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The American Crisis:
Political Idealism and the Cold War
- Abstract
A VERY large number of the ablest minds in the country, if concerned at all with defense and foreign policy, work for the Air Force’s Rand Corporation, the Army’s Operations Research Office at Johns Hopkins, or in the CIA. In some universities, the political science department has close personal and professional ties with such agencies. So, too, within each of the Armed Services and the AEC there are exceptionally intelligent men whose full-time job it is to find holes in any possibility of a test ban or other rapprochement with the Russians. They are in the business of manufacturing objections, much as any military clique in any country can manufacture incidents. Take, for example, the fantastic idea, developed in Edward Teller’s Livermore Laboratory, that deep holes might be dug in salt mines and bombs exploded therein without anybody’s noticing-a notion that is fantastic, not because the Russians couldn’t do it, but because it would take a long time, require immense commotion of men and machines, and would therefore be very hard to keep secret, if not from us, then from the Russian people themselves. Moreover, there are numerous indications that the Soviet Union has little interest in testing small or “clean” nuclear weapons, and that many Soviet citizens have a better sense of the dangers of a spread of nuclear weapons than is often found on the American side.*
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