The Stage Is Set for Leaders to Deal : Reagan Has Brought Us to a Rare Point--Will He Go for It?

I do not know what will happen in Iceland, nor what is intended. I do know that our most surprising President, Ronald Reagan, has established the negotiating condition that, for the first time in almost half a century, allows some hope of a downward turn in mankind’s spiraling capacity to destroy itself.

Since the end of World War II American Presidents and Soviet chairmen have risen to power, met, and left the scene without arresting the arms race--although some of them desired most deeply to do just that.

In both countries the military and its allied industries dwarf all others in resources and political power. Mammoth bureaucracies exist to serve and nourish this power. Hundreds of experts--an entire school of nuclear theologians--serve to provide the logical and numerical justification for the most arcane and absurd concept of strategy.

Contriving coinages beyond even Orwell’s prophetic powers, language itself is perverted to impart rational resonance to a powerful incoherence of fears and desires: “Essential equivalence” means that each side wants all the weapons the other has, and a few more besides. “Window of vulnerability” means that the other side may be able to destroy some of our missiles or bombers during the half-hour interval before the world goes up in flames. “Nuclear parity,” “Mutual Assured Destruction,” “Strategic Defense Initiative” are others in the compendium designed to throw a cloak of thoughtful calculation over the essential insanity with which the modern world has afflicted itself.

This immense conglomerate has been able to baffle and ultimately thwart every American President who has desired to reduce fear by restoring coherence to mankind’s control over its terrible Promethean power. And the same has been true, must have been true, for the transient leaders of the Soviet Union.

National leaders are captives as well as masters, constrained by the forces that, in part, dominate their society. They are confined by those who control the flow of facts and arguments on which decisions must be based. As a result, at every summit meeting, the political leaders have been unable to break through the clustering counselors--the disciples of armament who have surrounded, informed and counseled them. The result: No progress--for 40 years.

Perhaps you find it hard to believe. Naturally so. For it contradicts the most powerful mythologies of power and leadership. Yet President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s science adviser told me how, in his last days in office, a sorrowful President confided that his entire term was a failure because he had not persuaded either the Soviets or his own government of the urgency of arms control. And I was in Washington when President John F. Kennedy found it necessary to deliberately enlist allies from within his own Administration to persuade the Pentagon to accept a test-ban treaty--and even then winning the argument largely because radioactive fallout from testing was beginning to appear in Midwestern fields.

Since that time I have been certain that the nuclear danger would never be reduced by elaborate negotiating committees, special emissaries or contesting position papers. It would only happen if the two leaders sat in a room and made a deal. Not a deal based on amiable good feeling, naive trust or even modest affection. But an agreement that rested on the most hard-headed appraisal of mutual self-interest.

Stop for a moment and look outside. A single nuclear warhead exploded within your sight would kill more Americans than the number of those who have died in every war in American history. Both we and the Soviets have built more than 10,000 of these things, poised and ready to go. So, step by rational step, we have reached a form of insanity.

Nuclear weapons have only one rational purpose: They are built so they will not be used. Deterrence is the faith that no nation will begin a war that would result in its own destruction.

The desire for arms control rests on a conflict in premise: that faith is not enough, that humanity is not to be trusted with such power, that security--national and world--demands its elimination.

Simply reducing armaments will not achieve this result. We must at least begin to develop some form of supra-national controls over this weapon that will prevent any nation or group of nations from using it. That is the only form of “control” that can guarantee the survival of the race.

This will not be easy to achieve. We are not even sure how to begin. But there is no other path out of the dangerous, anarchic wilderness in which we have wandered for 40 years.

Ronald Reagan has, for the first time, established the necessary condition for such progress. I do not know if this was his intention. Nor if he intends to take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity. Should he do so, however, the inevitable outburst of protest and accusation will be drowned by the overwhelming approval of the American people--astonished, relieved and even exuberant by a tangible movement toward a less dangerous world.