"This means, in turn, that a purely deferent strike force need be no more than modes size. Less than 1000 megatons--a few hundred megatons--emplaced in secure and "hardened" bases have enough retaliatory killing power to keep the enemy from striking your population first."
Piel also discounted the pre-emptive strike, or "retaliate in advance," as an irrational strategy. Despite our over-whelming nuclear superiority, "counterforece" attacks on hardened targets--aimed at knocking out the enemy's deterrent--"are of little avail." They would require pin-point location of the target, a continent away; fantastically accurate guidance of missiles; and a strike capacity with "the astronomical dimension of 20,00 megatons."
The official justification for our present military posture, Piel stressed, is not based on this pre-emptive strike strategy, which requires a "huge preponderance of striking power, "but takes another line. Thanks, to our superiority in nuclear strike power, it is said, the second-strike capability that would remain to us after a first strike by the enemy would be varsity greater than his first strike. But there is a contradiction buried in this line of logic that makes nonsense of this statement: an enemy so heavily outgunned could not conceivably be contemplating a first strike.
"So long as the game of nuclear war is played on paper, there is never a last word. It can still be argued,l it is said, that our overwhelming nuclear power promotes our security because it interdicts a first strike from the other side. But a necessary corollary to this argument is that the other side should also feel more secure in our possession of a potential first-strike capability. And in fact they have been given to understand that we would never strike first except on some intolerable provocation.
"Yet, somehow, our excess nuclear armament has failed to promote stability in world politics. The Soviet Union called off the moratorium on nuclear testing last year, and reversed the hopeful downward trend in its military expenditures. When disarmament talks resumed at Geneva this year, the Russians proved to be more than ever obsessively concerned with their geographical security aid resistant to early inspection.
"Our enormous armament also complicates our own approach to disarmament. We would have to do so much more disarming than the other side that ratification by the U.S. Senate begins to look like a bigger miracle than an agreement at Geneva.
"Meanwhile, the prolongation of the arms race darkens than prospects of the world. If the present conference at Geneva should break down, it cannot be reconversed without the presence of chin. Which is on the verge of becoming a nuclear power. By think there will be either new nuclear powers demanding or resisting invitations to the conference. France is only the first second-class power to realize that the nuclear weapon is the ultimate equalizer, and to adopt this dangerous route beak to the summit.
"As the number of players in the game approaches the with number, the hazard from irrational trategies, or from here accident, must rise. In the words of G.P. Snow--the Godkin lecturer two years ago--We know, with the certain of statistical truth, that if enough of these weapons are made--by enough different states--some of them are going to blow up!"
Piel began his address with the dra-