War Without Suicide

...It might have been necessary to demonstrate the illogic of this series of maxims if Osgood did not follow them with this admission: "Before nations possessed nuclear weapons, they might gain worthwhile objectives consonant with the sacrifices of war even in a war fought with their total resources...

...Partly as a result of this process, the USSR has had to loosen some of the controls within its own sphere...

...If we cannot deter them, then we want to win them...

...Instead, the Soviets aim to diminish the influence of that great hindrance to its hegemony, the United States, by separating it first from the more neutral part of the free world and then from its allies...

...At the same time, we are taking perhaps greater pains to avoid political situations that may cause the Soviet Union to react with irrational anger...

...We can maneuver with all our strengths and with all our ability to foster good will in order to keep our friends and allies and to exert whatever influence we can within the Soviet sphere...

...capacity for massive retaliation may be either completely ineffective in a small war or so vastly destructive that they could blow us into a general war...

...Osgood makes a much stronger ease for a capability to wage local war as a requirement of our strategy to contain Soviet power...

...The Administration is vulnerable only in terms of whether its defense budget allows the services to acquire or maintain the kinds of strength that will fulfill this recognized strategic need...

...But Osgood pays little attention to the problem of deterring limited wars...

...Furthermore, if political objectives are at all attainable, they must be limited rather than absolute...

...The tactical nuclear weapons that may be best calculated to deter limited wars may also make it impossible to win them in any usual sense of the word if the enemy has similar weapons in quantity...

...The publicists, politicians, ami military men who have expounded it usually have based their stand on the likelihood that there may be many objectives we would like to defend, and many positions we would like to strengthen, without running the risk of nuclear devastation...

...World domination may still be the goal...

...But Osgood, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago, writes as a member of an academic school of Realpolitik founded by Hans Morgenthau...

...Osgood's theory of war is suitably general but hardly persuasive...

...The capacity to wage local wars is one of these strengths: it could convince Stalin's successors that there might be little to be gained from reverting, even temporarily, to his methods of expansion...

...Although he believes that the United States and the Soviet Union are mutually deterred from acts they think will lead to total war, he has a well reasoned discussion of the conditions under which this deterrence might break down...

...Billions are spent on increasing the number and effectiveness of hydrogen bombs, on building and operating hundreds of B-52s, on developing long-range ballistic missiles, on constructing far-flung networks of electronic early-warning lines, etc...

...Thus we stifle our first, natural impulse to come to the aid of the revolutionaries of East Berlin and Hungary, and hardly stir while they are suppressed...

...This proposition has become a rather familiar one in the past few years...

...But it is no longer equally obvious that containment is our best strategy for meeting the Soviet threat...

...Whether the present administration admits it or not, it has been following its predecessor's strategy of containment...

...This certainly was done in World War II, whatever the errors of our political and military leadership might have been...

...Containment does not meet the challenge of this strategy nor the opportunities created by it...

...If Osgood is weakest in presenting the rationale of the strategy he advocates, he is most convincing in displaying its complexities and difficulties...

...But it has become increasingly apparent that the new Soviet rulers have abandoned this rigid directness for a strategy of maneuver and indirection...

...Secretary Dulles made this clear in an address on October 27, 1956, when he said: "We and our allies should, between us, have the capacity to deal with these [local aggressions] without our action producing a general nuclear war...

...Some forces may be well suited to do one and not the other...

...The kind of weapons and forces that assure the U.S...

...Michigan State University Our most troublesome nightmares are caused by the possibility of a general nuclear war...

...The overriding objective of containment is to keep the Soviet sphere of control from expanding beyond its postwar boundaries by building local situations of strength and by demonstrating a capacity to meet force with counterforce...

...War, we are told, is senseless and immoral unless it serves valid political purposes...

...In spite of these difficulties, the Eisenhower Administration decided some time ago to accept the case for a capacity to wage limited war...

...To assure that these purposes are served, war must be fought under political control, which Osgood takes to mean the same as limitation...

...And he is well aware of the difficulties of keeping any future war limited...

...Osgood does not have much to contribute toward this rather technical debate, although he does plead for an Army that would have about 28 or 29 divisions...

...The means is no longer the amoebalike spread of the Soviet organism, forcing in its path the free world to consolidate its opposition...

...To the usual argument, he would add one derived from a theory of the nature of war and another derived from a specific strategy for dealing with Soviet power...

...Professor Osgood argues that our national interest requires that the United States have a strategy and a capability for waging the kind of limited war that need not result in total war...

...Even a total war can be kept under political control and fought for realizable objectives...

...But while concentrating on the direct threats of total war, we seem to be progressively depriving ourselves of the military means to deal with lesser threats, the sort of situation that arose in Indo-China, Korea, Greece and Berlin...

...His method was the fairly direct expansion of physical control, even though it tended to force all those who were not his satellites to become his enemies...

...One of the counter-forces obviously should be an armed force that can exert effective local pressure...

...The means to attain them must be proportionately limited because of the principle of economy of force...

...In fact, he is not too hopeful that this can be done in just those areas in which the two great powers are most interested, Europe and the Middle East...

...Even within the limits set by mutual deterrence, there is still room for the United States to adopt the indirect approach...

...Variations and elaborations on the same theme have been produced by many other officials...

...It is not the nature of war but the nature of modern weapons that makes total war useless as an instrument of policy...

...Yet, even a political scientist could help the public to understand some of the issues in the debate...

...We want to deter limited wars in the first place...

...Containment was an answer to Stalin's foreign policy...

...Therefore, we are taking great pains to maintain the retaliatory forces we hope will deter it...

...See the essays by Robert C. Tucker in The New Leader, October 22, 1956, and elsewhere...

...By this combination of caution and strength, we may avoid total war and may be laying the foundations for some measure of disarmament...

...He could underscore, as Osgood does not, the difference between deterring wars and winning them...