A talk with Louis Harris

Abstract

Over the past year, we have witnessed an impressive awakening of world public opinion to the dangers of the nuclear arms race. The West European movement for European Nuclear Disarmament is now finding counterparts in the United States. And more modest expressions of concern have been heard from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.The American public is concerned, even scared, by the enormously high level of nuclear deployments by the Soviet Union and the United States, but they are even more worried by the belligerent rhetoric of government leaders concerning the possibility of using these weapons. Not only do Administration officials speak of “limited nuclear options, “but they speak of being able to “prevail” over the Soviet Union in a “protracted” nuclear war. With the help of such comments, the American public is rapidly coming to realize that we must somehow get out from under the shadow of this Damoclean sword.One measure of their concern was the massing of more than 700,000 in the streets of New York to greet the opening of the Second United Nations Special Session on Disarmament on June 12. Other measures are provided by Louis Harris in the following sketch of American public opinion on the problem of nuclear war.The potential political implications of Harris's findings are stunning. And the phenomenon his figures delineate has already provoked a response from Washington: the Reagan Administration's new found passion for arms control as formulated in START. But if Harris's analysis is correct, it will take more than that to deflect the rising expectations of the American people. What is a scarcely discernible tremor in 1982 could turn into a political earthquake by 1984 unless there is measurable progress toward the elimination of any possible use of nuclear weapons as an instrument of international conflict resolution.—Bernard T. Feld