By Richard J. Barnet billing foul-ups in department stores; cool rational leaders are expected to make the most agonizing decisions in a crisis, without information or sleep. Anyone who ponders this system can understand why growing numbers of scientists state flatly that if the arms race continues nuclear war is now inevitable. What is a practical alternative for the 1980s to a national security strategy based on escalating the arms race? Arms limitation agreements can create a positive political climate in which it becomes possible to move toward an alternative security system — but only if certain requirements are met. The first requirement is that the agreement makes both sides feel more secure. Since partial limitations on nuclear weapons may appear to favor one side or the other, as the opponents of Salt II have alleged, the more comprehensive the limitations the more stable the agreement. Second, the new arms relationship should have clear economic payoffs for both sides. Third, the principle of “rough equivalence” should be extended not only to numbers and characteristics of weapons systems but to other aspects of the military relationship, including the right to acquire bases and to threaten the homeland of either power from such bases. Fourth, the explicit purpose of the agreement should be to remove ambiguities about intentions. The more that these agreements require significant internal changes in both societies, the better reassurance they provide. Clear political commitment in the direction of demilitarization is not easy to reverse and thus offers the most reliable indication of national intentions. A substantially emptier parking lot at the Pentagon or at the Ministry of Defense in Moscow and the conversion of defense plants provide better indices of national intentions than satellite photos of missile silos, as important as they are. If Soviet consumer production began getting the priority attention now available only to the Soviet military-industrial complex and their tanks began to look as dowdy as their hotel elevators, one could reasonably conclude that something important had happened. A serious program of conversion would require the leaders of both sides to confront powerful interests with a bureaucratic and ideological commitment to the arms race. That itself would be impressive evidence of a turn toward peace. The single most important measure toward fulfilling the four criteria I have proposed would be a mutually agreed-upon moratorium on the testing and deployment of all bombers, missiles, and warheads. Such a moratorium would be verifiable by existing intelligence capabilities on both sides. During that period, the signatories would undertake to negotiate a formula for making deep cuts in their strategic nuclear arsenals along the lines recently proposed by George F. Kennan. The mutual moratorium, not unlike that which preceded the negotiation of the atmospheric test ban, would enable the negotiators to keep ahead of technological developments and would create a much more favorable climate for the ratification of long-term agreements. The greatest perceived threats are not the weapons already built, although they are more than adequate to destroy both societies, but the weapons about to be built. New weapons systems convey threatening intentions. However, a freeze on all new nuclear weapons systems would clearly indicate that both sides indeed intend to stop the arms race. If the United States is to reverse the decline in its power and security, we must recognize that the uncontrollability of the arms race is the greatest threat we face. War is not a national security option in the nuclear age. If our strategy for war prevention fails, everything fails. Whether the survivors number in the millions, or tens of millions, the American experiment will be over. In thirty minutes we will have cashed in two hundred years of history and perhaps put an end to all history. There is no longer a way to base U.S. security on the threat of nuclear war without running enormous risks of having to fight a nuclear war. No national security objective can be served by such a war, for it would destroy our country and quite possibly civilization as well. America and Russia continue to stumble toward war. The greatest security threat of all is the fatalistic belief that the war no one wants cannot be avoided. The Soviet Union is most likely to commit aggression under two circumstances. The first is when it senses that its own security is slipping away and makes a military move, as in Afghanistan, to stabilize its shaky domain. The more the Soviet Union feels its relationship with the United States is unstable, the more likely it is to make such a military move. The second circumstance in which the U.S.S.R. might well use military power is when the temptation to do so is overwhelmingly because of the political vulnerability of the United States. The United States should therefore build situations of strength, but the source of such strength is not more military hardware but strong political relationships. Ironically, the rush to rearm is weakening our most important relationships — the ties with the nations of West Europe and Japan. We need a much clearer definition of the national interest in the Third World and a much closer collaboration with the rest of the industrial world on new rules for developing a just international economic order. Our failure to project power stems from excessive spending on behalf of military strategies that cannot work and insufficient spending on political and economic strategies that can work. We fear the triumph of socialism in other countries so much that we continually tie the national destiny to doomed regimes and undermine our own legitimacy as a force for freedom and democracy in the world. It is ironic that, at the very moment that the Soviet Union has lost much of its ideological force, the United States is reviving our ideological diplomacy. Our decline in power is not a consequence of our failure to build more missiles but of our failure to manage our own society. ■ Richard J. Barnet is co-founder of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. Matt Wuerker is a Portland artist living in L.A. Revue • Carrera Fashion Italiana O 5 ra at o co Finally re Quality Prescription Eyewear at Near Wholesale Prices! FRAMES (min.)........... 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