_ __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.
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