Freeman Dyson Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Part of your book is devoted to the notion of concepts, the ideas by which, in a general way, we organize the way we think about our weapons. You critique Mutually Assured Destruction and the notion a limited nuclear war, and you propose a concept of live and let live. Could you explain your concept for us?
Yes. It is a rather vague concept. I think it has to be, because a concept is not the same thing as a policy. A concept is just the underlying idea out of which policies grow.
What I call live and let live essentially says in the long run, we want to base our security on non-nuclear defense. Defense in the sense of just defending our friends and allies on the ground, protecting them against Soviet penetration or Soviet invasion with non-nuclear forces on the ground, rather than with nuclear threat. We don't in the long run want to base our security just on threatening to destroy the other side. So that's the concept.
How to implement that in terms of policy depends on all kinds of details. Part of it is certainly to get rid of the first-use option which we now have. The first-use option is an essential part of our present policy, that is, that we have the option of using nuclear weapons first in a non-nuclear war. That's very much a part of our doctrine. That has to be gotten rid of. That's item one in the live and let live program, but there are many other things that you may or may not be able to do, depending on how the Soviet Union behaves.
The live and let live concept doesn't demand good behavior on the side of the Soviet Union. If the Soviet Union happens to behave well, there are more things you can do. You can come to agreements with the Soviet Union in periods when they are behaving well, and you can't when they are behaving badly. But the concept remains the same in either case.
The Soviets' concept is one of counter-force, and you explain how there is very little that we can do in terms of changing their way of dealing with their own weapons and what they feel are their security needs.
Right. I don't feel that we should try to change their way of looking at things. It's not all that unfavorable to ask them. The Soviet concept of counter-force in fact is quite consistent with their security and, in the end, also with ours. It's consistent, for example, with the negotiation of weapons down to very low levels on both sides, or even to zero. So their concept is not an obstacle to arms control agreement, and I don't see any reason why we should try to pressure them to change.
What we should do, of course, is to try to pressure them into behaving better on the local level. We should try to discourage them from the sorts of things that they have been doing in Afghanistan and in Poland, which are the primary obstacles to agreements during the last ten years.
One of the contours of the present debate is the mobilization of public opinion, pressure groups, with regard to the nuclear issue, that have had minimal involvement before -- the bishops' letter, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and so on. On balance, do you think that this awakening of public consciousness among broader groups is a positive thing?
Very much so. Without that, we could not make any progress. That is absolutely essential. The big question is whether that can be maintained. It hasn't before, in the early sixties, when it sort of petered out after the first test-ban treaty. I hope it won't peter out again. That remains to be seen. I'm making it my business to try to keep it alive.
In this mobilization of the public, one of the things that you're pointing to is that there is a fascination with war that we're not willing to admit. What I have in mind is your discussion of the movie Star Wars and the extent to which you see the popularity of that movie as a vicarious displacement of a fascination that we discussed earlier at the elite level with war.
Yes. I don't know whether that's right or not. It's an interesting fact that that movie was so spectacularly successful. I don't think it only has to do with Alec Guiness's qualities as an actor.
In this involvement of the public, there are great ethical issues being raised. A key element in your notions about live and let live is the positive virtue that you see in a defensive as opposed to an offensive doctrine.
Yes. I believe that this is fundamental, that we shan't get to a safer world unless we grapple with these basic ethical issues. A great part of what I'm saying is that the nuclear weapons have, in some ways, the same place in society that slavery had two hundred years ago. They are an admitted evil -- in some sense admitted by everybody to be fundamentally evil. They involve genocide if they are ever used. They are weapons of extermination. And that is something which in the long run is unacceptable to us, in the same kind of way that many people decided, two hundred years ago, that slavery was in the long run something that had to be got rid of. But it was so deeply rooted in the society that it was not at all obvious how you get rid of it or whether it was feasible. It took a hundred years or more for the abolitionists to persuade the society that that was something that one actually could get rid of. I believe the same is true of nuclear weapons. But first of all, the sense of moral outrage has to be there before anything much can be done politically.
You tie these threads together in your book quite well. You are basically saying that you need the moral outrage, you need the successful politics, both internally within the nation and between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and finally, you need the concept. It's somehow hoping in the future that all of these elements will come together.
Yes. You have to be patient. That was one thing the abolitionists were very good at. They continued their campaign, through good and bad times, for a hundred years. That's what it takes. One should never let up. One should not be discouraged because this year nothing much happens or for the last ten years, things didn't go well. Just keep on at it. That's what we have to learn.
Professor Dyson, thank you very much for joining us today for this very interesting discussion. Thank you very much for joining us for this conversation on our nuclear dilemma.
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