BISHOPS AND OTHER STRATEGISTS ON BOMBING INNOCENTS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP85T00153R000100040040-3
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 54
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 15, 2008
• Sequence Number: 40
• Publication Date: February 26, 1983
• Content Type: REPORT

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BISHOPS AND OTHER STRATEGISTS ON BOMBING INNOCENTS
February 26. 1983
Albert Wohlstetter
strategists in the antinuclear counterestablishments here and in
Protestant Europe have received a.message from 23 Catholic Bishops.
But what is the message in their draft pastoral letter on nuclear war?
may, nuclear weapons or other instruments of mass slaughter be used for
Strategists in Western foreign policy establishments -. and
it seems quite unequivocal on one crucial point that should be
obvious to nonCatholics and'Catholics alike:' "Under no circumstances.
the purpose of destroying population centers or.other predominantly.
civilian targets." Though that message only restates an exemplary
part of Vatican II two decades earlier, it is far from commonplace.
well, as genuine pacifists should oppose aiming to kill,innocent
Nonetheless informed realists in foreign policy establishments as
The Bishops' reaffirmation of Vatican.II seemed to counter
political and military as well as moral grounds for improving our
,bystanders with nuclear or n=uclear weapons. We have urgent
ability to answer an attack on Western military forces with less.
unintended killing, not to mention deliberate mass slaughter.
perverse dogma that after the Cuban Missile Crisis increasingly came
to be used by Western foreign policy establishments eager to spend
less on defense: that.the West should rely`for deterring the Soviets
on the ability to answer a nuclear military attack by assuring the
deliberate destruction of tens or even hundreds of millions of Soviet
civilians; and that the United States should also, for the supposed
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they say too that we may continue to maintain
and so implicitly threaten their use
as a deterrent
moving towards permanent verifiable nuclear and general
sake of "stability," give up any defense of.its own civilians and any
undefended cities. The new doctrine exactly reversed this; it calls
The long humanist as well as the religious tradition on just war
stresses especially the need to avoid attacks on "open," that is
attack on military targets in order to assure the Soviets that they
could, in response, destroy a comparable number of American civilians.
both for leaving cities undefended and threatening to annihilate them.
John Newhouse succinctly stated this dogma,',to which he was
sympathetic, in the "frosty apothegm:" "Offense is defense, defense is
offense. Killing people is good, killing weapons is bad." The late
Donald Brennan, a strong, long-term advocate of arms control was not
sympathetic. He noted that the acronym for Mutual Assured
Destruction-"MAD"-adequately describes that Orwellian dogma.
r Having observed long ago that not even Ghengis Khan had adopted a
policy of avoiding military targets to focus on destroying
noncombatants, I was grateful, on a first look at this issue in the
pastoral letter, to find the Bishops on the'side of the angels.
Unfortunately, a closer reading suggested that they are-also on the
other side. For, while they sometimes suggest that we cannot threaten
disarmament; y. cannot meanwhile p 2m'?& he able ,tQ fight
nuclear war even 131 response Q nuclear attack.
.Before that distant millennial day when all the world disarms
totally, verifiably and irrevocably-at least in nuclear arms-if
we cannot plan deliberately to attack noncombatants, as the letter
says, what alternative is there to deter nuclear attack or coercion?
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Perhaps the Bishops can work this out in.their final draft. But
a close reading of their text, their prior writings and the writing of
their equipment,. facilities, or direct sources of combat supply.
That, however, is what is meant by planning to.be able to fight a
nuclear war - which the letter rejects.
Plainly only to be able to aim at the combatants attacking us, or at
some of their associates suggests that this-is unlikely. For their
struggle with conscience has led them to make only- more explicit the
widespread confusions and pious evasions of.many secular strategists
-including many scientists, editors, senators, business leaders and
former government officials. Take John Cardinal Krol and Father
Brian Hehir, a key associate who has been staff advisor to the ad hoc
committee drafting the pastoral letter. Cardinal Krol repeated in a
sermon at the White House in 1979 what he and his associates had been
suggesting in recent years-that it is all right for the United States
use of such weapons, whatever the consequences." The consequences, it
implicitly to threaten the use.of nuclear weapons, but "at the point
of such decisions, ...political and military authorities are
responsible to a higher-set of values" and so "must reject the actual
is plain, may include surrender.
As Father Hehir elaborates. this tortured view: 'A).
cannot even plan to get an ability to attack combatants. B). We can
maintain an ability to attack noncombatants while waiting for nuclear
disarmament, and C). We can use that ability irm1i 1y (though not
explicitly) to threaten retaliation against noncombatants. D). Indeed
to deter nuclear attack, we must convince. other nations that our
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"determination to use nuclear weapons is beyond questi3np" E). That
means a deliberate and difficult deception for we cannot really mean
to use nuclear weapons or declare our intent to-use them even in reply
to a .nuclear attack. And, F). We cannot actually use them, that is
to say, we cannot retaliate at all.
Precisely how this volubly revealed deception is to fool allies
and adversaries "beyond question" has not itself been revealed.
(Perhaps future sermons at the White House would have to be
classified.) If the final letter could transmit-that revelation, it
would fortify a good many strategists in our foreign affairs
establishment who want fervently to believe that we can deter an
adversary solely by threatening the nuclear extermination of his
cities while making quite clear to the entire world that we would
never actually use nuclear weapons at all. In sending that message to
Western elites the draft letter only relays, amplifies, and broadcasts
an extreme that many among our. elite have themselves been signaling
for years. The troubling obscurity of the draft letter reflects their
ambivalence and absurdities. Some of the draft, for example, derives
from the same apocalyptic and millennial MAD bombers who believe that
defense is offense and that killing people is good and killing weapons
bad. On many matters of technical, military, and political fact the
Bishops derive their views not from sacred authority but from a much
more limited and doubtful range of secular strategists than they
realize.
The many.Catholic dissenters from these dubious lay views might,
as Michael Novak suggests, fear being barred from sacraments if sacred
authority is invoked to sustain secular dogmas. But given their moral
prestige, the Bishops' strategic views may weigh heavily with non-
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Catholics as well, and may serve'to reinforce the impassioned pacifist
and neutralist movements that have been growing in Europe and in the
antagonisms divide regional as well as superpowers, are there serious
early prospects for negotiating the complete, verifiable and permanent
elimination of nuclear or nonnuclear arms? If antagonists don't
agree, should we disarm unilaterally? If we keep nuclear arms, how
should we use them to deter their use against us or an ally? Plight an
adversary in some plausible circumstance make a nuclear attack on an
element (perhaps a nonnuclear element) of our military power or that
of an ally to whom we have issued a nuclear guarantee? Might such an
enemy nuclear attack (for example, one generated in the course of
allied nonnuclear resistance to a conventional invasion of NATO's
United States, and the establishment strategies which helped to
generate these protest movements.
For the Bishops do pass lightly over or further confound many
controversial and muddled questions of fact and policy: In a world
where so many intense, deep and sometimes mutually reinforcing
center or of a critical country on NATO's Northern or Southern flank)
have substantial military effect yet restrict side effects enough to
leave us, and possibly our ally, a very large'stake in avoiding "mutual
mass slaughter? Could some militarily useful Western response to
such a restricted nuclear attack destroy-substantially fewer innocent
bystanders than a direct attack on population centers? Would any
Western discriminate response to a restricted nuclear attack--even
one in an isolated area on a flank--inevitably (or more likely than
not, or just possibly, or with some intermediate probability) lead to
the destruction of humanity, or "something little better?" Or at
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least to an unprecede d catastrophe? Would it be 1s or more
likely than a direct attack on population to lead to unrestricted
attacks on populations? Can we deter a restricted nuclear attack
better by.-threatening an "unlimited" and frankly suicidal and,
therefore, improbable attack on the aggressor's cities or, by a limited
but much more probable response suited to the circumstance?
The Bishops' authorities evade or confound almost all of these
questions. The Bishops sometimes seem only to be saying that the
extent of direct collateral harm done by a particular restricted
attack is uncertain, quite apart from the possibilities of
"escalation." At other times they are quite certain that restricted
attacks will lead to an entirely unrestricted war. And they then
suggest that the chance is "so infinitesimal" that any Western nuclear
response to a restricted attack would end short of ending humanity
itself, that we might better threaten directly to bring on the
apocalypse. The Bishops cite experts as authority for their judgment
that any use whatever of nuclear weapons would lead to.un.limited
destruction with an overwhelming probability. And some-of their
experts do seem to say just that. But some-they cite appear only to
say that we cannot be quite sure (that is, the probability is not
quite equal to one) that any use of nuclear weapons would stay
limited. Distinctions betweena probability not quite equal to one
and a probability that is not quite zero may be quite important if we
are to avoid making reckless nuclear threats. Yet two successive
paragraphs in a recent article by Messrs. Bundy, Kennan, McNamara and
Smith, which the Bishops cite, assert each of a wide range of such
differing possibilities without distinction. Most of the authorities
relied on by the Bishops are themselves not very discriminating about
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which point. they are trying to assert or prove.
Some important components of conventional military power
vulnerable to nuclear attack are close to population centers. Others,
however, may be very far from then, for example, naval forces at sea,
or satellites in orbits hundred or even hundreds of thousands of
miles above the earth, that may be expected to perform many tasks
during a nonnuclear war.such as reconnaisance, surveillance,
navigation, guidance and communications. These are more vulnerable to
nuclear than nonnuclear attack. If we have no way of discouraging a
limited nuclear attack except by extracting a promise from an
adversary that he will not attack, or by threatening that we will
respond to such isolated attacks with a suicidal retaliation on Soviet
cities, an adversary might, in the course of a conventional war,
chance a small but effective nuclear attack against such isolated
military targets. Such an attack would do incomparably less damage
to civilians in the West than any of the "limited" attacks discussed
by the Bishops' authorities. Is it really so evident that a
similarly restricted Western nuclear response to such a nuclear attack
would be nearly certain
to escalate to the end of humanity? Wouldn't
a restricted response doing minimal damage to'civilians on either side
be.much less likely to escalate than a direct. attack on cities? And
wouldn't the ability to respond in a proportionate way be a better
deterrent to an adversary's crossing the gap between nuclear and
nonnuclear weapons? The Bishops' lay experts tend to see the Soviets
as mirror images of themselves, but sometimes diabolize them. They act
as if the Soviets would not continue during a war to have the
strongest possible incentives to keep escalation within bounds; and as
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if the Soviets would love every killing of a Western bystander
exactly as much as the West values his or her purvival; as if their
interest were in annihilating rather than dominating Western society.
In fact, calculations cited by the Bishops' authorities hardly
probe the issue as to whether an adversary might find occasion to use
nuclear weapons that would destroy important components of a military
force discriminately, leaving us a very large stake in making either a
discriminate response or no response at all. The calculations
published in 1979 by the Office of Technology Assessment [OTA] in
response to an inquiry by supporters of MAD on the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, deal with hypothetical "small" and supposedly
"limited" attacks. However, OTA's "limitations" were not seriously
designed 'to test the feasibility, now or in the future, of destroying
military targets and ncLt population. One of their "limited" cases
involves direct attacks on the populations of Detroit and Leningrad.
And OTA's most "limited" Soviet attack directed 100 one-megaton
nuclear warheads at oil refineries, including sane inside of
Philadelphia and Los Angeles, in order "to inflict as much economic
damage as possible" and "without any effort-'to maximize or minimize
human casualties." .(emphasis added) No one'should be surprised that
such a "limited" attack might kill about five million bystanders; or
that a similar attack on Soviet oil refineries might kill 840,000-a
result which the influential English military historian, Michael
Howard, describes as "little better" than a genocidal nuclear exchange
killing up to 160 million in each country. But such analyses dodge
all the serious issues as to whether an adversary might, in the course
of a nonnuclear war, use some nuclear weapons with substantial
military effect and yet leave us and our allies with a large stake in
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avoiding mutual mass slaughter; and as to whether we should have no
response to such an attack except bringing on the mass slaughter or
surrendering; and no better way of deterring it than promising one or
the other or even, like the Bishops' strategists, both of these two
incompatible, bad alternatives. Yet the problem of deterring nuclear
.coercion or attack on an ally will persist.
Despite lip service at Geneva and the United Nations, hardly
anyone seriously expects that each and every one of the six or seven
or eight nations that have made nuclear explosives will destroy all
their nuclear arms irretrievably and verifiably in a future near
enough to govern our present actions. (The uncertainty as to the
number of present nuclear powers suggests some of the difficulty we
would have in getting actionable evidence that all of the existing
nuclear powers had destroyed all of their weapons.) Nor are all.
prospective nuclear powers likely to surrender the possibilities of
making the bomb. Moreover, the harm that these weapons can do is so
great that merely reducing them to the numbers talked of*by "miniirum
deterrers," who would use the remainder to'threaten the mass slaughter
of an enormous catastrophe. And it would not prevent the potent use
of threats of mass slaughter for coercing those who have disarmed.
of populations, would not remove, and might increase the probability
Coercion, moreover, will be a persistent problem. John Paul II has
observed that "a totally and permanently peaceful human society is
unfortunately a Utopia;" that "pacifist declarations" frequently cloak
plans for "aggression, domination and manipulation of others" and
could "lead straight to the false peace of totalitarian regimes." (The
Pope has known that false peace personally).
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It has been obvious since the 1950s that the West needs to rely
less on nuclear weapons and much more on improving conventional
defenses; to discourage the spread of nuclear weapons; to continue to
make nuclear weapons more secure against seizure, unauthorized or
mistaken use, safer from "accidental" detonation, and less vulnerable
to attack. The Soviet Union has it own reasons, as have we, for
undertaking such measures unilaterally, with or without formal
agreements or even "understandings." (Formal'agreerrents on these
matters, in fact, have frequently defeated their overt purpose.
Agreements, for example, that were supposed to encourage exclusively
peaceful uses and research on nuclear energy;-have spread plutonium
useable in explosives.) Moreover, the West has many excellent reasons
for reducing the numbers and destructiveness 'of our nuclear weapons
quite apart from any agreement. The number of megatons or
indiscriminate destructiveness of the American stockpile was four
times higher in 1960 than in 1980. The number of weapons was one-
third higher in 1967. The failure of Westerners who ;make. a fetish of
bilateral agreements to observe the unilateral decline in
destructiveness and nurrbers in either the strategic or tactical-.
American stockpiles shows, at the very '1east, a certain lack of
seriousness. In any case, the U.S. can reduce'further and drastically
the numbers and destructiveness of its nuclear stockpile by exploiting
the improved accuracies possible today. Improved accuracies make
feasible greater discrimination as well as effectiveness and more
extensive replacement of nuclear with nonnuclear weapons.
My own research and that of others has for many years pointed to
the need for a much higher priority on improving our ability to hit
what we aim at and only what we aim at. That would mean, in
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particular, that effective n=uclear weapons could drastically reduce
the West's reliance on nuclear force. Moreover, for years now,
technology's thrust, as in the electronics revolution, has been
increasingly to provide us with just such intelligent discriminating
choices between using nonnuclear or. nuclear weapons, and between.
killing innocent bystanders with nuclear weapons or attacking means of
aggression and domination. The danger of Soviet aggression is more
likely to be lessened by a Western ability to threaten the military
means of domination than bystanders. First they value their military
power, on the evidence, more than the lives of bystanders. Second,
Western nonsuicidal threats against legitimate military targets are
more credible than threats to bring about the indiscriminate
destruction of civil society on both sides. The latter have a
negligible likelihood of being carried out, and therefore are not
reliable means of dissuasion. No deep moral dilemma or fundamental
paradox forces us to threaten the nuclear destruction of civilians in
order to prevent nuclear or nonnuclear war. Only sore widely
prevalent but shallow evasions and self-befuddlements. The Bishops are
clear about rejecting the actual use of nuclear weapons to kill
innocents. About threats to kill innocents, they are much less clear.
Their obscurity mirrors a vital and uneasy area of darkness in
establishment views.
Precisely because many of the Bishops' views on these matters do
not come from on high but are shared by many in the establishment and
also in the antinuclear and pacifist movements that shake the
establishment, it is worth looking at several of their arguments more
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closely in the context of the evolution of defense policy, and of the
changing technologies of discrimination and control as distinct from
those for releasing destructive nuclear energy; and in the context of
a sequence of earlier writings on nuclear deterrence and the humane
traditions of "just war." Arguments of the antinuclear movements
proceed not much more irrationally than many in the establishment from
some of the same premises about the inevitable dependence of
deterrence on threats deliberately to kill innocents. Establishment
bluffs about bringing on the nuclear apocalypse helped generate the
rise of the unilateral nuclear disarmers; and continuing reliance on
such bluffs helps to disarm the establishment from answering the
unilateral disarmers. The arguments of both undermine deterrence.
Many recent accounts of the evolution of defense policy in the
nuclear age rewrite history to lend an aura of inevitability to the
extreme view that we can reliably deter a nuclear attack in any
plausible circumstance by threats solely to kill innocents on both
sides, threats which we would and should clearly never carry out.
Advocates of that dangerous self-labelled bluff, like some revisionist
historians and, most recently a senior editor-of the Xw'Republic
claimed that this extreme has been the essential base of Western
defense policy since Hiroshima. It wasn't at the beginning. r?or was
it the meaning of the second-strike theory of deterrence that
originated near the start of the 1950s. Neither the immediate views
after Hiroshima nor the second-strike theory held that we had to
choose between deterring and preparing to fight if deterrence failed.
Americans who oppose unilateral disarmament have never split into a
"war party" as distinct from a "party of deterrence."
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But the evolution of doctrines and policies of deterrence, or
fighting in case deterrence fails, needs to be seen in relation to the
evolution of nuclear weapons and of our understanding of them. The
least destructive fission bomb--the scientists associated with its
development assumed iimnediately after Hiroshima-would-affect so large
an area and the number of such bombs would always be so scarce that
they were suited only to attacks on large population centers rather
than military forces or war plants directly supporting them.
Therefore the standard description-weapons of "mass destruction" or
"mass slaughter." And, since the atomic scientists did not believe
that atomic deterrence would be at all stable, they therefore believed
that the probability of a totally destructive nuclear war was so great
and so imminent that nothing less than world government soon and total
disarmament would permit our survival.' It was-in a slogan
common in 1945 to which Jonathan Schell mig'ht'now subscribe-"One
World or None."
By the time it had become clear that we were not about to get one
world, and that fission weapons could be used effectively and in
adequate numbers against military targets, the Atomic Scientists
Movement had come to the view that they should be used Di against
military targets. By that time, fusion weapons were in prospect. and
many of the same scientists assumed, as they had at first about the
A-Bomb, that the H-Bomb was suited only to destroy population centers
and, at that, offered a net advantage over A--Bombs only against: a few
of the largest population centers. Therefore, they opposed fusion
weapons and advocated a vast expansion of the fission bomb stockpile
to be used in fighting a ground war in Europe, in anti-submarine
warfare, in continental defense and against enercy bomber bases.
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In 1952, thoughtful analysts of the implications of thermonuclear
weapons, like the economist Charles Hitch, found that-contrary to
many claims-H-Bombs were indeed much more effective than A-bombs
against military targets and war-supporting industry; but, like the
atomic scientists, he was concerned that they raised the gravest
problems of unintended collateral damage to noncombatants: to reduce
civilian casualties one should give priority to targets outside cities
and warn urban populations to evacuate. Like the"-physicists, Hitch's
study considered mainly very large (25 megaton) H-bombs delivered with
great inaccuracy, that is, with half the bombs missing by a radius of
at least a half mile and generally by well over a mile. Other
writers on the H-Bomb at the time, like Bernard Brodie, an
international relations theorist who had once-thought A-bombs were
suited only to attack whole cities, sometimes agreed with Hitch that
H-bombs trade restraint essential and that war objectives had to be
limited as well; at other times talked of them as "city busters;"
and at still other times, talked about their tactical advantage for
use in Europe where they could destroy so large an area as to
frustrate dispersion and concealment of ground forces.
Yet, whether one considered H-bombs or A-bombs, the trend in
Alliance policy-if only to manage domestic economic and political
problems-was to rely increasingly on nuclear weapons and to neglect
the unintended harm they would do. Churchill, who justified British
nuclear weapons in part because they would be able to destroy military
targets of special interest to Britain, was so impressed by the
destructive side effects of the H-Bomb soon to be acquired by both
Britain and the U.S., that he talked vividly and hopefully of safety
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becoming the sturdy child of "terror." The Republicans, coming to
power at the end of an unpopular and costly nonnuclear war in Korea,
talked of nuclear weapons as simply "modern weapons" which furnished a
"bigger bang for a buck." They talked of massive retaliation against
lesser threats; and the NATO Military Committee in 1957 formally
adopted a strategy of threatening a "full" nuclear response even to a
local incursion into NATO territory so long as it persisted.
Inevitably, uneasiness about the credibility or sturdiness as
well as the morality of a balance based on threats of such massive
destruction, however unintentional, led many sober critics to propose
more limited applications of nuclear force, and especially the use of
small nuclear weapons on the battlefield. But it soon became clear
that tactical nuclear weapons used on the battlefield in the center of
West Europe also might have their drawbacks as a replacement for
adequate conventional force. The Carte Blanche exercise in 1955
indicated that the side effects of their early introduction might kill
nearly two million West Germans and wound many others.. Chancellor
Adenauer therefore resisted an increased-reliance on nuclear weapons
and changed his mind only at the end of 1956, when it became clear
that a conventional buildup in West Germany would be drastically
-constrained by domestic political problems in getting 18-month terms
for Army conscripts. After that, the Germans and other West Europeans
came to favor relying on nuclear weapons as a cheap substitute for
conventional force more than any American president since 1961.
Operational plans, however, have always differed from the rhetoric
of indiscriminate threats. Certainly NATO has never planned to avoid
military targets in order deliberately to kill innocents at long or
short range. NATO plans have always included various restraints on the
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size of weapons used against military targets in Eastern as well as
Western Europe. Nonetheless the problem of unintended harm to
noncombatants on both sides remained and always cast some doubt about
the sturdiness of deterrence and especially about Western will to
respond to limited or isolated nuclear attacks against the military
forces of an ally. (Where that ally is a country on the Northern or
Southern flanks of Europe, the doubt is most obvious; yet these "flank
countries" are at present more endangered and more critical for the
alliance then ever.) Doubts have increased especially about the
effectiveness of massive nuclear threats as a substitute for
conventional force.
Another line of research that was pursued intensively in
classified form, beginning in 1951, disclosed a different but even
more urgent range of problems about the sturdiness of nuclear
deterrence. This research, which generated the second strike theory
of deterrence, looked at the vulnerabilities of all the essential
elements of strategic nuclear forces under nuclear .attack, and the
.problems these entailed for maintaining a .convincing deterrent. These
problems had been badly neglected in part because the original belief
after World War II that nuclear weapons could be used effectively only
against cities, predisposed political and military leaders, as well as
scientists, to neglect the possibility that our own nuclear force
might come under attack; also because doctrines of strategic bombing
during and before World War II had stressed as the main function of
strategic forces their ability to destroy the centers of war
.supporting industry and not the military forces themselves.
As a result the force we had planned for the mid and late 1950s
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was much more vulnerable than is generally realized even today. A
strategic force, however powerful when left undisturbed to do its
work, cannot deter an attack which it is unable itself to survive; and
the studies showed that we needed to protect not only the vehicles but
all the complex elements of an effective response, including in
particular a responsible command and control. Moreover, preserving
responsible cormrand and control required operating in peacetime in
ways that avoid a large risk of lethal "accidents" or even more lethal
mistakes in response to false alarms. It excludes, for example,
launching ICBMs on warning or, to use a present euphemism, "launching
under attack".
Popularizations of the second-strike theory and some academic
recent accounts distort history to make it seem essential to threaten
innocents in order to deter. They frequently identify a second strike
with attacks on civilians. In its origins the second-strike theory
assumed no such identity. The study that generated the distinction Sand
that first specified requirements for a second strike,'the Rand Base
Study, in which I was engaged between 1951 and 1953 with Fred Hoffman,
Harry Rowen and Robert Lutz, made explicit that it would not deal with
how to choose targets, but rather how to choose a protected mode of
basing and operating a strategic force that would be best and.
invariant for any of several target systems. It looked at several
target sets typical of the time: a quite limited number of key war
plants supporting combat, at military targets whose destruction might
retard the advance of ground forces in Europe, and those that might
blunt a continuing enemy strategic attack. It did so in order to show
in all cases how best to reduce the vulnerability of our own strategic
forces. The study saved 9 billion 1953 dollars, illustrating that one
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does not have to aim to destroy cities only or to destroy cities at
all, to avoid "exponential" increases in defense spending, as one
implausible rationalization for bombing innocents has it. Its authors
became increasingly clear in further studies, that to have only the
alternative of indiscriminate attack on civilians would seriously
compromise the credibility that there would be any response at all.
The two lines of research, one on targeting and reducing collateral
damage and the other on protecting the strategic force converged. It
had became apparent that to have a persuasive deterrent, we had not
only to be able to protect command and control, but also to have some
alternatives which a reponsible political leader would be willing to
command.
That raised again the problem of unintended collateral damage.
The recognition at the end of 1953 that fusion warheads might be made
small enough to be carried in ballistic missiles by the 1960s, might
have seemed to hold out the prospect for reducing collateral damage
somewhat. For these first ballistic missile warheads were expected to
be substantially smaller than the gravity bombs carried in aircraft.
(Later Navy SLBM warheads were about the same size as some early A-
bombs, 40 kilotons. .Ewen the first StBM and ICBM warheads were about
a half megaton, much smaller than the H--bombs-contemplated in the
initial debate.) Actually, however, the prospect of the ballistic
missile worsened expectations about collateral damage because the
first generation of missiles was expected to be much more inaccurate
than aircraft. The median miss distance then expected for the first
.ball i stic missiles was anywhere from two to five miles. A five mile
median radius of inaccuracy meant that half the bombs would strike
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outside of an 80 square mile area!
But inaccuracy is a more basic determinant of unintended damage
than the explosive yield of individual bombs. It is the lack of
technology that is smart enough rather than the availability of large
brute force single weapons, that is at the root of the problem of
collateral damage. One can make up for incompetence in aiming by
filling an enormous area of uncertainty either with a few large yield
nuclear-weapons or, as the British did in World War II, with a very
large number of small, nonnuclear bombs. VIen the British discovered
early in World War II that only a third of the bomber crews that
thought they had bombed the target were within 80 square miles of it,
they resorted to huge raids involving thousands of bombers with the
results that became visible in Hamburg and in Dresden. David Irving's
estimate of the dead in. Dresden came to 135,000. Much more than the
official estimates of the Hiroshima dead. A single American
nonnuclear raid on Tokyo in March 1945 destroyed an area over three
times that destroyed by the Hiroshima bomb (15.8 compared to 4.7
square miles) and nearly nine times that destroyed by the Nagasaki
bomb (1.8 square miles). The average area destroyed in 93 nonnuclear
attacks against Japanese cities amounted.tothe same as that in
Nagasaki.
During the post-war period the prospects for reducing collateral
damage seemed at their worst in the late.1950s, when the average
explosive yield of a bomb was at its peak and when anticipated missile
inaccuracies were at their maximum. Some of the most familiar and
perverse current views on nuclear deterrence, including those that
have influenced the Bishops' draft letter, were formed at that time.
Since then, the prospects of hitting only what one is aiming at have
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changed by several orders of magnitude. That implies improvements in
effectiveness against small, hard, fixed targets that are in some ways
more revolutionary than the transition from nonnuclear to fission
explosives or even fusion weapons. The fission and fusion revolutions
blasted themselves, so to speak, into public awareness. Revolutionary
improvements in our ability to focus destruction on targets alone have
proceeded quietly and attracted less public notice and understanding.
However, a tenfold improvement in accuracy is roughly equal in
effectiveness to a thousandfold increase in the explosive energy
released by a.weapon. Improving accuracy by a factor of one hundred
improves blast effectiveness against a small, hard, military target
about as much as multiplying the energy released a million times. The
fission bomb at Hiroshima released about 1,000 times more energy and a
ten megaton fusion bomb can release a million times more energy than a
ten ton nonnuclear "block buster." A one hundredfold improvement in
accuracy roughly equals in effectiveness a millionfold increase in the
release of destructive energy to enable the blast destruction of a
small fixed target.
However, while the improvement in effectiveness may be the same,
there is an essential difference in how these two technologies achieve
that improvement.' When one improves effectiveness in destroying
targets by releasing more destructive energy, there is a corresponding
increase in collateral damage. When one improves the ability to
destroy a target by increasing one's accuracy, there is a
corresponding decrease in collateral damage.
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improvements in guidance using midcourse adjustments have already
reduced cruise missile inaccuracies to 200 feet from the 12,000-30,000
feet average misses expected for ballistic missiles in the late 1950s.
That improvement by a factor of 60 to 150 makes feasible radical
reductions in collateral damage. Even more important, terminal
guidance systems in development now that can be deployed in the late
1980s could further reduce inaccuracies at extended ranges by another
order of magnitude. That would permit a nonnuclear weapon to replace
nuclear bombs in a wide variety of missions with an essentially equal
probability of destroying a fixed military target. It would
drastically raise the threshold beyond which one would have to resort
to nuclear weapons in order to be effective. It would mean a much
smaller likelihood of "escalation" and incomparably smaller side
The destruction of targets on land which could substantially
affect the outcome of a conventional conflict, has side -effects which
may trouble us more even in relatively isolated land areas than the
destruction of important naval forces at sea or key satellites deep in
space. Yet the situation has altered greatly here too. Most such
land targets are less resistant to attack than ICBM silos. But
attacking than effectively with the huge inaccuracies expected in the
late 1950s would have meant filling an enormous area of uncertainty
with destruction. That might typically have subjected an area of 1000
sq. miles or so to unintended lethal effects. A current cruise
missile with midcourse guidance and a small nuclear warhead, could be
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equally effective aonst a military target while coining lethal
damage to about one square mile. Most important, improvements in
terminal guidance in the next few years can enable a cruise missile
with a suitable nonnuclear warhead to destroy the military target and
reduce the area of fatal collateral damage to about one-thousandth of
a square mile.
It is important to emphasize that these-advances in our ability
to reduce collateral damage and increase the effectiveness of
nonnuclear weapons do not blur the distinction between nuclear and
nonnuclear force. On the contrary, that remains vital. But these
revolutionary changes make it much more feasible to avoid crossing the
divide between nuclear and nonnuclear weapons. They give us choices.
Discussions of the morality of bombing and deterrence today often
proceed as if, as one eminent physicist suggests, "the technical
realities" foreclose choice; as if "the mutual hostage relation" were
not at all a "consequence of policy and therefore..... subject to
change," but, a matter of physics - permanently determined by the
technology for releasing nuclear energy. Yet-'the evolution since the
1950s of technologies other than the release of nuclear energy have
altered the possibilities of discrimination and will not excuse us
from the responsibility for preparing to keep violence from mounting
without bound.
III
With a few exceptions even the best of the discussions of the
moral and prudential considerations in threatening to bomb innocents
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have been mired in technology of the late 1950'md
specifically in the technology of nuclear brute force. I can
illustrate this by referring to the evolution of NATO policy, to the
development of technologies of destruction and discrimination, and to
a sequence of five substantial writers on deterrence. and just war
between the end of the 1950s and the present time: in temporal order,
Robert W. Tucker, Alain Enthoven, Paul Ramsey, Michael Waizer and
William V. O'Brien.
-Tucker md..th? Nuclear- Policy md Technology Df t 1950s.
Tucker, in his book, T,,, Just W, observed'that the policy of nuclear
deterrence in the 1950s had demonstrated "at"'least a striking verbal
insensitivity" to the consequences of the actual defensive use of
nuclear force. Indeed "the more extreme versions" were "obsessed"
with the idea that the deterrent threat would never have to be carried
out and therefore regarded "the effectiveness of deterrence as
directly proportionate" to its horrors. If one accepts this extreme
then one must acknowledge that "in the nuclear age...there are
virtually no substantive restraints which need to be..observed by those
waging a defensive war." But Tucker himself seemed to lean toward the
extreme, since he thought no restraints would be effective.
Indiscriminateness,'he suggests,*is a "necessity' that :inheres in
technology." He rejected the position taken by the World Council of
Churches in 1958, that. the "all-out" use of nuclear weapons should
never be resorted to. As Paul Ramsey later observed, Tucker agreed
with the pacifists that statecraft in the nuclear age necessarily
involves using evil nuclear means--a threat of destruction that would
inevitably exterminate. civilians. He parted company with the pacifists
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would rather abandon`rality. His concluding paragL argues,
"There is something patently absurd in the complaint that a threat of
extermination, even when restricted to preventing one's own
annihilation, signifies a moral decline for which there is no
explanation other than that men have deliberately chosen to abandon
any sense of restraint. If men presently show less restraint in
threatening-their adversaries, it is largely because they are less
secure than in an earlier age.". But during-the 1950s, dissatisfaction
grew with the political and military implications'that indiscriminate
destruction and massive retaliation inhered in technology.
Enthoven m2d ,sev n It& McNamara Doctrine Df , First ',d2
years Alain Enthoven's defense of the continuing validity and
relevance of the traditional Christian doctrine of just war.was made
at Loyola University in Chicago in February 1963. He wrote in the
context of the defense policy characteristic-of the first two Kennedy
years, and expressed the view that was then dominant in the
administration and its advisors. The new policy embodied the two
converging lines of research on the protection of the strategic force
and its targeting.. It put into effect many bf the criticisms of
massive retaliation that cumulated during the 1950s.
It stressed the
importance of a second strike.capability,,including a responsible
command and control system, with its vulnerabilities reduced, for
example, by the use of airborne command posts. But it also called for
a conventional buildup to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons and
considered the use of nuclear force itself only with discrimination
and restraint in the service of political ends.
Enthoven starts with the assumption that military force is not
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which Tucker seems to have had in mind. It is known sometimes by the
euphemisms "Minimum Deterrence" or "Deterrence Only." He notes that
this view, which had begun to take hold after Sputnik, resembled that
of the pacifists in its belief that a stable-and lasting peace was
about to disappear as an instrument of policy. Both non-nuclear and
nuclear force, neither of which could substitute for the other, would
have to be used in limited ways, if we were to deter aggression, or
frustrate it should it occur. He explicitly rejects the 'realist'
and pacifist views of deterrence which assume in common the
incompatibility of morality and statecraft in the nuclear age. On
Enthoven's view, they are compatible. We do not have to choose one or
the other. The realists would eliminate moral restraints because they
believe them impossible. The pacifists think that the impossibility
of restraint in nuclear war proves what they have believed all along,
that the only moral course is to disarm totally, even if unilaterally,
and thus bring about an unshakeable peace.:
Enthoven distinguished his view also from the obsessive extreme
feasible in the short term. But "Deterrence Only" would base
stability on threats to respond to a militaiy-'attack on our strategic
force by deliberately bombing enemy civilians. The core of this newer
view, as he might have noted, was therefore-an antithesis both of
pacifist non-violence and of the Christian and other ethical
traditions of humane warfare. In one sense the new dogma seemed to
return to the immediate post-war view about the nuclear bombing of
cities. But the typical view after Hiroshima held that either side's
nuclear stockpile would be intrinsically so small in number and the
individual bombs so destructive that they could be effective only
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 but held that we should respond to such an attack only by bombing
against N -_F- *l -A-.* -- L_.-.~
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attack only cities. Os victims could effectively r*iate only
against the aggressor's cities. "Deterrence Only," on the other hand,
accepted the fact that strategic forces gourd bbmb.military forces,
but also because it represented a 180 degree-turn by many of its main
proponents, who, for nearly a decade before they adopted this dogma,
cities, and that we should leave our own cities undefended. It was
remarkable not only for its extreme departure from Christian ethics,
had proposed using nuclear weapons only against military targets :in
deliberately to exterminate innocents.
current debate defenders of deterrence as diverse as the co:
Walter Berns and the liberal Leon Wieseltier seem to assume
uncritically that "deterrence" by definition-means a threat
continental defense against invading bombers, against ground forces in
Europe, and against combat ships at sea: and who had recommended
immense deep shelter programs for civil defense. Deterrence Only was
an extreme minority view at the time of Enthoven's writing. After the-
Cuban missile crisis, it became an established ideology. In the
It was in a speech at Ann Arbor, Michigan in June 1962 that
principal military objective would be to destroy enemy military
war growing out of a major attack on NATO, the United States
Robert McNamara had announced in public that-in the event of a nuclear
forces, not his civilian population. The part about restricting, so
far as feasible, the use of strategic forces to military rather than
civilian targets, was embedded in statements stressing that American
military force was designed. only to discourage aggression, not to
change the status quo and never to initiate a war; that the United
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States was reducing reliance on nuclear weapons in general and wanted
to discourage the spread of nuclear weapons.
Despite these cautions, his speech produced an extraordinarily
negative response from conservatives as well as liberals both here and
abroad, and from keepers of the traditional morality of just war. Mr.
McNamara's blunt style can hardly explain it. Rather, a certain
ambivalence, if not affection, for nuclear'terror, had become: nearly
universal. Franz Josef Strauss, who was then West German Defense
minister, made clear that he continued to believe-'that deterrence
depended on threatening the immediate use of tactical nuclear weapons
at the battle line, to be followed quickly by massive strategic
retaliation mainly against cities. Senator Russell and Senator Smith,
Democratic and Republican stalwarts respectively on the Senate Armed
Services Committee, denounced McNamara's statement. The scientists
and engineers, who'had only recently, in the aftermath of Sputnik,
turned to relying on threats to bomb cities-and away from advocating
the use of nuclear weapons against"military-forces and: from massive
continental defense and deep shelter programs, now pronounced any
attempt to attack military forces or to defend cities to be
"destabilizing." With a rancor suggesting a'bad conscience, they said
that the very modest Kennedy fallout shelter program and that the new
official focus on military targets rather than massive retaliation
might influence American leaders to initiate'preventive nuclear war.
This, though members of the administration had abundantly stated the
very opposite and had explicitly recognized that any nuclear war would
be an "unprecedented catastrophe."
It is plainly silly to suppose that American political leaders
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would be eager to un sh such an unprecedented cataSophe simply
because it might not be total. The reaction was all the more striking
since neither these critics nor anyone else had ever suggested that
the much more costly programs the critics had been backing a few years
earlier (for nearly leak proof airdefenses, a thick ballistic missile
defense of population as well as strategic forces, extensive deep
shelters for civilians, and the limitation of nuclear weapons to
legitimate military targets), would induce American leaders to
undertake preventive war. All in all, the venomous response,
including that of the media, was shallow, partisan and, not
infrequently, in bad faith. Such venom unfortunately continues to
poison the current debate. It takes a great deal of civic courage
for a leader to sustain that burden and, in the detente that started
after the missile crisis, the administration did not. Nonetheless
the last six Secretaries of Defense have found it essential both to
reduce reliance on nuclear weapons and to return to the subject: of the
.limited and selective use of long as well as short range nuclear
forces against military targets. Nuch of Paul Ramsey's work on just
war is related to such a policy.
Ramsey's answer to Tucker states that the conduct of a nuclear
war need not and, if it is'to be moral, cannot- "violate the moral.
imminity of noncombatants 'from direct attack." If any harm is done at
the very least it should not be intended.. He implies, moreover, that
the conduct of nuclear war should involve a serious effort to minimize
such unintended daTage. If he had been more aware of the
possibilities implicit in the electronic revolution, he might have
added that research and development needs to aim at improving the
ability to discriminate. He insists that attacks should not only
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attempt to discri but that the unintended damagshould be
proportionate to any good that can come out of the war.
In a chapter on "The Limits of Nuclear War-," Ramsey considers
what actions in a nuclear war are "undo-able," even if they are
"thinkable." He notes that McNamara's announcement at Ann Arbor
that the main objective in responding to an attack on the alliance
should be to destroy the enemy's forces, not'his civilian population,
had occasioned hardly a single Amen on either side of the Atlantic.
.Only stereotyped objections from defense establishments here and
abroad and the same from publications like the Christian Qentu which
one normally thinks of as the keepers of such a civilized rule. Ramsey
proceeds with a brilliant support of such limitation and with a
sympathetic but penetrating critique of Thomas Schelling and Herman
Rahn, who favored limiting nuclear war, but included under those
limits selective exchanges of attacks on cities, and held that it
might be rational to threaten such attacks even if it was irrational
to execute them. Limited attacks on military installations and forces
are both thinkable and do-able, according to Ramsey;.but.a direct
attack on innocent civilians to achieve some other goal, even a good
goal like deterrence, is wrong. Like art.a'political action, (or
doing), has consequences beyond itself, but, as Aristotle pointed out,
an action is also right or wrong in itself.---"Attacking innocent
civilians is wrong even to accomplish something else. Ramsey
rejected the use of threats of even limited city exchanges.
Enthoven criticized such threats on the grounds that they would
also not be believed : `? - ~,
The trouble with trying to exploit 'the rationaliiyl
of irrationality,' as theorists of bargaining and
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conflict this, is that it simply is notta
viable policy in the long run for a democracy,
especially a democracy with allies... Moreover,
threats to blow ourselves up along with the
aggressor are not likely to be credible. Rather,
the most credible kind of threat is the threat that
we will do what in the event will be most in our
interest to do. In the case of piecemeal
nonnuclear aggression, that will be to apply
conventional forces."
According to Michael Walzer, who believes that to deter one must
threaten to kill innocents, Ramsey relies on unintended "collateral
civilian damage from counterforce warfare in its maximum form' to
deter potential aggressors." Walzer takes this as a justification of
unintended collateral damage: fortunate, because it makes possible
deterrence. But Ramsey was not, as Walzer suggests, referring in that
context to deterrence of the initial outbreak of an aggression. He
was explicitly talking of the possibility that, during -tactual
conduct D s& WaL waged against military targets .4L bpth sides, both
sides may avoid attacking cities and also avoid a "maximum"
"counterforce" attack-in order to prevent the collateral damage that
would ensue from attacking even military targets that.are closely co-
located with population centers. That is a very different point from
saying that to deter the initial attack one must rely on a threat to
kill civilians-intentionally or unintentionally. Nor does
selectivity in attacks on military targets during a war mean
threatening civilians, but rather the opposite.
One difficulty in getting the evolution straight of both official
doctrines and official operational policy on nuclear weapons is that
operational policies and formal statements of doctrine have often
diverged and the statements of doctrine have often been designed for
political combat within domestic bureaucracies rather than potential
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combat with the Sovie? While McNamara, after the Missile Crisis,
sometimes talked of Mutual Assured Destruction as if it were a
seriously operational policy, it never was. He-never abandoned the
objective of limiting harm to American civilians and never abandoned
the intention to use strategic nuclear forces against Soviet military
targets. Even as a declaratory doctrine, he did not in general state
it in the unqualified and brutal Orwellian form of the aphorism
"killing weapons is bad, killing people is good." When he first
talked about a capability for assured destruction-of 20-25% of the
Soviet population, he was thinking of deterring the Joint Chiefs of
Staff from asking for higher budgets rather than the Soviets from
attacking the U.S. It was his way, if not the best way, of winning a
budget battle and putting a lower ceiling on the size of our
strategic forces. He stressed that, while we would have the
capability for destroying Soviet population-and he expected that
capacity to deter the Soviets-we would actually use our strategic
forces against military targets. In short, the original official form
of the MAD doctrine which he introduced can best be described by the
acronym "MADCAP" rather than "MAD." Mr McNamara said we would use a
MAD CAPABILITY for deterrence without any serious intention actually
to assure the destruction of enemy civilians.
The Bishops' strategists,'who believe that one can deter even if
one is plainly committed never to use nuclear weapons, first, second,
or ever, would maintain a capability but never use nuclear weapons at
all. Mr. McNamara, when he changed from the doctrine of his first two
years to talk of capabilities for mutual assured destruction, said he
would maintain the capability to kill Russian civilians but would
actually use nuclear weapons against military targets. That's rather
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different. Nonethelee it was a long step on the wayle the present
absurdities and evasions of the moral and prudential problems of
discouraging an attack on the U.S. or one of-its allies.
Aid Nuclear Threats ter Nonnuclear Attack Michael Walzer
has very perceptive things to say about the use of terror by
guerrillas to provoke counterterror against innocents. But when it
comes to nuclear weapons, he accepts the essential stereotypes of the
MAD rather than the MADCAP version of the use-of threats of terror
against innocents to deter attack. He doesn't question the
technical determinism of the nuclear technologists that limiting harm
to civilians on either side is impossible. He advances comfortably
the familiar paradox about "the monstrous immorality that our policy
contemplates" but. thinks it inevitable. "The unavoidable truth is
that all of. these, policies rest ultimately on imrnoral threats." Like
Tacker, Walzer is unwilling to give up immoral threats because he
thinks they are necessary for deterrence. Here he rests on the
baseless judgment that the only thing that will deter Soviet
aggression is the prospect that Russian bystanders will be killed.
To reject that view one need not assume that the Soviets' values
are the same, as our own, nor that they are simply monsters who are
indifferent or even like to see citizens killed. We need only
.observe that the Soviets value military power and the means of
domination at least as much and possibly more than the lives of
Russian civilians. This is surely evidenced by a long history
documented by careful scholars like Adam Ulam, Robert Conquest,
Nikolai Tolstoy and many others, in which the Soviets have sacrificed
civilian lives for the sake of Soviet power. Their collectivization
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program in the 1920s gained the control of the peasants at the expense
of slaughtering some 12-15 million of them. (Stalin told Churchill
that the great bulk of 10 million kulaks had to be wiped out or
transferred to Siberia.) The Soviet government sharply increased
grain exports during the famine year of 1933, when 5 million Ukrainian
peasants were dying. If Robert Conquest, is right the Great Purge of
the late 1930s killed several million more Soviet citizens. If
Nikolai Tolstoy is right, Stalin and the NKVD were responsible for
more than half of the 20-30 million deaths suffered by the Soviets
during World War II. Soviet refusal to abide by the Geneva Convention
on Prisoners of War doomed many additional Russian as well as German
prisoners.
Whatever else one may say of these actions, they do not suggest
that Soviet leaders value the life of Russian citizens above political
and military power. If the West responds to Soviet military attack by
destroying military targets, it would affect something that the
Soviet leaders appear to cherish more than the lives-,of Russian
citizens; and the prospects of such a Western response would be the
best deterrent to their initiating war. Moreover continued attacks
during a war on elements of their military power and means of
domination would appear to be the best way to bring the war to a rapid
close. There is no prudential reason to rely on even the unintended
damage done to civilians by military attack for deterrence.
Discrimination remains an important goal during the war-and an
important capability to achieve in advance of the war, both for
deterring the war and bringing it to an end.
But Walzer believes that "counterpopulation deterrence" is
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basic. He al sc~ hPl i c s that it is r rfPC+ly occ-;
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out" (i.e., makes so eikely as to be negligible) aniort of nuclear
war between the great powers; even though the Soviets know we believe
that nuclear attacks on populations would be suicidal, our threat
would be sure to deter them. And, typical of his time, he was also
quite,comfortabl.e about the effectiveness of counterpopulation
deterrence for forestalling a conventional invasion. His complacency
here parallels that expressed in various British and American
magisterial writings of the late 1960s and 1970s. He quotes with
approval a passage from Bernard Brodie: "7.he spectacle of a large
Soviet Field army crashing across the line into western Europe in the
hope and expectation that nuclear weapons would not be used against
it-thereby putting itself and the USSR totally at risk while leaving
the choice of weapons to us-would seem to be hardly worth a second
thought..." One may surmise that if Brodie-were alive he would be
having second thoughts today. Many who wrote that way in the late
1960s and 1970s are less comfortable today, in particular about
threatening mutual annihilation as a way of deterring nonnuclear
attack on Western. Europe.
McGeorge Bundy. illustrates the change--in-'the American
establishment. He had chided Henry Kissinger for expressing very
public doubts on that subject at Brussels_irn 1979. "American strategy
-
for the' protection of West Europe," he was
satisfied, was "so far, a
classic case of doctrinal confusion and pragmatic success." The two
words "so far" suggested some misgivings.' I"cautioned at the time
that it would be a great mistake to attribute the pragmatic success to
the doctrinal confusion; and Mr. Bundy did not disagree. The protest
movements in Europe were already visible for one thing; for another,
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there were the Soviets, and they may not be confused just because we
are. We cannot count on a Mutual Assured Confusion. In any case
Mr. Bundy, less confident about MAD threats to deter conventional has
joined Robert.McNamara, George Kennan and Gerard Smith in proposing
that we exchange pledges with the Soviets that neither would be the
first to use nuclear weapons. The four stress the No-First-Use pledge
much more than any serious and extensive program to improve the size
or quality of NATO conventional forces, so that NATO could depend less
on nuclear threats to overcome Soviet advantages in the use of
nonnuclear force. These advantages have to do not only with the
massive and increasing size and quality of the Soviet force, but with
their geographical position. Japan and Korea as well as all our
European allies are within immediate range of Soviet, but far from the
center of American conventional power.
Indeed, it seems that the four have not really abandoned the use
of an implicit threat of the first use of nuclear weapons to make up
for our conventional disadvantage. For while the four may really
mean the Western pledge literally, they rely on the Soviets not
actually trusting us to live up to our pledge and so continuing to
keep their ground forces dispersed and less effective for conventional
attack and defense. In short, the policy they advocate resembles the
pastoral letter in explicitly and intentionally abandoning a nuclear
threat, while implicitly continuing to-rely on it. In their case,
the threat is implicit in NATO's continued capability to use nuclear
weapons first. If their policy led each side to believe the other's
'pledge, the Soviets would be more likely to concentrate their
conventional force effectively-and safely since we would mean our
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pledge. On the other hand, if we risked concentrating our defenses at
the point of attack, that would x be safe since NATO has no way of
enforcing such a Soviet pledge. It seems likely that the four would
want NATO to continue to be wary of Soviet first use. In sum, it
does not appear that the policy of exchanging unenforceable pledges
about the first use of nuclear weapons in Europe reduces the
doctrinal confusion that has been troubling NATO even on the subject
of the nuclear deterrence of conventional attack. It has only alarmed
West European leaders who continue to place excessive reliance on
nuclear weapons.
Many have observed that the four are rather perfunctory about a
program to improve NATO conventional forces-in size or quality or
method of deployment or strategy--a program that might make them more
capable of defeating a Soviet conventional attack without resorting to
nuclear weapons. (The pastoral letter is'even more halfhearted on,
the subject of replacing nuclear with nonnuclear weapons. "We do not
in any way want to tribute to a notion of 'making , the: world safe
for conventional war', which introduces its own horrors." It warns
that an "upward spiral even in conventional-arms may lead to war.")
I do not doubt the earnestness of the'authors' desire for a more
than nominal decrease in NATO's reliance on nuclear weapons. In the
case of Robert McNarrara, I can testify that his interest in improving
NATO's conventional capability goes back at least twentytwo years. I
was his representative on the Acheson Committee which drafted the
National Security Council decision formally to end the U.S. policy of
massive retaliation in the spring of 1961. That decision called for
a substantial raising of the nuclear threshold; preparations of a
capability to crake a substantial conventional fight able to defeat all
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but a very massive nonnuclear attack; and the use of nuclear weapons
only if our increased conventional force did not suffice. But as the
stormy reaction to the McNamara doctrines of his first two years
indicated, NATO's policy of early first use did not evidence any
convincing willingness actually to use nuclear weapons quickly, but
rather evidenced NATO's reluctance to spend the resources needed for
an adequate conventional defense. Moreover, though Mr. McNamara was
skeptical about the utility of battlefield nuclear weapons, he did not.
resist increasing the number of tactical nuclear weapons to 7,000 in
order to quiet the stormy, reaction. When six years after the Acheson
Report the Europeans did agree to "flexible response" it was a rather
grudging compromise-agreeing on the need for improved conventional
forces but insisting that the main defense would be nuclear. That
tended to undercut the seriousness with which they or we attended to
the problem of improving NATO's ability to defend itself against
conventional attack without resorting to the early use.. of nuclear
From the beginning of the 1960s to about the late 1970s, all the
major Allies, including the U.S., while prattling about an arms race,
cut their defense budgets in half, in percent of GNP, while the
Soviets steadily increased their spending in real terms for
conventional general purpose forces as well as for theatre and long-
range nuclear forces. Though NATO continued to rely on U.S. strategic
forces to respond even to a conventional attack, if it were
overwhelming, our strategic spending in constant dollars was three
tines as high at the beginning of the 1960s as in 1976. The
corresponding figure for the Soviets was three times as high at. the
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end of the 1970s as ours. Even more telling is our record on the
military investment needed to improve the quality and size of our
general purpose forces if we were to offset the Soviets' geostrategic
and other advantages .for nonnuclear attack. U.S. investment in
research and development, procurement and military construction for
general purpose forces was about the same in 1966 as the Soviets. In
1981 their investment was more than one third higher than ours. And
since investment, unlike maintenance and operations, has a cumulative
effect on a longer run future, their greater efforts in the
intervening years will continue to have a substantial effect. As a
result NATO found itself continuing to rely'on the early and first use
of nuclear weapons while the correlation of forces was changing so as
to make that less convincing than ever before.
It may be that the apocalyptic antinuclear movement in West
Europe, if it has served any useful function at all, has done so by
making responsible West Europeans more conscious of the recklessness
of depending on apocalyptic nuclear threats to meet nonnuclear
attacks. And given the economic problem that European governments
face, key Western leaders are forced to think not merely of
multiplying brute numbers but also of exploiting the new intelligent
? technologies to increase the effectiveness-of-the resources used. Such
an effort has been hampered up to now by a kind of Luddite and
moralist resistance to qualitative inprovement and by a particular
antipathy to technologies that improve the possibility of
discrimination and choice.
Moralists who have chosen to emphasize the shallow paradoxes
associated with deterrence by immoral threats against population have
been at their worst when they have opposed any attempts to improve the
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capability to attack targets precisely and discriminately. While they
have thought of themselves as aiming their policy at nuclear weapons,
they have done collateral damage to non-nuclear weapons. They have
slowed the development of technologies which can free us from the
loose and wishful paradoxes involved in trying to save the peace with
threats to terrorize our own as well as adversary civilians.
There are some parallels here in the events leading up to the
massive nonnuclear raids on German and Japanese cities in World War
II. British scientists, when the menace of Hitler overcame their
natural distaste for arms research, formed a Cc rmittee for the
Scientific Study of Air Defense which backed Watson Watts' development
of radar for the defense of Britain. Their distaste was not quite
overcome enough for them to support as energetically the Committee for.
the Scientific Study of Air Offense, whose work was quite desultory.
The lag in developing radar for navigation and bombing, however, did
not prevent the bombing of German targets. It only assured that the
raids would be more destructive of German civilians. Much of the
responsibility lies with the Royal Air Force failure to exercise the
necessary diligence to imrpove their accuracy in between the wars.
Marshall Trenchard, relying on the untypical experience of strategic
bombing in clear weather against undefended targets in Iraq as part of
Imperial Defense, thought British bombing accuracy was excellent. In
1928 he argued, "What is illegitimate, as being contrary to the
dictates of humanity, is the indiscriminate bombing of a city for the
sole purpose of terrorizing the civilian population." Citing the
draft code of rules for Air War drawn up at the Hague in 1922-23, he
held that air attacks were legitimate--"provided all reasonable care
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is taken to confine the scope of the bombing to the military
objective..." But it is doubtful that he exercised reasonable care
fore the outbreak of war to improve bombing accuracies. Trenchard's
opposite numbers in the British Army and Navy had expressed their
doubts that-the state of accuracy in 1928 would permit either the
effectiveness or the discrimination that Trenchard.claimed. During
World War II when he found how poor its accuracy was, Trenchard
advised that if the Bomber Command missed the intended targets they
would still kill Germans and so do good work.
The evolution of declaratory doctrine for the American defense of
Europe beginning in the 1950s started with the belief that we could
simply substitute tactical nuclear weapons and especially strategic
nuclear weapons for the conventional fire power which our NATO allies
were reluctant to supply to meet a conventional invasion. It went
through a phase in which many of those who were concerned about the
extensive destruction worked by nuclear weapons entertained
exaggerated hopes for limiting the destruction done in the course of
the large scale use of tactical nuclear weapons on European
battlefields; and for using active and civil defense on a massive
scale to limit the damage done by a large raid on U.S. cities to quite
small amounts. When these hopes were disappointed those who had
entertained them adopted the view that unlimited destruction was a
good thing or at least that the threat of unlimited destruction was
nearly sure to deter even a conventional invasion. In the last year
or two, we are seeing signs of a renewed serious interest in improving
NATO'S ability to meet a conventional invasion in Europe on its own
terms. Manfred Woerner, the current Minister of Defense in the
Federal Republic has set forth a program which is designed not only to
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invasion, but to do it ressonsibly in a
discourage Soviet nonnuclear
way that will also put to rest the antinuclear movement that has'been
growing in West Germany. He would exploit the advanced technologies
that are coming to be available for that purpose.
,Woerner's view stands in great contrast to that of his predecessor who
held that even a nonnuclear war in Europe would be "the end of
Europe," and that it was essential that tactical nuclear weapons be
used quickly but only as a link to "the intercontinental exchange,"
which would be "the end of the world." But anyone who relies on such
threats to deter a conventional attack is likely to threaten up to the
last minute and then, when it became clear that the Soviets did not
believe that NATO leaders would consciously bring on the end of Europe
and then the end of the world, rush to reassure the Soviets that they
did not really mean to execute the "threat." Such a Policy, Herman
Kahn'labelled accurately, "preemptive surrender."
It differs from the
policy advocated by the Greens in the antinuclear movement. They
between the leaders of
`,figures in the West European establishment who
would make their accommodation with the Soviets now in time of peace,
wellin advance of a potential Soviet attack. The brilliant French
politica]. scientist, Pierre Hassner, characterizes the difference
th antinuclear movement and some leading
rely on suicidal threats as essentially the difference between
"preventive surrender" and "preemptive surrender".
Messrs. Bundy, McNamara, et
nP,tgrr; n9 L~uc]~~? 5 S?Il AIl B11,K
al~ have lost their faith in suicidal threats as a way of deterring a
conventional invasion. They continue to believe in the necessity and
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adequacy of such threats to deter nuclear attacks. H ? er, a hope
that an adversary can be safely deterred by our threat to blow him up
along with ourselves, (and any claim that an adversary can be stably
deterred by a capability which we make plain we would never actually
use if deterrence failed) is as clearly absurd in connection with the
deterrence of a nuclear attack on an ally and not just a nonnuclear
attack. Consider, for example, a strategically placed ally like Norway
with an American nuclear guarantee and no nuclear weapons of its own.
How would a capability for destroying Soviet civilians, along with
American civilians and possibly the civilization of Europe itself,
discourage the Soviet use of nuclear weapons against military targets
in the course of an attack aimed at seizing the sparsely populated but
strategic northernmost counties of Norway? No one-no Norwegian, no
American leader, and no Soviet leader-seriously would expect us
actually to respond to such an attack by consciously initiating the
killing of one hundred million or so innocent Soviet civilians and a
corresponding number of Americans and/or West Europeans. That is one
reason why holders of the MAD dogma explicitly exclude the actual use
of such a capability. But a capability which plainly will never be
used to initiate a chain of events we believed would lead to the end
of civilization will terrify an adversary no more than a capability
that would destroy half, or a tenth or a millionth the number of.
civilians or no civilians at all. The only way weapons can inspire
concern is by the likelihood that they will be used. The residual
fear that the West may deliberately blow up the world tends to terrify
some in our own elites much more than the Soviets who chatter much
less on this subject.
rOM 7_ncohe rence er cn e Only" Even . Deterring Mc ear
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Attack ,4n Oneself". Dogmas of "minimum deterrence" and "deterrence
only" had their origins in the late 1950s in the writings of General
Pierre Gallois. Gallois believed that nuclear weapons spelled the end
of alliance: no nuclear guarantee to a nonnuclear ally was credible
since no nation would commit suicide for another. His version of
minimum deterrence formed the center of his rationalization for the
spread of nuclear weapons to any nation, even very small ones that
wanted protection from nuclear attack or coercion. Initial.
American variants of the minimum deterrence doctrine in 1958
cited some of Gallois' principal arguments and the calculations he
designed in order to prove the necessity for targeting cities rather than
opposing military forces; and in some cases the 1958 American writings
on minimum deterrence recommended the distribution of nuclear
submarine launched ballistic missiles to NATO allies to replace the
American guarantee. However the incoherence of the deterrence only
view is thorough and applies to deterring attack on oneself. If it is
true that no nation will commit suicide for another it .seers quite as
clear that it cannot commit suicide in order to assure its own
survival. Suicidal threats are in general not a reliable means of
Yet the absolute separation of threat from any possibility of
execution has been common in establishments abroad as well as here,
even among those who would maintain the alliance. An associate
director of that pillar of the European establishment, the
International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS), talked in much
the way Father Hehir does. Father Hehir holds that nuclear weapons
exist "to be not used. They are destined to threaten, never to
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strike." Ian Smart, then of the IISS, has said that "nuclear weapons
are exclusively destined to deter" and suggests.,that it is only
certain misguided American hawks who view than "as reasonable and
effective" for fighting. But the absolute dichotomy between deterring
and fighting is not tenable.
William O'Brien's writings since his 1981 book on T
Conduct Df Just Mid_ Limited NAL are especially blunt about the
insanity of the deception that labels itself a deception as does any
doctrine of "Deterrence Only." The Jesuit Father Winters has an
enthusiastic explication of the pastoral letter which parallels Father
Hehir: the letter opts "with notable casuistic ingenuity for
possession of the strategic arsenal along with renunciation of the
intention to employ it." O'Brien responds that, "given the centrality
of credibility to deterrence... this proposition is insane. What is
needed is not casuistic ingenuity, but a serious commitment to face
the dilemmas of nuclear deterrence without recourse to escapist
diversions." He hopes, as should we all, that the final letter will
not advance that proposition.
O'Brien's 1981 book, while a painstakingly honest and informed
inquiry into the-circumstances in which war is justified and into its
discriminate and proportionate conduct in a*wide range of historical
conflicts, is somewhat less incisive on the subject of MAD. He gives
a little credence to the possibility that at least a onesided
abandonment of the threat against innocents might be destabilizing,
and, though he is aware of the possibilities, he appears to
underestimate the actual progress in technologies that give us a
significant choice between destroying military targets and destroying
innocents. However, he is right on the mark in his answer to the
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Deterrence Only version of the pastoral letter proposed by Father
Winters and Father Hehir.
.
Father Hehir is aware of but troubled by the fact that some
nuclear weapons are less destructive than some nonnuclear ones. He
argues on the basis of "psychological criteria" that we may continue
to threaten to use nuclear weapons but should ban their actual use
because he wants to solidify in our minds the dangers of crossing the
gap between nonnuclear and nuclear weapons. He wants to set up a
psychological barrier against cur ever actually using them.
Unfortunately, he is less concerned to set up a psychological barrier
for the use of nuclear weapons by our adversaries. Assuring then that
we would never actually use nuclear weapons, even in response to a
.nuclear attack, cancels the deterrent and, for them, opens up a
psychological expressway.
One can see why "casuistry," which once meant dealing with cases
of conscience and the resolution of questions of right or wrong in
conduct, acquired a bad name and came to refer to the trivial and
false application of moral principles to make things seem like their
opposite. It is striking that the upholders'of what might be called
the Doctrine of No-Use--First-Or-Second-Or-Eger seem unaware that an
adversary might be concerned not only about the magnitude of the harm
we threaten but about the likelihood that we will actually inflict it.
However, it is a familiar fact of everyday life that we consider
implicitly in our behavior not only the size of the assorted
catastrophes we might conceivably face when we get up each morning but
also their likelihood. Blizzards in August might find us peculiarly
unequipped to survive them. So might the prospect of intense heat and
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sunstroke in December. Neither bothers us much, nor leads us to wear
furs in summer and carry parasols in winter. We enter rooms
unconcerned that the molecules in the air filling the room may not
continue to move at random in accordance with the Kinetic Theory of
Gases, and that they will not suddenly all wheel and head for a corner
leaving us to suffocate.
Even when we face adversaries and not merely environmental
dangers, we have a way of arraying threats according to the
probability that they will actually be carried out and not only in
terms of the damage they would do if they were carried out. When a
threatener can execute a terrible threat to us with little harm to
himself, we worry more than when he would suffer at least as much as
we would. Moreover, when a threatener, who expects to destroy himself
and his allies along with the aggressor, says that he has no intention
whatsoever and, in fact, would regard it as immoral to execute his
threat because it would end civilization, this can only be extremely
reassuring to a potential aggressor. It is an invitation rather than
a deterrent. Somehow it does not occur to those who hope to deter by
a suicidal but empty threat (which they loudly proclaim they will
never execute) that they may be doing the very opposite of deterring.
Their policy is-to use that dread catchword-="destabilizing."
Nonetheless, in advancing this doctrine of No-Use-First-or-Second-or-
Ewer, the Catholic thinkers are only expanding and making more obvious
some of the confusions of secular strategists.
Many analyses in the early 1960s related the actual use of our
.strategic forces to the problem of limiting harm done to ourselves and
our allies in case deterrence fails; and related deterrence of the
initiation of war exclusively to the harm that we could do to an
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i is
adversary if we responded. They tended to treat these two objectives
as quite independent. That was, in fact, the mode of discussion in
Robert McNamara's Annual Posture Statements after the Cuban Missile
Crisis. However, the separation is extremely artificial. It
misconstrues the problem of deterring. It is very hard to convince an
adversary that the action he wants to undertake will be excessively
risky if we convince him, at the same time, that we are most unlikely
to respond for fear of the unlimited harm we would bring on ourselves;
and especially if we take steps to assure that we will be annihilated.
Much of the discussion after McNamara left the office of Secretary of
Defense completed the absurdity by making it a matter of explicit
statement that we have no intention of actually fighting a nuclear war
at all, i.e., of actually using nuclear weapons, that we Dnly mean to
threaten. Unfortunately, the Principle of Deterrence and the
Principle of No-Use-First-Second-orEver mutually annihilate each other.
Declaring that one does not really mean to use nuclear weapons,
if deterrence fails, is one way of stilling uneasiness about using a
threat to kill innocents in order to deter. Another, standard way of
softening guilt is to say that the West should continue to use such an
immoral implicit threat only if it is making serious progress towards
the elimination of nuclear weapons altogether. That, however, does
not lie solely within the West's power. It depends on others who have
or may acquire nuclear weapons, and in particular it depends on the
disposition of the deeply suspicious hostile leadership of the Soviet
Union. For a brief time in the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima, some
Western leaders talked fervently about world government and the need
to sacrifice national sovereignties to assure world peace. Prime
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Minister Attlee invoked "an act of faith" by the United States, the
United Kingdom and other nations, and "a new valuation of what are
called national interests." Secretary Stinson "spoke continuously
about a way to use nuclear energy for other things 'than killing
people'" and of "the changed relation of man to his universe." It is
easy to understand and sympathize with their initial emotional
reaction to the enormous destruction released at Hiroshima and to feel
their disappointment as Russian behavior made evident taht such hopes
were Utopian. But 37 years later, the utopian hopes expressed by
Jonathan Schell and others are more obviously groundless. Since then,
the Soviet leadership has made clear many times that Western versions
of utopia differ from their own. They see the independence of Western
democracies side by side with their own system, as a permanent danger
to the maintenance of their system, not to say its expansion. There
is little evidence that any feasible arrangement would lead them to
surrender so powerful an instrument of coercion or defense. That
after all was indicated in their rejection of the Baruch. Acheson
Lilienthal plan, and the contrast of their private view with that of
Western leadership is illustrated by the accounts of such reliable
witnesses as Milovan Djilas. Stalin exhibited none of the anguish
that was sincerely felt by Western leaders and none of their hopes for
a world authority governing Communist and non-Communist nations side
by side. "He spoke of the A-Bomb 'That is a powerful thing, pow-er-ful!'
His expression was full of admiration..."
Nor have Soviet leaders since Stalin shown any lesser awareness
of the value of nuclear weapons as an implicit or explicit means of
intimidation in a hostile world they do not dominate. Their value is
only enhanced by the contrasting Western scruples on the same subject.
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If Western political as well as religious leaders take Western
possession of nuclear weapons as justified only if there is progress
towards agreement with the Russians to eliminate them altogether, this
places in Soviet hands the decision as to whether the West will
continue to maintain a nuclear deterrent.
Not all differences are negotiable. Pretending that they are in
this case suggests a willingness to disarm unilaterally-either because
the Soviets have prevented an agreement-or because they have.consented
only to an agreement under which their disarmament would be purely
nominal and the West's disarmament would be real. The Utopians in
West Germany's Party of the Greens look forward to the total
elimination of nuclear weapons and their immediate withdrawal from
Eastern and Western Europe. They are not noted for their realism.
However, they have rejected the zero option for intermediate nuclear
forces in Europe as "unrealistic," even though it would seem to be a
rather substantial step on the way to their goal. Petra Kelly and
Manon.Maren-Griesbach, two of their principal leaders,-explain that the
zero option is unrealistic because the Russians would never agree to
it. It is therefore "not [even] an honest step towards arms
reduction." But the inconsistency of the Greens and their willingness
to see the West accommodate to.an unaltered Soviet position does not
differ substantially from many in the West who express great concern
that. the American government has not been able to convince the Soviets
that we are sincere.
Here again, Paul Ramsey understood very well what was involved in
the Western tendency to take negotiation and, in fact, agreement with
adversaries as an absolute essential. He questions the
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"omnicompetence of negotiation" and observes about some statements in
Pacer in Terris to the effect that there can be hope in negotiations
only if these proceed "from inner conviction" that, if such statements
mean that "the way to conduct negotiations is not to permit them to
fail" then the adoption of that way of negotiating by any single!
nationa would mean "its premature surrender...It takes two to
negotiate in any such fashion."
The view of the present Reagan administration on this subject is,
at best, mixed and sometimes seems to lack conviction. The President
has said "it takes two to tango." But when the New York Times
editorialist, who apparently thinks the impulse for social dancing is
universal, said "So Tango!" and when the American Catholic Bishops
proposed arms control instead DE new weapons, the administration has
tended mainly to justify its intermediate nuclear force programs and
its strategic programs as the best way to get an agreement with the
Soviets. Implicitly, the administration, then, seems to agree that
there is no escape from the holocaust except by agreeing with the
Soviets. But this particular apocalyptic view, like others, has no
basis in fact.
We should pursue arms'agreements but. recognize that utopian hopes
for total nuclear disarmament cannot excuse A 'Western failure to
defend its independence soberly without using reckless threats. The
phrase "arms control" is loaded with wishful and mistaken prejudices
that have shaped American and European policy on arms negotiations
beginning in 1963. It suggests that without arms agreements our
spending on defense inevitably will rise exponentially and
uncontrollably; and that with arms agreements Soviet arms efforts will
diminish. The experience since the Cuban missile crisis illustrates
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the opposite.
A serious effort to negotiate agreements with the Soviets might
enable us to achieve our objectives at lower levels of armaments. than
might otherwise be possible. Being serious about arms agreements,
however, is not the same as being desperate. Even without agreements
the West is quite capable of deterring war and defending its
independence against a formidable and persistently hostile adversary
committed, as the Soviets have been, to changing the nuclear and non-
nuclear 'correlation of forces,' in their favor. The contrary view is
deeply pessimistic and, ultimately irresponsible, leading easily to
treaties and "understandings" which only worsen the situation ofd the
West.
For a serious pursuit of arms negotiation by the west cannot be
simply sincere but wishful. It calls for a sober and thoughtful.
assessment of how any arrangements contemplated in an agreement. are
actually likely to affect the West's long-term objectives of security
and independence, and its intermediate objective of redressing the
balance which worsened during the period of detente. These are not
merely technical matters. The actual results of arms negotiations
have, in the past, contrasted sharply with our expectations and
desires. The negotiations of the last two decades started with
Western expectations that the agreements achieved would reduce arms
spending on both sides without any change. in the balance. We assumed
that the Soviets, like ourselves, had, as a principal objective, the
desire to reduce the percentage of their resources devoted to arms
spending and that they would choose "arms control" rather than arms
competition. The record plainly shows that Western assumptions were
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wishful. The Soviets pursued arms agreements as a method of limiting
Western spending-which did decline as a proportion of GNP by nearly
half in the period after the Missile Crisis while they, themselves,
steadily increased their spending and did succeed in changing the
balance. Now the West has the problem of catching up and that is
especially hard to negotiate.
Serious negotiations today must recognize the limits to what can
be accomplished by negotiation. We and the Soviets share an interest
in avoiding a mutually suicidal nuclear war, an interest which each of
us will pursue whether or not we reach genuine agreement in various
understandings and formal treaties. But the Soviets also have
interests in expanding their influence and control and, in the
process, destabilizing the West, if necessary by the use of external
force rather than simply by the manipulation of internal dissention.
Arms agreements might temper but are unlikely to eliminate this
reality. In particular, there seems scant basis to hope for major
economies in our security effort through negotiated limits or
reductions.
Experience suggests that when the Soviets agree to close off one
path of effort, they quickly redirect their resources to augment other
projects posing differing but no lesser dangers. On the other hand,
many of the ostensible goals of arms agreements such as reducing the
danger of nuclear war, are best achieved, through measures which we can
and should implement unilaterally. Our current efforts to design and
deploy nuclear weapons which are more accident proof and more secure
against theft or unauthorized use are a good example. Measures to
improve the safety, security and invulnerability of nuclear weapons
can be implemented by both sides individually because they make sense
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for each side independently of formal treaties or elaborate
verification measures. These need not mean a net increase in the
numbers or destructiveness of nuclear weapons in our stockpile. The
United States has already greatly reduced both the megatonnage and the
numbers of its nuclear weapons. It recently removed 1000 weapons from
Europe and has said that, if in accordance with NATO's decision in
1979, it installs 572 intermediate range nuclear missiles, it would
withdraw an equal number of warheads. If we increase precision
further, we can drastically further reduce the number and
destructiveness of our nuclear weapons. That can improve the
effectiveness of nonnuclear weapons so that they may increasingly
replace nuclear brute force. And it would improve our ability to
avoid the unintended bombing of innocents with nuclear or nonnuclear
warheads. It would enlarge rather than foreclose our freedom to
choose.
But many strategists in our foreign policy establishment would
prefer to foreclose choice. The orthodox view expressed by editors of
our magazines that deal with foreign policy, liberal senators,
scientists and many former government officials holds that any use of
nuclear weapons by us will almost surely end in a catastrophe leaving
almost everybody dead or worse than dead; yet that we should have no
alternative other than to threaten the bombing of cities; and that we
should therefore make clear to our adversaries and allies that we will
never actually fight a nuclear war. Anyone who holds that to be right
and orthodox will want to believe that he has no other choice. If he
cannot say, like Flip Wilson, "The Devil made me do it," he can
introduce the deus machine of technology: Nuclear Technology makes -ex
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me do it. He is likely to be outraged by any heretic who dares
suggest we might have choices.
The grand inquisitors on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
had Kenneth Adelman on the rack recently. They probed to find some
trace of a doubt in him on the question as to whether we should try
for a capability to limit nuclear destruction. Dostoyevsky would have
been fascinated. His Grand Inquisitor, a venerable jesuit who had had
Christ seized on the streets of Seville, argued with the savior that
his mistake was not to recognize that men cannot bear the burden of
free choice. That's a point on which many in our establishment have
selfconsciously impaled themselves.
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