NUCLEAR DETERRENCE 19 Thus, from the temple/of-deterrence, there emerged finally the satanic idea of fighting and winning a nuclear war. It was a logical evolution of the ideas of deterrence from the 1950s. President Reagan's initiation of the Star Wars in 1983 was not surprising, given the inexorable thrust of the war-winning doctrine. The Star Wars is presented to the U.S. public as a total astrodome defence of American population. The U.S. liberals attack this as pure technological fantasy. But the direction of the U.S. Star Wars programme is not to defend U.S. people, but to protect its nuclear forces. Star Wars makes litde sense against a hypothetical full-scale Soviet nuclear attack. It could make sense as a shield against a depleted Soviet attack, after an American first strike. The essence of Star Wars is thus to deny the Soviets an ability to retaliate, thus completing U.S. strategic superiority. The most ironic defence of the counterforce and Star Wars doctrines of the USA has been in moral terms. The resurgent right wing strategic thinking gave the final knockout blow to the declining breed of those championing MAD, in a powerful religious argument. Is not MAD immoral, holding populations as hostages to maintain deterrence ? Is not a doctrine which emphasizes attacks on military targets and defence of people a better way of deterrence ? Thus, the new jargon for war-winning strategy is "mutual assured survival' as opposed to mutual assured destruction. The tragedy of deterrence lies in the fact that forty years after the invention of nuclear weapons, we are now closer to a nuclear war than before. The hope that deterrence can prevent a nuclear war is in shambles. Instead, it has finally enshrined Vince Lombardi's dictum : "winning is not everything, it*s the only thing." Thus, deterrence appears to be the problem rather than the solution. The only alternative to nuclear deterrence is nuclear abolition. The proposals by Gorbachev calling for elimination of all nuclear weapons has fallen on deaf ears in the West. Forty years of addiction to nuclear deterrence is difficult to shake off.