Nuclear Argument

Keith Kyle

• Objections to Nuclear Defence: Philosophers on Deterrence edited by Nigel Blake and Kay Pole
  Routledge, 187 pp, £5.95, September 1984, ISBN 0 7102 0249 0
• Reagan and the World: Imperial Policy in the New Cold War by Jeff McMahan
  Pluto, 214 pp, £3.95, August 1984, ISBN 0 86104 602 1
• A future that will work by David Owen
  Viking, 192 pp, £12.95, August 1984, ISBN 0 670 80564 5
• The Most Dangerous Decade: World Militarism and the New Non-Aligned Peace Movement by Ken Coates
  Spokesman, 211 pp, £15.00, July 1984, ISBN 0 85124 405 X

‘It’s not that Ronald Reagan hasn’t got any ideas of his own,’ an American who held high office in the Pentagon under Jimmy Carter remarked recently. ‘The trouble is that he has such peculiar ones.’ He was referring to what has been officially termed the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) but what is much more appropriately called Star Wars. It is the President’s idea for making nuclear weapons ‘impotent and obsolete’. With all the fervour of a true believer he has announced that he is staking his faith in America’s scientific and technological genius on the proposition that a carapace can be erected over the United States – and (why not?) over Nato Europe as well. Any and every incoming missile is to be intercepted at some place along the flight path starting with the initial boost phase. After all, Americans produced the atom bomb, they got to the Moon, why not this as well? Reagan wants $26 billion spent on research and then, when American scientists have come up with the secret, they can share it with the Russians – then they will both be safe. Anyone who opposes the project – and some of America’s most distinguished citizens have explained, in lucid prose and with impeccable logic, why it cannot succeed and why it is dangerous to try – can be shown either to lack faith in America’s ability to do anything it really sets out to do or to be morally unwilling to depart from the appalling implications of Mutual Assured Destruction.