What Price Survival?

Should the U.S. build up an elaborate and expensive system of defense against atomic-thermonuclear attack, or can it rely on retaliatory striking power to deter attack? Last week two of the nation's most respected atomic scientists argued that deterrent power is necessary but not sufficient.

Speaking in Buffalo, Dr. Ralph E. Lapp, director of the Nuclear Science Service, blasted the deterrent theory as a doctrine of "peace through mutual terror." Instead of assuring peace, said Lapp, possession of retaliatory atomic-thermonuclear weapons by both sides will create an "utterly unstable" situation in which one side or the other might attempt to strike a devastating first blow. Therefore, the nation needs both "sword and shield." An effective defense system against atomic-thermonuclear attack is possible, Lapp insisted, "if we really give our scientists their heads." But would the U.S. public be willing to pay for the costly defense measures the scientists might devise? Yes. said Lapp, if the Administration would tell the people the hair-raising facts--such facts as that it is now entirely feasible to make a thermonuclear bomb 500 times as powerful as the A-bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945.

Writing in the current Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Dr. Frederick Seitz, physics professor at the University of Illinois, maintains that "the current controversy on the issue of defense versus offensive weapons . . . originates in an unwillingness to admit that both are essential," and that the unwillingness stems from "false notions [about] the relative values of things at stake." Expenditures for "adequate offense and defense," Seitz admits, would entail expansion of the national debt, further inflation and sacrifice of some luxuries. But defeat by the Soviet

Union would bring economic disintegration, famine, and the postwar liquidation of millions who survived the bombs.

Both to help deter aggression and to help avert defeat, Seitz calls for "a defensive net." But he warns that the nation must also be ready to strike with "the most fearsome of our weapons." In discussing the morality of employing atomic or thermonuclear weapons, Seitz indulges in none of the hand-wringing that scientists often display in the pages of the Bulletin. It would be immoral, he says, "not to restrain Soviet aggression by any means which will be effective."

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