Volume 29, Number 20 · December 16, 1982
Nuclear Sense and Nonsense
By Lord Zuckerman
The Nuclear Delusion: Soviet-American Relations in the Atomic Age
by George F. Kennan
Pantheon, 207 pp., $13.95
With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War
by Robert Scheer
Random House, 285 pp., $14.95
Any European citizen who picks up the two books under review hoping to inform himself about the nuclear dangers that bedevil East-West relations could well be excused were he to gain the impression that George Kennan was brought up within a culture wholly different from the one out of which the characters in Robert Scheer's pages emerged. How, one might well ask, could a politically sophisticated analysis of American-Soviet relations, of the kind which George Kennan provides, appear in the same country and at the same time as the proclamations of a band of military camp followers who pretend to provide intellectual backing for the controversial defense policies of Ronald Reagan and Caspar Weinberger? How is it that senior and experienced American military leaders who have spoken out have so far failed to refute the martial vaporings of a handful of civilians who offer guidelines for all-out nuclear war, as though its consequences would be little worse than a succession of severe droughts? Can it be that the enormous momentum of the arms race, and the pervasive power of the military machine, have in recent years so conditioned the environment of American opinion that, for all that may be said in favor of free speech, public expressions of dissent have so far had as little impact on the formulation of government policy in the US as the whimpers of dissent have in the USSR?
Review, 4963 words
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