Minds at War

...Should either superpower come to believe that war is imminent, it would have some incentive to shoot first as a last resort...

...That assumption avoids many, though not all, of the contradictions in their doctrine...

...Even as some acknowledge the irrationality of actually engaging in a nuclear war, those in the grip of traditionalism still cling, almost desperately says Kull, to prenuclear thought in a vain attempt to deny present-day reality...

...Beneath the surface of cool rationality, however, the very logic of nuclear deterrence is rife with contradiction...

...As a practicing psychologist he recognizes the poignancy, indeed the pain, that internally inconsistent beliefs can produce and the struggle of patients to ignore, deny, or otherwise cope with that inconsistency...

...In Herman Kahn's words, "The presence of nuclear weapons is likely to prove a powerful inducement to clear and/or cautious thinking...

...For instance, the assumption that nuclear war is inevitable may undergird the belief system of some traditionalists...

...The traditional strain, which gets most of Kull's attention, assumes that nuclear devices are weapons like any other, hence usable and likely to be used...

...and for trying to develop strategic defenses to protect populations against nuclear attack...

...How can reducing the threat of nuclear war bolster deterrence...

...At one level, Kull's conversations with U.S...

...He cites the desire to deploy hard-target kill capability as "an expression of a wish to make nuclear war [somehow] controllable...

...Nuclear weapons are totems so meaningful that strategists seem willing to worship them even if doing so sacrifices security...

...The crucial question is not numbers but the kind of weapons...

...It exposes these doctrinal dilemmas through conversations with practicing Russian and American nuclear strategists...

...Deep-seated resistance to a change of mind is a well-documented finding of cognitive psychology...

...Behind the confusion, evasion, ambivalence, and denial he discerns not logic, but psycho-logic at work...

...Exploring the irrational resistance of prenuclear attitudes to change, Kull uncovers the symbolic value of the Bomb...

...Perhaps so, but Kull neglects to mention that nuclear disarmers may be no less in thrall of the Bomb as symbol...

...The adaptivists whom Kull favors, as I do, reject prenuclear thought that superiority matters...

...With weapons of this magnitude, the difference between 500 and 25,000 is not as significant as those who press for reductions want to think...

...It follows that the more weapons the United States has, the better it is for deterrence, and that marginal superiority will reassure allies and instill caution in foes...

...of the urge to assimilate nuclear war into a conventional war paradigm...

...Consistency of belief, however, may be no improvement over inconsistency...

...Lacking the means of retaliation or the certainty that covert production of nuclear weapons can be detected, how could disarmed states assure they would not become vulnerable to nuclear attack...

...Kulls book...

...for deploying weapons: with a capacity to destroy the other side's weapons and command-and-control (so-called "hard-target kill" capability...

...Neither the adaptive nor the traditional strain in strategic thought can escape the fundamental contradiction posed by nuclear interdependence, between deterring premeditated war by policies that, in a crisis, invite preemptive war...

...Under this condition of nuclear interdependence, deterrence means manipulating the shared risk of a nuclear war neither side can afford...

...Once the Soviet Union as well as the United States acquired that capability, it became difficult to raise the cost of war to one side without doing so for the other...

...Minds at War, breaks new ground by going beyond the clash of nuclear doctrine with nuclear reality...

...Nor is there any reason to believe that the abolition of nuclear weapons would make the world safest of all...

...That may be what strategists have in mind when they talk about thinking the unthinkable...

...How can the United States deter the Soviet Union by threats that it manifestly would have little or no incentive to carry out...

...Would the balance of power in a disarmed world, with many states capable of covertly producing nuclear devices as a hedge against uncertainty, be more precarious than it is today...

...designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to mere wind.'' But Kull has a deeper intent...

...How rational is it to base deterrence on the threat that any war may escalate out of control even if neither side intended it...

...Strategists act in the belief that they can master the forces of nature by careful calculation-not only in peacetime, but also in times of crisis or war...

...With the advent of: nuclear interdependence, strategy has reached a dead end...

...Thus, steps taken to reduce the risk of premeditated war by exploring or improving one's nuclear arsenal by either superpower may only raise the risk of preemptive war...

...Perhaps most profound is their capacity to mock man's rationality...

...Kull's is an insistent voice, probing inconsistencies in strategists' reasoning as they shift back and forth between two strains of nuclear thought: an adaptive strain that acknowledges the profound impact that nuclear weapons have had on strategy and diplomacy, and tries to adjust to it...

...Yet attempts at manipulation could provoke unintended war in a crisis...

...It is difficult to square that finding with Kull's optimistic conclusion that the "rationality" of the adaptivists will triumph and that security will ultimately dominate symbolism...

...Yet restoring consistency in that way may turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, one that hardly makes the world a safer place...

...Steven Kull appreciates many of the dilemmas of deterrence and the resulting contradictions in policy, especially in proposals that call for overmatching the other side's nuclear arsenal, qualitatively or quantitatively...

...Traditionalists who advocate waging and winning nuclear wars do not stand alone in their inconsistency...

...Kull does not go far enough in exposing the contradictions in nuclear thinking...

...The recognition that nuclear strategy is a contradiction in terms has long been a staple of the academic literature, Military strategy necessarily implies a rational economy of force, some proportionality between means and ends...

...For example, deploying even a relatively small number of accurate MX or SSI8 missiles in vulnerable silos arguably increases the risk that the other side will resort to first strike in the event of a crisis...

...Drastic cuts, it is true, may lower the risk of an accident, but under present conditions, there is no reason to believe that the fewer weapons the superpowers have, the safer the world would be...

...They attempt to adapt to nuclear interdependence by advocating arms control agreements and reduced relianep on nuclear deterrence...

...By sheer de-structiveness and indiscriminateness, however, the Bomb demolishes any meaningful distinction between winning and losing and turns means-ends calculation into an absurdity...

...and a traditional strain that denies the difference that nuclear weapons make...

...But this position poses contradictions of its own...

...and Soviet analysts and policymakers, in government and out, bring home the wisdom of Orwell's observation that "political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible...

...for, "prevailing" in the event of a nuclear war...

...Nuclear weapons do have profound effects on today's world...

...So long as each superpower has nuclear forces capable of surviving attack and retaliating in kind, how can more nuclear weapons-or more accurate ones-add to deterrence...