II WEAPONRY ~ The Price of Defense, The Boston Study Group, 1979, $15 from: New York Times Boo_k Co. 3 P;:irk Avenue New York, NY 10016 For a society living more than 30 years in the ominous shadow of our own stockpile of more than 30,000 nuclear warheads and a global military escalation fueled in large part by our own government's gigantic and almost uncontroll~ed "defense" budget, this book comes as a shining ray of hope. It is .comparable in the military area to Lovins' Soft Energy Paths in the energy field or Lappe's and Collins's Food First in exposing the myths of our agricultural/food practices. Together, these three books are additionally encouraging, in that they show that networks of knowleqgeable and concerned· people exist in every area of our culture- be it health, education, transportation, law or whatever-that can winnow through the myths of our current practices, assemble a viable vision of saner and wiser ways, and give us the basic ammunition to open up public discussion and action to refocus our activities in more benign ways. The Price ofDefense shows pretty convincinglx that the majority of our ,"defense" spending is bogus-that the only real military risk our country is exposed to is nuclear missiles, and that we have admitted no possible defense against them. It shows how our excessive military power encourages us to use it in offense-ive ways abroad·, and shows the total and face-risking vulnerability of small, shoulder-launl:hed "intelligent" anti-ship/plane/tank ~issiles. Such RA IN cheap weapons can, and have in Vietnam and the Israeli wars, regularly erase y;nulti-million or -billion dollar equipment. It shows that Pearl Harbor, one of the flags always waved to rally us to greater military expenditures, was actually a major error by the Japaneseit eliminated only obsolete types of ships, and galvanized the American will into action against them much more powerfully than if it had never happened. The BSG show one of those epochmaking major shifts of military advantage occurring today-now from the wealthy to those with popular support; from those with elaborate armaments to those with a sound base in human rights; from offen~ive to defense advantage of action. Our little group in the Oregon governor's office shocked Pentagon officials five years ago when we confidently asserted that the U.S. no longer had the energetics to support a sustained foreign war. But that was peanuts compared to1what these good people so cal!DlY ai:id clearly lay out for us. They show, in conclusion, how we can actually strengthen our real defensive capabilities, reduce the provocativeness of our present military capabilities, and simultaneously reduce our military expenditures by 40 percent. A big order, well filled. Read and act. -TB () rn en en "Anti-Submarine Warfare," Robert Aldridge, Co-Evolution Quarterly, Fall 1979, $3.50 from: Box 428 Sausalito, CA 94965 Aldridge details one of the current examples of the provocative nature of our military expenditure's and the escalation they cause in the threat of catastrophic war. It has been repeatedly shown that our military research efforts have conjured up new horrors unopposed by related action by Russia or other countries, but which result in 4 or 5 years time in the development of countervailing capabilities by these countries. Our emerging capabilities, through precise tracking of the Russian missile submarine fleet, to destroy the Soviet ability to retaliate against a nuclear assault by our country threatens to destabilize the precarious balance of deterence upon which our standoff has depended. "It is ironic that a U.S. disarming first strike capability, regardless of intentions, could motivate the USSR to attack first. An l,mstable condition could come about d\lring some future international crisis when Soviet leaders might feel tempted to launclit their weapons before they lose them. Thus could be the beginning of World War III." -TB November 1979 RAIN Page 3
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