Word: sherwin
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...Nacht associate professor of Public Policy at the Kennedy School, currently finishing a book on strategic nuclear questions for the Brookings Institute in Washington. Joseph S. Nye Jr., professor of Government who had dealt with proliferation issues as a State Department officials in the Carter Administration and Martin J. Sherwin, a visiting scholar at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History and author of A World Destroyed. The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance now writing a biography of physicist J. Robert Oppeheimer '25, following is an edited transcript of the interview, which was conducted by Crimson editors...
...Sherwin: I think it has been building for a long time, in the same way that the nuclear arms race quantitatively has been building for a long time. In 1948, we had 50 atomic bombs. Today there are something like 50,000 to 60,000 nuclear weapons in Soviet and American missiles, and that doesn't even count the French and British, so the sheer quantity is beginning to get frightening...
...agree with Marty that what has prompted it in this instance is the Reagan Administration and its policies. I would say that it is a combination of three things: first, the accumulation of the various policies that [Sherwin] has noted--the discussion of a nuclear warning shot, nuclear war fighting strategies. Second, the failure of the President to do what every president since Eisenhower has done, and that is to speak about nuclear weapons in a reassuring way, to make it clear to the world and to the American people that he recognizes the dangers of nuclear weapons...
...Sherwin: I think it's a positive step that the Administration has taken reluctantly as a result of external pressure. I think that point has been made in terms of political strategy, and the critical question becomes has it really changed its strategy? And the answer to that in my view is, yes. Has it changed its objective? The answer to that at this point. I think, is maybe. It may have to change its objective...
...Sherwin: Let me go back to a point that was brought up a little bit earlier by Professor Nye about deterrence because this is really at the heart of things...That is the alleged reason we have nuclear weapons and we continue the build-up. We live in a system that believes that deterrence is what prevents war, and war will be nuclear, so deterrence prevents nuclear war. And I think one of the problems that has emerged...that, with respect to our nuclear weapons, we really go beyond deterrence. I think that it is true that we have...