Although a world safe from nuclear destruction is an ideal that all civilized people should pray for, as a practical matter, it is an impossibility. Nuclear weapons exist and will continue to do so until the time that (a) they have been used and so only rubble remains or (b) they have been replaced by more potent forces. This is not the City of God—at least, yet. Of late, there has been a great deal of attention focused upon the proliferation of these weapons. This attention, as it inevitably happens, has consolidated itself into a movement: the nuclear-freeze movement. Whether the participants in that campaign are, well-meaning individuals or dupes is essentially of little concern. There is a more fundamental consideration: the question of freedom. Freedom is a fundamental of civilized existence. In the U.S. people are able to organize themselves, march, shout, publish articles, etc. That’s obvious; everyone in the U.S. takes it for granted. But the other power doesn’t believe in values like freedom. It concerns itself with coercion, brutality, violence, and other topics that even the animal kingdom has evolved beyond. Every day, it seems, there are reports that severe prison overcrowding exists in the U.S. No such reports come from the Soviet Union: the gulag knows no bounds.

Sidney D. Drell is a theoretical physicist and he has been an adviser to the U.S. government on matters of national security and arms control for more than two decades. He is clearly a knowledgeable man. In Facing the Threat of Nuclear War he sets forth a number of proposals that he believes and thinks will reduce the possibility of a nuclear war. The items are sensible—or would be if all things were equal. But they are not. Can thugs be reasoned with? Can free people openly trust those beings which viciously annihilated the lives of 269 persons who happened to be aboard an unarmed, lumbering passenger plane that erred into the wrong geography? Metaphors of inhumane being fail before the reality of the foe.

The value of the text comes from an appended open letter written by Andrei Sakharov, wherein he states that his and Drell’s points of view coincide in believing that a large nuclear war is nothing more than “collective suicide.” The difference between the approaches of the two men is that Dr. Drell posits a gentlemanly enemy while Dr. Sakharov works with the actual given. He not only knows and understands it, but he has intimately experienced some of its cruelty. While fully acknowledging the desire for peace, Dr. Sakharov warns against easy solutions: “Objective reality is much more complicated and far from anything so simple.” He sensibly maintains that in order for the U.S. to deal with the U.S.S.R it must do so from a point of strength This means that if the Soviets build missiles and the U.S. doesn’t, then there is no reason why the Soviets would pay any attention to the U.S. And while Dr. Sakharov does want a reduction in nuclear arms, he also understands that conventional weapons and soldiers must be there to replace them. Do any placards in nuclear­ freeze marches speak of this necessity?

In the near-term, the U.S. must bolster its conventional forces and stay current with regard to nuclear weaponry. But it won’t be a simple thing to do. A long passage from Dr. Sakharov must be quoted here:

 

The restoration of strategic parity is only possible by investing large resources and by an essential change in the psychological atmosphere in the West. There must be a readiness to make certain limited economic sacrifices and, most important, an understanding of the seriousness of the situation and of the necessity for some restructuring. In the final analysis, this is necessary to prevent nuclear war, and war in general.

 

The question is, of course, whether or not we will do it. The possible—perhaps probable—consequences of not making those changes include not only the deaths of hundreds of millions, but also a reduction of oxygen in the atmosphere, various epidemics of known and unknown diseases, and a general collapse of all that is taken for granted. Dr. Sakharov says, “even if mankind were able to preserve itself as a social body, which seems highly unlikely, the most important social institutions—the foundation of civilization—would be destroyed.” Should we desire to preserve that foundation—as it doesn’t seem that our enemy is too concerned with matters related to civilization—then we must be both pacific and strong.