The Derangement of MIRV

Abstract

It has thus far proved a considerable strain to fit the lethal power of nuclear weapons into some reasonable conception of political serviceability. Of the ratiocinations most generally advanced, two, the primordial fear of being defenceless before a surprise attack and the conviction that as the bombs' effects are made more ghastly their employment will be less likely, have made most of the running in the nuclear arms race. One is as pervasive as the other is fundamental. No country willingly stays long in a position where no risks need attend the opponent who would lay it waste; no country yields to the superpowers' conviction that if the risks are then made big rather than small, the odds are that one will take no risks at all. Even in a crisis where the alternatives to nuclear war might look bad but not, it has been noted, as bad as a nuclear war. Which ratiocination prevails is as much as anything a question of personal style. Robert McNamara, the former United States secretary of defense, once he had laid to rest the fear of a preemptive blow, chose to justify the expanding size of the nuclear establishment over which he presided on the grounds that the weapons' very destructiveness would determine their unemployment. His successors are fonder of the more atavistic view: they maintain and sustain an arsenal of a size and variety to ward off most, if not all, imaginable contingencies on the grounds that one side might yet achieve the capability to threaten or to launch with impunity a first strike such as would leave the recipient with no adequate response. They equally hold that much as the employment of nuclear weapons clearly could not be a rational act, rationality cannot be vouchsafed.