The past year has seen the publication of a spate of books on war, armaments, and the future course of American foreign policy. They have in common a sense of urgency—a sense that the nation has reached a major point of decision in which the old and tried formulas no longer suffice. Certainly the turn of the decade coinciding with a presidential election year has helped inspire this conviction of unaccustomed challenge. In addition there has been the mounting suspicion that the United States has slipped behind in its competition with the Soviet Union—in the arms race, in economic expansion, and in winning friends among the new or uncommitted nations—and with it a widespread doubt as to whether our government itself knew where it was going. Finally the launching of a militant “peace movement,” extending through a wide gamut of organizations from the sober and cautious Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy to the more radical Committee of Correspondence, has shown the need for a counter-offensive on the part of the “cold warriors” and the proponents of a dynamic defense policy.

The current flood of new books, then, has had to take into account both confusion in public policy and the challenge from peace and disarmament spokesmen. The result has been salutary: the level of discussion has gone up, and the great debate of the 1960’s which these books have inaugurated promises to combine an unprecedented technical sophistication with a sensitive awareness of moral ambiguities. Such is notably the case with the work which is widest in its range—Henry A. Kissinger’s The Necessity for Choice¹ The product of sustained reflection on America’s foreign policy prospects, it marks a departure from its author’s earlier insistence on the possibilities of limited nuclear war. Kissinger’s new book shows a cumulative revision of his views in the direction of both humility and humanity.

In contrast with the range and detail of Kissinger’s work—whose concluding chapters (the best in the book) extend beyond the question of war and arms control to discuss the role of the uncommitted nations in international affairs and of intellectuals in policy formation—Richard J. Barnet’s Who Wants Disarmament? ² claims to offer no more than a summary of the disarmament stalemate over the past decade and a half, plus a reasoned and heartfelt plea for resuming such negotiation in earnest before it is too late. Barnet writes with a moral conviction and a clarity which are extremely rare in a field where most authors get hopelessly bogged in technical complexities. From the standpoint of an insider rather than an outside critic, Thomas E. Murray’s Nuclear Policy for War and Peace³ has similar virtues; Murray served as an Atomic Energy Commissioner for seven years, and as the “conscience” of that body unremittingly urged that the Commission and the government in general confront the ethical implications of American arms policy.

With Thomas C. Schelling’s The Strategy of Conflict, ⁴ we are in another world—the world of the RAND Corporation’s cool and ultra-professional assessment of risk-taking. Schelling deals with the problems of thermonuclear war in the context of contemporary game-, decision-, and communication-theory; his book brings to bear on war and strategy the new logical and mathematical techniques of social science. Much of it will necessarily seem abstruse and irrelevant to the layman. But even the intellectually lazy would do well to read Schelling’s opening remarks on “The Retarded Science of International Strategy” and his concluding analysis entitled “Surprise Attack: A Study in Mutual Distrust.” Moreover, Schelling’s dispassionate presentation can serve as a psychological decompression chamber for those who may hesitate to dive into the most important and the most troubling book of the lot, On Thermonuclear War,⁵ by Herman Kahn.

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I think one can say without qualification that Kahn has written one of the great works of our time. Its title sounds like plagiary of Clausewitz’s On War, and if Kahn aspires to be the master military strategist of the mid-20th century, I certainly know of no better claimant. For several years now, as a RAND expert in the field of nuclear armament, Kahn has been dazzling and bewildering a series of highly selected audiences with marathon “briefings” that have become legendary in military circles. His book offers an almost literal transcription of three of these lectures, plus tables, charts, priority listings, aphorisms and asides, and explanatory appendices. From the literary standpoint, this method of presentation is far from ideal. It entails both gaps and repetitions; the style oscillates wildly between the over-explained and the elliptical, the colloquial and the jargon of social and military science, the jocular and the heavily serious. But such has been the character of most similar great books in the past: their message has been too overpowering to come out in tidy form. Their very dishevelment has been one of the marks of their significance.

What Kahn tries to do—and what, so far as I know, no one else has tried to do in so thoroughgoing a fashion—is to look thermonuclear war in the eye and to treat it as a reality rather than a bad dream. He asks himself the question: after such a war, “Will the survivors envy the dead?” and he answers, no—at least if we begin right away to take the proper precautions. “Despite a widespread belief to the contrary,” he argues, “objective studies indicate that even though the amount of human tragedy would be greatly increased in the postwar world, the increase would not preclude normal and happy lives for the majority of survivors and their descendants.” Hence he offers us a table of “tragic but distinguishable postwar states”—ranging from two million to 160 million dead—and he urges us to abandon the idea that the “only choices available” are “immediate surrender, immediate preventive war, or eventual world annihilation.” A child, he says, could tell the difference between ten and sixty million casualties, yet “few adults seem . . . able to do this.” When he has pressed them, however, most Americans he has interviewed have settled on something like the latter figure as the highest they can imagine being worth a war (most Europeans set their total a good deal lower). And this gives him his solid starting point. Building out from the notion of a “bearable” number of deaths, Kahn proceeds to analyze in rather reassuring style the genetic dangers from radioactivity and to urge the merits of a minimum program for constructing underground shelters.

Hence his book deals not only with thermonuclear war itself but with the possibilities of postwar recovery. The most fascinating, in fact, of the analytical devices he has thought up for dealing with his novel data concerns the “recuperative powers” of nations like the United States and the Soviet Union. Each, he says, can be divided into “two countries, an ‘A’ country consisting of 50 to 100 of the largest cities, and a ‘B’ country made up of the remaining rural areas, towns, and small cities. . . . While the A country cannot survive without a B country, the B country can not only survive without the A country; it also seems to have the resources and skills it needs to rebuild the A country in about ten years. . . . In fact, the problem the B country faces in rebuilding the A country is probably less difficult than the one met by the Soviet Union in constructing the Soviet Union of 1955 from its 1945 base.” For the United States, such a job of reconstruction would be a bit harder; we are a more urbanized nation. But the difficulties would still not be insuperable.

The reader’s first reaction is to be appalled by the apparent callousness of such statements. It is true that Kahn underestimates the effects of frightful devastation on the emotions of the survivors. Despite his efforts to convey to us the notion of thermonuclear war as a present reality, he is unconvincing in his suggestion that a nation like our own, after losing its great urban centers and a third of its people, would go briskly about the task of picking up the pieces. The survivors, he tells us, could be mobilized for effort by the reassurance of radiation meters (which he finds even more urgent than shelters for a civil defense program). And he cites a hypothetical conversation with a man apparently in a state of post-attack shock: “You have received only ten roentgens, why are you vomiting? Pull yourself together and get to work.”

Yet we should be wrong merely to recoil in protest. As Kahn most persuasively argues, the notion that it is “all too horrible” has barred the way to a proper understanding of the perils we confront. On the one hand, it has encouraged a doctrinaire pacifism. On the other hand, and far more dangerously, it has produced among military men and policy makers a tragic all-or-nothing stance—the conviction that we and the Soviet Union are linked by a “mutual suicide pact.” Kahn’s insistence that there are other choices available is echoed, from their widely differing standpoints, by such fellow strategists as Kissinger and Schelling, by an advocate of disarmament like Barnet, and by Murray, with his personal knowledge and background of public responsibility. All believe that something can be done to save us from annihilation. Yet all—with the possible exception of Barnet, who is unclear on this point—refuse to abandon a policy of thermonuclear deterrence. Deterrence remains at the center of their arguments: to appreciate their more specific recommendations, we must understand first what they mean by deterrence and where and when they think it should be applied.

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II

“Deterrence,” Kissinger tells us, “requires a combination of power, the will to use it, and the assessment of these by the potential aggressor. . . . There can be no gap in deterrence. Deterrence is either effective or it is not. There is no margin for error. Mistakes are likely to be irremediable. If the gains of aggression appear to outweigh the penalties even once, deterrence will fail.”

Kahn or Schelling or Murray could have written the same. And likewise with the limits to the deterrent ideal. “The notion that there is only one form of deterrence—the threat of nuclear retaliation—must be abandoned. . . . Flexibility in both diplomacy and strategy requires that a maximum number of stages be created between surrender and Armageddon.” It is Kahn in particular who elaborates these stages. A large part of his book is devoted to explaining the distinctions between “minimum” and “finite” deterrence, and between a “credible first strike capability” and a largely mythical capability which relies on the mere existence of thermonuclear bombs.

There is too much of the latter type of thinking, our authors agree, in American military circles today. Kahn calls it “Maginot-mindedness” and cites the aphorism attributed to one of the high brass in the Pentagon or at SAC : “If these buttons are ever pressed, they have completely failed in their purpose! The equipment is useful only if it is not used.” American strategic doctrine, they find, suffers from both rigidity and defensiveness; it is unprepared for the kind of ambiguous challenge—something short of a real attack on our own country or on one of our allies—which is the form of threat we are most likely to confront in the next decade. To unleash the “deterrent” against such an indirect challenge would be obviously excessive. Kahn and Schelling think that we should be prepared instead to bomb selective enemy targets in the confidence that our “pre-attack mobilization base” will be sufficiently strong to withstand the shock of our adversary’s retaliation—our national “posture” should be solid enough to make our counter-challenge “credible.” Kissinger and Murray, while agreeing on the need to strengthen our “posture” and “harden” our air and missile bases, emphasize rather the possibilities of limiting devastation by restricting the types of weapons employed.

Quite naturally, then, these writers are impatient both with Dulles-type threats of “massive retaliation” and with the bland diplomacy by round-robin travel which Eisenhower inaugurated after his Secretary of State’s death. By implication they are scarcely less critical of the Truman-Acheson policy of “containment,” which they find almost as rigid and whose relative success they attribute to a temporary Soviet inferiority in nuclear weapons which has now come to an end. In particular they focus on the years 1953-55 as a period of missed opportunities. Following Stalin’s death, they argue, the Soviet leaders were unsure of their course and ready for negotiation and accommodation; the Russian military had not yet convinced the Communist chiefs that their country could stand up to the threat of thermonuclear war. From the standpoint of a disarmament advocate, Barnet voices similar regrets; in the first three years of Eisenhower’s presidency, the Soviet leaders came closer than they ever had before or have done since to accepting the Western point of view.

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Even if one grants the contention that the past decade and a half has been an almost unbroken succession of American mistakes and missed opportunities, the literary strategists of 1960 and 1961 offer small comfort for the future. Nearly all the proposed substitutes for a conventional strategy of deterrence they reject as mere palliatives or even as remedies more dangerous than the disease. Disengagement, a ban on testing, disarmament through inspection—none of these stands the test of their disabused analysis. There are differences on details: Kissinger, for example, advocates converting NATO into a true North Atlantic federation and the fusion of its nuclear capability with that of the United States; Kahn speculates that a neutralization of Europe might actually be to our interest; Barnet thinks that the Soviet proposal for complete disarmament should not be rejected out of hand. The net impression they convey, however, is bleakness itself: no obvious solution will work; there are no short-cuts to salvation.

What is left? Only self-imposed limits on weaponry and the new shibboleth of “arms control”—a term which is fast replacing “disarmament” in the language of the conoscenti.⁶ Kissinger and Murray show a characteristic interest in self-limitation: the former argues for strengthening our capability in conventional arms; the latter puts his hope in thermonuclear weapons of small yield, stressing (along with Kahn) that the critical point in devastation lies not between kiloton weapons and conventional bombs measured in tons, but between nuclear warheads of kiloton and megaton range. Schelling and Kahn are less concerned with such humanitarian niceties. To them a scheme of bilateral or multilateral arms control seems alone worth working for; it is arms control or nothing, if, as Kahn graphically puts it, we are ever to reach 1975.

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Yet when these authors begin to elaborate specific arms control proposals, it is something quite different from a disarmed world which emerges. The main goal, it appears, is not a reduction of weapons. It is stability and symmetry and invulnerability. The greatest danger of conflict arises not when arms are at a peak, but when one side or another has a “weapons system” that is vulnerable to surprise attack; the very worst situation of all is a state of “mutual vulnerability.” Hence it may actually be necessary at times to raise the level of armaments rather than to lower it. Specifically, in the case of missiles (the reasoning is Schelling’s), we must be sure that each side has enough for a second try: “The larger the number on both sides, the greater is the absolute number of missiles expected to be left over for retaliation in the event that either side should strike first, and therefore the greater is the deterrence to an attempted first strike.” Similarly, with a greater number of missiles at large, the chance of one side’s cheating is reduced.

Cheating, of course, is the bête noire of the arms controllers. It is curious that writers like Kahn and Kissinger and Schelling can find it possible to be such persuasive advocates of arms control at the same time as they seem to believe in the almost unlimited guile of the Soviet Union. The schemes they propose are fascinating in their elaborateness and technical sophistication; I find myself particularly attracted to Kissinger’s plan for “inventory” inspection, whereby each side would check at intervals on the size and character of its opponent’s armory, which would be collected for the purpose in specified areas. A fixed and complicated protocol would govern such transactions. As Schelling puts it, “Where trust and good faith do not exist and cannot be made to by our acting as though they did, we may wish to solicit advice from the underworld, or from ancient despotisms. . . . The ancients exchanged hostages, drank wine from the same glass to demonstrate the absence of poison, met in public places to inhibit the massacre of one by the other, and even deliberately exchanged spies to facilitate transmittal of authentic information.”

Would safeguards drawn from classical or gangster inspiration, one wonders, ever be sufficient to foil the endless inventiveness our authors attribute to the Soviet adversary? Kahn in particular seems to take a perverse delight in detailing all the dirty tricks our potential enemy might play on us—altering the weather, “spoofing and jamming” to confuse our defense system, even dispatching “juvenile delinquent Eskimos” to destroy Arctic radar installations. Have the Russians really thought up such stratagems? Or are our military theorists perhaps suggesting to them ideas for cheating which they might never have come to on their own?—as, I understand, happened when the American technical delegation wrecked a test ban agreement that was all but reached, by suddenly advancing the theory of the “big hole.” Our strategists are trying to have it both ways. They are attempting to convince us both that the Soviet Union is bound to cheat and that we can find adequate measures to cope with such cheating.

Ultimately, then, the complex reasoning of the strategists of deterrence boils down to two irreducible points. First, there is the nightmare that perpetually hangs over us—Soviet nuclear blackmail, perhaps accompanied (as a grim token of serious intention) by the evacuation of their cities, at which, it appears, they are far more adept than we. Second, there is the distant goal of safety: in Kahn’s words, “Many who have thought about this problem” (and other, parenthetical references suggest he is one of them) “have come to the conclusion that reliable stability can only come through an international agency with an effective monopoly of force, or total disarmament.” Between these two ultimates lies the vast gray area of fear and doubt in which all men of good will—whether unilateralists, multilateral disarmers, or arms controllers—now find themselves condemned to live.

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III

It would be Easy—all too easy—to dismiss the Kissingers and the Kahns and the Schellings as bloodthirsty men who have computing machines where their hearts should be. I know that this is not so; I am personally acquainted with all but one of the writers I am discussing, and I know that they are both intellectually honest and morally responsible. In terms of intellectual rigor, the only fault I find in them is a tendency to slant their interpretations in favor of the United States. In terms of moral choices, I need say no more than that they have made the opposite choice from mine. But this does not mean that I think them immoral—far from it. Faced with the frightful dilemmas of peace and war today, the best any man can do is to make his personal choice in the agony of his own conscience, convinced that whatever he does will be in some sense wrong, that, like Pascal, he is making a desperate wager in the dark, and that no one will forgive him if he proves to have been in error.

The new strategists of deterrence offer one of the best reservoirs of brains in the country. Alongside their reasoning, the arguments of most “peace” people seem vacuous and sentimental—one need only contrast their intellectual astringency with the caution and tentativeness of Barnet’s two concluding chapters. The advocates of peace and disarmament will never be taken seriously until they can meet and answer the magisterial authority of a Herman Kahn. I should like to make a beginning in that direction. For I believe that there are cracks in the impressive façade of deterrence apologetics—cracks which the strategists themselves are honest enough to recognize but whose implications they have not fully spelled out.

I noted a moment back Kahn’s rather surprising suggestion that “reliable stability” can come only through total disarmament or a supra-national authority. In the short term, then, there will be no stability. By 1973, he warns us, we shall be living in a world in which “there are quite likely to be about 50,000 ready missiles . . . each with its own button.” Unless in the meantime a nearly foolproof system of arms control has been established, the “balance of terror” a decade hence promises to be more terrible than what we are living under today.

In such a situation—if I have not completely misunderstood the reasoning of Kahn and the others—the mutual annihilation or “mutual suicide pact” which they have tried to exclude as a present-day possibility would have become the dominating reality of our lives. We should be forced to ask ourselves a question that is almost taboo today: are the matters at issue between us and the Communist world worth such a sacrifice? At the present time, it appears, most Americans think so; they are prepared for the deaths of ten to sixty million of their fellow-countrymen in a slaughter which would indeed fall short of Armageddon. In another half generation, will they feel the same way about a truly apocalyptic battle?

Here Murray offers a helpful suggestion. As a good Catholic, he is gravely concerned with the moral implications of nuclear responsibilities. He reminds us of the theological distinctions between just and unjust wars, three of which are relevant here. First: will more good be accomplished by fighting than by refusing to fight? Second: will the violence applied be no more than is strictly necessary to achieve its end? Third: will “the degree of force employed . . . bear some proportionate relation to the injustice . . . perpetrated?”

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All of these questions, I think, have to be answered in the negative in the case of any foreseeable conflict between our country and the Soviet Union. What does this leave us, then?—no more than reliance on a mutual trust which the strategists of deterrence dismiss as a snare and a delusion. Murray, like the others, has little confidence in Russian promises, but he at least thinks it worthwhile to remind us of the further theological requirement that “good faith be kept with an enemy.” If good faith remains both our inescapable moral duty and the only hope we have, we need to take another look at Soviet public statements and at the current Soviet “posture” to see whether there may not be something in them that the strategists of deterrence have missed.

Kahn makes a great deal of the fact that in the past five years the Russians have been taking the possibility of nuclear warfare with deadly seriousness and “claim to have given every adult in the Soviet Union between 20 and 40 hours of instruction in civil defense.” In his view, this means that Khrushchev and his colleagues are prepared to use blackmail or “dirty trick” tactics and thereby run the risk of thermonuclear retaliation. But such evidence can be read differently. It can suggest a genuine fear of attack, more particularly with the spread of nuclear arms to America’s European allies. As Barnet reminds us, “The possibility that the Kremlin might decide to risk the adventure of atomic war cannot be discounted, but from the Soviet point of view a nuclear contest seems an irrational means of expanding its power in view of the available alternatives.” Communists—unlike Nazis—have never made a cult of war for its own sake, and the economic burden of the arms race and the threat of the extension of nuclear weapons to further powers offer powerful arguments for restraint in military policy.

There is a case, then, for a minimum trust in the Soviet Union. Indeed, Kahn and Schelling seem to recognize it when they imply that a thermonuclear war would be terminated after one or two “strikes” back and forth. Peace would evidently be negotiated in the traditional fashion, and the two nations would go about the business of disposing of their millions of dead and repairing their battered economies. The picture is too “normal” to be credible. Are we really to believe that after sustaining the most dreadful physical and psychological shock of human history, the populations of the United States and the Soviet Union could settle down once more almost as though nothing had happened? What about the boundless grief and the madness and the despair? (I am reminded of the Black Death and the sense of hopelessness that settled over Europe in the mid-14th century.) It is no more difficult to give some credence to Soviet professions of faith than to believe in the postwar future conjured up by the strategists of deterrence.

The same is true with the never-never land of arms control. I find it impossible to imagine a world in which each side carefully nurtures a “weapons system” which it will never use, while its putative enemy stands watchfully by with a benevolent avuncular interest. In such circumstances, I think, life itself would begin to serve these systems: their cost, both economic and psychological, would be so enormous that rulers and peoples would eventually find the greater part of their energies absorbed in perfecting and in guarding a vast establishment that served no rational purpose. Or rather, one that served a purpose so exquisitely rational that somewhere along the way its original logic had been lost. By then, as Riesman puts it, we would be in the realm of “mad rationalism.”

As arms control has a specious air of logic, so it holds out a false promise of stability. Even its apologists find it adequate only in a bi-polar world and wrestle in vain with the problems of spiraling technology and of an “Nth” nuclear power—most obviously Germany or Communist China. Arms control is not simply another word for disarmament. It is a substitute for disarmament and an equivocal one at that. In the words of Seymour Melman,⁷ it is an “essentially military plan . . . a new theory for the . . . arms race.”

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Rather than following the will-o’-the-wisp of equal strength and “stabilized deterrence” which arms control promises, we need to look once again at real disarmament. The American scientists at the recent Pugwash Conference in Moscow came back with the conviction that their Soviet opposite numbers were in earnest about disarming and that the Soviet government had made it a central policy goal. The Russian technical men, they found, worried about the same things as the Americans—nuclear arms in the hands of Nth powers, a war brought on by accident, the spiral of technological advance—and they were receptive to the idea of finding a compromise between the American insistence on establishing an inspection system before disarmament and the Soviet emphasis on immediate progress in arms reduction.⁸

In this connection, a few statements of Barnet—whose modesty and tentativeness may lead us to underestimate the importance of what he has to say—are directly relevant. He reminds us that deterrence has not worked. It has not prevented the expansion of Soviet influence in the Middle East, in Southeast Asia, and in Latin America. And he underlines the fact that all partial measures to reduce the danger of war “share a common assumption . . . the assumption . . . that the arms race will go on.” “It seems plain,” he concludes, “that attempts at disarmament proposals which try to hedge against all conceivable risks will not only fail to build confidence but will actually further inflame the atmosphere. Any agreement for meaningful disarmament requires an awareness of the risks involved, as objective an assessment of those risks as it is given to humans to make, and, ultimately, an act of faith.”

“An act of faith”—such is the only solution I can see to the irreducible dilemma in which Kahn and Kissinger and Schelling have left us, with their fear of Soviet blackmail on the one hand and their implication of the necessity of world order on the other. I can find no alternative to the renunciation of thermonuclear deterrence as an instrument of national strategy. The risks in such a course are appalling. There is no final answer to the argument from blackmail and to accusations of “appeasement” and “surrender.” The only remotely satisfactory reply is that these risks are preferable to the horror of thermonuclear war itself. Those of us who advocate the abandonment of deterrence must realize that we have set forth on uncharted ground and that we may find ourselves pushed step by step into a moral radicalism which few of our fellow citizens will understand and which may end in transcending more than one of the loyalties that most Americans take for granted.

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¹ Harper, 370 pp., $5.50.

² Beacon Press, 141 pp., $3.50.

³ World Publishing Company, 241 pp., $4.00.

⁴ Harvard University Press, 309 pp., $6.25.

⁵ Princeton University Press, 651 pp., 10.00.

⁶ See the Fall 1960 special issue of Daedalus on arms control, to which Kahn, Kissinger, and Schelling are all contributors.

⁷ Editor of Inspection for Disarmament (Columbia University Press, 1958).

⁸ See the excerpts from the January 1961 television program “Report from Moscow: Disarmament and World Security” published in the January 25, 1961 Christian Science Monitor.