At the Reykjavik "preparatory summit" in October, President Reagan had stunned

many of his allies, at home and abroad, with his proposed "zero option": we and the Soviets would, within ten years, eliminate all our ballistic missiles. The summit broke down only when Secretary Gorbachev said, Oh, by the way, and you'll stop this Star Wars business. General Rowny has been dealing with apocalyptic matters most of his adult life, but it seems to have dampened his spirits not at all, and he takes us genially through the ins and outs of arms control. ER: "The Soviets say that they don't want a nuclear war because a nuclear war could never be won ... Yet they continue to pile up large numbers of nuclear weapons, and how do you account for this anomaly? They must feel that there's some psychological value ... Now if we could reduce the number of

weapons so that neither side had a first-strike capability--we don't have one today, the Soviets do--then we have begun to reduce the risk of nuclear war."