Volume 34, Number 8 · May 7, 1987
The Nuclear Opening
By Lord Zuckerman
Star Wars: A Defense Insider's Case Against the Strategic Defense Initiative
by Robert Bowman
Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc. (distributed by St. Martin's), 180 pp., $7.95 (paper)
Watershed in Europe: Dismantling the East-West Military Confrontation
by Jonathan Dean
Lexington Books, 286 pp., $9.95 (paper)
Searching for World Security: Understanding Global Armament and Disarmament
by Curt Gasteyger
St. Martin's, 216 pp., $27.50
Nuclear War, Nuclear Proliferation, and their Consequences
edited by Sadruddin Aga Khan
Oxford University Press (Clarendon Press), 483 pp., $22.95 (paper)
In his impressive short book, Star Wars, Dr. Robert Bowman, the president of the Institute for Space and Security Studies, reminds us that the pursuit of SDI presages not only the abrogation of the 1972 ABM Treaty—which said that the parties will not 'develop, test, or deploy ABM systems or components which are…space-based'—but the death knell of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and even of the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963. The Outer Space Treaty banned the placing of nuclear warheads in space orbits. The Partial Test Ban Treaty banned the testing of nuclear warheads in space—which, for example, is what is called for by the X-ray laser. In what could still technically be an era of peace, such testing would not, of course, result in as much radioactive fallout as did testing in the atmosphere. What it could do is play havoc with modern telecommunications—televisual as well as telephonic—and with the satellite system on which both sides now depend for a large part of the information they have about each other's military deployments.[1]
Review, 6249 words
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