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Approach to Nuclear I Weapons I I n addition to generating a great deal of tension in the world, the United States and the Soviet Union have also cooperated in keeping the peace. This cooperation is most explicit in areas where there is a continuing risk of inadvertent conflict, such as incidents at sea and allocation of space slots, but it can be found in other areas as well. It can be found in crises, and it can be found in the two sides’ approach to the problems posed by the existence of nuclear weapons. At the time of this writing, the divergences and possible incompatibilities in the two sides’ nuclear policies are uppermost in the political and the scholarly discussions. But there are also in the two sides’ actions crucial elements of compatibility, consciously arrived at and maintained. These elements of compatibility appear mainly in the way both sides have coped with what they have seen as an unavoidable situation of mutual deterrence. Each government has acquired enough nuclear weapon systems to destroy most of the industrial and military capabilities of the other, along with tens of millions of people. Each has also devoted its major efforts to ensure that the systems would function after an attack, although the two sides do not have the same deployments and have not evaluated the circumstancesthat might lead to an attack in just the same way.’ Neither government has shown any sign of expecting nuclear war as a likely or desirable outcome of its policies. Both governments have acted with caution where the other’s vital interests were thought to be concerned. In Europe, where local insecurities brought both countries into war twice this century, the U.S. and the Soviet Union have taken pains to remain the two dominant powers and to maintain a clear line of demarcation between them. Thereby, they have apparently allayed the Western European insecurities that caused wars for many centuries. Whether they have introduced other serious ones remains to be seen. This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S.Department of Energy by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract W-7405-Eng-48. Michael M . May is Associate Director at Large of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. 1. David Holloway, The Souiet Union and the Arms Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), Chapter 3. international Security, Spring 1985 (Vol. 9, No. 4) 0162-2889/85/040140-14 $02.50/0 0 1985by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 140 U.S.-Soviet Approach I 141 Outside Europe, the overriding policy on both sides has been to avoid direct confrontation if possible and to limit crises when they occurred. Each side has found itself on occasion attempting to defend distant positions that could not be defended without much widening of the conflict. In each such case, the working assumption of both governments has been that peace between the two was the dominant interest of each. Both sides have accepted verifiable arms limitations at roughly equivalent levels, in terms of effectiveness against the main possible target sets.2 The success of this endeavor is often questioned on the grounds that numbers of weapons have not significantly decreased. Reducing numbers may not be the most important measure of success, however. Numbers of nuclear weapon systems must remain high if the futility of a first strike is to remain obvious; if undetectable cheating is to remain unimportant; and if the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. are to remain secure in their deterrence regardless of what other nuclear powers may do. Within those constraints, agreed reductions might reduce tensions and save money, but would not change the nuclear threat qualitatively. Over the past twenty years, on the other hand, arms control has helped the U.S. and the Soviet Union to avoid mistakes that, while they might have been recognized as mistakes on either side, might nevertheless have been difficult to avoid without agreement. Such steps as building more missile launchers than existed at the time of the Interim Agreement, deploying nuclear weapons in Antarctica, on the moon, in outer space, or at the bottom of...

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