This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC wreath lectures.

This lecture in the series The Two-Eged Sword, given by Lawrence Martin, was originally broadcast in 1981.

I remarked in my first lecture that the centrepiece of the contemporary strategic scene is something called nuclear deterrence.

Many who find this doctrine alarming draw comfort from the

strategic arms limitation talks and the so-called salt agreements that resulted.

They must have received a bit of a shock, however, if they ever read the best-known

account of the first salt talks, written by Mr. John Newhouse, a former official in the

United States Arms Control Agency. Mr. Newhouse,

the great admirer of Dr. Kissinger and his achievement of assault treaty, suggests that the

underlying principle of the exercise was, killing people is good, killing weapons is bad.

This judgment, flippantly expressed, is deadly serious in the literal meaning of that phrase.

It moderates somewhat one's enthusiasm for a process of arms control that seeks to perpetuate such a system.

Of course, Mr. Newhouse doesn't really mean that killing people is good.

He means that threatening to kill them is good, because he believes that such a threat

will deter a nuclear attack on anyone with an obvious capacity to retaliate. Why does he think

killing weapons is bad? Because they might be the very weapons needed to kill the people,

and their destruction might thereby undermine deterrence.

The idea of mutual mass killing is, he hopes, unthinkable.

Attacking weapons is not unthinkable, and by opening up the idea of nuclear attacks that are not immediately and utterly catastrophic, it falls into the category of what are often

labeled war-fighting strategies.

Because these strategies suggest ways of actually using nuclear weapons,

they alarm many people who condemn the very idea as making the world safe for nuclear war.

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