Aucbvax.1472
fa.arms-d
utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!CSVAX.upstill@Berkeley
Mon Jun 1 11:45:58 1981
Response to RMS response
...and here is my response to RMS civilized flamation.
First the minor point. The implication embodied by:
...the weapons we have now don't work, so we have to build newer ones...
(or some approximation thereto) is A implies B, where A is "We haven't succeeded
in becoming safe yet", and B is "we have to try harder along the same path."
This is what I mean by staying stuck in the same old game of initiate/respond,
and THATs the game I'm talking about needs to be transcended.
Briefly, here's what I'm saying: the issue of reducing the threat of
nuclear destruction is not the same as that of strategic theory. The one
regards increasing safety (actually preserving it) while the other deals in
abstractions of military significance (i.e. who gets hit hardest). The point
is that there is no way of making us safe within the strategic weapons game,
and in fact we are so profoundly unsafe despite 35 years of the most devoted
efforts in that direction, that the whole game seems worthless to me.
And yet it is a deeply-entrenched, desperately-clung-to game. How do we
break out of this vicious cycle. We, together with the Russians, have to
figure some way to abandon the whole game, and transcendence does not come
easy. It is a painful and difficult problem to change contexts. The reason
I think everybody should become painfully aware of the problem is to provide
motivation for making that leap of perception.
An example? Suppose the prevailing international value was on outstripping
the other guy in a backwards arms race? That that nation was perceived as
most peaceable and attractive which did the most to reduce the threat to
the world. (These adjectives do mean something; nations DO care what other
nations think about them--look at how the Russian stock went down in the
third world after Afghanistan)
That's just an example of course. The real point to be made is that
the arms race model of superpower relations isn't the only possible one,
and I find it hard to imagine a more hideously dangerous one. Looking beyond
the game we've got now gets ever more difficult as the tension between
US and USSR gets more hysterical. But it also gets more necessary. And
that is what Kosta Tsipis is good for--pointing out that we are not about
to feel safe in a hyper-nuclear world.
This is why I get frustrated when you say that you "concede the point"
that nukes hurt. It is not a point to concede but a huge, overriding
threat the immensity of which should always be with us..
And this is also why I say that some disarmament freaks are not just
opposed to particular weapons but to the whole game.
Steve
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