It's a Mad MAD World

I really realized how crazy our world had become when I read that our policy of nuclear deterrence is known as MAD which, believe it or not, stands for "Mutually Assured Destruction." Add to that telling acronym the "Star Wars" speech of President Reagan in which he urged the employment of American technology to render Soviet nuclear weapons useless before they could reach our shores, and you get a pretty good picture of the fantasy world we live in.

Except that we're not talking about Disneyland. If it weren't so grotesquely monstrous it would be laughable — the idea of our very survival depending on strategems denoted as MAD and Star Wars.

Note that the wording, Mutually Assured Destruction, contains as its premise a reciprocal nuclear build-up and reliance on concocting the latest annihilation techniques. In short, "You kill us, and you're dead, too!" Is this any way to run a world?

Can you imagine the havoc the latest weaponry can wreak when almost 40 years ago we had already developed a single bomb that destroyed an entire Japanese city?

Our current defense budget is $250 billion, and escalating madly. What for? How much safer do we feel today after several years of bloated Reagan defense budgets? Throwing money at the problem will no more solve the nuclear dilemma than Reagan felt spending more money on welfare would resolve that problem.

Ask your children how "secure" they feel today. Please do.

The nuclear weapons competition between the United States and the Soviet Union is destined to continue and, at best, inconclusively. Both countries are now prisoners of the fears and mistrust that they, themselves, have created and fostered. Each is afraid of the other, and will spend whatever it takes to achieve superiority. The nuclear arms race thus becomes self-perpetuating and takes on a life of its own.

All this, despite the incontrovertible evidence that superiority in this area is meaningless as both the United States and the Soviets already have it within their power to destroy each other. Thus, MAD is a fitting acronym since that's what either side would have to be to assure its suicide by launching a nuclear attack.

How long can reason and sanity prevail in the face of the accusatory invective regularly traded between Washington and Moscow? Such drift toward rancor and implacable hostility gives rise to mutual paranoia and is fraught with incendiary terrors. None of us can rest easily under such circumstances.

To put these figures in proper context, you should know that the previous pre-Reagan record deficit was less than $66 billion.

Is the public so inured to chicanery and double-talk from our leaders that it can serenely accept a tripling of the annual deficits, without sending messages thunderous enough to shake up Washington?

Unfortunately, the Democratic party leaders are little more decisive on this issue. Even responsible critics stump only for reducing the deficits rather than eliminating them. The accretion process insidiously has become irreversible. Red ink has become the accepted order of the day.

Contrary to any rationalization, we are courting disastrous consequences to our economic and financial structure if we countenance deficits of such magnitude. As pointed out in my year-ago column ("The Sins of the Parents"), the repayment of the trillions of debt can be deferred, but interest on that debt must be paid every year. At this rate, such interest payments will approach $250 billion annually by the end of this decade. What a legacy to leave to our children and grandchildren!

Granted deficits are a boring abstraction; but if neglected they will come back to haunt us. Make no mistake about it —

A boring abstraction evokes finger pointing, mortgages our future, and tests our mettle.

Is there anything we can do about this? I think there is.

Let's assume that Russia is truly fearful of our intentions (as we are of theirs). Certainly, the rhetoric of President Reagan would frighten the daylights out of me if I were a Russian; and the Russian leaders are no better.

Our first step is to present some tangible evidence of our peaceful intentions. We should inform Moscow that for the next three years we will build no new nuclear weaponry. In so doing, we will supply reliable evidence of our peaceable intent.

We will lose nothing thereby. Our current nuclear arsenal is sufficient to thwart or make suicidal any attack upon us.

What is the risk? Will Russia attempt to conquer us during this 3-year period? How well have they succeeded, close to home, in Afghanistan? How well did we succeed in Vietnam and Lebanon? I submit we have very little to lose by implementing this concrete measure to halt the death derby.

And we have a lot to gain. If the Soviet Union truly fears us, we will be giving them good faith evidence of our peaceful intentions, rather than the usual messages of acrimony and abuse. They might well reciprocate once the chain of hate and fear is broken.

Such 3-year respite may cause the Russians to revise their view of our motives and may serve as a goodwill beacon to penetrate the atmosphere of mistrust. It could break the current stalemate and herald a new dawn of escalating disarmament.

If this all sounds like idealistic nonsense, I ask you if the so-called realistic alternatives fostered by our leaders over the last three decades have brought us any closer to a secure peace?

Did you see the spontaneous way in which our athletes embraced and danced with their foreign counterparts at the closing ceremonies of the Winter Olympic games at Sarajevo, without looking first to see whether they were from behind the Iron Curtain or not? I can't accept that there is an endemic enmity between the peoples of the Soviet Union and the United States. The rhetoric of paranoia that their leaders hurl at each other causes citizens of both countries to close ranks patriotically behind their xenophobic leaders.

It need not be that way. We can and must learn to live in the same world as equals, despite our different politics, economics and cultural systems. Civility should replace hostility.

Our thinking tends to get stratified and inflexible. A train must of necessity stay on its tracks, but people can change tracks — especially when old strategems haven't worked.

So long as the notion of survivability is presented as a viable possibility in nuclear conflict, there may be no ground swell of public support for a change in our thinking. If we respond in knee-jerk fashion to our preconceived biases and prejudices, we will remain on the same track toward Armageddon. The tautological chain must be broken if any real progress is to be made.

The American people can get the kind of nuclear policy they really want. They are far from powerless. Their will can be effectuated at the ballot box. We do elect Congress and our President. It is axiomatic that elected officials live by the ballot, and they rarely opt to die by it. Ironically, they would sooner choose annihilation by nuclear holocaust to death at the polls.

Our vote is thus our ultimate weapon in effecting a change of policy. We can elect representatives who will take such measures as outlined here and who will relegate MAD and Star Wars to the video parlors where they can't harm a living soul.

We must choose leaders who will do more than pay mere lip service to the proposition that nuclear warfare is unthinkable; who will indeed realize that they, too, are now personally vulnerable in nuclear warfare; and who will realize that even if they personally survive such holocaust, they will have little left to govern.

Almost 30 years ago Albert Einstein said, "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."

What was true then is all the more true today.