‘Is Winning Arms Race Worth Living For?’

How sad to read Richard Goodwin’s article (Editorial Pages, Oct. 3), “Is Winning the Arms Race Worth Living For?” Like so many of us, he is a person frustrated with the senselessness that threatens our extinction.

What an incredible time we live in--and what a burden mankind must collectively shoulder every minute of every day of our lives.

As Charles Dickens once prefaced about yet another chaotic moment in our world’s history, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” To the tick of the clock, both the United States and the Soviet Union have thus far managed to avoid those “worst of times.” But in their fear of each other, they have deferred the rights of battle to the rest of humanity.

Like seismic shock waves, the paranoid rumblings of these two giants have unleashed global warfare of a different kind. Around the world, both countries have fostered champions, armed them for combat, then set them forward on the field to battle for our most dubious honors.

If the nuclear war has yet to be fought from missile silos, surely this great world is being torn asunder in other sad ways. One has only to look at Lebanon to understand the first results of this international match--a sickening example of all that is ugly in the motives of misguided nations.

Like Goodwin’s “Looking Glass” in Lebanon we have been given a privileged, if frightening, vision of what we can become--and a glimpse of the chaos that threatens our uncertain future.

That both the United States and the Soviet Union have begun to feel the wrath born of a world they helped perpetuate, should not surprise them. This is the legacy.

Let us supremely hope that both nations can forgo the coward’s role and, instead, find strength enough to help bring peace to a planet so desperately in need of rest.

We can only await the decisions of Geneva.

FRANK KERR

Los Angeles