WHEN COLD WARRIORS MEET TO TALK PEACE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP85B01152R000700990003-2
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 15, 2008
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: September 1, 1983
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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Las AtLqAkj Ti -~ Sunday, e wnber M2/Part Id
By .t Bwby
arvard University plans to show
the world how to avoid nuclear
war. a mission so extravagant as to
be arrogant anywhere except here at
Harvard.
It does not take a Yale graduate, for
example, to ask the obvious first question:
What do these people, slouching toward
Harvard Square with their Topsiders and
book bags, know about nuclear war?
If Harvard means to you bricks and Ivy
and open-air jugglers and string quartets
performing in the square after dark, your
answer is short, Not much.
There is a better answer inside the John
F. Kennedy School of Government. a short
walk toward the Charles River from the
square, where some of the best teachers at
Harvard have been quietly laying a foun-
dation for the extravagant mission with
something called the Executive Program
in National and International Security.
Most of these teachers have worked in
government-in arms control or non-pro-
liferation, as economic or legal advisers,
and as top managers. Program director
Douglas M. Johnston Jr., for example,
spent 10-years in nuclear submarines.
Some still divide their time between
Harvard classrooms and Washington war
rooms, their minds so cluttered with
classified information that they often have
to stop t,lkft halfway through a sen-
t~ce.
For the past five mmmers, the faculty
has gpasnt two crowded weeks at black-
bcants in taa"U as tt eat r lectn*' to
and Eng.. in the Socra. c sense. with
admirals and generals and their civilian
counterparts in the State Department, the
Central Intelligence Agency, Congress and
a range of other federal agencies.
They are the heart of a unique program
that lifts cold warriors out of their world of
weapons systems and spy satellites and
coaxes them into a second look at the rest
of the world and at the stereotypes on
which decisions too often depend.
Prof. Joseph S. Nye Jr. started one
morning class by suggesting that former
President Jimmy Carter invented human
rights as a cornerstone of American for-
eign policy. Right? There was no dissent.
"By a vote of 300-1," said Nye, "Congress
cut off trade with Russia in 1903 because of
the Immigration policies that covered Jews
during the pogroms." The silence around
the carpeted amphitheater was broken
only by the sound of minds bending.
Nye did not stop there. The lesson was
riot that there are surprises in history but
that national character is a crucial factor in
shaping foreign policy. Why did Congress
act as it did in 1903?
"We don't like people sticking sticks in
-other peoples' eyes, " said an Army gener-
aL "As in Guatemala?" Nye teased. "As in
Guatemala," said the general. "You're onto
something," said Nye. "For good or bad,
we are a moralistic people."
How moralistic? Now do you balance
morality against other more tangible in-
terests--women's rights, for example,
about which this nation feels strongly, in
dealing with oil-rich Saudi Arabia, where
women have no rights? No tidy conclu-
sions, just something to think about.
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Later, the class t 90 minutes wres-
tling with two questions posed by political
scientist Stanley Hoffmann: Is there any
room for ethics in international relations?
If so, what kind of ethics?
Prof. Michael Nacht argued that Ameri-
cans are not as good at thinking regionally
as they are at thinking head-to-head with
the Soviet Union. To cure that, the class
was divided, half invited to look at a
problem through Israeli eyes, .the other
half to think like Palestinians.
Ernest R. May. historian and former
dean of Harvard College, lured his class
into one trap after another to demonstrate
the dangers of misinterpreting history as a
base for making decisions or, worse,
selecting from history only the facts that
fit your case.
Economist Francis M. Bator gave a
positively Shakespearean performance of
the dismal adence for an audience not
given to thinking about the workings cl
the system to whose protection they
devote their lives. Archibald Cox, a legend,
and Arthur R. Miller, a erratic cobra,
both of the Harvard Law School, showed
the other aide of journalism to security.
conscious people, most of whom arrived
thinking that newspapers are. at beat
irresponsible and at worst subversive: .
The program is more boot camp than
summer school. A crimson loose-leaf bind-
er, three inches thick, holds required
reading that begins at the end of nine-hour
days of classes and guest lecturers and
might end sometime before midnight.
But the students--one-third of them
with the rank of general or admiral. a
tprlnkling of journalists, executives of
corporations in defense work, intelligence
analysts, all with work piling up on desks.
at home-buckled down like freshmen.
By the final session it was clear that the
Washington contingent, which included a
general who draws the five-year defense
plan for the Marine Corps, another who
commands an army, a U.S. senator, Jeff
Bingaman (D-N.M.), were giving as much
Some of the best
teachers at Harvard have
been quietly laying a
foundation for an
extravagant mission:
to show the world how
to avoid nuclear war.
?
as they *ere getting. As historian May
emphasized often. the pr;;gr..sr 11 a
two-way street.
For its part, the faculty was probing the
minds of people whom the defense and
diplomatic establishments see, by and
Iarge, as comers, people with the potential
to be chief of naval operations, chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or the top civil
servants in their agencies.
What the faculty seemed to find was a
group that already knew enough to look
both ways before it crossed a street, that
needed only reminders to look beyond
crises to the future for opportunities for
long-term victories In return for
short-term draws.
Prof. Albert Carnesale, who, along with
Graham T. Allison, dean of the Kennedy
school, Nye, May and others will conduct
Harvard's search for nuclear peace, had a
message for the class. after it had tiptoed
through a hypothetical case looking for a
way to save the anti-ballistic missile
treaty with the Soviets. "There's a lesson
here on stereotypes. When our regular
students are cast in this case as generals,
they say, 'Great! Burn up the treaty and
let's go."
What the class got in return was a
demonstration by the faculty of the brand
of intense detachment that the nation will
need to think rather than feel its way
through global shocks like the destruction
by the Soviets of Korean Air Lines Flight
007 that, in the end, ripped the academic
curtain that Harvard had tried to drape
around the class of 1983.
The Harvard program has been criti-
cized as a merger of elites in education and
government who are more interested in
managing tensions than in reducing them.
The missiles of August made it rather
plain that, critics or no, the program has its
priorities right. Managing tensions by
building better barriers against accidental
use of weapons, shaping arms-control
proposals to squeeze out all incentives to'
be the first to launch missiles and improv-
ing communications are, for now and as far
ahead as you can see, the names of the
game. Topsiders and book bags or not, the
Kennedy School program has laid a foun-
dation for just ouch an effort, easily the
moat important study of our time--how,
indeed, to avoid nuclear war.
Jack Burby is a istant editor of The Times'
ed'ttoric papa. '
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