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One of my more sophisticated friends, a poet and fellow teacher at Dartmouth, is firmly convinced that Americans stopped believing in the doctrine of progress about 1920. “No doubt the majority of the uneducated still believe in it,” he concedes. “I imagine they see a slightly improved version of human existence as being issued by some kind of central committee of scientists every fall, just about the time the new cars come out. But no educated man, except maybe an occasional leftover Victorian, supposes any such thing.”
I disagree. Even in, 1972, it seems to me, a majority of educated Americans believes in progress—not, obviously, as the product of a central committee but as an impersonal force. And while a wave of skepticism really did arrive some fifty years ago, it involved only a few thousand intellectuals. But I think he is going to be right within the next decade. A much larger wave is curving toward the beach right now. Before it lands, it seems worthwhile to consider what this thing is we have believed in and what the consequences will be when as a society we cease to.
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- Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1972
References
page 32 note * When I first drafted this article I thought its proposal was quite new, though not without partial precedents. Since then, however, I discovered an important paper by Arthur Lee Burns that, while differing in a number of major respects, is strikingly similar in others and in basic outlook. See his "Ethics and Deterrence: A Nuclear Balance Without Hostage Cities," Adelphi Papers, No. 69 (London: Institute for Strategic Studies, July, 1970).
page 34 note * It appears that the term "countervalue" was originally devised to cover whatever the enemy was assumed to value, and hence could have been applied to the targets I suggest here. It is common, however, to use it synonymously with counterpopulation or counter-city,
page 34 note ** A target hardened to withstand 60 psi in overpressure will be destroyed by a 20 kiloton bomb striking within a quarter of a mile of it; that same bomb can destroy frame houses up to about 13/4 miles away, but not much farther. U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962).
page 34 note *** While critics on the Left have frequently attacked the doctrine of assured destruction as calling for damage far in excess of deterrence requirements, several right-ofcenter critics have denounced its usual interpretation as insufficient for deterrence. They emphasize the Soviet government's presumed evacuation and civil defense capability and suggest that the actual casualty total would not be high enough. Such critics might well find a concentration on military targets as described here to be in fact more plausible as a restraint on Soviet aggressive acts. For doubts about the sufficiency of current targeting see Eugene P. Wigner, "The Myth of 'Assured Destruction,' " Congressional Record (October 13, 1971).
page 35 note * See John J. Hoist's "Missile Defense, the Soviet Union, and the Arms Race," in Hoist and William J. Schneider, Why ABM? (New York: Pergamon, 1969).