The Nuclear Question

...Michael Mandelbaum quotes him in his new book, The Nuclear Question: "I will always remember Dean Acheson coming into our meeting and saying that he felt we should knock out' Soviet missiles in Cuba by an air strike...

...This is a compellingly interesting book that will suoceed in making any reasonably open-minded reader think hard about what abortion is...

...The lesson, of course, is that what might have happened then, might be happening now...

...Popularizing the past THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS Elaine H. Pagels Randum...

...The only thing they had in common with real surgery, was blood...

...submarines and planes would still threaten sufficient destruction of the Soviet Union to override any minor advantage to be gained by taking out Minuteman...

...The professional literature on this subject is vast...

...But a reasonably diligent reader of the newspaper traditionally had no cause to complain...

...Most of the cosmos that we know is a carefully constructed plot to keep humanity from awakening to its true divine home...

...their critics, that revolt will be legitimated...

...This strategic concept is as valid now as it was fifteen years ago...

...Eventually the approach was scrapped because of the danger it would force Khrushchev's hand, and lead to War...

...Beyond that, in Mandelbaum's view, we cannot go...

...I think they will knock out our missiles in Turkey.' And then the question came again, 'Well, what do we do?' 'Well,' he said, 'I believe under our NATO treaty with which I was associated, we would be required to MARX AND TEILHARD Two Ways to a New Humanity Richard I.ischer 'Richard Lischer has given Marx and Teilhard the skilled, attentive, penetrating reading which serious thinkers deserve:' --Walter J. Ong, S.J.,author of The Presence of the Word "Dr...

...10,- 203 pp...

...The point, in Mandelbaum's view, is that the m'gument is still about deterrence: not how to win nuclear wars, but how to avoid them...

...he quotes the sentence at least half a dozen times, and his history of the many futile attempts to find a way to use the bomb demonstrates what was implicit at Hiroshima--that it's safe to drop only on people who haven't got one...

...Like most professional academics devoted to the study of war and peace in the nuclear age, Mandelbaum reveals an astonishing degree of confidence in the stability of the nuclear status quo...

...The United States might have attacked, the . USSR might have responded, and the world might have gone to bed at peace, and waked up at war...

...The policy of both Truman and Eisenhower was to build enough of them so the Russians would never dare to launch any sort of attack which might trigger a nuclear response...

...During that period, it will be remembered, Kennedy's advisers met daily to argue possible courses of action...

...He has studied these things for so long, is so familiar with the technical arcana, and has discussed them with so many men who'lived with the details for years, that the prevailing wisdom of the defense community now appears to him as if engraved on granite...

...Like many esoteric movements they feel that they have contacted the deeper truth of the' "JudeoChristian tradition...

...What that confidence comes down to is the observation that deterrence has worked so far, which might have been said equally well of the balance of power which maintained the peace of Europe for so long after the FrancoPrussian War--43 years-- until 1914...

...Too confident in common sense...

...obtained proof that the Soviets were putting nuclear missiles into Cuba, despite many denials, For six days Kennedy and his advisers debated what to do, and on October 22 the President announced a blockade of Cuba along with other measures...

...As it happened, cooler heads prevailed before the first shot was fired, but it might have gone the other way...

...If it were vulnerable to surprise attack it would cease to deter;, hence the importance of launch systems so "hard," like the concrete Minuteman silos, or so elusive, like nuclear submarines, there would always be bombs and missiles enough in reserve to devastate an attacker...

...Pheme PerirJns w , henever discoveries of ancient manuscripts hit the media, orthodox Christians hope that their traditional positions will be confirmed...

...Vietnam offered many such examples of surgery...

...The 20,000 Russians sent to establish, maintain and guard the missiles would have experienced many casualties...

...But the Cuban Missile Crisis might have gone the other way...

...Here is the storyof what One old man did in less than five years to make peace by refusing to acquiesce in a permanently frozen east-west cold war, to reform the Church, and to mobilize the whole Church to work and pray on behalf of the poor and the exploited all over the wodd...

...the debate over SALT II comes down to an argument over the Russian threat to the Minuteman, which will soon be vulnerable to increasingly accurate Soviet missiles...

...One faction says this fact will invite attack, unless we build a new, less vulnerable system...

...Kennedy went one step beyond the bomb's deterrent value after recognizing that the Russians were eventually bound to reach the stage where they could do to us, what we could do to them...

...Theodore Sorensen, one of Kennedy's chief aides, described these deliberations at length for the Kennedy Library's oral history...

...Logic does not always suffice...

...For an ad hominem reason, I wish, per impossibile, that it had been written by a woman, or by a man less impatient with "emotion...

...Christian gnostics interpreted Christian traditions and sacraCommonweal: 634...

...That put the strategic emphasis on the bomb's survivability...

...Another faction says U.S...

...We would know nothing of that other reality had a revealer from that world--usually, the revealer is Christ--not come to call us to our true destiny beyond this cosmos...

...Both sides in the precarious balance of terror have a capacity for lightning strikes, and the rest of us are dependent on cooler hods...

...Sound morality and sound law must take account of what people feel and are able to perceive...

...This is a possibility which runs counter to the history of warfare...

...Eugene Carson Blake, former General Secretary, World Council of Churches $9.95 paperback 9 November 1979:633respond by knocking out a missile based inside the Soviet Union.' 'Well, then what do they, do...

...The fighting does not generally start bang...

...that sounds like a cause for gloom to me, but its pessimism doesn't make it untrue...

...A political crisis usually announces the onset of hostilities...

...Mandelbaum describes this situation as "the best of all possible nuclear worlds," while conceding it is not "the best of all imaginable nuclear worlds...

...War doesn't make sense, only a madman would run serious risk of one, neither side could gain, both sides know what would happen...

...War in the modern age is so fearful there is always a ghastly shock when it actually begins, even if its approach has been obvious for years, as it was during the 1930s...

...plenty of evidence was there for those with eyes to see...

...As early as 1946 the military analyst Bernard Brodie grasped what Mandelbaum still takes to be the basic truth concerning the Bomb: "Everything about it is overshadowed by the twin facts that it exists and that its power is fantastically great...

...When they emerge into view in the second century, the gnostics are a religiously varied lot...

...Extravagant claims from both sides often stick in the popular imagination long after both sides have settled down to the sober task of understanding a religious phenomenon neither so orthodox nor so revolutionary as its original enthusiasts would have us believe...

...The god of the Old Testament--as well as pagan deities and "the divine" of philosophers--is not the transcendent source of divine being which constitutes the source, essence, and goal of humanity...

...So long as that is the case, he suggests, the nuclear peace will be maintained...

...Thomus Powers A GREAT MANY lessons can be drawn from the Cuban Missile Crisis, but the one which has received the least attention is the implication we may not know the final crisis has even begun until the fast bomb goes off...

...THE NUCLEAR QUESTION Michael M/ndelbaum Cambridge, $16.95, 277 pp...

...The crisis began on October 16, 1962, when the U.S...

...There is time for a run on food stores, wild confusion on the bourses, long analyticaJ articles on why things must go this way or that, kisses goodbye as the soldiers ~o off to mobilize...

...Someone asked him, 'If we do that, what do you think the Soviet Union will do?' He said, 'I think I know the Soviet Union well...

...But I can't help wondering if Mandelbaum's confidence in the system's stability is misplaced...

...Its only possible utility is to frighten off opponents...

...He may even be right that this is the best of all possible nuclear worlds...

...The prevailing wisdom comes down to nothing more substantial than common sense, but it is so common, and so sensible, it is hard to image any turn of events which would push the world over the brink...

...That is the essential fast step toward making us do what must be done to make abortion never appear necessary...

...During the first few days the advisers leaned in favor of a"surgical" air strike to destroy the missile sites...

...Mandelbaum has a great deal that is interesting to say, especially about the success of diplomatic efforts to control weaponry once the United States abandoned visionary attempts to negotiate multinational agreements which would do away with arms and war altogether...

...Mandelbaum's book is distinguished by its brevity, its clarity of analysis, and its focus on the history of how we got from there to here...

...just like that...

...I know what they are required to do in the light of their history and their posture around the world...

...Mandelbaum's history is brief because the strategists have never managed to get very far from the great fact of the Bomb' s destructiveness...

...Lischer shows how, in spite of the obvious antagonism of their basic philosophical and religious positions, the common concern of Marx and Teilhard with the predicament and destiny of mankind makes their comparison and contrast highly illuminating in our contemporary situation:' --E.L Mascall, University of London $6.95 paperhack THE UTOPIA OF POPE JOHN XXlll Giancado Zizola "The Utopia of Pope John is a fascinating account of the most important five years of the papacy since the CounterReformation...

...Well,' he said, 'that's when we hope cooler heads will prevail and they'll stop and talk...

...its powers and gods...

...Only a vague uneasiness obtained...

...More importantly, I wish its author had contented himself with diagnosis and description of our problem, making us more aware of the life within the womb, and had resisted the temptation to offer a societal remedy...

...During those six days rumors began to filter through Washington that something was up, but journalists failed to discover what it was and there was certainly nothing like open public alarm...

...He is a false, arrogant offspring of a heavenly figure, usually the female Wisdom, who fell away from the perfection and praise Of the transcendent God...