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@make(letterhead,Phone"497-4330",Who "John McCarthy", Logo Old, Department CSD)                    
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Mr. Dennis Paulson
16 W. Pedregosa
Santa Barbara, CA 93101
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@greeting(Dear Mr. Paulson:)
@begin (body)

	Although I do not accept all their implicit
 premises, let me begin by
answering your four questions.

	1. There is a danger of nuclear war.  A full scale nuclear
war between the Soviet Union and ourselves would damage civilization
severely but probably not destroy it.  It might be comparable in its
impact on the countries involved to the Khmer Rouge
destruction of Cambodia.  Let me
assure you that this opinion is based on considerable
thought and computation and is not casual wishful
thinking -- even though I may be wrong.

	It seems to me,
however, that such a war is not more likely than it has been.
I do not see any process inexorably advancing towards a
war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.  The arms race itself
(more a walk than a race at least on the U.S. side where
a mere 6 percent of the GNP as compared to 10 percent in 1960
goes to the military) does not make war more or less
likely.  That depends on political factors.

I do not believe that there is any chance that the U.S.
will initiate a war.  The present Russian leaders are very
unlikely to begin it unless, perhaps, their system starts
to collapse.  However, every time the top man dies
in such an oligarchy, there is a chance of civil war, and
a civil war in China or Russia might become nuclear if
a side possessing nuclear weapons will otherwise be
defeated.  Another possibility is that the Afghanistan
war may produce a Soviet Napoleon, i.e. a military
man who wins a great reputation by ruthlessness and audacity.  All these
are dangers but not very likely dangers.  As you see,
I see the danger of world war as coming primarily
from the specific characteristics of communist society.

	A nuclear war in the third world is more likely
than a Soviet-American war.  There are more and more
countries with nuclear capability and more crazy leaders.
Probably we wouldn't be involved.  I cannot predict whether
the devastation of such a war would make further nuclear
war more or less likely.

	You will note that I do not see the problem
in the terms suggested by your letter, and I fear
many people would regard this as some kind of moral or
intellectual defect.

	2. We are not acting to save the world, because
we cannot agree on what action will save it.  There is
no unilateral American action that would necessarily save the
world from nuclear war -- not even
surrender to the Russians.  The last ten years have
shown that communists are even more inclined to fight
among themselves than democracies are.  Surrender might
result in our becoming an expendable resource in an
intra-communist battle.  Our present dithering between
detente oriented and defense oriented policies is
more likely to avoid war than either extreme.  A
steadier policy would reduce our nervousness,
but we are unlikely to adopt it.
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	3. Some people have deathwishes, but I doubt
that it is more widespread than usual.  More is being
done about all kinds of pollution than was ever done
in the past, because science is better at identifying
the problems and devising means of mitigating them.
There is no substitute for scientific understanding,
but the tone of your letter, and of this question in
particular, rouses my fear that you consider generalized
panic as helpful or morally superior to a calmer view
that attempts to determine what problems are most
important on what time scale.  The actual damage to
human health from all kinds of pollution is far less
than it has ever been.  Evidence of this is that
the incidence of disease is declining slowly and
the death rate is dropping in almost all countries,
both developed and backward.

	4. On the whole I am optimistic about humanity's future
over the next few hundred years.  Beyond that I worry more
about our maintaining motivation than about anything
else.  There is no resource or pollution  problem that even present
science cannot solve that jeopardizes our survival and even comfort
for millions or even billions of years.  This opinion
has a considerably firmer basis in science than
the one about civilization probably surviving
nuclear war.

	My major unpleasant surprise with the last forty years
is that technology affecting daily life has developed
so slowly -- more slowly than in the beginning years of
this century.  I am also disappointed, but not surprised,
 that social science
has not developed means of reducing our political and
economic conflicts, but social phenomena are very
complicated, and the search for understanding is
made less effective by the fact that many of
the social scientists themselves are committed to
groups seeking power or seeking to maintain power
they already have.

	However, I believe that when an intellectual
understanding of social life is achieved, whoever
achieves it will eventually be able to convince
enough of the rest of us to put the findings into
practice.  In the meantime, we need to keep plugging
at achieving scientific understanding of social
phenomena while remaining skeptical of claims to
have achieved it, since this is an area where
wishful thinking is prevalent and has led
to millions of deaths.  I refer to Marxism.

	Your phrase "aware of the ultimate
threat" suggests the common attitude in the peace movement that people
would necessarily agree with them
if only they would pay attention.  When people with this
persuasion obtain power, it usualy does
more harm than good.  They demand drastic changes in policy
even if they have no good idea of what the new policy should be,
and they are often intolerant of other points of view.

	Should you want to include the previous paragraphs
in a publication, I'm agreeable provided it
is included as a whole or I approve any shorter version.
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Sincerely,
 
   
    
John McCarthy
Professor of Computer Science
         
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P.S. My age is 55, and I don't have a handy photograph.
I would prefer to be identified as a computer scientist.
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