With Enough Shovels

A fundamental change has occurred in the U.S. since the election of 1980: Our leaders during the time of Ronald Reagan have come to plan for waging and winning a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and they are obsessed with a strategy of confrontation--including nuclear brinkmanship--that aims to force the Soviets to shrink their empire and fundamentally alter their society.

That obsession has gone beyond the discussion stage. President Reagan had been in office less than a year when he approved a secret plan to provide the U.S. with the capability to win a protracted nuclear war. This plan, outlined in a so-called National Security Decision Document (N.S.D.D.), committed the U.S., for the first time, to the idea that a nuclear war could be won.

"Nuke war," as Louis O. Giuffrida, whom Reagan had named head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), calls it, has come to be discussed not only as a war that can be won but as a war consistent with the preservation of civilization. "It would be a terrible mess, but it wouldn't be unmanageable," Giuffrida told ABC News. Or, as his assistant in charge of the civil-defense program, William Chipman, put it when I asked him if democracy and other U.S. institutions would survive all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union: "I think they would eventually, yeah. As I say, the ants eventually build another anthill."

The idea that "nuke war" is survivable begins with the assertion that an effective civil defense is possible. Proponents of this view in the Reagan Administration claim that civil defense can protect the Russian population and, therefore, that Soviet military planners think they can survive and win a nuclear war. According to Reagan and his people, this confidence is one important reason for the Soviet military build-up and for our own urgent need to close the "window of vulnerability"--Reagan's phrase to describe the presumed vulnerability of the U.S. to a Soviet first strike. Ergo, the renewed interest in America's civil defense, massive military spending and new Pentagon plans for waging a protracted nuclear war--what Reagan calls "the rearming of America."

That attitude results in part from the growing sophistication of nuclear weapons in the arsenals of both superpowers: weapons that can do more than destroy heavily populated areas; weapons whose control and accuracy are, theoretically, so refined that they tempt their makers to think they can be detonated not only as weapons of genocide or countergenocide but as if they were conventional weapons, to take out selected enemy targets in a war that would be fought on a limited or, at least, a less than catastrophic basis. In other words, a war with winners as well as losers.

Combined with this view is the idea that détente has not served us well, that the Soviets have not accepted its terms but have, in fact, gained nuclear superiority. This argument was advanced by President Reagan, despite substantial disagreement among experienced people who had studied the question, as one justification for his 1.6-trillion-dollar five-year military program.

Whatever its inherent defects, as long as we lived in the era of détente, with its seemingly endless arms-control negotiations and other complex dealings between the superpowers, most Americans found it relatively easy to avoid thinking about nuclear annihilation. There was comfort in the knowledge that somewhere in the midst of the interminable SALT talks, our respective leaders were trying to cut whatever deal was possible in the interest of their, and our, survival. One assumption of the détente period was that no matter how awful the other fellow might be, he still didn't want to commit nuclear suicide; the instinct for self-preservation would win out over nationalist and ideological obsessions.

The notion that nuclear war means mutual suicide had for years been a basis of détente and arms-control negotiations. It became obvious, however, as Reagan installed his people in high places, that all this had changed as many of the highly vociferous critics of détente and arms control moved into positions of authority in Washington, and attempts to live with the Soviets became more scorned than honored.

As we shall see, a Cold War cabal of unreconstructed hawks and neohawks who had never been fully at ease with the arms-control efforts of the Nixon, Ford and Carter Administrations suddenly came into its own. The members of this group categorically reject peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union as that country is now constituted. They seek instead--through confrontation, through the use of political and economic pressure and through the threat of military weapons--to alter radically the nature of Soviet society. They assume, as Reagan has stated, that "the Soviet Union underlies all the unrest that is going on. If they weren't engaged in this game of dominoes, there wouldn't be any hot spots in the world." Convinced that the nuclear-arms race is dangerous not in itself but only if the Soviets gain "superiority," they have shifted the emphasis of American foreign policy from the avoidance of nuclear war to the preparation for its possible outbreak.

If the extent to which this change occurred went widely unremarked at first, it was not because these men were secretive about their beliefs: As Eugene V. Rostow, Reagan's Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, had written before being selected for this important post, "We are living in a prewar and not a postwar world." Other statements by officials of the Reagan Government have been just as direct. For example, we are now committed to what Deputy Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci III, in his Senate confirmation hearing, called a "nuclear-war-fighting capability," a position that presupposes that nuclear war can be kept limited, survivable and winnable.

In 1981, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger told the House Budget Committee that the Reagan Administration would expand the U.S. capability "for deterring or prosecuting [italics mine] a global war with the Soviet Union." Halfway through Reagan's first year in office, Weinberger presented the President with a defense-spending plan by which the U.S. could gain nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union within this decade. The goal, according to senior Pentagon officials, was to build a capacity to fight nuclear wars ranging from a limited strike to an all-out exchange.

One of those who helped shape Reagan's war-fighting views was former Harvard historian Richard Pipes. In 1978, before he was appointed the senior Soviet specialist on Reagan's National Security Council staff, Pipes criticized the nuclear-war plans of previous Administrations, both Republican and Democratic, because "deeply embedded in all our plans is the notion of punishing the aggressor rather than defeating him." Or, as Secretary of Energy James B. Edwards put it, in a nuclear war, "I want to come out of it number one, not number two."

In a telephone interview with me in the fall of 1981, Charles Kupperman, a Reagan appointee to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, said that "it is possible for any society to survive" a nuclear war. He added that "nuclear war is a destructive thing but still in large part a physics problem."

Reagan's first year was continually marked by such comments about waging nuclear war in some form or other. The President himself claimed that it would be possible to keep a nuclear war on the European continent limited to a tactical exchange, thereby making Western Europeans more nervous than they had been in some time.

When word of the Administration's stance toward nuclear war began to emerge, it caused a powerful sense of alarm among the general public, both in this country and abroad. By the end of Reagan's first year, public-opinion polls were showing that proposals for a bilateral freeze on additional nuclear weapons were being approved by two-to-one margins. Demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands of people protesting the nuclear-arms race took place in Europe and the U.S. Whatever else Reagan and his aides accomplished, they greatly stimulated the dormant peace movement in the free world and gave the Russians a fine opportunity to trumpet the fact that the U.S. was the more bellicose of the two superpowers, the greater threat to human survival.

By the spring of 1982, the Administration realized that it had got itself into deep trouble on this issue and began to alter its public posture. It was then that Reagan floated his so-called START proposal. START stands for strategic-arms-reduction talks and represents a replay of Reagan's successful ploy in his pre-election debate with Carter, when he called for bilateral arms reductions in an effort to counter Carter's portrayal of Reagan as a warmonger.

The Soviets were not likely to accept Reagan's proposal, because it would take from them half of their ICBM force while leaving ours relatively undisturbed. Former Secretary of State Edmund Muskie, in fact, suggested that START "may be a secret agenda for sidetracking disarmament while the United States gets on with rearmament--in a hopeless quest for superiority in these things." Even so, the proposal made for good public relations.

With the START announcement, the Administration showed that it had learned its lesson and thereafter would try not to alarm the public as it built up its strategic arms. From then on, there would be little public talk about nuclear-war fighting. The interviews by journalists with top Administration officials on nuclear-war fighting and survival would be harder to come by. At least, that was the plan; but such profound changes in U.S. defense strategy as were being conceived in the Defense Department and the White House were bound to leak out and would raise serious questions about the Administration's intent in the START talks.

In May, a United Press International report by Helen Thomas stated, "A senior White House official said Reagan approved an eight-page national-security document that 'undertakes a campaign aimed at internal reform in the Soviet Union and shrinkage of the Soviet empire.' He affirmed that it could be called 'a full-court press' against the Soviet Union." (A full-court press is a basketball expression that describes an attempt to wrest the ball away from one's opponent in his own territory.)

That remarkable statement reflects the views of Pipes, who had said early in 1981 that "Soviet leaders would have to choose between peacefully changing their Communist system ... or going to war." At the time, the Administration had sought to downplay Pipes's statement, but by the spring of 1982, his view seemed to have become official policy.

On May 30, a week after that U.P.I. story, New York Times Pentagon correspondent Richard Halloran broke the story of the 1982 five-year Defense Guidance Plan. His article began with the following statement:

Defense Department policy makers, in a new five-year defense plan, have accepted the premise that nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union could be protracted and have drawn up their first strategy for fighting such a war.

The document was signed by Weinberger. It outlined the strategy to be pursued by the Pentagon for the next five years and was intended as a general guide for the next decade as well.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the implications of this strategy document, for it resolves a debate in the highest councils of Government and places the U.S., for the first time, squarely on the side of those extremists in this country and in the Soviet Union who believe in the possibility of fighting and winning a protracted nuclear war. As the Times put it:

The nature of nuclear war has been a subject of intense debate among political leaders, defense specialists and military officers. Some assert that there would be only one all-out mutually destructive exchange. Others argue that a nuclear war with many exchanges could be fought over days and weeks.

The outcome of the debate will shape the weapons, communications and strategy for nuclear forces. The civilian and military planners, having decided that protracted nuclear war is possible, say that American nuclear forces "must prevail and be able to force the Soviet Union to seek earliest termination of hostilities on terms favorable to the United States."

The nuclear-war strategy outlined in the document aims at the "decapitation" of the Soviet political leadership, as well as at preventing communication between the leadership and the forces in the field. It specifies further that the Chinese would be granted military assistance to keep Soviet forces pinned down on Russia's eastern border. In addition, psychological-warfare, sabotage and guerrilla-warfare operations would be improved. All of that presumably has to do with the full-court press on the Soviet empire.

Halloran underscored the significance of this Administration's departure from the attitudes of its predecessors on the matter of nuclear-war fighting when he wrote:

In many parts of this document, the Reagan military planners started with a blank sheet of paper. Their views on the possibility of protracted nuclear war differ from those of the Carter Administration's military thinkers, as do their views on global conventional war and, particularly, on putting economic pressure on the Soviet Union.

The Defense Department's plan disturbed such experts as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Hans Bethe, who had headed the theoretical-physics division of Los Alamos National Laboratory during the Manhattan Project in World War Two. Bethe and physicist Kurt Gottfried wrote that the plan "comes close to a declaration of war on the Soviet Union and contradicts and may destroy President Reagan's initiatives toward nuclear-arms control."

Nor did the professional military unanimously applaud these ideologically derived war-fighting plans. For example, The Washington Post reported on June 19 that General David C. Jones, who had retired as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "left office yesterday with the warning that it would be throwing money in a 'bottomless pit' to try to prepare the United States for a long nuclear war with the Soviet Union." The newspaper said General Jones doubted that any nuclear exchange between the Soviets and the United States could be contained without its escalating into an all-out war. According to the article, "'I don't see much of a chance of nuclear war being limited or protracted,' said Jones, who has pondered various dooms-day scenarios.... 'I see great difficulty' in keeping any kind of nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union from escalating."

Despite the reservations of the general and of others in and out of the military, the Reagan Administration reaffirmed its commitment to programs in support of protracted nuclear war. In the summer of 1982, a Pentagon master plan to implement Reagan's strategic policy was drafted. It lays out military-hardware requirements and nuclear-targeting adjustments necessary to wage such a war.

Unlike the Defense Guidance Plan, which is an internal Pentagon document, the new master plan, as I reported in the Los Angeles Times, was drawn up in response to a secret White House directive, a National Security Decision Document--which mandated that the Defense Department provide a program for implementing Reagan's nuclear-war policy. Reagan's N.S.D.D. is the first policy statement of a U.S. Administration to proclaim that U.S. strategic forces must be able to win a protracted nuclear war. That goes considerably beyond earlier tendencies toward nuclear-war-fighting strategies.

All post-World War Two Presidents, (continued on page 154) With Enough Shovels (continued from page 122) up to and including Jimmy Carter, have dealt with contingency planning. But the men around Reagan are not merely interested in "what if?" scenarios. This difference was acknowledged by Colin Gray, a leading advocate of the nuclear-war-fighting school and, oddly, now an arms-control advisor to the Reagan Government. In 1980, before the election, Gray wrote in Foreign Policy,

To advocate . . . targeting flexibility and selectivity [as Carter did] is not the same as to advocate a war-fighting, war-survival strategy. . . . Victory or defeat in nuclear war is possible, and such a war may have to be waged to that point; and the clearer the vision of successful war termination, the more likely war can be waged intelligently at earlier stages.

In this article, titled "Victory Is Possible," Gray and his co-author, Keith Payne, complained that "many commentators and senior U.S. Government officials consider [nuclear war] a non-survivable event." Instead, Gray presented the nuclear-war-fighters' alternative vision:

The United States should plan to defeat the Soviet Union and to do so at a cost that would not prohibit U.S. recovery. Washington should identify war aims that in the last resort would contemplate the destruction of Soviet political authority and the emergence of a postwar world order compatible with Western values.

Gray proposed that "a combination of counterforce offensive targeting, civil defense and ballistic-missile and air defense should hold U.S. casualties down to a level compatible with national survival and recovery." The compatible level he had in mind would leave 20,000,000 dead.

While there have undoubtedly been aggressive voices in previous Administrations, within the Reagan Government, the nuclear-war fighters are apparently unchallenged. The policies and the budget priorities of this Administration proclaim that the unthinkable can now be planned without hesitation. This development has alarmed many of the key architects of America's strategic-defense policy. One of those is Dr. Herbert York, a veteran of the Manhattan Project and a former director of California's Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, one of the nation's main developers of nuclear weapons. Dr. York, who was the Director of Defense Research and Engineering under President Kennedy, told me in an interview in April:

"What's going on right now is that the crazier analysts have risen to higher positions than is normally the case. They are able to carry their ideas further and higher because the people at the top are simply less well informed than is normally the case. Neither the current President nor his immediate backers in the White House nor the current Secretary of Defense has any experience with these things, so when the ideologues come in with their fancy stories and with their selected intelligence data, the President and the Secretary of Defense believe the last glib person who's talked to them."

An alternative view in the Reagan Administration was offered by Richard Perle, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy and an architect of the Pentagon's five-year war-fighting plan, who told me:

"I've always worried less about what would happen in an actual nuclear exchange than about the effect that the nuclear balance has on our willingness to take risks in local situations. It is not that I am worried about the Soviets' attacking the United States with nuclear weapons confident that they will win that nuclear war. It is that I worry about an American President's feeling he cannot afford to take action in a crisis because Soviet nuclear forces are such that, if escalation took place, they are better poised than we are to move up the escalation ladder."

Perle strongly believes that we can stockpile nuclear weapons and threaten to use them without increasing the risks of nuclear war. When I asked him about the fear of the nuclear-arms race expressed by such groups as Physicians for Social Responsibility, he replied:

"I am as aware as [the antinuclear-weapons advocates] are of the presence of nuclear weapons in the world. I'm more confident about our ability to deter war, nevertheless, than they are, and that is based partly on some judgments about history...."

Perle's judgments about history begin with the assumption, as he told me, that the Soviet Union is much like Hitler's Germany--inexorably bent on world conquest unless an aroused West intervenes. Like many others in the Administration, Perle fears that the danger of appeasement far exceeds that of nuclear escalation.

Eugene Rostow, Reagan's chief disarmament man, echoed Perle's fear that we are up against another Hitler. In 1976 he wrote, "Our posture today is comparable to that of Britain, France and the United States during the Thirties. Whether we are at the Rhineland or the Munich watershed remains to be seen."

When I interviewed Rostow in 1981, he told me, "I do not think the real danger of the situation is nuclear war and mass destruction; I think the danger is political coercion based on the threat of mass destruction. . . . And that is very real. You can smell it."

What Rostow, Perle and others who insist on this analogy ignore is that neither the Allies nor Germany possessed nuclear weapons at the time of Munich. Would even such a madman as Hitler have attempted world conquest--would his generals have allowed him to?--if French and British missiles had been holding Berlin hostage? Nor would Perle find much support outside his own tight cabal of anti-Soviet hard-liners for the idea that Soviet leadership is driven by the same furies that possessed Hitler. As for the Soviets themselves, who have their own memories of Hitler, the analogy can only be enraging.

There are two possible inferences to be drawn from this recent intensification of U.S. rhetoric. Either the Reagan Administration, while believing that nuclear war is catastrophic, has chosen to play nuclear chicken with the Soviets, with the intention of changing their political system and challenging their empire, or the United States really has abandoned the view that nuclear war is inevitably cataclysmic and that nuclear weapons can be detonated as viable instruments of policy.

Although I have spent much of the past three years reporting for the Los Angeles Times on our drift toward nuclear war, there are still times when I lose my sense of the devastation that lies behind the sterile acronyms by which these modern weapons are described. The words have grown stale after nearly four decades of so-called strategic development. We hear about SLCMs and MIRVs or of that weird hodgepodge of nuclear-war-fighting strategies--the window of vulnerability, the first-strike scenarios, the city strips--and after a while, the mind doesn't react with the appropriate horror.

The question of universal death grows stale partly because the arguments are often unnecessarily complex, rely on an insider's lingo and use terms that mute just what it is these bombs will do--which is, to start with, kill the people one loves and nearly everyone else as well.

I came to appreciate this fully only during a conversation with a former (continued on page 228) With Enough Shovels (continued from page 154) CIA analyst who had been responsible for evaluating Soviet strategic nuclear forces. He has spent much of his adult life concerned with the question of nuclear war and has heard all the arguments about nuclear-war fighting and survival. But an experience from his youth, he told me, remains in his mind and, he admits, may yet color his view.

This man had conducted some of the most important CIA studies on the Soviets and nuclear war. Now in his middle years, still youthful in manner, clean-cut and obviously patriotic, the father of a Marine on active duty, he recently left the CIA to join a company that works for that agency, so I cannot use his name.

He told me about this experience of his youth because he was frightened by the Reagan Administration's casual talk about waging and winning a nuclear war and thought it did not really comprehend what kind of weapon the bomb was. As an illustration, he recalled having seen, as a lieutenant in the Navy, a bomb go off near Christmas Island in the Pacific. Years later, at the CIA, he had worked with computer models that detailed the number of fatalities likely to result from various nuclear-war-targeting scenarios. But to bring a measure of reality to these computer projections, he would return in his mind as he did now to that time in the Pacific.

"The birds were the things we could see all the time. They were superb specimens of life . . . really quite exquisite . . . phenomenal creatures. Albatrosses will fly for days, skimming a few inches above the surface of the water. These birds have tremendously long wings and tails, and beaks that are as if fashioned for another purpose. You don't see what these birds are about from their design; they are just beautiful creatures. Watching them is a wonder. That is what I didn't expect. . . .

"We were standing around, waiting for this bomb to go off, which we had been told was a very small one, so no one was particularly upset. Even though I'd never seen one, I figured, Well, these guys know what is going to happen. They know what the dangers are and we've been adequately briefed and we all have our radiation meters on. . . . No worry."

He paused to observe that the size of the bomb to be exploded was ten kilotons, or the equivalent explosive power of 10,000 tons of TNT. The bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 13 and 23 kilotons, respectively, Now such bombs are mere tactical or battlefield weapons. Many of the ones to be used in any U.S.-Soviet nuclear war are measured in megatons--millions of tons of TNT.

He continued his account:

"So the countdown came in over the radio, and suddenly I could see all these birds that I'd been watching for days. They were now suddenly visible through the opaque visor of my helmet. And they were smoking. Their feathers were on fire. And they were doing cart wheels. And the light persisted for some time. It was instantaneously bright but wasn't instantaneous, because it stayed and it changed its composition slightly. Several seconds, it seemed like--long enough for me to see birds crash into the water. They were sizzling, smoking. They weren't vaporized; it's just that they were absorbing such intense radiation that they were being consumed by the heat. Their feathers were on fire. They were blinded. And so far, there had been no shock, none of the blast damage we talk about when we discuss the effects of nuclear weapons. Instead, there were just these smoking, twisting, hideously contorted birds crashing into things. And then I could see vapor rising from the inner lagoon as the surface of the water was heated by this intense flash.

"Now, this isn't a primary effect of the weapon; it is an initial kind of effect that precedes other things, though it is talked about and you can see evidence of it in the Hiroshima blast and in Nagasaki--outlines of people on bridges where they stood when the bomb was dropped. But that initial thermal radiation is a phenomenon that is unlike any other weapon I've seen."

The men who now dominate the Reagan Administration and who believe that nuclear war is survivable would surely wonder what those reflections have to do with the struggle against the Soviet Union. But what my CIA friend was telling me was that those birds are us and they never had a chance.

"It's the Dirt That Does it"

Very late one autumn night in 1981, Thomas K. Jones, the man Reagan had appointed Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces), told me that the U.S. could fully recover from an all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union in just two to four years. T.K., as he prefers to be known, added that nuclear war was not nearly so devastating as we had been led to believe. He said, "If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody's going to make it." The shovels were for digging holes in the ground, which would be covered, somehow or other, with a couple of doors and with three feet of dirt thrown on top, thereby providing adequate fallout shelters for the millions who had been evacuated from U.S. cities to the countryside. "It's the dirt that does it," he said.

After parts of my interview with T. K. Jones ran in the Los Angeles Times, a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee demanded that Jones present himself to defend the views that Senator Alan Cranston said went "far beyond the bounds of reasonable, rational, responsible thinking."

Meanwhile, Senator Charles Percy, the Republican Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, had confronted Jones at a town meeting in the Senator's home state of Illinois and had been sufficiently troubled by his relatively complacent views of nuclear war to pressure the Pentagon for an accounting.

But by then, the Administration had muzzled Jones, and he missed his first three scheduled appearances before the Senate subcommittee. It was at this point that a New York Times editorial asked, "Who is the Thomas K. Jones who is saying those funny things about civil defense?" Elsewhere, Jones's espousal of primitive fallout shelters was dismissed by editorial writers and cartoonists as a preposterous response to what nuclear war was all about. However, what these dismissals ignored was that Jones's notions of civil defense, odd as they may seem, are crucial to Reagan's strategic policy.

Reagan's nuclear-arms build-up follows from the idea that the U.S. is vulnerable to Soviet nuclear weapons, an idea that rests in part on calculations made by this same Jones before he joined the Government, when he worked for the Boeing Company. It was his estimates of the efficacy of Soviet civil defense that provided much of the statistical justification for the view that the Soviets could reasonably expect to survive and win a nuclear war while we, without a comparable civil-defense program, would necessarily lose.

And it was his celebration of the shovel and of primitive shelters that helped call into question the Administration's claim of U.S. vulnerability. In fact, it was from the Russians that he had borrowed the idea of digging holes in the first place. He had become fascinated with the powerful defensive possibilities of dirt only after he had read Soviet civil-defense manuals that advocated such procedures. (continued on page 299) With Enough Shovels (continued from page 228) If his evacuation and sheltering plans were absurd for the U.S., how, then, could any observer take the Soviet civil-defense program seriously? And if the Soviets were not capable of protecting their society and recovering from a nuclear war, how could anyone genuinely believe that they were planning to fight and win such a war?

I had first interviewed T.K. at his Pentagon office in the fall of 1981. I was interested in his views because of his extensive testimony five years earlier before Congressional committees and because of articles he had written on the need for civil defense and the possibilities for surviving nuclear war.

The interview took place in an office hung with pictures of the atomic devastation of Japan. Jones, as in his barely reported Congressional testimony, was reassured by the familiar scenes of destruction and pointed to the few surviving structures in an otherwise barren wasteland of rubble to support his analysis that, indeed, there are defenses against nuclear war. He praised the resilience of the Japanese, noting, "About 30 days after the blast, there were people in there salvaging the rubble, rebuilding their houses." Jones acknowledged that modern nuclear strategic weapons are hundreds of times more powerful than the devices exploded in Japan and that a large U.S. city would receive not one but perhaps more than a dozen incoming warheads. Yet he insisted that the survival of more than 90 percent of our people was possible.

I asked Jones about the Administration's vision for civil defense for Los Angeles in the Eighties: "To dramatize it for the reader, the bomb has dropped [in Los Angeles]. Now, if he's within that two-mile area, he's finished, right? If he's not in the two-mile area, what has happened?"

Jones replied, "His house is gone, he's there, wherever he dug that hole. . . . You've got to be in a hole. . . . The dirt really is the thing that protects you from the blast, as well as the radiation, if there's radiation. It protects you from the heat. You know, dirt is just great stuff. . . ."

He told me that he had been deeply impressed with what he claimed was the Soviet plan to evacuate the cities and protect the urban population in hastily constructed shelters in the countryside. He also referred to his studies at Boeing to show that the Soviet method of piling dirt around factory machines would permit their survival even if nuclear bombs fell close by.

These studies, he explained, were not universally admired. Some critics, for example, did not share his enthusiasm for the Soviet civil-defense program and scoffed at the prospect of millions of Soviet citizens' digging holes during the freezing winter in order to cover themselves and their machinery.

The day after the interview, I saw Attorney General William French Smith and his entourage. It was a reassuring sight--they all looked so solidly adult, sober, respectable; surely, they had too much going for them to accept the prospect of giving it all up for a hole in the ground or even for one of the fancy but ultimately no more effective Government blast shelters. And just as surely, Reagan and George Bush were solid and responsible. Or were they? How much, I wondered, did the views of men such as Jones reflect the thinking of our new heads of state? Had they all gone mad in their obsessive fear of the Russians? Or was Jones an aberration, a solitary eccentric who had somehow found his way into the Pentagon?

Reagan and Bush

Reflecting on Jones's startling remarks, I thought back to the time in January 1980 when I had interviewed Presidential candidate Bush aboard a small chartered plane en route from Houston to New Orleans. Bush was then seen as a moderate sort of Republican alternative to Carter, and it was for this reason that what he told me startled me so, though at first, I barely caught its implications.

The question that had provoked Bush's reply derived from the conventional wisdom of the previous 20 years that there was a limit to how many nuclear weapons the superpowers should stockpile, because, after a point, the two sides would simply wipe each other out, and any extra firepower represented overkill. This had been the assumption ever since former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had conceived the mutual-assured-destruction policy. But Bush had faulted Carter for not being quick enough to build the MX missile and the B-1 bomber, and I asked, "Don't we reach a point with these strategic weapons where we can wipe each other out so many times and no one wants to use them or is willing to use them, that it really doesn't matter whether we're ten percent or two percent lower or higher?"

Bush bristled a bit and replied, "Yes, if you believe there is no such thing as a winner in a nuclear exchange, that argument makes a little sense. I don't believe that."

I then asked how one won in a nuclear exchange.

Bush seemed angry that I had challenged what to him seemed an obvious truth. He replied, "You have a survivability of command and control, survivability of industrial potential, protection of a percentage of your citizens, and you have a capability that inflicts more damage on the opposition than it can inflict upon you. That's the way you can have a winner, and the Soviets' planning is based on the ugly concept of a winner in a nuclear exchange."

Did that mean, I asked, that five percent would survive? Two percent?

"More than that," he answered. "If everybody fired everything he had, you'd have more than that survive."

The interview with Bush seemed internally inconsistent at the time. But later, when I learned about an organization that called itself the Committee on the Present Danger (of which more later), I discovered the source of this dangerous, if muddled, line of thought.

The organizers of the committee had formed the center of opposition to détente. They had introduced the idea that the Soviets are bent on nuclear superiority and believe they can be victorious in a nuclear war. As I would learn, those men were influential not only with Bush but even more so with his campaign opponent, Ronald Reagan.

A month after I interviewed Bush, I was in another airplane, and the man beside me was talking. He said that, assuming we had a Soviet-style civil defense, we could survive nuclear war:

"It would be a survival of some of your people and some of your facilities, but you could start again. It would not be anything that I think in our society you would consider acceptable, but then, we have a different regard for human life than those monsters do." He was referring to what he said was the Soviets' belief in winning a nuclear war despite casualties that we would find unacceptable. And he added that they are "godless" monsters.

It is this theological defect "that gives them less regard for humanity or human beings."

The man telling me all this was Ronald Reagan, as I interviewed him on a flight from Birmingham to Orlando, where he was headed to pick up some votes in the upcoming 1980 Florida Republican primary. By mentioning the Soviets' low regard for human life, he meant to validate the view that he confided to me later--that the Russians have for some time been preparing a pre-emptive nuclear war:

"We've still been following the mutual-assured-destruction plan that was given birth by McNamara, and it was a ridiculous plan, and it was based on the idea that the two countries would hold each other's populations hostage, that we would not protect or defend our people against a nuclear attack. They, in turn, would do the same. Therefore, if both of us knew that we could wipe each other out, neither one would dare push the button. The difficulty with that was that the Soviet Union decided some time ago that a nuclear war was possible and was winnable, and they have proceeded with an elaborate and extensive civil-protection program. We do not have anything of that kind, because we went along with what the policy was supposed to be."

As President, Reagan set out to get something of that kind. The goal of the Reagan/Bush Administration has been to emulate what Reagan claimed was the Soviet program by developing the ingredients of a nuclear-war-fighting capability. And the key ingredient, even more than the number and power of the nuclear weapons themselves, is the ability of a country's leadership to control a war in the midst of massive nuclear explosions. This is what Bush had in mind when he told me that nuclear war was winnable by having "survivability of command and control." And when Reagan, in the fall of 1981, announced his strategic package, he singled out an 18-billion-dollar program for enduring command, control and communications (C3) as the most important element in his program.

But the calm and understated former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance had this to say when I asked him, in an interview in March 1982, what he thought of the Reagan Administration's plans to improve C3 in order to attain a nuclear-war-fighting capability: "I think it is sound and proper to have a command and control that could, hopefully, survive a nuclear attack. However, to take the next leap--that it is important to have a command and control that is survivable so that you can fight a nuclear war--is a wholly different situation. I happen to be one of those who believe it is madness to talk about trying to fight a continuing nuclear war as though it were like fighting a conventional war and that one could control the outcome with the kind of precision that is sometimes possible in a conventional war situation."

That the Administration had begun moving in a direction that Vance called madness was made abundantly clear by Lieutenant General James W. Stansberry, commander of the Electronics Systems Division of the Air Force, as reported in Aviation Week & Space Technology:

Stansberry said there is now a shift in strategic-warfare philosophy in the U.S. and that the country must be prepared to fight and to keep on fighting, and that an eight-hour nuclear war is no longer an acceptable concept.

The main reason that an eight-hour nuclear war is no longer acceptable is that the Administration has adopted the view, once held by only a fringe group of strategic analysts, that the Soviet Union is bent on acquiring nuclear superiority so as to win a nuclear war, as Bush had said. This was the point of Colin Gray and Keith Payne's controversial article "Victory Is Possible," referred to earlier. They argued not only that nuclear war is winnable but also that the U.S. should be prepared to initiate it.

Two years after that article appeared, Gray was appointed by the Reagan Administration as consultant to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. He was also named a member of the General Advisory Committee to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and a consultant to the State Department.

If the Russians had appointed a man with Gray's views to a high and visible government post, our own hawks would surely say, "We told you so" and demand vast new categories of armaments. Nor did Reagan appoint such men as Gray and T. K. Jones inadvertently. Their views and those of the other hardliners were well known to the Reagan people who selected them, and they were compatible with the strategic policy pursued by the Administration. For the views of these hard-liners, in fact, permeate the present Administration. They are views that had been espoused for years by men languishing in the wings of power, waiting for one of their own to move to center stage. With Reagan, their time had come.

The Committee on the Present Danger

It was the fall of Reagan's first year in office, and Charles Tyroler II, the director of the Committee on the Present Danger, was boasting a little. Five years before, he and a small band of Cold Warriors had set out to reshape American foreign policy, which they felt was too soft on the Russians, and suddenly, they had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. One member of their group was now the President of the United States, and he had recruited heavily from the committee's ranks for his top foreign-policy officials.

Committee members were ensconced as heads of the CIA and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and in top State and Defense Department and White House positions. Paul Green, the committee's public-relations director, told me that Eugene Rostow, a founding member of the committee and the new head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, had just that week written part of the President's speech on arms control. It was in that speech that Reagan had for the first time referred to START as the alternative to SALT. Green was proud that it had been Rostow who had come up with the acronym START, and both Green and Tyroler were obviously pleased that SALT II, which had taken three Presidents and six years to negotiate and which the committee had strenuously opposed, now seemed securely buried.

"The leaders of the Government," Tyroler boasted, "the Secretary of Defense, the President of the United States and the Secretary of State, the head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, the National Security advisor--when they give a speech, in general terms, it sounds like what we said in 1976. Yes, I think that is a fair statement." He then offered a self-satisfied laugh and added, "And why wouldn't that be? They use the same stuff--and they were all members back then."

The same stuff, of course, was the committee's persistent and shrill criticism of the SALT II treaty in particular and of détente with the Soviets in general. What emerges from the committee's literature is the view that the Soviet Union is as unrelentingly aggressive as Nazi Germany: "The Soviet military build-up of all its armed forces over the past quarter century is, in part, reminiscent of Nazi Germany's rearmament in the Thirties. The Soviet build-up affects all branches of the military: the army, the air force and the navy. In addition, Soviet nuclear offensive and defensive forces are designed to enable the U.S.S.R. to fight, survive and win an all-out nuclear war should it occur."

Committee founder Paul Nitze later added, "The Kremlin leaders do not want war; they want the world.... The Soviets are driven to put themselves into the best position they can to achieve military victory in a [nuclear] war while assuring the survival, endurance and recovery of the core of their party."

This last notion, later embraced by candidates Bush and Reagan, originated with the men who founded the committee and who have since become key players in the Reagan campaign and Presidency. It is they who have given us the language and the imagery of limited nuclear war and who claim that we can survive and even win such a conflict. It is they and their allies within the Administration who have pushed most strenuously for a rapid arms build-up. And it is they who are responsible, along with their Soviet counterparts, for dragging the world back into the darkness and the danger of the Cold War.

The committee's ideologues couldn't have done it alone. Their rhetoric fed on the continued Soviet military build-up and the wasteful civil-defense program that accompanied it, to say nothing of the violent statements of various Soviet military leaders and the outrageous suppression of their own and their satellites' people, as well as the invasion of Afghanistan. Yet the Soviet build-up does not, as we shall see, justify the committee's program or that of the Administration it now so profoundly influences. As Paul Warnke, Carter's arms-control director, says, "If you figure you can't have arms control unless the Russians are nice guys, then it seems to me that you're being totally illogical. If the Russians could be trusted to be nice guys, you wouldn't need strategic-arms control. And you wouldn't need strategic arms."

But Soviet behavior did alienate much American opinion that might have favored arms control and, thus, provided the emotional context and the minimal plausibility that were essential for the revival of a Cold War mood. The hawks on both sides of the superpower confrontation have a long history of feeding on each other's rhetorical and strategic excesses. In particular, both sides tend to exaggerate the technological success of the opposing side's defense program, meanwhile denying that the enemy can do anything else right. The hawks on both sides, including the Committee on the Present Danger, are threat inflaters who dourly predict every success for the forces of evil and nothing but trouble for the side of virtue unless that side adopts the methods and programs of its opponents.

The founding members of the committee included, among others, veterans of what came to be known as Team B, a group of hawks whom Bush had brought into the CIA from outside its ranks when he was that agency's director in 1975--1976. The aim of Team B was to re-evaluate the agency's own assessment of the Soviet menace, which Team B found too moderate. Team B's chairman was Richard Pipes, Reagan's top Soviet expert on the National Security Council. And one of its most active members was former Secretary of the Navy Paul Nitze, who has since become Reagan's key negotiator on European strategic weapons. To no one's surprise, Team B concluded what it had originally hypothesized: that the CIA had seriously underestimated the Soviet threat. In November 1976, Nitze, along with Rostow, formed the Committee on the Present Danger and asked several hundred prominent individuals, including Pipes, to support them.

"The committee's philosophy is dominant," said PR director Paul Green, who had joined Tyroler and me in the committee's offices. Green's cherubic demeanor and pleasant smile promise something far less threatening than the group's dire warnings about the strategic balance. Yet what he was about to outline spelled the end for serious efforts at arms control during the Reagan Administration.

"So the committee's philosophy," Green went on, "is dominant in the three major areas [in which] there is going to be U.S.-Soviet activity." He was referring to the various arms-control negotiations that were being resumed with the Soviets and that were directed by committee members Reagan had appointed to his Administration--all of whom had been strident critics of SALT II. The implications of Reagan's victory, not only for arms control but for relations in general with the Soviets, became starkly clear as Tyroler continued his inventory of the powerful posts then held by members of his group.

"We've got [Richard] Allen, Pipes and Geoffrey Kemp over at NSC. We've got the people most intimately involved in the arms-control negotiations for the Defense Department: [Fred] Iklé [Under-secretary of Defense for Policy]; his deputy, [R. G.] Stillwell; and Dick Perle. At the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, there are Rostow, the head of it; [Edward] Rowny, the SALT negotiator; and Nitze, the TNF [Theater Nuclear Forces] negotiator. And [William] Van Cleave on the General Advisory Committee. Well, that's the whole hierarchy."

Allen was later forced to resign as the President's National Security Council advisor over allegations, later dismissed, that he had improperly received money from Japanese journalists, and Van Cleave's nomination was withdrawn because his abrasive personality offended Caspar Weinberger. Rowny, while sympathetic, was not actually a member of the committee. But Tyroler could have added committee member William Casey, who became head of the CIA; John F. Lehman, Secretary of the Navy; Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ambassador to the United Nations; Colin Gray, nominated to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency advisory committee; and scores of other highly placed members of the Administration. Tyroler himself was appointed member of the President's Intelligence Oversight Board.

That wasn't quite the whole hierarchy, as Tyroler claimed, but according to him and Green, it was only accidental that then--Secretary of State Alexander Haig and Defense Secretary Weinberger had not signed up with the committee. When Haig resigned in June 1982, he was replaced by George Shultz, a founding member of the Committee on the Present Danger. He appointed another committee member, W. Allen Wallis, as a top assistant. As for Weinberger, Green said he had not joined because he had thought it would be hard to get to Washington from his job with Bechtel on the West Coast but "is very sympathetic to our point of view." He added, "It would be hard to find an outspoken opponent of our point of view who is still in the Government." Tyroler and Green reported somewhat gleefully that even Henry Kissinger, ever one to sniff the winds of change, had sent in a $100 contribution after Reagan had won the election.

I asked Tyroler and Green whether an article I had written for the Los Angeles Times that had stressed the committee's influence in the Reagan Administration had exaggerated the case, and they both said no. Tyroler said, "What we're talking about is [the committee's founding statement]--is that the viewpoint of this Administration? The answer is yes. Reagan has said so time and time again."

Special-interest groups tend to exaggerate their influence, but in this instance, we have the word of Ronald Reagan himself to confirm the committee's importance. After his election, he wrote in a letter to the committee, "The statements and studies of the committee have had a wide national impact, and I benefited greatly from them." He added that "the work of the Committee on the Present Danger has certainly helped to shape the national debate on important problems."

These unremitting Cold Warriors seem almost to miss the Stalinist era, those black-and-white years when the Soviet Union, with its timetable for world conquest, seemed to hold the unchallenged leadership of a monolithic international Communist movement arrayed against a united free world content within its own borders. They seem uncomfortable with events as they have evolved since then; the Sino-Soviet split, West Germany's increasingly close ties to Russia and the Eurocommunist movement independent of Moscow apparently annoy them by having introduced trouble-some complexity into that world view. For them, Communism is evil, and that's all there is to it.

Lest I be accused of exaggeration, I should report that when I interviewed Rostow in the spring of 1981, just after Reagan had appointed him Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and asked him whether or not he believed that the Soviet Union had any legitimate grievance against the U.S., he replied, "None whatever."

Ironically, committee leaders, who had for decades supported the U.S. nuclear-weapons build-up, offered the Soviet counterparts of their own hawkish position as proof that the two nations do not share a common perception and fear of nuclear war. Of course, it would be splendid news for everyone if the Soviet Union agreed to unilateral restraints in the arms race. Ever since their humiliation during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Russians have piled missile upon missile. However, the committee wants the U.S. to pile weapons systems upon weapons systems, and as long as that is so, the cheering will have to wait. The committee's leaders must be aware that the U.S. did not hesitate to develop each new weapons system it thought workable and useful as the Soviets pursued their own build-up in the Seventies. Thus, we have the Pershing II and cruise missiles, the Trident submarines and missiles and the technological basis for the MX missile, each of which exceeds Soviet development by a good five years, jeopardizing the expanding Soviet array of land-based missiles--the basket into which the Soviets have put most of their nuclear eggs.

Much of what we know, or think we know, about Soviet intentions and strength is based on estimates inferred from U.S. intelligence data, though during the SALT talks, both sides did provide details on their strategic systems. The Soviets do not reveal many details of their defense budget or force structure, and they alone seem to take seriously the relatively low annual defense-budget figure that they publish. The Western countries, however, possess a great deal of highly accurate information of the specifics of the Soviet-force make-up gleaned from constant and increasingly precise satellite surveillance as well as from old-fashioned spying. But this vast amount of material has to be submitted to intelligence analysis before its meaning becomes clear. To do that, however, involves interpretation based on the skills and the experience of U.S. intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA, which has traditionally attempted to evaluate Soviet strength in an objective manner.

One reason for the current confusion is that this objectivity was seriously compromised under the administration of CIA Director George Bush, with the help of some key founders of the Committee on the Present Danger. Those events occurred in 1976, and they were to have a profound effect on our evaluation of the Soviet threat and on the course of Presidential politics. I am referring to the creation of Team B, the group of outside analysts whose leaders were permitted by Bush to re-evaluate the CIA's own estimates of Soviet strength and intentions. The objective procedures by which the CIA formerly evaluated the scope and the nature of the Soviet threat may thus have been the first casualties of the new Cold War.

Team B

Until 1976, the CIA did not believe that the Soviets were militarily superior to the U.S. or were aiming at nuclear superiority. Nor did agency analysts believe that the Soviet leadership expected to survive and win a nuclear war. Then George Bush became head of the CIA, and the professionals at the agency were told to think otherwise.

Bush was appointed CIA Director during the last year of Gerald Ford's Presidency and took the unprecedented step of allowing a hawkish group of outsiders to challenge the CIA's own intelligence estimates of Soviet strength. In a break with the agency's standards of secrecy, Bush granted this group access to the most sensitive data on Soviet military strength, data that had been culled from satellite photos and reports of agents in the field, defectors and current informants. Never before had outside critics of Government policy been given such access to the data underlying that policy. Bush did not extend similar privileges to dovish critics of prevailing policy.

This intrusion into the objective process of CIA analysis greatly inflated the existing estimate of U.S. vulnerability to Russian forces and would eventually be used to justify an increased U.S. arms build-up. As The New York Times noted in a strongly worded editorial at the time, "For reasons that have yet to be explained, the CIA's leading analysts were persuaded to admit a hand-picked, unofficial panel of hard-line critics of recent arms-control policy to sit at their elbows and to influence the estimates of future Soviet military capacities in a 'somber' direction."

The group that Bush appointed was called Team B to distinguish it from Team A, the CIA professionals who were paid to evaluate Soviet strength in an unbiased fashion. Thanks to Bush, Team B was successful in getting the U.S. Government to alter profoundly its estimates of Soviet strength and intentions, though critics charged that Team B had seriously distorted the CIA's raw data to conform to the political prejudices of its members.

Those prejudices were described in a New York Times report as follows: "The conditions [for Team B members] were that the outsiders be mutually agreeable to the [Foreign Intelligence] advisory board and to Mr. Bush and that they hold more pessimistic views of Soviet plans than those entertained by the advocates of the rough-parity thesis."

The Team B report helped bolster and may even have been the source for Bush's and Reagan's assertions in the 1980 campaign that the Soviets had betrayed the hopes of détente and were bent on attaining nuclear superiority. It was the Team B study that led to charges during the campaign that Carter had allowed the Soviets to gain nuclear superiority and that the United States must "rearm."

The Times account of what followed the introduction of Team B was based on nonattributable interviews that suggested a civil war within the intelligence community. One intelligence officer "spoke of 'absolutely bloody discussions' during which the outsiders accused the CIA of dealing in faulty assumptions, faulty analysis, faulty use of intelligence and faulty exploitation of available intelligence. 'It was an absolute disaster for the CIA,' this official added in an authorized interview. Acknowledging that there were more points of difference than in most years, he said, 'There was disagreement beyond the facts.'"

Another outspoken critic of Team B was Ray S. Cline, a former Deputy Director of Intelligence of the CIA, who, according to The Washington Post, is "a leading skeptic about Soviet intentions and a longtime critic of Kissinger." The article continued: "He [Cline] deplored the experiment. It means, Cline said, that the process of making national-security estimates 'has been subverted' by employing 'a kangaroo court of outside critics all picked from one point of view.'"

Team B was hand-picked by Bush, and, as noted by The New York Times, a "pessimistic" view of the Soviets was a prerequisite for inclusion on the team. The committee's chairman was Pipes, the same hard-liner who, in 1981, announced that the Soviets would have to choose between peacefully changing their system and going to war.

According to Jack Ruina, professor of electrical engineering at MIT and former senior consultant to the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House, "Pipes knows little about technology and about nuclear weapons. I know him personally. I like him. But I think that on the subject of the Soviets, he is clearly obsessed with what he views as their aggressive intentions."

Pipes is the intellectual godfather of the thesis that the Soviets reject nuclear parity and are bent on nuclear-war fighting, a thesis later advanced by Bush and Reagan and now permeating the Reagan Administration.

Pipes clarified his position and that of Team B in a summary of the classified Team B report that he provided in an op-ed piece in The New York Times. The article criticized the view that each side had more than enough nuclear weapons and that the notion of nuclear superiority between the superpowers no longer made sense. Pipes wrote:

"More subtle and more pernicious is the argument, backed by the prestige of Henry A. Kissinger, that nuclear superiority is meaningless. This view was essential to Mr. Kissinger's détente policy, but it rests on flawed thinking. Under-pinning it is the widely held notion that since there exists a certain quantitative level in the accumulation of nuclear weapons that, once attained, is sufficient to destroy mankind, superiority is irrelevant: There is no overtrumping total destruction."

Pipes's alternative to Kissinger's view of strategic policy was the one embraced by Team B. His article continued:

"Unfortunately, in nuclear competition, numbers are not all. The contest between the superpowers is increasingly turning into a qualitative race whose outcome most certainly can yield meaningful superiority."

Five months after his piece in the Times, Pipes argued, in a Commentary article titled "Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War," that the Soviets do not agree that nuclear war is fundamentally different from conventional wars, a viewpoint that he himself seems to share as more realistic than the prevailing American idea that nuclear war would be suicidal. Pipes noted that at first, the U.S. military had held what he claims is actually the Soviet view, that "when it came to horror, atomic bombs have nothing over conventional ones," a point he attempted to prove by reference to the devastation of Tokyo and Dresden by conventional weapons. He argued that this sound thinking on the part of the military was "promptly silenced by a coalition of groups, each of which it suited, for its own reasons, to depict the atomic bomb as the 'absolute weapon' that had, in large measure, rendered traditional military establishments redundant and traditional strategic thinking obsolete."

Pipes complained that "a large part of the U.S. scientific community had been convinced as soon as the first atomic bomb was exploded that the nuclear weapon, which that community had conceived and helped to develop, had accomplished a complete revolution in warfare." That conclusion, he wrote, "was reached without much reference to the analysis of the effects of atomic weapons carried out by the military and, indeed, without consideration of the traditional principles of warfare." Instead, Pipes argued, this misguided notion was the result of psychological and philosophical distortions by the scientists themselves. "It represented," he wrote, "an act of faith on the part of an intellectual community that held strong pacifist convictions and felt deep guilt at having participated in the creation of a weapon of such destructive power."

Thus, Pipes dismissed the anguished concern of many of the scientists who knew these weapons best, as if their feelings of guilt and their wishes for peace were absurd or decadent or, perhaps, even anti-American.

The Soviets, by contrast--according to Pipes, who in a perverse way seems to revel in the heartlessness he assigns to them--were not so sentimental. They believed, instead, that Clausewitz was right: Nukes or no nukes, war was still the pursuit of politics by other means. And because the hardheaded Soviets believe that nuclear weapons can be used just as successfully in war as conventional weapons can, the Americans must prepare to emulate the Russians.

The principal Team B analysts, Nitze and Van Cleave, shared this view. They had already held discussions for months with Rostow and others to plan the formation of the Committee on the Present Danger even before those gentlemen, acting as Team B, had entered CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, to re-evaluate the agency's data. Thus, their decision to form an activist organization based on the notion that the U.S. was losing out to the Soviets and to press for greater arms expenditures predated their look at the CIA's material. So much for pretensions of objectivity.

Team B's conclusions were based on three points: a depiction of Soviet strategic intentions; the claim that the Soviets were engaged in a massive military build-up: and the idea that the Soviets' civil-defense program made credible their expectation of surviving a nuclear war with the U.S.

Those same three points would later form the core assumptions of the Reagan Administration's strategic policy, including, of course, T. K. Jones's shovel-based plan for protecting the civilian population. Yet, while the Team B study is still classified, enough of it has leaked to raise serious questions about the credibility of its analysis.

When Bush accepted the Team B conclusion that the Soviet build-up was much greater than had previously been assumed by the CIA, he did so, he told The New York Times, because of "new evidence and reinterpretation of old information [that] contributed to the reassessment of Soviet intentions." Yet the new evidence to which he referred, in fact, actually refuted the conclusions of Team B and the subsequent assumptions of the Reagan-Bush Administration.

The new evidence available to Team B was the CIA's revised estimate of Soviet defense spending, published in October 1976, that held that Soviet military spending as a percentage of G.N.P. had increased from the six-to-eight percent range to the 11--13 percent range. That was Team B's proof that the Soviets were building a bigger military force than the U.S. had thought.

However, as former CIA analyst Arthur Macy Cox pointed out in an article in The New York Times, the revised CIA estimates of 1976 tell us, in fact, nothing of the sort. As Cox observed in another article, in The New York Review of Books, "While Team B's report . . . remained classified, the CIA's own official report on Soviet defense spending of October 1976, had contradicted Team B's conclusions, not supported them. The true meaning of the October [CIA] report has been missed. A gargantuan error has been allowed to stand uncorrected all these years."

Cox then cited the same CIA report on which Team B had relied and to which Bush had referred as the new evidence: "'The new estimate of the share of defense in the Soviet G.N.P. is almost twice as high as the six-to-eight percent previously estimated,' the CIA report said but then added, 'This does not mean that the impact of defense programs on the Soviet economy has increased--only that our appreciation of this impact has changed. It also implies that Soviet defense industries are far less efficient than formerly believed.'"

It was exactly wrong, then, for Bush to have suggested that the CIA had doubled or even measurably increased its estimate of the size of the actual Soviet defense program, for what it had revised was only its evaluation of the efficiency of Soviet production--in other words, the amount the Russians were paying for what they got. What the CIA showed was that the Soviets were having a harder time punching out the same number of tanks and missiles as the CIA had formerly projected for them; that they were, in other words, paying more for the same level of production. As Cox noted, "What should have been cause for jubilation became the inspiration for misguided alarm."

As for increases of actual Soviet defense spending during the Seventies, the CIA, in its official estimate published in January 1980, concluded that for the 1970--1979 period, "estimated in constant dollars, Soviet defense activities increased at an average annual rate of three percent." This is higher than the U.S. increase during the Seventies and lower than the U.S. rate from 1979 through 1983. For the Seventies, NATO expenditures exceeded those of the Warsaw Pact. A three percent increase in Soviet military spending is actually no higher than the over-all increase of the Soviet G.N.P. during the Seventies, which is put at between three and five percent by experts on the subject.

There is much more to be said about the increases that have occurred in the past two decades in the Soviet-force posture relative to that of the U.S. and of its allies. My purpose here is simply to emphasize the serious error that underlay Team B's assertion that U.S. intelligence had underestimated the Soviet build-up and that a new spiral in the arms race was therefore in order.

Team B's somber estimates of Soviet intentions, accepted as the national intelligence estimates under Bush's prodding, were to alter the climate for détente and arms control that the incoming Carter Administration would face from the time of its Inauguration. According to The New York Times in December 1976. "President-elect Carter will receive an intelligence estimate of long-range Soviet strategic intentions next month that raises the question whether the Russians are shifting their objectives from rough parity with United States military forces to superiority."

The Times account added that "previous national estimates of Soviet aims--the supreme products of the intelligence community since 1950--had concluded that the objective was rough parity with United States strategic capabilities." It then quoted Bush as saying that the shift in estimates was warranted because "there are some worrisome signs" and added that "while Mr. Bush declined to discuss the substance of the estimate, it can be authoritatively reported that the worrisome signs included newly developed guided missiles, a vast program of underground shelters and a continuing build-up of air defenses."

The claims made for Soviet underground shelters and civil defense had generally been a critical element in the controversy within the intelligence community even before Team B intervened. The Times article stated that the convocation of Team B "came about primarily through continuing dissents by a long-term maverick in the intelligence community," Major General George J. Keegan, who retired as Air Force Chief of Intelligence soon after the Team B report was completed and who had been a consultant to Team B. The Times said, "In 1974 [Keegan's] dissents to the national estimate relating to the significance of the Soviet civil-defense program and new guided missiles provoked such a storm that he was called to the White House to make his case before the [Foreign Intelligence] advisory board."

Keegan convinced Leo Cherne, then Chairman of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and one of the original architects of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, to persuade Bush to convene Team B. Cherne, who heads a private business-consulting firm, is also head of the International Rescue Committee, which deals with political refugees. He was one of those Americans who, in the early Fifties, discovered Ngo Dinh Diem living in a Maryknoll seminary in New Jersey and proposed that he become the George Washington of Vietnam. Back in the Forties, this same Cherne had directed a company that employed William Casey, now CIA Director.

The Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, of which Cherne has been a member since the Nixon years (he was appointed chairman in 1976), was de-activated during the Carter Administration but resurrected under Reagan, and Cherne is now its vice-chairman. This body, which supervises the work of the intelligence agencies, now draws almost half of its current roster of 19 members from the ranks of the Committee on the Present Danger.

The Team B report remains classified, but retired Lieutenant General Daniel O. Graham, who had participated in that group's challenge to the previous intelligence estimates of Soviet strength, told The Washington Post, when the Team B report was filed at the end of 1976, that there were "two catalytic factors" that had caused this re-evaluation of Soviet intentions. One was the recalculation of the percentage of Soviet G.N.P. going to defense--the meaning of which, as we have seen, was distorted in the Team B report. And, according to the Post, "The other major force in changing the official U.S. perception, Graham said, has been 'the discovery of a very important [Soviet] civil-defense effort--very strong and unmistakable evidence that a big effort is on to protect people, industry and to store food.'"

But this big effort, as much as it may have impressed and alarmed General Graham, is simply the primitive-shelter-and-evacuation scheme that T. K. Jones had advocated in his interview with me. When Jones told me that the U.S. could recover from general nuclear war in an estimated two to four years, he meant that we could do so with a "Soviet-type civil defense." But if digging a hole and covering it with doors is a preposterous defense for Americans, by what logic does the same procedure become "a very important civil-defense effort" according to Team B? Why do Soviet manuals telling their people to dig holes in the tundra become a serious problem for American strategic planners? Yet it is these very holes in the ground that are meant to justify the assertion that the Soviets think they can win a nuclear war.

The argument that the Soviets' civil defense proves they are aiming for nuclear superiority and a war-fighting capability was strongly advanced by Pipes in his Commentary article. Pipes was especially opposed to the notion that mutual assured destruction was an accurate prediction of what would occur should the two superpowers resort to nuclear war.

Pipes claimed that the Soviets thought they could fight and win a nuclear war in part because they could keep their casualties to the level of past conventional wars. Their civil-defense program, Pipes said, would permit "acceptable" casualties on the order of 20,000,000, or about as many Soviet dead as in World War Two. The fact, obvious to even the most casual visitor to the Soviet Union, that the Russians still deeply mourn their wartime dead did not trouble Pipes. He simply assumed that the Soviet leadership would see to its own survival and that of its power base in a nuclear conflagration by organizing large-scale civil-defense programs.

The problem with the large-scale civil-defense programs envisioned in the Soviet manuals is that to mobilize them takes not the 25 minutes required for an ICBM to reach its target but days or, by some accounts, weeks. The estimate used by such civil-defense advocates as Jones and FEMA's William Chipman is three days to a week or more.

But even days of such highly visible preparation would seriously limit the impact of a Soviet first strike on U.S. nuclear-armed submarines and bombers. Clearly, if the Soviets decided to arm their citizens with shovels and evacuate their cities, the U.S. would put its bombers and submarines on alert, which would make them far more elusive targets, while the U.S. President could simply announce a launch-on-warning policy for the land-based ICBM force, thus canceling the advantage of a Soviet first strike against our land-based missiles.

For a first strike to make any sense, such a civil-defense effort must be on a large scale and, therefore, highly visible--visible enough, certainly, to alert the other side, which is to say that any attempt to send people to their shelters could in itself provoke an attack. Yet nuclear-war fighting is inconceivable as a rational policy option without some such highly visible scheme to protect people and machines.

Pipes underscored the importance to his argument of a credible defense against nuclear attack when he wrote, "Nothing illustrates better the fundamental differences between the two strategic doctrines than their attitudes to defense against a nuclear attack." He warned that "before dismissing Soviet civil-defense efforts as wishful thinking, as is customary in Western circles," one must recognize that "its chief function seems to be to protect what in Russia are known as the 'cadres,' that is, the political and military leaders as well as industrial managers and skilled workers--those who could re-establish the political and economic system once the war was over. Judging by Soviet definitions, civil defense has as much to do with the proper functioning of the country during and immediately after the war as with holding down casualties. Its organization . . . seems to be a kind of shadow government charged with responsibility for administering the country under the extreme stresses of nuclear war and its immediate aftermath."

Thus, Pipes apparently believed that despite the extreme stresses of nuclear war, there would actually be an aftermath in which enough of the cadre would survive, along with sufficient machinery, roads, power facilities, foodstuffs, medical care and all the thousands of other essential items to "re-establish the political and economic system once the war was over."

Unlike T. K. Jones, Pipes was not rash enough to forecast an actual recovery period of two to four years, but his argument clearly assumed that some such recovery is feasible. To help justify this imputed confidence on the part of the Soviet leadership, Pipes added that "the Soviet Union is inherently less vulnerable than the United States to a countervalue attack," meaning an attack on people or industry.

Pipes thought that the Soviets were less vulnerable because, according to the 1970 Soviet census, they had only nine cities with a population of more than 1,000,000, which in the aggregate represents 20,500,000, or 8.5 percent, of the country's total. By contrast, the 1970 U.S. census showed that 41.5 percent of the United States' population lived in 35 cities of more than 1,000,000 people. But what that has to do with anything is not clear from Pipes's argument. As the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency noted in 1978:

"A comparison was made of the vulnerability of the U.S. and the Soviet Union to nuclear attack. It was found that both countries are roughly equally vulnerable, although urban density and population collocation with industry is greater in the Soviet Union."

The 200 largest cities in either country include most of the population. It would require only the Poseidon missiles on two fleet ballistic submarines to destroy those 200 Soviet cities. With both superpowers in possession of more than 20,000 strategic nuclear weapons, what does it matter if the "best" countervalue targets are nine or 200? But Pipes believed that his comparision of the populations of the two countries' largest cities was crucial to his argument.

"It takes no professional strategist to visualize what these figures mean. In World War Two, the Soviet Union lost 20,000,000 inhabitants out of a population of 170,000,000--i.e., 12 percent; yet the country not only survived but emerged stronger, politically and militarily, than it had ever been. Allowing for the population growth that has occurred since then, this experience suggests that as of today, the U.S.S.R. could absorb the loss of 30,000,000 of its people and be no worse off, in terms of human casualties, than it had been at the conclusion of World War Two."

In case the readers of Commentary had missed the point, Pipes added, "In other words, all of the U.S.S.R.'s multi-million [-population] cities could be destroyed without trace or survivors, and, provided that its essential cadres had been saved, it would emerge less hurt in terms of casualties than it was in 1945."

Pipes conceded that "such figures are beyond the comprehension of most Americans. But clearly a country that since 1914 has lost, as a result of two world wars, a civil war, famine and various 'purges,' perhaps up to 60,000,000 citizens, must define 'unacceptable damage' differently from the United States," which has known no such suffering.

If Pipes is right, however, then the rest of Europe--including our allies, who also experienced much wartime destruction--should be less squeamish than the United States about the prospect of nuclear war. That this clearly isn't true undercuts Pipes's argument, even if one factors in such theories as the barbaric temper of the East's leadership or the tendency toward neutralism that Reagan's first National Security Council advisor, Richard Allen, discerned in the Europeans or the "Protestant angst"--whatever that might mean--that Perle told me accounts for much of the European peace movement.

Pipes's argument was not much different from Jones's, except that Jones supplied the details of the Soviet civil-defense program while Pipes was careful to omit them. Jones risked ridicule when he talked to me about building primitive shelters with hand shovels, but he was more honest than Pipes, who, when he wrote about the Soviet civil-defense program, disingenuously neglected to say that it was largely a matter of shoveling dirt around factory machinery and over doors atop holes in the ground.

A pamphlet that Pipes and the Committee on the Present Danger drafted says nothing about shoveling three feet of dirt onto some doors but says, instead, "Soviet nuclear offensive and defensive forces are designed to enable the U.S.S.R. to fight, survive and win an all-out nuclear war should it occur." And how can the Russians be so confident? Because of "the intensive programs," the pamphlet says, "of civil defense and hardening of command-and-control posts against nuclear attack undertaken in the Soviet Union in recent years. . . ." T.K.'s mistake--the one that brought him before a Senate subcommittee--was that he talked about shovels and dirt when he should have talked about intensive programs.

Window of Vulnerability

When you first hear it, the term window of vulnerability sounds an elusive but unquestioned alarm.

It was a favorite of Republican candidates during the 1980 election, and while neither my colleagues in the press corps nor I understood exactly what it meant, it sounded provocative enough to keep us listening. What we were told was that this window would open up sometime in the mid-Eighties and in would fly thousands of "heavier" and more accurate Soviet ICBMs in a first strike capable of wiping out our own intercontinental missiles. Indeed, as candidate Reagan frequently asserted, the window would be open so wide that "the Russians could just take us with a phone call." He meant that Soviet superiority would be so obvious to our leaders that the Russians could blackmail us into surrendering merely by threatening a first strike.

This claimed vulnerability is the major justification of the massive nuclear-arms build-up called for by the Reagan Administration. It was also the basis for Reagan's attacks on the SALT II treaty and for his opposition to a nuclear freeze, both of which, he insists, would lock the United States into a position of strategic inferiority. According to Science magazine, "The scenario [of U.S. vulnerability to a Soviet first strike] did not achieve wide circulation until it was taken up by the Committee on the Present Danger. . . ."

Whatever its degree of plausibility, the window of vulnerability was scary stuff in a political campaign, echoing as it did the missile gap of John F. Kennedy's Presidential campaign, which, while no more accurately describing an impending real crisis, offered the same kind of simple slogan that voters might buy.

In 1960, Kennedy scored heavily with his accusation that the Republicans had left open a missile gap between us and the Soviets. Once he was elected and read the intelligence data, he discovered that the Soviets had only a few missiles compared with our 1000. But no matter. By the time he discovered the error, he was President.

So, too, the window of vulnerability became a successful election ploy for Reagan and for the other Republican candidates who succeeded in scaring voters into believing that our country's strategic posture had been seriously damaged by Carter's policies of "disarmament."

But the analogy with Kennedy ends here, for Reagan became addicted to his campaign rhetoric and as President continued to invoke the window of vulnerability to justify his massive arms build-up. At the October 1981 press conference in which he outlined his strategic program, Reagan once again warned that "a window of vulnerability is opening," and he added that it would "jeopardize not just our hopes for serious, productive arms negotiations but our hopes for peace and freedom." Yet he was not clear about just what this vulnerability entailed. Christopher Paine, who is on the staff of the Federation of American Scientists, described the press conference in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

"'Mr. President,' inquired one reporter, 'when, exactly, is the "window of vulnerability"? We heard yesterday the suggestion that it exists now. Earlier this morning, a defense official indicated that it was not until '84 or '87. Are we facing it right now?'

"The President appeared confused by the question. He responded, 'I think in some areas we are, yes.' As an example, he cited the long-standing 'imbalance of forces in the Western front--in the NATO line, we are vastly outdistanced there.' And then, in an off-the-cuff assessment that must have touched off a few klaxons in the Navy, the President added, 'Right now, they [the Soviets] have a superiority at sea.' What did any of this have to do with silo vulnerability?"

Referring to the President's observation about Soviet naval superiority, Roger Molander, a former National Security Council member and founder of Ground Zero, told me that Reagan's comment "demonstrated how poor the President's grasp of this issue was. If there's one area in which the U.S. has acknowledged superiority, it's the Navy--submarines, antisubmarine warfare, aircraft carriers, naval armaments, across the board."

In any case, to link a presumed Soviet naval advantage with the vulnerability of our land-based nuclear weapons to a Soviet first strike was a startling non sequitur. But this sort of exaggeration worked for Reagan as a rhetorical device both during the campaign and in the Presidency. In a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August 1980, he said, "We're already in an arms race, but only the Soviets are racing." Reagan is convinced that the U.S. disarmed unilaterally during the Seventies while the Soviets barreled ahead in weapons development and deployment; that we accepted parity in nuclear weapons while the Soviet Union pushed forward to attain superiority.

One problem with that argument is that few experts on strategic matters agree that the U.S. is inferior. While it is possible that the U.S. may be inferior to the Soviets in specific areas of conventional military power, such as the size of land forces or the number of tanks, it is difficult to understand the charge that the U.S. is inferior to the Soviets in nuclear weaponry. Perhaps the kindest thing that can be said for such assertions, to quote Gerard Smith, President Nixon's chief negotiator on strategic-arms-limitations talks, is that they "raise questions about the Administration's common sense and, worse, its credibility."

Reagan's campaign rhetoric confused a threat to U.S. land-based missiles with a threat to over-all U.S. ability to deter a Soviet first strike. While there is much disagreement among experts as to the percentage of U.S. missiles that would be destroyed by a Soviet attack, no one doubts that the increased accuracy of Soviet missiles has made U.S. land-based missiles more vulnerable to such attack. While U.S. observers were surprised by the speed with which the Soviets caught up to the U.S. in land-based missile accuracy, no one had seriously doubted that this would eventually occur.

It was precisely because of this expectation that land-based missiles would become more vulnerable that the United States decided to concentrate instead on the other legs of the defense triad--submarine-launched missiles and the bomber fleet. The Soviets have not been able to develop the technology to match this development, and as a result, the survivability of the U.S. nuclear force is unquestionably far greater than that presumed of the enemy.

This last point is important, since Reagan's literal definition of the window of vulnerability is the prediction that at some point in the near future, the Soviets will have a strategic advantage of such magnitude that they can launch a first strike sufficient to prevent a devastating U.S. response. This prediction, however, rests on a distortion of elemental facts about the make-up of the U.S. deterrent force and the nature of nuclear war--a distortion so transparent that the prediction of U.S. vulnerability has the hollow sound of deliberate fabrication.

For the window-of-vulnerability argument to work, its proponents must simply ignore America's submarines and bombers, most of which are on alert at any given time and cannot, therefore, be taken out in a first strike. Most experts believe that these two legs of the triad of U.S. defense forces would survive a Soviet first strike and, given their firepower, that their use in retaliation following a Soviet first strike would mean the end of Soviet society. As Harold Brown, Carter's Secretary of Defense, noted in his last statement on the defense budget, "The retaliatory potential of U.S. forces remaining after a counter-force exchange is substantial even in the worst case and would increase steadily after 1981, with or without SALT. . . ."

During the campaign, Reagan was fond of offering sad-eyed descriptions of "our aging B-52s" punctuated with his inevitable anecdote about encountering a B-52 pilot whose father and grandfather had flown the same plane. The implication was that the plane--part of our deterrent forces against a Soviet first strike--was all but falling apart, hopelessly old-fashioned and in every other way inadequate to the grand defensive task at hand. Carter had disarmed us, or so the Reagan argument went, in part by refusing to fund the B-1 bomber to replace those presumably derelict B-52s.

Reagan ignored the fact that the Soviet bomber fleet is a poor shadow of our own. Most modern Soviet bombers lack the range to reach the U.S., and the airplanes that can reach us are slow and are used mostly for reconnaissance. Nor did Reagan mention the air-launched cruise missiles that the Carter Administration had brought into production at great cost to the taxpayer. One argument against the B-52s is that they are supposed to be increasingly vulnerable to Soviet antiaircraft fire. Yet when cruise missiles are installed on those B-52s, the aging planes become very effective launching platforms far outside Soviet territory, beyond the range of Soviet antiaircraft power. No matter who had won the 1980 election, those air-launched cruise missiles would have been installed beginning in 1982.

This fact prompted Hans Bethe, who dismissed Reagan's charge that the Carter Administration had somehow "disarmed" America, to note, "On the contrary, the most important progress in weapons in the past decade, I would say, was the cruise missile, which was developed under Carter."

Now 76, Bethe has continued working on U.S. strategic-weapons systems, from the hydrogen bomb through anti-ballistic-missile defenses, and helped design the heat shield to protect ballistic missiles as they re-enter the atmosphere. It was, therefore, from a position of some authority that he challenged Reagan's vulnerability argument last winter, telling me:

"I don't think that either country is going to make a first strike, because it is absolutely crazy to do so. But suppose there were a first strike from the Russians, and suppose they could destroy all our Minuteman missiles. It wouldn't make the slightest difference. Would we be defenseless? Not at all. We have the submarine force with an enormous striking power."

Bethe, as is his custom, referred to careful notes he had made in preparation for our interview.

"I would like to state that there is no deficiency in armaments in the U.S., that we don't need to catch up to the Russians, that, if anything, the Russians have to catch up to us. The Russians have their forces mostly in ICBMs, a type of weapon that is becoming more and more vulnerable. I think our military people know this, but they always talk about the vulnerability of our nuclear ICBMs and never talk about those of the Soviets. The Russians are much more exposed to a possible first strike from us than we are to one from them."

One who agrees with Bethe is McNamara. I asked him how it was possible to argue that the Soviets could now contemplate a first strike when the U.S. was not able to pull that off at a time of massive nuclear superiority, and he replied:

"They no more have a first-strike capability today than we had then. No one has demonstrated to me that the Soviets have a capability of destroying our Minutemen. But even if they could destroy our Minutemen, that doesn't give them a first-strike capability, not when they are facing our Polaris submarines and our bombers. The other two legs of the triad are still there. . . . The argument is without foundation. It's absurd."

Postscript

I have referred to some of the men now running our Government's foreign policy as neohawks because they are more ideological, more complex and better informed in their advocacy of a hard military line than the traditional "nuke 'em" crowd. These men came to their militarism not through a love of battle or of the gadgetry of war or even through a belief in the robust cleansing effect of rough physical contact. They are intellectuals who in their personal demeanor hardly bring to mind Achilles or Hector but, instead, reveal a fussy, polemical, hairsplitting intellectual style that becomes only verbally violent.

Eugene Rostow, Paul Nitze, Richard Perle, Richard Pipes, who initiate policy for the Reagan Administration--who write the position papers and the policy options that are then funneled up the chain of command that sets the parameters for the major decisions--most of those men are academics or at home in academic settings. As I have come to know them. I have been struck by this curious gap between the bloodiness of their rhetoric and their apparent inability to visualize the physical consequences of what they advocate.

These neohawks refuse to acknowledge that reality. They want to threaten the use of nuclear weapons at a time of nuclear parity, when such a threat jeopardizes not only the enemy but one's fellow citizens. For the significance of parity is that both sides will be destroyed if we really do get high enough up the escalation ladder. To climb that ladder, as Perle, for example, would like to do, requires a fundamental alteration of the most common view of nuclear war: that it is an unspeakable disaster that would reduce both sides to ashes and destroy civilization for longer than anyone cares to contemplate--maybe forever.

These true believers in nuclear-war fighting, including the President of the U.S. and most of his key advisors, tell one another what they want to hear: that playing a game of nuclear chicken with the Soviets is not as dangerous as it might seem, for even in the worst case--even if the Soviets don't back off, even if they don't submit to our nuclear pressure--the resulting war will not be so bad; it can be limited and civilization can bounce back sooner or later.

But it is one thing to talk oneself into accepting that the nuclear-arms race and the game of threat escalation are not so dangerous and quite another to convince ordinary voters to go along with this madness. This is why in a time of nuclear parity, when both sides are totally at risk, our hawkish leaders invoke the chaste vocabulary of vulnerability and deterrence rather than the blunt language of death and disaster.

Instead of going to the people and saying, "Hey, listen, we want to get back to the good old days of superiority," they pretend that we have actually fallen behind and are simply trying to catch up. Instead of talking openly about nuclear-war fighting, as they did in the first year of their Administration--before their poll takers advised them to soften their rhetoric--they now stress the need for credible deterrence against the Soviet nuclear-war fighters. But the neohawks have already said and written too much to conceal their true intentions.

If this attempt to deceive were simply a matter of special-interest lobbying in some relatively unimportant area of our national life, one might shrug and say, "So what's new about political chicanery?" But the danger is that those people are dealing with more than commonplace matters, even though most of the violence has so far been verbal. Because of their role in an Administration whose President sympathizes strongly with their point of view, they have already profoundly affected the commitment to new weapons systems--systems that will make the world far more dangerous--while at the same time, they have abandoned the possibility of arms control no matter how many hours we are willing to spend in negotiation with the Soviets.

The danger is that the Soviet Union has no shortage of Perles and Nitzes of its own who are eager to play the same dangerous game--which is, after all, how the nuclear-arms race has been sustained for all these decades. The race now has a technological momentum of its own quite apart from the likely excesses of its human players. Consider a possible scenario: The Soviets deploy the SS-20 in Europe in response to what they claim is their vulnerability. We then deploy the Pershing II missile in Western Europe, which can hit the Soviet Union in six minutes, so the Russians must now go to launch on warning, even if this assumes the risk that the missiles will fly because some birds happen to cross the radar screen--something that actually happened not long ago over Alaska, when radar picked up a flight of geese and the computer decided they were missiles. Fortunately, on that occasion, there was time for the computer to correct the error.

Inevitably, in response to our own technological achievements, the Soviets will develop more threatening weapons of their own and we will counter with powerful and accurate missiles, and so on, until the ideological obsessions that have led to this political chaos end where no one--not even Paul Nitze or Richard Pipes--wants them to.

Early in this report, I described a former CIA analyst who has never forgotten the birds that turned to cinders as he observed them through the pulsing thermal effect of a nuclear explosion many years ago. This man has a son, and this is what he thinks about when he thinks of that young man:

"You know, my son just joined the Marine Corps. I don't know why he did it. He went out and joined the Marine Corps. And I think about him. He's a very enthusiastic kid. Goddamn, he's full of life, energy. And he really wants to be a Marine. He wants to be a good Marine. He's seriously involved in that stuff. He's an expert marksman. He does hundreds of push-ups, runs miles in a very few minutes. And I think of him in a nuclear war. I try to personalize what that is like according to the calculations that we do.

"I think of my son in a foxhole and what he's experiencing as this nuclear weapon goes off. And I'm comparing what he's experiencing with what I've seen of a nuclear weapon. Only he's up close--not like me, far away. . . . He's right there; he's on the front lines. And I'm saying to myself, 'He's in serious trouble.' I can see a variety of things that are going to happen to him, either quickly or afterward, that are not pleasant. And then I put myself back in this theoretical, strategic stuff, where these guys just calculate megatonnage. But my son is fried."

"'The President and the Secretary of Defense believe the last glib person who's talked to them'"

"If there are enough shovels to go around, ever body's going to make it.' "

" 'The dirt really is the thing that protects you from the blast. . . . You know, dirt is just great stuff.' "

A Brood of Nuclear Hawks

"Could we survive a nuclear war? It would be a survival of some of your people and some of your facilities, but you could start again."

"If you believe there's no such thing as a nuclear winner, the argument [that nuclear superiority is meaningless] makes sense. I don't believe that."

"We need more than counterforce. I think the Soviets are developing a nuclear-war-fighting capability, and we are going to have to do the same."

"The dirt is the thing that protects you from the blast and radiation. . . . If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody's going to make it."

"The Kremlin leaders want to achieve military victory in a [nuclear] war while assuring the survival, endurance and core of their party."

"The [nuclear] contest between the superpowers is increasingly turning into a qualitative race whose outcome can yield meaningful superiority."

"We are living in a prewar and not a postwar world."

"I worry less about what would happen in a nuclear exchange than about the effect the nuclear balance has on our willingness to take risks in local situations."