London. -- Greenpeace is pushing at an open door. If the protests, disturbances, negative polls, critical political commentary and immense press coverage of the French nuclear tests have proved anything, they've demonstrated that a nerve has been touched. People of many beliefs, from a wide variety of cultures and politics, have concluded that nuclear bombs are no longer acceptable.
Nuclear patriotism, like that of France's President Jacques Chirac, seems to be the last refuge of the scoundrel. Nuclear possession by anyone, even the superpowers, is now up for serious question. As Gen. Charles Horner, until recently head of the U.S. Space Command, says, ''the nuclear weapon is obsolete.''
Greenpeace's timing was as perfect as President Chirac's confessed ignorance of the 1995 anniversaries of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was unforgivable. It suitably capped a three-year debate by some of America's most eminent Cold War strategists, from Robert McNamara to Michael Mazarr, from Paul Nitze to John Steinbruner, on whether America's and Russia's nuclear arsenals should come down from 20,000 warheads to 100 or to zero.
Mr. Nitze, an old Cold War hard-liner and one of the originators of the ''containment'' policy for dealing with the Soviet Union, argues that high-tech conventional weapons are now more credible and effective as deterrent threats than nuclear missiles.
The U.S., he believes, now has a substantial degree of dominance in conventional war-making capability. It was otherwise during the Cold War. Washington believed that it was only its threat of nuclear retaliation that offset Soviet conventional strength in Europe. Today it is Washington that is deterred by others' nuclear weapons; thus Mr. Nitze argues that a program to reduce their role to zero would work to maximize U.S. power.
With thinking like this in the air, it is no surprise that a chairman of the U.S. joint chiefs of staff, Gen. Colin Powell, could cross his superior, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, when he was asked to ready plans for the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons against Saddam Hussein. ''We are not going to let that genie loose,'' Mr. Powell says he told his boss.
That was in 1991. Three years later Michael Mazarr, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, proposed that ''The involvement of . . . new members of the arms-control club provides the opportunity -- the first in the history of the nuclear age -- to construct a much stronger case for a sensible nuclear end-state.'' ''Weaponless deterrence,'' he calls it.
