Global Balancing Acts

...He worries about the Warsaw Pact's superiority in conventional arms, a condition made worse by the INF treaty, and urges a coherent, unified NATO strategy to correct the imbalance...

...His new book, Preventing World War III: A Realistic Grand Strategy (Harper and Row, 331 pp...

...Yet for every step forward, as Newhouse indicates, there has been motionin the other direction as well...

...After enduring 300 pages of orotundities—"What is needed is alongrange conceptual framework that reconciles our global challenges and balances competing interests and responsibilities" —a reader expects to be served a plate of rubber chicken...

...If our allies do not, in an explosion of Pollyannaism, eventually ask U.S...

...Unlike giant Mowed missiles, these cannot be accurately counted unless we allow Soviet inspectors to board American submarines, something we quite understandably refuse to do...

...One effect of this is to increase the temptation in Washington and in Moscow to order a preemptive strike, to "use 'em or lose 'em...

...Abshire tries to rejuvenate the marriage through traditional Cold War scare tactics...

...The positions he has held in an illustrious career include president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, chairman of the U.S...

...Now all eyes are on Star Wars as the latest U.S...

...But if Newhouse genuinely thinks broader discussion will guarantee a more "sober and balanced" examination of issues, he must have been vacationing in Mongolia during the last Presidential campaign...

...Either way, the outcome would be disastrous...

...19.95), indicates, however, that "writer" should not be listed among his job descriptions...

...If an objective observer were to add up the pluses and minuses, I suspect he would be hard put to say whether the world is a significantly safer place today...

...First it was the hydrogen bomb, then intercontinental ballistic missiles, then multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles (MTRVS), the most destabilizing of weapons systems because they give each side an incentive to try to establish a firststrike capability that wipes out the opponent's retaliatory forces...

...Gorbachev sends them into flights of reverie...

...And anyone who prefers that to the creaky and careworn NATO alliance should promptly be sent back to school with a failing grade in 20thcentury history...

...This is too bad...

...The cessation of nuclear testing in the atmosphere has also put to rest fears of our environment becoming progressively more contaminated...

...Board for International Broadcasting, U.S...

...Ike's response has a more contemporary ring: "You boys must be crazy...

...Newhouse blames a "nuclear priesthood" of experts for the crazier notions that have been espoused over the years, contending that the public has been discouraged from participating in the arguments...

...SLCMs could therefore destroy the chance of limiting nuclear weapons, indeed the whole arms-control process itself...

...Readers who stay with it to the end are likely to sleep less soundly at night...

...Where Harry S. Truman, Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis could count on having several hours to make decisions during an emergency, George Bush could have only minutes...

...His four years with NATO incline him to focus on the European arena, which he correctly identifies, despite the rise of Japan and all the other changes in the world, as the continuing center of U. S. foreign policy concerns...

...The warwouldbe fought by three separate and uncoordinated commands—in effect, three sovereign powers...

...A better strategy would have been to try to imagine what a world without NATO would look like...

...Add to this the rise of nuclear terrorism—"the most serious near- and middle-term threat"—and the steady proliferation of nations with bomb-making capacity—"weapons of mass destruction will increasingly become available on the open market unless steps are taken to discourage sales"—and it is easy to see why a reader of Newhouse may close his book with a few more gray hairs than he had when he began...

...attempt to leapfrog the stalemate, but Newhouse, who along with a majority of the scientific community is skeptical about its prospects, highlights a less publicized example of technological creep, sea-launched cruise missiles (SLCMs...

...Davtd M. Abshtre may not be one of the nuclear priests who trouble Newhouse, yet he is definitely a member of the high clergy, with an impressive résumé to prove it...

...As one former White House adviser explained: "There are people up and down the line who can fire the weapons—not alone, but with some cooperation...

...Linked as much by cultural as by economic and military ties, Europe and the U.S...

...Abshire favors a declamatory style, no doubt the result of too much speechmaking on the Establishment dinner circuit...

...Perhaps abit of popular ventilation would produce some new ideas...

...Should the President be killed or lose contact with our military centers in an attack—a distinct possibility, as simulated exercises reveal—anything could happen...

...ambassador to NATO from 1983 to 1987, and White House special counselor during the Iran-contra affair...

...For all of the theorizing about graduated nuclear exchanges, SAC plans for a simple massive response, "and SAC may well be right...

...Nonetheless, this is a disquieting book...

...The aim must be to prevent the possibility of a surprise attack or large-scale offensive, and Abshire is at his best in detailing how the alliance can be strengthened without additional expenditures, "thinking smarter, not richer...

...The picture that I, for one, can foresee is not a Soviet invasion, but a power vacuum filled by a militarized and nuclearized West Germany...

...Wecan'tusethoseawful things against Asians for the second time in less than 10 years...

...The Pentagon's recommendation to Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954, supported by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, that "three tactical ?-weapons, properly employed, would be sufficient to smash the Vietminh" sounds positively prehistoric today...

...need each other, though they may bicker incessantly like many other happily wedded couples...

...Oddly, he believes such good things are more likely to occur with a dash of populism thrown into the policy mix...

...In a brief epilogue where he focuses his attention primarily on decision-making procedures, he tends to wax rather platitudinous...

...As aresult, hesays, theory has floated away from reality, and "instead of a sober and balanced discussion of nuclear issues, society has been confused, hence victimized, by a shrill and polarized debate, the terms of which are often as arbitrary as they are absurd...

...troops to leave, we might one day succumb to our own ultimate tantrum and bring our dolls and dishes home in a snit...

...Stalin concentrated people's minds wonderfully...

...The President can't handle this alone...

...Yet the image he conjures up of a Russian blitzkrieg seems so wildly improbable in the present climate that he may have damaged his own case...

...We all prefer to believe that there is progress in human affairs, especially where nuclear weapons are concerned, and historians can record a number of developments that seem to have dulled or reined in the Damoclean sword overhanging mankind: the test-ban agreement, salt I, the Vladivostock accords, and most recently, the INF treaty...

...Who could be against it...

...As the companion to a public television series, it provides a broad rather than an intensive look at defense policy since World War II, giving one the feeling that everything contained in it has been said before...

...Technological progress has drastically shortened response-time...

...Except for such unanticipated calamities as the Chernobyl meltdown, no one worries about strontium 90 or radioactive milk supplies anymore...

...More worrying, says Newhouse, is the hairtrigger nature of the present systems...

...Newhouse notes that an inherent contradiction exists between the growth in numbers and flexibility of our weapons systems, and the principle of command from the top...

...Abshire, whose commitment to NATO is second to none, rightly sees dangers to the alliance on both sides of the Atlantic: a growing neutralist sentiment in Europe, mounting exasperation over policy differences and defense outlays in the United States...

...Newhouse thinks that decisions to launch would fall upon the Atlantic Forces, the Pacific Forces, and the Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command (SAC...

...But there is no conceivable alternative...

...The pattern has been for the United States to develop and deploy a new weapon in order to gain an advantage over the Soviets, forcing them to play catch-up...

...We are talking about 25,000 weapons out there...

...These are not matters that lend themselves to easy solutions, and Newhouse offers none...

...His problem is convincing an audience to take the Soviet presence in Europe seriously...

...Abshire has a lot to say, even if he does not know how to say it...

...Fortunately, too, the notion that nuclear weapons are merely one more asset in America's military arsenal, different only in size, not quality, from conventional tanks and bombs, is no longer fashionable...

...In fact, Newhouse identifies technological creep as the demon undermining the hope for stability...

...He declares that "the superpowers could and should have reordered their priority concerns years ago," and calls for a nuclear policy based "on sensible and balanced estimates of the threat," whatever those may be...

...One major minus involves Presidential control of nuclear arms—the famous "button...

...once they have succeeded in matching the Americans, as they inevitably do, the cycle begins all over again...

...Each has offered the prospect of a more secure world, while the ascendancy of Mikhail S. Gorbachev has signaled, if not the coming of the millennium oreventheend of theColdWar as Margaret Thatcher has suggested, at least the possibility of reducing superpower tensions to a postwar low...