In the September 13, 1961 issue of the New York Herald Tribune, the American political commentator, Walter Lippmann, eloquently summed up nuclear diplomacy. I have used a secondary source for my own quotation: the democratic socialist magazine, Dissent.
Nuclear Diplomacy
Dissent, Vol VIII. No. 4, Autumn 1961, inside front cover:
“American nuclear power can reduce Soviet society to smoldering ruins, and leave the wretched survivors shocked, starving and diseased. The Soviet Union can, it is coolly estimated, kill between thirty and seventy million Americans. Such a war would not be followed by reconstruction. It would be followed by a savage struggle for existence as the survivors crawled out of their shelters, and the American republic would be replaced by a stringent military dictatorship trying to keep some kind of order among the desperate survivors….
“This being the nuclear age it is the paramount rule of international politics that a great nuclear power must not put another great nuclear power in a position where it must choose between suicide and surrender. And the corollary of this rule is that no great nuclear power must put itself in a position where it has made such absolute and such rigid stipulations that it can no longer negotiate an honorable and tolerable accommodation.”
Walter Lippmann, New York Herald Tribune Sept, 13 1961
Rather sensible words. They can be compared to the less sensible words in Irving Howe’s editorial in the same issue of Dissent from where I extracted the above quote:
Against Nuclear Testing!
I.H. [Irving Howe]
Dissent, Vol VIII. No. 4, Autumn 1961, pp.427-429.
We propose• that the United States announce to the world that it will not follow the lead of the Soviet Union in resuming tests of nuclear weapons….• that the United States declare that it will refrain from nuclear testing no matter what any of the other powers may do.
