(5 of 6)
Since Peking is the motive force behind the chain reaction, there is a hard-line argument that the U.S. should simply destroy Peking's nuclear capability at its nerve center, an eight-acre diffusion plant near Lanchow (present capacity: one bomb a month). The U.S., of course, would thus risk Soviet retaliation; besides, Peking would rebuild its facilities. The wisest objection, perhaps, is that the U.S. would thereby shatter the ultimate hope of stability in Asia—the possibility that China's attitude toward the rest of the world will mellow in a generation or so.
Is the U.S. right in opposing proliferation under all circumstances and in every area? No, say some strategists. France's Pierre Gallois, a retired air force general and the nation's leading nuclear strategist, reasons that the U.S. faces the prospect of keeping troops stationed indefinitely on the Chinese periphery unless it chooses to give selective nuclear aid to Asians. "Either you help these nations to have a small capability themselves," he says, "or you have to be present with boys from America. Do you have the stamina to accept this?" Gallois goes so far as to question the moral right of any country with nuclear weapons to try to stop another country from acquiring them. "What right have you to say, 'I may protect myself but I deny that right to you?'" he asks. "And if you do have the right to do so, do you have the means to prevent it? The Russians were not able to prevent China from becoming a nuclear power. The U.S. was not able to prevent France."
A Series of Initiatives
Disarmament Director Foster maintains that the Gallois case for limited proliferation is "based on two premises that are both implausible and inconsistent": first, that proliferation could in fact be selectively controlled; and second, that the U.S. could avoid involving itself in a nuclear conflict. While Washington might adopt a hands-off attitude toward limited nuclear wars, Foster believes, it could do so only "at a price that would prove unacceptable in the long run. That price would be a renunciation of our commitments and involvement all over the world—an attempt to return to isolationism at a time when the world is shrinking so rapidly as to make any such policy at best wishful thinking and quite possibly a blueprint for disaster."
The Administration is officially committed to an anti-proliferation treaty that would ban all sales of delivery systems, strictly control the use of uranium and reactors, and pledge all non-nuclear powers to abstain from nuclear weaponry. Last November, President Johnson appointed a committee under Roswell L. Gilpatric, former Under Secretary of Defense, to devise a wider range of measures to discourage the spread of nuclear weapons. Its conclusions, completed in January, have never been made public, reportedly because they warn that if the U.S. and Russia were to cooperate closely in a non-proliferation program, the Western alliance would be seriously weakened by what NATO nations would regard as a softening of our commitment to Western Europe. The Gilpatric report also emphasizes a more serious obstacle: Soviet insistence that the U.S. must first withdraw entirely from South Viet Nam—a condition that is clearly unacceptable to the Johnson Administration.