E MEMORANDUM e@ STANFORD UNIVERSITY ¢ OFFICE MEMORANDUM © STANFORD UNIVERSITY © OFFICE MEMORANDUM

To

From

SuBJECT:

Dare: July 25, 1973

W.K.H. Panofsky ‘
Director and Professor SLAC ir!
Joshua Lederberg :

Department of Genetics

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Dear Pefe,

Thank you for sending me your beautiful paper on the mutual
hostage relationship. In my own correspondence with Ikle (I tried to
make a critical point by some too subtle irony). I was delighted
to see you articulate the basic issues with such clarity! I have
only the most minute of rhetorical remarks and a few comments that
perhaps should not be taken in to account for the publication.

I am particularly glad to see you put great emphasis on the
PAL/submarine problem. Was this not the subject of some news statements
between Brezhnev and Nixon?

Under reference 1 I wonder if you would not want to be reminded also
of Rapaport's book.

Page 2, "accrue", the term jars slightly when used in a non-
quantitative context.

Page 3 and elsewhere, "clean nuclear war". The paradox is that
a pure deterrent would consist of the dirtiest possible weapons: Perhaps
there are no rational arguments to want to discourage this emphasis. But
one had to sympathize with balkiness at advocating this direction.

Page 6, swift massive retaliation. Of. course, you are right that there
is no technical foundation for this necessity. However, there is a
psychological point. To retaliate in fact after one is mortaly wounded is
irrational. Programming for a swift response is a signal that no conditions
of rationality will be permitted to interferwith the certainty of retaliation.
The importance of establishing a secure conviction about such an "irrational"
retaliatory response is self-evident. And I think this may be the actual
historical foundation for the emphasis on the swiftness of the response,
This concern does not stand up to a very much further analysis, from the
standpoint of the expectations and the reliance of an adversary that he will
not be retaliated against!

Page 8, last word, "technically". The cliche "technically impossible"
might be misinterpreted, for some people will read that at least unconsciously
as "technically impossible but practically possible". "(There is no technical
means to achieve this") is probably a more reliable phrasing.

Page 10, strategic forces on either or both sides. Transpose both and
either.

Page 11, second paragraph, our hope: this is, of course, the crux of the

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argument. Perhaps you should even overteach, by repetition, the importance
of "the chance of anyone of them being delivered", as well as "the

number of nuclear weapons". Should you not also mention miscalculation?

And the possibility of such miscalculations may well increase, unless great
care is taken, even asa result of mutual force-reduction,

Page 11, bottom, and the general critique of Ikle. I fully agree with
your standpoint about his discussion, not withstanding the rather muted
irony of the way in which I expressed this in my letter to him,

Page 12, no technically demonstrable break —- except as I mentioned
the really dirty weapons.

Thank you again for a beautiful piece of analysis and of writing which
is an important contribution.