Red, dead, or neither.

RED, DEAD, OR NEITHER

IN APRIL 1945, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson briefed the new President, Harry Truman, about a secret program: "Within four months we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history, one bomb of which could destroy a whole city.' Stimson's account of the decision to drop the atomic bomb appeared in the February 1947 issue of Harper's. The article is reprinted in the current issue of the SAIS Review (Summer/Fall 1985), along with several original articles on the aftermath of Hiroshima.

The SAIS Review is hardly alone in its commemoration of the dawn of nuclear weaponry. Recent issues of prestige quarterlies have been chock full of such articles. For example, Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, devoted both its Spring and Summer issues to discussions of the Strategic Defense Initiative (a/k/a "Star Wars'). Similarly, the four-hundred-page April issue of the University of Chicago's quarterly journal Ethics was filled with articles on nuclear deterrence. (Robert W. Tucker's essay, "Morality and Deterrence,' deserves special mention.)

Nevertheless, for all the competition, the article that has attracted the most attention lately--and deservedly--is Albert Wohlstetter's "Between and Unfree World and None,' in the Summer Foreign Affairs. As one of America's foremost defense thinkers for four decades, and currently president of the European American Institute for Security Research and director of research at Pan Heuristics, Wohlstetter is awesomely well prepared to speak truth to power, including the powerfully misinformed.

Wohlstetter punctures the notion that we are painted into a "Red or dead' corner--a notion given some respectability by scientific reports predicting that a devastating "nuclear winter' would kill what life remained after a nuclear war. The concept of "nuclear winter' was made famous by the publication in late 1983 of a draft study by a group of scientists that included Carl Sagan, the Cornell physicist and host of the popular PBS series Cosmos. This paper extends the findings of a 1982 Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences study positing that the smoke from fires ignited by nuclear war might darken the earth. Furthermore, late in 1984, our own National Academy of Sciences concluded that there was a "clear possibility' that the sun would be blocked following a major nuclear exchange, causing frigid temperatures with disastrous effects on the Northern Hemisphere.

Wohlstetter cites a number of different kinds of uncertainties that would considerably affect the chances for a nuclear winter, but to which nuclear-winter theorists pay no heed. For example, we do not know where or in what season an attacker would use nuclear weapons, nor do we know how many warheads, or even what types of weapons. We cannot know beforehand the victim's (e.g., NATO's) response. And there are factual uncertainties. We have no empirical studies to tell us how much fuel, or what kind, is at various potential targets, and how it is likely to burn. No attention has been given to how smoke and dust would be transported in the lower atmosphere nor to potential biological effects from changes in temperature and the like. "Nuclear-winter theorists . . . tend to treat these uncertainties as if they were simply matters of chance uninfluenced by choice . . .,' Wohlstetter argues. "They presume explicitly, at any rate, that the antagonists will make their choices of targets, methods of attack, and timing without any intelligent consideration as to the likely implications of such choices for their own destruction by a nuclear winter.'

Furthermore, Wohlstetter considers unrealistic the scenarios of likely nuclear exchanges used in nuclear-winter studies. The number of bombs dropped is huge--25,000 on-target detonations in the National Academy of Sciences study, or half the world's stockpile. The studies seem to require collaboration by the antagonists, who drop their bombs to a remarkable degree on population (and, thus, fuel-storage) centers. What's more, their choice of targets is eccentric. The Swedish study estimates 15 nuclear explosions each over Manila, Djakarta, Bombay, Calcutta, New Delhi, Madras, Dacca, Sydney, and Hong Kong. "In a war between the United States and the Soviet Union?' Wohlstetter asks, incredulously.

AS CONSIDERABLE as is Wohlstetter's disagreement with the nuclear-winter theorists, however, ultimately he seeks to free us from an error graver than theirs. His real prey is Mutual Assured Destruction.

Supporters of the Mutual Assured Destruction doctrine figure that nuclear war is less likely if to use such weapons is tantamount to national suicide. Thus they oppose efforts to give the U.S., as it were, a non-suicidal nuclear capability. Yet ours is the only side whose policies they can affect. Hence, while the Soviets develop an ever more flexible nuclear force and constantly improve their civilian and military defenses, the U.S. gets locked into a configuration of weapons appropriate for Doomsday, but no other day.

Wohlstetter insists that there are ideologues in the West who would like "to foreclose any Western options for responding to nuclear attack other than the extremes of bringing on the apocalypse or giving up.' In the Summer issue of Foreign Affairs, they meet their match.

"The alternatives are not whether to be Red or dead,' concludes Albert Wohlstetter. "It is possible to be both Red and dead. Or neither.'