The drawback under the Kennedy Administration was that there really was no regular procedure to getting things done, except on crisis issues, because you never could be sure who was being heard in addition to the constituted people, who did not always present their cases in the presence of the others who disagreed with them. It was a somewhat amorphous process. Under Johnson you had the disorganization of Kennedy without the intellectual excitement, and with somewhat of a fear of the President superimposed on it. The organizational problem seems to be to combine the procedural regularity of Eisenhower with the intellectual excitement of Kennedy. Whether that is possible, I do not know.

Eisenhower tended to operate almost exclusively with the National Security Council machinery, and he had divided the responsibility so that the current NSC business would be conducted by the staff secretary, while the planning side was conducted by the chief of the NSC staff. The operations coordinating board was the undersecretary's and was supposed to implement the planning decisions of the National Security Council. The drawback of the NSC as it was run under President Eisenhower was that it was terribly formalistic. One way to tell they really weren't doing anything was to take their papers, write down the opposite of what they had said, and see that this involved no policy choice. One is not saying anything by advocating that it is in the American interest to have a pro-American government in country X. No one would argue that is in our interest to have an anti-American government there. It turned into a series of abstract platitudes which were not very effective.

Kennedy used the NSC primarily as a sounding board; it rarely made important decisions. He had something called the Committee of Principals which met when concrete decisions had to be made--such as the Berlin crisis. There was no regular staff work for these meetings, it was all done on an _ad hoc_ basis, on a very substantial intellectual level.

Johnson is compulsively secretive and will not say what he thinks, so it is very hard to discover people who think they know what he wants. There is less of a premium on coming up with new ideas under him. I think something like the Committee of Principals, or the National Security Council with a staff of McGeorge Bundy qualities is needed. There is a staff which keeps groping and is not primarily a diplomatic instrument.

Probably what is needed is something similar to what McNamara did in the Defense Department, that is, to try to establish some criteria by which to judge success and failure. McNamara got control of the Defense Department by flooding the various agencies with questions which they had to answer and which gave him good information. It took several

9

years to bring home to them that the usual bureaucratic double-talk
wouldn't go. Something like that is needed in the national security area,
where it is much more difficult to establish, because the criteria are
more elusive. There isn't any clear notion of what the American national
interest is, and this presents a great problem. Most of the traditional
concepts of balance of power just don't apply to the contemporary theory
of national interest. To develop criteria in this sort of intellectual
vacuum is very difficult.

All the thinking of balance of power has been related to territorial
control. You could judge whether there was an equilibrium by what
country changed allegiance. We live in a curious period in which terri-
torial control may not be that important. We have good categories for
resisting what we call aggression. Leaving the issue of whether we are
correct in our assessment that the Vietnamese war was Chinese instigated--
which I don't happen to believe--one would still be able to argue that no
conceivable territorial gain of Communist China in Vietnam, or for that
matter in Southeast Asia, could compare in terms of augmentation of its
strength with the acquisition of nuclear weapons so far as concerned its
impact on the international situation. We have some criteria for judging
one, and none for the other.

It is hard to argue that any area is essential for American survival
from the purely physical point of view, but there is such a thing as a
psychological, moral balance. What would it do to the U.S. to be com-
pletely isolated, irrelevant to the rest of the world, even if we had
enough of a nuclear arsenal to prevent a physical attack? This is an
area in which I have not seen any very systematic thinking, although it
is a chief problem in international equilibrium to which we have to address
ourselves.

QUESTION: This is really on a broader scale. Mr. Kissinger, must we worry about neutralization until the time and place has been set? Don't we have within the bureaucracy some kind of planning for negotiations?

MR. KISSINGER: There are two parts to plans: first, to get them; second, to have to take them seriously. We have more plans than we have plans that are taken seriously. Take the problem of negotiations on an issue that is highly controversial and may even have political implications. No doubt some planning paper gets prepared, maybe even an interagency one. Yet the people involved have in the back of their minds the question: why should they fight with that issue now? It will be just as bloody later on, but at least they will be paying the price then for a possible result. Why fight it as a purely theoretical issue?

10

And therefore my experience with any sort of negotiating plan shows that usually we'll get a multiplication of tough positions. Nobody wants to take on the unpleasant role of advocating major changes; nobody wants to be called before a Congressional committee. Therefore, that sort of plan, if you're talking about a negotiating plan, is very abstract and theoretical.

Secondly, in my experience, which is limited, it rarely receives the serious attention of the principals. Either the principals won't look at it at all or they will look at it in a way that requires no practical consequence. They won't do it in a way that requires implementation to follow, and this is especially true if there is no one who has a primary responsibility for it--if it is simply said that it would be a good thing to have a negotiating position but there is no one whose own bureaucratic success depends on having one.

**QUESTION:** Do you feel that negotiation is good in and of itself?

**MR. KISSINGER:** Do I think so? Don't apply what I said to Vietnam, although some aspects of it would apply. The tendency is to say that something is either a military problem or a diplomatic problem--and if it's a diplomatic problem, then it's the State Department's job. The State Department, probably for reasons of the background of its personnel that one could go into, tends to approach it on a largely tactical level. They'll develop a position, they'll want to see what the other position is, then they'll see what is negotiable. The difference between what is negotiable and what is desirable may be very wide. And if you don't know what is desirable and operate only on the basis of what is negotiable, you really encourage the other side to take a very extreme position. If the other side knows that you're going to compromise considerably, they are encouraged to take an extreme rather than a conciliatory position. So the problem with the State Department approach to most negotiations is that it is entirely tactical.

**QUESTION:** Could you comment, please, on the seizing of the Pueblo by North Korea?

**MR. KISSINGER:** It was quite an intelligence coup for the other side to get the equipment and all of these people. I think it also shows the extent to which we have become overextended by the Vietnamese war. It would have been inconceivable five years ago that North Korea could capture an American ship, tow it into Wonsan, and that absolutely nothing would happen. In our public discussion we say we must get it through diplomacy--well, diplomacy unrelated to other things can't achieve a great deal, and we can't do many other things because of Vietnam. Another thing the Pueblo incident illustrates or highlights to me is the following: I always

11

thought it was a mistake to get South Korea involved in Vietnam for
many reasons, one of which was the fact that at any level the outcome
of the Vietnamese war was not likely to be very agreeable to Seoul,
even before the Tet offensive. Besides, it created additional incentives
to what is already a very tough regime in North Korea to get itself in-
volved. But I have no brilliant solution on how to get these people back.

QUESTION: I have a double-barrelled question. Would we do better without a monumental State Department? It seems we do better if we have a small number of chairmen and officials than a huge array, or are they necessary? The State Department is habitually accused of being tedious and of not producing anything. Is that a plausible accusation?

MR. KISSINGER: I must say I hold the view that we are so overstaffed that it makes thinking almost impossible. When you have in embassies abroad individuals assigned to particular small groups, each of them filing endless reports, the result is that no senior official can possibly read everything that comes in--no new official in turn will say that he has nothing to report, so the machine keeps churning on. I've often been struck by the fact that when a U.S. embassy would use me to get people in that weren't easily accessible, there would be about twelve Americans hanging over these people taking down practically every word, so that they could include it in their reports the next day rather than to let it develop in a more normal way. I think the handling of all of this material does make it more difficult to reflect. Which part you cut out is a big problem, because the world has become more complicated and you have to know more things. On the whole, if we could get rid of the bottom half of the Foreign Service we might be better off.

Now about the State Department. There is a definite problem in the
State Department, and it consists of many factors. One is that State
Department training is in the direction of reporting and negotiation, not
of thinking in terms of national policy. They are trained to give a very
good account of what somebody said to them. They can give a much
less good account of what this means. Also, if an officer works on the
Iran desk, he can tell you every detail about Iran. Then he gets trans-
ferred to another job and you can never get him to talk about Iran again,
but he will know everything about Austria or whatever.

Another quality that is rewarded is a certain negotiation skill. But
what is not encouraged in the State Department hierarchy, though it is
in a military hierarchy, is an assumption of responsibility and the
tendency to think of problems from the vantage point of a higher level.
I think the first eight to ten years of a State Department man's career

12

tend to be such as to drive the more imaginative and more purpose-
oriented people out of it. When I look at people that I see engaged in
it at lower levels, I think this is probably true that they are the least
adventurous.

QUESTION: Can you make some comment on the role of intellectuals
in the bureaucracy?

MR. KISSINGER: I don't think you relate intellectuals to the bureaucracy
as one undifferentiated group. For example, in the preparation of the
strategic posture document it was the practice--at least on some occa-
sions--to call in outside intellectuals to help in the preparation. And
there they were useful on their merits, just as if they had been in the
bureaucracy. They were not being called in just because they could
referee the disputes but because of their expertise in a particular field.
Other intellectuals are called in not because anyone cares about their
opinion but because they are judged to be useful in defending the policy
elsewhere. This has the risk that if the policy changes, you have made
yourself a critic. Other intellectuals are called in in order to give
some moral reinforcement to the decision maker who really has heard
all arguments already, but would like to hear an outsider say the same
thing. Thus there are many different roles that outsiders play. Some-
times outsiders are called in because it is the only way of keeping knowl-
edge of certain things from getting too widely diffused in the bureaucracy.

QUESTION: There is in your presentation a kind of pessimistic histor-
ical inevitability in the American policy process. One almost has the
impression that policy making by lottery might be almost as good, if
not better. What then do you feel is rational and correct about the
policy process as you have known it, and do you think there are improve-
ments to be made?

MR. KISSINGER: I don't think policy by lottery would be better, but I
think that if one wants to understand what the government is likely to
do, one has to understand the bureaucracies of the problems. The ways
in which intellectuals from the outside often go wrong are several: one
is that they judge a policy by its plausibility to them without taking into
account that the policy maker is responsible not only for the best thing
that can happen but also for the worst thing, and that many ideas cannot
be implemented not because they are bad but because the consequences
of their failure would be too great. Another is that for the policy maker
the most difficult problem is the problem of conjecture. That is, when
the scope for action is great, the knowledge on which to base this action
is relatively small. When the knowledge is great, the scope for action
has often already disappeared. So you have to act on the basis of an

13

assessment which you cannot prove true when you make it. It involves
a moral and psychological act as much as an intellectual act.

And finally, there is the inherent dynamism of the political and bureau-
cratic process itself. In that sense, there is a certain necessity about
this. If you do not know how this process operates, it is very difficult
to predict on the basis of abstract rationality how it is going to come
out. The reason why this particular problem is magnified is, it seems
to me, that only in the rarest cases is there a relationship between
high position and great substantive knowledge. Most of our elective
officials had to spend so much of their energy getting elected that they
can give relatively little attention to the substance of what they are
going to do when they get elected. And therefore you get the curious
phenomenon of people deciding to run for high office first and then
scrambling around for some intellectuals to tell them what their posi-
tions ought to be. In many cases it is not that the intellectuals are used
merely as speech writers for positions that the policy-makers already
have; it is literally the case that you are starting with a *tabula rasa*,
and that the position the political leader takes is much influenced by the
type of intellectual that sometimes quite accidentally winds up in his
entourage.

The top policy makers usually do not know that they have a problem
until they have an administrative issue. They often show enormous
reluctance to guide the project, because they are not really sure in
what direction they want to guide it. Now de Gaulle has a conception
of policy, and I would therefore not say that he is the prisoner of his
administrative apparatus. The opposite may be the problem there:
that this policy verges on the capricious. But still, the typical political
leader of the contemporary managerial society is a man with a strong
will, a high capacity to get himself elected, but no very great concep-
tion of what he is going to do when he gets into office. This is true of
many of the cabinet officials as well, and in this sense, although I don't
accept your notion of inevitability, I am pessimistic about the ability
of modern bureaucratic society to manage a world which is quite dis-
continuous with its previous experience, and especially to do so with
generosity and vision. I am not saying it's technically impossible, but
the challenges are so much greater.

14

CHANGING ATTITUDES TOWARDS WAR*

Bernard Brodie

Of the various forms of human violence, war is undoubtedly the most intensive and reaches the highest magnitudes. It is also the most highly organized, and over the centuries and even millenia it has retained a remarkably unchanging institutionalized character.

I use the word "institutionalized" to cover a wide variety of phenomena. For one thing, wars have tended, since antiquity, to have a clear beginning and a clear ending, and various ceremonials have been involved, both in the initiation and in the termination of war. In the periods following wars, or perhaps one should say between wars, remarkable degrees of reconciliation have sometimes taken place. It is an old story that governments which had been enemies one month could be allies the next; and in modern times, when the involvement affects peoples as well as governments, the same can also be true. We have in our own times witnessed an extraordinary reconciliation, which has included a mutual security alliance, between the Japanese people and ourselves. We have seen something closely similar, on a basis of greater equality, between the Germans and the French. In both cases the reconciliation exists both on governmental levels and also, apparently genuinely, in the hearts and minds of the people. Even Winston Churchill's axiom that the grass grows up over battlefields but never over scaffolds--by which he meant that war could be forgiven, but not atrocities in war--has not proved to be true. Atrocities in war tend to be forgiven along with the wars themselves--as for example Japanese beheadings of American prisioners in World War II.

Among the various elements of institutionalization of war, one observes also the existence of a special profession--in older days a caste--to pre-

* This paper was prepared for the symposium "Studies in Violence" held at UCLA on June 1 and 2, 1968.

15

pare themselves for and to carry out during war the customary violent procedures. In former times this military profession enjoyed, along with the higher clergy, almost a monopoly of honor, and it has managed to retain down to modern times a good deal of punctilio which would appear bizarre in civilian life. There is perhaps special significance in the fact that military uniforms, especially in the past, have been means of permitting men to deck themselves out in much greater finery than seemed appropriate in civilian life. The tradition has continued until today with respect at least to the wearing of decorations. The only other kind of professional groups organized for the control of violence, the domestic police forces, share few or none of the characteristics I have just mentioned. Their position is hardly honorific--as that of the officer class of the military quite clearly is, even in our own non-military country¹ during national moods like the present, when the aversion towards war and war-making agencies rises considerably above the usual norms. Let us finally notice that while police forces usually belong to municipalities and other subnational political entities, the military forces belong to the nation. This situation merely reflects the fact that the main reason historically for the existence of the nation-state has been the existence and thus the threat of war, which requires in anticipation the necessity of preparing against it.

Thus besides accounting for by far the greatest number of lives lost through human violence² and the greatest amount of other destruction suffered, war has also dominated the political organization of mankind. Although its forms of institutionalization have tended to change over time, sometimes drastically, the fact of institutionalization has not altered and the history of war as an institution greatly affects its present status. That is, one might well question whether modern war, as we have recently known it or may presently anticipate it, could be invented in modern society in anything like the form in which it exists if its patterns were not handed down from the past.

I should also add that many of the institutional characteristics of war

1. In calling the United States "non-militaristic," I am using the terminology of Alfred Vagts's classic *A History of Militarism* (Norton, 1937) where he distinguishes between military proficiency on the one hand and "militarism" on the other.

2. This statement may not be true for the United States, which has had an extraordinarily high incidence of murder and a relatively small toll of lives lost in war. It is certainly true, however, for all the major European nations and for others like Japan.

16

have had on the whole a benign rather than an evil influence. Perhaps they have in the past tended to make war more acceptable, but they have also accounted for that kind of limitation of wanton destruction and violence which is embraced in customs or codes pertaining to the humane treatment of prisoners, the non-use of certain types of weaponry, and so on. Although often more honored in the breach than the observance, these customs or formalized conventions have worked to moderate the destruction which war inevitably has brought. Even today we notice many ways in which the institutionalized character of war limits or inhibits the otherwise provocative effects of various political and military actions, such as the conclusion of treaties of alliance clearly intended against some specific third party, or the deployment of vast arrays of terribly dangerous offensive armament like the nuclear strategic retaliatory forces which the Soviet Union and the United States have aimed against each other. Because they conform with familiar patterns, these measures can be accepted as facts of life--not desirable, but tolerable. Changes in the status quo can be disturbing, but in the absence of strongly unsettling political issues, new equilibriums are reached.

One of the reasons I have stressed thus far the institutional character of war is that while my subject is "changing attitudes towards war," the institutional factor itself has had a good deal of influence in modifying those changes in attitudes, possibly in the direction of slowing down in the net that kind of change of attitude which would make for rejection of war as a mode of settling disputes. I stress the word "possibly" because in these matters it is too easy to leap to false conclusions. There is too much about the subject that we do not know, mostly because we have not really studied it.

I should now like to speak more directly to the question of changing attitudes towards war. But what kinds of attitudes are we talking about? I shall in fact talk about several, but the most basic and primitive no doubt concerns the question whether men glory in war or on the contrary have a horror of it. Psychologically these are perhaps superficial distinctions--that is, not deeply plumbing the unconscious--but conscious attitudes are also important.

I shall be arguing that in this and other respects there has been a vast double-ridged watershed of difference between, on the one hand, the period following the two world wars, and, on the other hand, all of world history preceding those wars. It is a difference which I think applies to all of the important cultures and certainly the important governments of the world.

17

We must, however, disabuse ourselves of the notion that distaste for war and a feeling of repudiation of its awful characteristics and consequences are a peculiarly modern invention. We see many evidences of such rejection and sorrow in sensitive people in the past, but usually ambivalently, as though the sense of being appalled were coupled with a sense of the necessity of accepting that which is appalling, and perhaps even finding pleasure in it. We see touches of this ambivalence even in the work of Homer, whose *Iliad* is dominated by commitment to the grim requirements of war and to the glorification of valor on the battlefield but which nevertheless here and there--especially in the moving leave-taking of Hector from his wife Andromache, and also in the plea which the aged King Priam makes to recover from Achilles the body of his now dead son Hector--some touches of what is not merely compassion for individuals who suffer but also regret for the existence of a system or institution which causes these abominable tragedies.

We of course see it much more tellingly in the later and more civilized Greece. The historian Thucydides, who was also a general, writes of the Peloponnesian wars in a way which suggests anything but enthusiasm for the prolonged contest of strength, perhaps because it resulted in the destruction of the power of Athens. Among the great playwrights of Athens we see Aristophanes, with his remarkable *Lysistrata*, where the heroine enjoins the women of Athens to withhold their sexual favors from their husbands in order to force the latter to desist from making war. Despite the extremely precarious nature of the Athenian women's co operation, Lysistrata even manages to carry it off. But we must remember that her plea is only for a peace between the Athenians and their fellow Greeks, the Laconians, and she makes a special point of the fact that what is most wrong with Hellenes cutting each other's throats is that all the while the barbarian outside is threatening them. Lysistrata, in other words, is hardly a pacifist.

In more modern times, we see in Shakespeare the same kind of ambivalence. The histories of Shakespeare are taken up with wars, and typically, as in *Henry V* and in the opening passages of *Henry VI*, we see war and conquest glorified simply as a means of demonstrating the greatness of the men who are successful at it--or perhaps one might say of glorifying the virility of those men. But even in those same plays, and certainly in various others, one often finds a moving scene or passage where the great poet pauses to reflect on the folly and the tragedy of it all--for example in *Henry IV, Part I*, where Prince Hal slays Hotspur on the battlefield and then utters an elegy over his fallen warrior-opponent:

18

When that this body did contain a spirit,
A kingdom for it was too small a bound;
But now two paces of the vilest earth
Is room enough:

The same play has the King speaking fretfully of "this churlish knot of all-abhorred war."

Shakespeare was a contemporary of King Henri IV of France, who when charged by the merchants of the Paris flea market with being a miser, laughed and replied, "I am no miser; I make love, I make war, and I build." Henri thus equated making war with two other eminently creative pursuits (and incidentally showed a remarkably modern psychological insight in sensing the conflict between miserliness and making love). Yet it was his prime minister, the Duc de Sully, who fashioned for Henri to present to the world his so-called Grand Design, a plan for a European confederation, which was supposed to eliminate war forever.

The kind of ambivalence I have been describing characterizes our civili-
zation at least until the outbreak of World War I. Leo Tolstoy's own life,
which included service in the Crimean War, as well as his great novel
War and Peace illustrate this same ambivalence. War is terrible and it
is evil, but to meet its challenge appropriately is to prove oneself a great
citizen or statesman or even a great man.

In the two or three decades just prior to World War I a special note sets
in which is a form of pseudo-Darwinism. The "survival of the fittest"
tends to be loosely interpreted as the survival of the most warlike and
aggressive states, and we find numerous manifestations of this persuasion
in the speeches and writings of Europeans of the time--especially in Ger-
many, but by no means only there.

Nevertheless, from the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648 till nearly
the beginning of World War I, a span of time which covers many wars and
includes some great and terrible ones, the prevailing attitude of civilized
people, enshrined also in the language of their diplomacy, was fairly
standard: war is almost always regrettable, despite redeeming features
like the opportunity to win glory. In any case it has to be accepted as
part of the condition of man. States might enjoy long periods of peace
with particular other states; but if they were great powers, they knew
they could not for long be altogether at peace, and if they were lesser
powers, they had to recognize the prevalence elsewhere of wars which
might engulf them. Language befitting this general attitude is expressed
in our own nation's Constitution, which provides quite matter-of-factly,
and quite early in the document, for the appropriate competence to pre-
pare for and to wage war.

19

Over the same period of time there developed a fairly elaborate and complex body of legal doctrine concerning the international law of war as distinct from the international law of peace. This was complemented in the legal systems of various nations, including our own, by laws and judicial decisions which served to connect the international law of war to the individual citizen. Official doctrines either glorifying war or utterly denying its possible validity were almost equally rare, but various legal and moral thinkers concerned themselves with the question of the just as opposed to the unjust war. Nevertheless, up to World War I there was no effort on the part of governments to have the act of resorting to war itself declared illegal, under any circumstances. Nations might be expected as a matter of good manners to make official declaration of war before resorting to it, a requirement not actually written into international law until the second Hague Convention of 1907; but whether they did so or not, the ensuing war was something about which neutral nations behaved legally as though they made no moral judgments. The latter were not to concern themselves with the question of responsibility for initiation of war, which is to say for aggression.

We come now to the first of the two great catastrophes of the twentieth century, and in terms of the moral and political shocks derived from it, clearly the greater of the two. World War I far exceeded all previous wars in magnitude and intensity. The war was also fought on both sides with extraordinary military ineptitude, so that we had a succession of great offensives or "pushes" which accomplished absolutely nothing but vast shedding of blood.

On the western front, obscene carnage was epitomized for all time by the German offensive and subsequent French counteroffensive at Verdun, a battle which over its ten-month duration produced in one small corner of France almost a million casualties; and during the same year of 1916 there was the equally futile and terribly costly British-French offensive on the Somme. These and other bloody and futile pushes of that war tell a story of unutterable grimness and slaughter--as well as of the professional incompetence of the military leaders, which contrasted most incongruously with their pretensions.

The war began in a spirit of great nationalistic fervor among the major belligerents, which carried with it unexampled individual commitment and dedication. All this was burned out in the first two years, ending with the two battles I have just mentioned. After the failure of the Neville offensive in the spring of 1917 the French army mutinied. The mutiny was brought under control and the war ground on with continuing huge losses for another year and a half, but the world was never to be the same again. The three great and old monarchies of Russia, Austria and

20

Germany did not survive the war. That of Russia gave way, partly through historical accident, to the first great Communist government.

But perhaps the most significant result of the war, with respect at least to the subject I have chosen for this paper, was the mood which quickly followed it--a mood of profound disillusionment with the acts and ideas of the political leaders who had triggered the conflict and who had attempted to conduct it. World War I, unlike World War II, could not be found after the event to have had a purpose remotely warranting for any one of the powers truly engaged in it the great sacrifices it had been forced to make. France got back its lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, but few Frenchmen thereafter felt that the recovery was worth the cost. The other major combatants could not even boast such ambiguous gains, and whatever exhilaration there might have been at the fact that autocratic monarchies were replaced by something else was soon to be dispelled by the rise of Fascism in Italy, of Nazism in Germany, and the revelations of the brutal oppression and murderous tyranny of the Stalin regime. Yet even prior to these events there began in the West an outpouring of antiwar literature such as was to have no counterpart after World War II. Diplomacy was not too far behind. In a number of documents, especially the widely-signed Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, the initiation of aggressive war was for the first time in history officially declared to be a violation of international law.

Although World War I was easily triggered by the blunders of a few mediocrities who held senior posts in the foreign and war ministries of their respective countries, World War II required the evil genius of a Hitler to launch it. Certainly the kind of fervent celebrations which had greeted the outbreak of the earlier war in major capitals like Berlin, London, and Paris were not at all repeated in the same capitals in 1939. All the nations, including the Germans, went to war with feelings of dismay and glumness, obviously fearing for what the future might bring. The Germans were shortly to be inspirited by a succession of remarkable victories, but soon they were to settle down to continuing tragedy in the East. Later came the vast bombings from the West, followed by the successful American-British invasions of the Continent.

Certainly from the side of the West and that of the Russians, the war had a purpose. Hitlerism simply demanded to be destroyed, and the revelations which followed the war of massive slaughters and other atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis in their concentration camps and elsewhere only reaffirmed the convictions that had preceded and attended the war. For the people of the United States the attack on Pearl Harbor not only justified the commitment which followed but demonstrated in a most telling way the intolerable fanaticism of the military clique which had seized the reins of government in Japan.

21

World War II was not followed by a literature of disillusionment or rejection. But neither was there any special glorification of the war; it had been too costly and bitter for that. The prevailing mood following World War II was that the use of military power was legitimate if, but only if, the ends it served were essentially anti-war ends—as for example preventing or resisting aggression, which is to say deterrence. This idea was enshrined in the enforcement provisions (Chapter VII) of the U. N. Charter.

One of the important changes that World War I began and World War II completed was the liquidation from positions of power, if not from existence altogether, of that aristocratic and monarchical caste that had previously ruled affairs in most of Europe and in Japan. This caste had derived many of its moral and political values, including attitudes towards war, from the Middle Ages. The virtual wiping out of this formerly powerful caste in those nations which it previously controlled is a change of enormous consequences for the behavior of governments which I think we too frequently overlook.

Another cataclysmic event in World War II was the advent of nuclear weapons, which were at once recognized by almost all people for the terribly revolutionary things that they are. They were greeted with the most apprehension by the very people who at that time had a monopoly of them.

For some years the government and people of the United States felt that they had reason to worry whether the Russians would be as sensitive to the horrible dangers of nuclear warfare as we felt ourselves to be from the outset, but by now the answer has clearly been accepted to be in the affirmative. Actually the Chinese too have been sending similar signals—like their vehement denial in late 1963 of Khrushchev's charge (following their denunciation of him for retreating from the Cuban missile crisis) that they did not understand the horrors of nuclear war.³

We are now some years further away from World War II than the beginning of that war was from the end of World War I, which was just under twenty-one years. The ending of World War II is already more than twenty-three years in the past. The world has since known a number of wars, and some of them have been difficult and prolonged enough for those engaged directly in them, but in comparison with the two world wars, they have all been small.

3. The relevant Chinese note of September 1963 is translated and reproduced in *Survival*, Vol. 5 (Nov.-Dec. 1963), pp. 263-268.

22

The United States has been mainly involved in the Korean War of 1950-53, and in the Vietnam war that still goes on today. In the case of Korea, we backed into a kind of war that ran counter to one of our axioms of the time that "all modern wars must be total wars," and we did so out of a kind of helpless feeling that our position of world leadership left us little choice to do anything else. The aggression which we intervened to counter, on the whole successfully, was indeed brusque and arrogant. Our Secretary of State had early in 1950 described our "defense perimeter" in terms which left Korea outside, and even though we had no direct treaty commitments to defend it, our initial responses were guided by the conviction that someone did have to resist aggression and that there was no other nation which could do so effectively. That we managed, after these decisions were made, to get the United Nations involved more as a cover than as a meaningful source of assistance occurred through a mere diplomatic fluke--which took the form of the Soviet delegate to the United Nation's Security Council boycotting that body while the critical votes were being taken.

The Korean War was the first example of modern limited war, about which there has since been a good deal of theorizing. By modern limited war--as distinct from earlier types--we mean a kind of war in which at least one of the powers involved is a major power and is deliberately refraining from using the most powerful and terrible military capabilities under its control, especially nuclear weapons. Of the Korean War, we must remember also that our military leaders in Washington considered it throughout the period of the most active hostilities to be, in the words of General Omar Bradley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: "the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy." By this statement he was giving voice to the conviction then strongly felt in Washington that the real enemy was the Soviet Union, and that the aggression in Korea has been simply a ruse de guerre to absorb our attention and forces in that far-off area while the Russians prepared a massive attack against Western Europe, which for a while was considered imminent. This was a huge and potentially dangerous misreading of Soviet intentions, but we do seem to have adopted a more mature official outlook in the years since.

The Vietnamese War has had similar yet distinctive characteristics. We got involved the way we did mostly out of the feeling that after the French defeat and departure, there was again no one else to do what we thought needed doing, which was to carry out what we called "containment."⁴

4. The word "we" refers in the first instance to Administration attitudes, including the presidencies of Eisenhower and Kennedy as well as Johnson,

23

There were various other related attitudes and perhaps fixations, such as notions bound up in the so-called "Domino Theory." Neither in Vietnam nor in Korea were the dimensions of our ultimate commitment at all foreseen in the beginning; even so the commitment in both wars was kept very far short of full mobilization.

In both wars we have shown ourselves willing to settle for a negotiated compromise peace while exercising massive restraint against the militarily inferior enemy. In the Korean War we never bombed beyond the Yalu River, although the major enemy was China. In the case of Vietnam, we refrained not only from the use of nuclear weapons, which we now had in enormous numbers, but from any attempt at invasion of North Vietnam. The bombing in the North, at this writing largely suspended, has always been of a controlled and relatively constricted kind, and we have also exercised great restraint on the shipping lanes leading to Haiphong.

I mention these points not to attempt in the least degree to justify our political and military intervention either in Korea or Vietnam, but rather to point out that the United States, which is a very great power, is practicing a kind of behavior marked by conspicuous military and political restraint such as would have been totally unthinkable prior to 1914. Some of course hold that we have been too restrained, and have thus made ourselves militarily ineffective; but the tide of opinion is all in the opposite direction. Any future president of the United States, at least in the next decade or so, is likely to view the personal disaster of President Johnson in Vietnam as a compelling reason for not intervening in like manner somewhere else, rather than as a good reason for throwing off restraint. And surely if there has been any degree of enthusiasm for the war in Vietnam or elsewhere, it has not been particularly noticeable. The same was true of Korea.

I do not wish to concentrate attention mainly on American experience since World War II, except insofar as that experience is vivid to us. With respect to the changes of attitude I have emphasized, I do not see that the experience of France either in Vietnam or later Algeria was much different. In both cases the public attitude in the metropolitan country became one of being thoroughly fed up with a military operation abroad which was simply not prospering. In the case of Algeria it is

but it is worth remembering that dissent from Administration actions concerning Vietnam was hardly voiced prior to 1966 and remained a minority opinion in the United States at least until the Tet Offensive of early 1968.

24

all the more remarkable in that this territory had been considered legally
a department of metropolitan France for very many years. If we consider
the Middle Eastern war of June, 1967, the attitude of the Israelis before
the event seems to be well summed up by one of them who was quoted as
saying: "If there is a war, we will win; but who needs it?" And if the
Arabs had a markedly greater degree of enthusiasm, it was not reflected
in the verve of their fighting.

Thus, certain attitudes towards war which national governments used
to be able to count upon, or feel obliged to take into account, have gone
out of fashion or even out of existence since 1945, and even more marked-
ly since 1914. The kind of mindless fervor which brought people out on
the streets when their national government declared war seems quite
definitely a thing of the past, except possibly in Cairo. Personal hero-
ism is of course always respected, but rather little is made of it nowa-
days, and war heroism seems not to enjoy a much higher status than
peace-time heroism.

National glory is clearly no longer a commodity of much importance
in the minds of statesmen trying to decide for or against resort to arms
in particular instances. Conquest of foreign territories, the passion
for which has been one of the greatest war makers since ancient times,
seems no longer to move people as a suitable reason for giving up the
relative comfort and safety of peace. Even the regaining of lost terri-
tories, or what we used to call *irredentas*, the thirst for which so in-
spired French foreign policy from 1871 to 1914, tends to be put in per-
spective when the means of regaining them involve the chance of nuclear
war. In Germany today there is universal persuasion that reunification,
though desirable, must be accomplished *ohne Krieg*--without war. For
this reason among others, the danger of war today within the European
community, the former cradle of modern wars, seems lower than at
almost any other time in history--a factor which has much to do with
the decay of both NATO and of the Warsaw Pact.

How then must we relate the changes I have described, as well as
many others that I do not have space to mention or develop, to the prob-
abilities of war in the future, or rather to the probabilities of specific
kinds of war among specific nations. In order to do so, we should want
to start with an exploration of the basic causes of war, about which much
has indeed been written. But if we do so we will immediately find that
by far the greater portion of it is scientifically rubbish. What should be
abundantly apparent by now is that the approach to the study of the causes
of war is inevitably a highly eclectic approach, necessarily combining
with a deep and accurate understanding of history such modern insights
as psychology, cultural anthropology, and political science may offer.

25

Any explanation which stresses any one of these areas to the virtual exclusion of others is bound simply for that reason to be wrong.⁵

I have no doubt said enough both to antagonize some spirits in this audience and also to persuade the more detached ones among you that there is today very little solid knowledge about the general reasons why nations fight. There is better knowledge about why particular nations may or may not be likely to fight wars with each other, but this is because the discipline of looking hard at particular situations tends to induce the student to collect and analyze pertinent facts.

At any rate, I hope that I have been able to persuade you that among the things about war that are changing are the attitudes that men have about it, which affect also the probability of its occurring in particular instances. I should stress finally, and again, that there is much we still have to learn about these matters.

5. A portion is deleted here because it is contained, in expanded version, in the paper which follows entitled "Theories on the Causes of War."

26

TECHNOLOGY, POLITICS, AND STRATEGY¹

Bernard Brodie

The original title of this paper was to be, rather grandly, "Strategy and Technology," but after I had somewhat rashly accepted the invitation to present it here, the question arose: What can now be said on the subject of technology and strategy that is both significant and new? I do not wish to strain for novelty, but neither do I wish to waste your time. The opportunities for concocting fresh generalizations in this area are not what they once were.

Some twenty-seven years ago I published a book which, insofar as it was not simply a history of the major naval inventions of the past hundred years, presented the basic argument that change in the instruments of war which appear to be simply tactical can be so far-reaching as to have large strategic and political effects.² I thought when I published it that there was some novelty in the idea, but that thought may have been illusory even then. Today the point would be obviously and ludicrously banal. The literature dealing directly or indirectly with the relationship of technology to strategy has, especially since World War II, been very considerable, and much of it has been quite good. In this present company I have to remember that one of the more recent examples of that literature was *Adelphi Paper Number 46*, entitled "The Implications of Military Technology in the 1970s," which contains six of the eighteen papers delivered at this Institute's Ninth Annual Conference at Elsinore last year.

But merely to refer to the vast amount of pertinent literature is certainly to understate the influence which preoccupation with technology has had on our recent strategic thinking. The whole impressive development

1. This paper was presented at the Tenth Annual Conference of The Institute for Strategic Studies held at St. Catherine's College, Oxford, England, September 19-22, 1968.

2. Bernard Brodie, *Sea Power in the Machine Age*, Princeton, 1941.

27

of systems analysis and of related techniques, especially in the United
States, has fostered the notion that selection of future weapons systems
for appropriate development and deployment represents most of what
there is to modern military strategy. I suspect that the former American
Secretary of Defense, Mr. Robert S. McNamara, tended automatically to
think in such terms. Military history, which used to be the main acknowl-
edged source of strategic insight--Clausewitz and Mahan are examples--
has been enormously down-graded in favor of the new analytical techniques.
Except for economics the modern social sciences have had only a periph-
eral influence.

As you may by now guess, I shall use this circumstance as the basic
challenge in this paper, and I shall be emphasizing mainly the limitations
of technology in strategy, and also the limitations of the study of techno-
logical trends as a means of acquiring strategic insights. The time is
indeed overripe for considering these limitations. Vietnam is almost too
conspicuous an example of technological superiority having inadequate
payoff and of the modern techniques to which I have referred proving ir-
relevant. Over the past year, incidentally, I have witnessed two instances
where a remark like the one I have just made provoked in each case the
retort that systems analysis could not have been proved inapplicable in
Vietnam because it has not been tried--the implication being that an appro-
priate trial might produce some very far-reaching results. In each case
the person making that retort was a distinguished member of the strategic
intellectual fraternity. I feel that such a reply reflects either a profound
misunderstanding of what has been happening in Vietnam, or a stubborn
refusal to distinguish between the areas of consideration where systems
analysis is applicable and indeed invaluable and those in which it has little
or no relevance. I suspect it reflects both.

One of the first points I should like to make is that the speed and extent
of technological change have not usually been closely coupled with the
strategic and political implications of the relevant changes. Some techno-
logical advances may be so earth-shaking in their consequence that subse-
quent ones, however more sophisticated individually and impressive in
the aggregate, cannot but be of diminished significance relative to the
original device. The outstanding example is the weapon which introduced
the nuclear age, the original fission weapon tested at Alamagordo in 1945
and used in that same year at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.³ A corner was

3. It is, of course, now well-known that the Nagasaki bomb was the same (implosion-type) as that tested at Alamagordo and that the Hiroshima bomb was different, but for purposes of this paper the difference is in-consequential.

28

turned in those few months which vastly separates the world before those
events from the world after them. Against the bursting flash of the first
A-bomb, the later much larger thermonuclear weapons and all their asso-
ciated gear are of distinctly lesser importance.

Let me develop this example a little further. At the end of the first
decade of the nuclear age, that is about 1955, a condition had settled upon
us which in most essential respects is the same as that in which we find
ourselves now and which involved changes much greater in their political
implications than were to derive from the second decade of that age, end-
ing about 1965. I will also venture the prediction that the second decade
will prove more significant than the third, in which we now live, even
though the changes occurring in this third decade are far-reaching enough.

At the end of the first decade there was fairly general understanding
among statesmen that major war must be avoided at almost all costs.
Notice I do not specify thermonuclear war but simply major war between
powers possessing large nuclear capabilities, because no one is entitled
to have, and practicing statesmen seem not to have had ever, any abiding
faith in our abilities to control or avoid escalation from non-nuclear to
nuclear war between such powers. We might observe, however, that at
the end of this first decade the ideas were already developing that were
subsequently to constitute a theory of limited war, the existence of which
has in itself had enormous political consequences—including on the nega-
tive side, I regret to say, helping to get the United States involved in the
Vietnam war.

At the end of the second decade the most important achieved realization
was that the balance of terror was really not delicate, that is, that the
expectation of being able to make a surprise attack against the major
opponent with near-impunity was most unlikely ever to be entertained by
leaders of either of the superpowers. This second decade, embracing
the shift from fission to fusion weapons, included also great developments
in ballistic missiles of all ranges, and vast increases in the stockpiles of
all nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. As it happened, missiles
lent themselves to passive protection and to concealment in a way that
aircraft did not—or at least appeared not to among those responsible for
operating them. The result of this latter change was enormously to re-
duce the fear of surprise attack, a fear which persisted halfway through
the second decade of the nuclear era and which was in itself by far the
single most important factor that would have made for swift escalation
to nuclear war in the event of a really serious break in the peace between
the superpowers. The dominant military concern for those powers in the
earlier period was with getting one's own delivery vehicles moving in time
in order to avoid their being destroyed on the ground. The coming of

29

underground silos and Polaris submarines greatly reduced that anxiety, though this reduction of fear was also vitally assisted by various political and psychological influences, including simply the experience of having lived for years under a regime of strong mutual deterrence--during which process one may also get to know the enemy much better and to fear him less.

For reasons I have already hinted at, I am not able to be seriously disturbed by such new technologies as MIRV or as Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD). The latter in its present American form we call the Sentinel system. MIRV has been called potentially destabilizing because it tends to alter in favor of the attacker the cost in offensive missiles of destroying retaliatory missiles--that is, it seems to put "surprise attack" back in business. From the strictly technological side, I should expect that if the individual components of the MIRV system acquire the accuracy they will need to make them a real threat to heavily hardened retaliatory missiles, there will be some options open to the defender which will enable him to restore some large measure of his defensive integrity--assuming he moves not altogether too laggardly with the times.

Much more to the point, the patterns of thought and of emotional response with which governments have become imbued as a result of living with nuclear deterrence are undoubtedly capable of surviving very large perturbations in the style of the weaponry which originally induced them. The frequent use of the phrase "unacceptable damage" conceals the fact that no one knows what the phrase means quantitatively to anyone, and no one will know, for almost any phase of nuclear technology henceforward, just how limited the attacks upon oneself can be made to be. So far the trend in potential destructiveness has steadily gone up, and only a most drastic reversal would really be meaningful. Under such circumstances, it will continue to require a very great deal of motivation for one great nation to think of attempting to destroy another. An enemy one has lived with a long time has after all proved that it is possible and perhaps not even seriously inconvenient to live with him. The Chinese seem not to fear and have no real reason to fear preventive action by the United States, whose nuclear superiority is not only wholly commanding, but, unlike the situation vis-à-vis the Soviet Union prior to 1950, expressed also in huge capabilities.

I do not expect that we should ever be indifferent to changes which might threaten sharply to reduce the retaliatory capability of American nuclear power against our major opponent or opponents. However, I do expect that if such changes should appear to impend, our threshold of panic would remain rather high--partly, I suppose, but only partly, because we would expect an alert and provident defense organization to

30

be anticipating these changes by appropriate technological measures. Since 1945 the United States' record in this respect, though flawed, is not one of neglect. If, however, such anticipation failed to bring the retaliation factor quite back to its previous high level, I should expect the defense communities on both sides to become quickly adjusted to being adequately deterred with other patterns of potential attack and response. That awful phrase "assured destruction" will inevitably still count for a lot in a world which will have more nuclear weapons in it than already exist today.

Similarly, the BMD has been accorded vast potentiality for both good and evil, but it seems to me likely to be enough limited in its future technical effectiveness as to have little consequence other than adding huge additional expense to the weaponry systems that accomplish nuclear deterrence. U.S. Senator Frank Church has been quoted somewhere as having called it potentially the most expensive sieve in history. An article in the March 1968 issue of *Scientific American* by Drs. Richard L. Garwin and the enormously respected Hans A. Bethe (reprinted in the August 1968 issue of *Survival*) describes some of the ways in which the system can be defeated. Perhaps it has shaken some in the American defense community whose high expectations of the Sentinel system seemed to me at the very least one-sided. The story of how that confidence became so inflated in the first place is itself interesting and significant, and is unfortunately the kind of story that rarely gets properly told in print. To do it requires someone with the requisite exposure, the necessary freedom, and the appropriate talent for interpreting and describing human behavior in a technological environment. Professor R. V. Jones of Aberdeen University is one of the few who have enjoyed such a combination of opportunities and abilities.

I have myself seen only the outer edges of the BMD enthusiasm, and all I can bear witness to is the fact that people who have access to the classified information needed to make a rounded evaluation of the system are by no means immune to highly subjective judgments. Many tend to be particularly prone to a desire to see put in service highly sophisticated and novel weaponry mostly because they have been working on them for a long time. I might add that Drs. Garwin and Bethe are particularly mercifully about the proposal for a so-called "thin" BMD defense against China, as is also Dr. Donald G. Brennan, who, unlike Garwin and Bethe, strongly advocates a large BMD system.

I will not pretend to know much more than is in the public domain about the Sentinel system. I will only say that the arguments made for that deployment, and especially for the thin defense against China only, seem to me to be transparently full of flaws both in logic and in the reliability of

31

the applied data. They certainly do not take into account the vital points made by Garwin and Bethe, as well as others. The simple fact that the Spartan exo-atmospheric missile alone will cost between one and two million dollars each, and is easily confused by decoys, is enough to suggest to me that although the case for deploying it may be substantial, it can hardly be overwhelming in technical terms alone, even before some negative political considerations are taken into account. Of course the presently available BMD system will improve, especially if we avoid or postpone as long as possible that deployment which tends to freeze designs, but so will the means of defeating it.

Both MIRV and BMD represent an extraordinarily high degree of technological sophistication, but, as I have already suggested, they do not compare with the original A-bomb in their effects on the whole pattern of deterrence. Their appearance stems from and in turn induces a good deal of costly competition--possibly avoidable in part by international agreement, tacit or formal. Also, because of their effects on the total costs of nuclear capabilities, they will tend, when and if deployed, to maintain the exclusivity of the superpower club.

That last observation suggests, however, a contrary idea which is possibly worthy of being called a second "major point." We have become accustomed, largely through the thinking fashioned over a long period of American denunciation of French nuclear ambitions, to conceiving of very high thresholds of expense below which it makes no sense to have or to aspire to a nuclear capability. A very few nuclear weapons, perhaps even one, in the hands of either Israel or the United Arab Republic could be of very great significance in the Middle East, even though de-liverable only by fighter aircraft. The effects of possession by one side or the other would not be symmetrical, and mutual possession would have still different and possibly even favorable effects, though I should certainly not have enough confidence in the possibility to want to see it tried out in practice.

Still on the subject of meaningful thresholds of nuclear power: I admit to finding it somewhat difficult in my own thinking to find a convincing utility for the French nuclear effort on its present scale of activity, but I might find it at least as difficult to justify those additional conventional military forces that could be purchased and maintained with the same money. One of the common fallacies of our time is that nuclear forces are inevitably expensive and conventional forces are by comparison cheap. It certainly matters how much and what kind of each one is talking about. Well-equipped ground divisions or naval forces are certainly not cheap, and the one sure thing de Gaulle could accomplish by sacrificing his nuclear power to buy more divisions is please the Americans--which is

32

clearly not his main endeavor in life. Anyway, he would not get many
more divisions.

The same people who have made the most of that alleged threshold
have often expressed a fear of proliferation--I think appropriately, though
somewhat inconsistently. Some of them have also displayed a fear of the
Chinese nuclear capability which seems to me to be entirely disproportion-
ate to the true menace of that capability, and which is anyway entirely in-
consistent with their arguments about the nullity of French nuclear power.
The reasoning which shows the French being shatteringly overwhelmed if
they dare raise the threat of their nuclear power against the Soviet Union,
not to mention the United States, which figures in the "all armaths" plan,
described by General Ailleret before his untimely death, applies just as
cogently to the case of China. Nevertheless, China's potentiality for mis-
chief is for some reason--somewhat obscure so far as the manifest argu-
ment goes--supposed to be sufficient to warrant the construction of the
thin missile defense referred to above.

We notice here a certain disorderliness of thinking that goes on above
those levels which all would agree are appropriate for the application of
cost-effectiveness or systems analysis. What was the basis for justifying
the projection of the thin BMD system partly on the ground that China was
a less responsible adversary than the Soviet Union so far as concerned the
use of military force? On what evidence and whose expert analysis was
this finding based? Political judgments of such character and importance
can be carefully weighed and evaluated by persons of the appropriate po-
litical expertise and sensitivity, but the patterns for doing so systemati-
cally seem not yet to be established in government practice. The Chinese
have said and done many foolish things, but where have they shown the
tendency to mad abandon in their use of military force beyond their fron-
tiers which is presupposed by those who advocate the thin defense--the
justification of which must also presuppose a form of Chinese nuclear
missile attack that is technologically primitive, i.e., sans decoys? At
least one student of Chinese affairs has, apparently without major dispute
from colleagues in his field, cogently argued the case that the Chinese
Communists have always shown appropriate circumspection and indeed
caution in the external use of military power.⁴

None of this would matter very much if the thin BMD defense would
really stay as thin and as cheap as some of its advocates claim, but if
the recent restatement by Mr. Clifford of Mr. McNamara's proposal

4. David P. Mozingo, "Containment in Asia," *World Politics*, April, 1967, pp. 361-377.

33

and the Senate support thereof do not actually prod the Russians into the
appropriate arms control agreement--which the Russian response to the
Senate's voting the funds gives us some reason to hope it may--then there
are several reasons for predicting with relatively high confidence that the
thin defense would soon become a thick and enormously expensive one,
and that it would probably have mischievous political consequences as well.

My third major point concerns a phenomenon, related to the one just
discussed, which is very well known but is very far from being well under-
stood. We have witnessed, for what is surely the first time in history, a
huge development and growth of outlandishly powerful weapons systems
which are sealed off from use but not yet from utility. How much are
they really sealed off from possible use? What utility do they neverthe-
less continue to have? When provided in the lavish manner in which they
are provided and developed in the United States, strategic nuclear forces
are exceedingly costly. If we should add a large anti-missile defense to
our existing anti-bomber defense and retain our offensive nuclear capa-
bilities in anything like the configuration that they have today, the cost
of maintaining both the offensive and defensive sides of the strategic nu-
clear capability in the United States may come to approximate what we
are currently spending each year on the Vietnam war. We could bear it,
but who should want to?

I have been speaking thus far only of strategic capabilities; but we also
have tactical nuclear capabilities, which, according to official reports,
are already large and still growing and which appear to be sealed off from
use to only a slightly lesser degree than the strategic nuclear weaponry.
Everyone, of course, agrees that for the United States huge expenditures
on these tremendous and all-too-powerful forces are indispensable. The
debate of some few years ago on the question of minimum or finite deter-
rence seems to have petered out--or rather to have been replaced by a
debate on the question of whether it is really necessary or even meaning-
fully advantageous to maintain a substantial numerical superiority over
the Soviet Union if that country should choose to challenge our existing
superiority, as she appears to have been doing of late. The jargon of de-
bate has given us such barbaric terms as "overkill," "assured destruction,"
and several similar unappetizing word figures. On the whole, however, I
would submit that on these issues there has been much dogmatism but
little searching inquiry. How much are all these weapons systems really
sealed off from use in war, and under what situations might they become
unsealed? Almost everyone seems to be agreed that the cement should
be very strong indeed, but should it mean effectively a promise of non-
use under almost any circumstances? If so, the utility of these systems-
in-being will inevitably be much diminished, and that utility is presently

34

high. They make major war between the superpowers and between their respective alliance systems certainly much less likely than without them and perhaps critically so.

The vital question, however, is: How much utility have these capabilities exerted in deterring much lesser conflicts? This is the area in which I feel we have sustained a real failure in our efforts to understand the issues. All the diplomatic pressure by the United States on her allies since 1961 to build up their conventional forces, slackened within the last two or three years only because the allies refused to heed these admonitions and demands (and recently resumed, or rather exhumed, in the wake of the Czechoslovakian misfortune) has been based on the assumption that our large nuclear capabilities had inadequate utility in deterring less than major wars and were not even proof against the occurrence of major wars on the conventional level. Much of this pressure was not simply an attempt to interpret probabilities but rather to strengthen that cement which would keep nuclear capabilities totally and completely out of use. Many relevant propositions have been urged simply as articles of faith, with a minimum of hard, cold analysis. A simple and familiar example will serve to clarify my meaning. What was essentially a leading question was often put in the form: Suppose the Russians and their allies make a massive attack on western Europe without using nuclear weapons? This was presumed to be enough to justify building up large conventional forces. Hardly anyone, however, asked and then proceeded to work on the quite researchable question: Is it at all possible for the Russians to think of doing such a thing in the face of American and allied forces possessing huge nuclear capabilities?

To be sure, analyses in areas of this kind do not yield hard and fast figures, which can be neatly portrayed in graphs on charts. Those who produced numbers on charts have enjoyed a better hearing in recent years than those who were merely reflective and who asked relevant and penetrating questions. My friend and former colleague at RAND, Dr. Amrom Katz, has said that the trouble with charts is that one can present only data on them, usually in the form of numbers, and that therefore the motivation to produce charts tends to become an incentive to gather data because of their availability rather than because of their relevance.⁵

Thus, while we have relatively rigorous and disciplined thinking at the mostly tactical levels at which systems analysis are applicable, the tolerance for sloppy thinking appears to be at least as great as ever the moment

5. Amrom H. Katz, "The Short Run and the Long Walk," *Air Force*, June, 1967.

35

we spill over into those areas of inquiry where systems analysis, by common agreement among the best practitioners of the art (e.g., Charles J. Hitch), has no real applicability. As it happens, these are the areas where we find all the really tough and important strategic and political questions. I am assuredly not suggesting that the questions that the new quantitative techniques help to solve are not important, I am suggesting rather that generally they prove to be of much lesser importance than the questions which normally are answered out of the simplest kind of intuition and bias. The point would not be worth making except that I do happen to believe that a great deal more rigor is possible in what are significantly enough often called the "soft" areas.

To be sure, the appearance of a new problem--and the questions of choice which arose following World War II with respect to new weapons systems had the dimensions of an historically new problem--had a greatly stimulating effect in producing a new kind of skill. People who had the requisite training for developing into systems analysts might not have become interested in strategic questions at all if these new problems, and the research institutions for solving them, had not come forward. On the other hand, a prestige factor has been involved, and what should have been supplementary talent tended in fact to become preemptive of the field of strategic study. Under the seven critical years of the regime of Mr. McNamara, something like the effect I am describing took place in the United States.

The demands for figures, and for new ways of using computers, are relatively easily met. I understand that something called music is now being composed by computers. No doubt I should try to hear some before passing judgment on it, but I always have felt that both the composing of and the listening to music were a deeply personal kind of communication. The fact that machines have now intruded into this process suggests to me only that it has become extremely fashionable to find new and additional ways--the farther out the better--of exercising these machines. One is always interested in useful work, but not in make-work projects.

I turn now to some relevant considerations of the Vietnam experience. What makes Vietnam especially germane to our discussion today is that a vast American technological superiority in practically every department has turned out to be of much lesser value than we had expected and sometimes even dysfunctional. By dysfunctional I mean, for example, that we sometimes fix our attention on ways for utilizing our technological superiority rather than on methods of solving the tactical problem. One result is that the Air Force and the Navy's air arm compete with each other to produce high sortie rates. When we begin to put an emphasis on sortie rates and on weight of bombs and shells dropped, we are not only tearing up

36

real estate needlessly but also requiring additional services of supply to
maintain those rates of expenditure.

The problem seems to be intensified, as Dr. Katz has also pointed out, by the fact that there is no front line to bring both sides into common agreement on how they are doing. When a front line is moving backwards or forwards, both sides know who at the moment is winning or losing. But the kind of war we have been fighting in Vietnam is one in which our "winning" is demonstrated by the use of charts containing data. These data may or may not be accurate and they may or may not be terribly relevant. The enemy is probably using a very different kind of criteria for determining gain or loss from what we are using. This is something beyond what is generally meant by a non-zero sum game.

Although the fighting still continues, we cannot wait for its end to begin organizing our thinking about what has gone wrong in Vietnam. The effects of our enormous frustration in that land will long influence United States military and diplomatic policies elsewhere. Some of these effects will no doubt be beneficial. A more realistic appraisal of our true capabilities is always to the good; but we have probably experienced a real constriction of those capabilities rather than merely a clarification of them. The political disunity within the United States which is so largely attributable to the war in Vietnam, and the disaster which has overtaken President Johnson as a result of his personal commitment and involvement, will not soon be forgotten by his successors.

I cannot presume to know all the important things that have gone wrong in Vietnam, but I don't doubt we can group most of them under the heading of "political misjudgment." Clausewitz did his best to warn us against neglecting the political dimension in strategy, but that was a long time ago. It may not be fair to blame this neglect of political considerations upon our preoccupation with technology and with the various analytical skills we have developed, but it is remarkable how few of the pitfalls we have encountered in Vietnam were taken into account in the kinds of war games, scenarios, and cost-effectiveness analyses done at places like RAND over the past twenty years. Nobody engaged in these pursuits warned us of the pitfalls involved in attempting to support through military action a regime or series of regimes which show a high common denominator of corruption and ineptitude and which have in any case failed utterly to attract the allegiance of the people. Certainly no one ever warned us about the possibility of getting into a bind where we could neither escalate, nor deescalate, nor extricate ourselves from an impossible situation; war games always assumed in these matters wide latitudes of choice. Nor do I remember that we ever took into account what frustration from denial of victory or at least of clearly visible progress might mean with respect to the attitudes

37

of the American people in supporting such a war, and also the attitudes
of other peoples who were simply witnessing what was going on. We
had in fact some warning in the Korean experience.

One of the great weaknesses of our Vietnamese military policy is that
is has been based on the draft. As both a parent and a teacher I have
seen at first hand how insidiously the draft affects the plans and out-
looks of the young men who are subject to it. It does not depreciate them
to surmise that most of their moral indignation over our Vietnamese
adventure has been connected with the draft. There are, indeed, other
reasons for being concerned with real moral issues in Vietnam, one
certainly being the effects upon the Vietnamese people of the prolonga-
tion of the war, inherent in denying victory to the Communists. Even
the extent of this prolongation, however, is to some degree draft-
connected, for the draft accounts for the one-year rotation system,
which has been extremely costly to our military effectiveness. The
United States can surely afford a professional army where the incentive
to enlist is higher pay. We are now spending about thirty billion dollars
per year in Vietnam, which amounts to about $60,000 for each military
person we have in that country. That leaves a good deal of room for
increased pay, especially if we get direct and disproportionate increases
in efficiency as a result of being able to lengthen periods of rotation or
to dispense with rotation altogether. This is really a cost-effectiveness
issue.

Incidentally, the $30 billion annually amounts to some $100,000 for
each North Vietnamese or Viet Cong fighting man engaged in the war. I
am not speaking here of enemy casualties, which cost astronomical
figures to produce, but simply of soldiers in the field. War seems al-
ways to confine us to the costliest possible way of producing (or failing
to produce) a desired result.

I am trying (not very successfully, I am afraid) to avoid a judgment as
to whether it was or was not a correct policy to become committed in the
first place. One would have to consider several questions that we do not
have time for here. The effort in any case would be a digression. How-
ever, I do have a strong allegiance to the idea that failures of the kind we
have experienced thus far should be predictable. Some persons did in
fact predict failure, and for approximately the right reasons.⁶ Before

6. Two such persons I can mention are Professor John Kenneth Galbraith, who while he was ambassador to India warned President Kennedy against involvement, and Dr. Guy Pauker of the Social Science Division of the RAND Corporation.

38

committing U.S. combat troops we had rich opportunities for informing
ourselves about the situation in Vietnam, and actually since that time
we have had few surprises from the environment. The major surprise
is that the environment has changed so little. Naturally, to avoid pre-
dictable failure means either to avoid the commitment altogether or to
change the methods normally used for fulfilling such a commitment.
Our experience in shaking bureaucratic structures in order to bring
about a change in methods does not warrant optimism about the results
of such attempts. It is also relevant that our declining to invade North
Vietnam--in line with the concept of "sanctuary" which is so conspicuous
a part of modern limited-war theory--affected the conditions of the war
in a most fundamental way, and inasmuch as we were making that choice
we should have had some awareness of the probable penalties. The
restraint was, surely, a correct one; what was incorrect was our failing
to appreciate the military burden it entailed.

Another problem that has been acute concerning Vietnam has been the "information gap," which again flies in the face of a marked advance in the technology of communications. The Vietnam war is reported daily on the television screens of America, with more than enough views, in color, of the fighting, the killing, and the destruction. It is surely the first war in history that has been so reported. Yet it is a war in which the public, including that part of it which is usually highly informed, seems to be at a loss not only about the issues but about the facts of the situation. The government, with its own monumental but bureaucratic sources of information, which tend to overwhelm or at least displace outside and contradictory sources, is probably differently confused rather than less confused. The books, articles, and shorter news reports on the war are by now voluminous, but to get some detached view of what is really going on is extraordinarily difficult, even among the few who try. The question of stopping the remaining bombing in North Vietnam has now become a hot election issue, yet probably not one in a thousand voters has any idea what kind of bombing is involved, or where it takes place.

I know how partial and inadequate is this synopsis of lessons we should
be deriving from Vietnam. I intend it as much to illustrate as to im-
plement remarks made earlier in this paper. Nevertheless, what I have
called "the political dimension" is remarkably visible in Vietnam. So
is the fact that a virtually complete monopoly of air power and a great
preponderance of every other form of war materiel have brought us only
the conviction that we cannot escape the quagmire through military
defeat, as the French did. Also, if pride goeth before a fall, members
of the American strategic fraternity have had both their pride and their

39

fall. Let us hope we recognize the fall for what it is and do not ration-
alize away its benefits.

A friend said to me recently that history teaches us only how to fight past wars. In a very real sense that is true, precisely because of the rapid advance of technology. Nevertheless, I suspect that the wisdom that the same friend brings to his own interpretation of our military needs is in large measure based on his own experience with military and associated bureaucracies, in other words, on recent history as it has funnelled through his personal experience. I think history is of far greater value than my friend allows, but it obviously has to be another kind of history than the one we are accustomed to. In any case, we learn from history that while battles and campaigns have sometimes been won largely with the help of clever technological devices, others have been quite unaffected by considerable technological superiority. We should learn that although technology amounts to very much indeed-- it after all is what separates the rich and the powerful from those who are neither--it falls very short of being the name of the game which is strategy.

40

ENDING A WAR: IS THE KOREAN LESSON
VALID FOR VIETNAM?

Bernard Brodie

In the spring of 1951 United Nations forces launched an offensive against the combined Red Chinese and North Korean armies, jumping off from the line deep into South Korea to which the Chinese had driven us following their massive intervention in the previous November. The new U.N. offensive made good progress from the start. The Red armies fell back as the U.N. forces gathered momentum, until the battleline was once again in the area of the 38th parallel which had originally divided North and South Korea.

At this point a few words by Soviet Ambassador Jacob Malik in the United Nations headquarters in New York had an effect which was beyond the power of the retreating Red armies. Mr. Malik suggested that the North Koreans and their Chinese allies might now be prepared to negotiate. President Truman, urged by many around him and also by our British ally, Prime Minister Clement Attlee, immediately gave orders to halt the United Nations offensive. This was to be a gesture to make it easier for the other side to negotiate.

At about that time, Dr. Herbert Goldhamer of the RAND Corporation, who had been involved in POW interrogation, sent a memorandum to his chief which vividly described the deep morale crisis that had developed among the Red armies during our offensive. Prisoners confirmed our observation of efforts at defection, and painted a picture of advanced OPERATION. This memorandum was forwarded to the Tokyo headquarters of General Matthew B. Ridgway where it apparently created a sensation. It had not been known that the enemy was so badly off. However, the

* A slightly condensed version of this paper was originally published under the title "Paying in Full for Limited War," in the _Los Angeles Times_, Thursday, Oct. 17, 1968.

41

orders to stop the offensive had already taken effect, and the Red armies were permitted to recover. Although there were some limited U.N. attacks afterward, the pressure was never fully reapplied.

In my *Strategy in the Missile Age*, published in 1959, I presented the story described above and added the following comment: "We paid bitterly for that error in the great prolongation of negotiations, in the unsatisfactory terms of settlement, and above all in the disillusionment and distaste which the American people developed as the main emotional residue of their experience with limited war." Indeed, during the negotiations, which dragged on for over two years, we lost more American lives to enemy fire than we had lost in the more intensive hostilities preceding the negotiations, but that intensive and mobile stage had lasted under a year.

What we did in Korea was a radical departure from previous practice-- and the new experiment proved disastrous. Relieved of pressure the Chinese armies quickly recovered, and their political leaders were freed of any inducement to come to terms. Only a slightly veiled threat in mid-1953 by the newly installed President Eisenhower that he might be forced to use nulcear weapons in a renewed U.N. offensive moved the Communists finally to agree to an armistice on what was essentially the *status quo ante bellum*. Something like two divisions of American troops were left permanently in South Korea, and in this year of 1968 the situation in Korea seems to be heating up again to add to our other troubles.

The question now is: What does this experience with Korea suggest to us concerning the termination of war in Vietnam? The moment we ask that question we are reminded again that historical precedents are rarely sufficiently like present situations to warrant the wholly mechanical application of a lesson derived from a previous experience.

Some parallels with the Korean experience, however, there undoubtedly are. Although it is extremely difficult to get an accurate appraisal of the opponent's predicament, it is pretty obvious that he must be hurting. Our government recently announced that the number of enemy killed in action in Vietnam had now passed the 400,000 mark. Such a figure is not to be taken on faith given the confused nature of the reporting, but if we reduce it by half or even more, it still must be a large number for a small country. Reports in recent months have consistently pointed out the much reduced role of the Viet Cong as compared with North Vietnamese troops. There has also been a marked rise in the rate of defections, both from the Viet Cong and especially from the North Vietnamese. People who defect usually believe that their side is losing. This would seem to be the time for Americans to increase their pressure rather than to relax it.

42

But whether we are in a position to increase it effectively is another matter. And here we see surfacing the contrasts with the Korean situation of seventeen years ago. The issues are essentially political rather than military, but this is usually a false distinction in any case and is vitiated in the case of Vietnam. Clausewitz told us 140 years ago that political considerations must dominate strategy, but though we have tended to forget it in the intervening time, we are not permitted any longer to forget it in Vietnam.

We must observe several striking factors, not necessarily in the order of their importance.

First, there has never been in Vietnam, as there was in Korea, a front line, the movement of which backwards or forwards tends to signal the same message to both sides about who is at the moment winning or losing. We have multiple criteria for estimating our gains or losses, and the enemy is probably preoccupied with quite other criteria--certainly including what is happening within the United States. Both sides may be right in thinking they are winning according to their respective criteria, but the opponent may have the better set. The contrast here too with Vietnam is obvious. When President Johnson introduced American combat troops (complementing the 16,000 American military advisers) early in 1965, he felt constrained to deny that there had been a radical change in the character of the war.

Also, we have ourselves from the beginning imposed such a marked restraint upon our military action that the initiative has perforce been left to the enemy. For one thing, we have never even threatened to invade North Vietnam. For two years we conducted a restrained and selective bombing in the north but that has now been stopped. All that is left is some strictly interdiction bombing in and just north of the so-called "demilitarized zone." The territory of North Vietnam is a total "sanctuary," and much of South Vietnam is effectively so. This means that the North Vietnamese forces largely make the judgment when and where to fight, and if they have too rough a time of it they can retire to heal their wounds and recover. We can impose heavy casualties on them, but probably not heavy enough to injure critically their staying power.

Nor is there much likelihood today that we can go back up the escalation ladder to levels of fighting intensity not previously approached in this war. Of the various presidential and vice-presidential candidates in the field today, probably only General Curtis LeMay would have sufficient insensitivity to public opinion at home and abroad to make the really savage ripostes that could make the North Vietnamese sue for peace. General LeMay is clearly not an adherent of the view that politics must

43

dominate strategy. He is a complete prisoner of the traditional Air Force view that air power overwhelms, and on the cheap. He would hardly favor an invasion of North Vietnam but rather a rapidly ascending rate of bombing, perhaps intended to give the opponent every reason to fear our use of nuclear weapons if he did not opt for peace on our terms. There is reason to suppose that such a strategy would work if we could bring ourselves to apply it, and there is relatively little likelihood that the Chinese or the Russians would intervene against us in a war that had suddenly become so dangerous. However, the main trouble, apart from the absence of guarantees, is that all possible remaining political motives for fighting this war would go down the drain. General LeMay, who complains that other people do not understand air power, does not understand the necessity for a reasonable match between political ends and military means in this or any other war, and therefore he does not really understand air power.

We come back basically to the political constraints that have been operative all along and have now become critical. World opinion has been overwhelmingly against our intervention, and would be aghast at our returning to a policy of drastic escalation, especially if pointed toward the use of nuclear weapons. However, world opinion, though very important, is for a superpower like the United States somewhat less critical than opinion at home.

It has not been easy until quite recently to trace the ebb and flow of public attitudes within the United States concerning the Vietnam war. But within the last few months it has become abundantly clear that an overwhelming majority of Americans is now fed up with our continuing entanglement in Vietnam, and most consider our intervention to have been a mistake from the start--which is not to say that they are yet ready to see a simple abandonment of our commitment.

Perhaps equally important to the swiftly rising trend of the majority towards rejection of the war has been a persistent and intense opposition of two special classes. One is the young people, whose idealism may well be qualified by a dislike for the draft but who nevertheless have in large numbers been moved to a state of open rebellion. The other group is the intellectuals, largely associated with universities, whose alienation has grown over the last two years. Intellectuals, whether bona fide or pseudo, are relatively small in numbers compared with the rest of the population, but their influence gains weight by their articulateness.

These groups especially, and now the majority of the American public, have proved unable to accept the Administration's justification of its war policy. Whether or not the basic rationalizations of all the Administrations since Eisenhower's for getting more deeply involved in Indochina made

44

sense, the fact is that the present Administration has lost its debate with
the people concerning those views, which are mostly notions bound up in
the so-called "Domino Theory."

Unquestionably, it is mostly frustration that is at the root of the public's rejection of the government's war aims and war policies. Frustration, which is to say military failure, also accounts for the great growth of the feeling that the war is basically immoral. Actually, failure does contribute considerably to creating a real moral issue, simply by the fact that it results in the prolongation of the war and thus the suffering of the Vietnamese people.

This leads us to what is perhaps the basic difference between the situation today and that of 1951 or even 1953. We are very much farther down the course now than we were then. The great military power of the United States has been applied to the coercion of a third-rate power and, under special circumstances, has been found wanting. That the failure stems largely from a policy of restraint does not mean that that policy can now be reversed. In view of our often expounded war aims, restraint was in any case essential from the beginning. The choice was between non-intervention and intervention with restraint, not between acceptance or rejection of restraint. In any case, the people of the country are bewildered at what has happened, and they want out.

We may be told that the government of Syngman Rhee in Korea was just as corrupt and as oppressive as the successive regimes which have ruled South Vietnam, including the present one under General Thieu. The fact is that in 1968 we have had plenty of time to smell and to contemplate that corruption and ineptitude, which we had not had by 1951. Besides, the government of Rhee was hardly so inept as the successive regimes which we have called governments in South Vietnam.

Some may not know it, but it is much more difficult for anyone to threaten the use of nuclear weapons in 1968 than it was in 1953, especially where there is no real threat to the existence of ourselves or our major allies. Mr. Nixon will enter office with far less prestige than Eisenhower had when he took up the power of the Presidency in 1953. Mr. Nixon will understand fully that he must terminate the war rapidly, but he will also understand, I expect and trust, that he cannot do it by any threat of massive re-escalation opening toward anything so horrible as the possibility of using nuclear weapons on North Vietnamese cities.

We do indeed have something to bargain with, above all the continuing American presence in Vietnam, which Hanoi and also much of South Vietnam would gladly do without. But in terms of what our original war aims were, it is probably not enough. If that is so, these aims must now be drastically reduced.

45

THEORIES ON THE CAUSES OF WAR

Bernard Brodie

Nothing in the habits of man seems more ancient than war, nor more
modern. This persistence is remarkable, because the very words
"ancient" and "modern" conjure up fabulous changes in the environment--
technological, cultural, and political.

War itself has also changed, culturally as well as technologically.
The pursuit of glory, for example, is not nearly so much a part of it as
it once was, even recently. Nevertheless, there have remained through-
out certain identifiable characteristics which justify us at least in using
the same label, "war," to denote what we are talking about. Among
these characteristics are an explicit sanctioning of very large-scale
violence, which is practiced by well organized groups, usually in a
fashion ruled by convention, and obedient also to certain well-defined
circumscribing or limiting factors--for example, customs relating to
the humane treatment of prisoners of war. Customary too are such
remarkable traits as a clear beginning and a clear ending--which separate
periods of war from what are longer, usually much longer, periods of
equally remarkable amicability.

It is easy to jump to the conclusion that this persistence of something
which changes and yet remains identifiable as war only proves that there
is something in human nature which requires it, or at least accounts for
it. Well, perhaps there is. We shall want to examine this notion later
on, but we ought at once to recognize that there are some cultures which
do not practice or even know war, that even within our own nation-state
culture there are some states which for all practical purposes never
engage in it, and that those which do may have very long periods--forty
or fifty years or more--without war. Also, where war exists it operates
through and among many institutional and bureaucratic elements which
tend to filter out the thing we call human nature. It is also obvious that
certain other forms of human behavior, similar or dissimilar to war,
have sometimes existed for extremely long periods of time only at last

46

to disappear suddenly, or at least be modified out of recognizable relation-
ship to the original custom. I have in mind, for example, such a custom
as dueling, with its elaborate and rigid code, which happened to be an
expression of human nature restricted mainly to the upper classes, and
which took a very heavy toll of these classes for many centuries.

Anyway, despite the persistence, frequency, and extreme costliness
of war, our knowledge of its basic causes is slight and marginal. Also,
as I shall try to make clear presently, what purports to be knowledge is
often a fabric of the most conspicuous error. Even more astonishingly,
few persons seem at present even to be trying in any rigorous and system-
atic fashion to find out why men fight wars. There are, as there have
always been, plenty of offhand declarations about what causes war, most
of them falling into a number of quite familiar patterns, but the real
testing of one concept against another, insofar as it is possible to do so,
seems presently to be out of fashion.

It was very much in fashion in the period between the two world wars,
but in the academic or scholarly world practices and pursuits often go
in and out of fashion for reasons that are not always rational or even
identifiable. I am talking now about theories explaining or pretending
to explain war as a phenomenon, rather than about the explanations given
for the origins for particular wars. The latter is the work of historians,
who, incidentally, have tended to make the causes of particular wars
appear a good deal more rational than was warranted by the fact that
very fallible and usually mediocre men were responsible for tripping
them off. Actually, a moment's reflection will suggest that it is rather
difficult to find particular causes for any given war when we are so much
at a loss to understand the underlying factors through which the particular
ones must operate. Without that knowledge we may easily fasten our
attention on the wrong things.

Those specific elements in a situation which one observer might con-
sider of considerable importance are ignored by others, perhaps includ-
ing the mass of historians, either because they think those elements are
totally irrelevant or because they have been too little noticed. For
example, in what I have read about Kaiser Wilhelm II, I should deduce
that he was a man of pronounced homosexual tendencies, and that would
seem to help explain certain clearly aberrant aspects of his behavior
prior to and during the crisis of 1914. Yet I know very few historians
who have noticed that fact and fewer still who consider it relevant. I
should not want to exaggerate its relevance or importance, but it may
help account for the exceptional braggadocio and instability conspicuous
in the Kaiser's character and in so much of his intervention in diplomacy.
At least I can imagine it being as important in the world crisis leading

47

to the guns of August as various other factors which have been much more noted.

I should like now to take up a number of general theories about causation of war which have been popular during the last thirty or forty years. This theorizing can be fitted into four general categories: economic, psychological, political, and historical or specific. The last mentioned hardly belongs in this talk, because I want to emphasize here basic causation of war rather than specific causes of specific wars. However, there is a tendency to find in some alleged causes of specific wars lessons of general applicability. For example, the naval race between Germany and Britain prior to 1914 is supposed to have played a major role in the causes of World War I, or at least of the British intervention in that war, and it therefore has been used ever since as a perennial example of the danger of arms races.

A kind of theorizing which was particularly popular during the twenties and thirties and which still has echoes today belongs within my "economic" classification, though it happens that few if any economists of stature ever attached much importance to it. It was a species of Marxian or rather neo-Marxian theory, though the people who advanced it most ardently rarely considered themselves Marxians.

The original Marxian idea was that not individual capitalists but the system of capitalism itself was responsible for causing war. In the Marxian view, when all nations would be communist there would no longer be wars. During the recent Czechoslovakian crisis we did in fact see one way in which war is avoided between two communist powers, that is by one moving in with such overwhelming strength that the victim considers it futile to resist. That is surely not what Marx had in mind, but perhaps we shall live to see a test of the true Marxian gospel in a confrontation between the Soviet Union and China. I hope not, because I do not have that much interest in seeing a theory disproved. Nevertheless, the present tension between those countries is interesting for theoretical as well as tactical reasons.

However, the theory that was popular in the twenties and thirties was not Marxian in this aloof sense. It blamed not capitalism but rather some selected capitalists, particularly--though this was a somewhat later development--those entrepreneurs who were "merchants of death," that is to say manufacturers of arms and munitions. In other words, it was essentially a "scandal school" or "witch hunt" theory.

Those who wrote books and tracts in support of this thesis included some quite distinguished or at least well-known people. Perhaps some of you will remember the names of P. T. Moon, Harry Elmer Barnes,

48

Charles Beard, and Walter Millis (who died only a few weeks ago), and of course Bertrand Russell. In general, this theory, if it can be called such, was an attempt to expose the hidden economic incentives of competitive imperialism which, as was well known or at least assumed, was the major factor in producing wars.

The pattern went something like this: A capitalist would invest heavily in some backward area, mostly to exploit natives and create markets, and when he encountered the competition of foreign capitalists, he would get his government to support him with threats or actual use of force. Naturally, the foreign entrepreneurs would do the same and the result would be a confrontation between governments. Sometimes it was not even the entrepreneur's own government that allegedly pulled the chestnuts out of the fire. For example, Napoleon III was supposed to have intervened in Mexico in support of the claims of a Herr Jaecker, who was actually a Swiss national. Question: *Why* should Napoleon III have been so willing to stick his neck so far out in support of the claims of a Swiss? Further question: *Why* should he do so even for a French national? The "why" is after all important, and the answering of it should be part of the explanation.

There was a group of what were supposed to be well-known instances of like nature, like the machinations of the Mannesmann brothers in Morocco, which were supposed to have greatly heated up the fires of controversy between Germany and France. There was also the Yalu River dispute in the Far East, in which Russian private investments in the Yalu River area were supposed to have touched off the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, which proved so disastrous for the Russian monarchy.

Later on, as I indicated, the emphasis fell on the munitions makers. Walter Millis wrote a book called *The Road to War*, which happened to be one of my assignments in a course I took as a graduate student and which explained the U.S. intervention in World War I primarily on the basis of the allegation that American munitions makers had committed themselves to heavy support of the Allies on a credit basis and then induced our government to protect their loans by going to war to prevent the collapse of the Allies. Our American Ambassador to Great Britain, Walter Hines Page, was supposed to have played an especially important role in this maneuver. To be skeptical of these explanations was to be thought simply naive.

In the late thirties, however, these theories began to take a real beating from the work of a few first-rate scholars who took the trouble to study some of the source material. One of them was the distinguished historian, William L. Langer, still flourishing I believe, who contributed an insightful and revealing book called *The Diplomacy of Imperialism, 1890-1902*,

49

published in 1935. He discovered that the sharp rivalry of the European powers in the building up of their empires during that period was due to quite different motivations from those the demonologists described. Another significant author was Herbert Feis, also still flourishing, who wrote a very significant book called *Europe, the World's Banker, 1870-1914* (1930). Then there was Professor Eugene Staley, who I think is still active at Stanford University and who produced a book entitled *War and the Private Investor* (1935). It was Staley's teacher, Professor Jacob Viner (also, I am happy to say, one of my own great teachers), then at the University of Chicago, who became suspicious of the fact that it was the same well-worn cases that were adduced over and over again to prove the scandal-school interpretation of the chain reaction from private investment to national crisis. Under Viner's guidance-- the book began as a doctoral dissertation--Staley began to look carefully into the facts surrounding each of the well-known cases, and found that the results were almost invariably an inversion of the alleged pattern. That is, where entrepreneurs were involved in internationally dangerous maneuvers abroad, it was usually their governments that had put them up to it in order to have what was at that time considered a respectable cover for governmental action. Thus, for example, it was the Russian court which was using for its own expansionist purposes those of its nationals who could be induced to invest in the timber of the Yalu River. Finally, there was that wonderful summing-up little book by the British economist, Lionel C. Robbins, *The Economic Causes of War* (1939), which utterly demolished the scandal-school approach for those who could read.

However, social science has the great disadvantage that its insights are conveyed by the use of words, sometimes many words, and usually badly written ones. Words of one author have to compete for attention with those of many other authors. Thus, even the best and most original works are often ignored. After all, Freud's greatest and most searching work, his *Interpretation of Dreams*, was originally published in only 700 copies, which it took years to sell. I think what really destroyed the scandal-school theory, at least for the thirties and forties, was the advent of Hitler and subsequently World War II. Though Hitler was in the beginning described as a front man for some nefarious German capitalists, this interpretation was soon relegated to the place it deserved. The whole phenomenon of Hitler and World War II simply did not fit the theories which had been so popular. Even the attribution of supreme evil to the munitions makers, which had stimulated inquiries of the Nye Committee in 1934 and which had moved the head of the DuPont family to declare that his firm would no longer engage in any kind of munitions manufacture because he did not want to spend the rest of his life proving

50

that he had not caused the war which might come soon, tended to fall
by the wayside.

Most unfortunately the old idea was given new life by the valedictory
speECH of President Eisenhower, where he warned his countrymen to
beware of what he called the "military-industrial complex," without
telling us either what he meant by the phrase or what that complex was
supposed to be guilty of.

Obviously, there are companies which make products that the military
use, whether arms or household goods. Obviously too, these companies
want to sell their wares, even if the chief buyer is the Government, which
happens often to be a rather difficult customer to deal with. Some of
those companies will engage in lobbying to be at least in part successful.
That this kind of activity has ever had a significant effect on American
foreign policy, however, particularly that kind of policy which might
produce a war, is a consideration of quite different significance. Even
Mr. Juan Bosch, whom one would expect to be very sensitive to such
influence, declared after the unfortunate American intervention in the
Dominican Republic in 1965 that he saw no indication that our intervention
had been at all instigated by American financial interests.

Let us consider a few relevant and obvious facts. In the first place,
companies in the same industry are usually competing primarily with
each other. The firm known as General Dynamics was interested not
only in having the Government buy what later became the F-111, but
was specially interested in winning the contract over Boeing. Actually,
Boeing was probably lucky to have lost the contract, even though it spent
$25 million in the research and development attendant upon making its
bid. Second, the aircraft industry is rather exceptional in the degree
to which its products are oriented towards military use. Yet even the
major aircraft companies are primarily interested in cultivating their
civilian rather than their military business. Most of the very large
companies which are engaged in the production of some munitions are
usually enormously diversified, and have on the whole very little commit-
ment to that portion of their business which is military. I am told, for
example, that Dow Chemical Company, the prime supplier of napalm,
devotes about 0.5 percent of its entire manufacturing effort to the pro-
duction of that commodity. I am told also, and I fully believe it, that
the company would be glad to be rid of its commitment to making napalm
(its executives have undergone a good deal of harrassment because of it)
but that it continues to engage in its manufacture mostly out of a sense
of patriotic duty. Certainly Dow Chemical was one of the very many
companies engaged in military production whose stock advanced with the
sharp and prolonged rally in prices touched off by President Johnson's

51

announcement of March 31 that he was stopping the bombing of most of
North Vietnam and inviting President Ho Chi Minh to engage in negotia-
tions. Also, everyone on Wall Street agrees today that the end of the
Vietnam war would have a further bullish effect on practically all stock
prices (although this may already have been anticipated in recent weeks).

The idea that the continuance of the war is considered good for business,
and that this alleged result is responsible for its continuance, is a notion
as ridiculous as it is disgusting, yet many people do believe it. In our
own great newspaper, *The Daily Bruin*, the following sentence appeared
in an article of exactly a week ago. It said about Mr. Humphrey, the
day before he was defeated at the polls: "Moreover, his support of a
policy of sending thousands of U.S. workers and students to die in Viet-
nam so that Mobil Oil, Bank of America, and many others could make
fatter profits, shows that he is an enemy of the people." This notion
reaches a special height of preposterousness in mentioning a bank, which
is exactly the kind of financial institution which likes the war the least--
the severe credit crunch of 1966 was hardly favorable for them--but in
any case it is taken off a very dusty and antiquated scrapheap of discarded
ideas. How much easier life would be for us teachers if we didn't always
have to redispose of notions properly disposed of long ago!

It happens that we live in an era in which the most sensitive decisions
of government are kept secret for hardly more than a matter of months.
Books of memoirs which Meg Greenfield has described as the "kiss and
tell" type, like those of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Ted Sorensen, Roger
Hilsman, and General Maxwell Taylor, have revealed as well as criti-
cized the actions of presidents and cabinet members still in office. Even
General Eisenhower has given us some revealing memoirs of his tenure
in the presidency. There are also numerous articles, like that of the
late Robert Kennedy in the current issue (November 1968) of *McCall's*,
where he describes in detail the emotional as well as calculating atmos-
phere around President Kennedy in the Cuban missile crisis. These are
among the many non-clandestine ways of learning what is really going
on, and there are a lot of industrious people scrutinizing the records
and telling us what they find.

I have myself had some occasion in the past two decades to witness
some of the decision-making process at moderately high levels in the
departments of both State and Defense. I could prove what I have already
stated and what it is not at all necessary to prove, namely that represent-
atives of various industrial firms do a certain amount of lobbying to get
contracts. But I have never seen or read or heard the slightest real
evidence of any intervention of financial or industrial interests with

52

respect to such high policy decisions as those determining our inter-
ventions in Korea, Lebanon, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Viet-
nam. This is the kind of influence which members of government
would not let them have, and which they have shown no desire to acquire.
Nor do I remember seeing, hearing, or reading evidence of their stim-
ulating or guiding in any significant respect policy decisions concerning
procurement or use of various categories of armaments, including
decisions involving the use or non-use of napalm. The evidence to the
contrary is not only impressive, but overwhelming.

To cite one specific example among innumerable available ones: it
was not the (considerable) lobbying of North American Aircraft Corpo-
ration to sell their B-70, but the ardent desire of the Air Force to have
that bomber system that Mr. Robert McNamara had to contend with in
denying it to them. Those who witnessed that epic battle at close range
know that North American's propaganda was of zero influence on the
chief contenders and certainly in the outcome.

I turn next to that group of theories which might be called psycho-
logical, or more precisely, psychoanalytical. If there are those among
you who feel that we are now entering the area of pseudo-science, I
assure you that I do not share your feelings. At this date one should
hardly have to say so. The practice of psychoanalysis is now about
seventy years old, which means it has had thousands of practitioners,
some of them very brilliant indeed, and hundreds of thousands of patients.
I mention this only because some of my remarks may seem negative
about the field and about its practitioners, and I want you to be clear
that my overriding feeling about both is certainly not negative.

It is probably true that excessive intellectual modesty is not an
occupational disease of the psychoanalytic profession. They have very
much indeed to tell us about human behavior, and it is too easy to
believe that that is all one needs to know. I have heard speeches and
read papers by analysts who purported to tell us why men love war and
violence where I thought that the authors needed to know a good deal
more about facts not readily available in the clinical offices where they
spent so much of their time. Before we ask ourselves, for example,
why men love war, we ought to be clear that they really do, and it seems
to me that the evidence to support the notion that they do is very slender
and subject to all kinds of counter-indications.

Unquestionably, human emotions, including and perhaps especially
repressed emotions, are a terribly important part of the reason why
men resort to war or, being in an obviously unprofitable war, find it
so difficult to withdraw from its clutches. Emotions affect perception

53

as well as decisions and behavior, and they certainly affect the degree of rigidity we show about any of these. No doubt there is a good deal of aggression in the normal human being, especially the male human being, and no doubt there is also much repressed rage in some neurotic personalities who occasionally rise to commanding positions of power. There can hardly be any doubt that these factors are involved in the genesis of wars and in accounting for the intensity and especially the persistence with which they are often fought.

However, it is also obvious that war is a rather poor form of outlet for human aggression or rage. It has long been much too dangerous and too costly, and the object or intended victim is too impersonal and remote. Aggression and rage are always more suitably taken out on visible, tangible persons close at hand, who have a significant relationship to oneself, especially if the means of retaliation are circumscribed or limited. Also, it is more satisfying not to have the intervention of enormous policy-directed bureaucracies to over-organize the job, which is what happens in war. Besides, emotions like anger are usually press-ing in their demand for fulfillment against a target. The man who is struck across the face needs to strike back at once. If hours or days must intervene before he can do so, he is likely to have second thoughts and to balance his original motivations against considerations not origi-nally potent.

I am especially unimpressed by the current (though by no means new) habit of drawing analogies from the aggressive or otherwise antisocial behavior of animals. Animal behavior as compared with that of human beings has at least the benefits of relative simplicity and frankness of exposure, but until I see the counterpart in animal life of government bureaucracies, of customs and traditions by which foreign policy and other objectives are determined and pursued, and the ability to predict easily certain gross consequences from the reciprocal use of such gadgets as nuclear weapons, we are clearly wrong in pressing analogies too far.

There is also the simple and hard to negate fact that different political regimes do have conflicting objectives and interests, however foolishly or shrewdly those objectives and interests have been determined. Also, while the determination of the subjects to pursue those interests even through war clearly draws power from the emotions, it draws them also from intellectual conviction, which again may be faulty but is not neces-sarily psychologically irrational. I am speaking, for example, of the conviction of President Ho Chi Minh that Vietnam ought to be unified under the control of himself or his party, and that of three American Presidents that in this objective he should be opposed. Surely their minds have been fixed on the goals rather than on the expression of aggression.

54

In an article in the current issue (November 1968) of *The Atlantic Monthly* Professor Adam Yarmolinsky, who as Mr. McNamara's chief assistant was in a position to know, tells us how each stage of the escalation in the Vietnam war was decided upon without enthusiasm, and he tells us also something of the inertia of and the unquestioning obedience to outworn axioms that governed so many of the decisions. Perhaps without meaning to do so he advises us once again that one should always in studying the behavior of governments, be prepared to acknowledge a good deal of ignorance and perverseness of judgment as well as the influence of emotions.

Moreover, psychological theories do not adjust easily to man's considerable adjustment to the enormous changes in the character of war that have taken place in modern times and especially over the last twenty-five years. Nuclear weapons have clearly made a critical difference in man's proclivity for war, because almost anyone has enough sense to know that they are very dangerous. There are no doubt other factors of comparable influence, including man's experience with two world wars. One notices too that some nations formerly warlike have been pacific for centuries, like Denmark or Sweden, not because of changes either in the genes or in the emotions of the inhabitants, but because of changes in the circumstances surrounding those states.

If only enough persons who really were at home in the world of psychoanalysis, which is to say who understood deeply the inner springs of human motivation or compulsion residing in the unconscious, could take the time to study intensively the circumstances pertaining to some historic crises of confrontation and war, we should undoubtedly get some significant insights that are presently denied us. But, as I indicated earlier, the people with the appropriate equipment have to be prepared to acknowledge the existence both of problems and of data of which they are presently ignorant, and to be ready to take the time and make the effort to reduce their ignorance in those spheres. Thus far, it has not happened to any noticeable extent. From the other side, a few historians and political scientists have managed to acquire more than a bowing acquaintance with psychoanalysis, perhaps even through having contributed substantially to the income of one or more analysts. A few even use it effectively in their work. But they are very few, and anyway, in this area the distance between amateur and professional is formidable.

As we turn now to political theories of war causation, we come to what is essentially a melange of notions and ideas which have in common only the fact that they have rarely been thought through. On the utopian side we have the idea of "world government" as a cure positive for the greatest scourge of mankind. The idea makes strange bedfellows. I doubt whether

55

Drs. Edward Teller and Linus Pauling are agreed politically on anything but the necessity of world government.

I have nothing in principle against world government, except that I should always want to know exactly what functions are to be governed and by whom. But I see all kinds of evidence in the political behavior of mankind which makes me put an extremely low probability on its being realized within the next century or so--unless, of course, we first have a large-scale thermonuclear war, after which I should expect to see the world hegemony of a single state. This might indeed be a form of world government, but hardly in the utopian sense.

One of the things importantly wrong with world government is that no one seems to want it. That is, no one seems to be willing even to begin paying the price for having it. In saying so, I do not mean to imply that they should. There are good reasons as well as bad why people do not want world government, and in my opinion the good reasons easily pre-dominate. The world is full of a multitude of different people, and considering how imperfectly we manage to govern ourselves, I should not like to see any important part of our government put in the hands of peoples who are remote from us in place and understanding and who have very much less of the advantages of education and material well-being that we possess. Reading the debates that go on in the United Nations General Assembly can be a very sobering experience. I am perfectly willing to have in the United Nations a place where some of the so-called emerging nations should have a chance to express their views, and I can even imagine certain special instances where it might do us good if they had a greater influence on our affairs. But in order for a world government to be of any use, we have to think of the supra-national government having in the net a very large influence, and a persisting one, upon its subject peoples or nations.

Actually, there is a good deal of unifying of nations going on in the world, with or without the benefit of formal organization. The borders between the nations of western Europe are certainly not what they once were. I have a deep conviction that these nations have put war between themselves permanently behind them, and if so, that is a great change from the past.

Related to the idea of world government is that which holds nationalism to be invariably a bad or dirty thing. This idea was particularly prevalent before World War II, when all wars seemed to be the result of excessive nationalism. During World War II, however, we applauded that nationalism which enabled some nations to organize a resistance against the Nazi invader. In Vietnam today we deplore the weakness

56

of the feeling of nationalism among the people of the south, which is
one of the factors which prevents them from unifying around their gov-
ernment. The other major factor is that the only governments they
have been able to produce are hardly worth such rallying. The latter
condition is actually to some degree a product of the former. Peoples
lacking in any kind of real national feeling--which is after all the major
unifying influence that produces the largest political entities of our time--
are not likely to produce good governments.

There had also been a good deal of talk of how arms races produce wars. I don't doubt that arms races are often an exacerbating influence in an already tense political situation. I suppose the arms races between the Israelis and their Arab enemies have caused anxieties on both sides, but hardly anyone would doubt that the anxieties would already be there anyway, and a good deal of hostilities to boot. The same has been true of historical arms races like the naval race I mentioned earlier between Great Britain and Germany prior to World War I. It is always a nice question whether arms races are more the product of tensions than the cause of them, and historically one sees some mild arms races which were engendered mostly by technological change and which were neither stimulated by very much tension nor productive of it. I have in mind, for example, the modest kind of competition in naval building that attended the fantastically rapid changes in naval armaments in the latter part of the 19th century. This kind of competition is very little noted by historians, and properly so, because it had little influence on international politics.

Today we have to be concerned about arms races with the Soviet Union,
but mostly, I think, in order to save vast and possibly wasteful expendi-
tures rather than to save our lives. The point is highly relevant with
respect to the impending development of a huge new anti-ballistic missile
defense. If such a thing goes forward, as I fear it will--especially with
the defeat of Mr. Humphrey who was opposed to it and the election of Mr.
Nixon who appears to favor it--it will result in the expenditure of vast
sums of money without in the net greatly changing the deterrent effect
of the missile forces on both sides. I expect it will prove to be what
Senator Frank Church has called it: potentially the most colossally ex-
pensive sieve in history. On the other hand, I should not expect the
erection of a ballistic missile defense on both sides to result in any sig-
nificant deterioration in relations between the Soviet Union and ourselves.
Some kinds of arms races actually help greatly to stabilize relations
between nations, like the provision of underground silos for both the
American and Soviet ballistic missiles, which enormously reduces fears
of surprise attack and therefore makes the finger on the nuclear trigger
far less itchy than it might otherwise be.

57

The idea that the development of hostile blocs or alliances can stimulate the outbreak of wars stems very much from the experience of the outbreak of World War I. Certainly the alliance systems at that time caused what might have been a small and brief war to become a huge, prolonged, and terribly devastating one. On the other hand, alliances are supposed to have some deterrence value, too. Remember Winston Churchill's remark in 1938: "What I see is a bloc on one side and a rabble on the other." I think it important to avoid any special bias for or against alliances, but rather to fall back on the conception that wisdom in our foreign policy is always a good thing if we can achieve it, and wisdom is very much needed when it comes to determining what sorts of military commitments abroad we should make or avoid. My own inclination leans towards minimizing such commitments rather than expanding them, mostly because our expansion of such commitments since World War II has been more guided by hot-house axioms than I should like. On the other hand, it is worth remembering that in the two major wars we have been engaged in since World War II, that is, Korea and Vietnam, our involvement in each case was not the result of a formal commitment. Maybe there is some lesson in that. With an acknowledged formal commitment there might at least have been some chance of deterrence. By intervening despite being free of a commitment, we managed to achieve the worst of both worlds.

When we go finally into historical theories of causation, we find ourselves dealing with the alleged explanations of the outbreak of particular wars. I think there are a few general lessons to be derived from some of our experience in attributing certain specific causes to particular wars. I have already referred to the tendency to recast history in terms of some prevailing fashionable philosophy, like the idea that President Wilson projected us into World War I not because of the German resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare but because of his desire to protect investments of certain munitions makers. There are many such examples. The late Charles Beard was supposed to be a respectable historian, yet he found it necessary because of the times he lived in to write a Marxian interpretation of the writing of the United States Constitution. We have also for at least the last 30 or 40 years been living under the domination of what has been called the "revisionist" school of history concerning the American Civil War. This school considers that war to have been, to quote a book title of one revisionist author, "The Needless War." No doubt all wars are in a sense needless, but perhaps a war fought over slavery is less needless than most. This school has held the outbreak of the American Civil War to have been due mostly to the fulminations of wild men called abolitionists, rather than those who were at least as emotionally charged in their defense of a peculiar and evil institution.

58

History is our major tool in teaching us about the relevant behavior of man concerning the outbreak of war, and also concerning the relevant changes in man's attitudes and behavior. But it has to be good history, which is to say correct, relevant, and perceptive history. Our historians do their best, but they may need some help and encouragement from time to time from scholars in other fields. There are, however, very distinguished contemporary historians who scoff at the notion that the other social sciences, including psychoanalysis, might have something to offer them concerning their own art. We also see historians, like scholars in other fields, highly committed to fashionable schools of thought of which nothing is more certain than that they will not last.

Above all, historians have to know what is worth looking for before they can write really relevant history. To give you one example, some two years ago I found myself searching through four different books dealing with the Berlin Blockade of 1948-49 in order to find out just what were the Soviet moves which caused our government to feel that West Germany was being blockaded by force. I did so because I had developed the suspicion that we had not actually been so blockaded. None of the authors had thought it worth while to specify just what those actions were. I wrote to one of them asking if he could inform me by mail. His reply was that it would require additional research, and he inquired whether I would be able to raise the money for him to conduct that research.

I would not be harder on the historians than on my own profession. My intent, I trust, is not to be hard on anyone. I have only been trying to demonstrate that any theory of the causes of war which is not inherently eclectic and comprehensive, that is, which does not take into account at the outset the relevance of all sorts of diverse factors, is bound for that very reason to be wrong. Psychology or psychoanalysis can tell us much, but we have to remember that decisions are made through bodies of men and bureaucracies which go to make up governments, and that besides having a special mode of operation, these governments or regimes always carry a heavy baggage of notions about their national interests and the like. Similarly, I would put economic causation very low indeed, especially in modern times, but I should also want to remember that differences between great and lesser powers is usually a difference in wealth and in the means for making portions of that wealth available for military purposes. In a word, I should be ready to look always for the complexities in the causes of war and to be extremely suspicious of simplistic solutions. When men say that wars are due to innate aggression, my response is that they are using words which tend more to obscure meaning than to clarify it. Aggres-

59

sion and aggressiveness is a common manifestation of mankind, but so are many other relevant factors, like ignorance and stupidity, which, as words used by themselves, also mean virtually nothing.

If we ever succeed in refining any intellectually acceptable theory of the causation of war, the question will remain whether we will be able to do much about those causes. A generation ago, some political scientists like Professor Quincy Wright, then of the University of Chicago, used to make the distinction between general causes of war and what they called "key" causes. The latter were those causes which were not necessarily the most important but which could be manipulated. For example, the existence of independent nation-states may not be the basic reason for the causation of war, but if we could manipulate the world environment to reduce the autonomy of these states, that is, to produce a world government, we would then be dealing with what could be called a key cause. My example is perhaps an unfortunate one. Possibly, on the other hand, it is just the kind to warn us that proper knowledge is not only hard to come by, but we must not expect too much utility from it in advance. My own nomian tion for a key instrument would simply be a greater infusion of wisdom into the conduct of our foreign policy; but having said that I am not about to propose nostrums for bringing about that happy state of affairs.

60

FREDERICK A. PRAEGER

79 WEST 12th STREET
NEW YORK, N.Y. 10011

TEL: (212) 924-2784

May 4, 1969

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

Dear Henry:

We, that is, Fritz Molden Verlag, Munich, have bought the German translation rights to your essays and will publish with pomp and circumstance already this fall. As you see, you can't escape my enormous reach. Anyway, I am absolutely delighted.

I'll be around in the States until about July 1. Around that time I'll move. Please be sure to let me know if you might be able to get to Vienna. Dehmel's pastry shop is waiting.

If I get to Washington before I take off, might you have a few minutes? It would be nice if we could discuss some points in connection with the German publication of your book.

Roma, 2 Febbraio 1969

Desr Mr. Kissinger,

we offer you our warmest congratulations and our best wishes
for your work which we admire and appreciate very much.

We do hope that the U.S.A. policy will be from now on even
more actively engaged in the European political integration and we
want to confirm that "Europa Settanta" is disposed to support any
attempts of that nature.

Specifically, as we are now preparing a special issue of "Eu
ropa Settanta", for March distribution, dealing with the problems
of the Atlantic Pact and of the U.S.A. domestic and foreign policy
we would appreciate it, if you would permit us to translate and pub
lish in our magazine one of your past articles that you consider
particularly significant in this field.

We thank you in advance for your kind cooperation and remain.

AGENZIA SETTIMANALE - Via IV Novembre, 149 - Tel. 660530/640535 - 00187 Roma

Condirettori: On Bartolo Ciccardini • Sen. Luciano Dal Falco • Celso Destefanis On. Edoardo Speranza - On. Giuseppe Zamboni

Columbia University in the City of New York

EUROPEAN INSTITUTE

622 West 113th Street
New York, N. Y. 10025

May 19, 1969

Honorable Henry A. Kissinger
The White House
Washington, D.C.

Dear Henry:

I am delighted to receive a copy of
AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY, and I am
especially glad to have these three
recent and penetrating analyses, by
your pen, available in convenient form.
I am sure that many of my students will
be reading and reviewing this volume.

I, along with many, many others, feel
much greater confidence because your
profound knowledge and careful thought
are so close to the central place of
the most important decisions.

With all best wishes,

P