The Great Conflict Is Over; Junk the Blunt Instruments : Missiles: A world without potential war between major countries was the stuff of utopian novels. The dream is now real, turning ballistic launchers into dinosaurs.

There are literally thousands of them. They come in various sizes and shapes. All are flat, or nearly so, at the bottom. Most, but not all, are pointed at the front. The bottom is where the fire comes out. Inside are from one to 10 (and sometimes more) warheads. They’re called ballistic launchers, and the “strategic” ones--that is, the ones made to reshape the enemy’s country, not his army--are the scary ones. They’re dinosaurs. They’re the ultimate blunt instruments. They kill.

Since the Soviets deployed the massive SS-6, and we soon thereafter deployed the first-generation Atlas ICBMs, the world has lived in the shadow of these overgrown skyrockets. Both of these first-generation weapons have entered honorable retirement--both are still used for space exploration. The SS-6 is the Soviets’ only launcher rated for manned flight, the purpose for which it may actually have been designed. The Atlas in expanded configuration still launches satellites. Both of these designs date back to the early 1950s and have long since been superseded. Beginning in the late 1950s and carrying through until today, the United States and the Soviet Union have designed, built, tested and deployed variations on these systems for almost two generations.

The mission of these weapons has never quite been understood. Never really tasked to city-smashing, their purpose is roughly the same as that of the strategic bombers of World War II, to eliminate a country’s ability to conduct war. They’re really designed to eliminate centers of industry, militarily valuable assets and command-and-control centers. That population centers often find themselves located near legitimate targets of war is a regrettable coincidence. They are the ultimate instruments of war.

But they’re a thing of the past.

The state of the world today is different from anything in recorded history. There has always been superpower conflict. You can look as far back in time as the war between Troy and the city states of Greece--probably it was fought over commercial access through the Hellespont to the Black Sea, not the famous Helen. Rome fought three wars with Carthage for control of the Mediterranean Sea. As nation-states matured, so did their wars. England and Spain--Drake, the Armadas, and colonization rights in North America. England and France--over the balance of power in Europe, and who would own North America. France and Germany--over who would dominate Europe.

Napoleon widened the scope of war around the turn of the 19th Century. Once a fairly civilized affair, the ultimate game of kings, fought by semi-professional armies for mainly limited objectives, Bonaparte invented the “nation-in-arms” model for warfare. Now the resources of an entire country would be mobilized, and the goal of war grew also from adjustments of the power balance to physical and political rule over continental land masses. The growth in scope led to a growth of savagery. While war has ever been a bloody business at the local level, the new Napoleonic rules raised the stakes to national and cultural survival--for which ends one’s efforts increased accordingly--and at the same time made the wars far more difficult to win, for a nation-state is a hearty creature, and destroying all of its resources is of necessity a protracted business.

Extreme objectives command extreme measures. World War I, fought for both the domination of Europe, and by implication the colonial rule of nearly the entire planet, exhausted that continent and upset the pre-existing world order, replacing it with chaos and instability that lead inevitability to World War II.

World War II, essentially the second act of the 1914-18 conflict, was begun to formalize a new but malignant world order, and now the scope was explicitly the political control of the entire world. For these ends new extremes of barbarism were explored, to the point that something as horrific as the Holocaust was merely the political whim of the man who began it all.

The ultimate confrontation, of course, was the West and Democracy, championed by the United States of America, against the East and Marxism, championed by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The stakes here were not merely the control of the world, but the political philosophy of all mankind. Democracy won. Contemporaneous with the evolution of war was the evolution of human thought--the two are inseparable, of course--and the winning side was that which managed to attract the largest number of adherents and to demonstrate its operational advantages. The good news here--else this column would neither have been written nor read--is that the “final conflict” was won bloodlessly, or nearly so.

And now, for the first time in all of human history, we live in a world where superpower conflict does not exist. There is no historical model for the current world order. None. A world without potential war between major countries was until two years ago the stuff of utopian novels, blue-sky dreams of minds not grounded in reality. But the dream is now real, and we’ll have to learn to cope with it.

The world is not yet at peace. There are still regional conflicts. But regional wars are mostly the local echoes of superpower conflict, the current manifestation of the 17th-Century games, adjusting the balance of power in Africa or Asia, determining spheres of influence with gunfire. These nasty little conflicts will peter out. Not fast enough. People will continue to die for purposes that will in retrospect seem as meaningful as cancer or heart disease, but it’s been a long time coming, and in historical terms the change will appear rapid enough to future spectators.

Still with us, however, are the dinosaurs of this misbegotten age, the ballistic launchers whose warheads were built to keep the peace by the threat of unprecedented destruction. Already people are finding a new reason to worry about them. As the Soviet Union enters its period of decolonization, control of those weapons becomes a very iffy proposition.

I pose a more basic question--why allow them to exist at all?

Because the weapons have served their purpose. Because they really may have kept the peace. Now the peace appears to be achieved--or at least is in sight. Whatever purpose they may have served is now consigned to the age of Achilles and Drake and Napoleon and all the rest. A new age has begun, and the place for dinosaurs is in museums.

Not all that long ago, President Reagan proposed “the Zero Option” for theater nuclear forces. It proved to be a winning idea. It’s time for that idea to be extended. Let’s start now to plan an international agreement bringing intercontinental ballistic weapons down as close to zero as we can. The reason is simple--they are no longer needed. Their existence is itself a danger, however small it might be, that someone with the desire to turn back the clock might have the means to make his perverse dream real. Nuclear weapons will not go away--you cannot revoke the laws of physics--but it should be relatively easy to eliminate the great majority of the launchers. The time to start is now.