On the Right

New York, Oct. 12—I do not wonder that there is an almost universal impatience with the figures in SALT II. Listening to a recitation of how many missiles, how many silos, how many MIRVs, is only less discouraging than listening to economists and bankers quarrel over differentials in M1 and M2. It is so much easier to relax, and go to sleep with President Carter’s summary (one U.S. nuclear submarine is enough to destroy all major Russian cities) under one’s pillow; but the only trouble is you might, in the felicitous phrase of the ten-year-old boy, wake up dead.

For such reasons as this, the chances are that you have not heard the name of Donald G. Brennan. Well, you really should. He is a PhD, MIT, in mathematics, winner of all kinds of thises and thats, and so on and so forth. He is associated with the Hudson Institute in New York, which is the fountainhead of some of the most original and useful thinking of the day. But Brennan becomes intensely interesting when he brings his huge technical knowledge to bear in examining the SALT treaty, which he did recently before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His paper was in part technical, but its impact is not in the least technical. Because his conclusion is that the passage of SALT II increases the chance of world war, rather than the other way around. Lest you leap instantly to the conclusion that Brennan is a disarmament type. Indeed, he was one of the architects of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, having had a hand in the drafting of the act under whose general patronage we are looking at SALT II. And his conclusions about SALT II are devastating.

New York, Oct. 12—I do not wonder that there is an almost universal impatience with the figures in SALT II. Listening to a recitation of how many missiles, how many silos, how many MIRVs, is only less discouraging than listening to economists and bankers quarrel over differentials in M1 and M2. It is so much easier to relax, and go to sleep with President Carter’s summary (one U.S. nuclear submarine is enough to destroy all major Russian cities) under one’s pillow; but the only trouble is you might, in the felicitous phrase of the ten-year-old boy, wake up dead.

For such reasons as this, the chances are that you have not heard the name of Donald G. Brennan. Well, you really should. He is a PhD, MIT, in mathematics, winner of all kinds of thises and thats, and so on and so forth. He is associated with the Hudson Institute in New York, which is the fountainhead of some of the most original and useful thinking of the day. But Brennan becomes intensely interesting when he brings his huge technical knowledge to bear in examining the SALT treaty, which he did recently before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His paper was in part technical, but its impact is not in the least technical. Because his conclusion is that the passage of SALT II increases the chance of world war, rather than the other way around. Lest you leap instantly to the conclusion that Brennan is a disarmament type. Indeed, he was one of the architects of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, having had a hand in the drafting of the act under whose general patronage we are looking at SALT II. And his conclusions about SALT II are devastating.