The Washington Post Writers Group, by Charles Krauthammer

The accepted wisdom in South Africa, Lionel Abrahams, a literary critic, told Joseph Lelyveld of The New York Times, has it that “nothing will do but that hard black men come to grips with hard white men, to which end the soft men between must clear out of the way.”

In revolution, the soft men between must always clear out of the way. Revolution is not for moderates. From Alexander Kerensky to Arturo Cruz, nothing changes: the man of qualms, of balance, of ambivalence is lost.

Bishop Desmond Tutu -- Nobel Peace Prize winner, anti-apartheid activist and leading spokesman for nonviolence in South Africa -- is not a hard man. "I am the marginal man between two forces, and possibly I will be crushed," he admits. "But that is where God has placed me, and I have accepted the vocation."

The miracle of Martin Luther King, Jr., what set him apart even from Desmond Tutu, was the militance of his moderation, the steel will with which he insisted not just on his ends but on his means.

In a revolution, unwavering pursuit of ends is no great distinction. Everyone has an idea about destination. But only great, hard men are sure exactly of the path. Men like Lenin, Mao and Ho Chi Minh. (The list is depressingly long.)

Or like Gandhi, who believed with religious certainty that satyagraha, truth-force, was the way to freedom. And like King, who never wavered in his commitment to nonviolence, and who understood that for the moderate to survive in revolutionary times he must stick as hard by his means as the hard men at the extremes do by theirs.

Tutu is also deeply personally committed to nonviolence, and has shown extraordinary personal courage in its service. At least twice he has risked his life to save a suspected informer from a murderous mob. Last August in Daveyton, he stood alone between black demonstrators and heavily armored South African troops and negotiated a solution that averted certain violence.

Tutu’s nonviolence, however, seems more a personal choice. "I wouldn’t, myself, carry guns or fight and kill. But I would be there to minister to people who thought they had no alternative." Asked two days ago whether there is any justification for violence, he replied, "If I were young … I would have rejected Bishop Tutu long ago."

Personal choices are not forced on others. Instead, says Tutu, tactics are not even his domain. "I am an idealist. It is unfair to ask an idealist how he will move toward a utopian goal."

King was forever telling people how to move. His means were as inseparable a part of his being and his message as his ends. King made nonviolence the cornerstone of his philosophy of social action. Tutu’s two books, "Crying in the Wilderness" and "Hope and Suffering," are a passionate, prophetic call for reconciliation and negotiation. But of the books’ 62 speeches, sermons and writings, not one is devoted to the theory and practice of nonviolence. For Tutu, nonviolence is a discipline, a matter of conscience. For King, it was that and more: a weapon, a matter of hard political strategy.

Tutu is King’s natural heir. On Monday, the first annual holiday commemorating King’s birth, that kinship receives ratification from King’s living memorial, the Martin Luther King Center for Non-Violent Social Change. It will award Tutu its 1986 Non-Violent Peace Prize.

To compare Tutu to King is therefore inevitable, though it is perhaps unfair. First, because King was a great political leader and Tutu does not pretend to be one at all. “I am just a religious leader standing in for the real leaders of our people who are in jail and exile,” he says. “If I am a leader it is only by default.”

But more important, because South Africa is not America. There is no Kennedy, no Johnson. No franchise. No white public ready to be galvanized to action by scenes of Southern violence. South Africa is all South, old South.

Tutu knows that well. "Nonviolence presupposes a minimum moral level. And when that minimum moral level does not operate, I don’t think nonviolence can succeed." The oppressor society must be capable of "moral revulsion." It happened in Gandhi’s Britain and King’s America. "I don’t see that happening here," says Tutu.

The Pretoria regime won’t talk to him. And the young black militants want him out, says Tutu, so they can "get on with the revolution" without him. The hard men want the soft men to move.

King would not be moved. True, he was more fortunate than Tutu in his choice of birthplace. America had the capacity for shame that is the necessary condition for the success of nonviolence. But it is also a sufficient condition. The ground needs a figure. Nonviolent revolution needs a hard man to lead it. America was even luckier than King for his choice of birthplace. Monday, we give thanks for that good fortune.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

We are the first generation in space and we forget it. We forget that during the first three years when records were kept of such things in aviation, there were 33 fatal crashes in a world of only 1,000 fliers. "My memory is one long obituary list," said Anthony Fokker, the great Dutch pilot and engineer.

After 56 harmless manned space flights in succession it is easy to forget. After the tragedy of Challenger we will remember, at least for a time. We will tremble the next time engines light up to lift a man into space.

The first reaction to the death of Challenger and her brave crew, after the shock and the grief, was grit: the determination, as expressed by the president, to carry on, just as those who died would have wished.

A second reaction will quickly follow. Doubt. Is putting man in space really worth the cost and the risk?

It is an irony that the worst tragedy in the history of manned space flight coincides with one of the great triumphs of unmanned exploration, Voyager II's discoveries on Uranus. The conjunction of these two events gives immediacy to a question asked long before the Challenger catastrophe. Why rush to put men rather than machines into space?

Machines are better, safer, cheaper, says physicist James Van Allen (discoverer of the Earth's radiation belts) in the current Scientific American. We are going about space the wrong way, he argues. It is not our bodies but our minds, borne by rocket legs and robot eyes, that should be in space. Lugging bodies that demand oxygen and leg room and safety is inefficient. It is also bad for science. It steals funds away from past and future Voyagers.

The skeptics are not just ruminating. They have a target. Not the shuttle. The shuttle will live. It is now practically our only means of launching satellites. We have nearly disposed of disposable rockets. We have too much invested in the shuttle to turn back, even after Challenger.

The target is the manned space station. The president has called for building one by 1992, the 500th anniversary of the European discovery of America. It will cost at least $8 billion. Contracts have already been let, but it is the target of budget cutters in OMB and Congress, and of a chorus of critics who see in it all that is wrong -- mundane and frivolous -- with manned flight.

"An expensive yawn in space," The New York Times called the space station when Reagan first proposed it in 1984. Four weeks ago, The Times added: "an $8 billion white elephant." Britain's prestigious scientific journal, Nature, called the space station a "tragedy . . . another two decades of original research on why astronauts vomit." And besides, says the ubiquitous Carl Sagan, "machines are more reliable than people."

And so they are. But they cannot sing. And when they round the dark side of the moon, they do not recall Genesis.

The sensible types are right that man in space is bulky, demanding, expensive, a bother. Nature is right that, in space, people tend to "bump about and jiggle telescopes, disturbing the hardware."

Van Allen says that "apart from serving the spirit of adventure, there is little reason for sending people into space." Well, yes. Or for sailing west to the Indies. Or for crossing the sands of Kitty Hawk in a biplane. Or for -- How do you argue with sensible people? I wonder: What could Amundsen have told his banker to explain why he had decided to walk to the South Pole?

Yet even the sensible types can't help betraying a trace of appreciation for the romance of manned flight. The Times' most recent bash of the space station contains a reference, meant as a contrast, to "the splendid success of the Apollo voyages to the moon." But from the sensible point of view, Apollo was an exercise in frivolity. We spend a decade putting men up there, and what do they do? Drive around. Pick up rocks. Play a little golf. A robot could have done all that, except possibly the golf, at a tenth the cost.

Even sensible types must occasionally succumb to the majesty that is man braving the void. How can anyone live in this age and not dream of the first celestial habitat, of way-stations and colonies, of orbital space with addresses (and ZIP codes!)? You might as well take a child to a dark room and show him slides of a sunset. It is cheaper and more fuel-efficient than a trip to the hilltop, and will spare both of you unnecessary exposure to cancer-causing ultraviolet rays.

I admit that Uranus and her moons are beautiful in pictures. And there is a romance of pure knowledge too. To discover 10 moons that did not exist yesterday (in our consciousness) is nourishment for the spirit. The mind-over-matter space ascetics are right: Voyager has its place in space. But so does man, tiresome body and all.

Asks The Times, "What could a man do on Mars that robots could not do far better?" Weep, wonder, dream . . . look back to Earth and know what he had done.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

When the recidivist dieter decides he can't go on any longer, one more Twinkie and he'll explode, he does this: he locks the refrigerator door and mails the key to his uncle in Yuma.

The strategy is, of course, illogical. If he has the willpower to resist the call of the pilot light, he doesn't have to go through these shenanigans. And if he doesn't have the willpower, he can still fly to Yuma, pick up the key, come home and open the refrigerator. What's the point?

The point is that it is long way to Yuma. People don't always have the will to do what they know they have to do, so they invent little stratagems to make the alternatives unpalatable.

Welcome to the world of Gramm-Rudman. If Congress and the president cannot agree on a budget that cuts the deficit by a reasonable amount (one-fifth) every year for the next five, automatic cuts go into effect. An agent of the president (director of the Office of Management and Budget) and an agent of Congress (director of the Congressional Budget Office) agree on the amount of the shortfall. A referee (comptroller general of the General Accounting Office) then resolves discrepancies.

The three uncles calculate the procit and the required across-the-board cuts to meet Gramm-Rudman targets. The cuts then automatically go into effect. Unless, that is, the threat moves Congress and the president to reason -- i.e, judicious, non-automatic defense and domestic cuts and a tax hike.

From the anguished cries of critics, you'd have thought representative government as we know it had come to an end. Twelve House members are asking the courts to rule unconstitutional this transfer of power from the elected branches to the unelected.

But it is he elected branches that created the formula that governs the cuts. The formula -- calculate the shortfall, divide by X, add Y, and multiply by the number of cowards in Congress -- is in the Gramm-Rudman bill. And being a bill, it was passed not by the Supreme Soviet but by Congress, and signed by the president, also elected.

How can one seriously talk of excessive delegation during the reign of an imperial Federal Reserve? Who elected Paul Volcker? What the CBO and the OMB and finally the GAO do is no more than, as we used to say in grade school, plug in the values. Theirs is not a political decision but a determination of numbers, something the elected branches delegate to un Census Bureau calculations determine huge shifts in the allocation of federal monies, even of congressional seats. Who elected its chief?

So, line of attack number 2: Gramm-Rudman allows no choices. And to govern is to choose, said John Kennedy, an insight recently rediscovered by The New York Times and Sen. Daniel Moynihan, among other critics.

If to govern is to choose, the United States has been in anarchy for some time now. Last month, faced with a reconciliation bill cutting $75 billion over three years (out of a three year deficit maybe eight times that size) the 99th Congress boldly chose to adjourn.

True, Gramm-Rudman has no priority list. But neither does Congress. At least Gramm- Rudman has three classes of program: those subject to full automatic cuts, those subject to partial automatic cuts, and those exempt. Call it the modified flat cut, the budgetary equivalent (but enjoying none of the vogue) of that hot political property, the modified flat tax.

Now, if nothing happens other than Gramm-Rudman, the results will be absolutely intolerable -- soon. Soon no FBI. Soon no Coast Guard. Soon national parks paved over to pay their way as parking lots.

In short, a disaster, and a man-made one at that. But the deficit (dignified by the adjective "structural" to make it sound inherent to the natural order of things) is equally man-made, and threatens a worse disaster. What awaits us in 1991 if we accumulate $1 trillion more debt is far more serious than asphalt in Yellowstone -- the debt will pave over the whole economy -- but far less tangible.

And that is the genius of, and sole justification for, Gramm-Rudman: noth palpable will concentrate the mind of Congress and the president on cuts and compromise.

It is only January and the assumption is proved. In Washington today, political talk starts and ends with Gramm-Rudman. Everything is driven by Gramm-Rudman. That is, driven by the deficit. Except that the term "Gramm-Rudman" has the law behind it and a buzz-saw ahead of it. "Deficit" is mush.

In Congress, says Rep. Les AuCoin, "people are looking at this (coming session) with real dread." Already, words of hope.

Says Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole: "There's likely to be a lot of china broken around here before it's over." A nation awaits the first blessed sound.

The elected branches, incapable of choosing and aware of the incapacity, have undertaken an act of reckless wisdom and daring cowardice. They mailed the key to Yuma.

Sure it is a trick, the worst trick around except for all the others.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

Every time the Supreme Court issues a ruling on affirmative action, the groans begin: "unclear," "fudged," "muddying the waters." Can't the court give us a yes or no?

It can't, and a good thing too. Whether the court intended it or not, this issue, which exploded 15 years ago with so much passion and so much justice on both sides, is being compromised, fudged and muddied into submission. Perhaps even into some rough social consensus.

Consider the recent court ruling in the case of a layoff plan in Jackson, Mich. To protect recent black hiring gains, it called for laying off white teachers rather than black teachers with less seniority. A majority on the court held the plan unconstitutional. But the decision yielded no fewer than five opinions. Yet, sifting through the confusion, a position of reasonable compromise may be emerging.

The Reagan Justice Department would not be happy with this compromise. Its position is that race-conscious affirmative action should be permitted only to remedy specific cases of past discrimination against specific individuals. Accordingly, Justice wants to gut Executive Order 11246, which mandated preferences for minorities in federal contracting. And it keeps interpreting Supreme Court decisions (the 1984 Memphis firefighters case, now Jackson) as justifying this idea. But the Justice Department's view clearly does not command a majority of the court.

Sandra Day O'Connor, the swing vote in the Jackson case, held that race-consciousness does not require proof of past discrimination. A simple statistical discrepancy -- say, a lower proportion of black teachers than blacks available in the hiring pool -- might suffice to justify a race-conscious remedy. So (according to the Bakke decision) would a goal as innocent as "the promotion of racial diversity . . . in higher education."

What idea, then, is emerging? In Supreme Court talk, it goes by the name of "narrow tailoring." Wrote Justice Lewis Powell, courts "should give particularly intense scrutiny" to "a nonracial approach or a more narrowly tailored racial classification" system to promote affirmative-action goals. A race-conscious remedy must be something of a last resort. And even then, the least pernicious form of race-consciousness should be chosen.

Like what? Everybody has his own idea of what is pernicious and what constitutes narrow tailoring. But consider the pattern. First in Memphis, now in Jackson, the Supreme Court seems loath to permit affirmative action that lays people off. On the other hand, even Powell, writing for the conservative plurality that struck down the Jackson layoff plan, concludes that "other, less intrusive means of accomplishing similar purposes -- such as the adoption of hiring goals -- are available."

Why hiring and not firing? First, because firing is too "intrusive" a burden: losing a job you already have is a far greater injury than not getting one you only want. But second -- and in my view more important -- because the burden of affirmative action in hiring "is diffused to a considerable extent among society generally" -- and thus is socially tolerable.

Laid-off whites are obviously identifiable. You can not only count them, you can see them -- out of work, angry and in court suing. A disappointed white job applicant, on the other hand, is generally far from sure that he would have gotten the job had there been no affirmative action.

Hiring, yes; firing, no. This suggests a rather odd and elegant rule of thumb: to determine whether reverse discrimination is permitted, the important point is not whether the original (black) victims can be identified -- the administration position -- but whether the current (white) victims cannot be identified. The idea is diffusion, to produce a truly "societal" remedy for the "societal" injury of racial discrimination, and to cushion blameless individuals from having to pay for the failings of the larger society.

The diffusion principle lies behind many other governmental policies. Consider the debate about the 55 mph speed limit. We know that raising it to pre-1973 levels will cause 2,000-4,000 excess deaths. Since these are statistical deaths only, it is still arguable (and argued) that the tradeoff is reasonable. If we knew in advance, however, the names and addresses of those who would give their lives so that others could enjoy faster interstate deliveries, the question would never even be discussed.

In the Jackson layoff case, we have the names and addresses of those paying the penalty. Hence the court's distaste for the "tailoring" of this remedy. Hence the invocation of the "diffusion" principle. It is an approach to race-conscious affirmative action that is, to be sure, not wholly satisfying. After all, if race-consciousness is wrong in principle, it should be wrong in hiring as well as firing. But diffusion does finesse the competing claims of minorities for redress and of whites for equal treatment. It considers not what remedy is just (both sides have good claims), but what remedy is socially tolerable.

The court has two other major affirmative-action cases pending this session. It will be interesting to see whether it can maintain its course of muddling through, wisely.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

When I was a kid, movie Indians said things like "me no like-um paleface." No one ever explained the origins of the peculiar "-um" declension, but no matter. Logic was not expected of Indians, and the same held for other native peoples in other movies from "Tarzan" on up.

Things have changed. The dignity of language has been restored to movie Indians (well, PBS Indians -- there are none left in the movies). They speak in their own tongue now, and the subtitles report them saying lyrical things like, "The cry of the night pierces the soul of my darkness."

This process of language decolonization follows the general political decolonization of the last 30 years. It also follows modern recognition of the dignity and complexity of native cultures. That is all to the good. It even makes more fictional sense for Indians to be speaking something other than a bizarre variant of Ellis Island English.

The trend, however, has not stopped there. It never does. Linguistic emancipation, it seems, is for everyone. Even, say, cavemen. Twenty years ago, the Hollywood Neanderthal communicated with a pound on the chest and a wield of the club. It is hard to see one today for whom some consultant anthropologist has not invented a language as elaborate as it is bogus. And honored, like the highest German, with subtitles. Thankfully, the movement to subtitle dolphins is stalled.

I find these good intentions strained but tolerable. Less tolerable is the direction of another wing of the language decolonization movement, the school of Militant Anti-Colonials -- MACs for short. MACs insist that whenever, in conversation, you cross an international border, you must turn in your English and go native. A MAC is the guy (English-speaking) who, in the middle of a discourse (in English) about Central America, tells you that you totally misunderstand the situation in Neeeee-kahh-RAAAHH-gwahhh.

Neeeee-kahh-RAAAHH-gwahhh? Pronouncing Nicaragua the Spanish way is perhaps a sign of sophistication, but it is also an advertisement of one's raised consciousness. More annoying still is the ringingly rococo "elll-sahl-vahh-DOHRRRRR," all liquid l's and rolling r's, climaxed in the triumphantly accented last syllable. All this to signify hopes for a liberated El Salvador and, some day, a liberated listener.

MACs can easily be picked out of a crowd even before their conversation has wandered south. A MAC is anyone who carefully and aggressively says "North America" to mean "United States" (as in "North American aggression") to demonstrate that he has transcended the imperial (North) American tendency to appropriate for one country the name of two continents.

I can take this oblique swipe at the Monroe Doctrine. What I cannot take is the follow-up reference to, say, the drug problem in "Kohl-LOHHHHM-bia." My habit now is to respond with the observation that the problem is seen very differently in Paa-RRREEEE, is ignored totally in Mohs-KVA, though it has provoked street demonstrations in KUE-bin-hah-ven (DAN-mark).

Not that such an anti-MAC attack ever satisfies. But it does make the point that what drives English speaking MACs is not a sense of linguistic authenticity but merely a bad colonial conscience. They would never think of assaulting you with "Mahhh-DRRREEED." We never sent a Marine there.

In my calmer moments I do admit the existence of a real dilemma here. It is a problem: how do you pronounce a foreign-language word when speaking English?

My answer: when in Rome, speak Roman; when in America (what some call the United States), speak English. Drop the umlauts, the aigues and graves, and give foreign words their most mundane English rendering.

About the use of fancy accents in mundane situations, I speak from experience. When I was five, my family moved to Montreal, in part because it was French-speaking (my mother being Belgian, my father French). But our French was not the kind spoken in Quebec. Ours was what Montrealers called "Parisian" French, the language of Quebec's upper class (i.e., snobs, such as Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who once dismissed Robert Bourassa, the current Quebec premier and of working class origins, as "a hot dog eater"). This bit of local sociology was unknown to me the first time I got on a bus and asked, in my Parisian French, for directions. The bus driver did not take kindly to being linguistically patronized by a creature four feet tall and wearing short pants. I learned my lesson. From then on I used only English in public.

But one can't totally avoid foreign words, even when speaking English. I still did not know what to do with French words that pop up in everyday English. For years, I doggedly, and self-consciously, pronounced "deja vu" precisely as my folks insisted at home, with sharps and flats and lips pursed ("vuh") as if to whistle.

Then came "Deja Vu," the album. It's been "vooo" ever since. One does not discuss Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young in an Inspector Clouseau accent. The gig was up. Time to learn to embrace English, jettison flatulent foreignness, and say ciao to all that. So how about it, guys? Ni-cuh-rag-wa.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

Two years after the accident at the Unit 2 nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island, a suit was filed to prevent the restart of the other, undamaged reactor. The argument was not that this reactor was a health hazard. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission had produced 22,000 pages of hearing transcripts to determine that it was not.

The argument instead was that people believed it was dangerous. Thus if TMI 1 were reopened, it might produce "intense anxiety" ("tension and fear, accompanied by physical disorders including skin rashes, aggravated ulcers, and skeletal and muscular problems"), and that would be a hazard to the surrounding communities.

A novel idea. Something is safe, but because people think it is dangerous, that makes it, well, (psychologically) unsafe. Perception is reality. The Supreme Court, however, was unimpressed with this novelty. It ruled, unanimously, that the NRC did not have to consider imaginary effects.

Fear is undoubtedly an unpleasant state, but in itself it does not create actionable claims. If it did, the line of litigants invoking such claims would be endless. Is there anything, after all, that people do not irrationally fear? If a groundless fear is enough to endow one with legal rights, then there is no piece of nonsense that cannot result in yet another claim upon others. Your neighbor has a dog. The dog is harmless. But you are afraid of dogs anyway. Can you impound the dog?

In the case of Three Mile Island, the Reagan Justice Department argued no. Now, another year, another place, and another piece of nonsense. The hysteria this time is not about gamma rays but about AIDS, the irradiated irrationality of the '80s.

The Justice Department has considered again the question of whether perception is ir,4p reality. It issued a ruling this week on what kind of discrimination is permissible against AIDS victims. The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 prohibits discrimination on the basis of handicap. Justice XR decided that an employer may not fire an AIDS victim if the employer is concerned about the "disabling effect of AIDS." But he may fire the victim if he is concerned about the contagious effects of AIDS.

Of course, in the work place there are no contagious effects. You have about as much chance of catching AIDS in the work place as you do of catching cancer or multiple sclerosis. So: your employee has AIDS or cancer or MS. The employee is harmless. But you are afraid of him anyway. Can you fire him? Says Justice, yes.

The immediate effect of this ruling will be to permit AIDS firings left and right. Is there an easier claim than the claim of irrational fear? The more general effect is to debase the idea underlying the antidiscrimination laws. The whole point of such laws is to say this: it may indeed cause you psychological distress to mix with others whom you irrationally dislike or fear. Too bad. The state has decided that these particular prejudices are destructive and irrational. Therefore the state will prohibit you -- even in "private-sector" transactions such as hiring or firing or serving people in your own luncheonette -- from acting upon your groundless prejudices.

The point of the Rehabilitation Act was to add another class of irrationality -- irrationality about the disabled -- to the catalogue of those the state will no longer countenance. Now comes Justice, in essence, to add: " -- except for one category of irrationality, fear of contagion. The state will permit you to fire disabled people on that account."

Even as a piece of reasoning, this casuistry fails. After all, why in general do people shrink from (and end up discriminating against) disability if not from fear of contagion? Moreover, if contagion were really the problem, private employers would not have to worry about it at all. The state can handle that. It has more sweeping powers against people with serious contagious diseases than it does against criminals. If you are innocent of all sin but have TB, the government can lock you away.

The problem of AIDS in the work place is not contagion. It is, as someone well acquainted with disability once said, fear itself. Fear itself does not deserve special protection in our public life.

There is no greater intellectual laziness than the proposition that perception is reality. The last place that Orwellian slogan ought to find refuge is in the law. The whole point of the law is to determine which perceptions are real and which aren't, and to give legal standing to one and not the other.

It does not matter if people think you murdered. If you didn't, you don't go to jail. It does not matter if people think TMI 1 is dangerous. If it isn't, it stays open. It should not matter if people think you can get AIDS in the Xerox room. You can't. Ignorance is a cause of discrimination. It is not a justification for it.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

The first reaction to the Iceland summit was alarm over the breakup and disappointment about what did not happen. First reactions now yield to a second: alarm over what almost happened. I am not talking about almost giving up SDI. I can live without SDI. In fact, I have lived all of my 36 years without it. Some limited defensive system might make us safer. But the vulnerable, monstrously complicated and dubious total defense the president has in mind will not.

In any case, the "grand compromise" -- deep offensive cuts in exchange for restrictions on defense -- did not die at Reykjavik. In principle, the gap between the Soviet and American positions on SDI is not unbridgeable. On the one hand, no American, even one most opposed to SDI, opposes research, if only as a hedge against some Soviet breakthrough in research that we know is going on and that we cannot adequately verify. On the other hand, the president has offered to hold off on deployment for 10 years. So the remaining issue is 10 years of research and testing: how much and what kind (laboratory, ground-based, space-based). There is no reason why this issue should not be negotiable at Geneva.

The impasse over SDI was not the Reykjavik surprise. It is, after all, old news, at least two years old. The new news is the offensive cuts offered by both sides. They amount to a revolution in the postwar world. A hair-raising revolution.

Most hair-raising was the manner in which the proposals came up: the wizards of Armageddon flinging about, like tennis lobs, the most profound changes in nuclear strategy in a generation. In fact, it sounded more like poker. Gorbachev had started by offering a 30 percent cut in offensive arms. Fifty percent cut in ballistic missiles in five years, countered Reagan. I call your 50 percent, but make that all strategic nuclear arms, meaning not just ballistic missiles but bombers, cruise missiles, etc., replied Gorbachev. Reagan raised again: How about eliminating all -- yes, all -- ballistic missiles by 1996? Amazingly, reported Donald Regan, "they came back and said [eliminate] strategic nuclear arms, which would have included everything. There was discussion of that as to whether that meant such things, even down to artillery shells. And they said, yes, that's what they meant."

No nukes, down to artillery shells. The end of days, by 1996 mind you. And agreed to in 11 hours in the hothouse atmosphere of a college all-nighter.

In the end, these agreements were sunk (or, more accurately, suspended: both sides say they remain on the table in Geneva) by the SDI dispute. But what if they had not been? The implications of these agreements, largely ignored in the PR battle over who prevented peace from breaking out, are not altogether reassuring.

The ballistic missiles idea had certain attractions for Reagan. First, he offered it to save SDI. It allowed him to say to Gorbachev: if we eliminate ballistic missiles then an American SDI can be no threat to you. (It is also then of no use to us, but never mind.) Second, ballistic missiles is the one area where the Soviets have a distinct advantage. They may even have an inherent advantage: it is extremely hard to get democratic societies to back support for ever newer, ever bigger missiles. Witness our interminable debates over the MX. In the remaining technologies, bombers and cruise missiles, we are ahead.

On the other hand, and alarmingly, the Soviets also have a large advantage in conventional forces. The counterbalance has been the American strategic deterrent, and in particular our huge ballistic missile force on land and in submarines. By proposing to eliminate all American long-range missiles -- after agreeing to remove all intermediate-range missiles from Europe -- what is left of the American strategic guarantee to Europe, a guarantee on which the Western alliance hinges? Said Secretary Shultz, "I would by no means sell our ability short to hold our end up in providing conventional deterrence." West Berlin has not remained West for 40 years because of conventional deterrence.

Second, if the American deterrent reverts to bombers and cruise missiles, there is, ironically enough, a defense problem. The Soviets have the most sophisticated air defense in the world, and we have practically none. Which means that in addition to SDI, we would have to undertake the development of a truly massive new air defense system around the United States. Why is it any more likely that a democracy will indulge in that kind of defense spending than in today's kind? In fact, it will be less likely. An atmosphere in which we and the Soviets are turning Pershings into plowshares and Tridents into pruning hooks is hardly one conducive to Congress' shelling out billions for a new air defense.

Oh yes, one more detail. If the U.S. and U.S.S.R. destroy their ballistic missiles, Shultz was asked, what about those remaining in China, Britain and France? Sensing perhaps that there are many things that Americans will suffer, but that taking orders from the French is not one of them, he said that, of course, for the plan to go ahead the other countries would have to follow suit. In other words, not only will the Europeans have to do without the American nuclear umbrella. They'll have to do without their own.

It is a good thing that nothing was signed in Reykjavik. We now return to Geneva and pursue the end of days at more deliberate speed.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

Campaign '86 has already made its mark. Political advertising has reached a nadir of nattering negativism. The volume and pitch of negative advertising has itself become a major issue. (More than half of all political ads are negative, versus 5 percent in commercial advertising.) Hence a new etiquette: a James Broyhill commercial (Senate, North Carolina) pauses to call for "a clean campaign" before attacking opponent Terry Sanford. And some delicious touches: during a television debate, Roy Romer (governorship, Colorado) offers his hand to his opponent for a mutual moratorium on negative ads. Hand and offer refused. Live.

This may also be the year the American campaign finally went indoors, never to come out. ("A political rally in California consists of three people around a television set," observed Bob Shrum, Sen. Alan Cranston's media man.) But the market -- i.e. electorate -- will rule on negative advertising. And there is not much point decrying the electronic campaign. Might as well decry the demise of the slide rule. Technology has its imperatives. The real scandal of American elections is not the fact of television advertising nor the negative content, but the money it takes to buy it.

In any reasonable-sized state, campaigning has been streamlined. It now consists of two activities: fund-raising and media buys. Raise money from rich people to buy the means to persuade everybody else. The candidate has no choice. Campaign costs have gone from $ 750,000 per Senate race in 1980 to $ 3 million in 1984. The 18 hottest races in the '86 campaign have already reached that level and there are two weeks still to go.

Why so much? Television. On average more than half of all campaign money goes to TV advertising. In Florida the two Senate candidates, Paula Hawkins and Bob Graham, will likely spend over $ 7 million between them on television alone. In California, the candidates are spending about $ 10 million each, mostly for media.

The result? A set of rich people (donors) grows powerful, and a set of powerful people (owners of television stations) grows rich. A cozy arrangement within the, shall we say, ruling class. The result is an extraordinary, and extraordinarily unnecessary, augmentation of its power.

The rich already have more than their share of power in a democracy. That can be cured in two ways. By abolishing the rich, a method amply shown to be the surest road to general poverty. Or by loosening their grip on the electoral process.

How? The approach until now has been, as usual, supply side. We pretend to fight drugs by burning out Bolivian suppliers; we pretend to fight campaign corruption by limiting the supply of political money.

Campaign laws that limit giving have produced their inevitable, if unintended, consequences. Among them are the wild proliferation of special interest PACs, the absurd political windfall for rich candidates (you can give as much as you want to yourself: John Dyson just gave himself $ 6 million to lose a New York Senate primary), and the premium on glamorous friends who can raise large sums with a concert at their Malibu estate.

Candidates should not have to spend all their time in the salons of the rich or of pop stars to get money to pay for ads to engage in the most important political speech of the day, TV speech. There is a simpler way. Demand-side: make political advertising on television and radio free. Take away the largest financial drain on campaigns and the demand for political money falls. And with it falls the political price extracted from the candidate -- and the democracy -- by donors.

Airwaves, like landing rights or Yellowstone camp grounds, are a scarce national resource to be regulated by government. Sensibly, the American government does not operate the airwaves. It allocates them to private persons. Television licenses are unbelievably lucrative. In major markets a television station is worth about a quarter of a billion dollars. The physical plant costs roughly $ 5-$ 10 million. Much of the difference is the value of the operating license, a gift from the FCC. Recipients of that gift should minimally be required to grant free air time for political speech.

Taxpayers should not have to pay for it. Nor should candidates. Nor, beyond their quota of free time, should candidates be permitted to buy more. Otherwise the whole point of free media -- fairness and reducing the political utility of money -- is defeated.

True, a fixed amount of television time is a kind of restriction on political speech. But (1) the amount of free time can be made large. (2) It works elsewhere: Britain has a similar system, and British democracy is not noticeably impaired. And (3) you can't have everything. There is a trade-off. In a democracy, power depends on votes. To the extent that votes are less a slave to money, democracy is enhanced. If the price for that is curtailing, at the margin, the political speech of the rich and famous, we will have found ourselves a bargain.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

When Lyndon Johnson sent the Marines into the Dominican Republic in 1965, the official justification was to safeguard and evacuate endangered Americans. To no one's surprise, our boys stayed on a bit to put down a communist threat and install a friendly (and, mind you, a democratic) government. That is how we used to do things: when for traditional geopolitical reasons we needed to intervene, the rescue of Americans was a convenient pretext.

Rescue is a pretext no more. It has become an end in itself, a primary, obsessive end of American diplomacy. In the process, American foreign policy has become a slave to hostages. From the Vietnam POWs to the Mayaguez, from the Iranian to the TWA hostages, from Nicholas Daniloff to David Jacobsen, American diplomacy has moved to an astonishing degree from the traditional pursuit of national interest to the rescue of individuals. We have become an international rescue squad.

And now, with the McFarlane mission, the individualization of American foreign policy reaches its apex. Iran has revealed that, in September, President Reagan sent Robert McFarlane and four others on a bizarre diplomatic mission to Tehran. According to the speaker of the Iranian parliament, they came bearing Irish passports, a Bible, a cake in the shape of a key (it never reached its destination: hungry revolutionary guards polished it off at the airport) -- and a planeload of weapons.

Which brings us to the bizarre part: the deal being discussed. In exchange for helping to "curb terrorism" and release American hostages held in Lebanon, the United States helps Iran get spare parts for its war against Iraq. Now, nothing would be more destructive to American interests in the Persian Gulf than an Iranian victory over Iraq. And nothing prevents that outcome more than Iran's technological inferiority. The high-tech weapons bought by the shah are on the shelf for lack of spare parts. Restoring the flow could be a crucial factor in helping Iran win the war.

Which is exactly why the mullahs are swallowing their hatred for the Great Satan and offering to deal. (The mullahs, also desperate for money, are demanding $ 500 million in frozen assets and U.S. help in raising oil prices.) After six years, they are just short of toppling Iraq. Any marginal boost to their war effort could be decisive.

For the United States, preventing Islamic fanaticism from sweeping through the Persian Gulf is a crucial national interest. And yet, as a ransom for hostages and protection money against future terrorism, we are considering altering our policy, tilting toward Iran and thus jeopardizing that interest. (And more than just considering. The Post reports that the release of three American hostages in Lebanon over the past 14 months followed secret shipments of military cargo to Iran.) Such a capitulation would constitute an appalling act of dereliction.

Easy for me to say. What if I had a loved one being held hostage in Beirut? Wouldn't I be screaming for the government to do anything necessary to get the hostages back? Of course, I would. Families are right to use every instrument they can to force government to capitulate.

Which is why hostage families should not make foreign policy. Victims' families don't decide the punishment of domestic criminals. Courts do that. Courts were invented so that the general interest (it is "The People" -- not "The Victim's Family" -- "v. John Doe") would replace private vengeance. Diplomacy was invented to secure the general safety of the nation, not the safety of individuals.

Why has our diplomacy been turned on its head? To a certain extent, all societies are concerned about rescuing individuals. (The urge is particularly compelling, and most justified, when the individuals are POWs and others captured in service to country.) All the more so in America, where individualism is a uniquely powerful creed. But these are still insufficient explanations for the rescue fixation of American foreign policy of the last 15 years.

The power of television is, of course, one factor. On video, such abstractions as national interest or collective security have no meaning. They cannot be represented in pictures. A grieving family can.

More important, however, is leadership, a failure of leadership. It takes courage to risk the safety of visible, countable individuals in the name of some larger, national purpose. Wartime leaders -- Lincoln and Eisenhower -- had precisely that kind of courage. Courage is not to be confused with callousness. Preferring nation over individual was a decision they made with great agony. But they made it.

We are unwilling to. And so long as we are, America will remain hostage, by choice. In exchange for considerations that include shipments of military equipment to Iran, three American hostages have been released in Lebanon during the past 14 months. During the past two months, three new Americans hostages have been seized in the streets of Beirut. This is commerce without end. "Hostage families should not make foreign policy."

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)