paralyzed. It recoiled before the consequences of full mobilization;
but its strategic doctrine provided for no other contingency. Faced
with the prospect of all-out war and obsessed by the memory of 1914,
France could not decide whether to rely on Germany's profession of
peaceful intentions or on its own military strength. In order to
justify its vacillations the French General Staff ascribed to
Germany a military capability it did not possess. By adjusting their
estimates of the enemy's strength and provocation to their strategic
doctrine instead of the other way around, the French General Staff
vindicated its theory of all-out war which the country dreaded and which
was impossible without allies that proved reluctant. Finally, France
torn between its premonitions of disaster and the inhibitions produced
by its strategic doctrine, recoiled before the military alternatives
available to it. Instead it sought refuge in another guarantee of its
frontier which substituted a legal for a physical safeguard and contributed to the sense of impotence of France even while its army was
thought to be the world's finest. Only four years later, France was

French analogy is good, but can't you carry it further - 42 [Y]
or more explicitly, France thought only of fighting a defensive war; we
confronted with the unambiguous aggression which was the only con-
tingency for which French strategic doctrine provided; but by then
7/ it was too late.

SAC is a sort of maginot Line 20 yrs later.

No more urgent task confronts the U.S. than to strive for
a military policy which will give our diplomacy the greatest freedom
of action. It must deal with the question whether the NBM nuclear
age permits a policy of intermediary objectives, whether it presents
risks or whether it also affords opportunities. It is a strangely
complex task, different from any before in our history. For there is
little experience to guide us; the theory we develop will determine
our response to the challenges which will inevitably confront us:
The Soviet capability to inflic a catastrophic blow on the United
States is increasing yearly and just beyond the horizon lies the
prospect of a world in which not only two super-powers will possess
nuclear weapons but also many weaker and perhaps more irresponsible
 nations with less to lose.

7/ for a splendid discussion of the interplay between the French general Staff and the foreign office of 1936, see *World Politics*, April 1956.

In this task, moreover, absolute solutions are no longer
possible. A history of relative invulnerability has
fostered the illusion that there are "purely" military answers to
the problems of our security and that policy ends where strategy
begins. But the luxury of such an approach ended with our atomic
monopoly. Henceforth our problem will be one long familiar to
less favored nations; how to relate the desirable to the possible
and above all how to live with possible catastrophe.

VII

A-33

by the Western Powers and perhaps not even by the Soviet-Union.
And the Hungarian revolution came as a rude shock to the Kremlin.
Both instances resulted in military action which with the pre-
vailing strategic doctrines might easily have spread to become
all-out. And similar Soviet moves in East Germany or Poland would
be fraught with even more serious danger. In turn, the absence of
any generally understood limits to war undermines the psychological
framework of resistance. A gap ¹⁵ thus opened between the quest for
total peace and the military doctrine of total war, a gap within which the
Soviets can operate with relative impunity.

A diplomatic program looking towards eventual disarmament
should therefore have as one of its cardinal points a program to
mitigate the horrors of war. There has been a shrinking away
from advancing such plans, as if the admission that war may occur
could itself be a factor in bringing it on, or perhaps because of
lack of clarity about the nature of war limitation in the nuclear
age. But a disarmament plan based entirely on an attempt to avoid
war is hopelessly one-sided: it will put a premium on the conserva-
tism of military staffs because in the absence of an alternative
framework, they will have to base their plan on the worst contin-
gency which is all-out war. Because they give no indication of
intentions in case war does break out they increase the likelihood
that any war will spread to become all-out either because of mis-
calculation or because of a misinterpretation of the other side's
intentions.

> Insert A

by the Western Powers and perhaps not even by the Soviet Union.
And the Hungarian revolution came as a rude shock to the Kremlin.
Both instances resulted in military action which with the pre-
vailing strategic doctrines might easily have spread to become
all-out. And similar Soviet moves in East Germany or Poland would
be fraught with even more serious danger. In turn, the absence of
any generally understood limits to war undermines the psychological
framework of resistance. A gap thus opened between the quest for
total peace and the military doctrine of total war within which the
Soviets can operate with relative impunity.

→ Insert A