Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 13, 1975)
_ __editorial-----—“ A lengthening shadow of death Despite a facade of progress, the nuclear arms race is accelerating, and the likelihood of nuciear war is greater than ever. This tragic fact is documer*ed in brief articles in the December and January issues of Scientific American. The American-Soviet agreement reached at Vladivostok in November was ballyhooed as a step toward arms control. Nothing could be further from the truth. The agreement sets a limit of 2,400 on the number of strategic delivery vehicles (missies and bombers) which each side may have Up to 1,320 of these may be MIRVed (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles). The agreement will expire in 1985. There are several reasons while this agreement not only fails to provide arms control, but is likely to accelerate it. First, there is no limit on the number of warheads that may be placed on each MIRVed missile. Second, 1,320 is a very high number. The U.S. at this time has 776 MIRVed missies. The Russians have very few. With the new agreement, however, both sides are likely to deploy the maximum number. This will cause a severe strain on the economic re sources of both nations, particularly the U.S.S.R. But more important than any of these points is that the agreement only does half the job: it sets limits on numbers but not on quality so that, to quote Scientific American, "the arms race...is becoming qualitative rather than quantitative. This means that both sides are completely free to develop new, more “advanced missies to replace older ones so long as the total limit is not exceeded. V. Right now the U.S.S.R. has a greater number of missiles them the U.S., which depends more upon strategic bombers. However, the U.S. has massive superiority in what is known as “counterforce capability." This is the ability to destroy land based enemy missies in their silos before they could be fired. The U.S. will continue to improve the accu racy of its counterforce capability. The Russians will deploy more MIRVed missiles. The U.S. can then build maneuverable reentry vehicles (MARVs). “Eventually," says Scientific Ameri can, "such improvements might provide one side—presumably the U.S. first—with a true counter force capability . .. and thus partially frustrate mas sive retaliation, which has been the basis of the bal ance of terror.” But note that this frustration is only partial. Why? The U.S. currently has a massive lead in the arms race due to its highly superior counterforce capability, and advantage due to its highly superior counterforce capability and advantage which is ob scured...by the terms in which the U.S. political debate on armaments is conducted: aggregate numbers and megatonnage of missies." The current U.S. counterforce capability is esti mated by the Stockholm International Peace Re search Institute (SIPRI) to be five times that of the Russians. The purpose of counterforce is to elimini nate the threat of enemy missies ever being launched “Assuming no change at all in the U.S. arsenal, says Scientific American, “and assuming the greatest degree of improvement that SIPRI cam con ceive for the U. S. S. R., this country would still have an advantage . . in the early 1980’s. Neither side, however, would nave a large enough (counter force capability) to destroy all of the other side's missiles. Neither side, in other words, would have a dependable counterforce capability. This of course, is if the U S. stood still, which is not the case, since further improvements in missile yield and accuracy are now planned. But even if the U S. by some miracle developed a "perfect counterforce capability, it would be all for nothing...Even if every single Russian land-based missile was destroyed, the missiles on Russian submarines are fully capable of devastating the Un ited States What does this all mean? It means that the U S. and USSR. are sinking vast sums of money into an accelerating qualitative arms race which has no forseeable end—short of nuclear war. "In the long run, says Scientific Ameri can, the newly authorized quality race can only cost both sides dearly and destabilize world politics One possible solution is suggested by Kosta Tsipis of the SIPRI. This would be to limit qualitative advances Since on-site inspections have been re jected by the Russians and since satellite spying can only verify the number-and not the quality—of missies, Tsipis suggests the number of test launch ings be limited This would necessarily slow ad vances in arms quality But for now, the Kissingers, Fords, Brezhnevs and Strangeloves are too busy engaging in mutual back-patting to see what needs to be done. And the rest of us must live under an ever-lengthening shadow of death. J Support of businq by the Left is declining By NICHOLAS VAN HOFFMAN WASHINGTON (KFS)—“Every September, as the opening of school nears, white liberals steel themselves for moral paralysis over whether busing is a good idea or not; conservatives busily prepare speeches on quality education ; honest ra cists start getting nigger fever, and the Left prepares to be confused, writes Malecai Andrews, a black writer and intellectual in a symposium on busing in the December Ramparts, a superior left-wing magazine. Mr. Andrews words may signal the deci sion by the American Left to leave off that confusion and to junk their reluctant support for busing, an activity they never had much taste for anyway. Weie it not for the Left's revulsion at the others who oppose busing, radicals might have denounced it years ago as the idiot escapade it has turned out to be. "Busing is a racist, lazy selfish decision made by people who don't want to take the time to do the work required to improve the quality of education in all our schools," writes Ericka Huggins, who would have been described a few years ago as a black radical activist or worse. Today she is the director of a school for poor youth in East Oakland, and if, as an educator, her views on busing were formed long since, for other radicals the black-white scrimmaqes in South Boston this fall have turned uncer tainty into conviction. The news reports of that city's poorest whites and blacks pitted against each other in battle-nn which nither side had anything much to win— was too reminiscent of inter racial battles earlier in this century over joos. So Noel Day, himself a black man who took a leading part in the Boston school boycotts of a decade ago, writes: "...white mothers wearing football hel mets and carrying baseball bats to bat black kids may really think that they are keeping their children from being knifed: but under neath it all they must also know that Boston's blacks are their main competition for jobs, for decent housing, for self respect, and in all those other races that poor and powerless people must run... "More students go to college, for exam ple, from those high schools with large numbers of black students than from South Boston High School. The (white) kids in South Boston are as educationally dep rived' and disadvantaged as the black kids are. -instead of pushing for better schools, black people and white people are fighting over who will sit next to whom in some of the worst schools in the nation. By staking out a non-racist, anti-busing position, the Left has enabled us to think about eductation as something other than the contorted transportation logistics of upper-middle class, suburban lawyers and judges. Having ruled out any involvement with suburban school districts, these juns prudes are apparently mad enough to keep on truckin’ the children of the poor from one lousy school to another in aeternum Another contributor to the Ramparts symposium, Miriam Wasserman. says it: "Integration-desegregation-businq has now become a policy of the authorities—courts and federal bureaucrats—with community support mainly from some middle class minorities and liberal whites A perversion is the name Malecai Andrews fixes to it. 'DOCTOR . . . IT'S TIME.' Since the Left is scarcely one voice or organization, it doesn't propose one alter nate way of handling education, but the general direction of left-wing though, details aside, is fairly clear. The Left continues to advocate community control of schoolinq but not of the schools. The consensus seems to be that no system of community control in the present admmstrative and legal framework can be much better than gangsterism in its effects on the society at large and "a form of involuntary and unpaid servitude for the children, to quote Edgar Fnedenberg. the psychologist and educa tional philosopher. In the big city school systems, at least, matters have passed the remediable stage The thing has degenerated into a species of racketeensm. Racketeer administrators, racKeteer teachers unions and textbook publishers, racketeer teachers colleges, consultants, social workers, equip ment manufacturers, all of whom give as little for what they get paid by the local Pentagons of Pedagogy as the armament suppliers give to the big Pentagon of War Like the billions spent for foreign aid, of the billions spent on public education only the smallest part gets to the victims, as we might better call the pupils whom we compel by force of law to pass their child hood and youth in these places Unhappily, the job of abolishing the system and build ing a new one can't begin so tong as we re locked into the infinite busing dispute No matter what happens with it, the only con ceivable winner will be General Motors They sell the buses. Letters policy The Emerald will accept an'4. tr\ «o print all letters contami. d ta' com ment on ideas and topics of concern or interest to the University commun ity Because of space limitations, let ters must be no more than 2b0 words—typed, triple-space^, dated and signed with the person s major or discipline Longer letters will be shor tened at the editor s discretion Longer opinion columns will be pub lished whenever possible after being submitted to the editorial page editor The limit on opinion columns is 1.200 words using the same format as let ters
