"Return to Realism"

By Hugh Sidey

The world has grown more dangerous in the past few months. Tension over oil and the unrelenting growth of the Soviet arsenal have sent shock waves into the American system. "Nuclear war is becoming more probable," laments Richard Barnet of the Institute for Policy Studies. Yes, confesses one of President Carter's principal strategic planners, there is "a change in attitude" in the White House. There is the growing realization that the U.S. must sustain and demonstrate its power, even be prepared to use it.

As if orchestrated, the nation's clergy are raising their voices against the world's mad arms rush, but the people who are obsessed with weapons--like the Soviets--hurry on. The U.S. is dragged along. Need it be?

Carter prays these days, but it is also noted that he sent the aircraft carrier Constellation to the Arabian Sea even in the midst of his spiritual ministrations for peace in the Middle East. Is he becoming a little more of an Old Testament figure? The President laughs. "I think so," he says. "There's a good balance. It is a very vivid demonstration of the importance of American military strength when it is used for peaceful purposes." This latter-day Isaiah is trying his best to beat some of our swords into plowshares, but inside Jimmy Carter is the same belief found in most Americans--that our might has done more to preserve modern peace than any other single force. While he argues for disarmament, Carter intends to devise new and better weapons.

Peace through strength. There is a mockery in that equation. "We build up and build up," said John Kennedy one melancholy evening, "then somebody is going to use them. That is the lesson of history." Or is it?

Richard Nixon began the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks even while allowing Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to come to America and fill his military market basket. "I think I can prove," mused Nixon a while back, "that the arms Americans have sold have rarely been used in aggression, while those of the Russians and other nations have been used repeatedly. Are we to ignore requests from our friends in this kind of world?"

House Speaker Tip O'Neill predicts that his restive Congress is going to raise the defense budget even over the $11 billion increase (total $125.8 billion) proposed by Jimmy Carter. The eloquent and insistent voices for disarmament from Iowa's Senator John Culver and Wisconsin's Les Aspin have been subtly toned down lately as the facts of the Soviet buildup have hardened.

"A return to realism," says Secretary of Defense Harold Brown of the awakening American attitude toward our strength. We drifted in the years after Viet Nam, embarrassed by power. The Soviets did nothing of the sort. By the early 1980s the U.S.S.R. will probably have caught up with us in almost every modern military category. Their research into new weapons of terror, though now behind ours, will perhaps exceed our own because of the sheer concentration of effort.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, wounded three times in the Civil War, used to thunder a century ago about "this smug, oversafe corner of the world . . . a little space of calm in the midst of the tempestuous, untamed streaming of the world," so far removed from most human want and anguish. That has not changed much over the past decades. But now it is changing. Scarcity is catching us, and we would probably be one of the first nuclear battlegrounds if restraint ever fractured.

But along with fear these days comes also the faint scent of a new kind of courage, the renewed understanding that in every moment of stress there is opportunity. While searching for a nuclear accommodation with the Soviet Union, the U.S. seems to be showing more understanding of our power, both military and economic. Holmes contended that character emerged from adversity, heroes from heroics. There are no more battles of Ball's Bluff or Antietam with trumpets and cannons, but it is a time for our own brand of heroics and heroes, men and women who in these next months can bring new and bold ideas to preserve peace even among contending societies in the nuclear age.

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