The Doomsday Strategy

Progressive, The, Jan, 1999 by Sidney Lens

The decision-makers understand how frightful a nuclear war would be--they understand it much better than the rest of us do. But they are motivated by considerations that are never openly expressed, and that are therefore difficult for the average citizen to divine.... They have sought partial victories today and total, absolute victory at some point in the not too distant future.

They have been, and are, driven by a "win syndrome" that refuses to accept stalemate, that seeks victory with religious fervor--no matter how long it takes, how many of our resources it diverts to the moloch of militarism, or how totally it transforms America into a secret, repressive, security state....

Because of its catastrophic scope, the nuclear menace is neither believable nor believed by the general public. It has been absorbed, grain by grain, over a period of thirty years, so that its impact has been lost. Americans have become immunized to the permanent emergency, the permanent war economy, the permanent national security state. Crises arise in endless procession, but somehow they are resolved without triggering the big boom. We all know the firecracker is there--the nuclear arsenal--but the match to light it does not seem to be in sight. And we refuse, quite properly, to believe that the potential match-lighters are lunatics.

Yet, we are confronted by a lunatic process, in which every participant is sane but all collectively are trapped in psychosis. The process propels itself, like a machine gone mad.

February 1976

Sidney Lens wrote for The Progressive for four decades on labor, peace, and foreign policy.