Word: scheer
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...NUCLEAR DELUSION by George F. Kennan; Pantheon; 208 pages; $13.95 WITH ENOUGH SHOVELS by Robert Scheer; Random House; 285 pages...
That chilling conclusion seems only slightly overstated in the light of Robert Scheer's interviews with Ronald Reagan, George Bush and some high officials of the Pentagon. Scheer, who works for the Los Angeles Times, is one of those reporters who can get even the most experienced and cautious public officials to make the most unguarded and self-damaging disclosures, particularly when they are running for President. He got Jimmy Carter to confess lust in his heart in 1976, in Playboy, no less. Scheer induced Reagan, whom he interviewed in 1980, and others now in the Administration to talk...
...title of Scheer's book, With Enough Shovels, derives from a particularly bizarre interview with Thomas K. Jones, a Deputy Under Secretary of Defense. Jones is an enthusiast for civil defense and do-it-yourself bomb shelters. "Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top," he said. "It's the dirt that does it... If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody's going to make...
With absurdities like that, Scheer has no trouble making his subjects sound like Dr. Strangelove. His thesis is that Reagan and his men have carried the U.S. across a threshold: after years of reliance on the doctrine that nuclear weapons can deter the Soviets, the American Government is now in the hands of those who believe in the far more dangerous notion that such weapons can be used to defeat and destroy the Soviet Union...
...Scheer's book leaves the false impression that never before have senior officials sought to develop a "nuclear-war-fighting capability." Since the dawn of the atomic age, and particularly since the mid-1960s, American strategists and political leaders have had to ponder an inescapable dilemma: unless the U.S. has a credible answer to the question of what it would do if deterrence fails, deterrence itself is not credible...