OFFICIAL, jlp: 5/12/71

JACOBY,

Type of Request & Date

(Last name and pending date)

KISSINGER, HENRY A.

Name: Gad Jacoby (former member of the Seminar)

Request: Is in town through Thursday, May 13 and has brought an album he would like to give Mr. Kissinger. He met with Mr. Kissinger eight months ago when he was a member of Parliament in Israel; is not Deputy Minister.

Leave word at Dupont Plaza Hotel or contact through Mr. Eiran at the Israeli Embassy: If he has not heard by noon on Thursday he will call back.

DRY's Recommendation:
HAK's Answer:
Date and Time:
Party Contacted:
Additional Information:

Resolution:

RECEIVED
MAY 2 1-1971

CENTRAL FILES

KISSINGER, HENRY A./B, FTS./J

December 28, 1972

Dear Mr. Jahraus:

Mr. Kissinger asked me to write to you and
thank you for sending the picture of him with
his daughter. You need not apologize for the
delay; he was only pleased to receive it. Mr.
Kissinger wanted you to know how much he
appreciated your thoughtfulness.

Mr. Terry Jahraus
Assistant to the Vice President
for Administrative Services
Surety Savings and Loan Association
237 East Olive Avenue
Burbank, California 91053

Burpork, California 91023
237 East Olive Avenue
Safety Savings and Loan Association
for Administrative Services
Assistant to the Vice President
Mr. Terry Jahnsen

Henry V. Kissinger
Personal Secretary to
Julesne L. Pinesu

Sincerely,

appreciated your thoughtfulness.
Kissinger wanted you to know how much he
delays; he was only pleased to receive it. Mr.
his daughter. You need not apologize for the
thank you for sending the picture of him with
Mr. Kissinger asked me to write to you and

*Dear Mr. Jahnsen:*

Dear Mr. Jahnsen:

December 58, 1955

KISSINGER, HENRY V.

KISSINGER, HENRY A./GIFTS/J*

Dear Marion and Jack:

Just a short note to thank you for your very
kind telegram. It is indeed nice to be hear-
ing words of approval and support and I have
always appreciated your friendship.

Thank you, too, for the holiday gift of cheddar
cheese. It is delicious and I am enjoying it.

I hope to see you both some time soon.

Honorable and Mrs. Jacob Javits
911 Park Avenue, Apt. 14-B
New York, New York

RECEIVED
FEB 2 1973

CENTRAL FILES

jlp:1/26/73

AMERICAN CYANAMID COMPANY

CONSUMER PRODUCTS DIVISION
WAYNE, NEW JERSEY 07470

George R. Johnson

KISSINGER, HENRY

PHONE 201-831-1234

May 29, 1973

Dear Henry:

It has been some months since we had lunch and spent the day at the Jets Game in New York which certainly was a memorable occasion.

Tuesday evening, I attended the Emmy Awards Dinner in New York where the MC, Dick Cabot, announced you were scheduled to attend, but because of pressing business overseas, couldn't. However, he mentioned that your birthday was May 27, and consequently, in celebration, I thought you'd like some of our enclosed Pierre Cardin fragrances.

Recently had lunch at the Sans Souci in Washington, and planned to say "hello;" however, before I knew it, you were taking your guest to the airport, and I missed you. Perhaps on one of my business trips to Washington, I will give you a call and we can have lunch at your favorite restaurant, the Sans Souci.

Best personal regards,

GRJ:vd
Enclosure

Mr. Henry Kissinger
The White House
Washington, D. C.

The American Historical Association, because of its continuing interest in the teaching of history in the schools of the United States, has established the Service Center for Teachers of History in an effort to offer constructive assistance in solving some of the problems which today beset the classroom teacher. One of the programs being sponsored by the Service Center is the preparation of a series of pamphlets, each containing a concise summary of publications reflecting recent research and new interpretations in a particular field of history.

Prompted by an awareness of the fact that the average secondary school teacher has neither the time nor the opportunity to keep up with monographic literature, these pamphlets are specifically designed to make available to the classroom instructor a summary of pertinent trends and developments in historical study. Our aim is, in short, to help the teachers help themselves by keeping up to date in their fields of interest. It is our sincere hope that this will materially benefit the teacher and thereby contribute to the enrichment of classroom instruction. The extent to which the project is successful will be measured by the degree to which the regrettable gap between the teacher of history in the school and the specialist in historical research is narrowed.

GEORGE BARR CARSON, JR.

THE AGE OF REINTERPRETATION*

C. Vann Woodward

Innumerable influences have inspired the reinterpretation of history. The most common of late would appear to have been those originating within the intellectual community, or within the historical guild itself, rather than with the impact of historical events. Influences of the predominant sort include new theories, new methods, and new sources. Of special importance in recent years has been the example of other disciplines and sciences, old ones such as philosophy and biology with new theories, or new ones such as psychology and sociology with new approaches to old problems.

With no intended disparagement for prevailing and recent
types of revision, the present essay concerns itself almost exclusively
with reinterpretations that are inspired by historical events and
have little to do with new theories, new methods, or new disciplines.
The suggested opportunities for reinterpretation are, in fact, related
to historical events so recent that nearly all of them have occurred
since the summer of 1945. As responsible human beings we are
rightly concerned first of all with the impact of these events upon
the present and immediate future. But as historians we are, or
we should be, concerned with their effect upon our view of the
past as well. These events have come with a concentration and
violence for which the term "revolution" is usually reserved. It is
a revolution, or perhaps a set of revolutions, for which we have not
yet found a name. My thesis is that these developments will and
should raise new questions about the past and affect our reading
of large areas of history, and my belief is that future revisions may
be extensive enough to justify calling the coming era of historiog-
raphy an age of reinterpretation. The first illustration happens
to come mainly from American history, but this should not obscure
the broader scope of the revolution, which has no national limita-
tions.

* Reprinted from *The American Historical Review*, Vol. LXVI, No. 1, October, 1960.

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Throughout most of its history the United States has enjoyed a remarkable degree of military security, physical security from hostile attack and invasion. This security was not only remarkably effective, but it was relatively free. Free security was based on nature's gift of three vast bodies of water interposed between this country and any other power that might constitute a serious menace to its safety. There was not only the Atlantic to the east and the Pacific to the west, but a third body of water, considered so impenetrable as to make us virtually unaware of its importance, the Arctic Ocean and its great ice cap to the north. The security thus provided was free in the sense that it was enjoyed as a bounty of nature in place of the elaborate and costly chains of fortifications and even more expensive armies and navies that took a heavy toll of the treasuries of less fortunate countries and placed severe tax burdens upon the backs of their people. The costly navy that policed and defended the Atlantic was manned and paid for by British subjects for more than a century, while Americans enjoyed the added security afforded without added cost to themselves. In 1861 the United States was maintaining the second largest merchant marine in the world without benefit of a battle fleet. At that time there were only 7,600 men in the United States Navy as compared with more than ten times that number in the British Navy.¹

Between the second war with England and World War II, the United States was blessed with a security so complete and so free that it was able virtually to do without an army and for the greater part of the period without a navy as well. Between the world war that ended in 1763 and the world wars of the twentieth century the only major military burdens placed upon the people were occasioned not by foreign threats but by domestic quarrels, the first to establish independence for the American colonies and the

¹ During Andrew Jackson's administration Alexis de Tocqueville described the situation in the following terms: "The President of the United States is the commander-in-chief of the army, but of an army composed of only six thousand men; he commands the fleet, but the fleet reckons but few sails; he conducts the foreign relations of the Union, but the United States are a nation without neighbors. Separated from the rest of the world by the ocean, and too weak as yet to aim at the dominion of the seas, they have no enemies, and their interests rarely come into contact with those of any other nation of the globe." *Democracy in America*, tr. Henry Reeve (2 vols.; New York, 1904), I, 120.

THE AGE OF REINTERPRETATION

3

second to thwart independence for the southern states. After each of these civil wars, as after all the intervening wars, Americans immediately dismantled their military establishment. They followed the same procedure after every succeeding war, down to World War II, and even after that they carried demobilization to dangerous extremes before reversing the policy.

The end of the era of free security has overtaken Americans so suddenly and swiftly that they have not brought themselves to face its practical implications, much less its bearing upon their history. Conventional aircraft and jet propulsion had shrunk the time dimension of the Atlantic and Pacific from weeks to hours by the mid-fifties. But before military adjustment could be properly made to that revolution, the development of ballistic missiles shrank the two oceans further from hours to minutes. In the same period the hitherto impenetrable Arctic Ocean has not only been navigated by atomic-powered submarines under the ice cap, but has been shrunk in time width to dimensions of minutes and seconds by which we now measure the other oceans. The age of security and the age of free security ended almost simultaneously.

The proposition was advanced before a meeting of the American Historical Association in 1893 that "the first period of American history," a period of four centuries, was brought to an end by the disappearance of free land. Perhaps it is not premature to suggest that another epoch of American history was closed even more suddenly sixty years later by the disappearance of free security. It may be objected that security was never completely free and that the period when it came nearest to being so did not last very long. But one can reasonably ask as much latitude to speak in comparative and relative terms about free security as the theorists of free land enjoyed in their generalizations. Land was of course never completely free either, and the period when it came nearest to being so only dated from the Homestead Act of 1862, less than three decades before the end of the frontier era. In a comparative sense land may nevertheless be said to have been relatively free for a much longer period. In similar terms security may also be said to have been free until quite recently.

Military expenditures of the federal government have, of course, increased greatly and almost continuously since the last decade of

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the eighteenth century. Until very recently, however, they have
not increased so rapidly as the government's nonmilitary expen-
ditures. During the first century of the Republic's history, save in
war years, annual military expenditures rarely came to as much as
1 per cent of the gross national product, returned to that level a
few years after World War I, and remained there until the Great
Depression cut production back drastically. In the decade preceding
Pearl Harbor, the percentage of federal expenditures devoted to
military purposes fell lower than ever before in our history.²

Another measure of free security is the small demand that
military service has made upon national manpower. Before World
War I, apart from actual war periods and their immediate after-
math, it was an extremely rare year in which as many as 1 per
cent of the total male population between the ages of twenty and
thirty-nine saw military service. Between Reconstruction and the
Spanish-American War there was no year in which as many as
one-half of 1 per cent served in the armed forces.³ The handful of
men who made up the regular army during the nineteenth century
were not employed in patrolling frontiers against foreign invasion,
but chiefly in coping with a domestic police problem posed by the
Indians. Upon the outbreak of the Civil War the United States
Army numbered a few more than sixteen thousand men, and 183
of its 198 companies were spread among seventy-nine posts on the
Indian frontier. The remaining fifteen companies were available
for "defense" of the Canadian and Atlantic frontiers, and the
incipient Confederate frontier.⁴ The southern constabulary that
patrolled the slaves was organized on military lines, but like the
regular army it was concerned with a domestic police problem.

² M. Slade Kendrick, *A Century and a Half of Federal Expenditures*, Occasional Paper 48, National Bureau of Economic Research (New York, 1955), pp. 10-12, 28, 38, 40-42. For comparisons between military appropriations of the United States and other powers, 1820-1937, see Quincy Wright, *A Study of War* (2 vols.; Chicago, 1942), I, 666-72, Appendix XXII, esp. Tables 58, 59, and 60. The significant index of comparison is the proportion between military appropriations and national income. That proportion rose in the United States from 0.8 in 1914 to 1.5 in 1937, while in the same years it stood in Great Britain at 3.4 and 5.7; in France at 4.8 and 9.1; in Japan at 4.8 and 28.2; in Germany at 4.6 and 23.5; and in Russia at 6.3 and 26.4. This was the only period for which figures are given for all these powers.

³ Kendrick, *A Century and a Half of Federal Expenditures*, pp. 89-90. Before 1865 only white males of military age are included in these figures.

⁴ Theodore Ropp, *War in the Modern World* (Durham, 1959), p. 157.

THE AGE OF REINTERPRETATION

5

The contrast between free security and security costs of the present era scarcely requires emphasis. Military expenditures in 1957 and the years since have amounted to 10 per cent of the gross national product. By way of comparison, military expenditures in the 1880's were never over four-tenths of 1 per cent. In spite of the vast increase of the gross national product during the last century, military costs have increased far faster and now represent ten to twenty times the percentage of the gross national product they represented in the peace years of the previous century.⁵ Not counting payments to veterans, they now account for nearly 70 per cent of the federal budget. The more advanced and improved military machinery paradoxically requires more instead of less manpower, both military and civilian. The Department of Defense and its branches employ more civilian workers now than did the entire federal government before the Great Depression. Indications are that we are only at the beginning instead of the culmination of expansion in costs and manpower for military purposes and that future expenditures will be larger still.

If historians waited until the disappearance of free land to recognize fully the influence of the frontier-and-free-land experience on American history, perhaps the even more sudden and dramatic disappearance of free security will encourage them to recognize the effect of another distinguishing influence upon our national history. I am not prepared to make any claims about the comparative importance of the two themes, nor do I wish to make or inspire any exaggerations of the influence of free security. But if the influence of free land may be considered significant in the shaping of American character and national history, it is possible that the effect of free security might profitably be studied for contributions to the same ends.

Certain traits that Americans generally regard as desirable, such as democracy, individualism, self-reliance, inventiveness, have been attributed in some measure to the frontier-and-free-land experience. It might be that the sunnier side of the national disposition—the sanguine temperament, the faith in the future,⁶ what H. G.

⁵ Simon Kuznets in Committee for Economic Development, *Problems of United States Economic Development* (2 vols.; New York, 1958), I, 29.

⁶ Boyd C. Shafer, "The American Heritage of Hope," *Mississippi Valley Historical Review*, XXXVII (Dec. 1950), 422-50.

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Wells once called our "optimistic fatalism"—is also related to a long era of habituation to military security that was effective, reliable, and virtually free. Optimism presupposes a future that is unusually benign and reliably congenial to man's enterprises. Anxieties about security have kept the growth of optimism within bounds among other peoples, but the relative absence of such anxieties in the past has helped, along with other factors, to make optimism a national philosophy in America. The freedom of American youth from the long period of training in military discipline that left its mark upon the youth of nations where it was a routine requirement could hardly have failed to make some contribution to the distinctiveness of national character.

Free security is related at various points to the development of the American economy. So long as an economy of scarcity prevailed in the land the gross national product was not far above the level of subsistence. While the margin was narrow, the demands of an expensive military establishment could have consumed so large a proportion of the surplus above subsistence as to retard seriously the formation of capital. Relative immunity from this drain, on the other hand, enlarged opportunities for the formation of capital and the increase of productivity. Free security was certainly related to light taxes and a permissive government, and they in turn had much to do with the development of the famous American living standard.

Not all the historic influences of free security have been so benign. Tocqueville's classic study of the national character attributes to democracy some familiar patterns of military conduct that might be profitably re-examined in the light of the free security thesis. Tocqueville finds, for example, that "the private soldiers remain most like civilians" in a democracy, that they chafe under discipline with "a restless and turbulent spirit," and that they are "ever ready to go back to their homes" when the fighting is over. With regard to the officer corps he observes that "among a democratic people the choicer minds of the nation are gradually drawn away from the military profession, to seek by other paths distinction, power, and especially wealth." He adds that "among democratic nations in time of peace the military profession is held in little honor and indifferently followed. This want of public favor

THE AGE OF REINTERPRETATION

7

is a heavy discouragement to the army."⁷ Tocqueville may be correct in suggesting democracy as one explanation for these attitudes and patterns of behavior, but no explanation of American attitudes is complete that neglects a national disposition to look upon security as a natural right. What a people half consciously comes to regard as a free gift of nature they are with difficulty persuaded to purchase at high cost in treasure, inconvenience, and harsh discipline. To reward with high honors, prestige, and secure status the professional military men who insist upon these sacrifices in time of peace comes hard to such people.

The heritage of free and easy security can also be detected behind the disposition to put living standard, private indulgence, and wasteful luxury ahead of vital security requirements. The same heritage can almost certainly be discerned at work in the tendency to plunge into wars first and prepare for them later. The historic background of security might help to explain, even if it cannot excuse, the irresponsibility of political leaders who make foreign commitments, coin bellicose slogans, and indulge in wild threats and promises without first providing the military means to back them up.

There are other aspects of American history besides demagogic diplomacy and military shortcomings that are not to be fully understood without reference to the history of free security. Among these surely is the American Civil War. The United States is the only major country since Cromwellian England that could afford the doubtful luxury of a full-scale civil war of four years without incurring the evils of foreign intervention and occupation. Had such evils been as much a foregone conclusion as they have been among other nations, it is doubtful that Americans would have proved as willing as they were to fall upon each other's throats.

It is doubtful, also, that Americans could have developed and indulged with the freedom they have their peculiar national attitudes toward power, had it not been for their special immunity from the more urgent and dire demands for the employment of power to assure national security and survival. Having this relative immunity, they were able to devise and experiment with elaborate

⁷ Tocqueville, *Democracy in America*, II, 761-68.

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devices to diffuse and atomize power. They divided it among the states and later among business corporations. They used such devices as checks and balances, separation of powers, and division of powers to deadlock power and to thwart positive action for long periods. The experience probably encouraged the tendency to regard power as bad in itself and any means of restraining or denying it as a positive good.

The national myth that America is an innocent nation in a wicked world is associated to some degree in its origins and perpetuation with the experience of free security. That which other nations had of necessity to seek by the sword and defend by incurring the guilt of using it was obtained by the Americans both freely and innocently, at least in their own eyes. They disavowed the engines and instruments of the power they did not need and proclaimed their innocence for not using them, while at the same time they passed judgment upon other nations for incurring the guilt inevitably associated with power. "We lived for a century," writes Reinhold Niebuhr, "not only in the illusion but in the reality of innocency in our foreign relations. We lacked the power in the first instance to become involved in the guilt of its use." But we sought to maintain the innocence of our national youth after acquiring power that was incompatible with it. We first concealed from ourselves the reality of power in our economic and technological might, but after it became undeniable, and after military strength was added to it, as Niebuhr says, "we sought for a time to preserve innocency by disavowing the responsibilities of power."⁸ The urge to return to a free security age of innocence and the flight from responsibility and from the guilt of wielding power may be traced in elaborate efforts to maintain neutrality, in desperate struggles for isolationism and "America First," as well as in the idealistic plans of religious and secular pacifists.

So long as free land was fertile and arable, and so long as security was not only free but strong and effective, it is no wonder that the world seemed to be America's particular oyster. Now that both free land and free security have disappeared, it is not surprising that the American outlook has altered and the prospect

⁸ Reinhold Niebuhr, *The Irony of American History* (New York, 1952), p. 35.

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has darkened. The contrast with the past was even sharper in the case of free security than in the instance of free land, for the transition was almost immediate from a security that was both free and effective to an attempt at security that was frightfully costly and seemed terrifyingly ineffective. The spell of the long past of free security might help to account for the faltering and bewildered way in which America faced its new perils and its new responsibilities.

This discussion leads naturally to a second and more extensive field of opportunity for reinterpretation, that of military history. In this field there are no national limitations and few limits of time and period. Military subjects have traditionally occupied a large share of the historian's attention, a disproportionate share in the opinion of some critics. Yet the military historian is now faced with the challenge of relating the whole history of his subject to the vast revolution in military weapons and strategic theory that has occurred in the past fifteen years. Primarily this revolution involves two phases: first, explosives, and second, the means of delivering them upon a target. Both phases were inaugurated toward the end of World War II.

The revolution in explosives began when the primitive A-bomb was exploded by American forces over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.⁹ This was the first and, so far, the last such weapon but one ever fired in anger. That event alone marked the lurid dawn of a new age. But the entirely unprecedented pace of change in the weapons revolution has swept us far beyond that primitive dawn and broken the continuity of military tradition and history. Since 1945 we have passed from bombs reckoned in kilotons of TNT to those computed in megatons, the first of which was the hydrogen bomb exploded at Bikini on March 1, 1954, less than a decade after the A-bomb innovation. The twenty kiloton atomic bomb dropped over Nagasaki in 1945 had a thousand times the explosive power of the largest blockbuster used in World War II, but the twenty megaton thermonuclear bomb represents a thousand-fold

⁹ Two rival dates for the opening of the nuclear age are December 2, 1942, when Enrico Fermi established a chain reaction in the Chicago laboratory, and July 16, 1945, when the test bomb was exploded in New Mexico.

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increase over the Nagasaki bomb. One bomb half the twenty megaton size is estimated by Henry A. Kissinger to represent "five times the explosive power of all the bombs dropped on Germany during the five years of war and one hundred times those dropped on Japan."¹⁰ And according to Oskar Morgenstern, "One single bomb can harbor a force greater than all the explosives used by all bel- ligerents in World War II or even greater than all the energy ever used in any form in all previous wars of mankind put to- gether."¹¹ But this would still not appear to be the ultimate weapon, for it is now said that a country capable of manufacturing the megaton bomb is conceivably capable, should such madness possess it, of producing a "begaton" bomb. Reckoned in billions instead of millions of tons of TNT, it would presumably represent a thousand-fold increase, if such a thing is conceivable, over the megaton weapon.

The revolution in the means of delivering explosives upon targets, like the revolution in explosives, also began during World War II. Before the end of that war, the jet-propelled aircraft, the snorkel submarine, the supersonic rocket, and new devices for guiding ships, aircraft, or missiles were all in use. But also as in the case of the revolution in explosives, the revolution in agents of delivery accelerated at an unprecedented pace during the fifteen years following the war. The new jet aircraft became obsolescent in succeeding models before they were in production, sometimes before they came off the drafting boards. The snorkel submarine acquired atomic power and a range of more than fifty thousand miles without refueling. The expansion of rockets in size, range, and speed was even more revolutionary. The German V-2 in use against London during the last year of the war had a range of only about two hundred miles and a speed of only about five times that of sound. The intermediary range ballistic missile, capable of carrying a thermonuclear warhead, has a range of around fifteen hundred miles, and the intercontinental missile with similar capa- bilities has a range in excess of five thousand miles and flies at a

¹⁰ Henry A. Kissinger, *Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy* (New York, 1957), pp. 70-71. Italics in the original.

¹¹ Oskar Morgenstern, *The Question of National Defense* (New York, 1959), p. 10.

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rate on the order of twenty times the speed of sound. To appreciate the pace and extent of the revolution in agents of delivery, one should recall that in the long history of firearms, military technology was only able to increase the range of cannon from the few hundred yards of the primitive smoothbore to a maximum of less than eighty miles with the mightiest rifled guns. Then in less than fifteen years ranges became literally astronomical.

In all these measurements and samples of change in military technology it should be kept in mind that the revolution is still in progress and in some areas may well be only in its beginning stages. The line between the intercontinental rockets and some of the space rockets would seem to be a rather arbitrary one. The race for the development of the nuclear-powered plane may produce a craft capable of ranges limited in a practical way only by the endurance of the crew. The technological breakthrough has become a familiar phenomenon of the military revolution, and there is no justification for the assumption that we have seen the last of these developments.

To seek the meaning of this revolution in a comparison with that worked by the advent of firearms is misleading. The progress of the revolution brought on by gunpowder, first used in military operations in the early fourteenth century, was glacial by comparison. Only very gradually did the gun replace the sword, the arrow, the spear, and the battering ram. Flintlocks did not arrive until the seventeenth century, field artillery of significance until the eighteenth century, and it was not until the middle of the last century, more than five hundred years after the first military use of gunfire, that the era of modern firearms really opened. Military doctrine changed even more slowly.

The nuclear revolution is of a different order entirely. If strategic bombing with thermonuclear weapons occurs on an unrestricted scale now entirely possible with existing forces, it is quite likely to render subsequent operation of armies, navies, and air forces not only superfluous but unfeasible. It is not simply that huge concentrations of forces such as were used in major amphibious and land operations in the last world war present a vulnerable target themselves. Of more elemental importance is the fact that such armies, navies, and air forces require thriving industrial economies

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and huge bases and cannot operate when the cities of their home territories are smoking craters and their ports and bases are piles of radioactive rubble. As for the military effectiveness of survivors in the home territory, according to Bernard Brodie, "the minimum destruction and disorganization that one should expect from an unrestricted thermonuclear attack in the future is likely to be too high to permit further meaningful mobilization of war-making capabilities over the short term."¹² Faith in the wartime potential of the American industrial plant would appear to be another casualty of the revolution.

Historic changes in weapons, tactics, and strategy between one war and the next, or even one century or one era and the next in the past, become trivial in importance by comparison with the gulf between the preatomic and the nuclear age of strategic bombing. We are now able to view the past in a new perspective. We can already see that the vast fleets that concentrated off the Normandy beaches and at Leyte Gulf, or the massed armies that grappled in the Battle of the Bulge or across the Russian steppes, or for the matter the old-fashioned bomber squadrons that droned back and forth across the English Channel year after year dropping what the air force now contemptuously calls "iron bombs" were more closely related to a remote past than to a foreseeable future. They did not, as they seemed at the time, represent the beginning of a new age of warfare. They represented instead the end of an old age, a very old age.

This is not to assume that unrestricted nuclear war is the only type of military operations that are any longer conceivable, nor that wars of limited objectives, limited geographic area, and limited destructiveness are no longer possible. To make such assumptions, indeed, would be either to despair of the future of civilized man or to subscribe to the theory that national differences will thenceforth be settled without resort to force. Even assuming that limited wars may still be fought with "conventional" weapons, tactics, and strategy of the old era, there will still be an important difference setting them apart from prenuclear wars. Where major

¹² Bernard Brodie, *Strategy in the Missile Age* (Princeton, 1959), p. 167. See also pp. 147-49 on the comparison with the firearms revolution.

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powers are directly or indirectly involved, at least, limited wars
will be fought under an umbrella of nuclear power. The effects of
that conditioning environment have yet to be tested, but it can
scarcely be assumed that they will be inconsiderable.

Instead of making military history irrelevant or unimportant,
the sudden transition from the old to the new age of warfare
should actually enhance the role of the historian. We stand des-
perately in need of historical reinterpretation. The men who now
have responsibility for determining policy, strategy, and tactics
in the new age of warfare are inevitably influenced by their ex-
perience and training grounded on an earlier age of warfare and an
outmoded interpretation of its history. The fact is that many of
the precepts, principles, and values derived from past experience
in wars can be tragically misleading in the new age. These include
some of the so-called "unchanging principles of war" that are
imbibed during training and discipline until they become almost
"second nature" to the professional military man. Traditions that
associate the new type of war with honor, valor, and glory are no
longer quite relevant. The sacred doctrine of concentration and
mass, applied at the critical point, has lost its traditional meaning.

The age-old assumption of a commander's freedom of choice once war was started can no longer be made. In previous ages, one could start a war and assume that his objectives, methods, or degree of commitment could be altered according to changing prospects of success or failure, or according to whether probable gains outweighed probable losses. Even as late as World War II one could still approach the abyss of barbarism or annihilation, take a look and turn back, settle for an armistice or a compromise, and bide one's time. Once resort is made to unrestricted nuclear war, there is no turning back.

The underpinnings of logic that have served historically to
justify resort to war as the lesser of several evils have shifted or, in
their traditional form, quite disappeared. Victory has been de-
prived of its historical meaning in total war with the new weapons,
for the "victor" is likely to sustain such devastation as to lack the
means of imposing his will upon the "vanquished." And yet to
accomplish this end, according to Karl von Clausewitz, is the
only rational motive of war. Democratic participation or consent