THE TRIMTAB FACTOR: How Business Executives Can Help Solve the Nuclear Weapons Crisis

There is something at once disarming and unsettling about an anti-nuke brief that compares the US and the USSR to competitive businesses--""how did a company with such a good product and brilliant future get into such a dangerous and self-defeating predicament?""--and compares a weapons-turnaround to Ford abandoning the Edsel. There's also blindness, as well as wisdom, in Willens' appeal to his fellow executives to think of themselves as consultants to USA, Inc. ""As a business person, your experience, your approach to problem analysis, and your potential for political persuasiveness all place you in a unique position to influence the course of the American enterprise."" The anti-nuclear argument itself is straightforward and succinct: the escalation of deterrence into talk of ""first strike options"" (and winning a nuclear war); ""the relationship between our stagnating economy and our astronomical military expenditures""; the possibility that the Russians consider us as much of a threat as we consider them. He rightly points out, too, that we have every opportunity to beat the USSR in economic competition--to the benefit of the rest of the world. And, like other sincere disarmament proponents, Willens has a step-by-step plan. The reader, wondering just who Willens is, does finally learn that he headed the successful campaign for the 1982 California Bilateral Nuclear Weapons Freeze Initiative--and that ""my family and I escaped from Russia illegally in 1922."" The trimtab factor? Ingeniously, derived from a Buckminster Fuller observation (on a ship) of how a little leverage, properly applied, can produce a powerful effect. This little book intrigues, at any rate, as a testament to that belief.