As spring moved northward over Europe in 1970, a familiar scene was enacted in Vienna, a city where diplomacy is as much a part of the civic tradition as steelmaking in Pittsburgh. In April, Soviet and American officials exchanged greetings, drank champagne, smiled at news cameras, and then settled down to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, known to headline writers as SALT. So, with the opening of the 1970’s mankind’s long dream of disarmament once more cast its spell. It is a compelling vision. But a glance at the past suggests, even to those not inclined to be cynical, that the hopes of beating even a few surplus spears into pruning hooks will remain, as often before, unfulfilled.
The force that brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the parley was their awareness of the awesome destructive power of their nuclear arsenals. Any limitation on these superweapons will enlarge mankind’s chances of surviving future wars. Yet this awareness of possible disaster goes back beyond the era of the atomic bomb. Since the century’s beginning, military inventions —the submarine, the bomber, high explosives—have been creating an age of overkill. Nations have hesitated to pursue arms races that yearly become more threatening to noncombatants, merchant fleets, cities, factories, the countryside, and even civilized life itself.
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