WHICH WAY TO PREVENT NUCLEAR WAR?

by
Dr. G. A. Keyworth
Science Advisor to the President

In ABC television's well-advertised motion picture, "The

Day After", a vision of nuclear nightmare is more graphically
presented than ever before. When I saw it in a pre-screening,
I understood that the publicity was right: the film is
terrifying.

But as stunned as the film may leave some of us, we must

not let our revulsion at the idea of nuclear war turn into
feelings of helplessness or despair. Instead, we must
rededicate ourselves to doing everything we possibly can to
prevent a nuclear war from ever taking place.

That is why President Reagan has committed this nation

to the most ambitious arms control efforts in its history:
to make deep reductions in, and ultimately dismantle completely,
the nuclear arsenals of both the United States and the Soviet
Union.

Here are the steps the President has taken:

0
In November 1981, he offered to stop the deployment,
scheduled for later this year, of Pershing II and
cruise missiles in Europe, if the Soviets would remove
their own nuclear weapons from that theater.
0
In May 1982, the President offered to destroy 2,200
strategic warheads -- nearly a third of our nuclear
forces -- provided the Soviets would do likewise.
0
In October of this year, President Reagan offered
an interim proposal for a "nuclear build-down" in
Europe. Under this plan, both the U.S. and the
u.s.s.R. would destroy two to three old nuclear
warheads for each new one deployed.
.._
- 2 -

0
Finally, the President instructed his negotiators
to consider any reasonable proposal or interim step
that the Soviets might offer that would reduce the
threat of a nuclear exchange.

In the meantime, the President has taken other significant

steps to keep hostilities from ever escalating to the nuclear
stage. He is strengthening our conventional, non-nuclear forces
so that the likelihood of resorting to the use of nuclear weapons
is diminished. And in a prophetic speech last March, he proposed
that we embark upon a path that eventually can render nuclear
weapons obsolete. He called upon our technical experts to
develop the means to prevent nuclear weapons from striking
targets on our soil, or the soil of our allies.

To some people, this is the wrong approach; instead,

they propose the politically easy but dangerous notion that
our country can rid the world of the threat of nuclear war
by unilaterally disarming. In recent months, in fact, many
in the nuclear freeze movement have argued that if the U.S.
would simply eliminate its nuclear defenses, the Soviets
would follow suit.

What these people forget is that our country has already

tried this approach. In the 1970s, we removed every single
one of our land-based nuclear missiles from Europe. How did
the Soviets respond? They increased their European missiles
from 600 to 1300, and continue to add more missiles every
day.

It is pt~cisely when one side has an overwhelming

advantage over the other that the spectre of nuclear war
looms largest. As much as we might wish, we cannot banish
that spectre merely by laying down our arms and hoping the
other side will too. Instead, we must redouble our efforts
at the bargaining table, as President Reagan is doing,
working ever harder to achieve mutual, balanced, and verifiable
arms reductions, not settling merely for arms limitations.

- - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -