peace plea

books

State of the art peace plea

American Lake: Nuclear Peril in the Pacific By Peter Hayes, Lyuba Zarsky and Walden Bello Penguin, 529 pp. $A14.95 Never have the Superpowers been so prepared for nuclear war than in this International Year of Peace and, for added irony, the region which bears the name Pacific is just as likely as Europe to be the trigger point for conflict.

Notes the introduction to this highly detailed and depressing

book; “Here, as in Europe, both the United States and the Soviet Union have vital politi cal, economic and strategic in terests. Indeed, it was in the Pacific, not in Europe, that the first atomic bomb was ex ploded.”

It should be explained that “Pacific” also takes in such key parts of the ocean’s northwest reaches as Russia’s Vladivostok coast, Japan and Korea, the last seen as the greatest East-West flashpoint of all “The De militarised Zone (DMZ) of the Korean peninsula is the most

militarised place on earth”.

As the first part of the title makes clear, the authors be lieve that the USA is the pre eminent military power in the region. It is a conclusion with which not even the worst Red scaremonger in Washington could disagree despite feeling that the imbalance favours the right party, and should stay that way.

But the second part of the title is bound to cause dis agreement, the authors arguing that the large American pre sence, and its continuing build

up, is dangerously destabilising in that it encourages a Soviet response. In short, “arms rac ing” which cannot be controlled and whose effects if the weapons are used, deliberately or otherwise, would be catas trophic for all of humanity.

The counter argument, in the words of U.S. political and military leaders from the end of WW2 to the present day, is that communists must be deterred, by every means possible, from pursuing their ambitions. In peacetime, this entails what is termed “coercive diplomacy”,