To the Editors of The Crimson:
In his statement on the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, SALT II (Crimson, February 21), Professor Everett I. Mendelsohn unfortunately gets many things quite wrong. No statement of his, however, is more misleading than the one in which he asserts that at present the United States holds 30,000 nuclear warheads and the Soviet Union 20,000.
Since he is speaking in the context of SALT II, I must assume he is speaking of strategic missiles. Unless Professor Mendelsohn has access to private sources of information unavailable even to the Secretary of Defense, his figures are wide off the mark. According to Mr. Harold Brown's current defense posture statement, the United States now has 9200 warheads and the Soviet Union 6000.
An error of over 200 per cent strikes me, to put it mildly, as excessive. Richard Pipes Baird Professor of History
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