Lexington Road,
Lincoln, Mass.
(Postal address: Lexington 73, Mass.)
11-26-62

To The Editor:

I am still pretty numb after reading Henry A. Kissinger's "Reflections On Cuba" in The Reporter of Nov. 22, but I am, somewhat reluctantly, in Mr. Kissinger's debt for awakening me to the understanding that Secretary McNamara's "counterforce strategy" means that we have adopted a first-strike nuclear policy. Or perhaps I have misunderstood when Mr. Kissinger writes that the Cuban crisis could not have ended so quickly and decisively "but for the fact that the United States can win a general war if it strikes first and can inflict intolerable damage on the Soviet Union even if it is the victim of a surprise attack. Whatever one's reservations about the counterforce strategy enunciated by Secretary McNamara for the long term, it proved its efficacy in the Cuban crisis."

One thing Mr. Kissinger explained insufficiently for me. He writes, "The Soviet leaders did not invoke the threat of nuclear war against our blockade. If we believed the threat, even a nation like ours might feel compelled to strike pre-emptively." If even a nation likes ours might feel that way, what might a nation like the U.S.S.R. feel? Might it strike pre-emptively before we strike pre-emptively? Unless this is all built on miscalculation, namely, Mr. McNamara's, Mr. Kissinger's and mine, is the time for us to strike pre-emptively growing short?

Or is there perhaps a less complicated explanation, that Mr. Kruschchev decided quite straightforwardly that missiles in Cuba were not worth a nuclear war, even though other as yet untested matters might for him be worth such a war?

I would recommend to Mr. Kissinger and even to Mr. McNamara that this possibility be weighed before we too freely base our actions on the possibility that all we have to do now is to push Mr. Kruschchev and he will fall over.

I have seen it written since the Cuban crisis began that we should thank God for Mr. Kennedy's action. Maybe instead we should thank God for the opportunity to prevent the next nuclear confrontation, rather than just for surviving the last one.

Well, then, where do we go? To an unprovable intuition, says Mr. Kissinger. Not to facts, but to the statesman's "vision of the future." A dash of credible deterrent here, a threat of intolerable damage there, a cool use of the pre-emptive first strike gambit elsewhere. No irrelevancies, no conciliation, no soft negotiation, and above all, no thought substituting adjectives, just intuition and vision.

The superciliousness of Mr. Kissinger and the other mathematical game strategists to anything other than their own brand of brinkmanship and arms race ad infinitum is limitless. Ethereal idealists would seek disarmament, while the hard, clear thinker, avoiding the pitfalls of sentiment and irrelevancies alike, will arm and arm, threaten and threaten, with victory following victory as our credibility surpasses their credibility.

How long can such jargon-infested callousness to reality pass for responsible thought? Obviously, too long. We can watch Failsafe on our news programs all too frequently, and it barely horrifies. If a long overdue Erasmus does not come soon to point up the felly of such sophistry, the Kissinger's, ours and theirs, will "strategy" us into a nuclear holocaust. In that case, the thought concealed behind such terms as "winning a general war" and "tolerable" or "intolerable" losses will be all too apparent.

John H. Reinoehl
East Lansing, Mich.

1825 Linden Street