NUCLEAR POLICY FOR WAR AND PEACE

Clear, emphatic and valuable is this informed statement by a man who served on the Atomic Energy Commission for seven years and came to be known as its ""conscience"". He traces the sorry history of American nuclear strategy from his point of view of moral horrors which springs from the public's acceptance of a national policy based on massive retaliation. Again and again he states that the super-bomb, whose destructive capacity beggars the imagination, is an immoral ""weapon of violence"" that in no way guarantees American security and is too deadly to be called a ""military"" weapon. Our irrational effort to stockpile these bombs is based on a cart-before-the-horse attitude in which technology and military strategy dominate political decisions. So far, we have not developed a rational plan for nuclear armament confined to the use of ""third generation"" nuclear weapons, such as atomic artillery, etc. This would permit limited warfare, not engender potentially catastrophic fallout, and put force behind our political maneuvers. He suggests a plan calling for a distinction to be made between large and small atomic weapons- and a neutral international agency to conduct bomb-for-bomb dismantling of American and Russian megaton bombs. It is a large order, but he feels this is more practical than expecting the Russians to permit foreign observers on their soil to watch for clandestine bomb tests. All aspects of national, international and peacetime atomic policy get straightforward commentary in this important book that like Fallout (page 128) should be must reading for every American who wants to come to some understanding of forces that are now capable of changing the destiny of mankind in minutes.