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was interested to see, in a recent copy of The Nation, ....
What's that?
You want to know what an honest reactionary like Derb is doing,
reading a lefty whine-list like The Nation? Well, in the
first place, like Walt Whitman, I am large, I contain multitudes:
humani nihil a me alienum puto. In the second place, I find
a sort of nostalgic fascination in seeing that all the halfwitted
beliefs I held when I was 17 are still alive and well, and being
retailed by literate adults on the streets of America. (Not merely
literate, either. Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation's editor,
though obviously a tool of Satan, is also a babe, as those who have
seen her on The O'Reilly Factor will know. Her existence
casts serious doubt on
my theory that we righties have all the good-looking women.)
And in the third place, The Nation has the best crossword
puzzle in these United States — a real British-style "cryptic"
puzzle (2 down: One who tries to get even a five to turn green [7]*),
not the pathetic "quiz" type (14 across: Egyptian sun
god [2]), which is all that readers of the New York Times
can rise to.
So I picked
up my June 25th copy of The Nation — after first slipping
on a fresh pair of surgical gloves, of course — and noticed at once
an article by Jonathan Schell titled "The New Nuclear Danger."
Now, this caught my attention, because I am interested in nuclear
weapons.
I'm not sure
why I am interested in them. I always have been, since I was a kid.
I recall an occasion in art class once at school, when, given a
free topic, I painted a lurid picture of a mushroom cloud, with
lots of vivid yellows, oranges, and splashes of purple, to the horror
of our art master, a gentle pacifist. In my science-fiction phase,
I was especially attracted to books about nuclear holocaust and
its aftermath: Philip Wylie's
Tomorrow!, Strieber and Kunetka's
Warday (in which, if I remember right, Long Island gets
fried), Russell Hoban's
Riddley Walker, Nevil Shute's
On the Beach, a good one whose title I can't remember
about a jumbo jet flying across the Atlantic when the world ends,
leaving them with no un-nuked place to land, John Wyndham's beautiful
The Chrysalids, and of course the grandaddy of them all,
Walter Miller's weird, compelling exercise in Catholic propaganda,
A Canticle for Leibowitz. I have assumed, for as long
as I can remember, that there is an excellent probability I shall
die in a nuclear holocaust. The Boomer generation was supposed to
be "raised in the shadow of the Bomb." That is all nonsense;
most of them never gave a moment's thought to the Bomb. I did, though.
Even today I often find, when my mind is occupied with nothing in
particular, while I am driving west on the Long Island Expressway
or gazing idly out of the window of a train on the way into Manhattan,
that in my imagination I see the great blue-white flash which, if
it does not end human civilization, will change it beyond recognition
in a matter of hours. I dream about nukes: often discovering by
chance that some household object — refrigerator, leaf blower —
has turned into a thermonuclear device with a blinking count-down
display like the one in Goldfinger. Morbid, I suppose.
Anyway, here
is Jonathan Schell in The Nation, writing about nukes. It's
nice that someone is. As Schell correctly observes: "When the
cold war finally did end, nuclear weapons pretty much dropped out
of the conscious thoughts of most Americans. The weapons themselves,
however, remain in existence — some 32,000 strong at last count."
Schell says that with the end of U.S.-Soviet rivalry, the rationale
for our threatening each other with "mutual assured destruction"
has disappeared. He then takes us for a quick canter through the
arguments against abandoning the 1972 ABM treaty, against Nuclear
Missile Defense, and for total world-wide nuclear disarmament. (Arguments
that were demolished very effectively by our own Rich Lowry in the
April 2nd dead-tree National Review.) He ends with the nightmare
prospect of "American military dominance, nuclear and otherwise,
of the world," which, he warns, will lead to "a hellbent
military competition with the other powers of the earth — not just
one but many arms races..."
In related
news, as they say, Newsweek has run an
article telling us that President Bush was stunned when told
of the extent of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. "I had no idea we
had so many weapons," he is quoted as saying. Newsweek
spells out the numbers: 5,400 warheads on ICBMs, 1,750 bombs, and
cruise missiles to be delivered by plane, 1,670 "tactical"
nuclear weapons (presumably this includes nuclear artillery shells
and satchel charges — yes, there is such a thing as a nuclear satchel
charge that one man can carry in a backpack) and 10,000 warheads
stored in various bunkers around the country. I make that a total
of 18,820 nukes. Schell's "32,000" includes other countries'
nukes, I suppose.
Too many nukes?
The president's advisers seem to think so. Richard Perle, former
national-security guru in the Reagan administration, told Newsweek:
"The truth is we are never going to use them. The Russians
aren't going to use theirs, either."
I beg to differ.
18,820 looks like about the right number to me, though I'd feel
a little easier in my mind if we rounded it up to a neat 20,000.
I don't see how you can ever have enough nukes. Nukes are very,
very scary. A nation with 20,000 of them is a very, very
scary nation. That's the kind of nation I want to live in, so long
as it is under rational, constitutional government. While I strive
to see both sides of every issue, and do my best to comprehend the
concerns and point of view even of writers in The Nation,
I am baffled to know why anyone should object to "American
military dominance ... of the world." What would Jonathan Schell
prefer: Iranian military dominance? North Korean military dominance?
Chinese military dominance? What he really has in mind, of course,
is none of these things, but a world in which nobody is militarily
dominant. That's a lovely idea, but, as Schell more or less concedes
at the end of his piece, is not going to happen. As for "not
just one but many arms races," well, as someone said in a different
context, we'll just have to win, won't we? As we have won all previous
arms races ... while simultaneously creating the greatest, freest
economy the world has ever seen.
"The truth
is we are never going to use them. The Russians aren't going to
use theirs, either." Look: we don't need 20,000 nukes because
we intend to use them, any more than the stickleback fish lays 250
eggs at a time because she is really, really fond of kids. Popular
nightmares (and mine) notwithstanding, most nuclear weapons are
not targeted on cities, but on other nuclear weapons: on silos,
air bases, and so on. The main object of a nuclear attack is not
to destroy the other guy's civilization; it is to destroy his nukes.
This has been true for 30 years, since ICBMs and cruise missiles
became sufficiently accurate to make it possible. The point of having
20,000 nukes is that if 95 percent of them were to be destroyed
in a surprise attack, you still have 1,000 left ... making that
surprise attack pointless. "I see no reason why we can't go
well below 1,000 warheads," Richard Perle told Newsweek.
But then a 95 percent incapacitating attack would leave you with
less than 50 usable weapons. 50 nukes may still seem pretty scary
to you, but it is not clear that they would deter a lunatic like
Mao Tse-tung, who was in charge of China just 25 years ago, whose
portrait still looks down over Tiananmen Square, and who boasted
to Nikita Khrushchev that China could lose a hundred million people
without noticing.
As for "The
Russians aren't going to use theirs, either" — well, how does
Mr. Perle know that? Russia is profoundly unstable, and not even
her own leaders know what she might or might not do five, ten or
fifty years from now. Implicit here is the "end of history"
frame of mind. The mad despotisms of the 20th century — Nazism,
Stalinism, Maoism — are all in the past, according to this way of
thinking, and nothing like them will return to trouble our hedonistic
dreams, ever again. Markets have won, liberal democracy is the wave
of the future, what everybody all over the world wants is just to
get a job trading financial futures, chatter on a cell phone and
dance to Madonna records. Excuse my irritation, but what a heap
of dog crap. It's not as if this kind of wishful thinking is anything
new. Anyone remember the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which actually outlawed
war altogether? That was in, let's see, oh yes: 1928.
Here's how
I feel about the matter. This nation is the vanguard of civilized
values in the world. She must prevail in any conceivable conflict.
She must, in fact, keep a military profile so large and forbidding
that no other nation will even think of attacking us. When,
in 1996, Chinese General Xiong Guangkai threatened to nuke Los Angeles
if the U.S. interfered with a Chinese assault on Taiwan, I wish
someone in the administration had said out loud and clear that any
such attack on a U.S. city would, swiftly and infallibly, bring
about the annihilation of China. Threats like General Xiong's, threats
by barbarian powers against the U.S., should be welcomed by our
governments as an opportunity to state unambiguously what will happen
to any nation that is damn fool enough to carry out such threats.
Then, no nation will do so. It's called "nuclear deterrence,"
and it worked for forty years.
The human race
has nuclear war in its future, I have no doubt of it. The awful,
decisive power of that weapon will prove irresistible to some madman
sooner or later. Human beings now alive will see that dreadful flash.
Some despot somewhere will spot an opportunity to assert himself,
and vanquish his hated enemies, with a well-placed atom bomb or
two. I don't know where this will happen. In the Middle East, quite
possibly; or in south Asia, where India and Pakistan now both have
nuclear devices to play with; or possibly somewhere unexpected like
Africa or the Caucasus. My own private guess is that the next use
of nuclear weapons in anger will be in a Chinese civil war. It is,
after all, Madame Chiang Kai-shek who owns the sorry distinction
of having been the first person of importance in any nation to call
for the use of nuclear weapons against her own countrymen. (She
asked Truman to nuke the Maoists in 1950.) Whatever: We have very
little control over what India does to Pakistan, or what the Chinese
do to each other. What we can do is make a nuclear attack
on the U.S.A. an extremely unattractive option for anyone at all.
The way to do that is to have nukes coming out of our ears. If Saddam
Hussein has an atom bomb, we should have a hundred. If China has
a hundred, we should have ten thousand. If Russia has ten thousand,
we should have a million. Nukes, nukes, nukes — you can never have
enough of them.
* AVENGER. It's "a", followed by "V" (for "five")
followed by an anagram ("turn..." gives the hint) of "green."
New York Times readers, never mind: This stuff is too difficult
for your poor brains, addled as they are by decades of reading Anthony
Lewis's columns.
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