Nuclear 'Myths'

To the Editors of The Crimson:

Errol T. Louis seems like such a bright young man. He writes articles about the nuclear debate here and in Europe as if he were Anthony Lewis '48, and he effectively discounts any responses to his pieces by labelling all his opponents dupes of the Reagan Administration spewing forth propaganda like mindless morons (a nice twist on the traditional right-wing method of calling opponents Communist dupes). This is a tried and true method for advancing one's opinion--discredit the opposition and no one but you is left for the reader to believe--and it speaks well for Mr. Louis's cunning. I wish the same could be said for his common sense.

While trying to debunk the "myths" which rule our strategic thinking, Mr. Louis so effectively muddles the issue that one is left wondering where he has led us after meandering through an extended tour of the world of illogic. His first major point is that the threat of war in Europe is virtually non-existent, and in this he is quite right. But, in his desire to see us put less emphasis on the defense of Europe, he clearly fails to see that the sole reason that war in Europe is unlikely is that America and her allies have remained firm in their determination to defend Western Europe against Soviet aggression.

Deterrence works and has worked for 38 years, but it will only work in the future if NATO continues to match the Soviets missile for missile (or if nuclear weapons can be cut back to a lower, and equal, level), and this is why the Europeans asked us in 1979 to counter the growing threat of the Soviet SS-20 missile. At the time there were only 120 of them a number which Leonid Brezhnev called sufficient for nuclear parity in Europe. Today there are 351 SS-20's west of the Urals, and Yuri Andropov (you remember, the one who took out a contract on the Pope) claims that this is equality, although there have no new Western missiles installed since 1979. Behind this distorted Soviet view lies the desire to maintain the strategic superiority built up since the late 1970s, and to thereby decouple the U.S. from its European allies. As long as there is a realistc chance that the Soviets can attain this goat, they will reject any equitable compromise out of hand (as they did recently). Only the threatened deployment of 572 Pershing II and Cruise missiles brought the Soviets to the bargaining table at Geneva, and now Mr. Louis wants to remove this threat unilaterally, an action that would clearly have the effect of removing any incentive that the Soviets have to come to an agreement. Instead the West must stand firm and negotiate for parity from a position of strength.

Mr. Louis' other main point is that America is just as willing to resort to nuclear blackmail as the Soviets, and will often lie to the public to achieve its aims. It is true that the U.S. has threatened the use of nuclear missiles before (and has even used two atomic bombs), but such threats have ended two bloody wars and kept the Soviets at bay in Iran (1946) and Cuba (1962).

As for lying, other than routine propaganda, our Defense Department has a regrettable habit of overstating the Soviet threat, and thus our need for all types of weapons, and this habit must be broken if we are ever to control our defense budget. But these facts are mere trifles when compared to Soviet actions over the past 40 years, and it would be ludicrous to draw from them the conclusion that the U.S. is more or even as likely as the Soviets to begin a nuclear war.

When the U.S. had a nuclear monopoly it may not have always acted in a perfectly virtuous fashion, but it did support and defend freedom throughout the world, and it managed to keep the peace. In the light of the invasions of Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968) and Afghanistan (1979), the crushing of dissent in Poland, and the unleashing of Cubans upon Angola and Vietnamese upon Cambodia, who would have preferred to see a Soviet nuclear monopoly in the years 1945-49, or would like to see Soviet superiority in the future? Eric Stocked '84