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The Reagan administration felt little inclination to deal
with the Soviet Union short of war. “What disturbs American
policymakers is not that the northern hemisphere would be
charred in a missile exchange," Adam Smith wrote at the time,
“It's that the Soviets might win without even fighting a war."
President Reagan responded to the mass demonstrations of the
worldwide Nuclear Freeze and to European resistance against
deploying American missiles on their soil that they were
“diseased" with “pacifism and neutrality" and inferred they were
duped by communism. Yet he had to make a play at resuming
negotiations and instituted clumsy doubletalk in changing the
talks from SALT to START (Strategic Arms Reduction Talks,
with emphasis upon “Reduction”) and seized the first opportun
ity, his stance against martial law in Poland, to indefinitely
postpone them. “It would be a brief whirl if the superpowers
really wanted to start cutting back their superweaponry in
Europe,” The Nation commented. “Both want to emerge from
Geneva with the blame for the extra click of the ratchet of
destruction fixed on the other side."
In the absence of any substantial treaty a “Call To Halt
the Nuclear Arms Race" sponsored by a coalition of religious
and secular peace groups expressed in common sense terms
the basis for the long public (and obviously nongovernmental)
opposition to nuclear armaments:
“The United States and the Soviet Union should immedi
ately and jointly stop the nuclear arms race. Specifically they
should adopt an immediate, mutual freeze on all further testing,
production and deployment of nuclear weapons and of missiles
and new aircraft designed primarily to deliver nuclear weapons.
This is the single most useful step that can be taken now to
reduce the likelihood of nuclear war and to prevent the spread of
nuclear weapons to other countries."
The “Call To Halt the Nuclear Arms Race” had six major
provisions:
~ Underground nuclear tests should be suspended
pending final agreement on a comprehensive test ban treaty.
-There should be a freeze on testing, production and
deployment of all missiles and new aircraft that may have
nuclear weapons as their sole or main payload.
-The number of land- and submarine-launched tubes for
nuclear missiles should be frozen.
-No further MIRVing or other changes to existing
missiles should be permitted.
-Production of fissionable material (enriched uranium
and plutonium) for weapons purposes should be halted.
-Production of additional nuclear weapons should be
halted.
The SALT treaties, flawed as they were, were the first
substantial arms control agreements between the two super
powers. Worthless in themselves, as are all treaties because
there is no accountability for nations short of war — treaties
exist only as long as they are convenient to their signers and
have been used more often as justification for warfare than for
peace — their success was in reaching any agreement at all.
They were obviously unable to either counter or keep up with
the incredible pace of nuclear weapons design or production,
but even if they did not curb soaring military budgets or limit
the destructiveness of nuclear weapons, SALT and other nego
tiations and treaties over the span of the Cold War did at least
reduce the risks of nuclear war between the superpowers for
nearly half a century and eventually helped achieve détente
and the end of the Cold War.
Although SALT 3 was never negotiated, its intended
provisions were more or less acted upon until the end of the
Cold War and the collapse of the USSR.
Ironically, neither treaties nor the apprehensive secret
iveness of the superpowers prevented international proliferation
of nuclear technology. Secrecy removed public participation
from the issue and made it a process of the very few, who in
the United States manipulated national defense as a slogan
for corporate profit and as a screen to obscure the immense
fortunes fabricated from a war economy fueled and made self-
perpetuating with public money without the public having much
say about it.
Citizens of both superpowers were hostage to the
fears and oppressive secrecy the nuclear arms race invoked
and diverted hundreds of billions of dollars from essential
social needs. Not only did the nuclear arms race grossly bloat
the private fortunes of U.S. munitions makers as well as put
them outside public scrutiny and accountability, it provided them
tremendous political power which was primarily conservative
and anti-democratic in nature.
The American economy’s reliance on military spending
created an interlocking Mafia of corporations involved in design
ing and constructing nuclear warheads and developing systems
fortransporting, arming and launching the weapons. Estimated
annual costs during the Cold War for maintaining as well and
expanding the U.S. nuclear arsenal was an estimated $50
billion, with that figure nearly doubled when both nuclear and
concomitant conventional military systems were considered.
More millions of dollars were tunneled to hundreds of univer
sities and colleges in the form of nuclear weapons research
grants.
The Bush administration, which last year unilaterally
revoked the 1972 ABM Treaty, is about to reopen the nuclear
arms race by ratcheting up the development of so-called “low-
yield" nuclear weapons and roll back virtually every nuclear
arms agreement made during the Cold War. The White House
has held secret meetings of the military-industrial complex
to rewrite U.S. nuclear doctrine to nullify non-test treaties and
produce a new generation of nuclear weapons, such as ship-
fired cruise missiles with nuclear warheads and nuclear armed
“bunker busters” for use against enemy troops. No members of
Congress have been invited to these meetings.
Bush displays a recklessness with his nuclear inherit
ance that surpasses Reagan's notion of winnable nuclear war.
The Bush concept seems to be that any other nation's nuclear
arms are “weapons of mass destruction" while the world obliter
ating U.S. arsenal is a “nuclear deterrent.” This doublethink
resonates throughout current American foreign policy, which is
nothing less than regression to nuclear blackmail: be damned
if you possess or develop nuclear weapons; be damned if you
don’t.
The new improved Pax Americana for the Millennium:
‘Star Wars’ (if it ever works) to dominate near outerspace with
satellites, laser-beams — and the nuclear trump of missiles
capable of targeting any place on the planet that disputes
U.S. suzerainty; missiles that seem to have as many varieties,
sizes, shapes and subspecies as dinosaurs. Imperious China
be warned! Militant Islam, accept Jesus as your Savior!
“No government at the moment has anything remotely
resembling a policy for peace,” Kenneth Boulding said during
the era of SALT. “All of them have a policy for defense, but that
is something quite different. If the peace research community
(could inquire) as to what a policy for peace would look like,
even on the part of a single government, we might be able to lift
ourselves out of this slough of sterility and impotence into which
we have fallen.”
Jonathan Schell wrote in The Fate of the Earth, that “if
a council were to be empowered by the people of the earth to
do whatever was necessary to save humanity from extinction by
nuclear arms, it might well decide that a good first step would be
to order the destruction of all the nuclear weapons in the world."
Yet that would not be enough, nor would demolishing factories
that produce them, nor destroying blueprints of how to make
them — the real question is how do we erase the knowledge of
nuclear weapons from the human mind?
“To return to safety through technical measures, we
would have to disarm matter itself," Schell wrote, “something
not even the physics of our time can teach us how to do."
We should consider Matthew (5:13).
Ye are the salt of the earth But if the salt hath lost its
savour, wherewith shall it be salted?
TEACHING ABOUT NUCLEAR WAR
Although schoolchildren conducted “Duck & Cover”
drills throughout the Cold War, Americans have been reluctant
to teach their children about nuclear war while building ever
more grotesque weapons. An example is an attempt by Oregon
to establish a curriculum pertaining to nuclear war in the state's
public elementary and high schools during the height of the Cold
War. The idea was to develop a program of the history of the
Nuclear Age and the arms race that so quickly developed
between the superpowers, the consequences of the use of
nuclear weapons, the effects upon national economies and
ambitions, and alternate forms of resolving conflict short of war
in general.
The issue caused intense and heated debate. Support
ers (mostly Democrats) said teaching children about war would
be an important step toward averting holocaust. Opponents
(mostly Republicans) said it would create fear in children and
weaken the nation’s resolve to defend itself. Essentially, the
people who didn’t want kids to know about nuclear war were
those whose policies encouraged it.
Clatsop County Democrat Tom Hanlon said, “Children
are concerned about life in the nuclear age and should have
their concerns addressed in the classroom.” Eugene Represent
ative Cart Hosticka said giving children the opportunity to learn
about nuclear war was the legislature's first concrete step toward
preventing nuclear disaster.
One who disagreed was Gold Beach Representative
Al Schroader, a Republican, who compared nuclear education
to sex education, which he said produced more pregnancies,
abortions and homosexuals than before it was taught He said
children were not taught to distinguish between good and evil
and that education about nuclear war would only brainwash
them and dissolve their will in the struggle against the Evil
Empire.
His opinions represented the far right but were not
substantially different from more moderate Republicans such
as John Minnis from Portland, a former policeman and still a
member of the state legislature in 2003, who thought teaching
about nuclear war would coerce children into accepting what
he called a global philosophy that would countenance global
government.
Minnis said educating children about nuclear weapons
would undermine their national allegiance and indoctrinate them
in extremist politics, and that schools were inadequate to teach
about nuclear war. His opinion was children should be taught
how to think and grasp fundamentals before such dramatic and
complex issues as the nuclear arms race were put before them,
and he said elementary children in particular were too young to
understand and too prone to anxieties and nightmares about
what the courses might reveal to them
Minnis, then and now an ardent supporter of Star Wars
(which he claimed would end the nuclear arms race with more
certainty than a nuclear freeze) said that arguments about
nuclear weapons were more volatile than the weapons them
selves He felt antinuclear groups would use the schools to
manipulate children into opposing nuclear weapons
The major flaw in the argument that parents should be
responsible for teaching their children about nuclear war, not the
schools, was that most adults then and now do want to know or
think about it themselves
A 10 year old girl wrote a letter to an Oregon newspaper
during the nuclear school debate She had just watched a TV
movie about nuclear war (The Final Day) and she was afraid for
her future “I don’t want war to happen," she wrote. “If a bomb
does explode now, I think I’d rather die than live. Now when I
think of my future I think of nothing I hope a war will never
happen."
Was she afraid because she knew so little or too much
about the consequences of a nuclear war?
- michael M c C usker
HOPE L. HARRIS
LICENSED
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