Introduction

President Ronald Reagan’s distrust of nuclear deterrence as a guarantor of national and international security was—and is—fully warranted. But the appropriate path to national and international security is not, as President Reagan—and so far apparently President George Bush—would have it, via Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or some other “technological fix”. Most responsible observers agree that SDI is entirely consistent with—actually supportive of—nuclear deterrence and that if developed and deployed it would repudiate solemn arms control agreements and trigger an unbridled arms race between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as never before. In sum, SDI and minimum deterrence, representing traditional approaches to coping with conflict, are grossly inadequate to the task of nurturing and achieving genuine and lasting world peace. Alternatives to these traditional approaches and to the nuclearism that inheres in them thus demand to be invented, developed, evaluated, and applied.