TELL US WHO YOU ARE AND HOW YOU BECAME INVOLVED, WHY YOU BECAME AN ACTIVIST ON THESE ISSUES?

My name is Randy Forsberg. I'm the Director of the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies in Brookline, Massachusetts. I got involved in working for arms control, disarmament, peace about 20 years ago really by accident. I married a Swede and moved to Sweden and the day after I arrived in Sweden, the, it was announced on the news that the Swedish government had created an International Peace Research Institute. And I spent about two months learning Swedish and then I just walked up and asked for a job. I thought that would be a really interesting thing as an American abroad at a time of war. This was in the late 1960s. I thought I could learn something about peace and maybe I could do something for peace in some small way.

WHAT I WANT YOU TO DO IS JUST ENCAPSULATE; I'M RANDY FORSBERG, I'M DIRECTOR, I'VE BEEN WORKING IN THIS FIELD FOR 20 YEARS. I BEGAN THE NUCLEAR FREEZE. YOU CAN MENTION THAT YOU WORKED AT STOCKHOLM BUT DON'T GO INTO DETAILS.

My name is Randy Forsberg. I'm the Director of the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies in Brookline, Massachusetts. I've been working for peace for about 20 years. I started in the late 1960s when I was living in Stockholm and took a job at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. I later came back to the United States, did graduate work at MIT and in 1980 wrote a short statement that called to halt the nuclear arms race, which brought together many peace groups around the idea of a nuclear freeze. I was involved in the freeze movement but I worked out of my institute which is a think tank for disarmament and designed to provide strategies and information for people working to reverse the arms race.

OK, I JUST WANT YOU TO DO THE PART ABOUT MY INSTITUTE IS A THINK TANK...AND YOU CAN SAY THE NAME OF IT.

The Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies is an unusual place. We do research and public education and the concept is to be a kind of think tank for disarmament. So that people who are activists who are out around the country doing protests educating themselves, will have a resource to turn to find out about the military, which is disinterested, not involved, can give them objective information.

WHAT DO YOU THINK IS THE MOST IMPORTANT MISCONCEPTION THE PUBLIC HAS ABOUT NUCLEAR WEAPONS?

There's an incredible irony in the nuclear arms race in the sense that people have always thought the reason we have nuclear weapons is to deter a nuclear war. And, of course, that, to deter a nuclear attack on our country by threatening retaliation. And, of course, that is one of the purposes of nuclear weapons but it's not the main purpose in the sense that it doesn't account for those 50,000 weapons. It doesn't account for the constant innovation in new types of weaponry. Rather, the reason we have so many nuclear weapons is to deter a non-nuclear conventional war, another war like World War II by deliberating posing a high risk of escalation. Escalating to the possibility of nuclear attacks on military targets. And it's these huge numbers of military targets, conventional forces, and nuclear missiles and ports and airstrips that are the targets for the 50,000 nuclear weapons.

SO BRIEFLY WHAT IS THE KEY THING THE PUBLIC DOESN'T KNOW AND SHOULD KNOW ABOUT NUCLEAR WEAPONS? UH, HAS PUBLIC OPINION ALTERED THE COURSE OF THIS HISTORY IN ANY SIGNIFICANT WAY.

I think the anti-nuclear movements of the early 1980s in the United States and Europe have had an enormous impact on efforts to reverse the arms race. Before 1980 people didn't seem to be very aware of the fact that we had 50,000 nuclear weapons and they didn't seem to be very concerned. And the issue was really left up to the experts who negotiated agreements that set limits but didn't reverse the arms race, didn't really cut back. I think the INF agreement where we've gotten rid of first-line, recently deployed nuclear weapons for the first time in 40 years is largely a product of a response to these huge popular movements in this country and Europe.

WHY HAS THE PUBLIC RECENTLY BECOME SO VOCAL ABOUT NUCLEAR WEAPONS?

There's a kind of, there's a kind of chicken and egg process. People become, what's happened in the last few years is that a few people originally became involved. I have to start over again.

I MEAN WHEN YOU LOOK BACK OVER THE COURSE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS, THERE ARE VERY FEW TIMES WHEN THE PUBLIC WAS CONCERNED AND OUTSPOKEN IN ANY WAY. IN THE EARLY '80S AND SINCE THEN HAS BEEN A SIGNIFICANT TIME. WHY THEN?

In the late 1970s a very strange thing happened. There was the SALT II agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union that said, we're going to put limits on the numbers of weapons on the two sides. And when this agreement came up before the Senate for ratification in 1979, it was, it never really got through the process. It was actually withdrawn before it got through. And the reason was that there was a very strong right-wing movement that had gone out with hundreds of millions of pieces of mail and...bringing the message, we shouldn't have agreements with the Soviet Union. So we had a modest agreement not to reverse the arms but just to limit it, and even that couldn't succeed in getting through the US Senate. At the same time, we had a new generation of nuclear weapons that were all designed to try to fight and win a nuclear war. The MX missile on our side, the SS-18 on the Soviet side, the Trident II, which is a counterforce missile based on submarines, the new Euro missiles which can, some of them could get to Moscow in 12 minutes. So people saw this specter, the combination of no arms control and a new generation of really dangerous nuclear weapons. And that got more and more people concerned and then, of course, as some people who were more informed got concerned initially, they went out and educated other people and you had a kind of a blossoming effect with more and more people being reached with the message of what was going on and becoming concerned and devoting their free time and reaching new people and so on, a sort of geometric progression.

BUT WHAT GOOD HAS THAT REALLY DONE. THE ARMS RACE GOES ON, AND THINGS GO ON PRETTY MUCH THE SAME AND IT SEEMS AS IF PUBLIC OPINION HAS MANAGED PRETTY WELL WITH THE LEADERSHIP?

Well, certainly it's the case in United States that, in this country people feel that if we have negotiations going on, that's the main thing. It's...when people get really nervous, really scared and worried and upset is if there is a total breakdown in communication between the United States and the Soviet Union. No talks going on, no prospect of an agreement. Once there are talks or some agreement has just been signed or another one is in prospect, people feel that the situation is relatively more under control or going as well as can be expected. And they tend not to be as concerned and as vocal and as active. On the other hand, there has been a very profound change in the United States and I think in the western world in the last 10 years. And this change with Gorbachev is now spreading to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. People have sort of lost their innocence about nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are no longer very remote, very technical, you know, an expert-only type issue. People are informed at a more basic level. There's a kind of...basic layer of education and information that people have and people are organized. In United States today there are 7,000 grassroots peace groups which are detailed in our Peace Resource Book. So even though you don't see the same high visibility that there was, let's say in 1982 with the one million people demonstrating in Central Park. The structure, there's a permanent structure out there of education and concern and this structure is growing. It's, it's visibility ebbs and flows but the baseline of how many people know something about the military side of foreign policy, how many people know something about the arms race, how many people are aware of the limits of the current arms control negotiations. That's growing all the time.

WE'RE GOING TO COME BACK TO SOME OF THOSE ISSUES. NUCLEAR WEAPONS HAVE BEEN CREDITED WITH KEEPING THE PEACE FOR THE LAST 45 YEARS. DO YOU AGREE THAT THEY HAVE?

The important thing about the nuclear arms race is that it's totally tied up in the problem of conventional war. That's what people have not realized yet. That's where our education hasn't gotten up to that point yet. At the end of World War II, or even going back further to the creation of nuclear weapons; United States started a nuclear program in the middle of World War II out of fear that Germany might have a nuclear program. But in the spring of 1945 when Germany was defeated and we discovered they did not have a nuclear program, our program didn't end. It went right ahead. We made the first three nuclear bombs. We tested one in the desert in Alamogordo and we used the other two on Japanese cities ostensibly in order to end a non-nuclear conventional war. So right from the very beginning our nuclear policy has been tied up with fears of non-nuclear conventional warfare. In the 1950s, the United States had a monopoly on nuclear weapons. We had in the late '50s, 2,000 intercontinental bombers when the Soviets only had 150. What was our policy at that time? It was, if the Soviets get out of line, we will use nuclear weapons. If they march over Europe, if they invade Iran, if they do any foreign-policy action that the United States govern...government objects to, we are prepared to respond with nuclear weapons. In NATO we've always had a first-use nuclear policy. If there is another war in Europe, the West is prepared to escalate to the first use of nuclear weapons. So the notion that nuclear weapons are separated from world politics and from non-nuclear warfare is completely wrong. Now, the question of whether we would have had a war if we hadn't had all these nuclear weapons, of course, that's a hypothetical question that we'll never know the answer to. If, certainly if we look around at the economic system, at the course of international politics, what we see in Europe between east and west is an extremely stable situation, spheres of influence that were carved out at the end of World War II that had been very stable. I think what all of us on both sides of this issue would like to see is a preservation of that stability in the sense of peace, a loosening up somewhat of the spheres of influence, this kind of block mentality and a transition to what we could feel comfortable was a really stable permanent peace that doesn't rely either on military blocks or on nuclear weapons. And, of course, we can't be sure how much the peace is a product of nuclear weapons. Whether in some crisis, it might have gone into, further into a war if we had no nuclear weapons or fewer nuclear weapons. I think what we can be sure about is that we don't want to keep relying on a nuclear hair trigger as the principal mechanism for preserving the peace between East and West.

NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARE CONSIDERED A BLESSING BY A LOT OF PEOPLE. EACH SIDE IS AFRAID. THERE HAVEN'T BEEN ANY ARMED CONFLICTS DIRECTLY BETWEEN THE SUPERPOWERS. NO ONE HAS DIED. THERE'S BEEN NO MAJOR WAR IN THE NORTHERN HEMISPHERE?

It's hard for me to answer this question. I mean my view is that's why it's so hard to reverse the nuclear arms race. We're addicted to nuclear weapons. We rely on nuclear weapons as a means of making sure that we'll never go to war. And it's really a paradoxical policy. We're holding a sword of Damocles over our own heads by a slender thread because we don't believe we're grown up enough not to go to war if we don't have the threat of a complete holocaust, complete obliteration. So we have allowed ourselves to become dependent on the threat of obliterating the world as the main mechanism of keeping the peace between East and West. And this is an extremely dangerous policy. It's unlike any other area of human activity where what we try to do is minimize the risks that we take as we try to accomplish productive human ends. In this case, we've gone just in the opposite direction. We've posed the most awful risk, the most terrible risk that we can possibly imagine, which is creating the ability to destroy all the cities in the northern hemisphere and we don't even know what the effect on life itself would be. And then relied on this as a mechanism for keeping the peace.

ARE WE GROWN UP ENOUGH TO LIVE WITHOUT THAT SUPREME THREAT AND TO LIVE PEACEABLY TOGETHER?

I think it's questionable whether the world's nations are ready to keep the peace without nuclear weapons and that's really the problem we need to look at. The, if we look at the evidence of history, if we ask in cases where the United States and the Soviet Union have not faced a threat of nuclear war, the risk of escalation to a nuclear holocaust, have they kept the peace or have they gotten involved in wars. The answer is they've gotten involved in wars. The United States in Korea and Vietnam and currently, almost, we're sort of on the verge of war in Central America. All cases of civil wars or civil conflicts between communist and non-communist sides where we have chosen to introduce our troops to try to tip the balance in someone else's decision. The Soviet Union is doing exactly a mirror-image thing in Afghanistan. They have introduced their troops in a civil war to try to tip the balance. So what we see is the two superpowers are continuing to rely on the use of force as a tool of power, to try to advance their view of how the world should be, their political interest, their economic interest. In regions all around the third world, around the perimeter or the periphery where they don't face the threat of a nuclear holocaust. So if you ask the question, what's the evidence when we look around ourselves of whether or not these nations are prepared and can be relied on to keep the peace if we withdraw this escalatory nuclear threat. The evidence, I think, I'm afraid I have to say the evidence is we can't count on them. That, in fact, we do need to see more progress, more changes in the conduct of international affairs and the use of non-nuclear conventional forces before we can feel confident that they would keep the peace.

DO YOU EVER FEEL OFFENDED BY PEOPLE SAYING THERE'S BEEN NO WAR IN 45 YEARS AND YET IN THE THIRD WORLD THERE'S BEEN WARS ALL OVER, MANY OF THEM PROPAGATED BY, THE PROXY WARS BY THE SUPERPOWERS. DO YOU THINK THERE'S A RELATIONSHIP?

Nuclear weapons have helped create a very strange situation in the world where there is an island of peace in the northern hemisphere that stretches across the United States and Canada, Europe, the Soviet Union, China and Japan. And this island of peace is surrounded by a sea of war in the Third World, in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and some part of the Far East. And, in fact, what nuclear weapons are doing is creating a dividing line between these two parts of the world. They're sort of like a fence around the great powers, around the big power system, the traditional animosity among great powers such as Germany and France, the Soviet Union and Germany China and Japan. These countries which have been going to war with each other for centuries in efforts to see who'll be the top dog, who'll be the hegemonic power, can no longer go to war with each other. And, are fighting out their competition indirectly by supplying arms and in extreme cases, sending their own troops into conflicts in the Third World. So nuclear weapons have drawn a fence that keeps them at peace with each other while they continue to use force and to be involved in conflicts and to feed conflicts in the Third World.

NUCLEAR WEAPONS HAVE BEEN CREDITED WITH KEEPING THE PEACE FOR THE LAST 45 YEARS. DO YOU THINK THEY HAVE?

We're doing a very strange thing with nuclear weapons. We're relying on nuclear weapons to keep the peace among the great powers in the northern hemisphere, the United States, Europe and the Soviet Union. While we see more and more wars in the Third World. Civil wars, border wars, and also proxy wars, indirect expression of the conflict between East and West being fought out in the Third World. For example, in Central America today, which isn't really part of the East/West conflict, it's part of its own problem in development, in building up its own political strength internally and yet is being treated as an, a field for a proxy war between East and West.

SO DO YOU FEEL THAT THE THIRD WORLD IS BEING VICTIMIZED BY THIS STANDOFF?

We have to get back to nuclear weapons.

OKAY.

What we were doing with nuclear weapons is relying on them to keep the peace in the northern hemisphere while war continues and proliferates in the Third World. Really, nuclear weapons are like a fence around an island of peace in the northern hemisphere that is in the midst of a sea of war in the Third World. And what nuclear weapons do is send a message to the leaders on the two sides, that no war can creep up into the northern hemisphere, that we can't step across that line. So each superpower can use its military forces, and does, in civil wars in Third World countries but never against each other because that's too risky.

AND WHAT DOES THAT SAY TO YOU?

If we want to reverse the nuclear arms race, we have to look not just at nuclear weapons and not just at the US/Soviet relationship but actually at the non-nuclear conventional forces on the two sides. What we are doing with them and what the alternatives are in that area, since the roots of the nuclear arms race lie in the desire to make sure that we never have another war like World War II, that we don't go to war with each other. The question we have to ask is how can we create a truly stable peace between East and West where there's no expectation that we will make war on each other.

DO YOU REALLY BELIEVE THAT NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT IS PRACTICAL AND POSSIBLE?

I think that some day we will get rid of nuclear weapons but I think it's very far in the future. 25 years at a minimum, 50 years, maybe longer. I see nuclear disarmament as very comparable to getting rid of slavery. I think that we're standing today in a position that people were in a hundred years before the abolition of slavery when they knew it was wrong, they knew it was evil, they knew it was unnecessary. They didn't know when it would end but they knew that they had to work for it and eventually it would happen. And I think that is also true of nuclear disarmament. I don't think we can, the human race will continue to live under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust, having that weigh on our conscious, consciousness, on our image of our lives forever and ever. I think we will get rid of it but I think it's going to take a long time.

DO YOU SEE NUCLEAR DETERRENCE AS IMMORAL?

Absolutely. I think the idea of threatening to commit genocide as a way of conducting politics is outrageous. It's one of the most deeply immoral and subversive acts of governments in the modern world. There, there are some pretty bad things that are done. I don't think there are any that are worse than this.

WHAT I DON'T UNDERSTAND IS WHAT CHOICE DO WE HAVE? I READ AN ARTICLE BY JAMES SCHLESINGER IN WHICH HE SAYS A WAR WITHOUT NUCLEAR WEAPONS IS AN UTOPIAN DREAM. WHICH EVER PARTY SUCCESSFULLY CHEATED AND PRESERVED EVEN A FRACTION OF ITS ARSENAL COULD ACHIEVE DOMINANCE. PARTIES WOULD STILL BE POISED TO RESUME PRODUCTION AND DEPLOYMENT. TO SEEK TOTAL NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT IS TO SEEK A GOAL THAT IS AS RISKY AS IT IS IMPRACTICAL. IS IT SAFE?

In thinking about disarmament, we need to think about comparison with the old west in the United States in the 19th century. People went around in the beginning with their own guns. They took their law, the law into their hands. There was the ranchers against the farmers in the use of water and land and cattle and so on and so forth, and people just looked out for themselves. And gradually more and more people came to find this an unacceptable way of living. It wasn't, on balance, they lost more than they got out of taking the law into their own hands and people gradually came to accept the concept of sheriffs of law and order, of troops, of due process of law in dealing conflicts. And we saw an actual change, in this country, in many states, in the way people live their lives. At the beginning of that change, people would have said, lawlessness and sort of bands of strong men with guns were inevitable and there was nothing the average, weak person could do about this except just live with it and make the best of it. So we had a kind of situation of anarchy, which evolved little by little into a, what we could call a common security system. A system where people relied on law and on law enforcement to keep the peace and to resolve conflicts. We need to see, to imagine the same sort of thing happening in the international environment. Not because there's a world government, not because there's some supreme power that's telling us what to do, but because it's in our own self interest. For example, if you look at fishing rights and the law of the sea, many nations have now agreed on what their boundaries are and the zonal rights for different kinds of fishing and no one makes them observe these limits. They observe them because it's in their mutual self interest to have an orderly system and to know what's going on. We need to extend that kind of regime, that kind or order, into more and more aspects of life. We, we also do it with the postal union, we do it with the airwaves, with radio and television we're beginning to do it with energy. To have an orderly system that, where it's sort of supply and demand. It's not grab and keep and take. So, the long term process of disarmament will be a process, and in fact is a process that's already happening, of people recognizing that it's in their own self interest to have an orderly way of going about things and that we instead of having a zero sum game, where some people win and some people lose, if I win, it's at your expense, we can have a win/win game -- everyone wins. All of us produce more, live more fruitful lives, enjoy our lives more by not having the war system be a burden on us and invade our rights.

DOES THIS REQUIRE, GOING BACK TO YOUR ANALOGY OF THE OLD WEST, WOULD THIS REQUIRE SOME KIND OF EXTRA POLICE FORCE, OR A REAL WORLD GOVERNMENT WITH REAL AUTHORITY. SO THE QUESTION IS TO HAVE DISARMAMENT BE EFFECTIVE, DO WE NEED SOME KIND OF WORLD POLICE AUTHORITY OR WORLD GOVERNMENT, EFFECTIVE WORLD GOVERNMENT?

First of all, it's important to realize that we can't jump in one fell swoop from the world that we live in today to a completely disarmed and peaceful world. It's something that has, it's such a large change, it's got to happen in stages. You have to have a series of stages in which you have less warfare, less use of force, a more stable peace, a more reliable peace. We, we're already in the first stage because we are now living in a world in which another war in Europe or another war between great powers is unthinkable. In fact, we've created a huge part of the world that it covers, the United States and Canada, Europe, the Soviet Union and China and Japan, this whole band across the northern hemisphere. The use of force as a means of settling political objectives has become unthinkable in this part of the world. So that is a first stage in the process of moving toward a stable peace at much lower levels of armaments and ultimately a disarmed and stable peace. In that very long term process, there are a lot of different mechanisms that we need to rely on to keep the peace, not one world government and one police force. I think many people are afraid of turning over all power to some centralized authority which could then abuse that power. So what we need to do instead of a highly centralized world government, is a whole series of different mechanisms for keeping the peace, relying on the world court instead of abusing it the way the United States did recently. UN peacekeeping forces which don't tell people what to do but simply intervene between two fighting parties and create a demilitarized zone. In some cases, unarmed UN peacekeeping forces. In other cases, armed forces. We need to rely on mediators and negotiators. We need to rely on international law. We need to rely, in fact, on the whole system of banking and international finance which makes us all interdependent. If we, if we are in a situation where a Third World country owes our banks a huge debt in loans and development aid, and then that country goes to war and their economy is destroyed, we all lose. So I see the whole international finance market as one of the important mechanisms for keeping the peace.

BUT STILL, ANY COUNTRY COULD HAVE THE KNOWLEDGE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND THEN THE GUY WHO MADE ONE COULD CONTROL THE WORLD.

Gosh this is so difficult. In thinking about nuclear disarmament, I find it very useful to think about concrete stages of cutting back weaponry and forces, sort of different international regimes that would exist at different stages, let's say, over the next 50 years. Let me just give a couple of examples. I can imagine in one stage both the United States and the Soviet Union pulling back their troops and their bases which they now have in Third World countries. Just sticking to their own part of the world, sticking to the conflict between East and West in the northern hemisphere but getting out of all these Third World conflicts and leaving the people of the Third World to decide their futures for themselves. This is not disarmament. It's a far cry from disarmament, but it would be a major change in how we conduct affairs in the international system. It would establish a precedent that when there are problems, let's say border wars, the war between Iran and Iraq, for example, this is not dealt with by one superpower acting as the world's policeman, acting unilaterally on their own initiative to decide the future of the world, rather it is something that will be responded to by the international system acting as a community, through the UN with international peacekeeping forces and applying international law and applying international, multilateral sanctions. No no arms supplies. Economic sanctions that are done jointly by the international system. So the concept of a Third World non-intervention regime is like a first stage, a first plateau in a very long-term process of cutting back the role of force and the size of the forces that exist in the international system.

I'M TALKING HERE ABOUT THE DESIRED END STATE, WHETHER A WORLD WITHOUT ANY NUCLEAR WEAPONS IS A DESIRED END STATE, MANY PEOPLE WOULD SAY WELL, I DON'T SEE WHY 'CAUSE WE'VE HAD THEM, THEY HAVEN'T BEEN USED AND THEY'VE KEPT THE PEACE IN THE COUNTRIES THAT HAVE HAD THEM, THAT THERE HAVE BEEN NO WARS. HOW COULD YOU RELY ON, YOU KNOW...ONE COUNTRY HIDING ONE AWAY OR SOMETHING AND THREATENING THAT STABILITY?

In, in order to imagine a world without nuclear weapons, you have to imagine a very different world. A world in which people have spent many years, probably several decades, you know, 20, 30, 40 years not using conventional, non-nuclear military forces as a means of accomplishing political objectives. A world full of countries like Sweden and Switzerland where people have military forces, but they have one purpose and only one purpose, and that is defense against external aggression. If every country in the world limited the role of its military forces strictly and narrowly to defending against aggression by another country, of course, there would be no aggression. And there would be no internal repressive use of military force to maintain unpopular regimes, either. If we were living in a world in which the only use and the only role, the only legitimate use and role of conventional military forces was defense we would gradually build up a whole set of alternative means of resolving conflicts in terms of international war, civil liberties in terms of domestic situations and internalized constraints against the use of force. Sort of inhibitions that wouldn't allow people to think about using military force in order to coerce other people. So that the great majority of people would actually be socialized not to go to war. I think it's useful to compare it -- the goal of creating a world in which we could get rid of nuclear weapons with the situation of prohibition in the 1920s. The distinction between when you try to outlaw something by passing a law and then you know, relying on the police to enforce it, and when you get things done in a society by internalized change in people's attitudes. That is, I don't think in the long run you can't legislate morality. You can't legislate behavior. You can't get people to behave contrary to what they've decided they want to do or is in their own interest just by passing a law. That's what prohibition showed us. We tried to outlaw people drinking alcohol and people didn't want to stop drinking alcohol, and prohibition didn't work and we had to give up on that. Well, I think war is the same way. You can't outlaw war. You can't outlaw nuclear weapons. You can't just pass a law and say, "OK, we'll get rid of nuclear weapons and all other weapons and then there won't be any more war." You have to go through a very long-term process of educating and socializing people so they internalize different values which do not allow them -- in which it's unthinkable to pick up a gun in war just like it is in our private life. And I'm deeply convinced that internally in societies if you asked the question why don't most people, this is another analogy, why don't people commit murder right and left? Some people say, well that's because we have police and you would get punished. I don't believe that. I think the reason that most people wouldn't think about committing an act of violence of that kind is because it's so deeply socialized into them, it's so deeply internalized that it's just not thinkable to behave that way. That they're not moved by the police or the threat of jail. It's by their own internal value system.

YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT A SITUATION IN WHICH GRADUALLY THERE WOULD BE A HUMAN EVOLUTION, AN EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND A CHANGE IN HUMAN NATURE?

Yes. It's not...No, I'm not...I'm not talking -- I'm not talking about a change in human nature. I don't think we can change human nature, but I think what human nature is maybe isn't so clear to us. Warfare is an institution, a socially constructed institution like an educational system or a business -- it's a highly industrialized, highly constructed system. People don't go to war in anger. It's done in cold blood with long term advanced planning. It's a social behavior which has evolved historically. So what I'm talking about is changing that social behavior. It's not changing people's feelings. It doesn't end anger. It doesn't end you know feelings of being aggressive or even being violent. But it's how we deal with those feelings, how we are taught and how we learn to deal with feelings when we get very angry or when we want something that we don't have. Right now we're living in a world that has an ambivalent value system. It has two different kinds of values operating at one and the same time. According to one set of values that we're all taught it's totally unethical and immoral to use armed force or violence for any purpose except to protect yourself if someone else is attacking you. That's a sort of defensive morality. That's what I would call the 20th century morality. But we still have remnants of a 19th century morality and an earlier era, a kind of a...the big power morality, which is in the international system there's an anarchy where might makes right. If you can take it, take it. If you can get away with it, do it. That this is the way of the world and we all kind of accept that. We condone it. We may not like it. We may not approve of it, but we sort of accept it. So I think that in today's world most people are living with two different value systems coexisting inside of them at one and the same time, and in response to different events in the international system one or the other of these value systems is called up and gets expressed. So what we need to do to be able to think about getting rid of nuclear weapons is to strengthen that the modern value system that says the only legitimate use of force is in self-defense. And we need to get rid of this archaic big-power value system that says might makes right. If we can make that kind of conversion or transformation inside of people and inside of societies and in great power policies then we...the world will be in a position where we could begin to think about abolishing nuclear weapons. But of course that would be a very different world from the one we're living in today.

THAT SEEMS TO ME A VERY BIG IF. IF THERE'S ONE INTERNATIONAL OUTLAW FOR INSTANCE AND THERE'S NO FORCE TO STOP THEM, IT SEEMS TO ME THAT YOU HEAR A LOT OF HAWKS CALL UP THE CASE OF THE [MEHANEK]. YOU KNOW, WE TRIED TO BE NICE AND WE TRIED TO GIVE THEM THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT, AND APPEASED THEM, AND IN FACT THEY WALKED ALL OVER US, AND MAYBE WORLD WAR II COULD HAVE BEEN PREVENTED IF WE HAD STOOD UP TO THEM WITH FORCE. THAT IN A WAY, THE SOVIET UNION ONLY RESPECTS FORCE. AND WHEN WE...IN THE CARTER YEARS WHEN WE STARTED TALKING ABOUT...

You're bringing up a lot of different kinds of cases. One is the Soviet Union as a bad guy. The other is nations will be bad, you know, somebody will be bad. A wild card. That's like three different issues, so you should pick one.

OK, LET'S STAY OFF THE SOVIET UNION FOR RIGHT NOW. HOW CAN WE...TRUST THAT EVERYONE IS GOING TO ACT WELL, AND THAT NATIONS...

Idi Amin. You realize that I have...you are requiring me to solve all of the problems in the world in order to be able to say that I've got a case. But I'm willing to take this on.

OK.

Let's see. It's really extraordinary that just seven countries account for 85 percent of the military spending of the world. Just 7 countries: the United States and the Soviet Union, Britain, France and Germany, China and Japan. These countries together account for 99 percent of the nuclear weapons in the world. And they account for over 90 percent of the development and production of new types of non-nuclear major weapons systems, fighter airplanes, tanks, ships and so on and so forth. These countries also have really a monopoly on non-military nuclear technology, nuclear-powered technology. And it lies within the power of these countries to perpetuate a world in which we will see the spread of nuclear technology and advanced weapons systems, airplanes and missiles to more and more countries, which will then become independent centers of military power, or to reverse that spread. It still lies within the power of a very few countries, our own country and a few other countries to stop the spread of nuclear weapons throughout the Third World, and to stop the development of independent defense industries in more and more countries, such as South Korea, Taiwan, Israel, South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, Pakistan, India and so on and so forth. If we continue the way we're going for another 50 years we will probably be living in a world in which there are many nuclear powers and many centers of military power, a kind of an international anarchy, a true international anarchy in which no one can use military force because any war could go nuclear. So military force is useless. And yet we will have spent $1,000 billion dollars a year, which is what we're spending today, a trillion dollars a year, from now throughout the next 50 years getting to that precarious peace, a peace in which there are no wars and no one can use force to advance their interests because everyone has nuclear weapons and any war could go nuclear. So we really stand at a fork between two different futures. A future in which the great powers decide that we have come to the end of an era, it's the end of the period when they can keep using military force to advance their interests in the world. They might as well write it off and make up their minds to establish a stable international peace, and pull back those tentacles of military power that are now spreading out into the Third World and prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and military technologies to more and more countries. That's one future, where we will get to a stable peace 50 years from now which is a stable, largely disarmed peace. The other future is a...

WHY DO WE WANT TO GET RID OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS? MAYBE WE CAN REDUCE THEM OR SOMETHING, BUT WHAT'S WRONG WITH HAVING SOME AROUND? AFTER ALL, THEY'VE KEPT US OUT OF WAR.

Hmm. ... Relying on nuclear weapons to keep the peace is like being an adult--I have to start over. Okay. When we rely on nuclear weapons to keep the peace, it's as though there were an adult standing over a four-year-old child, saying, "If you do something wrong, I'm going to smack you." Only we're going to smack ourselves with obliteration. If you go to war, I'm going to smack you and obliterate the whole world. This is not a grownup way of living. This is not an adult way of running our lives. The idea that we have to pose the threat of committing suicide, species suicide, in order to make sure that we don't go to war anymore, that we don't have more wars like World War I and World War II. It's one way of doing it, but it's a terrible way of doing it. It's extremely dangerous. And even if it doesn't happen, or as long as it doesn't happen it's demoralizing. It's like saying, "We don't know how to behave like adults. We don't know how to treat other human beings decently. We don't know how to interact in a civilized way. We don't know how to reap the benefits of the life that's given to us without holding this sword over our own heads, that if we get out of line, we're going to destroy ourselves completely. And the only way we can make sure that we don't do that is by threatening ourselves with genocide."

YOU'RE IN SOME GOOD COMPANY WITH THAT, BECAUSE PRESIDENT REAGAN AGREES WITH YOU AND GENERAL SECRETARY GORBACHEV AGREES WITH YOU. AND WHAT I WANT TO KNOW IS, MAYBE THAT'S REALITY, AND MAYBE THAT'S THE WAY IT IS, BUT THERE ARE NATIONS OUT IN THE WORLD, THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO DO NASTY THINGS. AND IT'S UNPLEASANT, BUT WE HAVE TO PROTECT OURSELVES AGAINST THE THREAT OF THAT AGGRESSION. WE CAN'T CONTROL HOW GOOD, HOW ADULT THEY ARE.

Nuclear weapons are a part of the process of ending war. That's a paradox. The most terrible, awful, and unbelievable weapons ever invented are part of helping the human race finish growing up. Finish growing up in the sense of ending war as a social institution, as an accepted way of organizing our affairs. As something that we do deliberately and cold-bloodedly, and spend a lot of money and a lot of creative energy and a lot of people's lives investing in. Nuclear weapons are getting us get over the hump of coming to believe that we as a species can live without going to war. We don't really believe that. We don't trust ourselves. We don't believe that we can be completely civilized and socialized. And nuclear weapons are giving us a period of decades to say to ourselves, "See? It didn't happen. There wasn't another World War I or World War II." We did figure out how to resolve the problems of, let's say, civil liberties in Eastern Europe, which is a terrible problem. Energy dependence. International economic interdependence. Ideological differences. All of these things, we have learned how to manage and to cope with and to get through and to work through, without resorting to the use of force as a means of dealing with them.

SO WHAT I HEAR YOU SAYING-- WHAT I HEAR YOU SAYING IS THAT WHEN THEY LOOK BACK AT THIS TIME PERIOD IN 40 YEARS AND SAY, "WHEW. IT WAS DANGEROUS, BUT--"

We made it.

--IT GAVE US THE BREATHER TO NOT HAVE ANY WAR AND TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO CO-EXIST SO THAT WE COULD GET RID OF THE TERRIBLE THREAT."

The 20th century is a century of transition. This is the century in which we are ending war. In the 19th century we still had imperialism. We had great powers sending troops into small, weak, Third World countries, taking over and installing governments. In the 20th century, in 1945 the whole world was carved up, and we have no more outright aggression or outright imperialism. Instead, we have a lesser form of warfare in the late 20th century: intervention. The difference between aggression and intervention is: aggression is you march over someone else's territory, take it over, and incorporate it into your empire. Intervention is, you send in troops, you try to make sure that the side you want to win wins, and then you pullout. It's a much more limited use of force. In the late 20th century we have intervention not aggression. In the 21st century we will no longer have intervention. What we've seen in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, in Iran, in the Philippines, is the declining utility of force as a tool of power. Even in Poland. The Soviet Union intervened in Hungary. It intervened in Czechoslovakia 12 years later. Another 12 years after that, in 1980, it did not intervene in Poland. It mobilized. The troops were there. But they did everything they could short of direct military intervention. And why is that? In the Third World, in Eastern Europe, throughout the world, there is a rising political consciousness. Which means people won't tolerate the use of force. People won't tolerate other people telling them what to do. People are sort of taking back power, or taking power over their lives and their political systems for the first time in history. And doing so to such a great extent that we can't get away-- we the great powers, can't get away with using force as a means of installing governments and keeping them in power. We need to go with the flow. We have to. We have no choice, but to allow people around the world to determine their own futures. And what we are going to see in the 21st century is no more big power interventions at all. No more Vietnams. No more Afghanistans. What does that mean? We're going to have these huge standing conventional armies that don't have any role. They have nothing to do. We're now spending $300 billion a year on the military in this country. For what? Two things. To make sure we don't have another war in Europe, and to provide the capability to intervene unilaterally in civil wars in Third World countries. Well, the unilateral intervention is going away as a reason for having military force, for this country, and for the Soviet Union, for the whole world. And in Europe, in the Northern Hemisphere, we're going through decade after decade of no war. We see that we can live with each other. We can resolve our conflicts. We can deal with each other. So gradually the war system is withering away, and we will look back 40 years from now and see the period from 1945 to the year 2000 as a period of transition when we didn't believe we could end war, but we were actually doing it. And in the meantime, because we didn't believe it, we were relying on nuclear weapons to keep the peace for us.

COULD NUCLEAR WEAPONS BE SEEN AS THE AGENT FOR HAVING US HAVE TO ABANDON THE USE OF FORCE?

There are so many complex forces that determine how nations behave. I think nuclear weapons represent one reason why the great powers are not going to war with each other anymore, but certainly not the only reason, and maybe not the most important reason. Other reasons are, we're much wealthier than countries ever were before in history. We have so much to lose. In the past, when people went to war, they were extremely poor anyway, and maybe they had something to gain. Today we know that if we have another war among the big industrialized countries, everybody loses, and everybody loses big! Even if nuclear weapons aren't used, somehow. If we can imagine a war without nuclear weapons being used. So we're rich, and we have a lot to lose. We're t-- we've been bloodied. We've had these two huge world wars with millions of people dying in this century. People don't want to repeat that experience. Maybe we've learned something. We're economically interdependent. We don't want to make war on potential enemies with whom we have a huge amount of trade. There is huge energy interdependence between the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Western Europe right now. If one of them goes -- one part goes to war with another, they all lose their energy supplies, and their whole industrial system cranks to a halt. So we have economic interdependence. And finally, I think that we have a degree of political awareness of other people that comes from television and movies. We, we live in a shrinking world. People have become real people, not just you know, colored blotches on a, on a world map, and represented by some head of state. They're sort of real individuals that we see on television who come and visit, we have exchanges and that kind of thing. So I think all of these different factors are converging in order to make the use of force as a means of accomplishing countries' goals unacceptable -- on both sides. Both by the perpetrators -- we don't, in the United States, we don't want to send our boys into wars in the Third World, and the people in the Third World don't want to have them there. So I think it's really coming from both sides.

LET'S TALK ABOUT THE ARMS RACE A LITTLE BIT. I WANT TO ASK YOU WHAT, IN YOUR ANALYSIS, A SORT OF QUICK SUMMARY, WHAT DO YOU THINK THE KEY FACTOR-- SO WHAT I WANT FROM YOU IS A SIMPLE ANSWER: WHAT DRIVES THE ARMS RACE?

Oh my God! That's your next question? Oh my gosh. There are so many answers.

WHAT DO YOU THINK IS THE KEY THING? IS IT TECHNOLOGY? IS IT ACTION-REACTION? IS THERE A TECHNOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE? IS IT THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX? IS IT THE STATE OF TENSION BETWEEN THE SUPERPOWERS?

Okay. I think there are two main things that drive the arms race. One of them is well known: vested interests -- careers, jobs, profits, community dependence. People don't want to dismantle what they rely on. The other one is less well known. And therefore I give it more emphasis. We are afraid of disarmament. We're afraid to reverse the arms race. We're afraid that somewhere, as we go down through scaling back, we will come to a point that's less stable than where we are now. Where one of the players in the international system will break out and take advantage of the other players. Or where the whole international system, let's say we have another depression, it will collapse into war, there'll be a general collapse, and a ge...it won't be the fault of one country but of many countries. And I think that's a, an important and real fear that needs to be dealt with. I think that in the process of reversing the arms race, we have to think in terms of stable, a series of stable plateaus that are highly reliable, and where we have a lot of reason to feel confident that they will be lasting and enduring. And I think that question hasn't been adequately answered in the public mind, by people who want to reverse the arms race.

OKAY, I THINK YOU'VE DESCRIBED THAT TO US, AND I WANT TO JUST ASK YOU ABOUT THIS FIRST ONE. WHEN YOU TALK ABOUT THE INSTITUTIONS THAT HAVE KEPT IT GOING, CAN YOU GO A LITTLE BIT MORE DEEPLY INTO THAT?

In the United States, there are five or six million people employed by the military. There are two million people in uniform. But in addition to those, there's over a million civil servants who work for the government. And then there's another three million people employed in the defense industries that make weapons and equipment. That means that we have five or six million people who know which side their bread is buttered on. When the defense budget goes up, they make a better living and they have a secure job. When the defense budget goes down, they could get fired, they could be let go. So we've got a ready-made lobby group, organized, well informed, attentive, of five or six million people who are constantly lobbying to keep the military budget high. If you look on the other side, you say, well, there are a hundred million people working in the United States; only five million are working for the military, and all the rest of us are paying taxes that pay the military. So we've really got 95 million people who have an interest in keeping military spending to the minimum, and five million who have an interest in maximizing it. The problem is that the 95 aren't organized. They're not coming together, they're not lobbying, they're not cohesive, they're not well informed. So we have a strong lobby group, pro-military spending, which is organized, and the general population, which would benefit from minimizing the spending, isn't organized.

I'VE HEARD THAT ACTUALLY THE DEFENSE INDUSTRY PAC HAS MORE MONEY THAN ANY OTHER PAC. DID YOU KNOW ABOUT THAT?

No. But I can tell something else that's interesting.

OKAY.

Between 1981 and 1985, President Reagan increased military spending in this country by 50%. For 20 years before that period, in today's spending levels, spending was around 200 billion. Reagan raised it to 300 billion. Now the size of the military themselves did not increase. What happened was he got a lot more production of weapons and equipment than we had before. Bigger navy, more rapid introduction of new weapons. The impact of that was to take employment in the defense industries and drive it up from 1.8 million people to 3.5. So we now have doubled the number of people who are employed in the defense industries who are dependent on a high level of military spending. So whether or not it's in our national interest to cut military spending, whether in fact we would be more secure and have a more stable international peace to cut back on some of those forces and some of that weaponry, we have to cope with this defense dependency, a kind of addiction, a pernicious addiction in our communities.

WHAT IS THE MECHANISM BY WHICH THOSE PEOPLE WHO WORK IN THE DEFENSE INDUSTRY INFLUENCE POLICY? WAIT FOR THE PLANE. I MEAN, 5 MILLION PEOPLE WORK IN THE FOOD INDUSTRY, BUT I KNOW THE LOWER-LEVEL PEOPLE DON'T REALLY DO MUCH.

The defense the defense department has been very clever and spread their contracts into every congressional district in the country. So it means that each member of the House of Representatives as well as members of the Senate know that when a military contract is cut, they're going to be losing employment by people who are going to come to them and say, "Why did you do this to me?" And there will be 20,000 people here or 10,000 people there who are working in a factory that will be closed down. So there's a lot of pork barrelling. "You support the contract in my district, I'll support the contract in your district." And within individual congressional districts, as well as in the country as a whole, there is no off-setting, organized force that can go to the member of Congress and say, "If you vote for this military contract to perpetuate this level of spending I won't vote for you in the next election." So what there is this strong lobby group for more military spending, acting not just at the presidential level, but at the level of the individual congressmen, in terms of money and votes. And there is a weak lobby group on the other side.

WHAT ABOUT THE PEOPLE, THE NITZES, THE PERLES, THE ROSTOWS, WHO SELL THE SOVIET THREAT? DO YOU THINK THAT THEY SINCERELY BELIEVE THAT THE SOVIET UNION IS STRONGER AND THAT WE ARE IN DANGER? OR IS THERE SOME MORE PERNICIOUS MOTIVE?

One of the most shocking things about this defense dependency is that the defense department has actively lobbied in Congress to prevent legislation that would help convert military industries to civilian production. There has been for many years proposed legislation that any community which has a certain percentage of jobs dependent on the military budget should have a conversion plan; so that if we wanted to cut the military budget, these people wouldn't be just put out on the street. They would have retraining, retooling the plants, there would be people who would look into what's the most appropriate product which would sell well and for which there is a demand. And the defense department has actively prevented the passing of this legislation by lobbying very hard in Congress against, which I think is really pernicious. Because that means that supports that irrational reason for keeping up military spending. The other reason, the Soviet military threat, is of course something that we have to take seriously into consideration. I do not support unilateral disarmament. I think that we do need to be concerned about threats of aggression and threats of war. Among other things, I wouldn't like to see a US cutback in military spending offset by a buildup in Japan and Germany, West Germany, which are very strong countries economically and have kept their military down since World War II. If we unilaterally cut back in this country, I think it's quite likely that there would be significant re-militarization and rearmament in Japan and Germany. So I think that we do need to take an international point of view. We do need to be concerned about the possibility of a collapse into war, the possibility of recurring world wars every generation if we cut back on nuclear weapons or if the United States becomes more isolationist. I think we need to sort of hold up our end in the international system, but work for bilateral cutbacks in conventional and in nuclear forces. And to make those cutbacks possible, you have to have conversion legislation; you have to have-- get off of this economic dependency and have the ability to convert to civilian products.

BACK TO THE QUESTION OF WHAT ABOUT THE PEOPLE WHO SELL THIS THREAT? AND HAVE DONE THAT PERIODICALLY IN HISTORY. WHAT'S MOTIVATING THAT? HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THAT?

There's a small...there's a small group of military experts, some in uniform and some not in uniform, in the United States and in Western Europe, which has periodically exaggerated the military threat posed by the Soviet Union. I think this is done deliberately. That is, in-- these so-called experts select those parts of Soviet military forces where they have an advantage and give them a lot of play. And they ignore the parts of military forces where the United States and the West has an advantage. So you never hear anything about the offsetting advantages on the Western side. So it's, th-- it's one of the typical ways of lying with statistics. The things they say are true, they're just not the whole truth. They don't give you a balanced picture.

WHY DO THEY DO IT?

I don't...I don't think that this is done in a pernicious way. I think the problem is that they don't have confidence, in two different senses. They don't have confidence in ordinary people to have good judgement about what's good for them. And they think that people need to be sold an exaggerated bill of goods in order to support a reasonable level of military spending. They don't trust the ordinary population to hear the real truth, the whole truth, and make a good judgement about what we need for our security. That's one part of the problem. The other part of the problem runs more deeply in their motivation. And that is, they don't believe that we can get rid of the war system or that we will get rid of the war system. So in their view, they're not exaggerating the Soviet threat. They're representing in black and white terms, an underlying reality that will always be there. There will always be a threat. There's no way of getting rid of the threat. It's not just the Soviet Union as an evil empire, it's in the nation-state system, it's in the nature of things that there will always be military threats, and we should always have military forces. But they know that they can't sell that deep belief to the public. The public's view is, "Oh, if the Soviets are so much of a problem, then why don't we and the Soviets cut back." So instead of coming out with an honest representation of "I think we should maintain military forces permanently in peacetime, regardless of what openings or initiatives are made by the Soviet Union, because I don't trust nations to develop a stable peace." Instead of making that more honest statement of their view, they make what they think will be a more popular statement of their views. And that is, "The whole problem lies with the Soviet Union."

DO YOU HAVE ANY SENSE OF LIKE MORAL OUTRAGE ABOUT THE WAY THAT, YOU KNOW, CONGRESS, YOU KNOW KEEPS BEING PUSHED TO [END UP] FUND MORE AND MORE WEAPONS SYSTEMS? THE STRUCTURE, THE POWER THAT THE DEFENSE LOBBY HAS?

What I find really upsetting is the fact that there are millions of people who spend their lives developing means of death and destruction. There are hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers who turn their creative talents to figuring out better ways of killing people. There are millions of people in uniform, intelligent, bright, wonderful people, who train all of their lives in how to kill people and I think if you see the military system as at best a necessary evil. We have to keep what we need but only what we need to defend ourselves and preserve the peace and you sort of go at it with that attitude. I think for a transitional period its acceptable to have this kind of military system, this permanent mobilization of military force in peacetime. We can look at it as a necessary evil that smart people should develop weapons and learn how to use them. What really upsets me very deeply is when this is treated as a permanent feature of life. We will always do this. The international system will always be this way. A particularly outrageous example that's going on right now is the Soviet Union has offered to cut their advantage in tanks in Europe if the West will cut its big advantage in aircraft and the leaders of the NATO countries and particularly the conservative governments of Reagan and Thatcher and Kohl have said, "No thanks. Thanks, but no thanks. You can cut your tanks that will be fine but our aircraft are not up for negotiation because we don't want to move toward disarmament in Europe. We want to rely on the permanent mobilization of armed force to keep the peace. We will not negotiate the areas in which we are ahead." And, of course, this is misrepresented to the public with euphemisms, it's well we have to do this because we can't trust the Soviets. They don't come out and say, we do not want disarmament, we want to maintain large standing nuclear and conventional forces indefinitely and we are going to keep modernizing them indefinitely and we will not accept initiatives and openings offered by the Soviets. We won't take them up and challenge them and see how far they'll go in real verifiable ways.

A LOT OF SCIENTISTS AND ENGINEERS AND MILITARY PEOPLE THAT I HAVE SPOKEN TO FEEL THAT THEIR WORK IS WORKING FOR PEACE BECAUSE THEY'RE WORKING TO ENHANCE DETERRENCE.

Hm - Mm -

DO YOU THINK THE WORD DETERRENCE IS A WORD THAT IS USED FOR TOO MANY DIFFERENT...?

The Catholic Bishops pastoral letter on nuclear deterrence made, what I thought, was a very good point and that is we can accept the idea of holding the world hostage, of having this genocidal policy where we hold people hostage to the threat of a nuclear holocaust if and only if it's for a transitional period. If and only if we define an alternative that we are working toward and we take clear steps in the direction of that alternative. So I think when you know people say who are involved in the military system either as scientists and engineers developing new weapons or as military learning how to operate these weapons, when people say to themselves, "I am part of a moral system because I am preventing war." I would agree to that only to the extent that there is a counterpart on the disarmament side. Yes we have to maintain our forces and we have to keep strong and we have to defend ourselves and we have to preserve the peace. However we cannot lock ourselves into this mechanism for preserving the peace permanently. It has to be part of an evolution toward a truly stable peace which is maintained by non-violent means by our own self interest and not by the threat of genocide.

DO YOU THINK THAT THERE ARE MANY PEOPLE HERE IN WEST, IN THE UNITED STATES WHO REALLY JUST WANT SUPERIORITY, MILITARY SUPERIORITY AS THE ONLY WAY TO PRESERVE SECURITY NECESSARY TO BLOCK --?

I think that the average American would be happy to have parity, equal levels with the Soviet Union. Unfortunately there are small elites, influential elites who think that superiority is preferable, that the way to preserve the peace is for us to be ahead. Of course this is recipe for a permanent arms race because they will, the Soviets will constantly try to offset our superiority.

WHAT ABOUT ARMS CONTROL? LET'S TALK ABOUT THAT FOR A SECOND. HAS ARMS CONTROL WORKED?

There's there's a myth about arms control, that it's intended to lead to disarmament, that if we keep having arms control talks with the Soviet Union eventually we'll get rid of all these things and that is really a very basic misconception about what's going on in arms control talks. The whole concept of arms control is that we should both talk about what we have and we should limit it and in fact kind of describe where we plan to go next with the next round of weaponry, so we should set some limits and sort of like create a container, an arms control agreement is like a container for the arms race. We should set limits around it and describe it and predict what will happen next but we don't end it or reverse it or get rid of it.

SO DO YOU THINK THAT THE ARMS-CONTROL RECORD HAS BEEN PRETTY MUCH A FAILURE?

Up until the INF agreement there were four major arms control agreements. The partial test ban treaty in the early '60s, what did that do? That took nuclear testing of nuclear weapons which had been going on in the atmosphere and drove it underground, so it was good for the environment, it was good for health, it did nothing for stopping the nuclear arms race. There was the non-proliferation treat in which countries that weren't planning to get any nuclear weapons signed up and announced to the world, that they were not going to get any nuclear weapons, that's the non-proliferation treaty, there was the SALT I Treaty which said, we plan to raise our nuclear weapon levels but only to a certain limit, and then there was the SALT II treaty which said, we'll cut that limit down a little bit and we'll keep it fairly large and simply invest all our money in replacing older weapons with newer ones that have better and bigger capabilities. So those four agreements, the Comprehensive Test Bank treaty, the Non-Proliferation treaty, and SALT I and SALT II set some limits around the arms race but they did nothing to stop it or reverse it. The INF agreement is the first small step in a different direction where we actually got rid of one category of nuclear weaponry which was still very current, still very you know usable in the military sense and ended all future innovation by completely abolishing a whole category of weaponry, so it definitely was a step in the right direction but it was a very small step.

The problem with arms control is that it's not aimed at reversing the arms race. It's aimed at keeping the two sides talking while they continue the arms race. People political leaders often say, when they're talking about arms control negotiations, we want to reduce the risk of nuclear war and therefore we have arms control negotiations and the poor average Joe in the public thinks the political leader means we want to reduce the nuclear arsenals, we want to get rid of nuclear weapons and then there will be less of a risk if we get rid of half of them. Actually they don't mean that at all; what they mean is if we and the Soviets are racing to the teeth and arming to the teeth and racing as much as we can but we're talking about it then things won't be all that dangerous and that's all they plan to do with arms control talks. The way they have been in the past, the traditional approach to arms control is we will have a permanent arms race, a technological arms race. We are not going to increase the numbers. We'll keep the numbers constant but every ten years we'll throw out all the weapons that we had before and we will put in new ones that have better capabilities and arms control will allow us to do that because it will set quantitative limits, but its not really going to cut into the heart of the arms race by getting rid of whole categories of weapons. INF is the one exception so the rest of the arms control agreements have either just set quantitative limits but keep enough weapons around. For example in the strategic area each different type of weapon still exists, bombers, ICBMs, land-based missiles, and submarine-based missiles. So even if we have lower numbers of weapons the innovation that we can keep getting new bombers every ten years for the indefinite future, new land-based missiles, new submarine-based missiles. So typically arms control agreements have just put quantitative limits around the permanent technological race or else they, like the ABM Treaty, they banned weapons that didn't work and no one wanted anyway and were really boondoggles.

MAKE THAT A SEPARATE STATEMENT ABOUT THE ABM TREATY.

Many people say that the ABM Treaty is the single most, was before INF, the single most important accomplishment of arms control and its true that this treaty prevented defenses, which if we had gotten them, would have led to a spiral with more offense, more defense, more offense, more defense, it sort of cut into that spiral. They...what isn't true is how important this particular treaty was in cutting into this spiral. My opinion is what cut into the spiral was the defense didn't work. We could have spent billions of dollars deploying a small ABM system in the late '60s or early '70s just like today we are talking about spending billions of dollars deploying an unworkable SDI system for the same purpose and in effect what this treaty did was it prevented us from wasting our money building something that we didn't work, or having a congressional struggle over whether or not to build something that wouldn't work anyway.

SO WHAT I WANT IS ONE CLEAN SENTENCE ON THAT SAME LINE, THE ABM TREATY. YOU ARE BASICALLY SAYING THAT IT WAS EASY FOR PEOPLE TO MAKE SINCE THEY TURNED OUT WEAPONS THAT DIDN'T WORK AND THEY DIDN'T WANT TO BUILD ANYWAY.

The, the ABM treaty banned a system that didn't work. The ABM treaty banned a system that didn't work and people didn't want. They thought it would be waste of a money and this was a convenient way of not spending the money.

I WANT TO KNOW, YOU HAVE BEEN WORKING IN THIS FIELD FOR 20 YEARS PERSONALLY. IS IT FRUSTRATING TO SEE THE SLOW PACE OF ARMS CONTROL AGREEMENTS COMPARED TO THE RAPID PACE OF DEVELOPMENT AND TECHNOLOGY?

The first ten years that I was doing this [work] I spent a lot of time studying and learning about weapons. I would read Aviation Week and Space Technology. I would read Janes' Weapons Systems and other reference books and I would feel heartsick about the fact that every year the United States and the Soviet Union and other big industrialized countries are wasting hundreds of millions, in fact billions of dollars turning out new fighter airplanes, new tanks, new missiles, new submarines, new surface ships, new aircraft carriers, whose only purpose is to kill people ultimately. And that we are putting so much ingenuity and so much money and so much energy into perfecting these means of death and destruction. For the last ten years I've stopped reading these magazines. I could, I can't kind of keep on thinking constantly that deadening, demoralizing, thought that you know we're, there are literally three million people in the United States that spend their lives producing means of death and destruction. And I keep up my energy by concentrating on what are the alternatives, by looking forward, by trying to define positive alternatives that are realistic and educating people about them.

I WANTED TO ASK YOU THAT IN RELATION TO ARMS CONTROL AND MAKE A POINT ABOUT THE RELATIVE PACE OF ARMS CONTROL AND TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT.

I the way I think about this is as follows. If you ask people, if you ask people who are members of the so called arms-control community, what kind of world they see, not in 1990 but in the year 2000 or 2010 or 2020. If they're best hopes are fulfilled. If things go as well as they possibly could go, where would they like to see the world 20 years from now. The answer you will get is not substantially different from where we are today. We will still have a triad of strategic nuclear forces, bombers, land-based missiles and submarines. We will still have shorter-range nuclear weapons deployed in Europe. We will have innovation in nuclear weapons. We will have large standing conventional forces with innovation in their weaponry. We will have huge military budgets that take 5 percent of our gross national product. We will have permanent mobilization of men under arms. We will have the spread of more defense industries to more and more countries and if you then follow this up and say well, what about the waste of money? What about the waste of people's lives? They'll say well that's a small price for preserving the peace. And you say what about the spread of all of this weaponry especially nuclear weaponry but also independent defense industries to Third World countries. They'll say well that's just the way it goes. There's nothing we can do about that. They'll say, well what is arms control designed to do? Well arms control is designed to make the world safe for an arms race. It keeps the two sides talking, keeps us reaffirming the fact that we have a common interest in not having a nuclear war, while we build new types of nuclear weapons that are more threatening to the other side. So arms control if designed over a long time, not two or three years, but I'm talking now 10, 20, 30 years, in the past and in the future, to create a situation in which we are pulled back from the brink of nuclear war not by changing our nuclear forces themselves. Our nuclear forces themselves keep us right up at the brink of nuclear war. What pulls us back from the brink is just the fact that there is a dialogue about our common interest in not having a war and I think that this is a deception in which the public is fooled, because the public thinks that the objective of arms control agreements is to get rid of nuclear weapons. The public thinks that when politicians say we are anxious to reduce the risk of nuclear war and so we are negotiating with the Soviets that means we are going to reduce these weapons, pull them back from the front lines, have smaller numbers, have them in places where they're invulnerable and that there will be an objective decrease in the risk of a nuclear war but actually its just a psychological game that well it's more than a game we want to keep good US-Soviet relations and that's an important factor but that's it, that's the limit of what arms control has been designed to do.

SO DO YOU HAVE A COMMENT ON CONSERVATIVES CALLING ARMS CONTROL A LOLLIPOP FOR THE MASSES?

In...

KEEP IT SHORT.

Yeah, In the early 1980s, when the United States and the Soviet Union started the INF negotiations there were public statements from US and European leaders that we had to have these talks in order to be able to deploy the missiles, that the public in Europe would not accept new missiles except under the guise of having arms control negotiations to get rid of them. Of course one of, one of the wonderful things that happened in that particular case is that because of Gorbachev's initiative, his willingness to accept a 4-to-1 trade-off and because of the big anti-nuclear movements in Europe and the United States that guise of being prepared to get rid of these missiles and negotiate them away as a backdrop to deploying them, it actually became the reality. The reverse happened in this one case.

DO YOU THINK THAT THE CREDIT GOES TO THE PUBLIC MOVEMENTS AGAINST NUCLEAR WEAPONS?

I think that the public movements against nuclear weapons got Reagan back to the bargaining table. Reagan had been acting in the early 1980s like there would be no agreements with the Soviet Union. We couldn't rely on verification processes. We didn't want agreements with the Soviet Union and he changed his tone utterly but I do think that an additional contribution was made by Gorbachev.

WOULD YOU GIVE THE PUBLIC CREDIT FOR THE INF TREATY, THAT PRESSURE?

Frankly I wouldn't. I think that Gorbachev making a 4-to-1 trade-off is, I mean Gorbachev -- Reagan and the West made an offer that they thought the Soviets couldn't accept and the Soviets accepted it.

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT 50 PERCENT CUTS?

There's a misconception about 50 percent cuts in nuclear weapons, that is we are talking about all nuclear weapons. Actually we're not. Strategic weapons are only part of the weapons on the two sides. They're the intercontinental part, the part that can go from one continent, from one side of the world to the other side of the world. So first of all, its important for people to understand that we are only talking about cutting half of half. The other half of the nuclear arsenals on the two sides are the shorter-range nuclear weapons that in some ways are more dangerous. They're dispersed out among the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force in Europe, in the Mediterranean, in Korea, in the Pacific, in the Persian Gulf. All over the world where the United States and the Soviet Union have conventional military forces, they have nuclear weapons mixed among them that are called tactical or theatre nuclear weapons which means they're short-ranged nuclear weapons right up at the front lines and these weapons are not touched in the 50 percent strategic cuts.

AND WHAT DOES THAT SAY TO YOU?

Um.

ABOUT THE 50 PERCENT CUTS?

The, yeah. I recently heard a shocking statement by someone who worked at one of the nuclear weapon labs who has for many years made nuclear warheads and that was that the 50 percent cuts are designed to quiet public opposition to the nuclear arms race. Its cutting just enough, its big enough, its a big enough cut so that people will be placated and will stop opposing the continued nuclear arms race but the critical feature from the other side is it's small enough to allow the triad of strategic forces, the bomber, land-based missiles, submarine-based missiles to exist and therefore all the innovation in new bomber technology and new ICBM technology and new submarine technology can keep going forward within the 50 percent that remains. So really this is the ultimate sop to the public. Get off of our backs. Stop bothering us. We have now done a really big deal and you don't need to worry about the arms race anymore and so the arms race can continue without the degree of public opposition there has been.

DO YOU THINK THAT IT IS THAT THEY WANT THE ARMS RACE TO CONTINUE TO NEW KINDS OF WEAPONS, NEW TECHNOLOGIES AND WE'LL, OKAY WE'LL CUT 50 PERCENT OF THE BIG ONES AND THEN WE WILL BE ABLE TO CONTINUE ON, THE PUBLIC WILL BE COMFORTABLE. WE'LL CONTINUE ON WITH THESE NEW TECHNOLOGIES.

It's a combination. With 50 percent cuts we can have an arms race in, with 50 percent cuts we can still have an arms race in the intercontinental strategic weapons because there were so many weapons on the two sides, before the 50 percent cuts 10,000-12,000, after the 50 percent cuts there is still 5,000-6,000 nuclear weapons at intercontinental range so there is plenty of room for an arms race, a race in technology within those intercontinental strategic weapons but outside of them if we look at new technology such as cruise missiles, these are just beginning to come into the arsenals on the two sides along, in large numbers and shorter-range nuclear weapons -- there is innovation and new technology. So its really just a way of leading people to believe that we've taken a major step down the road toward disarmament when in fact its a kind of cul de sac, it's a, it's a dead end, it's 50 percent and then that's it. We are not going any further with the short-range weapons, we are not going any further in blocking off new technologies, especially cruise missiles and in fact we're not going any further with the strategic weapons themselves.

IN FACT WHEN YOU LOOK BACK AT ARMS CONTROL AGREEMENTS THEY'VE LIMITED NUMBERS BUT THEY'VE NEVER LIMITED THE NEW TECHNOLOGY THAT'S EMERGING.

That's correct. The terribly dangerous thing about the nuclear arms race, as an arms race, is that each generation of weapons that replaces an older one, incorporates new features that make them better for trying to fight and win a war. They are not better for deterrence. The direction of technology has never been to make the weapons more invulnerable and less likely to be used. On the contrary, because military officers set the goals for the new technology, of course their goals are to fight and win and what that means is that they get weapons which are more accurate, and have a better chance of destroying the weapons on the other side in a first strike. They go faster. They come from more different environments. They can hit more different targets on the other side. They're dispersed throughout the world better and they can penetrate the defenses on the other side so they have lots and lots of new features that make them better able to threaten to fight and win a nuclear war and especially to go first.

DO YOU PREDICT THAT IF WE HAD 50 PERCENT CUTS THAT THERE WILL BE NEW RENEWED CALLS FOR MODERNIZATION OF OUR EXISTING FORCES? IS THAT THE TREND?

When there, when there was a ban on nuclear tests in the atmosphere in the early 1960s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff testified before the Senate that if they were going to stop testing in the atmosphere, the price for them to support this treaty would be increased testing underground. I think the same thing will happen with the START agreement. That the price for 50 percent cuts in numbers will be increased investment in innovation and technology, and new technology.

THE OTHER QUESTION IS, AND I REALLY WANT TO TRY TO GET A VERY SHORT ANSWER FOR THIS, IS WHAT IS THE CONFLICT BETWEEN THE SOVIET UNION AND THE UNITED STATES ABOUT?

There is no conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. That's a short answer.

WHY NOT?

Traditionally when countries have been enemies, they've been on each other's border, and there have been conflicts over land, territory, political control, economic wealth. I think what's going on between the United States and the Soviet Union is a remnant, it's a vestige of an old great power system, in which countries competed militarily for power and influence in the world, and we not longer compete militarily directly in the sense of going to war. So we've kept the trappings of war, even though the actual competition has moved over to a totally different area, which is economic competition for hearts and minds, ideological competition. It's not a military competition. We do not have a military conflict with the Soviet Union.

BUT IS AN IDEOLOGICAL CONFLICT. YOU HEAR PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT, WE CAN'T HAVE PEACE IN THE SOVIET UNION UNTIL THEY IMPROVE THEIR HUMAN RIGHTS AND STOP EXPANDING INTO OTHER AREAS.

Mm-hmm. I think that there is a lot of, there's a great deal of mistrust between the United States and the Soviet Union. And I think each side does something to feed, each side does certain things that feed the mistrust on the other side. Soviet repression of human rights and civil liberties, both within the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe are the single most profound source of mistrust in the West. If you, if you turn it the other way around, you try to look at the world through their eyes what they see is a policy of containment in which the United States has deployed conventional forces all around the perimeter of the Soviet Union throughout the whole, we've really occupied the whole world outside of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and pose a threat that if there is civil unrest, we will send in our troops and support an uprising and try to overthrow the government of the Soviet Union, and that's their fear. And when they see the United States intervening in civil wars in third world countries, to try to make sure the non-communist side wins, in other words, to use our military force to advance the form of government that we prefer, they experience that as a threat. So I think that the Soviet repression is what we experience as the threat, and the US militarization of foreign policy is what they experience as the threat.

IS THIS ALL A MIS-PERCEPTION?

No, those are very real problems. The US does have a militarized foreign policy. And there have been, not all, but some US leaders have posed more or less explicit threats. That if there were an uprising in Eastern Europe, they would send in troops to support it, and they would indeed like to use force to overthrow the governments of those countries. And certainly, I think, Soviet repression in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union itself is an extremely important problem. And is a good reason not to trust their leaders. I think you, we need to see liberalization, we need to see legitimacy, we need to see participation, if we want to feel confident that the Soviet government can deal in a mature and non-violent way with the rest of the world.

WHEN JEANE KIRKPATRICK WAS WRITING ABOUT HOW THE SOVIET UNION HAS IN THE PAST DECADE MOVED INTO AND DONE DESTABILIZATION AND TAKEOVERS OF ALL THE CONTINENTS OF THE WORLD. THEY'VE BEEN EXPANDING INTO SEA LANES, STRATEGIC MINERAL SPACE, CULTURE -- THEIR AMBITION IS TO EXPAND. DO YOU SEE THE SOVIET UNION AS AN EMPIRE BENT ON GLOBAL DOMINATION?

The great myth about the Soviet Union is the idea that they're going to take their army and march around the world. Go into countries, fight, win, take over, install a government. And in effect create an empire by the means of using their own military force, by main military force, their ground troops, their huge army. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Soviet Union had a big occupationary force in Eastern Europe at the end of World War II. It left it there. It repatriated a lot of goods from Eastern Europe. It tried to compensate itself for the ravages of World War II. But it didn't actually go in and fight a war in order to take over. The only country, the only place in the world where the Soviet Union has used its army in order to try to get a communist government installed is in Afghanistan. And in Afghanistan they've gotten burned. I think that was a bad step in the wrong direction, but they're now in the process of pulling out of Afghanistan. If you take other examples, in Korea, in Vietnam, in Cuba, in Africa there are communist governments or communist parties which have come into power. But they were not installed, in fact, in China, itself, they were not installed by the Soviet army. They were installed as a result of civil wars between non-communist and communist factions, in which the communist side won. So it's really important to distinguish between direct... Oh my god. It's really important to distinguish between direct military intervention, with their own troops, their navy, their air force, on the one hand, where they're using their military forces in order to change the course of international events. And on the other hand, much more subtle and indirect forms of involvements -- military aid, supplying weapons, money, training, recognition, economic aid many countries in the world, are involved in international affairs in these lesser forms. Not just the Soviet Union, not just the United States, but the European countries, China, Japan, smaller neutral countries even Third World countries, engage in the process of supplying arms, training troops, giving economic aid, giving military aid, so there is nothing particularly distinctive about the Soviet Union running around the world giving military aid. I'm not saying that I support this on the part of the Soviet Union, I don't support it on the part of any countries. I don't think there should be an international arms trade. I think that it does subvert the independence of Third World countries, and their natural process of moving toward self-determination. But it's certainly not a unique quality of Soviet foreign policy.

THE SOVIET UNION IS AIDING AND ABETTING VARIOUS MOVEMENTS AROUND THE WORLD. AND THEY'RE INVOLVED IN DESTABILIZING COUNTRIES AROUND THE WORLD. AND THEY MARCHED INTO AFGHANISTAN, AND THEY CONTINUE TO HAVE A STRANGLEHOLD ON THE COUNTRIES OF EASTERN EUROPE, THEY FUND PROXY CUBAN TROOPS IN AFRICA, AND SO FORTH. HOW CAN WE NOT SEE THEM AS A THREATENING, EXPANSIONIST EMPIRE?

Lots of countries want to win friends and influence people in the Third World. Want to be powerful and influential. Want to have a say in their, in the Third World governments, and their economic policies, what economic system they choose, what political system they choose. The Soviet Union is one of those countries. It's not the only one. It's, it's not an accurate use of the word expansionist to say that because the Soviet Union tries to influence the economic and political systems of Third World countries, in the way that other big powers do, therefore the Soviet Union is an expansionistic country. The United States has had military bases and military training programs in over a hundred third world countries for thirty years. The United States has made a strong effort to influence which economic system and which political system those countries chose. But we don't therefore infer the United States is an expansionistic country, simply because we have military aid programs. And it's, we have to adopt the same standard when we look at Soviet behavior in the Third World, that, as when we look at US behavior in the Third World, or the behavior of other countries like Britain and Germany, Japan and so on, all of these countries have aid programs, they have delegations, they have representations, they invite people back to their country to have university training they're interested in being influential and in being recognized as a great power. That doesn't mean that they are marching out and creating an empire in the 19th Century sense. I think that is really a discredited image of the 1950s, ever since the collapse of Soviet-Chinese relations in the early 1960s, we've seen that the communist parts of the world are fragmented, they have different values, they have different kinds of nationalism, they have different views of the future, they have different foreign policies, there is not an empire in any sense.

MAYBE YOU COULD DO THAT, YOU KNOW, IN THE '50S IT WAS THOUGHT THAT, WORLD COMMUNISM WAS A MONOLITH.

Yeah, right.

BUT DO IT, JUST THE BARE BONES OF IT. DON'T GET INTO DETAIL.

Okay. I think in the late 1940s and the 1950s, there was an image of a communist monolith that was led by the Soviet Union, which included Eastern Europe, China, Korea, Vietnam, and so on and so forth. In the 1950s there was an image of a commu...In the 1950s there was an image of a communist monolith led by the Soviet Union, which included Eastern Europe, and China. But after the rupture of Sinese-Choviet...Oh, shit.

CAN YOU THROW IN THE WORDS "COMMUNIST MENACE" ALONG WITH THE...

Let's see. In, in the late 1940s, there was an image of a communist menace spreading around the world, this kind of red ink that was going over more and more areas. First, from the Soviet Union into Eastern Europe, then into China, then North Korea, then North Vietnam, and I think people had the feeling that there was a monolithic entity that was led and controlled totally by the Soviet Union, and was spreading steadily throughout the globe, it could be demonstrated on any map. But that image really collapsed with the collapse of Sino-Soviet relations in the early 1960s. When a really amazing thing happened. The Chinese said, You're troubling us. You're being annoying, you're being paternalistic and patronizing, and we don't like it, and we'd like you to leave, thank you. And you can take all your industry and all you technology, and we'll just manage by ourselves. And within a year, the Soviets were all gone. This is not the image of an empire that's strongly controlled from the center. It's the empire of ordinary behavior, a similar, although on a lesser scale, a similar thing happened when the Soviet Union for a while had 20,000 troops, military advisers in Egypt, and the Egyptians got tired of having them there, running their show, and they said, We'd like you to leave. And they just got up and left. So this is why it's very important to distinguish between ordinary involvement in international relations, including economic aid and military aid, on the one hand, and direct overwhelming military presence and control, sort of monolithic control sort of grasp which will never let go and is maintained by military means, which is not the behavior exhibited by the Soviet Union.

WHY DO YOU THINK PEOPLE IN HIGH POSITIONS OF POWER CONTINUE TO PERPETUATE THAT MYTH?

I don't know. Maybe they're not very smart. Maybe they haven't noticed that the Soviet empire fell apart. Maybe they need a threat in order to justify an arms race in which they have positions of power and influence, a say on the next generation of weapons, a say in the next treaty, in the next negotiations. I think it's very hard to understand why there are so many people in positions of influence in the United States and Western Europe, who seem to be hanging on to a Cold War image of the world, that's now thirty years out of date.

IS IT THIRTY YEARS OUT OF DATE?

Oh yeah, I think that since the late 1950s, that's thirty years, we have not seen a communist monolith. In fact, since the death of Stalin, we have seen a slow but steady evolution of Soviet military and foreign policy in a direction which is less controlling, and less paranoid, and less dead-set on an ideological confrontation, and a permanent arms race. And instead, more open more reasonable in international terms, more willing to make concessions, less reliant on military forces and means of implementing foreign policy.

PEOPLE INSIST, HOWEVER, THAT THERE'S A SORT OF MORAL RELATIVISM TO LOOKING AT THE UNITED STATES AND SOVIET UNION AS TWEEDLEDEE AND TWEEDLEDUM, THE SAME PROBLEM AND STUFF, THAT THERE'S A MORAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THESE TWO SOCIETIES AND GOVERNMENTS. DO YOU THINK THERE IS A MORAL DIFFERENCE?

I think that there are very important qualities in the West, of civil liberties and human rights, that are part of our political system that are not strong. They are legally represented but they're not really implemented in the Soviet system. And I think that's a -- I want to do that over again. I think the degree of repression in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union is a great tragedy. That there are several hundred million people who are living out their lives without being able to express themselves in writing, in art, in travel, in their job choice, in the way that they should be able to do. In that sense, I think there is a deep division between the West and the Soviet system. I think that we have kinds of opportunities and kinds of freedoms that all human beings have a right to. And all human beings deserve. What concerns me is when right-wing critics of the Soviet Union want to wall in those people in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and abandon them and leave them there forever, by having a permanent arms race, and a permanent confrontation with the Soviet Union. I think what we need to be doing is breaking down that wall between East and West, making a permeable, reducing the confrontation of the arms race, and instead creating a situation in which we can have trade, technology exchange, visits, travel, more emigration support glasnost more freedom of ideas, you know, constantly pushing for freedom of ideas, on freedom of expression on their side. So, instead of just writing off Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and saying, too bad, these people are repressed, that's the way it's going to stay and we're going to wall them in behind the wall of the arms race. We need to break down the wall of the arms race, and help to liberate those people.

HENRY KISSINGER PROMULGATED A THEORY OF DÉTENTE IN THE '70S IN WHICH IF WE BROKE DOWN THOSE WALLS AND INCREASED TRADE, IT WOULD GIVE THE SOVIET UNION MORE OF A STAKE IN THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM AND THEY WOULD MODERATE THEIR BEHAVIOR. BUT IN FACT IN THE '70S THEY HAD A BIG ARMS BUILDUP, AND THEY MOVED INTO AFRICA AND AFGHANISTAN.

That isn't true. The answer to this is that it just isn't true. The Soviet Union in the 1970s did what all industrialized countries have been doing for 40 years. It had a large standing army, nuclear and conventional, and it introduced new types of weapons, it had innovation. It took out the old weapons, and put in new ones. Every industrialized country does this. There was no quantitative buildup of weapons in the 19th Cen...There was no quantitative buildup in Soviet weaponry in the 1970s. They...

HOW CAN YOU SAY THAT? THEY WENT, THEY BUILT UP TO 2,000 MISSILES, THOSE HEAVY MISSILES --

They didn't. They built up their ICBM force in the 1960s. They started in 1965, and they finished in 1961, building up a huge force of ICBMs. What they did in the 1970s, starting in 1977, they did something that we had done on our side, starting in 1970, that is take out all the old missiles and put in new ones with multiple warheads. This is, in the West, this isn't called build up, it's called modernization. And we do it all the time. And what the Soviet Union did in the 1970s was the same kind of modernization, both nuclear and conventional that we had undertaken five, ten or even 15 years before they did. In fact, in the navy, the size of the Soviet navy decreased in the 1970s. And the reason for that is that in the '50s, they had built a very large number of relatively small ships, coastal patrol boats, frigates. And in the 1970s, they built a smaller number of somewhat larger ships, which could go a little bit further out to sea and stay out at sea longer. So the actual number of ships in the Soviet navy declined in the 1970s.

BUT THEY DID INCREASE SO THAT THEIR LAND-BASED MISSILE FORCE, WHICH IS THE FORCE THAT'S MOST THREATENING TO US BECAUSE IT'S ACCURATE AND DEADLY AND EASILY CONTROLLED, AND THAT GREATLY OUTNUMBERED OUR LAND-BASED MISSILE FORCE, AND MADE US FEEL THREATENED BY A FIRST STRIKE. AND ALSO MOVED INTO --

This isn't true.

It's simply not true that the Soviet Union had a big military buildup in the 1970s. It's not true in the way that most people think -- sorry, I'll have to do that over. It's simply not true... It's simply not true that the Soviet Union had a big military buildup in the 1970s, at least not in the sense that most people interpret the phrase, a big military buildup. They did introduce a lot of new weapons, a lot of powerful new weapons in the 1970s. However, the way that they introduced them was exactly the same way that the United States and other countries have been introducing new weapons. It was modernization. The Soviet Union actually built its original force of land-based missiles, for example, between 1965 and '71, during the period when we were having the SALT I negotiations. In 1970, during those negotiations, the United States started taking out our old land-based missiles, and putting in new ones with multiple warheads, so called MIRVs. The Soviet Union finally caught up with us in '76 or '77. So at that period, in the late '70s, they took out their half, a little over half of their original ICBMs, which had only been deployed for the first time ten years earlier, because they were so far behind, and they replaced them with new missiles with multiple warheads. Now when the United States took out one-warhead missiles and put in multiple-warhead missiles, we called it modernization. When the Soviet Union took out one-warhead missiles and put in multiple-warhead missiles, then we called that buildup.

HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN THE GENERAL PERCEPTION THAT AT THE END OF THE '70S, THAT IN FACT THE SOVIET UNION HAD TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF DÉTENTE AND OF CARTER'S WANTING TO NOT BE MILITARILY PROVOCATIVE? SO WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE PERCEPTION THAT WE WERE SNOOKERED BY THE SOVIETS?

It's right... It's really just right-wing propaganda. People in the extreme right of the political spectrum in the United States, created an image that something special happened with the Soviet Union in the late 1970s. And this image had two parts. One part was a military buildup. But they didn't have a military buildup. What they did was modernize by replacing some of their older weapons with new ones, exactly as we had done seven or eight years earlier. So the buildup part is just a, an exaggerated label for something that's labeled differently when we do it and when they do it. The other part of the image was that the Soviet Union was giving military aid to revolutionary movements in Africa and elsewhere. And that's true. They were giving military aid to these movements. But on the other hand, the United States was giving military aid to the opposite side in those conflicts. Both sides have been doing this for decades. And it was, again, a misconception that this was a particularly pernicious or surprising or unexpected act on the part of the Soviet Union. There had been some effort in the early 1970s to say, let us pursue détente in the sense of not threatening each other with our military forces. And then, I think people on the right in the United States misrepresented what the Soviet Union did. They took their military aid and reacted to it as though it were a direct military intervention. As though, you know, the Soviet Union giving rifles to revolutionary troops in Africa were the same thing as the Soviet Union taking its army down into Africa and having 500,000 men there fighting a war, and they said, "Oh, how terrible, the Soviet Union has let us down. They are not ceasing their militaristic ways." But in fact, the Soviet Union had never undertaken not to give military aid, nor had the United States. This was part of a long term process on the two sides of trying to win friends and influence people in the Third World. So, the one area in which I see a truly pernicious development in the Soviet Union in the late 1970s, happened in the very last days of the decade, when they sent troops into Afghanistan. This did represent a complete departure from previous Soviet practice. It was unnecessary. There was no threat to the Soviet Union, it cannot be excused or rationalized. It was just a gratuitous expression of power. They had a communist government which was going to such extremes that it was about to be overthrown, and the Soviet Union didn't want to have an ally replaced with an enemy on its southern flank. But I don't think that excuses going to the extremes that they did. I think it was a step in the wrong direction, following the pattern set earlier by the United States of intervening first in Korea, and then in Vietnam. They had their own little interventionary episode. But that episode, it should be stressed, came after the SALT II treaty had been withdrawn from consideration by the Senate, by Carter, after Senator Church had made a lot of noise about Soviet troops in Cuba, which had actually been there for 20 years. Church did that in August of '79. After Brzezinski had been to the Middle East and seen gone to a variety of countries around the Persian Gulf and said, can we set up military bases here, right on the southern flank of the Soviet Union, the Soviet intervention or invasion in Afghanistan didn't precede all of those aspects of the breakdown in the US-Soviet relationship. It followed.

DO YOU EVER GET SORT OF INDIGNANT WHEN PEOPLE TALK ABOUT SOVIET MILITARY INFLUENCE AROUND THE WORLD, AND WANT TO CITE THAT, LIST OFF THAT, HOW THE UNITED STATES HAS INTERVENED? AND WHAT WE DO DID DESTABILIZE AND SO FORTH?

I'm not, I don't want to do that. I think that we need to be concerned about the fact that the Soviet Union has a big army. I don't think they're planning to march all over the world. They neither have plans nor have they capabilities to send troops in large numbers outside of their own perimeter, to, let's say, Africa, or the Persian Gulf, or this hemisphere. There's no way the Soviet Union can bring their army over here. So there are important limits on what the Soviet Union can do with its big army, because they don't have aircraft carriers with modern supersonic airplanes. They don't have huge amphibious assault ships of the kind that we have. They don't have protected seaways. They don't have air transport that they can fly around the world troops and intervene in the way that the United States does. There are important limits. Still, they do have the biggest, most well equipped army in the world. They do face the United States' most important ally in the traditional historical, cultural and political sense, as well as in the sense of economic importance in Western Europe. And I don't, I don't think that if the United States were to unilaterally disarm, or NATO were to be disbanded, without any change in the Soviet army, we could feel confident that just because that army hasn't been expansionistic in the past, it wouldn't be expansionistic in the future. So I think that we need to be cautious, but not exaggerate the capabilities of the Soviet army.

WE'RE GOING TO CONDENSE THIS OKAY? I KNOW IT'S HARD. WE OFTEN HEAR IN CONTRAST TO OUR OWN STRATEGIC PLANNERS THAT THE SOVIET UNION, SOVIET MILITARY BELIEVES THAT IT CAN FIGHT AND WIN A NUCLEAR WAR.

Oh. The idea that it's part of Soviet strategy to fight and win a nuclear war is so absurd, it's really the opposite of the reality that happened in history in the 1950s and 1960s. In, let's take, just to take one point in time. In 1960, when the Soviet Union produced a document, a military strategy document that said any war will go nuclear. At that time, the United States had 2,000 intercontinental bombers, 600 B-52s in this country, and 1,400 B-47s in Europe. So we had 2,000 strategic bombers. They had 150. We had 10,000 tactical nuclear weapons in and around Europe. They had none. We had a first-use policy. They had a no first-use policy. Which side had nuclear deployments and nuclear operations which suggested that any war would go nuclear? Not the Soviet Union, they didn't have the nuclear arsenal to go nuclear. What their strategy was saying was, we have to be prepared for the policy of the West that if there is another big war, another war like World War II, it will inevitably go nuclear. They've got, they, the West, have nuclear shells for Howitzers with a range of 15 miles deployed on the front lines in West Germany. They have a first-use policy. We've got to face the fact that if there is another war, it will go nuclear. What can we do? How can we survive? Will our civil defense system work? Will they preemptively destroy all of our strategic forces? And part of what their document was doing was saying to their troops, fight on. Don't be intimidated by the fact that you've got 20,000 nuclear weapons facing you in the West, while we've got a few hundred on our side. You've got to keep fighting anyway, even if it goes nuclear.

IF THE SOVIET UNION IS... LET ME ASK YOU, DID YOU WANT TO DO THE LESSONS OF HISTORY ONE?

Mmm.

DID YOU HAVE SOMETHING SPECIFIC YOU WANTED TO SAY?

Yes. I think so.

OR ONE EVENT THAT YOU WANTED --

I'll try. Right. Well, there are actually two. When I was first working in this field, in 1970 the first US-Soviet strategic arms negotiations were going on, the SALT I talks. And by 1970, they'd gotten up to the point of saying, there were going to be limits on the missiles on the two side. And there would also probably be a treaty banning anti-missile defenses. So even though the treaty wasn't finished, they were talking about this. In June of 1970, in spite of the fact that these negotiations were going on, and there was going to be a ban on defenses, the United States went ahead with new deployments, which had been planned for about seven years, replacing the single-warhead missiles we had on land and on submarines with multiple-warhead missiles. And I remember that day, in June of 1970, thinking to myself, if we're going to have a treaty that bans defenses on the two sides, so we know that our offensive missiles will be getting through in huge numbers, why are we going ahead with replacing our existing missiles, which already face the Soviet Union with 2,000 warheads, with new multiple-warhead missiles, that will mean 5,000 warheads. After all, there are only ten big cities in the Soviet Union, there are only a few hundred cities if you go to smaller ones, why are we moving ahead, when there are no defenses, which is why we were supposed to be getting the multiple warheads, we were supposed to be getting them to penetrate defenses being built out in the Soviet Union. And I felt, on that day, that it was clear that what's driving the nuclear arms race is not deterrence in the simple sense, that people understand it. It's not, we have to have nuclear weapons to make sure they don't threaten our cities or commit nuclear blackmail, by being able to retaliate on their cities, and threaten them in return. If that's what the nuclear arms race was all about, and given that we had a treaty in the works banning defenses, there was no need to move ahead with these multiple warhead deployments. So what I concluded from that was the military or in the United States, and to a less extent this is also true in the Soviet Union, the military are targeting military targets on the other side. They're not targeting cities. They're targeting the missiles and the submarine ports and the army bases and the airfields. And they want to be able to pre-emptively strike and destroy. They want to be able to fight, to pose a threat, they don't want to fight the war, but they want to --

IT'S OKAY RIGHT? YOU CAN CONTINUE.

What stands out in my mind looking back over the arms race, is this lesson that we still haven't learned. It's not about basic deterrence. It's not about parity. It's about trying to get superiority and the ability to threaten, not commit the act, but threaten to fight and win a nuclear war. There is a technological imperative that's constantly driving the nuclear forces towards improvements, particularly in those aspects which threaten the other side's survivability. For example, in 1970, in the middle of the first strategic arms negotiations, when I had just been working in this field a couple of years, and was sort of learning it all for the first time, watching it all for the first time, I saw a contradiction happen. On the one hand, the US and Soviet negotiators were talking about banning defenses. On the other hand, in June of 1970, I really thought we should have a big funeral, I felt like the whole office should go out and have a funeral march, because there was a day in June that was unmarked, an unnoticed day passed, when the United States began to proceed with deploying Minuteman IIIs and Poseidons. These are the multiple-warhead missiles, the new generation of multiple-warhead missiles that replaced the original ICBMs, such as, and submarine-launched missiles that just had one warhead. And I thought if we, if there are no defenses, if you don't have to worry about this problem of what the military called penetration that is, having our missiles get through their defenses, if there are not going to be any defenses, we don't need multiple-warhead missiles, according to the general deterrence theory, we should be able to stop where we are. But we didn't stop where we are. And why is that? Because the arms race isn't about deterrence in the simple sense. It's about posing a high risk, of threatening to attack military targets. And if you want to do that, you want to have lots of nuclear, there, you can never have too many nuclear warheads, because there are always more different types of military targets.

LET'S TALK FOR SECOND ABOUT THE PURPOSE OF THESE WEAPONS. YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT ATOMIC, WHAT'S KNOWN AS NUCLEAR DIPLOMACY OR BRINKMANSHIP.

Yeah. From the beginning, the United States, it's not just new in recent years, but from the beginning, the United States has had nuclear weapons targeted not mainly on cities, but mainly on military targets. That's why there are so many nuclear weapons. There are only a few cities on the two sides. And if what we were doing was holding each other hostage, to make sure that the other side didn't commit nuclear genocide by threatening to do the same ourselves, we could stop with 200 or 300 or 400 nuclear weapons. But what's going on is that the military on both sides have the other side's forces targeted. They start, of course, with their nuclear forces, especially the intercontinental nuclear forces. Then there are the medium-range nuclear forces that have our allies targeted in Europe. Then there are the non-nuclear conventional forces. If you, if you keep adding -- I once heard that, in the theoretical target list of the single integrated operational plan, the SIOP, we have as many as 100,000 potential military targets in the Soviet Union, that this goes down to things like railroads, bridges electricity grids, communication networks, bases for satellites and so on and so forth. So the whole war-making capacity of the society. And the theory of the nuc...behind the nuclear arms race, is that we should be able to pose a plausible threat of preemptively attacking this whole military target set and destroying as much as possible of their ability to retaliate. And maybe even if they had something left, we would still have more, so we could play kind of nuclear one-upmanship game like, you know, where you can destroy our 200 largest cities, but we can destroy your 2,000 cities and villages, and there will be nothing but nothing left of your society, so this is a kind of one-upmanship game, and therefore we can get you to back down by intimidation, by nuclear intimidation. And behind all of that, is the threat of escalating in a crisis or a conventional war. So if you say, where does this come from? Why make those threats. It really goes back to the non-nuclear area. It doesn't really have to do with deterring a nuclear war. In fact, it means making a nuclear war more likely, not less likely, by relying on nuclear weapons as a tool in international relations. And particularly a tool in relation to the threat of conventional warfare.

AND TO ON FROM THERE.

In effect nuclear weapons drive up the price tag of a direct confrontation between East and West. If the Soviet Union goes into Afghanistan, or the United States goes into the Persian Gulf or Central America or Vietnam, that's one thing. One of the two superpowers intervening unilaterally in a smaller, weaker country that doesn't have any nuclear weapons. What this nuclear panoply does, and the fact that there are so many nuclear weapons, they're forward, they're at the front lines of East-West confrontation, they're strewn throughout the navy in the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, the effect of that is to send a signal to the political and military leaders on the two sides, that whatever they may do in smaller countries, under no circumstances can they let one of those lesser conflicts escalate into a general war, or a direct engagement between East and West. And this ends up being a self-perpetuating phenomenon. Because at the same time that we rely on nuclear weapons to make sure we'll never have another conventional war, no matter what the stakes are, it won't break out, we also don't want to rely totally on nuclear weapons. Because some people say, if we re...if we rely totally on nuclear weapons, that won't be very plausible, and it won't be very smart. Suppose we do get into some kind of a crisis, we better have some other alternative. Therefore, we also maintain huge standing armies on the two sides, and navies and air forces. So that we have something other than nuclear weapons to resort to. However, if we've got huge standing armies, that means the capability to go to war is right there at the ready. That at, any crisis could turn into a war like World War II at the drop of a hat. We don't have to mobilize for six months. We have mobilized, we are permanently mobilized in peace time. So that means that we have to rely on nuclear weapons to make sure that we don't go to war. So we have nuclear weapons to make sure we don't use these big conventional forces. And we have big conventional forces to make sure that if there's a really bad crisis, we don't have to use nuclear weapons. And each of them justifies the other in a permanent cycle that we can never break out of.

WAS THERE ANY TIME THAT YOU FELT THAT THERE WAS A REAL RISK OF NUCLEAR WAR, THAT YOU WERE REALLY SCARED?

I've been afraid in, during some of the Arab-Israeli wars when the nuclear forces on our side were put on alert. I was afraid when the Soviet Union sent troops into Afghanistan, because the United States had forces in the Persian Gulf, and also because again, our forces were put on alert. I was concerned during the crisis in Poland. I think what's missing from the rhetoric of arms control and the rhetoric of nuclear strategy is a realistic feeling of just how close to the brink of an all-out nuclear war we stand. By having this policy where we've got nuclear weapons dispersed all over the world, by having thousands of fingers on the trigger, by having each one of our ocean-going warships equipped with nuclear weapons. Right there in that shooting situation in the Persian Gulf, for example. We have created a nuclear tinderbox, where any severe international crisis, like, let's say, a civil war in Poland, or the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan spilling over into a civil war in Iran. Or a shooting war in the Persian Gulf. Any such crisis could go nuclear very easily. And the, there has been a kind of calming effect of the fact that nuclear weapons have been around for a long time and have not been used. That they haven't been used since 1945. So people have developed an illusion that even though there are lots of nuclear weapons, they'll probably never be used, and they don't really pose a very great danger. And that simply isn't true. The reality is that if any international crisis does ever get out of hand, just one, we will be thrown into a situation we will be thrown into a use 'em or lose 'em situation. Where nuclear weapons will be either fired on and destroyed by conventional weapons, or overrun by the other side or used. And that poses such an extremely high risk of nuclear war, that I'm nervous whenever we get into a really bad period in East-West relations, even though it doesn't look, let's say like the situation in Poland, doesn't look like it would, it would turn into an East-West war. And yet the fact that it could be the last step before an East-West war, is enough to make me very nervous.

IF THE SOVIET UNION IS SUCCESSFUL, IF GORBACHEV IS SUCCESSFUL IN THE REFORMS THAT HE'S PURSUING, IS THAT GOOD FOR THE UNITED STATES? OR WILL IT MAKE THEM A MORE DANGEROUS ADVERSARY, A STRONGER ADVERSARY?

I think that the reforms that Gorbachev is pursuing are extremely important and extremely valuable. It seems to me that he's working across the waterfront of problems in Soviet society. He's trying to deal with the lack of openness and participation. He's trying to deal with the, sort of economic selfishness which has grown out of centralized planning. He's trying to deal with the lack of innovation, the lack of creativity, he's trying to deal with consumer goods, he's trying to deal with conventional forces in Europe, where he's made some extraordinary statements about cutting back on their tanks in the area where, areas where there had, and he's trying to deal with the nuclear arms race. So I don't think he's actually even chosen one of these areas, at the expense of another and said I'm going to make progress in these areas, and I'm not going worry about all the rest of them. He's really trying to bring the whole society forward in many different ways.

DO YOU THINK THAT HE'S SINCERE ABOUT ACTUALLY WANTING TO DISARM AND GET RID OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS TOTALLY? IT SEEMS LIKE THE SOVIET UNION IS VERY CONCERNED ABOUT ITS SECURITY, AND IT WOULD NEVER TRUST CHINA, AND ALL THE OTHER NATIONS WHO HAVE WEAPONS.

Ready? Gorbachev.

GORBACHEV. YOU KNOW, DO YOU THINK HE'S REALLY SINCERE IN WANTING TO GET RID OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS? CAN YOU BE?

Right. Are you ready? At one point, early on in his career, Gorbachev proposed completely abolishing nuclear weapons in fifteen years. People in the West ridiculed this. And in fact, people in the Soviet Union got to him and said, look, this is not realistic, the time scale is too short. We're not going to get rid of nuclear weapons in fifteen years. You should modify this and replace it with a more realistic goal. Which is still very radical. And that's what he's done. He's replaced it with a more realistic goal, which is cutting back to a truly minimal nuclear deterrent force of a few hundred nuclear weapons on each side, in fifteen years. And I think he's quite sincere about that goal. In fact, for many years, the Warsaw Pact has been after NATO to get rid of all these short range tactical nuclear weapons that pose such a high risk, and to do that mutually and for many years the Warsaw Pact didn't have any. They introduced some lately. They're now modernizing, we're modernizing, there's an arms race in battlefield nuclear weapons that's going on right now. But it has for a long time been Warsaw policy to try to get rid of them, and NATO policy to say no we're not going to get rid of them, because you have a big army and we have to rely on nuclear weapons to offset your army. This is why one of Gorbachev's other initiatives is so important. There's a new set of talks going on right now between East and West called the Group of 23. There are talks on conventional forces throughout NATO and the Warsaw Pact. And in these talks, the Soviets have taken a really unprecedented step. They've said they're in favor of each side cutting back wherever they're ahead. So they will cut back to equal levels, at the lower level. And they've specified this privately as being we will cut back our tanks if you will cut back your long-range attack aircraft. And in fact, the Soviet superiority in tanks is exactly what NATO has said we, re..., leads to the need for battlefield nuclear weapons. And now we're, we're in a very strange situation in the West where NATO is dragging its feet on both counts. They both don't want to get rid of tactical nuclear weapons and they also don't want to take up the Soviet offer to cut back on their tanks.

DO YOU THINK IT'S A GOOD IDEA TO HAVE A MINIMAL NUCLEAR FORCE ON EACH SIDE?

I've thought for many years that we shouldn't go directly from where we are today to a minimal nuclear deterrent. For political reasons. Militarily, I think it would be advisable. I think having thousands of battlefield nuclear weapons is an extremely dangerous situation. And nothing in the world requires or warrants posing that kind of danger. However, unfortunately, most of those battlefield nuclear weapons are not on separate nuclear systems. They are actually what the military call alternative munitions. They're like spare bombs for airplanes and howitzers, large guns, that we have in Europe and in the Middle East.

IT SEEMS TO ME THAT IF WE GO TO MINIMAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS, A COUPLE HUNDRED ON EACH SIDE. WE'RE GIVING UP THE NUCLEAR UMBRELLA FOR EUROPE, AND THIS IS WHAT A LOT OF PEOPLE HAVE BEEN WARNING ABOUT. THAT THE EUROPEANS ARE SCARED OF, BRZEZINSKI HAS BEEN MAKING STATEMENTS ABOUT IT -- THAT THE SOVIETS ARE WINNING A PUBLIC OPINION COUP, AND WHAT THEY WANT TO DO IS DISENGAGE EUROPE FROM THE UNITED STATES. AND DISENGAGE THE NUCLEAR UMBRELLA.

I think there is a better alternative. Better than going directly from 50,000 nuclear weapons to let's say 500. And that is, reducing the conventional forces on the two sides first. If we cut back on the conventional forces, the threat of conventional war would be reduced, we would have greater stability, we would have improved relations, in fact we would de facto get rid of some of those battlefield nuclear weapons which are designed to be delivered as alternative munitions for the conventional forces. So I think that rather than hop directly from a huge nuclear arms race to very minimal nuclear forces, we should take an intermediate step. We should support the initial nuclear arms control measures that are underway. But then we should focus our attention very heavily on conventional forces on the two sides, on cutting back in that area, and creating greater stability. And I think both technically and politically that will create conditions where it will be a lot easier and more reliable to get down to a minimal nuclear deterrent.

SHOULDN'T WE BE SUSPICIOUS THAT THE SOVIET UNION IS TRYING TO DISENGAGE THE SOVIET THE AMERICAN NUCLEAR UMBRELLA?

I think they are, they are trying to disengage the American umbrella, but they won't succeed, unless we get cutbacks in conventional forces on the two sides.

SO YOU THINK WE SHOULD DISENGAGE THE NUCLEAR UMBRELLA?

I think we should disengage the nuclear umbrella if we can get conventional cutbacks.

WHAT IS THE BEST WAY TO INSURE RELIANT SECURITY?

What would we have to do to reduce our reliance on nuclear weapons?

IN EUROPE, YES.

When we think about conventional forces, I like to put it in terms of the three R's: Reduce, restructure, and restrain. We need to reduce because the two sides have huge armies. We need to restructure in the sense that both have blitzkrieg-type strategies. The best defense is a good...Oh shit, I said it backwards. When thinking about conventional forces on the two sides, and what would have to happen if we wanted to be able to reduce our reliance on nuclear weapons, I like to think in terms of the three R's: Reduce, restructure, and restrain. We need to reduce because we've got huge standing armies on the two sides. And as long as they are so big, people are going to be afraid of another war like World War II. We need to restructure because both sides have very offensive tactics when it comes to fighting a war in Europe. The Soviet Union on the ground has a blitzkrieg strategy. The United States in the air has a forward defense strategy. The best defense is a good offense. I said it wrong again. Is that right? What is the damn phrase?

THE BEST DEFENSE IS A GOOD OFFENSE.

It is right. So one of the most important things that we could do in order to create a more stable peace in Europe, to feel more confident in the peace, is restructure in a way that will give both sides really good defensive capabilities. And really bad offensive capabilities. Really bad forces for aggression. That's restructuring. And restraining is restraining unilateral intervention in smaller countries. We certainly can not trust the Soviets not to make war on us if they're making war on smaller, weaker countries. And vice versa. So I think that we need to see all of these three components put into place before we are going to have a chance of really cutting way back in nuclear weapons. And, and reducing our reliance on nuclear weapons to keep the peace.

CAN WE TRUST THE SOVIETS?

I don't think that we can trust the Soviets. I don't think we should trust the Soviets. Look at the Soviets in Afghanistan.

WE HAVE TO DO THAT AGAIN, WITH THE SAME ENERGY.

I don't think we can trust the Soviets. I don't think we should trust the Soviets until they earn our trust. Look at the Soviets in Afghanistan. The Soviet divisions that were sent into Czechoslovakia in 1968 are still there. The Soviets are in Hungary. The Soviets are throughout Eastern Europe. When we look at their behavior, it doesn't deserve our trust. M, it seems to me that talking about trust is putting the cart before the horse. We need to see some evidence in changed foreign policy, in changed conventional forces, in nonintervention, in liberalization. And it's sort of like that will be the proof of the pudding. When we see the Soviets behaving differently in the international arena, then we will see that they weren't dealing with them on a different basis.

WHY IS GORBACHEV SO EXCITING AND REVOLUTIONARY? WHY DOES HE GLADDEN OUR HEARTS HERE?

I talked to one of the advisers in the foreign ministry of the new generation that has come in with Gorbachev. And asked the question, why is Gorbachev so different from his predecessors? What's going on? And the answer I got, I found very persuasive. That is, a new generation of people have come in who are 25 or 30 years younger than the men they were replacing. And this younger generation is much more cosmopolitan. They are westernized. They've traveled. They're not paranoid. They're interested in human rights and civil liberties personally. They are interested in living in a different kind of world that's less repressive and less closed in, and more open. They're, they're interested in leading more exciting lives which includes debating subjects, taking leadership, having technology exchange, moving forward with their economy. I think we're just lucky in having a generation which is younger, more modern, more western, and also very creative. And not very bureaucratic. We could have younger Soviet leaders who were shear bureaucrats and had essentially the same kind of mentality as their predecessors. So in that sense, I think that we're lucky that Gorbachev won out in one of those bureaucratic battles.

WHAT'S REVOLUTIONARY ABOUT WHAT HE'S DONE SO FAR?

What Gorbachev is doing in foreign policy is very constructive. But it's not nearly as revolutionary as what he's doing inside, internally in the Soviet Union. He has turned management decisions back from the centralized structures in Moscow to plant managers and local enterprises throughout. He's beginning to institute a reward system, differential salary scales. You get paid according to your productivity. He has created more openness for private investment. He's in the process of negotiating terms with the west for capital investment. M he's really investing in every possible way in bringing the Soviet economy up to where it should be in the late 20th century. And one of those investments happens to be in the area of civil liberties. He's trained to encourage people to talk more freely. To express themselves in the press. There is uncensored media for the first time. There's criticism of government policy at the highest level and at lower levels. And I think that is seen as a necessary change if you are going to have a productive economy. If you're going to have people be creative, bring their best to bear on their jobs, they've got to be able to criticize shoddy work and bureaucracy when it arises.

WHAT DO YOU THINK IS MOTIVATING HIS CALL FOR DISARMAMENT AND GREATER ROLE FOR THE UN, AND ALL OF THAT? IS IT ECONOMIC PROBLEMS?

I think that there are two motives for Gorbachev in the area of arms control and disarmament. One is economic. These huge conventional forces on the two sides, And the red army in particular, really drain the Soviet economy. We know for many years that they have gone without consumer products and sort of the latest in appliances, household appliances, in order to invest in heavy industry and military industry. So I think that he has a real economic incentive to not just limit military forces, but to make some deep cuts in military forces. Which is what you have to do to get money. The other motive, I think, driving Gorbachev is that he has a very contemporary view of nuclear weapons. They're dangerous, and they're useless. We should get rid of them. And this is really a very personal thing. It's not strategic. It's not ideological. It's very individual how people see nuclear weapons. To what extent they experience them personally as dangerous and irrelevant, or as instruments of policy. And Gorbachev happens to be one of the people in the world, one of the world leaders, who sees them as truly dangerous and irrelevant and would like to get them out of the picture as far as possible.

DOES OUR MILITARY SEE THEM AS USABLE?

I think people in our military differ. There are, there are, there is a spectrum of opinion. I think there are extreme right-wing people who believe that we should consider using nuclear weapons on the battlefield, at sea, against ICBMs on the other side. In other words not on cities, but against military targets. I think there are other military people who believe that any use of military weapons is likely to lead to a general holocaust and we must avoid any use at all price.

WOULD YOU MAKE THE BUDGETARY LINE THAT YOU MAKE ABOUT MOST PEOPLE THINK THAT STRATEGIC WEAPONS THAT COST THE MONEY, BUT IT'S REALLY THE CONVENTIONAL FORCES, AND THAT'S WHY WE HAVE TO REDUCE THE DEFENSE BUDGET.

Recently I've given a couple of talks at colleges where I've asked a few hundred college students, how do you think the military budget is divided as between the nuclear arms race and our conventional non-nuclear forces, the Army, Navy, Air Force? Typically the answer is, "Oh probably 60 percent is nuclear, and the rest is non-nuclear." In fact the reality is just the opposite. Strategic nuclear weapons take only about 25 percent of our military budget, while 75 percent goes to the army, the navy, and the air force. Conventional forces designed to be used entirely over seas. In Europe or in the third world.

DO YOU THINK THAT THE COLD WAR IS ENDING?

I think that the Cold War has ended. I think that we are just over the threshold into a new era in US-Soviet relations, and East-West relations. I think this era will be based on pragmatism, self interest, and openness. And those are the qualities where it differs from the Cold War. Instead of being, having communication shut down, being confrontational, and having both sides bear a huge burden of spending and risk out of suspicion and mistrust of the other side. What we are going to see is an increasing amount of exchange of ideas, flow of information trade, technology, people, leading to a lowering of the mistrust, a lowering of the confrontation which ultimately will allow us to reduce the risk of nuclear war in real ways and also to reduce the burden in military spending.

I WANT TO HEAR JUST THE FIRST TWO SENTENCES.

I think that the Cold War is over. We have recently crossed the threshold into a new era in US-Soviet relations, and East-West relations. That's characterized by more open information, greater exchange of ideas, more interaction in all spheres of life.

DO YOU THINK THE UNITED STATES IS A DECLINING EMPIRE?

I don't think the United States is a declining empire. I think the United States is on the rise. I seem to be in a minority right now, but I think that this country's creativity, our technology our truly extraordinary openness when it comes to debating government policy and to information put us in a strong position in the sense of competing for hearts, minds, goods, lifestyle. I think that we have a long way to go in this country in showing leadership in the world. Even in the area of military and nuclear policy. This is the only country in the world where you can get good information about what's going on, and you can debate openly what's going on without being accused of violating state secrets. So we remain in the forefront of openness even in this controversial area of nuclear policy. And I think that's the great strength of this country and that it will lead us into as we cut back on the arms race, into a renewed position of leadership in the world rather than a decline.

DO YOU THINK IN THIS ERA OF DEFICITS AND DEBT, THIRD WORLD DEBT AND ALL OF THIS, THAT THE UNITED STATES IS GOING TO HAVE TO CUT BACK ON OUR COMMITMENTS? AND IF SO WHAT SHOULD BE OUR VITAL INTERESTS?

I think when we look at the national debt, we have to keep in mind that we spend 75 percent of our military budget on conventional forces that are designed to fight in overseas wars. They are not for the defense of US territory proper. And 75 percent of our military budget is something close to $200 billion a year. Well that's about the size of the deficit. That means our internal deficit, you could say, could be totally charged up to these conventional forces that are for helping to defend Europe in the event of a Soviet attack on the one hand. Or for intervening unilaterally in civil wars in the Third World. Clearly it's not in our national interest to keep paying this kind of price for intervening in Third World conflicts. On the contrary, we should be supporting self determination in the third World and cutting back on rapid deployment forces, interventionary forces, which don't begin to be worth the cost in terms of the national economy and the national debt. In Europe, I think that we need a shift in the burden as many people have said. The United States is spending a larger proportion of our GNP, helping to defend Europe, than the Europeans are. But the way to do that is not to get the Europeans to spend more, it's to get the US and the Soviets to cut their forces. To pull them back out of Europe so that our forces will be reduced more than proportionately. The European's share will go up and that stability will be increased. If we try to solve the burden sharing problem by having Europeans increase their military spending and build up their conventional forces, we'll just get into a conventional arms race with the Soviet Union which will be even more expensive than the nuclear arms race.

SHOULDN'T WE BE WORRIED IF WE HAND OVER MORE RESPONSIBILITY TO EUROPE, GIVE EUROPE MORE AUTONOMY, AND WE HOLD BACK FROM KEEPING SOME SORT OF STABILITY AROUND THE WORLD WITH OUR TREMENDOUS FORCE AND POWER. SHOULDN'T WE BE WORRIED THAT THINGS MIGHT DISINTEGRATE INTO CHAOS AND ANOTHER WAR COULD ARISE OUT OF THAT?

Certainly the Europeans have even more interest than we do in making sure there's not another chaos in Europe. I think the prospects for stability in Europe... The prospects for stability in Europe will actually be increased if we can get a cutback in conventional forces in the two sides. If we can reduce, restructure, and restrain the use of these forces for unilateral intervention, this is not likely to lead to a situation in which we will have a collapse into war and a crisis. On the contrary. What it will lead to is a situation in which we practice diplomacy. We practice other means of dealing with conflicts of interest. We develop them fully. We get to be experienced and knowledgeable and where they work and what their limits are. What the range of alternative means of dealing with conflicts are. At the same time, I think we will see a gradual liberalization in Eastern Europe. This is the biggest thing we need to do in Europe in order to create a truly stable peace is to see, to help along a process in which the pressure cooker in Eastern Europe is relieved of some of its pressure. The way to do that is to decrease the confrontation. De-escalate the arms race, promote liberalization where the Soviets will feel that they can accept a greater degree of openness and criticism without inviting a military confrontation.

SO DO YOU THINK THE WORLD WOULD BE A BETTER PLACE WHEN IT'S NOT DOMINATED BY TWO HEGEMONIC SUPER POWERS?

I think that the peace throughout the world will be far more stable, far more reliable when we're living in a situation that has two big differences from today's world. One is a division of responsibility and power. As long as so much military, and political and economic power is concentrated so heavily in the hands of just two countries, there's bound to be an aura of confrontation. Any competition could collapse into a confrontation or an open conflict. If you disperse power more evenly, and it's not coalesced, then what this will tend to do is to keep the peace better. Secondly I think that we need to see, and will see de-militarized foreign policies. So by dispersing power, and by de-militarizing ways of dealing with the international environment, I think we will help to build a much more resilient and stable peace than the precarious one we're living in right now.

I WAS WONDERING IF YOU COULD USE THOSE WORDS, HEGEMONIC SUPERPOWER.

We live right now in a bipolar world with two hegemonic powers that essentially control huge spheres of influence and group together countries and confront each other. I think as we move toward a multi-polar world, and we disperse power, as we de-militarize in the international environment, of course economic power and political power will become more important and we will see that there are many centers of power that include Japan, and Germany, and China, and potentially in the future, India. The European, the West European countries together. The East European countries that are growing up. In dispersing power, among all these different centers and in de-militarizing international relations, we will be creating a more stable and resilient peace.

WHY DO YOU PERSONALLY GO AROUND AND GIVE THESE TALKS AND ORGANIZE PEOPLE IN THE COMMUNITY? YOU GO OUT TO COLLEGES AND TALK TO NETWORK ORGANIZERS AND STUDENTS?

I'm deeply committed to the idea of democracy, of participatory democracy. Both within this country and in the international system. I think that people killing each other as a way of settling affairs is barbaric, and uncivilized, and atrocious, and horrible. And I think the opposite, which is talking about your differences and working them out and settling them peacefully, is really what we mean by democracy. Having due process. Talking instead of fighting. Allowing people to participate. Allowing people to express themselves. And I think that we need to do that in two senses. We need to do that within this country and within the European countries and the Soviet Union in the sense of having people participate in the decisions that shape their lives. We are not going to de-militarize. We are not going to reverse the nuclear arms race as long as this part of national policy is run by a tiny elite. If you want to create a stable peace that you can rely on, it has to be routed in the attitudes and values of the great majority of people; in this country, in Europe, and in the Soviet Union. So, changing people's attitudes in the sense of involving them in decision making, and deepening commitment to democracy, to talking instead of fighting, are sort of two sides of the same coin of moving toward a more stable peace. [TAPE STOP] When I go out and talk to people, what I feel is two things. Everybody can understand this issue. And if they did, they would do something about it.

WHAT DO YOU HOPE TO BE DOING WHEN YOU GO OUT TO TALK TO PEOPLE?

I think the elements, I think the real basic aspects of what's going on in the nuclear arms race, and what's going on in non-nuclear conventional forces, can be understood by anyone if they're explained simply without jargon and I have found in giving hundreds of lectures over the last ten years, that as soon as you explain to people what is going on, what the actual policies of the United States and the Soviet Union are, they feel empowered, and they feel indignant. They feel that they understand and that they are angry at what's being done in their name and they want to do something about it. So it's really a combination of educating people and motivating people at one in the same time.

DO YOU THINK THAT THE POLICY ELITES WOULD RATHER KEEP IT IN THE HANDLES OF THE POLICY ELITES?

Yes there was actually an interview done with me by some people from the National War College and the height of the freeze movement to find out what we were advocating and who we were. And they read a report in which the executive summary said, "These people are very well informed, and very knowledgeable. And that makes them very dangerous. And we've got to work harder if we want to put this issue back into the hands of small elites where it ought to be." So that is clearly a conscious sentiment on the part of some people. It's a kind of anti-populist, anti-democratic feeling. That matters of war and peace should be decided by a few people and not by the great majority.

WHAT DO YOU HOPE THESE PEOPLE YOU'RE EDUCATING CAN DO?

There are so many things that people can do. I think the two most important are to educate other people. And to include these issues when they decide who to vote for president or for Congress. In other words, not just to vote based on domestic, economic issues, but to realize that when you vote for a president, the main thing a president does that effects the country is foreign policy and military policy.

YOU'RE HOPING THAT THESE PEOPLE DEMAND CHANGE?

Um, yes. Obviously. I think it takes, it will take a lot of people. Concerned, informed, active people in order to reverse the arms race. We have to offset that naturally organized constituency for perpetuating the arms race, all the people who are paid out of the military budget. We have to offset that by having enormous informed organized, grass-roots movements who let our political leaders know that it's not in our interest to continue the arms race. That as a nation, as a people, it's against our best interest to continue spending our money this way.

CAN WE THEN NOT TRUST THE ELITES IN POSITIONS OF POWER WHO HAVE GUIDED US THROUGH THE NUCLEAR AGE SO FAR?

One of the sad things about being a decision maker or an influential person in national policy, is that if you don't have a popular mandate, there isn't much you can do. A president who gets out too far ahead of the people can be impeached. So we're in a way, we're sadly locked into the arms race. And we're locked in by ignorance. Because ordinary people don't know enough about our military spending, and about nuclear weapons, and about the military side of foreign policy. They don't demand change of politicians. Because they don't demand change, politicians find that the only people who are listening to them are the influential elites whose careers are wrapped up in perpetuating the arms race. So to the extent that there's someone really paying attention, it's people who want to see the whole thing continued and not the great majority who would like to see it reversed if they knew more about it.

I WANT TO GET JUST THE BEGINNING PART OF THAT, WITHOUT THE LINE ABOUT THE IMPEACHMENT. IT DOESN'T SOUND REALISTIC TO ME.

It's true you know, if Jimmy Carter had tried to implement the policy he had when he came in he would have been impeached because the national sentiment wasn't there. Politicians are not free to reverse the nuclear arms race all by themselves. If a politician makes a very radical proposal, for let's say 90 percent cut back in nuclear weapons, what would happen would be a hue and cry on the part of the military-industrial complex saying that this would endanger our national security and couldn't possibly be done and that this person must be off-balance or something. So if you want to create...if you want to reverse the nuclear arms race, we, the people, have to help the politicians. We can't expect to just be led by them. We need to create an environment in which they are free to follow their best instincts. To do what they think is in the best interest of the people. That means that they need the support of strong, well-organized, grass-roots, lobby groups, pressure groups, protests, whatever...to really be free to do what they would like to do.

WHAT ABOUT THIS MOVE IN THE PENTAGON THAT PART OF THE SOLUTION TO OUR PROBLEMS IS TO GO FOR SMART WEAPONS. SMART CONVENTIONAL WEAPONS AND SMALL ACCURATE NUCLEAR WARHEADS AS A WAY OF BEING ABLE TO MANAGE OUR FOREIGN POLICY IN THE THIRD WORLD AND IN EUROPE?

There are really two parts of this question. There are some people who have said that we need to refocus our attention away from Europe and toward the Third World and the Pacific. And I think this is a product of the fact that Gorbachev has made very far-reaching proposals for conventional reductions in Europe. And the West Europeans are interested. And so there are some people who see that the ... the sort of core of the East-West confrontation and the arms race, and our military policy is softening up. And they're really looking for other places in which to use military force as a tool of power. If we can't rely on Europe, we should look elsewhere to where we can use military force. In my mind this is, this is a backwards development. If we are in the process of resolving our long-standing, or reducing our long-standing confrontation in Europe, we should take this as an opening to reduce our military forces, not to shift the locos of military attention somewhere else. A second idea is to get more accurate weapons, and smaller nuclear weapons which will be more usable, or more plausible in posing threats of use of military force. I think this is also extremely dangerous and moving exactly in the opposite of the direction we should be moving in. We need to keep in mind that the standard is how do we create a stable peace so that we don't have to rely on nuclear weapons to keep the peace. That question should always be on the forefront of our minds. Well relative to that standard, the idea of introducing precision-guided, long-range weapons. That doesn't contribute to that kind of stability. That contributes to a sense of threat on the other side. A sense of intimidation. The kind of peace we need to be developing is one that we feel we can rely on which doesn't build on intimidation, but instead builds on our common interest, our common security.

YOU HAVE ONE LINE IN THERE THAT I WISH YOU WOULD ISOLATE. WE NEED TO BASE IT NOT ON COOPERATION OR PEACEFUL COOPERATION...

Common security, mutual interests.

ONE SENTENCE...

If we want to create a truly stable peace where we don't have to rely on nuclear weapons, then this can't be built on intimidation. On provoking fear on the other side. Instead, it has to be built on a sense of common security. On looking at our mutual interest, in preserving the peace, in promoting economic development and having peaceful interaction.

THE BIGGEST THREAT TO OUR NATIONAL SECURITY?

There's no question in my mind that the nuclear arms race is the biggest threat to our national security. This threat has dimmed... There's no question in my mind that the biggest threat to the United States is the nuclear arms race. This is the biggest threat to our national security. That image has dimmed somewhat because of the INF agreement and the START negotiations. People have gotten the feeling that because we're talking with the Soviets, the nuclear arms race isn't so dangerous. But that isn't true. We're developing and deploying new types of nuclear weapons on the two sides. Nuclear weapons remain at the front lines of East-West confrontation and they're spreading to more countries. And we remain only a small distance away politically from a confrontation that could end up leading to nuclear war.

SO IS PROLIFERATION ANOTHER BIGGEST DANGER?

I think right now we're undermining our national security by devoting $300 billion a year to the military. Instead of eliminating the deficit and plowing that money back into our economic infrastructure and education. This country would be far stronger in every way, politically, economically in the international environment, if we would cut our military spending by half. Stop spending money developing new systems for nuclear war fighting. Stop spending money for rapid deployment forces to intervene unilaterally in civil wars in the Third World and reinvest in our own economy.

HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT SDI AND ANTI-SATELLITE, THE EXTENSION OF WEAPONS INTO SPACE?

I think that SDI is ridiculous. It's perfectly clear that it won't work. That it can't work. We know, a priori, that it can't work. And the reason is, SDI is only intended, at best, if it worked 100 percent. It's only intended to defend us against one type of nuclear weapon. That is a ballistic missile. Ballistic missiles are like the rockets that go to the moon. They go up into outer space and come back down again on the other side of the world. But there are so many other types of nuclear weapons. There are nuclear weapons on little cruise missiles which fly very close to the ground inside the atmosphere. There are nuclear weapons on airplanes, on ships. You can put nuclear weapons on barges and float them into cities. You can bring them literally in a suitcase through international airports. We have no defense against nuclear weapons or nuclear war.

IS THERE SOMETHING ABOUT THE AMERICAN PSYCHE IN WHICH WE ALWAYS LOOK FOR A TECHNOLOGICAL SOLUTION TO DILEMMAS LIKE DETERRENCE?

I think the problem with SDI is that people trust their leaders a little bit too much. Someone has said we can develop a defense, people say, okay, go ahead, take the money and see what you can do. Without being skeptical enough and using their own judgment enough, and just look at the issue on its merits, based on what you know about nuclear weapons, and about defense, do you really think we're going to be able to develop enough of a defense to make a difference?

YOUR PERSONAL GOAL?

Um, I'm driven by a very long-range goal which I think may not even happen in my lifetime. But it moves me anyway. And that is a goal of ending war. I want to get rid of the war system. I want to get rid of nuclear weapons. But I don't just want to get rid of nuclear weapons. And I think we can't just get rid of nuclear weapons. I think if we want to get rid of nuclear weapons, we have to abolish war as an institution. And for me this is comparable to like abolishing murder in our own society. There may always be certain aberrant individuals who do something crazy. And you have to have systems to deal with those people. But just because there are a few crazy people, that doesn't mean you have to have a militarized world that's spending $1 trillion a year. A thousand billion dollars every year on making new weapons. And using them to kill people to deal with differences of opinion by killing people.

WHAT IF THERE'S ONE ABERRANT NATION WITH NUCLEAR WEAPONS? IS THIS A UTOPIAN DREAM?

I don't think that we can get rid of nuclear weapons altogether as long as there is any risk, any risk at all, that some nation will come back and acquire nuclear weapons. So I think that probably that means we, in the long run, have to get rid of nuclear power. We have to get rid of the capability to make nuclear weapons. Not in the short run but in the long run. When we get close to total nuclear disarmament in the first place. And in the second place I think that we have to have very strong international peace-keeping mechanisms which have the power of intervention. It's not police keeping. It's not policing and peace keeping which are problematic. It's when this is done unilaterally by super powers that it's problematic. We do need international peace-keeping forces. We do need international police forces. We need to be able to deal rapidly and decisively with nations that violate international law and pose threats to other nations. But if we are going to get to a world in which we have the opportunity to do that, we have to realize that means letting go of the use of force as a tool of power. Renouncing the use of force as a tool of power.

I WANT YOU TO RESPOND DIRECTLY TO PEOPLE WHO SAY THIS IS A UTOPIAN DREAM. I WANT YOU TO SAY IT'S NOT A UTOPIAN DREAM.

Abolishing nuclear weapons is not a utopian dream. It's just a big problem. It will take a long time. It will involve a lot of other changes. One of the most pernicious aspects of saying that abolishing nuclear weapons is utopian is that it allows people not to worry about this, not to do anything. To sort of throw up their hands and say, well if we can't, if we can't do the whole thing, and we can't do it soon, I don't need to do anything. And that's a recipe for not just keeping nuclear weapons, but keeping lots of nuclear weapons around. We don't know how long it will take to abolish nuclear weapons. We don't know how many other changes there will have to be in the international environment besides the nuclear weaponry itself. What we do know is if we're ever going to get there, we have to start taking some important constructive steps in the right direction. And if we keep the goal of abolishing nuclear weapons in mind constantly, that makes clear to us, working back to the present, what steps it is we need to be taking to move in the right direction.

IF YOU WERE A VISITOR FROM OUTER SPACE LOOKING AT OUR RECENT HISTORY, IF YOU HAD FALLEN ASLEEP IN 1940 AND WOKEN UP AGAIN, STEPPING BACK FROM IT ALL, HOW WOULD IT SEEM TO YOU?

I think if you compare today's world with the world in 1945 or 1940, the shocking thing is the degree of militarization. We are, by comparison with a world before World War II, we are armed to the teeth. We are permanently mobilized in peacetime. We are spending a huge, historically unprecedented share of our national product on the military. We have 50,000 nuclear weapons. We have nuclear technology spreading. And we have nuclear weapons spreading. We are moving toward a future in which there will be a global nuclear porcupine. Nuclear weapons all over the place. Lots of force, all of it, unusable. Very expensive, very dangerous, to no good end. I think right now we are in the midst of that kind of trend and we still stand at a fork where we can reverse it. Where we can move back toward a peace that's maintained out of positive incentives instead out of negative fears. But with each passing decade, we get further away from the opportunity to do that as technology spreads. As the nuclear industry spreads. As high-tech, non-nuclear weapons spread, and independent defense industries.

AND IF FORTY YEARS IN THE FUTURE YOU WERE LOOKING BACK AT THE INTERVENING TIME PERIOD, WHAT DO YOU HOPE YOU'RE GOING TO SEE?

I hope that in the next few years out from now, we will see a clear turning point. Not just in US-Soviet relations which has already happened, but in the expression of those relations in the arms race. That we will see nuclear weapons starting to be cut back in ways that don't allow continued modernization. In other words, whole types, whole classes of nuclear weaponry eliminated altogether. I hope that we will see in the next few years, an extension of some of the confidence-building measures in Europe like notification of troop maneuvers into more far-reaching changes such as withdrawing all tanks, or all nuclear weapons from the front lines of confrontation on the two sides. I hope that we will see liberalization in Eastern Europe, not just in the Soviet Union. And I hope that we will see the beginning of a withdrawal of the United States and the Soviet Union's military presence in the Third World. Pulling back to the part of the world that we should be properly concerned with.

WHAT DOES THE BERLIN WALL SYMBOLIZE TO YOU? AND DO YOU THINK IT WILL COME DOWN?

The Berlin Wall symbolizes a divided Europe and an oppressed people in the eastern half. I think the wall will come down. I think it should and will. As we reverse the arms race, as we improve relations between east and west; decrease the amount of confrontation; and especially move beyond just nuclear arms control to reduce the risk of non-nuclear, conventional warfare, and decrease the conventional forces on the two sides. I think we will see the creation of a kind of stability in Europe. A more positive stability instead of a negative precarious balance. We will see a more deeply-founded political stability that will allow the wall to come down. And will allow the creation of a healed Europe. A whole Europe.

WHAT WAS THE PURPOSE OF THE FREEZE MOVEMENT?

Well, I started the freeze movement in 1980. And at that time, the SALT II treaty had been canned, the peace movement was at a nadir. There were lots of little peace groups, but they had a very splintered agenda. There was very strong nationalistic sentiment. And I felt that if we had one positive goal for people to focus on, that would tip the balance. That would make the difference. Instead of having a laundry list of different objectives. And instead of having a message of doom and gloom, if we could tell people about the nuclear arms race, but at the same time, give them a relatively short-term positive goal to work for, that would energize them and mobilize them so they would start working, which happened.

WHAT WAS THE FREEZE MEANT TO SAY? SOMETHING LIKE "THAT'S IT, STOP IT RIGHT HERE, WE GOT TO THINK ABOUT THIS."?

Right. Well more than think. The concept behind the freeze was we should shut down the factories that are making nuclear weapons. We have enough, we shouldn't make any more. Some arms control experts said this is not a serious proposal. It was a serious proposal. And in fact a former CIA intelligence officer wrote an article saying the...one of the easiest things to verify would be a complete freeze. Because if you totally shut down all the factories that make nuclear weapons, you can tell whether there are people in them or there are no people in them. So it was a serious proposal to stop the nuclear arms race as a first step toward getting rid of nuclear weapons.

WHAT I WANT TO KNOW IS, WAS IT OUT OF A SENSE OF FRUSTRATION? I MEAN INCREMENTAL STEPS AND EVERYTHING... I WANT TO HEAR YOU SAY IT VERY STRONGLY. I WANT TO HEAR THE FRUSTRATION.

I was frustrated when I came up with the freeze proposal by the arms control process. I had lived through SALT I and seen that this didn't stop the nuclear arms race. It just put ceilings. I lived through SALT II which they said, well SALT II will get down to brass tacks. And it just set slightly lower ceilings. But it really fitted like a glove around a continued arms race. Every planned new weapon system in the United States and the Soviet Union could go forward under the SALT II agreement. And even that weak, wishy-washy agreement, was not brought before the Senate because people who supported arms control in the late seventies were so much on the defensive that they didn't want any agreement, even a weak agreement. And it was out of that frustration that I decided it was time to really work to mobilize a vast popular movement that would have a concrete, clear goal that wouldn't be too radical. But definitely would be turning things around. Taking a step in a new direction.

WHAT I WANT TO HEAR YOU SAY IS SOMETHING ABOUT, LIKE, OKAY LET'S JUST STOP GUYS AND EVALUATE WHERE WE'RE GOING.

The goal of the freeze was to mobilize a huge popular movement that would send a message to Washington and Moscow and say it's time to stop. Enough is enough. We don't want this half-hearted arms control stuff anymore. We really want to see an end to the nuclear arms race. We want to see an end to the production of new types of dangerous nuclear weapons as a prelude to getting rid of a lot of the ones we have already.

WHERE DO YOU GO FROM THERE? WHAT DID YOU DECIDE TO DO AFTER THE FREEZE MOVEMENT? WHAT DID IT ACHIEVE?

I was terribly disappointed in 1984 that the freeze movement had such a small impact on the presidential election. It really wasn't a major issue although it was a historically unprecedented popular movement. And I spent a lot of time thinking about why it hadn't had a bigger impact even though so many people were immobilized and involved. And my conclusion was that in an important sense it was a mile wide and an inch deep. It had succeeded in mobilizing people to say enough is enough. We want to end the nuclear arms race. But it didn't really educate people about the roots of the nuclear arms race. And it didn't really produce an educated protest or a resistance movement that could send a deeper message saying we want to do something about the whole war system. We want to do something about the role of nuclear weapons. All this time nuclear weapons have been relied on to prevent non-nuclear wars. And the people who were mobilized in the freeze movement didn't know that. And when politicians came back to the freeze movement and said "Well we take this as a message for continued arms control because we're not going to get rid of nuclear weapons. We're going to keep them around and we're going to keep modernizing. We need to keep them around and to keep modernizing." People active in the freeze movement didn't really have an answer to that. It was shocking. It was disappointing. They had no idea that the motives of the nuclear arms race was routed in conventional war, and in the East-West confrontation in Europe, and in deliberately posing a high risk of nuclear weapons. And when politicians came back and said, "Well we can't have a freeze. We can't stop modernization. We need to keep relying on nuclear weapons." People were sort of aghast and disillusioned. And they gave up. And I decided, all right, we have to go at this at a deeper level. We have to give people a more comprehensive view of the nature of the problem. And also the nature of the solution which includes not just nuclear weapons, but also the big conventional war system.

WE WERE DOING SOME OTHER SHOOTING THAT HAD TO DO WITH THE MX MISSILE, IT SEEMS LIKE PEOPLE WHO ARE REALLY INVOLVED IN THE INDUSTRY, VERY QUICKLY REVEAL IT TO HAVE VERY LITTLE LOGICAL SUBSTANCE. AND THE SAME SEEMS TO BE TRUE HERE. AS SOON AS YOU'VE TAKEN, SORT OF THE EMPEROR WITH NO CLOTHES...

Right, you just pull away the veil and there's nothing underneath there. Just an empty works.

WHY HASN'T...

Why hasn't it been revealed?

RIGHT.

Oh, you don't want to know the answer to that. It's because the liberal arms control community has been co-opted and is only partly protesting the status quo, but partly supporting it. And they don't want to go too far in challenging the common wisdom. Specifically they would like to reduce the escalatory part of the nuclear arsenal. But they share with the establishment, with the people who are running the show, the view that we can not basically change or do away with the war system. We can't do anything about conventional military forces. We can't do anything about Soviet conventional superiority. And therefore we can't go all that far with reducing nuclear weapons. So that the critique from the arms control community of the mainstream policy. The critique of the arms control community, of the mainstream establishment policy, the bipartisan policy of flexible response, is a fairly superficial critique. And it does not try to get at the root of the problem and say alright, if this door to reductions in nuclear weapons is closed, what other avenues are open to us. That's the question I've asked. I said, alright, if we can't get rid of nuclear weapons because we need to rely on them to deter conventional war, well what other ways are there of dealing with conventional war? And that question has not been asked before. People who've come up against it have just said, "Oh well, in that case, I guess we can't do anything." And they give up. They go home. And I've been more persistent.

I think a lot of the natural scientists and diplomats who have worked so hard to limit and reverse the nuclear arms race have not really looked carefully at the issues of the conventional balance between East and West and they've tended to buy into the mythology. The notion that since everyone says the Soviet Union has overwhelming superiority, it must be true. In fact when you look at this carefully, as when you look at so many other myths, it evaporates in front of your eyes. It turns out that yes the Soviet Union does have an advantage in some areas and numbers but we have advantages in other areas and numbers and more important our technology is superior to theirs and when you bring everything into play and you factor it into a kind of war scenario, what might happen if there were a war, the two sides don't look unevenly balanced. They look quite evenly matched and really knowledgeable military experts will tell you that.

WHAT ROMAN SAID TO ME AT LUNCH IS, I CAN'T UNDERSTAND, THE WHOLE THING IS SO ILLOGICAL. NONE OF IT MAKES SENSE. I CAN'T UNDERSTAND WHY WE'RE STILL DOING THIS.

Okay. The answer is this subject is not taught in the schools. It's not taught in high school, its not taught in college. People who don't have an ax to grind, who don't have a vested interest, do not study it, do research about it, write about it. Everybody that's involved is grinding some ax. Either they're part of the system and they want to perpetuate the system and their ax is to think that you can change it is to be naive and unrealistic. The people on the outside, who know very little about it, trash all the people on the inside but they don't have an informed alternative. And what we don't have in this society or in Europe is a middle ground of people who are extremely knowledgeable about the military from the military point of view but who are working to dismantle it, to get rid of it and you need that combination, you need both knowledge of warfare and risks of war and threats of war and you have take it very seriously and on the other hand you have to have a commitment to de-escalation and to creating a more stable peace, and that's a very special kind of role and up until now there just haven't been enough people playing that role.

WHAT IS THE BASIC FLAW? TELL US THE EMPEROR'S NEW CLOTHES. WHAT IS THE BASIC PARADOX WHY IS IT SO RIDICULOUS?

The basic paradox is that we can't use military force any more in the modern world and we haven't accepted that yet. There is an illusion that if we reduce our military forces, nuclear and conventional, we'll lose something. We'll lose some power or some control. The reality is we don't have power through military means anymore and we can't control events in the Third World and if we drop the illusion that military force is going to give us usable power rather than losing something, we gain a lot. We gain the ability to promote democracy. We gain economically. We gain in improvements in international relations. Actually, we reduce the risk of an inadvertent war.

WHY IS IT RIDICULOUS IN EUROPE? THE TWO SENTENCES THAT STAYED, THE EMPEROR'S NEW CLOTHES? THE PARADOX?

I don't understand your question.

WE CAN'T FIGHT A NUCLEAR WAR IN EUROPE RIGHT?

Right.

BUT WE'RE PREPARING TO FIGHT ONE, OUR WHOLE POLICY IS BASED ON A HOAX ALL OF THESE SMART GUYS, SCHLESINGER, KISSINGER, ALL THOSE GUYS ARE PROPAGATING...

That's, but I don't agree that its an Emperor's New Clothes. I don't think that's quite right. The official policy for thirty years has been to deliberately pose a very high risk that any conventional war would go nuclear but to claim that this is not terribly risky because we all know that nuclear wars can't be won, so it's an actually deliberate monkey wrench. It's not a system which is intended to be used. It's a system which is highly inflammatory, like a tinder box but it's intended not to be used, what it's intended to do is to scare off politicians and generals from going to ordinary warfare by making ordinary warfare too risky. It's a deliberate nuclear monkey wrench like if you make a mistake and you get into an ordinary war, the jig is up. The whole world will be blown up. We, we've set up a doomsday machine where if you fight over something little the price will be so high it will be everything and this is the sort of ultimate war to end all wars. We have made it now so scary and so risky that you will never make the mistake of going to war again and so what they're doing is they're poising our survival on the belief and the hope that our leaders will have enough sense never to make one mistake, never to get into war once again and that is paradoxical because it's a contradiction. If human beings are intelligent enough and in control enough not to go to war then we should be intelligent enough and in control enough to do it without posing the threat of our own extinction as the price. And if we're not smart enough to stop going to war then we've set up a doomsday machine. So you can't really have it both ways and people just have not yet come to grips with this because its such a profound truth, people don't believe that we can end war but if we don't end war we've ended the species and its a conflict, a contradiction that people just have to come to terms with in order to reverse the arms race.