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With all due respect for my colleagues in the peace movement, one of our goals is more immediate than the amorphous and idealistic goal of peace. The peace symbol is based on the semaphore symbols for "N" and "D" for "nuclear disarmament," and although total "ND" may not be a good idea for a while, it is an important goal. A good deal of nuclear disarming is an ethical imperative.

With all due sympathy for the people of New York City and Washington, D.C., everything did not change on Sept. 11, 2001. "Everything" is vast, and the destruction of our galaxy would be a relatively minor change.

However, with the development of nuclear weaponry, as Albert Einstein warned, much changed for human beings. And some time in the latter part of the 20th century, everything, in a sense, did change for us. Some time between the 1970s and the end of the century, the nuclear states produced enough warheads to threaten Nuclear Winter.

Even short of Nuclear Winter, that collection of warheads represented a doomsday device for human civilization and perhaps the human species.

The nuclear threat is still with us, especially with U.S. development of anti-missile technology, and Russian perception of such technology as a potential first-strike weapon. The missile-defense systems proposed have always made most sense as first-strike weapons.

The Cold War logic was simple: U.S. missile defense would be swamped if the U.S.S.R. struck first. However, if we Americans struck first, we could, with luck, take out most of the Soviet missiles, destroy the Soviet command and control capacity, and kill a sufficiently large number of Russians to impose our will on the survivors.

Soviet missile retaliation would be — as Gen. Buck Turgidson correctly notes in the film "Dr. Strangelove" — uncoordinated and relatively small, and, relevantly here, within the capabilities of missile defense.

Turgidson says, when recommending a first strike without missile defense: "I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks."

With missile defense, we might come off with only a couple million or few hundred thousand killed — sustainable losses.

(The Soviet Union lost some 20 million people in World War II and still survived as a society. World War II — fought almost entirely with conventional weapons — caused barely a wiggle in the graph for an increasing human population.)

Hence, there is a powerful brief against nuclear weapons, one from the conservative tradition. Traditional conservatives stress "the continuity of generations" and raise the question of just what any given generation has the right to change.

That general question can and should be argued, but it is inarguably the case that one generation of human beings does not have the right to put at risk the existence of all future generations of humans. We have no right to maintain such huge numbers of nuclear weapons as to put at risk those future humans.

We are ethically obligated — on traditional conservative grounds — to reduce the number of nuclear warheads to where they may kill off a large number of our generation but not endanger civilization or our species.

We must not put the warheads in storage or redirect them, but destroy them.

Certainly we in the United States and the United Kingdom have no right to develop new generations of nukes, especially not nukes that are relatively small and placed on missiles that are very accurate. We have no right to develop missile defense systems that might do some good against rogue-state

missile systems that don't yet exist but which would be undoubtedly useful in taking out Russian and Chinese missiles that survive a "counterforce" attack by small nukes on highly accurate missiles.

Russian President Vladimir V. Putin may be a mildly paranoid former KGB official, but he is right to be suspicious of U.S. proposals for missile defense. A good missile defense is, potentially, an invitation to offensive, first-strike nuclear warfare. Which our generation does have a right to do to ourselves — after we've reduced the number of warheads to where the horrors will be mostly on us, not prevent the birth of generations who get no say in species destruction.

Not that most current humans have a say even over state actions, to say nothing of "loose nukes" and terrorist threats, but that's an argument from a bleeding-heart, democratic perspective, where even a few thousand deaths can raise ethical objections.

On hard-nosed conservative grounds, President Bush needs to devote the remainder of his time in office to "ND" — not total nuclear disarmament, not yet, but a lot of immediate disarmament, enough to get humans off the list of endangered species.

Richard D. Erlich is an emeritus professor in English at Miami University,

Oxford,

and

c

u

rrently lives in California's Ventura County.