Bumper Car Philosophy

DO YOU HAVE the guts? Would you kill millions of innocent men, women, and children, and possibly destroy the world, because the Soviet Union lobbed a few hundred-megaton nuclear warheads on the fair old U.S. of A.? The question is, of course, heavily loaded; and answering 'no' is crucial to coming to terms with Jonathan Schell's latest epistle. The Abolition.

Asking, "Do you dare?" is more than an exercise in Alan Alda Yuppiedom: it lies at the crux of deterrence theory, a theory that Schell painstakingly and convincingly shows is as out-of-date as John Wayne machismo.

Schell, if you remember, is the sanctimonious New Yorker staff writer who penned the hopelessly whiny, self-righteous. Fate of the Earth, which many on the Left and in the Dovish Center embraced as the anti-nuke Bible.

Fate was the most irritating of essays, describing ad nauseum the effects of nuclear war on every manner of life imaginable, and then proposing that we save all the cute furry animals and our children by forming a world government. Schell simply wasn't playing by political science rules--one doesn't simply say things are awful and then prescribe the best of all possible worlds.

Schell obviously understood this, and The Abolition hastily debunks much of what Schell, with much hoopla, put forth two years ago. In fact, the author, with customary hubris, goes so far as to quote his previous work as an example of a historic consensus: world government can be the only real solution to the nuclear crisis--this consensus, by the way, includes such luminaries as nuke guru. Herman Kahn, Harvard's Living With Nuclear Weapons gang, MIT nuclear specialist George Rathjens. Bertrand Russell, Grenville Clark, and Louis B. Sohn Schell explains parenthetically. "I take the liberty of quoting myself again only because I wish to acknowledge my former adherence to a point of view with which I now propose to argue."

It is good that the author saw in 1984 what most involved in the nuts and-bolts of nuclear policy took as a given two years ago, but his bumper car style of dealing with theories and solutions give him what Walter I. Mondale would call a "credibility gap."

Perhaps, then, the best way to approach The Abolition is to forget that Schell ever wrote Late of the Earth. If Abolition were a laundry detergent, it would be labelled "all new and improved," and housewives and husbands in TV ads would be shown embracing the new product while blithely tossing the old into the trash.

But this Schell product really is new and improved. Finding Schell back on terra firm a must be welcome to those who--like their progressive idealists flexing their thinking muscles in the realm of the possible. Forget world government, now you get a policy that is not simplistic, and--if one stretches the definition of 'possible' to its utmost breaking point--maybe even workable. There are, of course, still many bugs to be worked out in the new product.

THE DELIBERATE POLICY" put forth in The Abolition in a nutshell, is to persuade all nations to destroy their nuclear weapons (zap!), while allowing and encouraging open deployment of defensive anti-nuclear weaponry. This defense--which would possibly include something along of President Reagan's oft-ridiculed "Star Wars" weapons--would primarily ensure the capacity to build new nuclear warheads, should another country feel like breaking the pan pact.

The proposal doesn't "uninvent" nuclear weaponry--Schell concedes that is impossible but rather seeks to use the everlasting knowledge of how to construct nukes as deterrent against another power attempting nuclear blackmail. The difference is that, instead of the current seven minute time lapse between the commencement of hostilities and Armageddon, the lag would be anywhere from a week to a few months

Moreover, this state of what Schell calls "existential deterrence" would set the stage for deeper, more lasting agreements between the superpowers. These agreements are not described; Schell merely writes:

The abolition agreement described here can be seen as a mere holding operation, giving us time in which these good qualities [of courage, trust, prudence, imagination, decency, and love] can be brought to bear on the vast political work that alone can lead to a true and fully satisfactory resolution of the nuclear predicament.

Schell's optimism and self-conscious naivete are clearly heartfelt, but they do not alone make policy, and the author's bouts of wishful thinking only underscore the incompleteness of the more complete proposals. They also beg the two crucial questions that Schell leaves unanswered; namely, how does one convince a country to abandon all its weapons? and, once Schell's plan is put into effect, how do we make a clean break with our policy of deference, a policy that he has convincingly argued always carries the threat of nuclear holocaust?

Given that we cannot even hold talks with the Soviets on freezing our nuclear arsenals, finding a way to dismantle the whole lot is a heady task indeed. And, if Schell's list of positive human attributes ever did hold away in foreign policy matters, we probably wouldn't have to bother with his complicated solution at all

It is also curious that Schell's proposal never departs from the commonly accepted deference theory that has ruled the Nuclear Age. Curious, because Schell uses the first half of the book to convincingly argue that deference theory is a contradictory, dangerous, inhuman, and without credibility. He asks us if we would date sacrifice the world to uphold our sovereignty, confident that the only sane and rational answer is "no."

BUT HIS PROPOSAL leaves that same horrific and impossible threat of global extinction in place. An agressor in a non-nuclear world could still kill millions, though not as fast, and passive nations would still have to threaten global extinction to stop the agressor from letting the rockets fly. The threat of extinction is still there, just the mechanisms are slower

Schell acknowledges the continued primacy of deference in his non nuclear world: in fact, he applauds in part II what he successfully debunked in part I. He sets a trap for the conventional thinkers of the world, and then, eyes open walks right into it. Of course, the matter is not that simple. Schell's deference would be the result of the massing of defensive weaponry (supposedly ABMs or space weapons, he does not say). But such deference, by its very nature, is doomed to imperfection, and given present and near future technology, there is no politically or militarily credible defense against nuclear attack. Does Schell share the President's jingoistic optimism that throwing a few billion Pentagon dollars at some American scientists will save the U.S. and the world from extinction and or Communism?

Probably not, but Schell, like every other person who is looking for ways out of the nuclear morass, is torn by the conflicting pulls of realism and idealism. While interpreting much of the nuclear debate to this point as a debate between the two approaches to problem solving. Schell does not show his own stripes as he did (to little effect) in Fate of the Earth. One part of Schell Model '84 is saying blast nationalism and provincialism and advocate a King Solomon of a world government that will solve everything; the other is looking for solutions within the traditional framework of deference and inviolate sovereignty.

The result is that Schell is neither here nor there; he cannot please the million marchers in Central Park who demand simply and unequivocally. "No more nukes:" and those who want a solution they can push through Congress and then through the Kremlin. Of course, this seeming conflict has always tied anti-nuke thinkers up in knots, and that's too bad.

As Schell himself notes advances in the realm of the political and in the realm of the theoretical are mutually beneficial. Each new foray into an imagined world where we do not live our lives knowing we could extinguished like a cigarette butt makes real change more acceptable and more possible. And even Schell, with his inconsistent rhetoric, is bringing the discussion of a non-nuclear world from the political fringes to the forefront of political dialogue.