To the Editor:

It is a striking coincidence that Richard Pipes’s article, “How to Cope With the Soviet Threat” [August], appeared almost simultaneously with the publication of two articles, a letter to the editor, and an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association and another one in the New England Journal of Medicine. These articles deal with the disastrous consesequences of a nuclear war and the futility of any reasonable medical response. Similar articles written by distinguished physicists, climatologists, and biologists on the ecological consequences of nuclear war have appeared in outstanding scientific journals throughout the year.

Mr. Pipes dismisses the threat of nuclear war by asserting that the “familiar horrors” of nuclear war resemble the holocaust fantasies that have been expressed for more than 5,000 years in religious writings. He calls these quasi-religious fears of the supernatural. He feels that the matter of nuclear war should be stripped of its emotionalism so that we and the Soviets can get down to “matter-of-fact bargaining.” He advocates continued political, economic, and military pressure that will result in the collapse of the intransigent Soviet system. A military build-up must include nuclear weapons and anti-ballistic-missile defense systems. He sees no other solution.

Does Mr. Pipes believe that the statement in 1981 that the board of trustees of the American Medical Association made about the medical consequences of a nuclear war and the impossibility of an adequate medical response is emotional and quasi-religious? Does he believe that the 30,000 members of Physicians for Social Responsibility are suffering from fear of an ancient fantasy? Does he believe that the thousands of physicists and biologists, including at least forty Nobel laureates, who fear the destruction of the combatant nations, and perhaps the world, by a nuclear war are irrational? Does he not recognize that ancient holocaust fantasies can quickly become today’s realities?

I submit that even a professor of history at Harvard cannot be so ignorant of the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology which reasonably estimate the disastrous consequences of such a war. Rather, I would suggest that Mr. Pipes denies what he knows because his hate and fear of the Soviet Union are even greater than his fear of nuclear war. His position is hardly devoid of the emotionalism which he suggests we avoid. Mr. Pipes’s pseudo-rationalism is dangerous. What is needed is an appropriate blend of reason and emotion for dealing with the only problem in the world in which an accident or miscalculation could lead quickly to the death of most of us and the destruction of the very things for which such a war might be fought.

Morris A. Lipton
Director, Biological Sciences Research Center
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, North Carolina

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To the Editor:

Richard Pipes moves quickly to address what he identifies as the “critical issue”—the cause of Soviet misbehavior. He dismisses at once the suggestion that the Russians may be overly concerned about national security as a consequence of foreign invasions, and he supports this dismissal by reference to a Russian study dated 1898.

But the study of history is not the same as participating in it or, worse, being the victim of it. One cannot remain unmoved by the enormity of the suffering resulting from the Nazi invasion of 1941, and Russians have been endlessly schooled in and reminded of its awesome reality ever since. But Mr. Pipes would have us believe that such a concern, springing logically from events of the recent past, is no more than the musing of American “dilettantes.” Surely the exploration of such a “critical issue” is deserving of greater empathetic insight.

But his speculation on the source of Soviet misbehavior is not what one might have expected from an observer trained in scholarship. By ignoring the study of history, political philosophy, social psychology, and the more generally accepted principles of introspective psychology and psychoanalysis, Mr. Pipes has brought no more understanding to this issue than one would have brought to bear on it from the perspective of the Middle Ages. Rather than exploring causes “rooted in Russian geography and history, others in Marxist-Leninist theory and practice,” he spurns his own suggested path of historical overview for which he is professionally qualified and in its place gratuitously selects the narrowest cause possible. In short, the cause of the Soviets’ bad behavior, according to Mr. Pipes, is that bad people are in command. And as the outcome of his harsh judgment he has a terrible punishment in store for them.

He recommends that the United States renounce the “barbaric” policy of retaliatory strikes aimed at the Russian civilian population. He turns to concentrate instead on “the true culprits of such aggression, the Soviet elite and its armed forces.” He informs us that there are between 10,000 and 20,000 targets of political and military significance in the Soviet Union, and that the United States must possess sufficient warheads in its nuclear arsenal to destroy each and every one of them after absorbing a Soviet first strike—“this capability alone will provide a deterrent credible to Moscow.” Nonsense. Sufficiency in terms of deterring a deliberate first strike on the part of rational men—how to deter the crazies is an altogether different matter—should be defined as no more than that which would, in fact, deter, plus a bit extra as some cushion for error. Would not the destruction of 500 of the largest cities suffice? But Mr. Pipes insists that we not think in terms of cities—that would be not only barbaric but “futile” (?)—and instead substitutes political and military objectives numbering in the tens of thousands. But wait; just what are these “objectives of political and military significance” after the Soviets have launched their first strike? I would suggest there would then be no military objectives left to target. They would have been already employed. Silos and submarines whose missiles have been launched, airfields whose bombers are in arctic airspace, and the command-and-control centers which coordinated these activities all become the refuse of this dismal scenario. Like so many bits of disposable packaging, they are not to be confused with what they previously contained; thus they possess no further military potential. Obviously there is no great purpose to be served in the mass destruction of empty launchers, and no reason to suspect that the Soviets would have kept significant numbers of missiles in reserve. Their first strike would not be exercised with restraint but with gusto; if it does not succeed as a knock-out punch with the first blow, they then must suffer the awesome consequences of its failure.

And just what is meant by objectives of “political significance”? Beyond wasting the Kremlin, are we to target bureaucrats all over the Russian mainland on their way home to dinner? Or have we developed a warhead capable of distinguishing commissars from common folk? Of course not. The political “objective” is Marxist domination, repression, and control. But these political elements are the warp and weft of contemporary Soviet life. It would be impossible to extricate them from their human surroundings to be set up as theoretical targets far from the cities we would presumably refrain from attacking.

Once we place Mr. Pipes’s blueprint for retaliatory attack under a bright light it melts like soft wax, and what emerges from the puddle is the specter of the very horror he would abjure: the mass destruction of Russian cities. There would be nothing else left to target. Military ones would have disappeared by means of their previous employment, and “political” ones are merely the sanitizing euphemism for the cities.

In the middle of all this he slips in the bogus cue that “. . . the U.S. has no first-strike doctrine or capability whereas the Soviet side has both.” We have no first-strike capability? This humble disclaimer is patently false. Far from lacking such capability, we are its proud inventor. We were the first to create a large nuclear force and deploy missiles abroad in the early 60’s. We were first in highly accurate warheads and long-range cruise missiles, first in MIRVed missiles, first in placing the world’s most accurate missiles ten minutes from the other side’s command-and-control centers—a vital element in any first-strike scenario—and we are now busily engaged in the development and deployment of an across-the-board first-strike triad. How else can one view the MX missile, Trident submarines with new missiles of first-strike accuracy, the B-l bomber, the Stealth bomber, and the many thousands of cruise missiles being deployed throughout our three military branches? Doctrines aside, first-strike capability is a thing we have aplenty, and from the Soviets’ viewpoint it is their task to try their damnedest to match it. To insist that they have the capability we lack is contrary to the factual record. Why this attempt, irrelevant to the paragraph in which it is placed, to establish through suggestion our innocence in these matters?

A pattern is emerging from all this, but to complete it a closing element is required both to insure its credibility to the reader as well as to reveal its essential characteristic. And this element is persuasively provided by the proffered example. This consists of the “. . . most shocking instance of the contribution that Western technology has made to Soviet military capabilities. . . .” It is the tale of the Soviets’ requirement for ball bearings, made evident in 1959-60, and their lack of machinery to produce the large quantities necessary for their missile-guidance systems. Are we to believe what is implied? That (a) while they could define their requirements in 1959, and (b) knew that the technical problems of manufacture had been solved, yet (c) twenty-five years later, they still would be incapable of producing their own? Presumably what a technologically advanced country cannot imitate in twenty-five years is effectively beyond its grasp forever. Ball bearings? Is there something systemic in the Soviets’ machine-design capability that closes them off for all time from matching the skills of the Bryant Chucking Grinder Company of Springfield, Vermont? Not likely. It is difficult to believe that the present circumstances of nuclear balance are in any way different from what they would have been had we continued to deny export permits for this equipment.

The pattern is now complete. It is a paradigm of childhood fantasy expressed in the familiar elements of the fairy tale. The Soviet Union is run by wicked men. Taken as a whole they represent the witch, the bad wolf. Their wickedness is endemic—it will not change or be modified. The punishment they deserve is no less than the cataclysmic annihilation of their evil empire. We, on the other hand, are as innocent as Little Red Riding Hood, constantly tempted, as was Snow White with the seductive apple, by their wily offers of peaceful intercourse.

The problem is not that Mr. Pipes is dead wrong. He is in some measure correct. The problem resides in the gaps between his perceptions and the nature of the real world. While the gaps may be small, as in a poster whose colors are only slightly out of register, the resulting image becomes badly distorted—and a poor source for guidance. It is in these out-of-register areas that the fairy-tale elements enter the scene.

Bruno Bettelheim writes, in The Uses of Enchantment:

Only if a fairy tale met the conscious and unconscious requirements of many people was it repeatedly retold, and listened to with great interest. . . . The wild and destructive wolf stands for all asocial, unconscious, devouring powers against which one must learn to protect oneself, and which one can defeat through the strength of one’s ego. . . . The wolf’s badness is something the young child recognizes within himself: his wish to devour, and its consequence—the anxiety about possibly suffering such a fate himself. So the wolf is an externalization, a projection of the child’s badness. . . . Whatever our age, only a story conforming to the principles underlying our thought processes carries conviction for us.

Mr. Pipes is well informed, but his presentation fails to survive logical examination. Why should such a learned man go so wrong? One possible explanation is that he has attempted to force-fit elements of the real world into the template shapes of his uniquely personal perceptions—the inevitable exercise of those who lack the empathetic skills essential to objectivity. But he writes persuasively, and unless we read very carefully we may be convinced that his view is the one with which we must deal, along with his recommendations for response. But if we wish to instruct others how to cope we surely must first learn to cope with ourselves, or we risk tainting our instructions with our own secret longings.

Richard Mazer
New York City

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To the Editor:

The first part of Richard Pipes’s article contains more of theology than of objective appraisal. Where they do not support his strategic preconceptions, both recalcitrant facts and alternative interpretations of events are resolutely ignored. . . .

Mr. Pipes’s analysis of the “verification” problem is characteristically subjective; it is also weak. At one point he wonders whether “. . . the bulk of Soviet ICBM’s intended for use is concealed, to be launched in wartime from soft pads, such as sheds and other places of storage, beyond the range of observation.” In rebuttal, it must be stated that if the ratio of such secret deployments to known deployments were small, they would be strategically irrelevant, except at a late stage of massive arms reductions. Further, the likelihood of such deployments being discovered by U.S. intelligence must increase, at least in direct proportion to their size; strategically relevant hidden arsenals could not be kept hidden for long. Since his days as the leader of Vice President Bush’s team of analysts in 1975-76, Mr. Pipes has never shown much confidence in the reliability of CIA data where they conflict with his own dogma; . . . perhaps this is the explanation for what appears, at first glance, to be mathematical naiveté.

Finally, if even one such concealment were discovered, Soviet strategists would find themselves eternally at the mercy of American “worst-case” scenarists who would feel obligated to race against imagined Soviet arsenals as well as known ones. The Soviets would then be compelled to place an ICBM beneath every outhouse in Siberia whether they wished to or not. Mr. Pipes’s argument leads, in short, practically to a reductio ad absurdum.

Mr. Pipes accuses the Soviets of two-facedness on the issue of whether or not theater-ballistic missiles deployed in Western Europe should be considered “strategic weapons.” Leaving aside the semantics of SALT and START treaty language, the following fact must be recognized: European-based Pershing 2’s, with their extremely short flight times, under the sole control of U.S. commanders, constitute a threat of decapitation to the Soviet high command which is not reciprocated for the U.S. by Soviet SS-20 deployments. Rather, the parallel is to recent Soviet SSBN movements that have put our own central-command authority in an analogous position, a fact conveniently glossed over by the Reagan administration. If the Soviets were to deploy SS-20’s in Cuba, how would Mr. Pipes wish to “define” them? The deadly pressure these short-flight-time missiles put on command-and-control facilities, by forcing a reduction in negative and redundant controls and by encouraging predelegated launch authority or launch-on-warning, almost justifies putting them in the “superstrategic” class. Their existence dramatically reduces the security of both sides. The requirements of extended deterrence would be better served by upgrading, if need be, the SSBN force assigned to the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe.

In this regard, a response must be made to the following statement of Mr. Pipes: “It should be made eminently clear to these people [the Soviet leaders] that if they should ever dare to carry out their strategic plans and fire nuclear missiles in anger, they and their families will perish.” If Mr. Pipes feels that we are buying better deterrence by shoving Pershing 2’s down the Soviet leaders’ throats, he is quite wrong. Fear, not anger, is the mother of preemption; it also tends to encourage bad accidents.

Finally, we come to Mr. Pipes’s account of recent activities in the ABM field. Here he says: “Should such a development take place [improvements in Soviet ABM systems], it would pose a serious threat to U.S. security. Opposition to nuclear defenses on the grounds that they are ‘destabilizing’ should go the way of the advocacy of mutual assured destruction (MAD), whose ill-begotten child it is.” Under every interpretation but one, these two sentences are simply inconsistent with each other. The (barely) viable interpretation reads: American ABM systems are not destabilizing; Soviet ABM systems are. . . .

Such a formulation can be rescued from incoherence only on the following assumption: in general, Soviet defense planners neither fear nor respect what American planners do. This veiled theme, which runs like a common thread through most of Mr. Pipes’s arguments, both in this article and elsewhere, begs for a psychological explanation. Since Mr. Pipes has not hesitated to diagnose the malady of the Western “collective unconscious,” perhaps he would not think it amiss if one were to inquire after his own inner motivations.

Mr. Pipes was born in a nation whose power-relationship with the Soviet Union was, and still is, extremely lopsided. I am speaking of Poland, of course, and the Soviet Union clearly does not fear Poland (except to the limited extent that events in Poland reverberate in Western Europe). Mr. Pipes is now an American scholar and an important figure in American defense planning, yet he carries with him what can only be described as an atavistic obsession with Soviet dominance, totally inappropriate to his adult environment. In this he is not alone (one thinks also of Zbigniew Brzezinski); nor can he really be blamed, for most of us carry the prejudices of our youth to our graves. Native-born Americans, however, should feel dismay whenever they find their own thinking in convergence with his.

Parity is a fact, because any two infinite things are equal to each other, and the destructive power of the U.S. and Soviet arsenals is (effectively) infinite. The recent “nuclear-winter” scenario has demonstrated this beyond cavil. Nor do questions of the credibility of our political will to use such weapons have nearly the significance Mr. Pipes attributed to them in his earlier article in COMMENTARY [“Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War,” July 1977].

The intractable vulnerability of command / communications links can only drive both sides to extensive predelegation and decentralization of command authority, in effect giving these weapons a life of their own. Recent defense directives such as PD-49 and NSDD-13 are thus revealed to be little more than Byzantine fairy tales. It is a dangerous distortion of reality not to recognize Soviet fear for what it is, because then, in our own search for security, we will tend to take unwitting actions which only increase that fear. The ultimate result of the ensuing action-reaction cycle can only be—a reenactment of August 1914. The consequences of such a replay, however, will be several orders of magnitude greater than the original.

Karl Wessel
Rancho Palos Verdes, California

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To the Editor:

Richard Pipes’s analysis of the cause and cure of Soviet misbehavior, like much of his other work, strikes me as encapsulating one central flaw in a body of otherwise excellent reasoning. It is this: if Moscow really believes it could win a nuclear war with the United States (“. . . the U.S. has no first-strike doctrine or capability whereas the Soviet side has both”), why has it not launched one? Surely the answer is that, just as the Soviet leadership—as Mr. Pipes correctly says—considers that a major, protracted conventional war would subject the Soviet Union to intolerable stresses, as World War I did to czarist Russia, so it believes that a nuclear war with the United States would threaten the Soviet Union with unacceptable damage, if not total destruction. Evidently mutual deterrence is still alive and well, although it requires eternal vigilance and frequent maintenance on the American side.

Mr. Pipes is wrong in saying that Soviet behavior has never been influenced by nuclear threats; it was when the threats were uttered by John Foster Dulles.

Harold C. Hinton
George Washington University
Washington, D.C.

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To the Editor:

Small wonder that liberal American Sovietologists are apologists for Communism and advocates of appeasement. But what is disturbing about some conservative scholars is that their staunch and sound anti-Communism is quite often mixed with Russophobia. They are either unable or unwilling to make a distinction between Russia and the Soviet Union or Russians and Soviets. They claim that the Soviet regime is rooted in Russian history and that Great Russian nationalism is one of the reasons for Soviet aggressiveness. In a word, Russian spells evil.

In his article, Richard Pipes takes a step forward in understanding the real nature of the Soviet threat. . . . Yet he has not completely abandoned his contention that Soviet imperialism is a continuation of old Russia’s imperialism. . . . No one has ever tried to deny the fact that old Russia was imperialistic. But the point is that every European power at that time was imperialistic, including small nations like Portugal and Holland. Expansionism and colonialism were a way of life, with Russia no better and no worse than other nations. . . .

Imperial Russia, like any other European power, pursued certain political, economic, and nationalistic interests in a certain geographic area but never strove for world domination and never posed a global threat. The Russian presence in Finland, Poland, and Central Asia was not, of course, a blessing for the peoples of those countries, but it was not destructive, either. Soviet imperialism (which should be called more exactly Soviet gangsterism and terrorism) is an absolutely new phenomenon; it is not at all political, economic, or nationalistic; it has nothing to do with the interests of the country. . . .

The Bolshevik coup d’état in 1917 was both a national and an international disaster. . . . Now, after sixty-seven years of Soviet power, Communism has proved completely bankrupt as a philosophy and as a social and economic system. In the confrontation between the free world and Communism, the Russian people, as well as all the enslaved peoples in the Soviet bloc, are on the side of the West. So the cornerstone of any long-term strategy for the West must be to help the people of Russia bring down the Soviet regime and establish a free Russia. . . . How to accomplish this is a different topic.

Joseph Ioffe
St. Paul, Minnesota

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To the Editor:

Richard Pipes’s article is simultaneously excellent and disappointing. Its analysis of the West’s military, political, and economic posture vis-à-vis the Soviet Union is clear and insightful, but the promise of the article’s title has not been met.

The essence of the article is that Western delinquencies facilitate Soviet repression of “forces within the Communist bloc which are working for a change of the system.” The unarticulated but necessary implication is that the policy of containment is fundamentally sound; its execution has simply gone awry. . . . Ultimately, “the West cannot destabilize the Soviet Union”—but we should at least stop doing things which prejudice hoped-for internal Soviet changes. . . .

In short, as good as Mr. Pipes’s article is in dissecting Western shortcomings in the three areas addressed, it does not offer any philosophical alternative to a policy whose very failures now require that, almost forty years after its inception, articles such as this be published. . . .

Some hard questions must be asked: . . . Can anyone honestly believe that the circumstances which are so cogently recited in the article are going to change? When? How? Why?

Why should the cumulative momentum of half a century of Western economic support of the Soviet Union abruptly about-face? . . .

How can a policy, having failed when pursued during the peak of America’s worldwide economic and military influence, now be considered viable under circumstances in which the geopolitical realities have so fundamentally changed? . . .

A realistic Western strategy toward the USSR must go a few steps beyond acting upon the urgencies that Mr. Pipes identifies. . . . There must be a change of intent toward the Soviet Union. . . .

Such a change of focus requires two things. First, we must face and accept the realities of democratic society, with all its vested interests, mercurial public opinion, political rivalries, and other characteristics that have and will continue to subvert the policy of containment. . . .

Second, we should divest ourselves of the self-imposed rule that international politics is basically a regulatory affair, concerned with preserving the status quo. This requires a forthright acknowledgment that the two mutually inconsistent philosophies of the Western democracies and the Soviet bloc cannot coexist in perpetuity. The thrust of Soviet ideology, foreign policy, and military strategy has been and remains offensive. The thrust of American foreign policy and military strategy (we profess no ideology) has been and remains defensive. Moscow specifically rejects compromise, restraint, and convergence. We put our faith in arms control, reason, and negotiation. Soviet policy is dynamic, outgoing, and aggressive. Our “policy” is regulatory, concerned with relations between states and with stabilizing those relations. We try to preserve; Moscow revolutionizes. We react to events; Moscow seeks to govern them. One or the other philosophy—and way of life—must sooner or later give way. . . .

There was an allusion to such a realignment of American thinking in Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger’s early congressional testimony: “. . . We must not pursue a defensive strategy that anticipates a point-by-point response to [aggressive Soviet] actions, but rather one which permits us to take full advantage of Soviet vulnerability.”

Much to his credit, Mr. Pipes recognizes this by recommending increased radio and telecommunications addressed to the Communist bloc. Unfortunately, however, neither this administration, nor Mr. Pipes, nor Western policymakers generally have expanded their consideration of the issue, perhaps because the issue itself is all too often framed (as Mr. Pipes himself frames it) in terms of “destabilizing” the Soviet Union. . . . The issue then becomes easily perverted and degenerates into a rhetorical knee-jerk response: “So what should we do? Send in the Marines?” This, or a similar retort, is usually followed in quick succession with a reference to the 1956 Hungarian uprising as an example of the futility and suicidal nature of hypothetical Western action. . . .

The ultimate question must be whether the West is prepared to stop Soviet imperialism by exploiting the fundamental vulnerabilities within the Soviet network. . . . A popular argument against such a policy is that internal crises within the USSR only fuel Soviet aggressiveness overseas, which itself serves as an outlet for domestic frustrations. . . .

The necessary corollary to this argument is that Soviet aggression outside its borders can be lessened by assisting the Kremlin in its struggle to fight its way out of a domestic quagmire. Eliminate internal frustrations and the reason for foreign adventures disappears. Advocates of the argument would probably deny that America should alleviate Moscow’s problems on the home front if the question were posed directly, but say as much by propounding this theory. Ironically, in our half-hearted implementation of containment, we have for decades mitigated the effects of Soviet domestic problems. To no avail. . . .

One could as easily, and with more convincing logic, assert that internal difficulties would require Moscow to concentrate on them instead of compounding matters by diverting resources abroad.

The theory reverses the causal relationship. We are to believe that an increasingly sclerotic Soviet economy during the last ten years has caused a fourfold increase in Soviet military spending, instead of vice versa.

To argue that the Kremlin must look abroad in order to divert/ mollify/appease its citizenry is to presume an accountability to a constituency, hardly a characteristic of a totalitarian state. This theory, however, would then require that the domestic failures be addressed, and not that Nicaragua be armed. How, exactly, is the frustration of a collective farm worker mollified upon learning that Soviet troops are in Afghanistan? Reports from the Soviet Union state the opposite.

We must, thus, sooner or later decide whether it is in our interest to preserve the status quo in the world, in the greater part of Europe, and within the Soviet Union. . . .

As early as 1958, when the demography of the Soviet Union had not yet shifted in favor of the non-Russian nations, Mr. Pipes observed that it came as a surprise to most people to learn that there were more Turks in the Soviet Union than in Turkey, and more Muslims than in the United Arab Republic. Indeed, it is extraordinary that Russian domination of more than one-third of the total territory of Asia has continued largely to escape the notice of the peoples of non-Soviet Asia and Africa.

Not surprisingly, the nationalities issue in the Soviet Union is a historically permanent operating factor. It is an integral part of Soviet domestic and, increasingly, foreign policies. It plays a pivotal role in shaping such diverse Soviet decision-making processes as capital and labor allocations, energy and military spending, military conscription, East/West relations, as well as relations with China. . . .

Since the founding of the United Nations (by, among others, two Soviet Republics) the number of independent states in the world has increased threefold. Can free choice and self-determination, which today are so elemental in any society, . . . have no application within Soviet borders?

At the beginning of his article, Mr. Pipes quotes Sun Tzu to the effect that the “acme of skill” is to attack the enemy’s strategy. More sublime still is to subdue your adversary by implementing against him his own strategy against you. That strategy was conveniently recited in the New York Times by Yuri Kornilov, political correspondent of Tass, soon after President Reagan’s inauguration. After exhorting a “maximum effort to prevent detente from collapsing and mankind from sliding down toward a nuclear holocaust,” Kornilov said:

It seems obvious that the growing desire of peoples for national liberation, independence, economic and social progress is an inevitable and natural process that one can neither “repeal” nor “ban,” no matter how much some people may wish it. To try to present things as though the changes at work on our planet are the result of somebody’s “ill will” means being unable to grasp the meaning of events.

Peter Paluch
Harvard University
Ukrainian Studies Fund
Cambridge, Massachusetts

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To the Editor:

In his otherwise excellent article, Richard Pipes makes the point that a policy of rewards and punishments will not induce good Soviet behavior as long as the Kremlin’s basic motivation is not understood. However, this needs further elaboration. . . . During the Korean war, there was tremendous indignation in this country because Britain and France were trading with Red China, which was in turn helping the North Koreans. Yet during the Vietnam war, at the same time that Johnson and Nixon were pouring troops into South Vietnam, they were encouraging American trade with our former glorious Soviet ally, which was in turn supplying North Vietnam. I wish that someone who can understand the logic of a policy like this would explain it to me.

But again, Mr. Pipes’s basic point applies: the reason for the capricious application of sanctions is that Soviet motivation is not understood.

W.S. Hamma
Reno, Nevada

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To the Editor:

Richard Pipes is a mentor to those of us who believe that the Soviet threat is real and not imagined, and his article, “How to Cope With the Soviet Threat,” is great. I am especially thankful to him for writing: “It is essential for the West not to allow Moscow to insinuate itself into its domestic politics and not to give it any opportunity for exploiting the ‘rifts’ in the enemy camp which Lenin regarded as the prime objective of his political strategy.” It is rare that one finds such insightful understanding from anyone who has not been a Marxist-Leninist. Mr. Pipes is on target when he writes about “rifts” in the pro-freedom bloc of nations. . . .

Too many Americans continue to deceive themselves that Leninists are other than what they claim to be: totalitarians. I would add that Lenin also wrote to the Bolsheviks: “While you lack the strength to do away with bourgeois parliaments and every other type of reactionary institution, you must work with them.”

Phillip Abbott Luce
Chairman, Americans for a Sound Foreign Policy
Washington, D.C.

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To the Editor:

For a great many years Americans have had difficulty understanding the nature of the Soviet threat to their very existence. Richard Pipes is to be congratulated for explaining it so well in his article. He also shows, using the magnificent work of Anthony Sutton, what is at the core of socialist strength—capitalism, that is, mainly American help which since 1921 has succeeded in establishing the Communist monster. The solution obviously is what President Reagan started—to stop all economic aid to the Soviets. The problem is how the Soviets can hurt us in the meantime: by using nuclear weapons to gain immediate victory. This is the greatest threat ever faced by Western society. Mr. Pipes’s solution . . . is the immediate growth of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. There is simply no other answer. What this would do to the American economy is another serious matter, but as a British general once said: “The greatest social service a nation can do for itself is caring for its security.” A nation that cannot defend itself against all odds simply will not survive. . . .

Oded Yinon
Jerusalem, Israel

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Richard Pipes writes:

My attempt to identify in mankind’s collective unconscious antecedents of the nuclear terror which the Soviet Union exploits for its own purposes leads Morris A. Lipton to the conclusion that I dismiss “the threat of nuclear war.” This charge is a non sequitur. My references to biblical and similar anticipations of nuclear holocaust were intended to explain human reactions to the threat of nuclear war, not the threat itself, which I consider very real. Nor did I anywhere in the article advocate policies that would “result in the collapse of the intransigent Soviet system”: in fact, I explicitly stated that “the West cannot destabilize the Soviet Union.” The thrust of my argument was that we ought to encourage internal forces already at work in the Communist bloc to accomplish change, which I envision as a reform, not a collapse, of its political and economic system. It is distressing that a scientist who holds responsible academic and administrative positions at a major university should prove unable to read a text without distorting it to suit his political preferences.

Richard Mazer’s letter consists of a burst of random assertions, some irrelevant, some uninformed. I referred to a “Russian study dated 1898” in order to dispel a prevalent belief that Soviet aggression is a response to centuries of invasion of the Russian homeland. This study, which the passage of time has not rendered obsolete, demonstrated statistically that for every invasion which Russia had experienced in the 18th and 19th centuries it had committed eighteen acts of aggression against its neighbors. The significance of this information should be obvious.

The 20 million casualties which the citizens of the Soviet Union suffered in World War II (a war made possible, be it noted, by the Soviet pact with Hitler) are less than half the number of casualties that the Soviet government is estimated to have inflicted on its own people through starvation, executions, deportations, etc. Even so, the memory of the horrors of war has not inhibited Moscow from recently dispatching over 100,000 of its young men to Afghanistan to kill and be killed. The trauma of World War II constitutes a poor basis for crediting the Politburo with peaceful intentions.

Mr. Mazer is simply misinformed if he believes that after launching a first strike the USSR “would have no military objectives left to target.” For one, simple calculations show that, given the existence of MIRV’s, the Soviet Strategic Forces would need to employ only a fraction of their ICBM’s and SLBM’s in a first strike against U.S. targets: the bulk of Soviet missiles would be held in reserve in order either to prevent a U.S. response or to retaliate for it. Secondly, ICBM’s and SLBM’s represent, of course, only one segment of the Soviet military establishment, which also includes rockets of intermediate range, not to speak of a formidable army, navy, and air force—all “military objectives” in their own right. As for the statement that “political targets” must mean “bureaucrats . . . on their way home to dinner,” I can think of no civil way to respond to it.

Mr. Mazer’s views of alleged U.S. “first-strike” plans are as wide of the mark as is his statement that the Soviets are doing their “damnedest” to try “to match” the American nuclear build-up. When the Soviets initiated their anti-satellite (ASAT) program in 1968, what comparable U.S. program were they trying to match, inasmuch as the United States did not begin work on ASAT’s until nine years later? Whatever it is that inspired Moscow’s deployment of anti-ballistic-missile defenses around Moscow, it could not have been the U.S. example, since we have not deployed such a system to this day. The same applies to Soviet “heavy” missiles like the SS-18. With a threefold advantage in the throw-weight of strategic missiles and a fivefold one in the throw-weight of theater rockets, Moscow need hardly strain to “match” its potential opponent: rather, it is incumbent upon us to do so.

To Karl Wessel I shall respond briefly:

(1) He overestimates the ability of the U.S. to detect concealed Soviet objects. (2) I have never questioned “CIA data” on Soviet missiles: since I own no satellites, like everyone else I rely on the figures provided by the CIA. (3) American Pershing 2’s can reach Soviet territory not in “extremely short flight times,” but at the same speed it takes Soviet SS-20’s to strike NATO territory where we have over 300,000 troops and allies whom we are treaty-bound to defend. (4) The U.S. has no ABM system deployed whereas the Soviet Union does—“destabilization” occurs when one side enjoys a monopoly on defensive systems. (5) Ad-hominem arguments belong in the intellectual gutter; I normally ignore them. Here, however, let me state that my having been born in Poland no more affects my attitude toward Communism (which began to interest me only after I came to this country) than my being a Jew determines my feelings toward Nazism. My total ignorance of Mr. Wessel’s “native-born” background as well as his “inner motivations” would in any event prevent me from attributing personal reasons for his Soviet apologias even if I had the taste for such contemptible polemics.

Harold C. Hinton wonders why, if the Soviet Union really believes it could win a nuclear war with the United States, does it refrain from launching a nuclear strike. The answer is that victory in such a war would be exceedingly costly. The USSR views nuclear war as a last resort, preferring to expand by means of political attrition and conventional proxy wars.

Joseph Ioffe chides me for failing to distinguish the Soviet regime from its Russian predecessor. He sees Soviet imperialism as “an altogether new phenomenon,” that is, one without roots in the past of Russia or any other country. There exists a scientific maxim, natura non facit saltum—“nature makes no leap.” The same holds true of human affairs. History knows no “absolutely new” phenomena—its entire effort goes into explaining events and processes in terms of their antecedents. The very notion that a people with a thousand-year-old history could, in one single day—October 26, 1917, to be precise—totally break with its past and bring into being something entirely unprecedented surely belongs to the realm of fairy tales.

I might add that the Soviet establishment itself does not share Mr. Ioffe’s sense of discontinuity with the past. A cursory glance at Soviet historical works will indicate to him that the regime proudly claims the entire heritage of czarist imperialism. Current Soviet historical literature depicts every war the czars ever waged as defensive, and every one of their conquests as justified.

I fail to understand Peter Paluch’s objection since he and I seem to be in agreement. His complaints about the inability of democracies to carry out a consistent policy toward the Soviet Union are mine also. As for the need to “exploit Soviet weaknesses,” I was under the impression that this is what my article was all about.

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