President Carter started his recent address to the League of Women Voters with what he and his audience apparently thought was a joke. The typed transcript shows the word “(Laughter)” immediately after it.
The President said, “When people ask me now, ‘How can we solve our problems on an international and national basis quicker and more incisively?’, my answer is ‘We need a better class of problems.'” It is true that Carter has had a very difficult set of problems to deal with, but the principal difficulty has not been in the circumstances but in the inexperience, inability, and lack of will in the man who so eagerly sought and got the job of being our presidential problem-solver.
Take, for example, the question which one woman in his audience asked him about the SALT II Treaty. Carter replied, “It is still on the calendar as a top priority business. … I have made it plain to the Soviet Union leaders that until this treaty is ratified, provided there is a reciprocal commitment by the Soviet Union honored through our own close observation of their action, that we will also honor the provi- sions of SALT II even before it is ratified.”
Carter will never get “a better class of problems” as long as he salts down U.S. defenses by the humiliating inferiorities imposed in SALT II. When he committed to SALT II, he committed us to a policy of inferiority to the Soviet Union in the weapons that count in the nuclear-space age such as ICBMs, submarines, and long-range bombers.
The threat of nuclear war has never been real to the American people. Because nuclear war is so horrible to contemplate, and because the sloganeers have told us it is “unthinkable,” most people don’t believe it would ever happen.
The popular notion of nuclear war is that, after the pushing of one fatal button (either accidentally or on purpose), the end result would be that the whole world would go up in smoke, that survival for anyone would be next to impossible, and that the living (if any) would envy the dead. Popular acceptance of this scenario has been fostered by such scientifically false movies as “On the Beach” and “Dr. Strangelove.”
The popular notion of nuclear war is a macabre vision of Russia and the United States each firing all their missiles and bombs at each other, resulting in the near-total devastation of both countries and decimation of their populations. Nuclear war is not going to happen that way.
The Soviet missile force is designed for one primary mission: to destroy American missiles in their silos. Defense Secretary Harold Brown has been testifying for several years that the Soviets will have the capability to do that in the “early 1980s.”
If the Soviets carry out their primary mission of firing their SS-18 heavy ICBMs to knock out our Minuteman missiles in their concrete silos, less than one percent of the American people would become casualties. The rest of us would hear about it on television as we hear about the Miami riots or the eruption of Mount St. Helens.
The popular mythology propagated by disarmament advocates tells us that, if this should ever happen, our President would fire our missiles back at the Russians. That’s what is called “mutual assured destruction.” But would he? In the first place, he would only have a maximum of about 20 minutes to make that dread decision, and even that length of time assumes perfect functioning of all watchdog personnel and equipment.
In the second place, what good would such a retaliatory strike possibly do? Our missiles are built and programmed only to kill people, not weapons. Killing millions of Russians would serve no moral or military purpose and would only bring upon our cities a sure retaliation from the hundreds of still unused Soviet missiles.
The end result of this most probable scenario for nuclear war is that our nation would be defeated by the Soviet Union. The Soviets would then have the capability to do to us what they have done to every other nation they have conquered.
The American people would be as helpless as are our hostages in Iran and the conquered people of Afghanistan. The only way to get a better class of problems is to rebuild our military superiority so that we can avoid being the loser in the nuclear confrontation that is coming just as soon as the Soviets think they have the power to knock out our Minuteman missiles.
