wait for the Soviet regime to shape up, by our standards, before we engage in nuclear arms reductions, we will wait a long time indeed. The reverse is true: The more our relations turn sour, the more imperative it is to drive down the risk of nuclear war.

What about the Russians? They see themselves, however erroneously, as surrounded by hostile, nuclear-armed powers on their long borders. Their leaders are greatly concerned by any change that would threaten their power, the security of Mother Russia or the control of the Communist Party. Yet they, too, understand the terrible dangers of nuclear war. Many an official pronouncement and many an unofficial approach testifies to their willingness, even eagerness, to entertain the idea of deep cuts in nuclear weapons.

Soviet spokesmen contend that Soviet doctrine on nuclear war has changed in the past five years, and radically so in the last two. This is what they are saying: ''To try and outstrip each other in the arms race, or to expect to win a nuclear war is dangerous madness.'' - LEONID BREZHNEV, in a speech before the 26th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, Feb. 23, 1981. ''Western politicians and strategists stubbornly push the thesis that Soviet military doctrine allegedly assumes the possibility of an 'initial disarming strike' of survival, and even of victory, in a nuclear war. All this is a deliberate lie.'' - MARSHAL DMITRI F. USTINOV, Minister of Defense, in a speech at a Kremlin rally, Nov. 6, 1981. ''Political and military doctrines have been changed. This has been reflected in our internal life. There is new determination to seek sharp reductions.'' - NIKOLAI N. INOZEMTSEV, director of the Soviet Institute of World Economy and International Relations, at a Soviet-American seminar in Washington, Jan. 12-14, 1982.

These and other similar statements are accompanied by the interesting assertion that the change of doctrine is recent, that it involved internal political struggle, and that it was resolved by Brezhnev himself. We in the West are invited to note that this change will find expression in Soviet military schools, in military training manuals and elsewhere. How much can we trust these declarations? Are they not just propaganda, intended to put us to sleep? If I were planning a military campaign, or even betting on the stock market, I would evaluate the downside risk of any given course of action. If we treat these statements as sincere and the Russians are deceiving us, the worst that can happen is that we lose some propaganda points or get otherwise snookered in some inconsequential way during arms negotiations. For no matter what the Russians say, we would never accept an unequal treaty. But if we fail to take these statements seriously - and hence fail to negotiate on arms reductions - we risk getting our heads blown off. It will be little consolation that the Russians will lose theirs also.

But the most compelling reason to take the Soviet authorities seriously on this score has been given by W. Averell Harriman, President Roosevelt's Ambassador to Moscow and, like Kennan, a profound scholar of Soviet affairs: ''You can trust the Russians - to act in the Russian interest.'' Our own best minds have come to the conclusion that nuclear war is unwinnable. It would be folly to assume that the Russians are too dumb to have reached the same judgment.

Thus, in measuring the deep-cuts proposal against the security interests of the United States, the West and the Soviet Union, we find no major obstacles in the way.

Let us look next at whether deep cuts are negotiable - in other words, whether such reductions can be embodied in a treaty that (1) takes account of practical realities, and (2) can be sold to those elements within the American and Soviet societies that dominate the two countries' domestic politics. These are tough criteria, and they can be met only by a treaty that conforms to a strict set of principles.

An acceptable treaty must not only reduce the risk of nuclear war or nuclear blackmail but must be readily seen as achieving those ends. It must not only improve the security of both sides but must do so in ways that each side recognizes as valid for its own concerns. It must be equitable in mutually acceptable ways. The planned reductions must be such as to improve stability in a crisis by cutting down the advantage to be gained by striking first. Most especially, the negotiating parties must not be duplicitous, or strike phony poses, or arouse false hopes or unreasonable expectations.,P. Fortunately, these principles can be solidly based on the common interest. Neither superpower wishes to be destroyed. Neither wishes nuclear weapons to be in the hands of a variety of small powers or terrorist groups. If these overriding concerns can be kept separate from all other issues between Washington and Moscow, fruitful negotiations are almost certain. It is essential, however, that each Government give a clear political directive to its negotiators: ''Find solutions that remove our joint peril and enhance the security of both.''

The third factor - the physical technicalities of deep cuts - presents lesser difficulties. The essence of a nuclear weapon is its fissionable material. All else is mere supporting hardware -missile or cannon or airplane, guidance system or re-entry shield or arming and fusing. Moreover, all nuclear weapons have roughly the same amount of fissionable material. In a ''small'' weapon, the fission element accounts for the weapon's entire explosive yield; in a megaton-range weapon, which depends on fusion, a similar quantity of fissionable material acts only as the spark for the enormously greater succeeding explosion.

Hence, in counting the weapons to be eliminated from the nuclear arsenals of both sides, all weapons can be treated alike. That provides a realistic basis for counting every weapon, no matter what its size, as one nuclear device, and for implementing the cuts by converting the fissionable material to nuclear energy. A desirable, though not essential, corollary to enhancing the effectiveness of weapons disposal would be an agreement to stop manufacturing weaponsgrade fission material - both from reactors designed for that purpose and from the spent products of civilian power plants. A stop to production from weapons reactors can be verified by each side with current intelligence techniques. Diversion from nuclear-power reactors is more difficult to monitor, but not impossible.

The effect of deep cuts would be extraordinary. Reductions in the nuclear weaponry of the United States and the Soviet Union would prove the superpowers' willingness to bring the nuclear arms race to a halt. That would produce a much better climate for efforts to limit proliferation of nuclear weapons around the world. Major reductions in the more threatening or more vulnerable systems would enhance stability, thus reducing the probability of nuclear war. Weapons would no longer be available for ''war-fighting'' strategies, and greater validity would be given to the assurances of national leaders on both sides that their nuclear forces had no objective beyond deterrence. The chances of accidental or unauthorized firings would be greatly diminished.

In all of the above, several things stand clear. Deep cuts are practical. They will enhance the security of the United States, of NATO, of the Soviet Union, of the world. They can be equitable and verifiable. They can be negotiated by the great powers and sold domestically. And there is a straightforward way to begin.

No one can doubt the extreme peril that nuclear weapons pose to civilization on earth. Getting rid of a lot of weapons on both sides will reduce the peril immeasurably. In Leonid Brezhnev's astonishing phrase, ''God will not forgive us'' if we do not act.

Last Updated Friday, July 22 2011 @ 09:13 PM EDT

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