Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

When Scientists Know Sin
for the citizens of the United States in case of global thermonuclear
war.
It is claimed by apologists for the Reagan administration
that, whatever the exaggerations in capability, some of it
intentional, SDI was responsible for the collapse of the Soviet
Union. There is no serious evidence in support of this contention.
Andrei Sakharov, Yevgeny Velikhov, Roald Sagdeev, and
other scientists who advised President Mikhail Gorbachev
made it clear that if the United States really went ahead with a
Star Wars programme, the safest and cheapest Soviet response
would be merely to augment its existing arsenal of nuclear
weapons and delivery systems. In this way Star Wars could have
increased, not decreased, the peril of thermonuclear war. At
any rate, Soviet expenditures on space-based defences against
American nuclear missiles were comparatively paltry, hardly of
a magnitude to trigger a collapse of the Soviet economy. The
fall of the USSR has much more to do with the failure of the
command economy, growing awareness of the standard of
living in the west, widespread disaffection from a moribund
Communist ideology, and - although he did not intend such an
outcome - Gorbachev's promotion of glasnost, or openness.
Ten thousand American scientists and engineers publicly
pledged they would not work on Star Wars or accept money from
the SDI organization. This provides an example of widespread
and courageous non-cooperation by scientists (at some conceivable
personal cost) with a democratic government that had,
temporarily at least, lost its way.
Teller has also advocated the development of burrowing
nuclear warheads, so that underground command centres and
deeply buried shelters for the leadership (and their families) of an
adversary nation might be dug down to and wiped out; and
0.1-kiloton nuclear warheads that would saturate an enemy country,
obliterating its infrastructure 'without a single casualty'.
Civilians would be alerted in advance. Nuclear war would be
humane.
As I write, Edward Teller - still vigorous and retaining considerable
intellectual powers into his late eighties - has mounted a
campaign, with his counterpart in the former Soviet nuclear
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