We're all passengers aboard a deadly ship USS Alaska is a messenger of megadeath carrying passionate dreams of peace 30 January 1986 They live in a world of taut discipline, highest technology and constant, artificial light. They never leave home. Days will pass, and then weeks, and then months without the breath of a fresh breeze across the face or a glimpse of the moon behind clouds. Their senses are eclipsed by their environment, but amplified profoundly by the technology they command. Men and machine, they are the planet's most potent messenger of megadeath, but they carry its most passionate dreams of peace. Together, crew and capsule, they are named for our land, the USS Alaska. These submariners represent the dilemma of our age at its most complex and disquieting. They are the ultimate contradiction, a supreme killing machine launched with the prayers of peace. To borrow the motto of their cousins aboard the strategic bombers of our nuclear arsenal, they might claim "Peace is our profession." But they are schooled for war. They are the most terrible threat of death yet devised by human beings. Within the envelope of their Trident submarine rest multiple warhead missiles that can deliver death to millions. Millions of people. If ever their missiles fly, it will surely be one of the last acts of the human race. Only the most bewildered or blinded of observers believes our planet could survive the hard rain of nuclear war. But there is a desperate sincerity in the contradiction they embody. None but the mad could launch such a machine without sincere conviction that it will deter, and not trigger, world's end. Thus, in the tortured logic of the age, does threat become security. Thus does man attempt to build peace on the foundation of destruction. This is a contradiction of profound dimension. Many of us cannot fasten on such tormented thoughts for long, and so turn away in helpless resignation. Others become preoccupied, facing the realities of the threat in frustrated fascination. A few, perhaps, can look unblinkingly at this life-or-death complexity and presume to find answers. But there is no consensus in their ranks, and even the simplest of first steps toward solution -- a mutual, verifiable freeze of nuclear weapons -- is dashed upon the rocks of contention. At first I thought naming the vessel for Alaska was a mistake, but I was wrong. The ceremony of its christening and launch have served to remind us in a specific way of the perils this underwater missile platform represents, and that is valuable. Perhaps we should name the missiles, too. Let one warhead be called "the Anchorage," so we can focus more personally upon the potential we have financed. Let us think specifically of some Soviet city -- say Komsomol'sk, like us a northern city of 260,000 souls -- and think of a missile named Anchorage speeding westward. I believe the men of the USS Alaska want to serve peace, a tense and troubled mission when you sail with the potential death of millions aboard. But we no less than they are passengers. Less directly, but no less finally, the missiles are also ours.