Arms and the Man: The Insanity of Realism
Wolff, Robert P.
History has until now been kind to the school of politi( al theorists who are known, to themselves as well as to others, as the "realists." The ineptitude, Sunday. school moralism, and easy...
...From SAC airplanes with a transit time of several hours, we have progressed to missiles which take barely thirty minutes for their deadly flight...
...Since the limited wars of the nuclear age are fought with the weapons of previous wars, the Realist can feel perfectly at home with them, secure in the knowledge that the status quo is preserved by the existence of the stabilized deterrent...
...the weapons are a source, rather than a reflection, of tension...
...the unending revolution in technology makes all strategies immediately obsolete...
...we must all live together or die together...
...With each successive development, the destructive force grows greater, and the tension increases...
...The counters are human lives and the hell which awaits us is here on earth, but there is the same mathematical calculation of damnation...
...Here we see, finally, the attraction of the theory for the political realist...
...Their favorite gambit is the weary but patient explanation, to some enthusiastic johnny-come-lately, that "a knowledge of the history of negotiations on that point will reveal the impossibility of any significant alteration in the present situation...
...These unprecedented developments, in particular the second, make the policy of Stabilized Deterrence absurd and irrelevant...
...Khrushchev that it is "all a mistake...
...Secret diplomacy meets science fiction as Henry Kissinger and Herman Kahn join lands beneath a banner inscribed with the device of their legion: Sta bilized Deterrence...
...It helps to have a German accent...
...The ever-decreasing reaction time of our defenses makes hair-trigger responses and dispersed authority inevitable...
...In that short time, the decision must be made whether unidentified blips on a radar set are enemy missiles—or geese...
...Young men, clean-shaven and smiling, stand their watches at the control center...
...Technological innovation has become so standardized that one can even assert as a general law that an entirely new weapon system will appear every four to five years...
...This one casually holds Moscow in his hands, that one Leningrad...
...One can imagine the fate of nations suspended while an aide hurries through the White House, searching for the President who has just slipped out to visit a friend...
...He has learned that "war is always with us, and must be used as an instrument of policy...
...Just as these years of preparation seemed ready to pay off, with a new President sympathetic to their caveats and critiques, history played a trick on the Realists...
...Here we encounter one of those curious paradoxes which from time to time enliven the political scene...
...Nor are there experts on the subject, unless we so classify the physicists and engineers who invented them...
...No ideology, bias, or un founded optimism clouds his vision, we are told...
...Polaris submarines, it is urged, will free us of the necessity to respond instantly, for hidden under the water they can deliver their deadly cargo even after the United States has ceased to exist...
...The mark of a sane man is that he sees the world as it really is, and adjusts to it when it changes...
...It threw up on the world scene a problem unlike those which had bedeviled nations in past years...
...Then they can lower their voices to an impressive rumble, fix the poor fool with an avuncular eye, and explain the facts of life...
...The distinguishing features of the new thermonuclear age are, first, the overwhelming destructiveness of weaponry, and second, its unending technological revolution...
...He has learned, too, that "we arm to parlay...
...By the time the Eisenhower years were drawing to a close, they had made sizable reputations for profundity and sagacity, frequently by doing no more than suggest that ambassadors learn the language of their country or the name of its prime minister...
...Such a plan, of course, requires that both men be always within ten-minute call...
...The effect of these measures, we are told, is to reduce below the danger point the probability of accidental war, while allowing us to retain the military might on which our policies are founded...
...He can still plead for a "recognition of complexity...
...Herman Kahn, taking what he considers a long view of future problems, tries to calculate ways of living until 1J70...
...Yet what if the parlay is about—disarmament...
...They like to imagine themselves surrounded by blithefully ignorant optimists who impute to the Russians (or the Germans or the Japanese) absurdly humane motives...
...If he cannot be wise, he can still look wise...
...THE SCHEMES for stabilization all involve an assumption of awesome selfcontrol and delicate calculation on the part of the men whose hands hover unceasingly over the buttons...
...Thus the deterrent which is stable in one phase of the arms race may become unstable in the next...
...Now the stock-in-trade of the "political realists" is the long view—backward...
...Quoting copiously from Churchill, they have developed a style which marked them as sober, solid, sophisticated students of the "immeasurably complex" problems of international affairs...
...The danger always exists of a self-confirming prophecy, that night marish situation in which one nation launches its deterrent in the mistaken belief that it is being attacked, and thereby provokes the very response feared...
...The solution offered is to take steps to stabilize this balance of terror, while not reducing the ability of either nation to destroy the other...
...Rules are to be worked out determining which weapons may, and which may not, be used in a "limited war...
...Minuteman missiles, shunting endlessly back and forth on the tracks once occupied by the New Haven and other dying railroads, will elude the warheads which destroy our cities...
...Now the realist prides himself on his unblinking acceptance of the real world of international affairs...
...One hundred million men and women, half a world away, rise and work and sleep again, while the lads who have spared their lives go off to a movie...
...No one is prepared even to speculate on the possibility of seeing 1980...
...Secret diplomacy in the eighteenth century, power politics in the nineteenth century, and the British foreign service in any century, are their standards of excellence in the conduct of present-day affairs...
...In the past fifteen years alone there have been three complete revolutions in the nature of our weapons: first the original fission bombs, then the one-thousand times more powerful fusion (hydrogen) bombs, and most recently the intercontinental ballistic missiles...
...But in the past several years the Realists have gone progressively "insane," for as the world has changed, their view of it has remained unaltered...
...school moralism, and easy optimism of unskilled diplomats and politicians has served as an easy target for their critical treatises...
...According to this theory, the instability of modern weapons systems is the principal threat to peace...
...But, unfortunately for the Realist, there is no history of nineteenth-century negotiations on nuclear weapons...
...Indeed, a student of Max Weber might find here a "rationality" to challenge Benjamin Franklin's double-entry account of virtues and vices...
...BUT THE PROBLEM REMAINS, on which side of this new issue shall the realist throw his weight...
...An Air Force general with poor judgment, a Polaris submarine com mander who has gone mad, a miscal culated bluff, can all touch off an un wanted nuclear holocaust...
...With some technical ad justments and safeguards, the threat of annihilation is removed, and the business of international affairs can go on as usual...
...This problem, making suddenly irrelevant their accumulated lore, was dis armament...
...Polaris submarines stimulate anti-submarine research, the missile engenders the antimissile missile...
...The insane man, by contrast, clings to comforting beliefs, ignoring contrary evidence and postulating ever more improbable conditions in order to protect his image of his surroundings...
...The Realists have chosen to cast their lot with a new breed of brisk, futuristic, thermonuclear men — the game-theory strategists...
...Direct telephone lines must be opened between Washington and Moscow, so that should an American missile accidentally take off for a Russian city, President Kennedy can quickly assure Mr...
...The catch-phrases of the new literature on disarmament reveal the novelty of our present situation: War has ceased to be an instrument of policy...
...The hard-won maxims of generations of conference tables is worse than useless to the Realist—it is a liability...
...Indeed, one might add a second law that as the first operational model of a weapon comes off the assembly line, the prototype of a device to counteract it is on the drawing boards...
...But the most hopeful prediction that he can wring from the scientists is the possibility that we might survive one more war—not even the Realists can bear to think about a war after that...
...The world has changed out of all recognition, and the Realist, seeing it still through the eyes of yesterday, has suddenly become an unrealist...
...His expertise no longer applicable, he salvages his sole remaining possession: the pose...
Vol. 8 • April 1961 • No. 2
