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Bad guys and missile defense AMAZING! Usually I complain about the politics, philosophy, or intelligence of one of your stable of left-leaning professors that you quote so frequently in the magazine. For the first time in memory, I write to congratulate you on the interview in April with the marvelously intelligent and balanced Michael Nacht, dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy at Berkeley. If there was ever an area where I would expect Cal to be politically correct, it would be in missile defense (“Star Wars”). Instead, I found that Professor Nacht has a completely realistic view of the world, the dangers present both from rogue states and from fumbling giants like China, and that he understands the uses of and need for military and political power. He shows an unusually astute awareness of both the limits and the value of a missile defense system, as well as other technological forms of mass destruction. --Arvin Gibson ’50 Kaysville, Utah THE INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL NACHT MADE ME THROW UP. It didn’t reassure me to know that bad guys out there are catalogued and neutralized by high-quality, well-educated, and highly dedicated middle managers with “special clearances.” The ribbons these middle managers wear decorate the sacrifice of three million Vietnamese, murdered in order to prevent elections in Vietnam, and signal the skills required to bombard Cambodia with 530 thousand tons of high explosives—not to mention other non-trivial assassinations and overthrows of governments. --David Lucier ’71 Santa Cruz YOUR INTERVIEW WITH THE DEAN OF THE GOLDMAN SCHOOL of Public Policy and the sidebar about the school, “Speaking truth to power,” left me wondering what this pithy slogan has to do with the school. What does “speaking truth to power” mean if the truth is hidden by official secrecy or confounded by propaganda of the national security state? Nacht says, apparently approvingly, that our government is up to things “that are not known unless you have a special clearance.” Also: “In U.S. foreign policy, there’s a whole layer below what is generally known—a whole ocean of things are going on that the public knows nothing about.” Maybe the Goldman School trains an elite qualified to have the special clearances denied the rest of us. They would do well to remember that we live in a democracy where it is assumed that the people have a right to know what their government is up to. By the way, Nacht’s father was wrong about Eisenhower in saying, “What he does tell you is the truth.” Ike lied to us big time, usually by denial, as his administration overthrew governments in Guatemala and Iran and plotted the invasion of Cuba. He got caught, of course, in denying overflights of the USSR when Gary Powers’s U2 was shot down. Had these operations been subject to prior public exposure and almost certain rejection, the national interest would have been better served. --Larry Waldron Professor emeritus, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management NACHT SAYS “There are bad guys out there.” Not all the bad guys are overseas. Some of them, in fact, operate freely in Washington, D.C., where they are even more a threat to the country and harder to deal with. --John Mackinney ’53 Albany HOW DID Dean Nacht get through the Vietnam era maintaining such beliefs? --Richard Thompson ’80 Honolulu MANY OF US—alumni, students, faculty, staff—have a very different view of the proposed National Missile Defense (NMD) than that of Michael Nacht. Most particularly, I have led a team of scientists and engineers who worked over a year and produced, under the aegis of the Union of Concerned Scientists and the MIT Security Studies Program, a lengthy report on the NMD. The main conclusion of our 150-page report, “Countermeasures: A Technical Evaluation of the Operational Effectiveness of the Planned U.S. National Missile Defense System” is that the NMD won’t work. Simple countermeasures, will defeat the system. Furthermore, the proposed NMD would increase—not decrease—the missile threat to the United States when consideration is given to the probable response of China or Russia. The full report, along with reprints of some newspaper articles based upon the report, may be found at http://www.ucsusa.org. --Andrew Sessler Former director, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory |
Have an opinion? Write to “Letters,” California Monthly, Alumni House, Berkeley 94720 -7520; 510/642-6252 (fax), calmonthly@alumni.berkeley.edu.
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