Their Obedient Servant

...It is as if international law didn't exist—which is possibly a manifestation of Bundy as realist, confirming the imperial mindset of the inner counsels of government even on the liberal side of the political establishment...

...Bundy writes as an elitist who respects the nuclear priesthood of strategists and military advisers far more than he respects democratic procedures...

...Bundy is openly scornful of revisionist perspectives on President Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb, relegating Gar Alperovitz's careful critique to a single condescending footnote...

...Bundy has worked for almost a decade on this book, and his reward will be to have it included in the canon of nuclear orthodoxy...

...relationship to nuclear weapons...

...His complacency about the awesome character of Presidential authority and power, despite the procession of mediocre and somewhat unbalanced personalities who have held office in the nuclear age, persists unchallenged for more than 700 pages...

...Once more, we realize that our supreme leaders and their advisers are managers lacking in both vision and any sense of the political community required to keep democratic life vital...

...Its exclusions are illuminating and distressing...

...But sadly, Bundy's evident resolve to remain a loyal servant of the Establishment deprives his work of the insight and guidance that might be expected from someone of his ability who served so long at the top...

...citizens give the frequent impression of being docile subjects...

...In the end, there is a scary aura about Bundy, who emerges from these pages as a contented nuclear Cold Warrior...

...This latter is surprising as Bundy himself, in what for him must stand out as his closest approximation to "civil disobedience," co-authored an article (with George Kennan, Robert McNamara, and Gerald Smith) in Foreign Affairs in the early 1980s which guardedly proposed that the United States consider abandoning its first-use option in the NATO setting...

...Finally, Bundy seems unable to bring himself to any serious consideration of alternatives to deterrence...

...He seems oblivious to the cumulative constitutional implications of the secrecy implicit in nuclear strategy and decisions as it disrupts checks and balances between branches of government and distorts the proper relationship between popular sovereignty and the Federal bureaucracy...

...worthy of review...

...It is, of course, an enormous responsibility to act in the midst of a crisis in superpower relations, but to associate courage with the willingness to implement an overwhelming political consensus— that of Cold War absolutism—rather than to resist it, as Adlai Stevenson did to some slight degree, is to make a mockery of political virtue and to diminish the overwhelming human interest in averting nuclear catastrophe...

...As a specimen of what makes nucle-arism palatable to the Establishment, this book has immense evidentiary value...

...Remarkably, Bundy never comments on the exclusion of Congress or the absence of public debate through all this period on such elemental and crucial matters as the propriety of preparing to wage genocidal (or omnicidal) warfare, or even on whether the U.S...

...In this long, comprehensive account the names of Jonathan Schell, Robert Jay Lifton, Richard Barnet, and Daniel Ellsberg are never even mentioned, nor are their critical stances discussed, even in the footnotes or bibliography...

...Such reasoning is as banal as it is irrelevant...

...Bundy has always fascinated us by his bewildering mixture of analytic bril-iance and stupefying conformity on the great public issues of the day...

...In this book, as part of his overall defense of nuclear deterrence, he retreats from even this critical stance, arguing that the failure of West Europeans to beef up their conventional forces now makes it again reasonable, even beneficial, for the United States to rely on a first-use option...

...It is sad to note that U.S...

...such radical critics of U.S...

...Loyalty takes its toll...

...and if it is one in 200 two decades later, if we can make it one in 800 for the first decade of the Twenty-first Century, and so on after that, the chance of permanent escape will be 99 per cent...

...It is difficult to forget David Halberstam's featured portrayal of Mac Bundy in The Best and the Brightest as one schooled from birth to serve the leadership, a Boston brahmin who displayed exceptional ability and devotion to duty from his earliest years...

...Bundy christens such prospects as "hope," whereas I would regard them as unintended yet decisive acknowledgments of despair, as a revelation of barren imagination...

...As might be expected, partly because John Kennedy was the President Bundy most closely identifies with, the Cuban missile crisis is depicted in such a way as to make heroes of those who were prepared to go all the way to nuclear war if that was what was required to face down Nikita Khrushchev on deploying missiles in Cuba...

...Government should reserve for itself the option to use nuclear weapons first...

...He actually invests those who have moved the world close to the nuclear brink with the attribute of "courage...

...Bundy tries vainly to end his book on a hopeful note by assuring us that nuclear war is not statistically inevitable...

...Beyond this, and more disturbingly, Bundy nowhere finds space to consider the legal impropriety of using atomic bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki (though there is a brief, banal, and dismissive discussion of moral impropriety), nor of relying on nuclear threats as diplomatic tactics and on doctrines that leave unfettered discretion to the Oval Office to unleash nuclear war...

...These qualities help explain the fulsome mainstream praise Danger and Survival has received despite the book's failure to address, or even raise, the hard questions about the U.S...

...By what conceivable calculus can Bundy put a number on the probability of nuclear war at a given time...

...Even fellow oligarch George Kennan, who has become outspokenly antinuclear in recent years, is referred to only in relation to his role as architect of the Cold War...

...His forte is analysis within the framework of accepted assumptions (that is, nuclear weapons are here to stay and should be used to deter enemies of the United States...

...Typical of the Bundy method is his obscure acknowledgment of this fatuousness at the end of a long footnote: "Such formulas are indicators of possibilities, not predictors...

...Bundy, the player in Presidential power games, is far more intriguing (and revealing) than Bundy, the sober commentator on the history of nuclear weapons policy...

...The prose is clean, the argument reasonably well-documented, and the policy positions more moderate than Presidential politics on nuclear matters during the 1980s...

...Surely, sustaining nuclearism for five decades has eroded civil liberties and contributed to the decline of public confidence in the value of political participation...

...The real achievement of Bundy's book is to make nuclear strategists and political leaders feel themselves reasonable, honorable, and decent even as they participate in this horrible undertaking...

...by Richard Falk Fortunately, McGeorge Bundy's book, Danger and Survival, possesses some praiseworthy elements: opposition to the Government treatment of the Oppen-heimer case, resistance to the more mindless and paranoid forms of nuclearism, and narration of the evolution of nuclear policy by a well-placed insider with ample scholarly credentials...

...nuclear policy are implicitly regarded as irrelevant...

...If the overall chance of general nuclear disaster per decade was one in fifty in the decade of the 1960s...

...Somewhat peculiarly, however, its shortcomings are what make the book Richard Falk, a member of The Progressive's Editorial Advisory Board, is Albert L. Milbank Professor of International Law and Practice at Princeton University...