Hiding from the Nuclear Age
Rosen, Stephen
"Hiding from the Nuclear Age" ideological bayis of the conservatives, but would moderate it by acknowledging that our foreign policy should not focus primarily on fighting and winning World War III and that for the forseeable...
...The limits to American power and the permanence of international conflict were considerations very much in the mind of Henry Kissinger as he began his attempt to reconstruct American foreign policy in the aftermath of the Vietnam War...
...Unlike the unpredictability of conventional wars, as-sured destruction promised a simple war...
...Since World War II, the major groups involved in American strategic planning, the scientists, the mili- tary, and, later, the civilian strategic analysts, have traditionally displayed a striking sobriety when real danger was in the air...
...Assured destruction thus meant that military competence would become, all at once, superfluous...
...Nor will an anti- Communist ideology necessar- ily prevent the American people from deciding that the safety of the West and the safety of America are two dif]erent things...
...In addition, because of their familiarity with missile and aircraft engineering and with the physical effects of nuclear explosions, assured desti'uction would give the scientists a distinct advan- tage over the generals in any political struggle for influence in thearea of strate- gic polity...
...Military theorists such_ as Bernard Brodie had already articulated the essential ele- ments of assured destruction and the doc- trine is one with obvious allure to the scientific mind...
...Kissinger dealt with the collapse of the American will to fight by isolating, as far as it was possible, the conduct of American foreign policy from the public and by relying on diplomacy...
...The saving grace of the bad times in which we live is that the necessity for collaboration with less than perfect governments is now more visible because the Soviet Union is stronger...
...At the outset of the Cold War, the American scientific community would have preferred that problems caused by the emergence of nuclear weapons be resolved through international agreements regulat- ing the use of atomic power...
...This can only be created by genuine leadership, by men who ask whether after two hundred years of republican government and two world wars, ours will be the generation that turns its back on civiliza-tion...
...When diplomacy failed, however, and American foreign policy required the expenditure of lives and money as in Ango- la in 1975, the weaknesses of Kissinger's style o f cabinet diplomacy were revealed...
...Our actions should be guided by older conservative axioms...
...For the last 15 years American thinking about nuclear war ha~ been dominated by an idea that by now seems as natural as it is simple...
...With the United States today no Stephen Rosen is a research fellow in the National Security Studies Program at Harvard University...
...Stephen Rosen HIDING FROM THE NUCLEAR AGE In American strategic thought, MAD policies of convenience are a bad substitute for serious defense planning...
...In the area of internatio~aal politics, assured destruction offered the scientists the realization of their dream of world peace through world harmony...
...Astute as his policies were, he seemed to have forgotten that traumatized nations need something beyond competence if they are to recover...
...If the people were not willing to fight, he would not ask them to...
...Yet when efforts towards this end quickly proved impractical, the scientists did not immedi-ately turn to assured destruction, the doc- trine with which they would later become closely associated...
...Abroad, as at home, there are no permanent remedies for the pains of our political condition...
...This gap created severe problems at/some in the 1960s...
...It seemed THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1980...
...ideological bayis of the conservatives, but would moderate it by acknowledging that our foreign policy should not focus primarily on fighting and winning World War III and that for the forseeable future the Soviet Union is going to remain a powerful and hostile force in the world...
...Assuming that the enemy had also adopted assured destruction, war would be based on attacks against undefended civilian tar- gets and would involve no clash of opposing armed forces...
...we can, at best, hope to ameliorate those conditions...
...The strategic theories of the 1960s were suitable for the 1960s, and the emphasis on deterrence was proper when the chance of war was small...
...These calls and Kissinger's strategy have both failed to understand what Senator Moynihan has long pointed out: Men wtll not vote to go out and get themselves killed unless they have a vivid idea of-what the fight is about...
...The articles in this issue suggest ways in which competence can be restored to the conduct of American foreign policy, but it is the ,evival of the anti-Communist ideology that will provide the rock on which our morale and future efforts can be based...
...This ideology will face many problems, not the least of which will be that anti-Com- munism and support for liberal regimes abroad do not always seem to be synon- ymous...
...But an examination of the deve!opment of American strategic thought reveals that an emphasis on what ought to be done if nuclear war did break out was often thought necessary...
...They need an explanation of why it is reasonable for them to send their men out to die...
...This is surprising...
...War will be deterred by the existence of a stable nuclear balance...
...The limitations on political action, in short, mean that prudence is the most necessary quality in a statesman, something both left- and right-wing Amer- icans have forgotten in their efforts to solve the problems of world politics by ending world politics...
...longer in a dominant strategic position, it is necessary to restore realism to American strategic planning...
...Some efforts to establish a policy of neo- containment seem to call for containment without the ideology of the Cold War...
...The idea of a mutual hostage relation among nuclear powers is simple and logical, far more so than the messy, inelegant theories that had emerged from con- ventional military operations...
...Secret, shuttle diplomacy did not require popular or con- gressional support when the going was good...
...sr America on War and Diplomacy...
...Cities would simply stand still while attempts were made to destroy them...
...The unintended consequences of foreign policy, as of domestic policy, are likely to be as or even more important than the desired ones...
...But what if deterrence fails...
...Neither competence nor ideology can take the place of a sense of national honor...
Vol. 13 • November 1980 • No. 11
