THE RIGHT BOOKS

It is a year ago this month that President Reagan made a speech proposing the defense of the United States against Soviet missiles—a speech Teddy Kennedy called “reckless,” and Anthony Lewis a “dangerous fantasy,” and for which James Reston dubbed Reagan the “April Fool.” Trouble was, the President had expressed the apocalyptic opinion that the way to defend yourself against enemy missiles carrying nuclear warheads is to deploy missiles of your own to shoot them down. Unfortunately for the President, and equally unfortunately for 230 million other Americans, U.S. policy has been for the past 12 years—ever since the ABM treaty of 1972—one of maintaining the country undefended against a threat of nuclear attack, on the presumption that preparedness invites just such a threat.

Unfortunately again, it takes, as Robert Jastrow says in How to Make Nuclear Weapons Obsolete (Orwell Press, The Committee for the Free World, 211 East 51st Street, New York, N.Y. 10022; $1), “a person with an idealized view of the world to think up something like the ABM treaty,” the chief result of which, in the dozen ensuing years, has been to weaken the land and air legs of the American defense triad, leaving only the sea leg—composed of the Trident submarines—relatively intact strategically. “The essence of the matter,” Jastrow writes,

CW

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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It is a year ago this month that President Reagan made a speech proposing the defense of the United States against Soviet missiles—a speech Teddy Kennedy called “reckless,” and Anthony Lewis a “dangerous fantasy,” and for which James Reston dubbed Reagan the “April Fool.” Trouble was, the President had expressed the apocalyptic opinion that the way to defend yourself against enemy missiles carrying nuclear warheads is to deploy missiles of your own to shoot them down. Unfortunately for the President, and equally unfortunately for 230 million other Americans, U.S. policy has been for the past 12 years—ever since the ABM treaty of 1972—one of maintaining the country undefended against a threat of nuclear attack, on the presumption that preparedness invites just such a threat.

Unfortunately again, it takes, as Robert Jastrow says in How to Make Nuclear Weapons Obsolete (Orwell Press, The Committee for the Free World, 211 East 51st Street, New York, N.Y. 10022; $1), “a person with an idealized view of the world to think up something like the ABM treaty,” the chief result of which, in the dozen ensuing years, has been to weaken the land and air legs of the American defense triad, leaving only the sea leg—composed of the Trident submarines—relatively intact strategically. “The essence of the matter,” Jastrow writes,