‘Dropping Out of War System’

Thank you for Mueller’s column, which raises questions about our past policy of deterrence. Two prominent physicists would seem to confirm Mueller’s thesis that the fear of nuclear weapons does not fully explain the absence of a nuclear war over the past 40 years.

Several years ago Hans Bethe and Kurt Gottfried pointed out that for two decades we were immune to a Soviet nuclear attack. But that vulnerability did not deter the Soviets from blockading Berlin, absorbing Czechoslovakia and crushing the revolt in Hungary. Furthermore, in 1965 a speaker from the War College in Washington conceded that if the Russians wanted to attack the United States, they would not do so by military means but by infiltration, subversion and sabotage.

Thus nuclear weapons are rendered impotent in the face of revolutionary communism. Let us hope, therefore, that the destruction of nuclear arsenals in both Russia and the U.S. will continue.

VANCE GEIER

Los Angeles