The Price of Paranoia

She thought...she would chat for a moment with the girl at her right. Just as she turned her head away from the windows, the room was filled with a blinding light...

Everything fell, and Miss Sasaki lost consciousness. The ceiling dropped suddenly and the wooden floor above collapsed in splinters and the people up there came down and the roof above them gave way; but principally and first of all, the bookcases right behind her swooped forward and the contents threw her down, with her left leg horribly twisted and breaking underneath her. There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books. --John Hersey, Hiroshima

USUALLY, ONLY the photographs are true. Usually, the words and numbers--telling us of the hundreds of millions who would die, and of the smoking, charred rubble and flesh that would remain--seem more like lurid black humor than objective reporting. Or worse, the truth of nuclear war gets omitted completely--it is a truth too sensational to be believed, too obscene to be printed.

The Boston Study Group comes closer to the truth than most. Its members--four academies, a politician and a graphics artist--have thought about the consequences of nuclear war. They have imagined Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and have wrought their vision into The Price of Defense, a book about the American military that is at once humane and informative, radical and sensible, evident yet original. For the most part, they have avoided both the military jargon that sanitizes insanity and the tired, violent rhetoric of destruction. Though the book's voice is somewhat anonymous (an inevitable result of group writing) occasionally lapses into obfuscation (kill capability, unacceptable damage and soft-skinned targets), it generally speaks plainly and directly, a welcome virtue in a book about military policy.

Formed out of a meeting at the Harvard Faculty Club in 1973, the members of the Boston Study Group met weekly for four years, talking, writing, criticizing, trying to find a way to "re-orient American foreign policy" away from future Hiroshimas and Vietnams. In The Price of Defense, they have made sense of the senseless--they have brought order to the chaos of American foreign and military policy. The present system rests on the assumption that more military spending means a safer nation, and it fails to subordinate military spending to the government's foreign policy goals. The system does not budget money lot specific policy purposes, such as defending Western Europe against Soviet aggression instead the Department of Defense requests and Congress votes funds for accounting categories "military construction" and This same schism between purpose and spending exists in the Congressional committee structure the Armed Services Committee determines the military budget, the House International Affairs Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee articulate our supposedly non-interventionist, peace-loving foreign policy.

THIS CHAOTIC approach has plagued those outside the government as well. As the authors note, "What has been lacking is a coherent alternative to the unchanging stance of the Pentagon. Public concern with military matters has been confined to individual weapons or foreign bases or bizarre instances of waste. The B-1 bomber becomes a cause, while the cruise missile gets built. The neutron bomb grabs the public attention, while outmoded long-range bombers are deployed. "The broad links from major military forces to policy goals, on the one hand, and to alternative levels of military spending, on the other hand, have not been made clear," the study group says.

The Price of Defense succeeds in forging those links and providing the alternatives. The Boston Study Group members begin with a coherent view of what U.S. foreign policy goals should be--defense of our traditional allies and of the United States itself, and the maintenance of a nuclear second-strike capability. In calm and modest style, they then describe in detail how U.S. defense spending could be reduced by 40 per cent. They propose cutbacks in the forces "which are primarily useful not against the U.S.S.R. but against the lesser military powers in the poorer half of the world, like Vietnam," and in "the vast excess in the quantity of nuclear weapons" that the U.S. now has and continues to build. They recommend that we do without our nuclear bombers and land-based missiles; the nuclear submarine force, the most invulnerable to Soviet attack, could also be substantially reduced:

It should be possible to reduce the 5000 to 7000 ready 40-kiloton warheads now on our recommended 31 boats down to one warhead per missle, 16 tubes per boat, for a total of 496 warheads. This is an adequate deterrent. It would still guarantee about 40 equivalent megatons delivered-more than a third of Soviet industry at once, with the probably prompt death of 15 to 20 million people. We say nothing of the raging fires, the confire mated lands, the burned and injured, the epidemic of tumors, the dearth of food and fuel and shelter in the winter to come, the scattered lable of the nation. Ample deterrent?

THE DISPARITY between what the national debate over foreign and military policy is and what it should be is striking. Deceived by faulty military metaphors, we still speak of a "balance of terror," as though relative power exists when each side can annihilate the other several times over.

Perhaps when these six people met over pizza (they almost entitled the book The Pizza Papers), the gobbledygook appropriate to high-level briefings and high-flown speeches and editorials just sounded like the absurdity that it is.

The members of the Boston Study Group have taken an important step towards changing the terms of our national debate. With The Price of Defense, they have spoken with clarity and boldness challenging an entrenched and dangerous view of the world. Their primer for peace won't be found on the bookcase that may crush us all someday.

THIS CHAOTIC approach has plagued those outside the government as well. As the authors note, "What has been lacking is a coherent alternative to the unchanging stance of the Pentagon. Public concern with military matters has been confined to individual weapons or foreign bases or bizarre instances of waste. The B-1 bomber becomes a cause, while the cruise missile gets built. The neutron bomb grabs the public attention, while outmoded long-range bombers are deployed. "The broad links from major military forces to policy goals, on the one hand, and to alternative levels of military spending, on the other hand, have not been made clear," the study group says.

The Price of Defense succeeds in forging those links and providing the alternatives. The Boston Study Group members begin with a coherent view of what U.S. foreign policy goals should be--defense of our traditional allies and of the United States itself, and the maintenance of a nuclear second-strike capability. In calm and modest style, they then describe in detail how U.S. defense spending could be reduced by 40 per cent. They propose cutbacks in the forces "which are primarily useful not against the U.S.S.R. but against the lesser military powers in the poorer half of the world, like Vietnam," and in "the vast excess in the quantity of nuclear weapons" that the U.S. now has and continues to build. They recommend that we do without our nuclear bombers and land-based missiles; the nuclear submarine force, the most invulnerable to Soviet attack, could also be substantially reduced:

It should be possible to reduce the 5000 to 7000 ready 40-kiloton warheads now on our recommended 31 boats down to one warhead per missle, 16 tubes per boat, for a total of 496 warheads. This is an adequate deterrent. It would still guarantee about 40 equivalent megatons delivered-more than a third of Soviet industry at once, with the probably prompt death of 15 to 20 million people. We say nothing of the raging fires, the confire mated lands, the burned and injured, the epidemic of tumors, the dearth of food and fuel and shelter in the winter to come, the scattered lable of the nation. Ample deterrent?

THE DISPARITY between what the national debate over foreign and military policy is and what it should be is striking. Deceived by faulty military metaphors, we still speak of a "balance of terror," as though relative power exists when each side can annihilate the other several times over.

Perhaps when these six people met over pizza (they almost entitled the book The Pizza Papers), the gobbledygook appropriate to high-level briefings and high-flown speeches and editorials just sounded like the absurdity that it is.

The members of the Boston Study Group have taken an important step towards changing the terms of our national debate. With The Price of Defense, they have spoken with clarity and boldness challenging an entrenched and dangerous view of the world. Their primer for peace won't be found on the bookcase that may crush us all someday.