Political Policy Or Nuclear War?
Newman, William J.
Of all the puzzles which a puzzled Eisenhower-Dulles administration has failed to solve, one of the most important is the proper relationship between military power and foreign policy. It is a...
...If these ungrateful wretches should threaten our power, what shall we do with them...
...and therefore tempted either into eccentric and quixotic actions due to panic or to waiting until we must start a limited nuclear war...
...America is losing the Cold War not because she has too little military strength but because she has the kind of military strength that frightens everyone whom she approaches—and because that is about all she has...
...V This case for fighting a limited nuclear war is well put...
...Also, it would be more expensive in men and money to maintain...
...This problem is a political problem, not a military one, and an understanding of how to fight the next war will not solve it...
...One must, however, disagree with one of Mr...
...But if America develops a policy of reliance on limited nuclear war, America will continue to be a war-like nation, will continue to rely on military force and war, even after Russia has given it up...
...because [in a conventional war] the two sides will be less clear about each other's intentions, the detonation of any nuclear device could then set off an all-out holocaust . . . A war which began as a limited nuclear war would have the advantage that its limitations could have been established...
...If we have no conventional forces, that state will be Russia...
...Further, a limited nuclear force would be a far more risky way to threaten Russia in Europe than dependence on SAC...
...At the very most it is one possible type of war to prepare for, and probably the least important kind, the kind of war that will probably not happen...
...Where is this limited nuclear war to come...
...But whatever Europe may, or may not do, the threat to Europe today is not from a full scale Russian invasion...
...What is our major political problem today...
...Kissinger's main conclusions, his belief that it is limited nuclear war which is the necessity for American strategy...
...The argument was simple enough...
...Wars were continuing...
...Sad but true...
...Kissinger's answer is to pose the contradiction of saying that America's allies will be reluctant to undertake a limited war in defense of Europe but that we will be ready or able to put into effect an all-out war which would be much more destructive...
...The only real possibility of war in Europe today is of local incursions, by design or through mistakes, of local forces along the East German-West German border...
...The discovery that Russia may not bite, but simply nibble, has finally been made and the result is that America is ready—or getting ready—to fight wars again...
...Recognizing that it will still be necessary to have a strategic atomic force for all-out war (since "it is the fear of thermonuclear devastation which sets the bounds of limited war"), he faces the question of what other kinds of military force are necessary...
...Then too the advocates of the Terrorized Peace had to face the inconvenience of the actual history of the world since 1945, a history of continued and frequent wars...
...The Russians don't fight because they have better methods...
...They're back again...
...Whether the military men know it or not, the aim of military policy today must be to negate, to neutralize, and in a sense, destroy, military power...
...Answer: when the General in the field decides that it is one or the other...
...why should they now after reading this article in DISSENT...
...To this day no one has yet been able to explain away this particular puzzle—with the result that the Cynical European whose Negative Frame of Mind is so distracting to the Straightforward Brain of a Soldier-Statesman like Eisenhower or Norstad, has been led to the conclusion that armies no longer being necessary in an age of push-button peace, he would no longer provide them...
...It is disastrous because to think of using limited nuclear weapons in Asia or the Middle East is to think about the wrong things...
...Asia faces America with a political problem...
...But the Korean War indicated (and the Quemoy imbroglio, as well as Indo-China) that Russia will not fight eagerly and quickly for China and that China restricts herself in her military aims...
...Further, and more important, to concentrate American efforts on limited nuclear war will do nothing to solve the political problems which are pressing America so hard today...
...To do that effectively we need a solid doctrine in tune with the realities our minds have created...
...It does not because limited nuclear war against China, if it were to be successful would have to be followed up with invasion, and invasion requires conventional armed forces...
...And hence we would not only hesitate until we were forced to act in panic fashion or not at all, but most of the world would choose to disassociate itself from us...
...The effect on the European of being told that he was considered by the experts to be a plate glass which was to be broken in order to set off an alarm for the American Strategic Air Force was two-fold...
...Some were larger and had uneasy overtones which led to the thought that with all due regard to the fail-safe techniques of the Air Force and the ratiocinations of Dulles, man might after all choose annihilation...
...Dulles, that he is not an advocate of diplomacy without power, but of power without diplomacy...
...Granted, but neither will they provide the equally large (or larger) number of troops needed for limited nuclear war, as well as the much greater sum of money it would require...
...will be forced to use limited nuclear weapons in the "gray" uncommitted areas of the world when she feels it is essential to intervene—and there is, I think, nothing wrong with intervention qua intervention...
...Because Europe is protected by SAC...
...War and Peace in the Space Age (1958...
...but the bang of our sophisticated bombs would soon be followed by the primitive noise of a Chinese chain gang rebuilding the batteries...
...How simple it all is...
...But could we deal with the sources and effects of these wars by diplomacy alone...
...It would also bring closer a major war...
...The maintenance and use of tactical nuclear weapons requires a very large and constantly in-being army...
...What is wrong with starting a limited nuclear war...
...But if the philosophers of the Defense Department, like most philosophers, had not discovered absolute truth, they had discovered partial truth...
...But does the tactical nuclear bomb provide a means of military balance against the gigantic population of China...
...well in advance of hostilities...
...Such use of limited nuclear weapons would not only be barbarous, but would negate the purpose of our intervention by raising opinion against us...
...It would be nice to think so, up against all that fertility as we are...
...How can they be kept at least neutral, that is, free...
...the emphasis in re-building our armed forces in "peacetime" must therefore be in creating not necessarily a large conscript army, but an army which is able to meet the emergencies most likely to occur...
...Given extreme dependence on SAC, we will either have to start an all-out war in defense of a local position or we will not be able to fight at all, because our policy will be one of bluff...
...We bluffed, it should be recalled (by us if not by Dulles) over Indo-China, and had to back down...
...It is possible, of course, to conceive of another World War II as a possible type of war today...
...In fact are we likely to have another World War II...
...Hans J. Morgenthau, "Atomic Force and Foreign Policy," Commentary, June, 1957...
...Russia is without any doubt a very aggressive state, one of the most aggressive in history...
...Much of what has been written on war has a rather quaint and slightly repellent air because it drives military logic to its logical conclusion...
...requisite for any [sic] kind of war limitation...
...Our handsome airmen crouched in the belly of a B-52 could not punish...
...V1 To prepare for a limited nuclear war is to prepare for the war which is least likely to occur...
...Such is the ironical and unexpected consequence of the nuclear stalemate...
...But there would be no such suicidal idea if we realized that what faces us is the possibility of hard, man-consuming, conventional war as an element in the political struggles of the 1960s...
...11 Today SAC is at a discount...
...but, to paraphrase, bunk must not only be revealed but be seen to be revealed...
...It is precisely in these areas of Asia where limited nuclear war is least advantageous...
...Would that it were so...
...Is limited nuclear war the right kind of war for which to prepare...
...It is this type of war more than any other that the advocates of limited war have in mind...
...but no one seriously thinks of it as a limited war in any real sense of limited destruction, a limited field of operations, or a limited amount of men and material being involved...
...but a political vacuum just as surely invites Russian political forces...
...There would be no political problem —like the Chinese mainland opposite Quemoy—which could not be solved by blowing it up...
...The adoption of a strategy based on limited nuclear war, on the tactical nuclear bomb, has a weakness which is precisely that which Mr...
...In Europe...
...A military policy of limited nuclear war in uncommitted areas forces other nations to be neutral: it is on their land that this war would take place...
...and for that, local conventional forces are necessary, not the blunderbuss of limited nuclear war...
...But, Kissinger and others will say, Europe has not provided enough conventional forces all these years...
...Today military power is with us more than ever, thanks to the popularity of a new military doctrine—the doctrine of limited nuclear war...
...b) since tactical nuclear weapons are weapons of the Hiroshima size and even the portable 1/ th kiloton weapon is the size of the blockbuster of World War II, a limited nuclear war is in fact a war on the scale of World War II...
...After all, scorching the earth in France is hardly an effective method of threatening Russia...
...1 War today, the Pentagon feels, is as vital to the interests of the state as it has ever been...
...More serious, in certain areas they may be the preliminary to a Communist take-over...
...But even more important, is the way in which conventional armed forces might cut through this dilemma of NATO...
...and how bloodless (for Americans...
...Further, these wars were often vital to American interests...
...And we have had enough of that to fill our queasy stomachs for a while...
...No doubt a military vacuum would invite Russian military forces...
...therefore defense would still be possible...
...The fact that Russia will not fight is of fundamental importance as we take our tour d'horizon...
...The question arose, for example, why was it necessary to have a NATO with its large ground armies...
...To put it still more briefly, the doctrine of limited nuclear war is bunk...
...As long as America puts itself to sleep with such narcotics Russia will be free to inch forward in one political situation after another...
...an all-out war now means total annihilation...
...P. H. Nitze, "Limited Wars or Massive Retaliation," Reporter, September 5, 1957...
...The next war would be an all-out war (since all wars are fought for victory...
...But did American power and moral disinterestedness mean that we could simply ignore these small-scale combats...
...Is there a problem which is a political problem...
...4) Limited nuclear war need not be "as destructive as it appears when we think of it in terms of traditional warfare" (a rather odd sentence, on the whole...
...It is too easy a way out...
...Russian policy—its method of attack—is political...
...Limited nuclear war represents our most effective strategyagainst nuclear powers or against a major power which is capable of substituting manpower for technology...
...But it may appear to do so, and it is therefore important to understand whether or not we are about to be sold another fancy substitute for the unpleasant necessities of politics...
...Of all the puzzles which a puzzled Eisenhower-Dulles administration has failed to solve, one of the most important is the proper relationship between military power and foreign policy...
...there would be, presumably, a few persons staggering around at the end of it upholding the banner of civilization...
...2) Once we have provided ourselves against more Korean wars by whatever .conventional forces we need, we will have completed the job of making military force impotent...
...Further, it is important to notice that Russia will not fight at all unless driven to it...
...Yes, yes, say the advocates of limited nuclear war, but we could have knocked the Chinese Communists into the next world...
...for such wars will not be fought on their territory...
...History had come to a stop, and that which the utopians had promised if only men would reform could now exist without the trouble of reform...
...Mr...
...What is the validity of this doctrine...
...It will be transformed in their simple minds to a hygienic exercise in which small groups of mobile troops looking like Boy Scouts will flush out the enemy with their portable ¼th kiloton bombs...
...It is a schoolroom exercise to make a distinction between the tactical and strategic use of such weapons (question: when is a city a tactical and when is it a strategic target...
...Should America concentrate on preparations for limited nuclear war...
...It will do that in the following ways...
...The question is of vital importance, not only because of the abstract principle that if one is going to prepare it is always a good thing to prepare for the right kind of war, but because if we do not, if we are suddenly faced with a war we cannot fight, we will be thrown back on SAC and SAC alone...
...The exception to this statement is, of course, the Russian aviators in the Korean War...
...But as long as Russia thinks that she can use a type of military force (by proxy or otherwise) for which we have no reply, she will be in a position to do so...
...Answer: (a) the distinction between a limited nuclear and an all-out nuclear war may exist in the mind of a scholar, but not on the reality of a battlefield...
...K. Knorr, The Crisis in United States Defense (1957...
...Russia has not lost a soldier in battle since the end of World War II...
...But in fact, such a war provides no special security against China...
...J. E. King, Jr., "Limited Defense," "Limited Annihilation ?," New Republic, July 1, 1957, July 15, 1957...
...To answer that question it is necessary to look at the possibilities of Russian action and the use by America of limited nuclear weapons in response to Russia in various committed and uncommitted areas of the world today...
...Where then...
...i.e., can no longer make the attainment of victory feasible...
...and by 1954 it had to be concluded by even the most dense Secretary of State that war was with us again as a permanent feature of life...
...And such a question is the crucial one, for if there is little possibility of their use in such areas then to prepare for limited nuclear war is to prepare for the wrong kind of war...
...one can shift easily from one to the other because there is no clear cut point as there is between conventional war and limited nuclear war...
...Further it is a policy which is inexpensive in terms of men if not money...
...But we must persevere to the bitter—and absurd—end (and it would be both bitter and absurd...
...Perhaps, but it gives Europe a fighting chance, whereas limited nuclear war would not...
...We have our choice: politics or war...
...For where is a World War III likely to break out...
...Well, how about it...
...6) A limited nuclear war is less likely than a conventional war to produce a showdown...
...Nuclear war should be fought as something lessthan an all-out war...
...not a Russian soldier has been engaged in battle with either America or any of her allies...
...Even at the time this argument was put forward there were some facts which jarred with this pleasant picture of a Balance of Terror...
...For such a war promises cheap victories and an avoidance of all-out war at the same time...
...In doing so it confines itself only to a military situation, or at best, deals with foreign policy only in military terms...
...Our "policy-makers" can then use such a doctrine to pretend to themselves and others that American policy problems are solved because we can "prevent" Russia from taking a piece of land anywhere...
...Dean Acheson—Mr...
...We have—should have—no desire to force them into our bailiwick...
...To put the matter briefly: the doctrine of limited nuclear war makes it possible—is making it possible—to avoid the political facts of life by providing a convenient aura of strength...
...We have already pointed out that Russia has not lost a soldier since the end of World War II...
...It should be pointed out, in defense of Mr...
...They would have ruined Indo-China, but would they have saved it from Chinese Communist control...
...To come to the crux of the question...
...The game has become obscene...
...And finally, if we assume a limited nuclear war in Europe, for example, and assume, as we must, that the Russians have tactical nuclear weapons, that side will win which, after each tactical nuclear army has wiped the other out, will have the biggest conventional reserves to take over the smoking real estate (there will be some real ruins to visit in Europe after the next war...
...This type of force would keep war damage to the minimum...
...But it is not very likely...
...if America was to be a global power it had to recognize that any slight shift of power in any place on that globe reacted in one way or another on our position...
...In short: The purpose of a policy of limited nuclear war is not to provide a substitute for all-out war, but to create a range of options within which the response can be brought into balance with the provocation and where military capability and the will to use it will be in greater harmony than in the stark case when all-out war remains our only response to a challenge...
...What are its implications for the political problems which face American foreign policy...
...The answer is, No...
...3) For the fact is that war is increasingly unlikely today...
...dependence on SAC—to be blunt—makes it at least possible that Europe will simply be flown over while America and Russia knock each other out...
...SAC, the self-designated defender of our civilization, is vital to American security and to peace...
...It is that motley collection of rulers like Colonel Nasser and Brigadier Qasim...
...Dean Acheson, Power and Diplomacy (1958...
...And for a very good reason...
...Since NATO would not be put in a position of being forced to start a limited nuclear war, it would be more prepared to defend itself...
...the tactical nuclear bomb is our best weapon against such hordes...
...An excessive reliance on limited nuclear war—a reliance to the extent that Kissinger and others have advocated—will make America ignore too easily what war is like and thus tempt it too often (much to the delight of the Russians...
...Israel could then rest in peace—a nice long peace...
...Once the impotence of military force is achieved then America can turn its attention without its teeth chattering to the real problem—the political problems of the world...
...It is possible, of course...
...Wouldn't Iraq or Egypt or Jordan make a lovely place to use some tactical bombs of the power of the bombs used in Hiroshima...
...Kissinger thinks that reliance on nuclear tactical limited war is the only solution to America's military problem because: (1) A decision to rely on conventional forces in a case of local aggression would be a break with the present trend of United States and Western military thought...
...What is here now is the political fact of these underdeveloped areas...
...At the worst we may have to use conventional forces to fight another Korea in the area...
...That theory broke down too...
...Someplace on the periphery of Asia where another Korea-type war may develop...
...5) Limited nuclear war need not expand into unlimited nuclear war "assuming, however, that both sides are eager to avoid all-out war—the pre...
...An army equipped with them in place of conventional arms assures that they must be used...
...And then, after the bombing, would we start an invasion of China...
...No, SAC may as well be of some use, and preserving a stalemate in Europe is, let us face it, a use...
...It can, however, prevent the growth of a belief that with the proper military policy we can forget the need for a political policy...
...Kissinger on his own grounds...
...America will then be able to conveniently forget the political problems which face her because she has the "answer...
...James W. Gavin, USA ret...
...But it is not so...
...At this point in the argument my moral sense begins to give a few uneasy jumps...
...For limited nuclear war means it is certain that Europe would be the battlefield (the only battlefield...
...Some of these are: They do in fact need as much or more manpower as a conventional army in order to force the opposing army to concentrate so that tactical nuclear weapons—never very subtle under the best of circumstances—can do their work...
...For if we do not we will be open to a nibbling process...
...He was told of course, by SHAPE, that NATO was a plate glass...
...The brutal fact that war, any war, is a bloody, filthy, disorganized and chancy scramble may easily be forgotten by our policy makers...
...today it aims not at seizing military control, but political control through political means...
...But today even that type of military situation is increasingly improbable...
...For it is correct that, with a reasonable amount of reason in Russian policy-makers, the atomic stalemate will prevent an all-out war...
...we can have our aggressive instincts and live too...
...Having answered that we can then see what our military needs are...
...Dulles as he broods (we hope) over the question: how do the military facts of our time relate to the political needs of American foreign policy...
...But their loss to Communism would be a tragedy for them as well as us— whether they know it or not, and there is no doubt about it, they are often not very bright on the question...
...2) The USSR may use limited nuclear weapons, and then we will be thrown into a position where we will have to answer with SAC...
...Even worse it is disastrous...
...Would nuclear weapons have saved Indo-China...
...Some of these wars were small—Indonesia, Kashmir, Palestine—and mattered only to the deluded inhabitants of the areas (a clear case of technological lag...
...Could we allow the children their play, only stepping in with a warning of punishment if they began to get too rough...
...Presumably, of course, peace will be chosen because war has become "impossible...
...One could go on at some length to discuss the general and technical deficiencies of tactical nuclear weapons...
...Any effort to portray such a war as limited simply betrays the extent to which big bangs in Nevada can distort a sense of reality...
...Kissinger's belief that nuclear war can and should be limited war, and, especially, that it is the only feasible type of military policy for America today derives from his keen destruction of the fallacy of reliance on strategical nuclear war...
...therefore we are faced with a choice between total annihilation and peace...
...Once upon a time, when Harry Truman was in the White House, it seemed that the problem of war had been solved...
...But let us put aside such unmanly thoughts and meet Mr...
...In nuclear terms such a war may be limited...
...It is a policy which in the present painful circumstances is essential to pursue...
...8) While limited nuclear weapons may not save in manpower, they make it possible for the United States to take advantage of the particular skills and qualities of our population...
...To postulate the use of limited nuclear weapons as even a step towards a solution of the problems they present is simply not to be serious...
...we intervened in Europe after 1947 and Europe today is free...
...But in fact is such a war the most likely kind of war America has to face...
...also, R. E. Osgood, Limited War (1957...
...Are the Russians going to start a push to the Breton coast...
...No doubt we can silence the batteries opposite Quemoy...
...It is a difficult problem to grasp, let alone solve, and for once one can have some feeling of sympathy for Mr...
...The argument comforts, for it promises a peace on earth without goodwill towards men...
...A preliminary fact must be noticed...
...The fact is: that in an age when technical change and "advance" was supposed to have brought war to an end there has been fighting on a larger scale and more of it and involving more men—dead and alive—than in the supposedly turbulent years which followed World War I. Obviously as an exercise in scientific thought—as distinct from Air Force politics and atavistic desires for governmental economy—the policy of strategic nuclear deterrence left something to be desired...
...We will meet it with one of our new limited nuclear bombs...
...And everyone knows what is at the end of a sack: total darkness...
...It is now time to reverse the process...
...Leaving aside the question of the quality of American diplomacy, any undergraduate knows that diplomacy cannot be divorced from power...
...There is another enemy, however, besides Russia and China...
...America can dedicate itself to the solution of political problems or become a war-like and military state which is a standing danger not so much to Russia and China as to everyone else...
...IV The case for limited nuclear war was first put publicly by Henry A. Kissinger in Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy.* It should be stated at the outset that both the public and the scholars owe a considerable debt to Mr...
...III The answer is in the process of being made today both by the purveyors of doctrine for the public and by the facts of American re-armament...
...We cannot do that as long as we are weak in one of the three major forms of war which exist today...
...Illusion though it may be, that is the illusion on which limited nuclear war really rests...
...7) Limited nuclear war would give the advantage to our technological superiority...
...Military power never provides a political solution to political problems...
...Kissinger ascribes to the policy of strategic atomic deterrence...
...If, for example, a full-fledged threat with Russian backing should develop against Israel how would we meet it...
...he became even more cynical and he supplied even fewer troops...
...The official answer is limited nuclear war...
...it allows American Generals and politicians to think that the tactical atomic weapon, like the strategic atomic weapon, is a gimmick which "solves" both the problems of limited war and foreign policy with few men and less money...
...Better a limited nuclear war than losing a yard of real estate...
...Have we got it...
...A World War II type of war could only mean the involvement of either Russia or China or both...
...Dulles by accepting Russian aid...
...It is to avoid the whole point of the Russian challenge...
...Greece, China, Malaya, Korea, Indo-China and Suez mattered to quite a few and indicated that it was not only the Arabs and the Israelis, for example, who were acting as if they were in a bow-and-arrow era...
...There should be no mistake about it...
...Fallacious reasoning...
...Henry A. Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (1957...
...More exactly, assuming a relationship between military power and foreign policy, what is the effect on our foreign policy of current military ideas...
...But Russia won't fight because she is achieving her aims in other ways...
...In Asia you drop a tactical nuclear bomb, make a big hole in the ground and look...
...Today we have such political vacuums precisely because the American government has created them by its belief that military measures provide the answer to the problems which face us, and its recent conversion to the idea that limited nuclear war will give us "peace...
...Korea himself— has the answer to that: Thoughtful criticism of our restraint in Korea does not suggest that we should have used atomic weapons in or out of Korea . . . . I mention .. . this to show that even in so considerable a conflict as Korea the criticism of our conduct there—even that put forth by General MacArthur—contended not against the adequacy of conventional weapons but contended for the desirability of enlarging the geographical scope of the conflict...
...The contradiction exists, but the fact on which it is based—a fear of nuclear weapons—is not done away with by Kissinger's formula of limited nuclear war...
...anything is possible...
...This belief was an illusion...
...Here is a brief statement of his argument: War between nuclear powers has to be planned on the assumption that it is likely to be a nuclear war...
...It can, however, be answered, and the argument sustained that while it is necessary to have limited nuclear weapons as well as strategic atomic power, tactical nuclear war is not as likely to occur as is a conventional war of the Korea type, of the Indo-China type, or of the police action type...
...they could only annihilate...
...There is the distinct possibility that this type of adventurer will not only take over more of the underdeveloped countries but will assert himself against Mr...
...1) In the absence of adequate conventional forces, the U.S...
...But so successfully was it foisted on America—especially by the cocky Air Force, an interest group without a peer—that it is still able to delude the Joint Chiefs of Staff...
...By limited nuclear war...
...Asian armies are the most mobile of all, and it is generally agreed that mobile armies can out-fox tactical nuclear weapons if anyone can...
...3) A given armed force cannot be equipped to fight both a limited nuclear war and a conventional war...
...And why not...
...But enough...
...The major problem facing America today is created by the underdeveloped states...
...Kissinger, not only for his excellent discussion of strategy, but for the way he brings together strategy and foreign policy...
...Indeed, it leads to putting these problems to one side...
Vol. 6 • January 1959 • No. 1
