Aren’t there already enough nuclear weapons to kill everyone in the world several times over?
The “overkill” argument is fraudulent emotionalism. There are enough rifle bullets in the world to kill everyone several times over. There are enough drugs in the pharmacies to kill everyone several times over. Those are irrelevant statistics because rifle bullets and drugs will never be used that way.
The real question is: in a nuclear exchange, how many Americans and how many Russians would be killed? The best answer is, 140-150 million Americans but only 15-20 million Russians. Soviet looses would be smaller than they suffered in World War II. So, from the point of view of those who place no value on human life, that exchange would be very profitable to the Soviets.
Isn’t nuclear war “unthinkable”? Don’t the Soviets realize that neither side could win a nuclear war?
Even if it were true that a nuclear was is unwinnable (which cannot be proved), the evidence is overwhelming from the mouths of Kremlin leaders that the Soviets think that nuclear was is “thinkable” and that they can “win” a nuclear war. It takes two to make peace, but it takes only one to make war. As long as the Soviets think nuclear war is winnable and plan all their military strategy to “win” and to survive a nuclear war, Americans are supremely foolish to pretend otherwise.
Do nuclear weapons have any use other than to kill millions of people?
Absolutely. They are immensely useful for political and economic blackmail. The day after SALT II is ratified, the Soviets can immediately push the Arabs to use their “oil weapon” against the West through a new oil embargo or a new doubling of oil prices. When we failed to protect our sources of oil in Iran and other Middle East countries, the Arabs realized that we cannot or will not oppose Soviet aggression there. The immediate danger of SALT II is no gasoline at the pump.
Won’t SALT II stop the Soviets from building more nuclear weapons that they would otherwise build?
No. The numbers set in SALT II are exactly the numbers of weapons the Soviets need to attain decisive nuclear supremacy. SALT II does not prohibit the Soviets from building anything they need to control the world. SALT II, for example, allows the Soviets to keep all their 308 “heavy” SS-18 missiles, each of which contains ten MIRVs; that makes 3,080 two-megaton warheads of great accuracy. By contrast, our entire force of Minuteman missiles can deliver only 1,650 warheads of about 170 kilotons each (only one-tenth the power of the Soviet warheads).
Won’t we be able to verify whether the Rusians are cheating on SALT II?
No. Many of the major provisions of SALT II are unverifiable by satellite photography. Cameras cannot see what is going on under the roofs of buildings. They cannot discover the number of warheads in ICBMs or the range of cruise missiles. The Soviet K.G.B. purchased from U.S. spies highly-secret information about our satellite systems which make it easy for the Soviets to encode data given off during missile tests and thereby evade our verification. We have lost our valuable on-ground listening posts in Iran close to the Soviet border. The Carter Administration does not even claim that SALT II is verifiable. It claims only that it is “adequately verifiable.” Would you be satisfied if your spouse were “adequately faithful”?
If we reject SALT II, isn’t the alternative an “arms race” which will lead to nuclear war?
History proves that a disarmament race is a bigger cause of war than an arms race. It was a disarmament race that led to World War II: the London and Washington naval treaties that supposedly limited the number of ships owned by the major powers, the Kellogg-Briand Pact that supposedly outlawed war, and the Munich Agreement which the Prime Minister of England said brought “peace in our time.”
The greatest danger in the world is not from an arms race but from superior nuclear weapons in the hands of ruthless men. To paraphrase an old bumper strip: “When nuclear weapons are outlawed, only international outlaws will own nuclear weapons.”
