1. Jonathan D. Auerbach, "'Nuclear Freeze' at a Crossroads," Boston Globe, June 22, 1986, p. A19; Senator Jim Sasser of Tennessee, quoted in Council for a Livable World literature, November 1987.

2. Bernard Brodie, ed., The Absolute Weapon (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1946).

3. Harold Freeman, This Is the Way the World Will End, This Is the Way You Will End, Unless (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1982), pp. 12-13, 2-4, 7-8.

4. Ibid., pp. 19-20; Barbara G. Levi, Frank N. von Hippel, and William H. Daugherty, "Civilian Casualties from 'Limited' Nuclear Attacks on the USSR," International Security 12, no. 3 (Winter 1987-1988), p. 189 (emphasis added).

3. Harold Freeman, This Is the Way the World Will End, This Is the Way You Will End, Unless (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1982), pp. 12-13, 2-4, 7-8.

4. Ibid., pp. 19-20; Barbara G. Levi, Frank N. von Hippel, and William H. Daugherty, "Civilian Casualties from 'Limited' Nuclear Attacks on the USSR," International Security 12, no. 3 (Winter 1987-1988), p. 189 (emphasis added).

5. Albert Einstein, quoted in Ralph E. Lapp, "The Einstein Letter That Started It All," New York Times Magazine, August 2, 1964.

6. New York Trust Co. v. Eisner, 256 U.S. 345, 349 (1921).

7. George Santayana, The Life of Reason, vol. 1, Reason in Common Sense (New York: Dover, 1980).

8. Freeman, This Is the Way the World Will End, p. 33.

9. Noam Chomsky provides the clearest and most extensively documented accounts of the Cold War and the U.S. role in the Third World. His many books on these topics include The Political Economy of Human Rights, with Edward Herman, 2 vols. (Boston: South End Press, 1979); Towards a New Cold War (New York: Pantheon, 1982); Turning the Tide (Boston: South End Press, 1985); and On Power and Ideology (Boston: South End Press, 1987).

in International Security 2, no. 4 [Spring 1978]; Quarles, quoted in Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982), p. 156.

11. Paul Bracken, The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 1.

12. Albert Carnesale et al., Living with Nuclear Weapons (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 67.

13. "Three Harvard Professors Argue for New Way to Reduce Nuclear War Risk," Boston Globe, May 31, 1985, p. 16; Graham T. Allison, Albert Carnesale, and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., eds., Hawks, Doves, and Owls: An Agenda for Avoiding Nuclear War (New York: Norton, 1985), pp. 223-246.

14. See Robert Jervis, The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984).

15. George Rathjens, "First Thoughts About Problems Facing EXPRO" (Boston, 1985, photocopied). A revised version of this paper was published as EXPRO Paper No. 5 (Chestnut Hill, Mass.: Exploratory Project on the Conditions of Peace, 1986), available from EXPRO, Department of Sociology, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02167.

16. Michael Howard, "Is Arms Control Really Necessary?" (lecture delivered to the Council for Arms Control, London), excerpted in Harper's 272, no. 1632 (May 1986): 13-14. Matthew Melko of Wright State University also argues that the arms race may be nearly irrelevant to war and peace in our time, though his reasoning differs from ours; see his "What If the Arms Race Did Not Matter?" (paper presented at the North Central Sociological Association meeting, Cincinnati, April 1-14, 1987), as well as his forthcoming book.

17. Joseph Gerson, ed., The Deadly Connection: Nuclear War and U.S. Intervention (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1986).

1. The term weaponitis was used by political scientist Samuel Huntington during a speech at a Boston College Graduate Student Association symposium on the arms race and nuclear war, October 12, 1983. See William A. Schwartz, "U.S. Nuclear Policies Increase Threat of War," Boston College Heights, October 17, 1983, but note that the author suffered from weaponitis himself at the time.

2. Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), p. 147.

3. Harold Freeman, This Is the Way the World Will End, This Is the Way You Will End, Unless (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1982), p. 10.

4. As Thomas Schelling correctly argues, the ability to devastate a society's inner core without first defeating its armed forces, not the raw ability to devastate populations, is what is fundamentally new about nuclear arms. During earlier periods it was surely possible for a victor to kill every inhabitant of a conquered land, if necessary by cutting every throat in turn. The key element of the nuclear revolution is not the increase in efficiency or speed with which this killing can be done—matters of real but secondary importance—but rather the

ability to do it without defeating the defender's military forces first. See Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), chap. 1.

5. McGeorge Bundy, "To Cap the Volcano," Foreign Affairs 48, no. 1 (October 1969): 9-10; Herbert York, "Nuclear Deterrence: How to Reduce the Overkill," in Pacem in Terris III, ed. Fred Warner Neal and Mary Kersey Harvey (Santa Barbara: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1974), 2:26, cited in Alva Myrdal, The Game of Disarmament (New York: Pantheon, 1982), p. 117; Michael Howard, "Is Arms Control Really Necessary?" (lecture delivered to the Council for Arms Control, London), excerpted in Harper's 272, no. 1632 (May 1986): 14.

6. Bernard Brodie, The Absolute Weapon (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1946), p. 31; James Schlesinger, "Rhetoric and Realities in the Star Wars Debate," International Security 10, no. 1 (Summer 1985): 5.

7. See Paul Bracken, The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); John Steinbruner, "National Security and the Concept of Strategic Stability," Journal of Conflict Resolution 22, no. 3 (September 1978): 411-428, and "Nuclear Decapitation," Foreign Policy (Winter 1981-1982), reprinted in Search for Sanity, ed. Paul Joseph and Simon Rosenblum (Boston: South End Press, 1984), pp. 181-192; Daniel Ford, The Button (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985); Desmond Ball, "Can Nuclear War Be Controlled?" Adelphi Paper No. 169 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1981).

8. Steinbruner, "National Security," p. 421; Ball, "Can Nuclear War Be Controlled?" p. 36; Colin S. Gray, "Targeting Problems for Central War," Naval War College Review 33, no. 1 (January-February 1980): 7. Gray is one of the most intelligent and fascinating of the right-wing nuclear theorists. In his acute diagnosis of the contradictions and impracticality of the mainstream approach to nuclear strategy and weapons development, he argues that they have caused little if any advance over the early days of massive retaliation. He is right. His prescription, a doctrine and weapons sufficient to ensure victory in nuclear war, is absurd. But he has accurately shown that they would be a logical condition for the meaningfulness of strategy and hardware development over the past quarter century.

9. Howard, "Is Arms Control Really Necessary?" p. 14.

10. Bernard Brodie, "The Development of Nuclear Strategy," in Strategy and Nuclear Deterrence: An "International Security" Reader, ed. Stephen E. Miller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 7 (first published in International Security 2, no. 4 [Spring 1978]).

11. Public Agenda Foundation, Voter Options on Nuclear Arms Policy (New York: Public Agenda Foundation, 1984), table 13, p. 20; table 38, p. 49; table 53, p. 64; table 10, p. 17.

12. McGeorge Bundy, "The Bishops and the Bomb," New York Review of Books 30, no. 10 (June 16, 1984): 3-8.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.; George Kennan, "A Modest Proposal," in Search for Sanity, ed.

Paul Joseph and Simon Rosenblum (Boston: South End Press, 1984), pp. 577-583 (first appeared as a paper, "Proposal for International Disarmament," 1981).

12. McGeorge Bundy, "The Bishops and the Bomb," New York Review of Books 30, no. 10 (June 16, 1984): 3-8.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.; George Kennan, "A Modest Proposal," in Search for Sanity, ed.

Paul Joseph and Simon Rosenblum (Boston: South End Press, 1984), pp. 577-583 (first appeared as a paper, "Proposal for International Disarmament," 1981).

12. McGeorge Bundy, "The Bishops and the Bomb," New York Review of Books 30, no. 10 (June 16, 1984): 3-8.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.; George Kennan, "A Modest Proposal," in Search for Sanity, ed.

Paul Joseph and Simon Rosenblum (Boston: South End Press, 1984), pp. 577-583 (first appeared as a paper, "Proposal for International Disarmament," 1981).

1. Daniel O. Graham and Gregory A. Fossedal, "First Strike and You're Out," American Spectator 18, no. 7 (July 1985): 12, 10; Keenen Peck, "First Strike, You're Out," interview with Daniel Ellsberg, Progressive 49, no. 7 (July 1985): 34; Howard Moreland, "Are We Readying a First Strike?" Nation 240, no. 10 (March 16, 1985): 297, 299.

2. Kosta Tsipis, Arsenal: Understanding Weapons in the Nuclear Age (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), p. 238. Tsipis notes that each side might be able to destroy some enemy subs, but not enough to make a difference.

3. Ibid., pp. 138, 142, 144, 145.

2. Kosta Tsipis, Arsenal: Understanding Weapons in the Nuclear Age (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), p. 238. Tsipis notes that each side might be able to destroy some enemy subs, but not enough to make a difference.

3. Ibid., pp. 138, 142, 144, 145.

4. Interview.

5. Frank N. von Hippel, Barbara G. Levi, Theodore A. Postol, and William H. Daugherty, "Civilian Casualties from Counterforce Attacks," Scientific American 259, no. 3 (September 1988): 36-37.

6. Thomas C. Schelling, "Abolition of Ballistic Missiles," International Security 12, no. 1 (Summer 1987): 179-180.

7. Michael M. May, George F. Bing, and John D. Steinbruner, Strategic Arms Reductions (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1988), pp. 15-17.

8. Ibid., pp. 22, 5-6; George F. Kennan, "Zero Options," New York Review of Books, May 12, 1983, p. 3.

7. Michael M. May, George F. Bing, and John D. Steinbruner, Strategic Arms Reductions (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1988), pp. 15-17.

8. Ibid., pp. 22, 5-6; George F. Kennan, "Zero Options," New York Review of Books, May 12, 1983, p. 3.

9. For a concise and authoritative discussion of command system vulnerabilities, see Kurt Gottfried and Bruce G. Blair, eds., Crisis Stability and Nuclear War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), chap. 6.

10. John D. Steinbruner, "The Purpose and Effect of Deep Strategic Force Reductions," in Reykjavik and Beyond: Deep Reductions in Strategic Nuclear Arsenals and the Future Direction of Arms Control, ed. Committee on International Security and Arms Control, National Academy of Sciences (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1988), p. 16.

11. Gottfried and Blair, Crisis Stability and Nuclear War, pp. 87, 95-96.

12. Frank von Hippel, quoted in William M. Arkin, "Sleight of Hand with Trident II," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 40 (December 1984): 5-6; Gottfried and Blair, Crisis Stability and Nuclear War, p. 87.

13. Richard K. Betts, "Surprise Attack and Preemption," in Hawks, Doves, and Owls: An Agenda for Avoiding Nuclear War, ed. Graham T. Allison, Albert Carnesale, and Joseph S. Nye, Jr. (New York: Norton, 1985), pp. 57, 60. Even Betts, who generally attributes importance to technical factors in determining the risk of a first strike, acknowledges that "without dramatic [that is, highly unlikely] increases in the vulnerability of forces or in strategic defense, marginal differences in the balance of forces could only be a straw to break the camel's back—something that would tip a decision that was already only a millimeter away from being made for other reasons" (p. 67).

14. Stansfield Turner, "Winnowing Our Warheads," New York Times Magazine,

March 27, 1988, p. 69; Richard Ned Lebow, Nuclear Crisis Management: A Dangerous Illusion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 61-62, 64.

15. Even if we were to grant that the vulnerability of command and control created incentives for preemption, the number and characteristics of the weapons on hand should not make those incentives much stronger or weaker. Command and control networks (like almost everything else) can be destroyed even by primitive, inaccurate nuclear weapons. The command systems of both superpowers have been at risk since at least the 1960s, and short of near disarmament they will remain at risk regardless of what weapons the superpowers create or what arms control treaties they sign. As Steinbruner notes, "Since only modest numbers of weapons are required to threaten the U.S. command system, increases beyond that level have little effect."

That sounds plausible, but it is misleading. There really is no such thing as damage limitation in modern nuclear war, especially for the Soviets, who would face a virtually unlimited supply of nuclear megatonnage based undersea in invulnerable U.S. submarines regardless of how much land-based nuclear firepower they destroyed. If damage limitation were possible at all, it would arise from disrupted command and control, not from the physical destruction of weapons. Each side will always have enough warheads to effectively destroy the other, regardless of who strikes first. The only question is whether those warheads will be used and how they will be targeted. But as we have noted, destruction of command and control, though easy, does not guarantee restraint. The consequences could be exactly the opposite, with isolated commanders launching far more weapons on their own authority than an intact central command would have ordered. And even if one does believe that command and control targeting is a rational damage-limiting strategy, its feasibility is for the most part independent of the weapons in place on either side.

16. Gottfried and Blair, Crisis Stability and Nuclear War, pp. 85, 89 (emphasis added).

17. Ibid., p. 88.

16. Gottfried and Blair, Crisis Stability and Nuclear War, pp. 85, 89 (emphasis added).

17. Ibid., p. 88.

18. Lebow, Nuclear Crisis Management, p. 175. Interestingly, Lebow is one of the seventeen analysts who contributed to Crisis Stability and Nuclear War . The preface to that book says that all seventeen contributors agree with the book's main findings. It seems odd that Lebow, whose earlier book, Nuclear Crisis Management, spelled out the irrationality of a prompt launch so clearly, would endorse the conclusions of Crisis Stability and Nuclear War on this point.

19. See Morton H. Halperin, Nuclear Fallacy: Dispelling the Myth of Nuclear Strategy (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1987). The arms race and arms control (with the exception of very radical proposals like Halperin's) should not much affect the risk of a hasty nuclear launch, even if leaders were insane enough to consider it. The only weapons-related factor of any importance is how fast decapitation could be accomplished, and hence how much time leaders would have to mull over the option of launching promptly after receiving warning of an enemy attack. Standard ballistic and cruise missiles can destroy nodes of command and control very quickly. Certain weapons, such as Pershing II missiles near the central front in Europe and Soviet submarines hugging the U.S. Atlantic coast, can in theory do the job slightly faster. Many believe that such weapons may lead to itchier trigger fingers in Washington and Moscow, where leaders will have several fewer minutes to interpret mysterious radar blips. Perhaps. But the insane risks of launch on warning are not affected by the length of the warning. In the missile age, the arms race and arms control can affect warning time by at most several minutes. And the real impact of decreased warning time is perhaps not obvious. It might just reduce the interval in which national leaders or lower-level commanders could convince themselves that an enemy attack was under way, panic, and launch the missiles.

coming at them and little confidence they understood what particular weapons would actually do if they hit, given the artificiality of peacetime testing and military intelligence. The horrifying suspicion that a swarm of enemy missiles was screaming toward their country—not unreliable assessments of the missiles' performance characteristics—would be their overwhelming concern. Desmond Ball notes that "the Soviet attack characterization and assessment systems, which are technically quite inferior to their American counterparts, would have great difficulty distinguishing a major counterforce strike from a more general attack, even if it were considered meaningful in Soviet strategic doctrine to attempt such differentiation." Despite its greater technical sophistication, the United States in fact would have a similar difficulty.

Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 224 (first published in International Security 7, no. 3 [Winter 1982-1983]); Gottfried and Blair, Crisis Stability and Nuclear War, pp. 97-98, 92, 86-87.

1. On NATO's favorable position, see, for example, Jane M. O. Sharp's letter "The Myth of Warsaw Pact Superiority Debunked," New York Times, November 9, 1986; Joshua M. Epstein's op-ed "Preserving Security in Europe," New York Times, November 14, 1986; Tom Wicker, "Don't Fear for NATO," New York Times, February 8, 1988, p. A19; and, for more detail, Center for Defense Information, "NATO and Warsaw Pact Forces: Conventional War in Europe," The Defense Monitor 17, no. 3 (1988). On NATO responses to any Warsaw Pact conventional advantages, see, for example, General Bernard W. Rogers, ''The Atlantic Alliance: Prescriptions for a Difficult Decade," Foreign Affairs, Summer 1982, pp. 1145-1156; and Strengthening Conventional Deterrence in Europe, Report of the European Security Study (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983).

2. Earl C. Ravenal, "Counterforce and Alliance: The Ultimate Connection," International Security 6, no. 4 (Spring 1982): 36. Ravenal believes that higher levels of credibility may be required for political reasons, even if they are irrelevant to extended deterrence: "It takes more credibility to keep an ally than to deter an enemy" (p. 36).

3. Allan S. Krass and Matthew Goodman, "Nuclear Rationality: The Clausewitzian Strategies of the Superpowers" (photocopied); Colin Gray and Keith Payne, "Victory Is Possible," Foreign Policy, no. 39 (Summer 1980).

4. Earl C. Ravenal, "Counterforce and Alliance," p. 32.

5. Robert Endicott Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 242.

6. Paul Bracken, The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 164, 163-164, 136.

7. Ibid., pp. 167, 168.

8. Ibid., pp. 170-171, 177-178, 176, 177.

6. Paul Bracken, The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 164, 163-164, 136.

7. Ibid., pp. 167, 168.

8. Ibid., pp. 170-171, 177-178, 176, 177.

6. Paul Bracken, The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 164, 163-164, 136.

7. Ibid., pp. 167, 168.

8. Ibid., pp. 170-171, 177-178, 176, 177.

9. "Who Could Start a Nuclear War?" Defense Monitor 14, no. 3 (1985): 1, 2, 4, 6.

10. Lori Esposito and James A. Schear, The Command and Control of Nuclear Weapons, Workshop Report (Aspen, Colo.: Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, 1985), pp. 15, 3, 17 (emphasis added). In Europe, they note, "there would ... be immediate pressure for dispersal [of nuclear weapons], especially of longer-range INF systems, if hostilities seemed imminent." Moreover NATO might well "consider the prospect of conditional delegations of release authority" to fire nuclear weapons (p. 16).

11. Barry R. Posen, "Inadvertent Nuclear War? Escalation and NATO's Northern Flank," in Strategy and Nuclear Deterrence, ed. Miller, p. 98 (emphasis in original; first published in International Security 7, no. 2 [Fall 1982]).

12. Ibid., p. 86.

11. Barry R. Posen, "Inadvertent Nuclear War? Escalation and NATO's Northern Flank," in Strategy and Nuclear Deterrence, ed. Miller, p. 98 (emphasis in original; first published in International Security 7, no. 2 [Fall 1982]).

12. Ibid., p. 86.

13. Michael T. Klare, "Securing the Firebreak," World Policy Journal 2, no. 2 (Spring 1985): 229-230; Alain C. Enthoven, "American Deterrent Policy," in

Problems of National Strategy: A Book of Readings, ed. Henry Kissinger (New York: Praeger, 1965), p. 124, cited in Klare, "Securing the Firebreak," p. 232.

14. Klare, "Securing the Firebreak," pp. 234, 240. Klare cites General Louis Wagner's testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, March 11, 1980 (p. 239). The firebreak concept actually applies to all types of nuclear weapons, not only those at the low end of the destructive spectrum. Just as there are tactical conventional weapons that tactical nuclear weapons can come to resemble, there are also strategic conventional weapons that strategic nuclear weapons can come to resemble. Old-style ICBMs, with their huge warheads and inaccurate delivery, obviously differed from conventional strategic weapons systems. Though the ashes of Dresden and Tokyo showed that nonnuclear strategic bombing can rapidly extinguish hundreds of thousands of lives, no one could mistake a conventional American air attack on the Soviet Union with a barrage of old Titan II missiles, which carry 9-megaton warheads about 450 times more powerful than the bomb that leveled Hiroshima. A modern Minuteman III/ Mk-12 ICBM, in contrast, carries a 0.17-megaton warhead, 50 times smaller than the Titan II, and (in theory at least) delivers it about six times more accurately. The most modern strategic missile systems, such as MX and the submarine-based Trident II/D-5, can supposedly deliver warheads reliably to within 400 feet of the target. Such weapons may appear able to conduct surgical nuclear strikes—say, against Soviet missile silos—that would not be altogether different from conventional bombing. Indeed, the major trend in strategic nuclear weapons systems, as in tactical ones, has been to refine them so that they can do the jobs of conventional ones, destroying military targets without decimating huge areas. In theory it is more tempting to leap the firebreak with a few well-aimed, low-yield Minuteman III/Mk-12 warheads than with monstrous multimegaton Titan IIs that could easily fall far off target and would almost certainly be the opening shot of an orgy of mass destruction. One day, conventional warheads mounted on strategic delivery systems (such as super-accurate long-range cruise missiles) may even be able to do at least some of the jobs now given to their nuclear counterparts. Then strategic missiles would be dual-capable too.

15. Complete destruction is unlikely at least in comparison to nuclear war and over a relatively short period of time. Casualties in Vietnam, for example, ran to the millions and included the decimation of the agricultural economic base, the ecology, and much of the social system. Some have said that the Vietcong did not fear nuclear weapons, since conventional ones were already doing so much damage. But despite the monstrous conventional attacks it suffered, Vietnam exists physically and socially. That might not be true had nuclear weapons been used. Another large-scale conventional war involving the superpowers, if by some miracle it remained conventional, might leave both societies alive. That cannot be said of a large-scale nuclear war.

16. McGeorge Bundy, "To Cap the Volcano," Foreign Affairs 48, no. 1 (October 1969): 9-10.

17. Societies can defend themselves—partially but effectively—against conventional

weapons, and they can bring conventional war to a halt long before they suffer or inflict complete destruction. True, conventional munitions can wreak total destruction, but only over a period of time long enough for the conflicts to resolve. As Thomas Schelling notes: "Against defenseless people there is not much that nuclear weapons can do that cannot be done with an ice pick.... Something like the same destruction always could be done. With nuclear weapons there is an expectation that it would be done" (Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966], pp. 19, 23; emphasis in original).

18. Robert S. McNamara, "The Military Role of Nuclear Weapons: Perceptions and Misperceptions," Foreign Affairs 62 (Fall 1983), pp. 71-72.

19. Klaus Knorr, "Controlling Nuclear War," International Security 9, no. 4 (Spring 1985): 92, 89; Leon Wieseltier, "When Deterrence Fails," Foreign Affairs 63, no. 4 (Spring 1985): 847; General Jones, quoted in Washington Post, June 19, 1982, p. A3. In principle some weapons could occupy an intermediate place in the hierarchy of destructiveness, spanning the gap between the conventional weapons of normal warfare and the unconventional weapons of total destruction. Because of this ambiguity, both credibility and the firebreak might be affected by how such weapons evolve. Some argue that today's chemical and biological weapons already hold this middle ground.

20. All technical data on nuclear weapons systems in this section are from Cochran, Arkin, and Hoenig, Nuclear Weapons Databook, vol. 1.

21. Desmond Ball, "Can Nuclear War Be Controlled?" Aldephi Paper No. 169 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1981), p. 37 (emphasis in original); Krass and Goodman, "Nuclear Rationality," p. 29.

22. Ronald Reagan, quoted in Boston Globe, March 30, 1980; Gordon H. Chang, "To the Nuclear Brink: Eisenhower, Dulles, and the Quemoy-Matsu Crisis," International Security 2, no. 4 (Spring 1988): 107-108.

23. Ball, "Can Nuclear War Be Controlled?" pp. 35, 37; Esposito and Schear, "Command and Control," p. 17.

24. Barry M. Blechman and Douglas M. Hart, "The Political Utility of Nuclear Weapons: The 1973 Middle East Crisis," in Strategy and Nuclear Deterrence, ed. Miller, p. 294 (first published in International Security 7, no. 1 [Summer 1982]).

25. Blechman and Hart, "Political Utility," pp. 294-295 (emphasis in original); Esposito and Schear, "Command and Control," p. 15; Strobe Talbott, Deadly Gambits (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), p. 187.

26. See Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence, pp. 36-43; H. R. Haldeman, The End of Power (New York: Times Books, 1978), pp. 82-83, cited in Daniel Ellsberg, "A Call to Mutiny," in The Deadly Connection: Nuclear War and U.S. Intervention, ed. Joseph Gerson (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1986), pp. 56-57.

27. For other discussions of the competing effects, see Glenn Snyder, "The Balance of Power and the Balance of Terror," in The Balance of Power, ed. Paul Seabury (San Francisco: Chandler, 1965); Ravenal, "Counterforce and Alliance," p. 27; and Peter J. Liberman and Neil R. Thomason, "No-First-Use Unknowable," Foreign Policy, no. 64 (Fall 1986): 17-36.

1. Steven Kull, "Nuclear Nonsense," Foreign Policy, no. 58 (Spring 1985): 28-52.

2. Warner Schilling, "U.S. Strategic Nuclear Concepts in the 1970's," in Strategy and Nuclear Deterrence: An "International Security" Reader, ed. Stephen E. Miller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 201 (first published in International Security 6, no. 2 [Fall 1981]). On megatonnage see Carnesale et al., Living with Nuclear Weapons (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 76. On warheads see Thomas B. Cochran, William M. Arkin, and Milton M. Hoenig, Nuclear Weapons Databook, vol. 1, U.S. Nuclear Forces and Capabilities (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1984), p. 15. To appreciate the hypocrisy of current official concern about Soviet numerical advantages in throw weight and the like, one must examine the history of U.S. nuclear planning, which clearly shows that deliberate decisions were made at various times to limit U.S. nuclear forces when there was no possible military benefit to adding more warheads or launchers. As Arkin explains, some of the reductions occurred because of the greatly increased capability of more modern weapons, which could operationally replace more than an equivalent number of older, cruder warheads.

3. Howard Moreland, "Are We Readying a First Strike?" Nation 240, no. 10 (March 16, 1985): 297.

4. Michael T. Klare, "Securing the Firebreak," World Policy Journal 2, no. 2 (Spring 1985): 229-230.

5. Schilling, "Strategic Nuclear Concepts," p. 202.

6. Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, George W. Ball, Roswell Gilpatric, Theodore Sorensen, and McGeorge Bundy, "The Lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis," Time, September 27, 1982, p. 85.

7. Marc Trachtenberg, "The Influence of Nuclear Weapons in the Cuban Missile Crisis," International Security 10, no. 1 (Summer 1985): 147-148.

8. Trachtenberg argues that "Soviet policy was very much influenced by the strategic balance," even though American policy was not. He asserts that "the Soviets seem to have been profoundly affected by their 'strategic' inferiority.' ... They probably took American ideas about 'damage limitation' and 'discriminate and controlled general war,' and the [weapons] capabilities with which they were linked, far more seriously than the Americans did." His conclusion that "the strategic balance mattered in 1962" may seem to damage our case about perceptions. But there is a great difference in the quality of both evidence and argument between Trachtenberg's claims about American and Soviet perceptions. In the American case, he relies on newly released transcripts of actual White House meetings in which key decisions were made. This strong documentary evidence completely supports other evidence from key decision makers that was already available.

United States initiated a massive conventional and nuclear military alert, the Soviets made no real effort to ready their military machine for war. Trachtenberg assumes that Soviet perceptions of the strategic situation can be reasonably inferred from this inaction. He argues that the Soviets feared an alert might provoke the United States into a nuclear preemption and "quite possibly" that the key factor in their fears was "the disparity in force levels and in degrees of force vulnerability." Thus, in Soviet thinking, the U.S. advantage in nuclear hardware made it more likely that America would strike first given the provocation of a Soviet military alert.

9. Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), p. 922. For a brief account of these events, see Barry M. Blechman and Douglas M. Hart, "The Political Utility of Nuclear Weapons: The 1973 Middle East Crisis," in Strategy and Nuclear Deterrence, ed. Miller, pp. 273-297 (first published in International Security 7, no. 1 [Summer 1982]).

10. Nixon, RN, pp. 920-943.

11. Blechman and Hart, "Political Utility," pp. 287-288, 291; Richard K. Betts, Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1987), p. 125.

12. McGeorge Bundy, "The Unimpressive Record of Atomic Diplomacy," in The Nuclear Crisis Reader, ed. Gwyn Prins (New York: Vintage, 1984), p. 51; Raymond L. Garthoff, Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1987), p. 113. Noting the origins of the window-of-vulnerability

hysteria in the Reagan campaign strategy, Bundy adds that "the notion of a new vulnerability to nuclear diplomacy was unreal; perhaps we were dealing instead with a little atomic politics" (pp. 51-52).

13. Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), p. 1175; Center for Defense Information, "First Strike Weapons at Sea: The Trident II and the Sea-Launched Cruise Missile," The Defense Monitor 16, no. 6 (1987): 3; Bundy, "Atomic Diplomacy," p. 53.

14. Bundy, "Atomic Diplomacy," p. 44.

15. Betts, Nuclear Blackmail, pp. 144, 145, 147, 149.

16. Ibid., pp. 150-151, 153, 155, 156; Steven Kull, Minds at War: Nuclear Reality and the Inner Conflicts of Defense Policymakers (New York: Basic Books, 1988), p. 6.

15. Betts, Nuclear Blackmail, pp. 144, 145, 147, 149.

16. Ibid., pp. 150-151, 153, 155, 156; Steven Kull, Minds at War: Nuclear Reality and the Inner Conflicts of Defense Policymakers (New York: Basic Books, 1988), p. 6.

17. Betts, Nuclear Blackmail, pp. 158, 159, 173; Kull, Minds at War, pp. 6-7, 249.

18. Garthoff, Cuban Missile Crisis, pp. 112-114.

19. McGeorge Bundy, "To Cap the Volcano," Foreign Affairs 48, no. 1 (October 1969): 11.

20. Barry M. Blechman and Stephen S. Kaplan, with David K. Hall, William B. Quandt, Jerome N. Slater, Robert M. Slusser, and Philip Windsor, Force Without War: U.S. Armed Forces as a Political Instrument (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1978), pp. 127-129, 527. These authors use a simple measure of the strategic balance: force loadings, or the number of nuclear warheads available. Even using a different measure, the number of delivery vehicles, they could establish no connection between the strategic balance and outcomes of military incidents involving both superpowers.

21. See the famous article by Richard Pipes, "Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War," Commentary 64, no. 1 (July 1977). For opposing views, see, for example, George Kennan, The Nuclear Delusion (New York: Pantheon, 1983); McGeorge Bundy, "A Matter of Survival," New York Review of Books 30, no. 4 (March 17,1983): 3-6; David Holloway, The Soviet Union and the Arms Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).

22. Robert L. Arnett, "Soviet Attitudes Towards Nuclear War: Do They Really Think They Can Win?" Journal of Strategic Studies 2, no. 2 (September 1979): 182-183; Holloway, Soviet Union, quoted in Bundy, "Matter of Survival"; Bundy, "Matter of Survival," p. 4.

23. Leon Wieseltier, Nuclear War, Nuclear Peace (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983), p. 35.

24. Dusko Doder, "A Comeback by Ex-Soviet Military Chief," Boston Globe, July 18, 1985, p. 13; "Is Arms Control Obsolete?" Harper's 271, no. 1622 (July 1985): 44.

25. Steven Kull, "Conventionalizing Nuclear Weapons" (photocopy).

26. Kull, Minds at War, pp. 305, 312, 57, 184, 77, 116.

27. Ibid., pp. 272, 275.

26. Kull, Minds at War, pp. 305, 312, 57, 184, 77, 116.

27. Ibid., pp. 272, 275.

28. George W. Rathjens and Laura Reed, Neither MAD nor Starstruck—And Doubts, Too, About Arms Control (Cambridge: Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1986), pp. 15-16.

29. Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1959), p. 171; John Steinbruner, "Beyond Rational Deterrence," in Power, Strategy, and Security, ed. Klaus Knorr (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 118 (first published in World Politics 28, no. 2 [January 1976]).

30. Bernard Brodie, "The Development of Nuclear Strategy," in Strategy and Nuclear Deterrence: An "International Security" Reader, ed. Stephen E. Miller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 20-21 (first published in International Security 2, no. 4 [Spring 1978]).

31. Ibid., p. 21.

30. Bernard Brodie, "The Development of Nuclear Strategy," in Strategy and Nuclear Deterrence: An "International Security" Reader, ed. Stephen E. Miller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 20-21 (first published in International Security 2, no. 4 [Spring 1978]).

31. Ibid., p. 21.

32. This explanation raises the question whether additions might eventually lead to a meaningful military advantage for one side if the other, taking the irrelevance of nuclear hardware to heart, unilaterally stopped building more. One former high-level political official we interviewed, for example, felt sure that such an advantage was possible, even though he understood that the normal give and take of the arms race has not led to any significant change to date. Even in this extreme scenario we seriously doubt that one side could develop a meaningful nuclear superiority.

33. Kull, "Nuclear Nonsense," p. 36.

34. Robert Jervis, "Why Nuclear Superiority Doesn't Matter," Political Science Quarterly 94, no. 4 (Winter 1979-1980), p. 631; Donald C. Daniel, "Issues and Findings," in International Perceptions of the Superpower Military Balance, ed. Donald C. Daniel (New York: Praeger, 1978), pp. 185, 188, 189; Ronald D. McLaurin, "Arab Perceptions of the Regional Superpower Military Balance," in ibid., pp. 178-179; Kull, "Nuclear Nonsense," p. 36.

33. Kull, "Nuclear Nonsense," p. 36.

34. Robert Jervis, "Why Nuclear Superiority Doesn't Matter," Political Science Quarterly 94, no. 4 (Winter 1979-1980), p. 631; Donald C. Daniel, "Issues and Findings," in International Perceptions of the Superpower Military Balance, ed. Donald C. Daniel (New York: Praeger, 1978), pp. 185, 188, 189; Ronald D. McLaurin, "Arab Perceptions of the Regional Superpower Military Balance," in ibid., pp. 178-179; Kull, "Nuclear Nonsense," p. 36.

35. Joseph Gerson, "What Is the Deadly Connection?" in The Deadly Connection: Nuclear War and U.S. Intervention, ed. Joseph Gerson (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1986), p. 14; Kull, Minds at War, pp. 162-163.

36. Richard H. Kohn and Joseph P. Harahan, eds., "U.S. Strategic Air Power, 1948-1962: Excerpts from an Interview with Generals Curtis E. LeMay, Leon W. Johnson, David A. Burchinal, and Jack J. Catton," International Security 12, no. 4 (Spring 1988): 78-95.

37. Army manual cited in Kull, Minds at War, p. 13.

38. Daniel, "Issues and Findings," p. 187; Time, August 1981, quoted in Kull, "Nuclear Nonsense," p. 46.

39. Richard K. Betts, "Innovation, Assessment, and Decision," in Cruise Missiles: Technology, Strategy, Politics, ed. Richard K. Betts (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1981), p. 17.

40. George Rathjens, "First Thoughts About Problems Facing EXPRO" (Boston, 1985, photocopied). A revised version of this paper was published as

EXPRO Paper No. 5 (Chestnut Hill, Mass.: Exploratory Project on the Conditions of Peace, 1986), available from EXPRO, Department of Sociology, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02167.

41. Robert Scheer, With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War (New York: Random House, 1982), p. 261.

42. Schilling, "Strategic Nuclear Concepts," p. 203.

1. Isaac Asimov, fund-raising letter for Americans for Democratic Action, n.d.; Harrison Brown, "Star Wars Once Funny, Now Frightening," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 41, no. 5 (May 1985): 3.

2. Robert Jastrow, citing Nature in "The War Against Star Wars," Commentary 78, no. 6 (December 1984): 20; Gary Thatcher, "Big Powers Maneuver on Both Nuclear and Conventional Fronts," Christian Science Monitor, January 16, 1986, p. 36.

3. See New York Times, March 24, 1983; letter cited in Ellen Goodman, "Star Wars Comeback," Boston Globe, April 4, 1985, p. 19.

4. James Schlesinger, "Rhetoric and Realities in the Star Wars Debate," International Security 10, no. 1 (Summer 1985): 3-12; McGeorge Bundy, George F. Kennan, Robert S. McNamara, and Gerard Smith, "The President's Choice: Star Wars or Arms Control," Foreign Affairs 63, no. 2 (Winter 1984-1985): 266; Schlesinger, "Rhetoric and Realities," p. 5.

5. Bundy et al., "President's Choice," p. 267; "The Crack in Star Wars," Boston Globe, July 20, 1985, p. 14. On software problems see, for example, Herbert Lin, "The Development of Software for Ballistic-Missile Defense," Scientific American 253, no. 6 (December 1985): 46-53; Jonathan Jacky, "The 'Star Wars' Defense Won't Compute," Atlantic 255, no. 6 (June 1985): 18-30. For a more balanced view see Warre Meyers, ''The Star Wars Software Debate," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 42, no. 2 (February 1986): 31-36.

6. Bundy et. al., "President's Choice," p. 267.

7. Schiesinger, "Rhetoric and Realities," p. 5; Bundy et al., "President's Choice," p. 268.

8. Ashton B. Carter, Directed Energy Missile Defense in Space: Background Paper (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, 1984), pp. 69-70; Fred Kaplan, "Snag Seen for 'Star Wars' Defense," Boston Globe, February 3, 1986, p. 1. Fred Hoffman claims that the Soviets would not expand their offensive forces to overcome a Star Wars defense and even that this idea "has been refuted by reality." How? Because "the United States drastically cut its expenditures on strategic defense in the 1960's and 1970's while the Soviets tripled their expenditures on strategic offense. After we abandoned any active defense against ballistic missile attacks even on our silos, the Soviets deployed MIRVs for the first time and increased them at an accelerating rate." This is a creative historical comparison. The question is whether an American buildup of nuclear defenses would impel the Soviets to an offensive missile buildup, but the example cited is different: an American reduction of efforts on the impractical nuclear defenses of the time. The same people who increased

their forces in the face of a decreasing threat to their survival will let their forces decline in the face of an increasing threat? What Hoffman's example really shows is that in the post—Cuban missile crisis era the Soviets were determined to build up their massively inferior nuclear arsenal to rough parity with the United States, regardless of U.S. decisions about deployments of nearly meaningless "defenses."

9. NBC, "Meet the Press," April 27, 1983; Schlesinger, "Rhetoric and Realities," p. 5; Carter, Missile Defense, p. 70.

10. Bundy et al., "President's Choice," p. 265; Carter, Missile Defense, p. 81; Abrahamson and DeLauer, quoted in Bundy et al., "President's Choice," pp. 266-267; Tina Rosenberg, "The Authorized Version," Atlantic 257, no. 2 (February 1986): 26-30. Charles Townes, then adviser to Secretary Weinberger and leader of two Pentagon groups studying MX missile basing modes, also acknowledged that perfect defense is "quite impractical. There is no technical solution to safeguarding mankind from nuclear explosives." Reagan's former science adviser, George Keyworth, admitted that in response to a workable Star Wars system, the Soviets would "shift their strategic resources to other weapons systems." Thus "by this acceptance he is conceding that even if Star Wars should succeed far beyond what any present technical consensus can allow us to believe, it would fail by the President's own standard."

countermeasures] first, you wouldn't bother reading the rest of the report. It presents an overwhelming case against the possibility of a hope of mounting something useful. It quite unambiguously indicates the problem was insolvable unless certain things were solved that no one knew how to address." The original draft of the report, reflecting the panel members' views, was first "smoothed" to the satisfaction of the panel's chairmen and then underwent "further transformations" by top Pentagon officials who had not participated in the study. The result was that, according to retired Major General John Toomay, deputy chairman of the Fletcher Commission, "the Administration in its public documents chose to interpret what the commission found out in a way that pleased them. A lot of technical people on the panel emphasized problems ... [that] the Administration tended not to emphasize.'' Similarly, the public summary of the Hoffman report, often cited in defense of SDI, discussed "the possibility that nearly leakproof defenses may take a very long time, or may prove to be unattainable in a practical sense against a Soviet effort to counter the defense." According to Rosenberg, "What the Hoffman report in fact endorsed was not SDI but a limited system of traditional ABM missiles" (Townes, quoted in New York Times, April 11, 1983; Keyworth, quoted in Bundy et al., "President's Choice," pp. 268-269; Rosenberg, "Authorized Version," pp. 26-30).

11. See Paul Bracken, "Accidental Nuclear War," in Hawks, Doves, and Owls, ed. Graham T. Allison, Albert Carnesale, and Joseph S. Nye, Jr. (New York: Norton, 1985); Carter, Missile Defense, p. 76. For a fuller, less sanguine discussion of nuclear arms in the Third World, see Aaron Karp, "Ballistic Missiles in the Third World," International Security 9, no. 3 (Winter 1984-1985): 166-195.

12. George Rathjens and Jack Ruina, "BMD and Strategic Instability," Dædalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 114, no. 3 (Summer 1985): 251; "Is There a Way Out," Harper's 270, no. 1621 (June 1985): 36-47; Sherman Frankel, letter to the editor, New York Times, February 24, 1988. The Department of Energy has actually cut its funding requests for nuclear safeguards and security programs. See Fred Kaplan, "Nuclear Safety Programs Victims of Budget Cuts," Boston Globe, January 26, 1986, p. 10.

and one can reasonably expect the Soviets to work to retain the integrity of their deterrent at almost any cost, as the United States would ("Talks, too," Economist, September 28, 1985, p. 30).

13. Fred S. Hoffman, "The SDI in U.S. Nuclear Strategy," pp. 16, 19; Sidney D. Drell and Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky, "The Case Against Strategic Defense: Technical and Strategic Realities," Issues in Science and Technology, Fall 1984, pp. 45-65, reprinted in Herbert M. Levine and David Carlton, The Nuclear Arms Race Debated (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986), pp. 226-242.

14. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Strategic Defense and Anti-Satellite Weapons, 98th Cong., 2d sess., April 25, 1984, p. 179.

15. Schlesinger, "Rhetoric and Realities," p. 6.

16. Zbigniew Brzezinski, "A Star Wars Solution," New Republic 193, no. 2 (July 8, 1985): 16-18; "The Case for Star Wars," Economist, August 3, 1985, p. 11.

17. Dolnick, "Star Wars," p. 47; William H. Taft IV, cited in Carter, Missile Defense, p. 65; Karl O'Lessker, review of Robert Jastrow, How to Make Nuclear Weapons Obsolete (New York: Little, Brown, 1985), American Spectator 18, no. 9 (September 1985): 38; Robert Jastrow, "Reagan vs. the Scientists: Why the President Is Right About Missile Defense," Commentary 77, no. 1 (January 1984): 23-32.

18. Schlesinger, "Rhetoric and Realities," p. 10; "Is There a Way Out," Harper's 270, no. 1621 (June 1985): 36-47; Stanley Hoffmann, "Fog Over the Summit," New York Review of Books, January 16, 1986, p. 24.

19. John Kogut and Michael Weissman, "Taking the Pledge Against Star Wars," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 42, no. 1 (January 1986): 27-30; Union of Concerned Scientists, "Appeal by American Scientists to Ban Space Weapons" (n.d.); Robert Bowman, cited in Mobilization for Survival, "The Nightmare of 'Star Wars'" (n.d.); Benjamin Spock, fund-raising letter for Mobilization for Survival (n.d.). President Reagan himself said that "if paired with offensive systems'' a defense screen "can be viewed as fostering an aggressive policy." As Richard Nixon put it in the Los Angeles Times in 1984, "Such systems would be destabilizing if they provided a shield so that you could use the sword." Charles A. Zraket, a Defense Department consultant and executive vice president of Mitre Corporation, a major defense contractor, was reported in the Boston Globe in 1985 as arguing that "if a highly effective defensive system were developed and one side started to deploy it ... there would be a strong incentive for the other side to strike first to destroy the system before it was operational" ( Los Angeles Times, July 1, 1984; David L. Chandler, "Pentagon Consultant Questions Space-Based Arms Plan," Boston Globe, June 26, 1985).

20. The most promising ABM is a "terminal" defense that attacks incoming Soviet warheads as they near their targets. But that is not "where the emphasis presently is in SDI. It is rather on boost-phase, post-boost-phase, and mid-course defense. Thus the SDI R&D program is ill-designed to the extent that the objective is to 'enhance deterrence'" (G. W. Rathjens, "The Technical (In)feasibility of SDI [remarks presented at symposium on SDI, Virginia Military Institute, April 8, 1986, photocopied], edited version published in S. W. Guerrier

and W. C. Thompson, Perspectives on Strategic Defense [Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1986]).

21. Charles L. Glaser, "Do We Want the Missile Defenses We Can Build?" International Security 10, no. 1 (Summer 1985): 32-33.

22. E. P. Thompson, "Folly's Comet," in Star Wars, ed. E. P. Thompson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), pp. 103-104.

23. George Rathjens, "The Imperfections of 'Perfect Defense,'" Environment 26, no. 5 (June 1984): 38; Rathjens and Ruina, "BMD and Strategic Instability," pp. 254, 245; Glaser, "Missile Defenses,'' p. 35.

24. "SDI Lasers May Become Offensive Arms: Study," Boston Globe, January 13, 1986.

25. Ashton Carter, "Satellites and Anti-Satellites," International Security 10, no. 4 (Spring 1986): 47-88.

26. Robert English, "Offensive Star Wars," New Republic 194, no. 8 (February 24, 1986): 14.

27. Bundy et al., "President's Choice" (emphasis added).

28. Richard K. Betts, "Surprise Attack and Preemption," in Hawks, Doves, and Owls, ed. Allison, Carnesale, and Nye, p. 77.

1. David Alan Rosenberg, "'A Smoking Radiating Ruin at the End of Two Hours': Documents of American Plans for Nuclear War with the Soviet Union, 1954-1955," International Security 6, no. 3 (Winter 1981-1982). See also Rosenberg, "The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945-1960," in Strategy and Nuclear Deterrence: An "International Security" Reader, ed. Steven E. Miller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 143-144 (originally published in International Security 7, no. 4 [Spring 1983]).

2. Noam Chomsky, "Which Way for the Disarmament Movement? Interventionism and Nuclear War," in Beyond Survival: New Directions for the Disarmament Movement, ed. Michael Albert and David Dellinger (Boston: South End Press, 1983), pp. 253-254.

3. Thomas H. Etzold and John Lewis Gaddis, Containment: Documents on American Foreign Policy and Strategy, 1945-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), p. 414. The full text of NSC 68 is also in Naval War College Review (May-June 1975) and in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1977), vol. 1.

4. Richard H. Kohn and Joseph P. Harahan, eds., "U.S. Strategic Air Power, 1948-1962: Excerpts from an Interview with Generals Curtis E. LeMay, Leon W. Johnson, David A. Burchinal, and Jack J. Cotton," International Security 12, no. 4 (Spring 1988): 82-83; Daniel Ellsberg, "A Call to Mutiny," in Joseph Gerson, ed., The Deadly Connection: Nuclear War and U.S. Intervention (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1986), pp. 40, 57; Richard K. Betts, Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1987), pp. 32, 34.

5. Ibid., p. 36.

4. Richard H. Kohn and Joseph P. Harahan, eds., "U.S. Strategic Air Power, 1948-1962: Excerpts from an Interview with Generals Curtis E. LeMay, Leon W. Johnson, David A. Burchinal, and Jack J. Cotton," International Security 12, no. 4 (Spring 1988): 82-83; Daniel Ellsberg, "A Call to Mutiny," in Joseph Gerson, ed., The Deadly Connection: Nuclear War and U.S. Intervention (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1986), pp. 40, 57; Richard K. Betts, Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1987), pp. 32, 34.

5. Ibid., p. 36.

6. Eisenhower, cited in Ellsberg, "Call to Mutiny," pp. 53-54.

7. Betts, Nuclear Blackmail, pp. 38, 41, 46, 47.

8. Ibid., pp. 43, 47. The Korean conflict brought other danger points as well, such as the October 1950 U.S. bombing, supposedly accidental, of a Soviet airfield near Vladivostok, the September 1950 attack by a Soviet aircraft on a U.N. fighter patrol just after a U.S. fighter strafed an airfield in Manchuria, and defensive operations by Soviet air units in Manchuria against U.S. planes, including one case of combat with unmarked Soviet aircraft flying out of the USSR (Stephen S. Kaplan et al., Diplomacy of Power: Soviet Armed Forces as a Political Instrument [Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1981], pp. 91, 92).

7. Betts, Nuclear Blackmail, pp. 38, 41, 46, 47.

8. Ibid., pp. 43, 47. The Korean conflict brought other danger points as well, such as the October 1950 U.S. bombing, supposedly accidental, of a Soviet airfield near Vladivostok, the September 1950 attack by a Soviet aircraft on a U.N. fighter patrol just after a U.S. fighter strafed an airfield in Manchuria, and defensive operations by Soviet air units in Manchuria against U.S. planes, including one case of combat with unmarked Soviet aircraft flying out of the USSR (Stephen S. Kaplan et al., Diplomacy of Power: Soviet Armed Forces as a Political Instrument [Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1981], pp. 91, 92).

9. Betts, Nuclear Blackmail, p. 49.

10. See Ellsberg, "Call to Mutiny," pp. 40, 55, 56; Betts, Nuclear Blackmail, p. 52.

11. Gordon H. Chang, "To the Nuclear Brink: Eisenhower, Dulles, and the Quemoy-Matsu Crisis," International Security 2, no. 4 (Spring 1988): 99. In the Mandarin pinyin romanization the islands are known as Jinmen and Mazu.

12. Ibid., pp. 96, 97, 98.

13. Ibid., pp. 100, 107.

11. Gordon H. Chang, "To the Nuclear Brink: Eisenhower, Dulles, and the Quemoy-Matsu Crisis," International Security 2, no. 4 (Spring 1988): 99. In the Mandarin pinyin romanization the islands are known as Jinmen and Mazu.

12. Ibid., pp. 96, 97, 98.

13. Ibid., pp. 100, 107.

11. Gordon H. Chang, "To the Nuclear Brink: Eisenhower, Dulles, and the Quemoy-Matsu Crisis," International Security 2, no. 4 (Spring 1988): 99. In the Mandarin pinyin romanization the islands are known as Jinmen and Mazu.

12. Ibid., pp. 96, 97, 98.

13. Ibid., pp. 100, 107.

14. H. W. Brands, Jr., "Testing Massive Retaliation: Credibility and Crisis Management in the Taiwan Strait," International Security 12, no. 4 (Spring 1988): 141; Chang, "To the Nuclear Brink," p. 106; Brands, "Testing Massive Retaliation," p. 142.

15. Chang, "To the Nuclear Brink," p. 112; McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988), p. 280.

16. Chang, "To the Nuclear Brink," p. 113.

17. Associated Press, "Eisenhower Approached 'Nuclear Brink,'" Patriot Ledger (Quincy, Mass.), March 26, 1988, p. 2; Betts, Nuclear Blackmail, p. 56.

18. Chang, "To the Nuclear Brink," p. 107; Brands, "Testing Massive Retaliation," p. 142; Chang, "To the Nuclear Brink," p. 107; Brands, "Testing Massive Retaliation,'' p. 150; Chang, "To the Nuclear Brink," pp. 107-108; Brands, "Testing Massive Retaliation," p. 142.

19. Chang, "To the Nuclear Brink," p. 108; Brands, "Testing Massive Retaliation," pp. 128, 129, 139-140, 129.

20. Brands, "Testing Massive Retaliation," p. 143; Chang, "To the Nuclear Brink," p. 116.

21. Chang, "To the Nuclear Brink," pp. 116, 121.

22. Brands, "Testing Massive Retaliation," p. 125, 146; Chang, "To the Nuclear Brink," pp. 116, 117-118; Brands, "Testing Massive Retaliation," p. 147.

23. Brands, "Testing Massive Retaliation," pp. 147, 148; Kaplan, Diplomacy of Power, pp. 93-96. See also Alexander L. George and Richard Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), chap. 12; Ellsberg, "Call to Mutiny," p. 40; and Morton Halperin, The 1958 Taiwan Straits Crisis: A Documented History, RAND Corporation research memorandum RM-4900-ISA, December 1966 (formerly top secret).

24. Kaplan, Diplomacy of Power, pp. 154-155; Betts, Nuclear Blackmail, pp. 63, 65 (emphasis in original).

25. William B. Quandt, "Lebanon, 1958, and Jordan, 1970," in Force Without War, ed. Barry M. Blechman and Stephen S. Kaplan (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1978), pp. 237, 256; Morton H. Halperin, Nuclear Fallacy: Dispelling the Myth of Nuclear Strategy (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1987), pp. 32-33; Betts, Nuclear Blackmail, p. 66.

26. Quandt, "Lebanon, 1958, and Jordan, 1970," p. 238 (emphasis in original); Ellsberg, "Call to Mutiny," p. 40; Kaplan, Diplomacy of Power, p. 158.

27. Robert McNamara, Blundering into Disaster (New York: Pantheon, 1986), p. 9; Raymond Garthoff, Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1987), p. 30; McNamara, Blundering into Disaster, pp. 10-11.

28. Richard E. Neustadt and Graham T. Allison, afterword to Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Norton, 1969), p. 112.

29. Lebow, Nuclear Crisis Management, p. 136 (emphasis added). Potentially dangerous post-1962 incidents not discussed in this book include the October 1967 sinking of an Israeli destroyer by a Soviet-supplied Egyptian patrol boat in the tense aftermath of the devastating June war, leading the Soviets to immediately send warships to Port Said in anticipation of a possible Israeli military response; the 1968 seizure of the USS Pueblo by North Korean patrol boats, leading President Johnson to deploy Strategic Air Command nuclear bombers to the western Pacific and the largest U.S. naval force since the Cuban missile crisis to the Sea of Japan, where they engaged in potentially dangerous incidents with two Soviet warships; the 1969 downing of a U.S. Navy EC-121 reconnaissance plane by North Korea, to which both superpowers fortunately responded with restrained actions; the 1975 seizure of a U.S. commercial container vessel, the Mayaguez, by Khmer Rouge forces in Cambodian waters, leading to a bloody U.S. military "rescue" operation; and the Angolan conflict, in which both superpowers, China, South Africa, and Cuba are substantially involved. See Kaplan, Diplomacy of Power, pp. 168, 105, 106, 403, 195-199.

30. McNamara, Blundering into Disaster, p. 13; Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963-1969 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971), p. 288.

31. Anthony R. Wells, "The June 1967 Arab-Israeli War," in Soviet Naval Diplomacy, ed. Bradford Dismukes and James M. McConnell (New York: Pergamon, 1979), p. 166; Paul Jabber and Roman Kolkowicz, "The Arab-Israeli Wars of 1967 and 1973," in Kaplan, Diplomacy of Power, p. 433.

32. Johnson, Vantage Point, p. 300; "Sect. Rusk and Sect. of Defense McNamara Discuss Vietnam and Korea on 'Meet the Press,'" Department of State Bulletin 63, no. 1496 (February 26, 1968): 271, cited in William L. Ury, Beyond the Hotline: How We Can Prevent the Crisis That Might Bring on a Nuclear War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), p. 22; Wells, "Arab-Israeli War," p. 167; James E. Ennes, Assault on the Liberty (New York: Random House, 1979), p. 78, cited in Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle (Boston: South End Press, 1983), pp. 449-450; Johnson, Vantage Point, pp. 300-301.

33. Leonard S. Spector, The Undeclared Bomb (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1988), p. 176; McNamara, Blundering into Disaster, p. 13 (see also Jabber and Kolkowicz, "Arab-Israeli Wars," pp. 435-436); Johnson, Vantage Point, p. 302; Wells, "Arab-Israeli War," p. 166. In Decade of Decisions (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), William B. Quandt writes that "other participants in the events have judged Johnson's version overly dramatic'' (p. 43).

34. Jabber and Kolkowicz, "Arab-Israeli Wars," p. 436; Johnson, Vantage Point, pp. 302, 303.

35. Wells, "Arab-Israeli War," p. 1660; McNamara, Blundering into Disaster, p. 13; Johnson, Vantage Point, p. 304; Betts, Nuclear Blackmail, p. 128.

36. Marvin Kalb and Bernard Kalb, Kissinger (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), p. 190; Dismukes and McConnell, Soviet Naval Diplomacy, p. 227; Quandt, "Lebanon, 1958, and Jordan, 1970," p. 258; Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, p. 190; Bradford Dismukes, "Large-Scale Intervention Ashore: Soviet Air Defense Forces in Egypt," in Soviet Naval Diplomacy, ed. Dismukes and McConnell, pp. 226, 221, 222.

37. Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), pp. 570-571; Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, pp. 190-191.

38. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 568, 572, 574, 581-582.

39. Alvin Z. Rubinstein, "Air Support in the Arab East," in Kaplan, Diplomacy of Power, p. 475; Dismukes, "Large-Scale Intervention," pp. 232-233.

40. Peter Pry, Israel's Nuclear Arsenal (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1984), p. 29.

41. Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, pp. 197, 199.

42. Quandt, "Lebanon, 1958, and Jordan, 1970," p. 257; Richard M. Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), p. 477; Seymour M. Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York: Summit, 1983), p. 238.

43. Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, p. 200.

44. Hersh, Price of Power, pp. 244, 245.

45. Ibid., p. 244.

44. Hersh, Price of Power, pp. 244, 245.

45. Ibid., p. 244.

46. Quandt, "Lebanon, 1958, and Jordan, 1970," p. 272 (see also Kaplan, Diplomacy of Power, pp. 181-183); Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, p. 198; Quandt, "Lebanon, 1958, and Jordan, 1970," pp. 269, 279; Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 609, 614.

47. Nixon, RN, p. 483; Hersh, Price of Power, 246. See also Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), p. 370.

48. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 621, 622; Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, pp. 201-202.

49. Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, pp. 202-203, 204.

50. Ibid., pp. 204, 205.

51. Ibid., pp. 205-206 (emphasis added).

49. Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, pp. 202-203, 204.

50. Ibid., pp. 204, 205.

51. Ibid., pp. 205-206 (emphasis added).

49. Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, pp. 202-203, 204.

50. Ibid., pp. 204, 205.

51. Ibid., pp. 205-206 (emphasis added).

52. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 624-625.

53. Ibid., p. 625; Quandt, "Lebanon, 1958, and Jordan, 1970," p. 271; Kissinger, White House Years, p. 625. Quandt adds that "these contingency arrangements

were subject to review," which may be the basis of the ambiguity over whether Nixon authorized Israeli ground operations.

52. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 624-625.

53. Ibid., p. 625; Quandt, "Lebanon, 1958, and Jordan, 1970," p. 271; Kissinger, White House Years, p. 625. Quandt adds that "these contingency arrangements

were subject to review," which may be the basis of the ambiguity over whether Nixon authorized Israeli ground operations.

54. Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, pp. 205-207 (emphasis in original).

55. Quandt, "Lebanon, 1958, and Jordan, 1970," pp. 271, 268.

56. Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., On Watch: A Memoir (New York: Quadrangle, 1976), pp. 300-301, cited in Abram N. Shulsky, "The Jordanian Crisis of September 1970," in Soviet Naval Diplomacy, ed. Dismukes and McConnell, p. 176.

57. Shulsky, "Jordanian Crisis," p. 176, cited in Desmond Ball, "Nuclear War at Sea," International Security 10, no. 3 (Winter 1985-1986): 7.

58. Quandt, "Lebanon, 1958, and Jordan, 1970," p. 271.

59. Hersh, Price of Power, p. 250; Kissinger, White House Years, p. 594.

60. Ibid., pp. 252, 253.

59. Hersh, Price of Power, p. 250; Kissinger, White House Years, p. 594.

60. Ibid., pp. 252, 253.

61. Nixon, RN, pp. 220—221; Kissinger, White House Years, p. 634; Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, p. 210.

62. Nixon, RN, p. 486.

63. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 641, 643; Nixon, RN, p. 488; Garthoff, Cuban Missile Crisis, pp. 33-34; Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, p. 211; Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 645, 647.

64. Nixon, RN, p. 488; Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, p. 211; Nixon, RN, p. 489.

65. Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, p. 211; Szulc quoted in Hersh, Price of Power, p. 255.

66. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 651.

67. Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, p. 257.

68. Nixon, RN, p. 526.

69. David K. Hall, "The Laotian War of 1962 and the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971," in Force Without War, ed. Blechman and Kaplan, pp. 177, 178.

70. Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, p. 259; Kissinger, White House Years, p. 904; Nixon, RN, p. 528.

71. Nixon, RN, p. 526; Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, p. 260; Kissinger, White House Years, p. 905; Hall, "Indo-Pakistani War," p. 188; Halperin, Nuclear Fallacy, pp. 41-42; CIA, cited in Hall, "Indo-Pakistani War," p. 201, and Kaplan, Diplomacy of Power, p. 184.

72. James M. McConnell and Anne Kelly Calhoun, "The December 1971 Indo-Pakistani Crisis," in Soviet Naval Diplomacy, ed. Dismukes and McConnell, pp. 183, 191.

73. Hall, "Indo-Pakistani War," pp. 193-194.

74. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 909-910; Nixon, RN, p. 527.

75. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 910, 912; Hall, "Indo-Pakistani War,"pp. 202, 195; Nixon, cited in Halperin, Nuclear Fallacy, pp. 41-42; Hersh, Price of Power, p. 457.

76. Hall, "Indo-Pakistani War," pp. 192-194, 200, 221 (emphasis in original).

77. From Westmoreland's memoirs, cited in Ellsberg, "Call to Mutiny," p. 55.

78. Halperin, Nuclear Fallacy, p. 40.

79. From H. R. Haldeman's memoir, The End of Power (New York: Times Books, 1978), pp. 82-83, cited in Ellsberg, "Call to Mutiny," pp. 56-57; Ellsberg, "Call to Mutiny," p. 48.

80. Hersh, Price of Power, pp. 128, 129.

81. Ibid., pp. 124-125.

82. Ibid., pp. 368-369.

80. Hersh, Price of Power, pp. 128, 129.

81. Ibid., pp. 124-125.

82. Ibid., pp. 368-369.

80. Hersh, Price of Power, pp. 128, 129.

81. Ibid., pp. 124-125.

82. Ibid., pp. 368-369.

83. See Nixon, RN, p. 591. Kissinger comments: "Considering that we were bombing Hanoi and Haiphong four days before my visit to Moscow, this was restraint of a high order. What was significant was not that the criticism stopped well short of a protest but that Moscow maintained its invitation even in the face of an unprecedented assault on its client" (Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1122).

84. The Arabs achieved almost complete surprise despite numerous longstanding warnings by the Arab states and by the Soviet Union that such a war was inevitable unless captured Arab territory was returned by Israel. "Sadat had made his intentions so open that they came to be generally disbelieved," and Gromyko, in a typical Soviet statement, told the U.N. General Assembly on September 20 that "the fires of war could break out at any time, and who could tell what consequences would ensue" (Raymond L. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan [Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1985], pp. 362, 365-366). Kissinger acknowledges in his memoirs that "Sadat boldly all but told what he was going to do and we did not believe him" (Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval [Boston: Little, Brown, 1982], p. 459). The United States bears substantial blame for making it possible for Israel to refuse to compromise over the territories they captured in 1967 despite the widespread understanding that their position made another war almost inevitable and with it the clear danger of the perilous superpower confrontation that did in fact occur.

85. Pry, Israel's Nuclear Arsenal, p. 31; "How Israel Got the Bomb," Time, April 12, 1976, cited in Pry, Israel's Nuclear Arsenal, pp. 31-32.

86. Amos Perlmutter, Michael Handel, and Uri Bar-Joseph, Two Minutes over Baghdad (London: Corgi Books, 1982), pp. 46-48; Spector, The Undeclared Bomb, p. 177. Perlmutter, Handel, and Bar-Joseph provide no documentation for their claims; Spector cites his interviews. According to Spector, the U.S. officials he interviewed said that Israel's readying of its nuclear weapons was not "necessarily in conjunction with the [Jericho] missiles." Spector adds that "Egypt was apparently aware of the possibility that Israel might use nuclear arms during the conflict" and that "some Israeli scholars believe that Israel's nuclear capabilities played a far more important role in the conflict than has been acknowledged" (pp. 177, 396).

87. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation, p. 369.

88. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 508, 509-510.

89. Ibid., p. 508; Zumwalt, On Watch, pp. 446-447, cited in Kaplan, Diplomacy of Power, p. 186; Stephen S. Roberts, "The October 1973 Arab-Israeli War," in Soviet Naval Diplomacy, ed. Dismukes and McConnell, pp. 196, 199-201; Kaplan, Diplomacy of Power, p. 188.

88. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 508, 509-510.

89. Ibid., p. 508; Zumwalt, On Watch, pp. 446-447, cited in Kaplan, Diplomacy of Power, p. 186; Stephen S. Roberts, "The October 1973 Arab-Israeli War," in Soviet Naval Diplomacy, ed. Dismukes and McConnell, pp. 196, 199-201; Kaplan, Diplomacy of Power, p. 188.

90. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 517-520.

91. Kaplan, Diplomacy of Power, p. 188; Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 559-560.

92. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 561, 569 (emphasis in original); Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation, p. 372.

93. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation, p. 374; Roberts, "Arab-Israeli War," p. 202; Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 575.

94. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation, p. 375; Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 580.

95. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 581.

96. Ibid., p. 582.

97. Ibid., p. 583; Barry M. Blechman and Douglas M. Hart, "The Political Utility of Nuclear Weapons: The 1973 Middle East Crisis," in Strategy and Nuclear Deterrence: An "International Security" Reader, ed. Stephen E. Miller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 279-280 (first published in International Security 7, no. 1 [Summer 1982]).

95. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 581.

96. Ibid., p. 582.

97. Ibid., p. 583; Barry M. Blechman and Douglas M. Hart, "The Political Utility of Nuclear Weapons: The 1973 Middle East Crisis," in Strategy and Nuclear Deterrence: An "International Security" Reader, ed. Stephen E. Miller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 279-280 (first published in International Security 7, no. 1 [Summer 1982]).

95. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 581.

96. Ibid., p. 582.

97. Ibid., p. 583; Barry M. Blechman and Douglas M. Hart, "The Political Utility of Nuclear Weapons: The 1973 Middle East Crisis," in Strategy and Nuclear Deterrence: An "International Security" Reader, ed. Stephen E. Miller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 279-280 (first published in International Security 7, no. 1 [Summer 1982]).

98. Scott D. Sagan, "Nuclear Alerts and Crisis Management," International Security 9, no. 4 (Spring 1985): 122.

99. But as Jabber and Kolkowicz observe: "It was not clear whether this [mobilization] was primarily connected with the contingency of possible Soviet intervention or was a precautionary move taken once it appeared that an early cease-fire was not in the cards. Apparently U.S. decisionmakers were not alarmed by the move. It was not immediately reported by the media, and U.S. officials made no allusion to it" ("Arab-Israeli Wars," p. 447). Indeed, on October 12 Kissinger had praised the Soviets for restraint in the crisis.

100. Blechman and Hart, "Political Utility," pp. 277-279.

101. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation, p. 378; Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 587-588.

102. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 589, 591; Sagan, "Nuclear Alerts and Crisis Management," p. 125; Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation, p. 379. For a review of the evidence that Nixon was excluded from these decisions and then lied about it later, in his memoirs and elsewhere, see Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation, pp. 378-379. McGeorge Bundy also alludes to "the short [nuclear] alert called in President Nixon's name on October 24, 1973" ("The Unimpressive Record of Atomic Diplomacy," in The Nuclear Crisis Reader, ed. Gwyn Prins [New York: Vintage, 1984], p. 50).

103. Sagan, "Nuclear Alerts and Crisis Management," p. 125; Blechman and Hart, "Political Utility," p. 283; Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 589.

104. Blechman and Hart, "Political Utility," p. 281; Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 590.

105. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation, p. 379. Most accounts of the 1973 crisis suggest, apparently inaccurately, that Nixon ordered the nuclear alert and managed the crisis.

106. Nixon, RN, pp. 939-940, Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 594-595.

107. Blechman and Hart, "Political Utility," pp. 284-285.

108. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 607, 604-605, 607, 608, 611.

109. Roberts, "Arab-Israeli War," pp. 204, 210.

110. Blechman and Hart, "Political Utility," pp. 295-296.

111. Kaplan, Wizards of Armageddon, pp. 370-371.

112. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation, pp. 828, 829, 841.

113. Ibid., pp. 829-830, 832, 836-837.

114. Ibid., pp. 837, 842 (emphasis in original).

112. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation, pp. 828, 829, 841.

113. Ibid., pp. 829-830, 832, 836-837.

114. Ibid., pp. 837, 842 (emphasis in original).

112. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation, pp. 828, 829, 841.

113. Ibid., pp. 829-830, 832, 836-837.

114. Ibid., pp. 837, 842 (emphasis in original).

115. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Adviser, 1977-1981 (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux), pp. 351-352.

116. Le Monde, June 11, 1982, cited in Chomsky, Fateful Triangle, p. 27; Chomsky, Fateful Triangle, p. 450.

117. See Ned Temko, Christian Science Monitor, June 23, 1982; Claudia Wright, New Statesman, June 18, 1982; both cited in Chomsky, Fateful Triangle, p. 450.

118. AP, "Soviet Embassy Heavily Damaged by Israeli Shells," New York Times, July 8, 1982; New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, December 2, 1982; all cited in Chomsky, Fateful Triangle, p. 450. As Chomsky notes, these sources do not make clear whether the Israelis killed the eleven Soviets during or before the Lebanon war.

119. Cited in Noam Chomsky, "Patterns of Intervention," in Deadly Connection, ed. Gerson, pp. 60-61.

120. William A. Schwartz, "Nuclear Weapons in Lebanon?" (Chestnut Hill, Mass., 1983). Given the particular vessels deployed to Lebanon, determined from newspaper accounts, and the known nuclear capabilities of each ship in the U.S. Navy, it was possible to compile a long list of nuclear weapons potentially on site. One must say "potentially" because the Navy does not confirm or deny the presence of nuclear warheads on its ships at any time. But on the basis of interviews with people familiar with nuclear weapons procedures, it seems clear that at least some of these ships, especially the carriers, almost certainly brought warheads along. Such vessels were actively engaged in combat, with Soviet forces stationed nearby. Most of the major U.S. newspapers refused to publish the article documenting these facts, submitted as an Op-Ed article in the midst of the 1983 crisis.

121. Ury, Beyond the Hotline, pp. 20-21.

122. Selig S. Harrison, "Afghanistan: Soviet Intervention, Afghan Resistance, and the American Role," in Low Intensity Warfare: Counterinsurgency, Proinsurgency, and Antiterrorism in the Eighties, ed. Michael T. Klare and Peter Kornbluh (New York: Pantheon, 1988), p. 183.

the Afghan defectors and the capture of the Soviet pilot, see UPI, "Pakistan Jets Hit Afghan Warplane," Boston Globe, September 8, 1988, p. 12; on the 1984 report, see John Prados, Presidents' Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations from World War II Through Iranscam (New York: Quill, 1986), p. 360.

124. Ahmed Rashid, "Pakistanis Want an Afghan Peace," Nation, January 31, 1987, p. 112.

125. On U.S. patrols, see John H. Cushman, Jr., "Pakistan Says It May Request Air Patrols by U.S.," New York Times, October 16, 1986, p. A12; John H. Cushman, Jr., "U.S. Seeking AWACs for Pakistan," New York Times, October 17, 1986, p. A6. On possible Pakistani and Afghan rebel terrorist attacks, see AP, "Afghans Say Pakistan Hit Civilian Plane," Boston Globe, April 1, 1987, p. 3; UPI, "Kabul Says Guerillas Down Plane, Killing 29," Boston Globe, April 11, 1988, p. 7; ''Afghans Say Rebels Downed Plane, 53 Died," Boston Globe, June 12, 1987, p. 3; UPI, "Afghan Rebels Down Plane, Killing 43, Westerners Say," Boston Globe, June 24, 1987, p. 8; AP, "Pakistan Car Bomb May Have Killed 72," Boston Globe, October 14, 1987, p. 13; Reuters, "Four Rockets Launched by Guerillas Explode in Afghanistan Capital," Boston Globe, November 30, 1987, p. 4. On rebel attacks on Soviet territory, see David B. Ottaway, "Soviets Say Afghan Rebels Inflicted Casualties in Attack on USSR Hamlet," Boston Globe, April 13, 1987, p. 7. Ottaway cites conflicting reports on whether the rebels actually entered the Soviet Union or just fired rockets across the border. He also mentions the rebel Islamic party's statement that the group attacked the USSR to show that "we are not only fighting to free our territory but to free land taken from us by force and our Moslem brothers under the control of communism"—that is, to liberate Afghan territory seized by czarist Russia. The leader of the Islamic party has publicly called for the "liberation" of the Soviet Muslim-dominated republics.

126. Laurence Martin, The Changing Face of Nuclear Warfare (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), pp. 90-91.

127. Spector, Undeclared Bomb, pp. 129, 133, 135, 142-143.

128. Lawrence Lifschultz, "New U.S. Spy Flights from Pakistan," Nation 243, no. 18 (November 29, 1986): 593, 606, 608, 610.

129. Harrison, "Afghanistan," pp. 205-206.

130. Spector, Undeclared Bomb, pp. 130-131, 132.

131. John Walcott and Tim Carrington, "CIA Resisted Proposal to Give Afghan Rebels U.S. Stinger Missiles," Wall Street Journal, February 16, 1988, p. 1.

132. Ibid., pp. 1, 31; Harrison, "Afghanistan," p. 201.

131. John Walcott and Tim Carrington, "CIA Resisted Proposal to Give Afghan Rebels U.S. Stinger Missiles," Wall Street Journal, February 16, 1988, p. 1.

132. Ibid., pp. 1, 31; Harrison, "Afghanistan," p. 201.

133. Walcott and Carrington, "CIA Resisted Proposal," p. 31; Rashid, "Pakistanis Want an Afghan Peace," p. 114; Harrison, "Afghanistan," p. 203; "Pakistan Expects Rising Pressure as Fighting Grows in Afghanistan," New York Times, April 6, 1987, p. A9.

134. On Brzezinski, see Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation, pp. 974-975. Some American press reports said Brzezinski actually fired the weapon, but Garthoff considers them "exaggerated." On the press backgrounder, see David Woods, January 18, 1980, p. 1, cited in Ellsberg, "Call to Mutiny," pp. 37-38.

1. McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988), pp. 517, 542, 590.

2. Ibid., pp. 593, 595, 596, 598. Bundy adds, in qualification, that Europe is safe from nuclear danger "as long as the countries of that region are self-confident and the tradition of mutual trust between them and the United States is maintained" (p. 598).

1. McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988), pp. 517, 542, 590.

2. Ibid., pp. 593, 595, 596, 598. Bundy adds, in qualification, that Europe is safe from nuclear danger "as long as the countries of that region are self-confident and the tradition of mutual trust between them and the United States is maintained" (p. 598).

3. Paul Bracken, The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 52, 68.

4. Barry R. Posen, "Inadvertent Nuclear War? Escalation and NATO's Northern Flank," in Strategy and Nuclear Deterrence, ed. Miller, p. 109 (first published in International Security 7, no. 2 [Fall 1982]).

5. Robert Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), pp. 47-49.

6. Details on these incidents are from Scott D. Sagan, "Nuclear Alerts and Crisis Management," International Security 9, no. 4 (Spring 1985), pp. 106-122.

7. See Desmond Ball, "Nuclear War at Sea," International Security 10, no. 3 (Winter 1985-1986), p. 20.

8. Sagan, "Nuclear Alerts and Crisis Management," pp. 118-121.

9. Ibid., pp. 121-122; Raymond L. Garthoff, Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1987), pp. 78-79. Some of this information had not been revealed before the publication of Garthoff's important book.

8. Sagan, "Nuclear Alerts and Crisis Management," pp. 118-121.

9. Ibid., pp. 121-122; Raymond L. Garthoff, Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1987), pp. 78-79. Some of this information had not been revealed before the publication of Garthoff's important book.

10. Stephen S. Kaplan, Diplomacy of Power: Soviet Armed Forces as a Political Instrument (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1981), p. 58; Barry M. Blechman and Stephen S. Kaplan, Force Without War: U.S. Armed Forces as a Political Instrument (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1978), pp. 28, 47; Ball, "Nuclear War at Sea," p. 28.

11. Ball, "Nuclear War at Sea," pp. 6-8.

12. Ibid., pp. 5-6.

13. Ibid., pp. 13, 29. Ball cites several other factors besides those we mention, such as the U.S. Navy's antisubmarine warfare strategy, as risk factors for unintended nuclear war at sea. This article is required reading for all serious students of how nuclear war might begin.

11. Ball, "Nuclear War at Sea," pp. 6-8.

12. Ibid., pp. 5-6.

13. Ibid., pp. 13, 29. Ball cites several other factors besides those we mention, such as the U.S. Navy's antisubmarine warfare strategy, as risk factors for unintended nuclear war at sea. This article is required reading for all serious students of how nuclear war might begin.

11. Ball, "Nuclear War at Sea," pp. 6-8.

12. Ibid., pp. 5-6.

13. Ibid., pp. 13, 29. Ball cites several other factors besides those we mention, such as the U.S. Navy's antisubmarine warfare strategy, as risk factors for unintended nuclear war at sea. This article is required reading for all serious students of how nuclear war might begin.

14. Johnson, cited in Richard Ned Lebow, Nuclear Crisis Management: A Dangerous Illusion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 218-219; Gerald R. Ford, A Time to Heal: The Autobiography of Gerald R. Ford (New York: Harper & Row and the Reader's Digest Association, 1979), p. 136. We do not know if the reports were true. The important thing is that such an action by Schlesinger would be quite plausible.

15. Robert Jervis, The Logic of Images in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 7; Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), p. 246.

16. Gordon H. Chang, "To the Nuclear Brink: Eisenhower, Dulles, and the Quemoy-Matsu Crisis," International Security 12, no. 4 (Spring 1988): 99; H. W. Brands, Jr., "Testing Massive Retaliation: Credibility and Crisis Management

in the Taiwan Strait," International Security 12, no. 4 (Spring 1988): 124, 138.

17. I. F. Stone, "The Brink," in The Cuban Missile Crisis, ed. Robert A. Divine (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1971), p. 156 (first published in New York Review of Books, April 14, 1966, pp. 12-16); Lebow, Nuclear Crisis Management, p. 16.

18. Richard M. Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), pp. 481-482, 485 (emphasis added); Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), pp. 596-597, 616; Marvin Kalb and Bernard Kalb, Kissinger (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), p. 202; William B. Quandt, "Lebanon, 1958, and Jordan, 1970," in Blechman and Kaplan, Force Without War, p. 281.

19. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 641, 886, 895, 898, 903, 914, 916; Nixon, RN, p. 527.

20. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 468, 520, 521, 536.

21. Lebow, Nuclear Crisis Management, pp. 71-72.

22. Daniel Ellsberg, "A Call to Mutiny," in The Deadly Connection: Nuclear War and U.S. Intervention, ed. Joseph Gerson (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1986), pp. 36, 39 (emphasis in original); Blechman and Kaplan, Force Without War, pp. 47-49.

23. Kaplan, Diplomacy of Power, pp. 54-60; Garthoff, Cuban Missile Crisis, p. 41; Sagan, "Nuclear Alerts and Crisis Management," pp. 129-130.

24. Barry M. Blechman and Douglas M. Hart, "The Political Utility of Nuclear Weapons: The 1973 Middle East Crisis," in Strategy and Nuclear Deterrence: An "International Security" Reader, ed. Stephen E. Miller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 296; Blechman and Kaplan, Force Without War, p. 531.

25. Cited in Raymond L. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1985), p. 974. For the original, see Presidential Documents 16 (January 28, 1980).

26. See Ellsberg, "Call to Mutiny," pp. 37-39, 45. At this writing, commentators such as Charles Krauthammer are citing the Carter Doctrine to justify the Reagan administration's intervention of nuclear-armed U.S. Navy ships in the Iran-Iraq wary—even though there is no connection between the two. The Carter Doctrine refers specifically to defense against an "outside force"; the Iran-Iraq war is a conflict between gulf states in which the United States is the outside force.

27. Christopher Paine, "On the Beach: The Rapid Deployment Force and the Nuclear Arms Race," in Deadly Connection, ed. Gerson, pp. 113, 117; Ellsberg, "Call to Mutiny," p. 44.

28. Joseph J. Kruzel, cited in Kaplan, Diplomacy of Power, p. 55 (from "Military Alerts and Diplomatic Signals," in The Limits of Military Intervention, ed. Ellen P. Stern [Sage, 1977], p. 89); Sagan, "Nuclear Alerts and Crisis Management," pp. 99, 130, 132, 135-136.

29. Sagan, "Nuclear Alerts and Crisis Management," p. 131; Lebow, Nuclear Crisis Management, p. 103.

30. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 536.

31. David Woods, Los Angeles Times, March 17, 1982, cited in Noam Chomsky, Turning the Tide (Boston: South End Press, 1985), pp. 171-172. According to Chomsky, "Lehman said he envisioned a conventional rather than a nuclear global war with the USSR—conceivable, but hardly likely."

32. Leonard S. Spector, The Undeclared Bomb (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1988), pp. 69-70, 91, 147.

33. Peter Hayes, Walden Bello, and Lyuba Zarsky, "Korean Tripwire," Nation 245, no. 8 (September 19, 1987), p. 256; see also their American Lake: Nuclear Peril in the Pacific (New York: Penguin, 1986), pp. ix, 1, 2. American Lake is a crucial study of the Pacific's many nuclear dangers.

34. "Who's Who, and Why, in Angola," Economist, June 14, 1986, p. 33.

35. Spector, Undeclared Bomb, pp. 288, 293, 284.

36. Bernard Avishai and Avner Cohen, "Time to Heed the Nuclear Threat in the Middle East," Boston Globe, April 3, 1988; Pranger and Tahtinen, quoted in Taysir N. Nashif, Nuclear Warfare in the Middle East: Dimensions and Responsibilities (Princeton: Kingston Press, 1984), p. 60.

37. Spector, Undeclared Bomb, pp. 164, 180, 32, 162.

38. Ibid., pp. 186-187; Perlmutter, Handel, and Bar-Joseph, Two Minutes over Baghdad; Avishai and Cohen, "Nuclear Threat," p. 67.

37. Spector, Undeclared Bomb, pp. 164, 180, 32, 162.

38. Ibid., pp. 186-187; Perlmutter, Handel, and Bar-Joseph, Two Minutes over Baghdad; Avishai and Cohen, "Nuclear Threat," p. 67.

39. Spector, Undeclared Bomb, pp. 179-180, 162.

40. Avishai and Cohen, "Nuclear Threat," p. 67; Pry, Israel's Nuclear Arsenal, p. 1.

41. New York Times, June 24, 1987; "Iranian Guns Aimed at Soviet Convoy," Patriot Ledger (Quincy, Mass.), November 20, 1987, p. 4; Thomas B. Cochran, William M. Arkin, and Milton M. Hoenig, Nuclear Weapons Databook, vol. 1, U.S. Nuclear Forces and Capabilities (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1984), pp. 244-278; Joshua Handler and William M. Arkin, Nuclear Warships and Naval Nuclear Weapons: A Complete Inventory, Neptune Papers No. 2 (Washington, D.C.: Greenpeace and the Institute for Policy Studies, 1988), pp. 39-73; Paine, "On the Beach," p. 119.

1. We have drawn general historical information on the Cuban missile crisis from a variety of sources, especially Ellie Abel, The Missile Crisis (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1966); Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Norton, 1968); David Detzer, The Brink (New York: Crowell, 1979); Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Harper & Row, 1965); Herbert Dinerstein, The Making of a Missile Crisis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); and Richard Walton, Cold War and Counter-revolution (Baltimore: Penguin, 1972).

2. Kennedy, Thirteen Days, pp. 1, 86; Raymond L. Garthoff, Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1987), p. 45.

3. Scott D. Sagan, "Nuclear Alerts and Crisis Management," International Security 9, no. 4 (Spring 1985): 109n.

4. Detzer, Brink, pp. 164-165.

5. John F. Kennedy's address of October 22, 1962, quoted in Kennedy, Thirteen Days, pp. 155-156; Sorensen, Kennedy, p. 705.

6. John F. Kennedy, quoted in Kennedy, Thirteen Days, pp. 153-154. President Kennedy acknowledged in this speech that the nuclear threat to U.S. cities was not entirely new: "American citizens have become adjusted to living daily on the bull's eye of Soviet missiles located inside the U.S.S.R. or in submarines.... In that sense missiles in Cuba add to an already clear and present danger." (p. 155). But this admission did not change the thrust of his almost panicky speech—that the Cuban missiles posed a direct threat to U.S. population centers.

7. I. F. Stone, "The Brink," in The Cuban Missile Crisis, ed. Robert A. Divine (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1971), p. 156 (first published in New York Review of Books, April 14, 1966, pp. 12-16).

8. David Alan Rosenberg, "The Origins of Overkill," in Strategy and Nuclear Deterrence: An "International Security" Reader, ed. Stephen E. Miller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 148, 150 (first published in International Security 7, no. 4 [Spring 1983]).

9. Roger Hagan and Bart Bernstein, "Military Value of Missiles in Cuba," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 14, no. 2 (February 1963): 8-13. Declassified Pentagon studies were made available to us by the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies, Brookline, Mass. We are grateful to Matt Goodman, Burton Wright, and David Meyer of the institute for their generous help in compiling and assessing strategic force data. On news coverage of the new claims about the number of Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles, see, for example, Dan Fisher, "Soviets Had Warheads in Cuba, Conferees Told," Boston Globe, January 29, 1989, p. 1; Bill Keller, "Warheads Were Deployed in Cuba in '62, Soviets Say,'' New York Times, January 29, 1989, p. 1.

10. Richard E. Neustadt and Graham T. Allison, afterword to Kennedy, Thirteen Days, pp. 123-124, paraphrasing statements reportedly made by Robert McNamara, then secretary of defense.

11. See Hagan and Bernstein, "Missiles in Cuba," for a discussion of this "short-circuit" theory of Soviet motivations.

12. Some might argue that nuclear missiles and bombers in Cuba would have complicated a coordinated American first strike, making its success less certain and thereby helping to deter it. Although Cuban weapons would be highly vulnerable, ensuring their destruction while at the same time eliminating all important nuclear arms bases in the Soviet Union would be more complex and uncertain than simply attacking Soviet targets. Timing simultaneous attacks of near and distant targets while ensuring surprise might be particularly problematic. But if, improbably, Soviet home-based nuclear forces were indeed vulnerable to preemptive destruction, such "complications" could not fundamentally invalidate a U.S. first strike. Given the long lead times needed to launch Soviet missiles and bombers of the time, complete surprise and simultaneity of attack would not be required. Destroying Cuban bases would be the easiest part of a preemptive raid and would not have to he completely coordinated with the intercontinental strikes at the Soviet Union. Therefore Cuban weaponry could not significantly add to the Soviet deterrent against a U.S. first strike.

13. Hagan and Bernstein, "Missiles in Cuba," p. 12.

14. Rosenberg, "Origins of Overkill," p. 175; J. C. Hopkins, The Development of the Strategic Air Command (Omaha: Strategic Air Command, Office of the Historian, 1981); Robert McNamara, declassified Department of Defense statement, 1966, substantiated by 1967 statement; Thomas B. Cochran, William M. Arkin, and Milton M. Hoenig, Nuclear Weapons Databook, vol. 1, U.S. Nuclear Forces and Capabilities (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1984), table 1.6, p. 15.

15. Some argued that the Cuban weapons would add to a Soviet first-strike capability against U.S. nuclear forces. In the purely academic sense that they would enable the Soviets to knock out more American nuclear forces than was previously possible, this may be true. But given the immense U.S. retaliatory arsenal, in a practical sense it would be meaningless. As Raymond Garthoff, then a State Department official, wrote in memoranda to President Kennedy's ExComm (Executive Committee of the National Security Council) during the crisis, even under a worst-case calculation the surviving American nuclear arsenal "could still cause considerable destruction in a U.S. retaliatory strike, the Soviets could not rely on the degree of surprise assumed in the above [first-strike] calculation, and it is very unlikely that the Soviets would be tempted toward resort to war by the change in the military balance" (Raymond L. Garthoff, "The Meaning of the Missiles," Washington Quarterly 5, no. 4 [Autumn 1982]: 78-79). The nuclear forces in Cuba were, moreover, vulnerable to American attack and, being liquid fueled, would take many hours to ready for launch. As we noted earlier, it would be impossible to maintain surprise while coordinating a strike by weapons in Cuba and by those thousands of miles away in the Soviet Union. The different flight times involved would give the United States ample warning before one of the two sets of weapons reached U.S. soil. The idea that the Soviets could mount a first strike against the United States with or without Cuban missiles in that era of overwhelming U.S. nuclear advantage is hardly credible.

16. Even with all the Cuban weapons operational, and under assumptions most unfavorable to the United States, after any Soviet attack we would have retained enough nuclear weapons to retaliate in any manner called for by the American strategic doctrine of the time (see Hagan and Bernstein, "Missiles in Cuba"). Even if by some stretch of the imagination the nuclear weapons in Cuba did pose a direct military threat to the United States, we had our own nuclear weapons systems in Turkey and elsewhere that would pose a parallel threat to the Soviet Union. The close symmetry between the Soviet missiles in Cuba and the U.S. missiles that had long been based on the borders of the Soviet Union is often ignored, but it reinforces the conclusion that the Cuban missiles could in no way have turned the United States into a nuclear hostage of the Soviets.

17. Richard Neustadt and Graham Allison, in Kennedy, Thirteen Days, pp. 124, 123-124.

18. New York Times, November 12, 1962.

19. Sorensen, Kennedy, p. 678; box 48, folder "Cuba. General. 10/17/62-10/27/62," Sorensen Papers, Kennedy Library, cited in Marc Trachtenberg,

"The Influence of Nuclear Weapons in the Cuban Missile Crisis," International Security 10, no. 1 (Summer 1985): 148. Trachtenberg claims that Sorensen's statement was "simply wrong" and that in fact "there was no consensus on the issue of whether the deployment of the missiles really mattered in strategic terms.'' He cites an October 16 statement by McGeorge Bundy that the Joint Chiefs of Staff felt that the Cuban missiles changed the strategic balance "substantially." The CIA reportedly held a similar view. According to Trachtenberg, both were particularly concerned that the Cuban deployment might be an opening wedge for a much larger one that might be sufficient to "blunt a retaliatory attack" and thereby threaten the United States with a first strike. Given the overwhelming U.S. nuclear advantage of the time, one must wonder about the motives of those who tried seriously to mount this argument. That some military and intelligence officials may have mistakenly attributed strategic importance to the Cuban missiles does not detract from our main point here: that President Kennedy and the other top U.S. political officials actually making the decisions were not worried about or motivated by any threat to deterrence or to U.S. physical security. Then secretary of defense McNamara, for example, explicitly rejected his joint chiefs' concern about the military significance of the Cuban missiles and bombers. Trachtenberg acknowledges that "neither President Kennedy nor anyone else at the [ExCom] meeting ... seemed much concerned with how such a deployment would affect the vulnerability of America's strategic forces" (pp. 148-150).

20. Dean Rusk et al., "The Lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis," Time, September 27, 1982, p. 85.

21. John F. Kennedy, "The Nuclear Balance of Power," in Cuban Missile Crisis, ed. Divine (first published in Public Papers of the Presidents: Kennedy, 1962 [Washington, D.C., 1963], pp. 897-898); Sorensen, Kennedy, p. 683; Alexander L. George and Richard Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), p. 448.

22. Nikita Khrushchev, speech to the Supreme Soviet, December 12, 1962, quoted as "In Defense of Cuba," in Cuban Missile Crisis, ed. Divine; Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, ed. and trans. Strobe Talbott (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), p. 496.

23. Raymond Garthoff, Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis (Washington,

D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1987), pp. 16-17; Detzer, Brink, p. 34; Charles A. Radin, "US Was Set to Attack Cuba Before Crisis," Boston Globe, February 15, 1989, p. 1.

24. For details on the paramilitary campaign against Castro, see Detzer, Brink, pp. 30-38.

25. Jean Daniel, "Unofficial Envoy: An Historic Report for Two Capitals," New Republic, December 14, 1963, pp. 18-19. No conventional military buildup could prevent the United States from overrunning an indefensible island ninety miles from our coastline. And U.S. leaders knew that the Soviet Union's central nuclear arsenal would not plausibly be launched just to defend Castro, given almost certain American nuclear retaliation against the Soviet homeland. But to Khrushchev local nuclear missiles represented a more plausible threat. In this thinking, America would know that the Soviets might initiate a limited local nuclear war to preserve Castro even though they would be unlikely to start a global nuclear exchange to do so. The United States had long used a similar logic, stationing nuclear weapons on the territory of allies around the globe to discourage Soviet aggression without relying on the implausible threat of an intercontinental nuclear attack.

26. Kennedy, "Nuclear Balance of Power," p. 113; Garthoff, Cuban Missile Crisis, p. 25; George and Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy, 463.

27. Stone, "The Brink," p. 156.

28. Ibid., p. 157; Ronald Steel, Imperialists and Other Heroes (New York: Random House, 1964), p. 119; McNamara, declassified Department of State document, 1966; Kennedy, Thirteen Days, p. 114.

27. Stone, "The Brink," p. 156.

28. Ibid., p. 157; Ronald Steel, Imperialists and Other Heroes (New York: Random House, 1964), p. 119; McNamara, declassified Department of State document, 1966; Kennedy, Thirteen Days, p. 114.

29. Arthur M. S. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p. 391; John F. Kennedy, cited in Kennedy, Thirteen Days, p. 155.

30. Sorensen, Kennedy, p. 683; Dinerstein, Missile Crisis, pp. 182-183; Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967), excerpted as "The Missile Gap," in Cuban Missile Crisis, ed. Divine, p. 120.

31. Arnold Horelick, "The Soviet Gamble," in Cuban Missile Crisis, ed. Divine, pp. 138-139 (first published as "The Cuban Missile Crisis: An Analysis of Soviet Calculations and Behavior," World Politics 16 [April 1964]: 363-377); Neustadt and Allison in Kennedy, Thirteen Days, p. 116.

32. Kennedy, Thirteen Days, p. 14; Neustadt and Allison, in ibid., p. 116; "Off-the-Record Meeting on Cuba, October 16, 1962, 6:30-7:55 P.M. ," JFK Library, p. 13, cited in Fen Osler Hampson, "The Divided Decision Maker: American Domestic Politics and the Cuban Crises," International Security 9, no. 3 (Winter 1984-1985): 138.

31. Arnold Horelick, "The Soviet Gamble," in Cuban Missile Crisis, ed. Divine, pp. 138-139 (first published as "The Cuban Missile Crisis: An Analysis of Soviet Calculations and Behavior," World Politics 16 [April 1964]: 363-377); Neustadt and Allison in Kennedy, Thirteen Days, p. 116.

32. Kennedy, Thirteen Days, p. 14; Neustadt and Allison, in ibid., p. 116; "Off-the-Record Meeting on Cuba, October 16, 1962, 6:30-7:55 P.M. ," JFK Library, p. 13, cited in Fen Osler Hampson, "The Divided Decision Maker: American Domestic Politics and the Cuban Crises," International Security 9, no. 3 (Winter 1984-1985): 138.

33. Horelick, "Soviet Gamble," p. 138; Hilsman, "Missile Gap," p. 120.

34. Walton, Cold War and Counterrevolution, pp. 122-123.

not experts on military alert procedures, but it seems inconceivable that the president did not have the option of specifically leaving nuclear forces on a non-alert status while readying the conventional military. Given the stakes involved, even a major violation of normal alert processes (which alert conventional and nuclear forces in tandem) would seem a minor price to pay for keeping nuclear weapons unambiguously out of Kennedy's actions.

36. John F. Kennedy, cited in Kennedy, Thirteen Days, pp. 156-158 (emphasis added).

37. The direct quotations from President Kennedy's address of October 22, 1962, are cited in Kennedy, Thirteen Days, pp. 153- 159.

38. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 77.

39. Kennedy, Thirteen Days, pp. 40, 65, 67-68.

40. Neustadt and Allison, in Kennedy, Thirteen Days, p. 114.

41. The fabricated speech is an amalgam of exact quotations from these top officials, drawn from "White House Plays Down Soviet Sub Threat," New York Times, May 22, 1984, p. 13; and "Transcript of President's News Conference," ibid., May 23, 1984, p. A22. On the increased deployment of Soviet ballistic missile submarines, see also "Soviet Said to Add New Subs off U.S.," ibid., May 21, 1984, p. 1; and Tom Wicker, "The End of Arms Control," ibid., May 25, 1984, op. ed.

40. Neustadt and Allison, in Kennedy, Thirteen Days, p. 114.

41. The fabricated speech is an amalgam of exact quotations from these top officials, drawn from "White House Plays Down Soviet Sub Threat," New York Times, May 22, 1984, p. 13; and "Transcript of President's News Conference," ibid., May 23, 1984, p. A22. On the increased deployment of Soviet ballistic missile submarines, see also "Soviet Said to Add New Subs off U.S.," ibid., May 21, 1984, p. 1; and Tom Wicker, "The End of Arms Control," ibid., May 25, 1984, op. ed.

42. All quotations are from President Kennedy's speech to the nation about the Soviet missiles in Cuba, October 22, 1962, cited in Kennedy, Thirteen Days, pp. 153-159.

43. Neustadt and Allison, in Kennedy, Thirteen Days, p. 115.

44. Cited in Trachtenberg, "Cuban Missile Crisis," p. 151.

45. Garthoff, Cuban Missile Crisis, p. 37.

46. Kennedy, Thirteen Days, pp. 16-17, 9.

47. Fen Osler Hampson, "The Divided Decision-Maker: American Domestic Politics and the Cuban Crises," International Security 9, no. 3 (Winter 1984-1985): p. 138; Sorensen, Kennedy, pp. 687-688.

48. Sorensen, Kennedy, p. 22.

49. See George H. Quester, "Missiles in Cuba, 1970," Foreign Affairs 49 (April 1971): 494-496.

50. See note 41. Moreover, on the basis of official American nuclear policy, in 1970 as well as now, a robust force of Soviet nuclear submarines, on station and within firing range of the United States, should be considered good . Since land-based nuclear bombers and missiles have become increasingly vulnerable to preemptive attack, invulnerable undersea-based nuclear forces on both sides are considered stabilizing. As long as neither side has reason to fear that it might be fully disarmed by an enemy surprise attack, neither's finger should become itchy on the nuclear trigger. This is the logical basis of the official nuclear doctrine, which explicitly renounces any effort to develop an ability to preemptively destroy all Soviet retaliatory nuclear forces for fear that it would lead the Soviets to a launch-on-warning policy. As George Quester said of the blustery U.S. response in 1970, "With the American stress on assured second-strike deterrents for each side, how could we insist on Russian submarines being kept out of firing

range of the United States?" (Quester, "Missiles in Cuba," p. 495). The hypocrisy of this position is even clearer now that it has become official policy to "drive the Soviets into the sea," meaning a combination of deployments and arms control measures designed to motivate the Soviets to move away from heavy land-based missile forces and to invest more in submarine-based nuclear forces (see House Committee on Armed Services, hearings, Part 2, Strategic Programs, 98th Cong., 1983, especially the "Report of the President's Commission on Strategic Forces," the so-called Scowcroft Commission report).

51. Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), p. 648. Fen Hampson estimates that the Soviets had at the time about 224 subbased ballistic missiles that could be brought within range of the United States and therefore that the number actually threatening the United States at any given time would be lower, since all subs are not on station at the same time. Even if only 20 percent were on station, that would mean over 40 ballistic missiles able to strike at U.S. cities from the sea, in addition to the overwhelming threat posed by Soviet home-based bombers. The sea-based missiles were more than enough to terrorize the United States, should that be the goal, and totally inadequate for launching a disarming attack. So to increase the number by a factor of two or three or even more would have no great practical consequence.

52. Quester, "Missiles in Cuba," p. 500.

53. To be more exact, they backed down twice in 1970, since, as we noted in Chapter 6, the United States suddenly added ludicrous new restrictions even after the Soviets had agreed not to construct a submarine base in Cuba—thus prolonging the crisis and raising again the risk of direct confrontation. What was the problem? According to Kissinger, the Soviets were running submarine tenders out of normal Cuban ports to service submarines in the open ocean. Even this, which bears no relation at all to the 1962 agreement on "offensive weapons in Cuba," was sufficient to produce stern warnings from Kissinger, who ended the crisis only after the Soviets had remarkably agreed not to run unarmed tenders out of Cuba. Imagine the outcry here if the Soviets issued an ultimatum barring U.S. submarine bases from allied nations such as Britain (e.g., the Holyloch base) and even banning from them the surface maintenance vessels used to service U.S. subs!

54. Garthoff, Cuban Missile Crisis, pp. 101-102. The incident was kept secret until the commander of the U.S. patrol revealed it in 1980.

55. Walton, Cold War and Counterrevolution; Hampson, "Divided Decision-Maker," pp. 134-149, 145.

56. Kennedy, Thirteen Days, pp. 72-73; Garthoff, Cuban Missile Crisis, p. 43; Eric Pace, "Rusk Tells a Kennedy Secret: Fallback Plan in Cuba Crisis," New York Times, August 28, 1987, pp. 1, 73.

57. Robert Jervis, The Logic of Images in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 178-179. In 1987 Dean Rusk stated for the first time that the day before the Soviets agreed to remove the Cuban missiles President Kennedy finally decided that the Turkish missiles should not stand in the way of a peaceful settlement. Kennedy reportedly drafted a statement to be read by U.N. Secretary General U Thant "proposing the removal of both the Jupiters and the missiles in Cuba." Only the president and a U.N. official named Andrew Cordier knew of the statement, according to Rusk; Cordier was to hold it in secret and deliver it to U Thant only if Kennedy gave the signal. Since of the three only Rusk is still alive, the report cannot be confirmed. Rusk said that the plan "was not all that much of a big deal; it was simply an option that would have been available to President Kennedy had he wanted to use it." If it really existed, the "Cordier ploy" would demonstrate that Kennedy might not have gone to war over the obsolete Turkish missiles. But one still has to ask why he did not just agree to the swap when the Soviets proposed it, thus avoiding all the terrible dangers that ensued. See Pace, "Rusk Tells a Kennedy Secret," pp. 1, 73.

58. "Proceedings of the Hawk's Cay Conference on the Cuban Missile Crisis," Marathon, Florida, March 5-8, 1987, p. 53, cited in Garthoff, Cuban Missile Crisis, p. 19.

59. Garthoff, Cuban Missile Crisis, pp. 65-73.

1. George W. Rathjens and Laura Reed, Neither MAD nor Starstruck—And Doubts, Too, About Arms Control (Cambridge: Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1986), pp. 14-15.

2. Center for Defense Information, "After the INF Treaty: U.S. Nuclear Buildup in Europe," Defense Monitor 17, no. 2 (1988): 5.

3. Rathjens and Reed, Neither MAD nor Starstruck, p. 5.

4. Time, cited in Morton H. Halperin, Nuclear Fallacy: Dispelling the Myth of Nuclear Strategy (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1987), p. 41; Rear Admiral Eugene J. Carroll, in The Nuclear Crisis Reader, ed. Gwyn Prins (New York: Vintage, 1984), p. 11; "The Belgrano Cover-Up," New Statesman (London), August 31, 1984, cited in Joseph Gerson, "What Is the Deadly Connection?" in The Deadly Connection: Nuclear War and U.S. Intervention, ed. Joseph Gerson (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1986), p. 13.

5. See Amos Perlmutter, Michael Handel, and Uri Bar-Joseph, Two Minutes over Baghdad (London: Corgi Books, 1982), pp. 46-48. See also Raymond Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1985), p. 379. Citing one detailed study, Garthoff rejects the theory that the Soviets were supplying nuclear warheads.

6. See Leonard S. Spector, The Undeclared Bomb (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1988).

7. Ibid., pp. 120-148, 159-189, 294-296; Rathjens and Reed, Neither MAD nor Starstruck, p. 20.

6. See Leonard S. Spector, The Undeclared Bomb (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1988).

7. Ibid., pp. 120-148, 159-189, 294-296; Rathjens and Reed, Neither MAD nor Starstruck, p. 20.

8. Rathjens and Reed, Neither MAD nor Starstruck, p. 20.

9. Gordon Chang, "To the Nuclear Brink: Eisenhower, Dulles, and the Quemoy-Matsu Crisis," International Security 2, no. 4 (Spring 1988): 121; Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation, p. 287.

10. Gary Milhollin, "New Nuclear Follies?" New York Times, November 25, 1987, p. A27.

11. Center for Defense Information, "First Strike Weapons at Sea: The Trident II and the Sea-Launched Cruise Missile," Defense Monitor 16, no. 6 (1987): 5-7 (emphasis in original).

12. Thomas B. Cochran, William A. Arkin, and Milton M. Hoenig, Nuclear Weapons Databook, vol. 1, U.S. Nuclear Forces and Capabilities (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1984), pp. 244, 84-88, 89-91, 82. In 1974 the Air Force reportedly removed nuclear warheads for air-to-air missiles from Air National Guard units nationwide after allegations that two Air National Guard fighter pilots were involved in drug trafficking (UPI, "Removal of Nuclear Weapons from Guard Units Revealed," Boston Globe, October 24, 1988, p. 5).

13. See, for example, essays by Rear Admiral Eugene J. Carroll, Admiral Noel Gayler, and Lieutenant General A. S. Collins, in Nuclear Crisis Reader, ed. Prins, and references cited in Chapter 3 of this book.

14. James M. Markham, "Soviet Bloc Seeks Battlefield Nuclear-Arms Talks," New York Times, January 6, 1988, p. A3. An interesting exception to the trend is Paul Nitze's unexpected informal proposal for a superpower treaty to ban nuclear-armed sea-based cruise missiles, depth charges, torpedoes, and possibly bombs carried by aircraft on ships. If done thoroughly, such a change could eliminate the sea-based tactical nuclear arsenals that, as we have seen, pose one of the most worrisome threats of nuclear escalation during conventional hostilities. The motive for this unusual proposal probably has less to do with reducing the risk of unintended escalation than with eliminating what many regard as a serious threat to the U.S. Navy in time of war. In our interviews, several ranking Navy officers complained that on balance tactical nuclear weapons at sea benefit the Soviets, one reason being that the United States has far more to lose if both fleets are destroyed in a nuclear war at sea. Nevertheless, unlike other arms control ideas, such a proposal could actually reduce the risk of nuclear war. See Michael R. Gordon, "U.S. Aide Offers Plan to Cut Arms at Sea," New York Times, April 6, 1988.

15. For unusual press coverage of these activities, see Charles Scheiner, "Atlantic Activists Meet, Seek to Close Down Huge Ocean Arsenals," Guardian, October 21, 1987, p. 14.

16. See David Corn and Jefferson Morley, "A Nuclear Gulf," Nation, October 3, 1987, p. 331; Robert Schaeffer, "Making, Waves," Nuclear Times 6, no. 2 (November-December 1987): 23, 24. La Rocque reportedly focused not on the risk of the weapons' coming into unauthorized use but on the problems we would face if they were lost at sea or if their radioactive materials were scattered into the environment in conventional combat. Greenpeace's campaign has drawn criticism not only for focusing attention on tactical rather than strategic nuclear weapons, but also for opposing all sea-based nuclear weapons, including the strategic ones on ballistic-missile submarines, widely considered the most secure and stabilizing strategic weapons platforms.

17. Halperin, Nuclear Fallacy, p. 55.

18. Bishop Thomas J. Gumbleton, foreword to Deadly Connection, ed. Gerson, p. vii; Christine Wing and Frank Brodhead, "Peace Movements East and West," Resist, no. 205 (April 1988).

19. Cochran et al., Nuclear Weapons Databook, p. 14.

20. Paul Bracken, The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 53; Paul Bracken, "Accidental Nuclear War," in Graham T. Allison, Albert Carnesale, and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., eds., Hawks, Doves, and Owls: An Agenda for Avoiding Nuclear War (New York: Norton, 1985), pp. 44-45.

21. Bracken, "Accidental Nuclear War," pp. 29, 49 (emphasis in original).

22. Bernard Brodie, "The Development of Nuclear Strategy," in Strategy and Nuclear Deterrence: An "International Security" Reader, ed. Stephen E. Miller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 9 (first published in International Security 2, no. 4 [Spring 1978].

23. John H. Cushman, "War Stocks and the Weapons Pact," New York Times, September 27, 1987, business section, p. 1.

24. Nicholas Wade, "The Hazards of Arms Control," New York Times, February 10, 1988, p. A30; Cushman, "War Stocks," p. 1.

25. Richard Halloran, "NATO Chief Assails Notion That Arms Pacts Save Money," New York Times, February 8, 1988, p. A2; Wolfgang Demisch, cited in Cushman, "War Stocks," p. 1.

26. Cushman, "War Stocks," p. 1.

27. Paul Lewis, "Soviet Proposes Shift of Arms Cash to Third World," New York Times, August 26, 1987, p. A9.

28. G. Adams and D. A. Gold, "The Economics of Military Spending: Is the Military Dollar Really Different?" Defense Budget Project, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 1985, cover page, p. 2.

29. Barry Bluestone and John Havens, "Reducing the Federal Deficit Fair and Square" (paper delivered at the Symposium on the Fortieth Anniversary of the Joint Economic Committee, "The American Economy in Transition: From the Second World War to the 21st Century," Washington, D.C., January 16-17, 1985), p. 24. See also Barry Bluestone and John Havens, "How to Cut the Deficit and Rebuild America," Challenge 29, no. 2 (May-June 1986): 22-29.

30. Gordon Adams, "Economic Conversion Misses the Point," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 42, no. 2 (February 1986): 24-25, 27.

31. James G. Hershberg, "National Insecurity: How the Red Menace Derailed the Contragate Probe," Boston Phoenix, February 3, 1989, p. 10.

32. See Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, Demonstration Elections: U.S.-Staged Elections in the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and El Salvador (Boston: South End Press, 1984).

33. Alva Myrdal, The Game of Disarmament: How the United States and Russia Run the Arms Race (New York: Pantheon, 1982).

34. "To the Summit, and Beyond," New York Times, September 20, 1987, p. 26. For another prominent acknowledgment that the INF treaty has little military significance, see Graham Allison and Albert Carnesale, "Why Say No to 1,500 Warheads?" New York Times, November 15, 1987.

35. "An Arms-Control Precedent," Boston Globe, November 30, 1987, p. 16; Mary McGrory, "New View, Old Habits," Boston Globe, December 9, 1987, p. 21.

36. David K. Shipler, "U.S. and Russians Sign Pact to Limit Nuclear War Risk," New York Times, September 16, 1987, p. 1; Philip Shabecoff, "Dozens of Nations Approve Accord to Protect Ozone," New York Times, September 17, 1987, p. 1; "Reagan and Gorbachev to Meet This Year to Sign Missile Pact, Now Nearly Complete," New York Times, September 19, 1987, p. 1.

37. Dianne Dumanoski, "Ozone, Arms and Politics," Boston Globe, September 20, 1987, p. A25.

38. Shabecoff, "Accord to Protect Ozone," p. 1; Dianne Dumanoski, "Scientists Fear Fallout from Ozone Loss," Boston Globe, March 21, 1988, p. 3; Dianne Dumanoski, "Ozone Pact Clears Hurdle to Senate Ratification," Boston Globe, February 18, 1988, p. 75.

39. Cochran, Arkin, and Hoenig, Nuclear Weapons Databook 1: 15, 5.

40. Center for Defense Information, "After the INF Treaty: U.S. Nuclear Buildup in Europe," Defense Monitor 17, no. 2 (1988): 2.

41. "The Dirtiest Bomb," Boston Globe, August 15, 1987, p. 14; Cochran, Arkin, and Hoenig, Nuclear Weapons Databook 1: 58.

42. New York Times, January 24, 1988, p. 12. Cochran, Arkin, and Hoenig, Nuclear Weapons Databook, give a yield of only 10-50 kilotons for the cruise missiles (1: 182).

43. Kaplan, "U.S. to Take Its Most Powerful Nuclear Bomb out of Mothballs," Boston Globe, August 6, 1987, p. 3; Dan Plesch, "NATO's New Nuclear Weapons," Defense and Disarmament Alternatives 1, no. 3 (May 1988): 2. The United States does plan to retire many obsolete nuclear weapons—bombs, artillery shells, and Lance missiles—from Europe as new ones are deployed, perhaps leading to reductions in the total number of U.S. warheads there. But as the commander of American and allied forces in Europe, General John R. Galvin, acknowledges, such reductions would be unilateral, would have nothing to do with the INF treaty, and would in no way weaken military capabilities. Like earlier warhead reductions in Europe and in the United States, such reductions would simply reflect modernization, which allows fewer, more advanced weapons to surpass the capabilities of larger numbers of obsolete weapons. See Richard Halloran, "NATO Chief Sees a New Reduction in Warheads," New York Times, August 11, 1988, p. A7. See also Natural Resources Defense Council, "A New Improved Nuclear Arms Race?" (advertisement), New York Times, December 6, 1987, p. 31.

44. Diana Johnstone, "Strategic Realignment," Nuclear Times, September-October 1987, p. 14.

45. Richard Halloran, "U.S. Weighs Effect of New Arms Pact," New York Times, December 6, 1987, p. 17.

46. The views we expressed in "Arms Control: Misplaced Focus" ( Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 42, no. 3 [March 1986]: 39-44) have been misinterpreted as a call for improved relations with the Soviet Union. See the letter by Howard Moreland, in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 43, no. 2 (March 1987): 61.

47. Richard M. Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), pp. 941-942.

48. Rathjens and Reed, Neither MAD nor Starstruck, pp. 17-18.

49. Nicholas Wade, "Hazards of Arms Control," p. A30; Ralph Earle II, "America Is Cheating Itself," Foreign Policy, no. 64 (Fall 1986): 16.

50. United Press International, "Afghan City Reported Under Siege; Many Dead," Boston Globe, December 9, 1987, p. 28; Philip Taubman, "Moscow Proposes Foreign Warships Quit Persian Gulf," New York Times, July 4, 1987, p. 1.

51. See "2 Soviet Warships Reportedly Nudge U.S. Navy Vessels," New York Times, February 13, 1988, p. 1; "Soviet Vessels Bump Two US Navy Warships," Boston Globe, February 13, 1988, p. 1; "Moscow Blames U.S. for Incident Between Warships in Black Sea," New York Times, February 14, 1988, p. 1; "Soviets See a Setback in Collision of Ships," Boston Globe, February 14, 1988, p. 8. Neither the Times nor the Globe reported the nuclear weapons capabilities of the American ships involved.

52. Cochran, Arkin, and Hoenig, Nuclear Weapons Databook 1:244; "Bumped US Ship Was Spying, Report Says," Boston Globe, April 22, 1988, p. 3.

53. "An Arms-Control Precedent," Boston Globe, November 30, 1987, p. 16; Fred Kaplan, "Questions Raised on Scope of Treaty Plan," Boston Globe, December 2, 1987, p. 13.

54. Ibid.

53. "An Arms-Control Precedent," Boston Globe, November 30, 1987, p. 16; Fred Kaplan, "Questions Raised on Scope of Treaty Plan," Boston Globe, December 2, 1987, p. 13.

54. Ibid.

55. "The Treaty After the Treaty," New York Times, December 9, 1987, p. A34; Michael. R. Gordon, "Reagan's Missile Cut Offer Throws Open 'Window of Vulnerability' Debate," New York Times, December 7, 1987, p. A20.

56. Rathjens and Reed, Neither MAD nor Starstruck, p. 21.

57. Michael M. May, George F. Bing, and John D. Steinbruner, Strategic Arms Reductions (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1988), p. 6.

58. Ibid., p. 54. In the other two 3,000-warhead scenarios—proportional reductions from current forces and modernized forces designed for attacking enemy missiles as well as for invulnerability—target coverage for retaliation after absorbing a first strike "falls off for the lower-priority targets." Nevertheless, even in these improbable scenarios, the victim of a first strike could strike most of the important military and industrial targets of its attacker and could of course utterly destroy the attacker's cities even if the victim waited until the attack was over before launching any weapons in retaliation (ibid., p. 54).

57. Michael M. May, George F. Bing, and John D. Steinbruner, Strategic Arms Reductions (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1988), p. 6.

58. Ibid., p. 54. In the other two 3,000-warhead scenarios—proportional reductions from current forces and modernized forces designed for attacking enemy missiles as well as for invulnerability—target coverage for retaliation after absorbing a first strike "falls off for the lower-priority targets." Nevertheless, even in these improbable scenarios, the victim of a first strike could strike most of the important military and industrial targets of its attacker and could of course utterly destroy the attacker's cities even if the victim waited until the attack was over before launching any weapons in retaliation (ibid., p. 54).

59. John D. Steinbruner, "The Purpose and Effect of Deep Strategic Force Reductions," in Committee on International Security and Arms Control, National Academy of Sciences, Reykjavik and Beyond: Deep Reductions in Strategic Nuclear Arsenals and the Future Direction of Arms Control (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1988), p. 14 (emphasis added).

60. May, Bing, and Steinbruner, Strategic Arms Reductions, p. 7; Spurgeon M. Keeny, Jr., "The Impact of Defenses on Offensive Reduction Regimes," in Committee on International Security and Arms Control, Reykjavik and Beyond, p. 23. Indeed, both sides could probably threaten the amount of damage Keeny describes even if all strategic weapons were abolished. The United States and the Soviet Union each have many weapons systems that are not considered "strategic" but that could in fact be used to deliver nuclear warheads to the other's territory. For example, as Alexander Flax notes,

All military aircraft—including all of our fighters—are tanker-refueled many times when they are flown to Europe. That is how they get there. Thus, they have intercontinental range. ... tactical transport aircraft like the C-141, C-5, and the C-130. ... have cargo doors in the rear that open for parachute extraction so that loads can be dropped to troops in the field. Those doors are also very good for extracting cruise missiles. They are also good for extracting anything else ... even space-launch vehicles, which originally were all converted ballistic missiles, are perfectly good ICBMs. And one can test all of the elements except the reentry vehicle by conducting a space launch.

61. May, Bing, and Steinbruner, Strategic Arms Reductions, pp. 67-68. The authors note that the high 3,000-warhead Soviet fatality rates we cite result from one assumption: that the United States equips its Trident submarines with D-5 missiles, which have a much higher yield than current Poseidon and Trident C-4 submarine-based missiles.

62. Ibid., pp. 68-69.

61. May, Bing, and Steinbruner, Strategic Arms Reductions, pp. 67-68. The authors note that the high 3,000-warhead Soviet fatality rates we cite result from one assumption: that the United States equips its Trident submarines with D-5 missiles, which have a much higher yield than current Poseidon and Trident C-4 submarine-based missiles.

62. Ibid., pp. 68-69.

63. "Is Arms Control Obsolete?" Harper's 271, no. 1622 (July 1985): 50; "An Arms-Race Precedent," Boston Globe, September 19, 1987, p. 14.

64. John B. Judis, "Would Long-Range Arms Treaty Be a False START For Peace?" In These Times, December 16-22, 1987, p. 3. Judis, like Kaplan, is referring to the NRDC study.

65. Michael Howard, "Is Arms Control Really Necessary?" (lecture delivered to the Council for Arms Control, London), excerpted in Harper's 272, no. 1632 (May 1986): 14; Halloran, "New Arms Pact," p. 17; Halloran, "Arms Pacts," p. A2. Even strategic arms cuts far deeper than START would not necessarily save money. One reason is that both sides would probably feel the need to restructure their forces, at great cost, to avoid concentrating their remaining warheads in a few of the giant delivery platforms they now use today. Flax writes: "Because of the relatively small numbers of launch platforms that may be involved as we go to 3,000 warheads and below, we really have to consider modifying our launch platform concepts. We probably do not want Trident submarines carrying 24 missiles. We probably do not want big bombers carrying 20 cruise missiles.... It could be that we will end up with a force of one-third the size of our current force, costing roughly what the present strategic force costs." See Flax, "Impact of New Technologies,'' in Committee on International Security and Arms Control, Reykjavik and Beyond, pp. 32-33.

66. Halloran, "New Arms Pact," p. 17.

67. Steinbruner, "Deep Strategic Force Reductions," p. 13.

68. George Rathjens, "The Conditions for Complete Nuclear Disarmament: The Case for Partial Nuclear Disarmament," in A New Design for Nuclear Disarmament, ed. William Epstein and Toshiyuki Toyoda (Nottingham: Spokesman,

1977), cited in Rathjens and Reed, Neither MAD nor Starstruck, p. 21; Rathjens and Reed, Neither MAD nor Starstruck, pp. 21-22.

69. Rathjens and Reed, Neither MAD nor Starstruck, p. 23.

70. H. D. S. Greenway, "Nuclear-Poor, Not Nuclear-Free," Boston Globe, December 11, 1987, p. 23.

71. Rob Leavitt, "Vision Quest," Defense and Disarmament News (Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies), August-September 1987, p. 7.

72. "Activists Greet Arms Pact with Guarded Optimism," Guardian, October 14, 1987, p. 6.

73. Information on the concept of the peace system is available from EXPRO, Department of Sociology, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02167.

1. Robert McNamara, quoted in William L. Ury, Beyond the Hotline: How We Can Prevent the Crisis That Might Bring on Nuclear War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), epigraph; Ury, Beyond the Hotline, p. 7.

2. Seymour Hersh, "New Light on the Cuban Missile Crisis: USSR May Not Have Been in Control," Boston Globe, October 11, 1987, p. 18; Associated Press, "They Feared the Worst in Cuban Missile Crisis," Patriot Ledger (Quincy, Mass.), October 14, 1987, p. 8; Raymond L. Garthoff, Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1987), p. 63.

3. Hersh, "New Light," p. 18. Strangely enough, the new data also surfaced during a review of Soviet forces in Cuba during the 1979 pseudo-crisis the Carter administration provoked over the Soviet "combat brigade" in Cuba (see Chapter 6).

4. Daniel Ellsberg, "The Day Castro Almost Started World War III," New York Times, October 31, 1987, p. 27.

5. Richard Bernstein, "Meeting Sheds New Light on Cuban Missile Crisis," New York Times, October 14, 1987, p. A10; Associated Press, "Cuban Leader Felt Betrayed by Soviets, Realized He Was Pawn," Patriot Ledger (Quincy, Mass.), October 22, 1987, p. 18; Fred Kaplan, "'62 Missile Crisis: Key Soviet Slip Suggested," Boston Globe, October 14, 1987, p. 1. Garthoff raises another possibility, that "someone in the Soviet leadership, necessarily high in the military or able to give an order to the military, was responsible for creating an incident in an unsuccessful attempt to forestall Khrushchev's efforts to arrange a compromise." See Garthoff, Cuban Missile Crisis, p. 53.

6. Garthoff, Cuban Missile Crisis, pp. 37-39 (emphasis in original).

7. Norman Cousins, "The Cuban Missile Crisis: An Anniversary," Saturday Review, October 15, 1977, p. 4, cited in Garthoff, Cuban Missile Crisis, p. 48.

8. Garthoff, Cuban Missile Crisis, pp. 39-41, 109 (emphasis in original).

9. Richard Ned Lebow, Nuclear Crisis Management: A Dangerous Illusion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 18.

10. Ibid., pp. 17-18.

11. Ibid., p. 167 (emphasis in original). Lebow's views differ from ours in that he attributes far more importance to crisis instabilities generated by the structure of nuclear forces and command systems produced by decades of arms racing. He appears to believe that in principle crises could become manageable

if profound changes were made in "force structure, strategic doctrine, and targeting policy" (p. 22). We see no reason for such optimism, for the reasons spelled out in Part I. Lebow also focuses only on the worst crises, such as the Cuban missile crisis, implying that lesser ones, such as those reviewed in Chapter 6, do not carry nuclear dangers. Again his optimism seems misplaced. It may derive from his overemphasis on strategic factors in the production of crisis instability, which seem more significant in crises so deep that leaders can imagine them escalating to all-out war. But all substantial superpower crises are unstable, not so much because of missile or command center vulnerabilities but because once nations begin to rally their forces they always risk being backed into a corner they feel they must shoot their way out of and also risk spontaneous war through miscalculation, error, or exceeded authority in the field.

9. Richard Ned Lebow, Nuclear Crisis Management: A Dangerous Illusion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 18.

10. Ibid., pp. 17-18.

11. Ibid., p. 167 (emphasis in original). Lebow's views differ from ours in that he attributes far more importance to crisis instabilities generated by the structure of nuclear forces and command systems produced by decades of arms racing. He appears to believe that in principle crises could become manageable

if profound changes were made in "force structure, strategic doctrine, and targeting policy" (p. 22). We see no reason for such optimism, for the reasons spelled out in Part I. Lebow also focuses only on the worst crises, such as the Cuban missile crisis, implying that lesser ones, such as those reviewed in Chapter 6, do not carry nuclear dangers. Again his optimism seems misplaced. It may derive from his overemphasis on strategic factors in the production of crisis instability, which seem more significant in crises so deep that leaders can imagine them escalating to all-out war. But all substantial superpower crises are unstable, not so much because of missile or command center vulnerabilities but because once nations begin to rally their forces they always risk being backed into a corner they feel they must shoot their way out of and also risk spontaneous war through miscalculation, error, or exceeded authority in the field.

9. Richard Ned Lebow, Nuclear Crisis Management: A Dangerous Illusion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 18.

10. Ibid., pp. 17-18.

11. Ibid., p. 167 (emphasis in original). Lebow's views differ from ours in that he attributes far more importance to crisis instabilities generated by the structure of nuclear forces and command systems produced by decades of arms racing. He appears to believe that in principle crises could become manageable

if profound changes were made in "force structure, strategic doctrine, and targeting policy" (p. 22). We see no reason for such optimism, for the reasons spelled out in Part I. Lebow also focuses only on the worst crises, such as the Cuban missile crisis, implying that lesser ones, such as those reviewed in Chapter 6, do not carry nuclear dangers. Again his optimism seems misplaced. It may derive from his overemphasis on strategic factors in the production of crisis instability, which seem more significant in crises so deep that leaders can imagine them escalating to all-out war. But all substantial superpower crises are unstable, not so much because of missile or command center vulnerabilities but because once nations begin to rally their forces they always risk being backed into a corner they feel they must shoot their way out of and also risk spontaneous war through miscalculation, error, or exceeded authority in the field.

12. See Chapter 6 and Richard M. Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap), p. 488.

13. Contrary to Americans' common belief, the United States, Israel, and South Africa use military force outside their borders far more frequently than any of the other presumed nuclear states. The others certainly do so, but relatively rarely. Britain and France long ago abandoned most of their imperial ambitions and fight abroad only in the occasional leftover imperial hot spots such as the Falklands/Malvinas, Northern Ireland, Chad, and the Pacific islands. Foreign intervention by Chinese, Indian, and Pakistani forces is also relatively rare, though it poses greater nuclear dangers than military action by the European nuclear states. Examples include Chinese involvement in the Korean War, the 1979 Chinese invasion of Vietnam, Pakistani involvement in the Afghan war, and various Indo-Pakistani conflicts. Apart from brutal civil interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia and the invasion of Afghanistan, the Soviet Union has engaged its forces abroad only occasionally and with restraint—though of course the nuclear dangers are always real, as in the 1970 War of Attrition. The United States, in contrast, intervenes in the Third World regularly, often with substantial forces—in the fifteen years since the pull-out from Vietnam, for example, attacking Cambodia (in the Mayaguez incident), invading and occupying Grenada, bombing, shelling, and landing marines in Lebanon, bombing Libya, and engaging Iranian forces and destroying an Iranian airliner in the Persian Gulf. Israel and South Africa fight abroad constantly, as they have for many years. In addition to violence in the occupied territories, for example, in recent years Israel has bombed Tunisia and Iraq and invaded Lebanon, where it engaged Syrian forces and still occupies territory and stages regular ground attacks and air strikes. South Africa recently invaded Angola, which is defended by Cuban soldiers, and fights on in Namibia.

14. This lack of external threats to physical or political survival should be uncontroversial for the United States, the USSR, China, Britain, France, and India, as well as other states that may be assumed to be nuclear or near-nuclear, such as Pakistan and South Africa (some of which face serious internal threats to the political status quo, as in the revolt against apartheid). Israel may be a partial exception, having faced a major attack in 1973, when it appears to have possessed nuclear weapons. Rapid and surprising Arab advances, coupled with

the depletion of Israeli weapons and ammunition stocks, may have produced a brief moment of fear that the country might be overrun. This is probably the closest a nuclear power has ever come to facing a genuine military threat, but it should not be exaggerated. The war aims of Sadat and the other Arab leaders probably did not extend to the political or physical destruction of Israel, and probably not even to the liberation of the occupied territories. The reason is simple: they knew those goals were far beyond their military means, as Israel's rapid (though costly) reversal of the war ultimately confirmed. The Arab leaders were probably also deterred from threatening Israel itself by the prospect of possible Israeli nuclear retaliation. This may have been a key factor in the U.S. decision to rush conventional weapons and supplies to Israel. See Amos Perlmutter, Michael Handel, and Uri Bar-Joseph, Two Minutes over Baghdad (London: Corgi Books, 1982). As we noted in Chapter 6, these authors report that after the initial Arab advances the Israelis may have actually put thirteen nuclear warheads on alert and readied both Jericho missiles and jet fighter-bombers equipped to deliver them.

15. Anthony R. Wells, "The June 1967 Arab-Israeli War," in Soviet Naval Diplomacy, ed. Bradford Dismukes and James M. McConnell (New York: Pergamon, 1979), p. 166.

16. Stephen S. Roberts, "The October 1973 Arab-Israeli War," in Soviet Naval Diplomacy, ed. Dismukes and McConnell, p. 202; Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), p. 575; Scott D. Sagan, "Lessons of the Yom Kippur Alert," Foreign Policy, no. 36 (Fall 1979): 167, 176.

17. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Boston: South End Press, 1979), pp. 105-106; Marvin Kalb and Bernard Kalb, Kissinger (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), p. 257; John P. Lewis, op. ed., New York Times, December 9, 1971, cited in Chomsky and Herman, Third World Fascism, p. 106; Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation, pp. 263, 265; Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), p. 914; David K. Hall, "The Laotian War of 1962 and the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971," in Force Without War, ed. Barry M. Blechman and Stephen S. Kaplan (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1978), p. 177; James M. McConnell and Anne Kelly Calhoun, "The December 1971 Indo-Pakistani Crisis," in Dismukes and McConnell, Soviet Naval Diplomacy, p. 185.

18. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 570-571; Alexander L. George, "Missed Opportunities for Crisis Prevention: The War of Attrition and Angola," in Managing U.S.-Soviet Rivalry: Problems of Crisis Prevention, ed. Alexander L. George (Boulder: Westview, 1983), pp. 196-197.

19. See, for example, Mahmoud Riad, The Struggle for Peace in the Middle East (London: Quartet, 1981), p. 162: "Nasser decided that the situation needed a joint concerted Arab effort to stop hostilities in Jordan, especially as US military movements pointed to a possible American military intervention which would inevitably enlist Israeli army support, the pretext for which would be the danger of Syrian involvement in the fighting in Jordan."

20. Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970, 1974), cited in Garthoff, Cuban Missile Crisis, p. 6. As Garthoff

notes, the authenticity of these memoirs, sometimes called into question, was established by comparing the voice prints of the tapes on which they are based with those of known Khrushchev verbal statements.

21. Stephen S. Kaplan, Diplomacy of Power (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1981), p. 131.

22. Officially the Israeli attack was a "preventive" action against impending Arab attack and followed provocations by the Arab states such as the closing of the Strait of Tiran, the ejection of U.N. peacekeeping troops, and the massing of Egyptian troops along the Israeli frontier. But the reality was more complex, with Arabs fearing that Israel was preparing to attack. Menachem Begin stated: "In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him" (cited in Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle [Boston: South End Press, 1983], p. 100, with other supporting material).

23. Wells, "Arab-Israeli War," p. 165; Paul Jabber and Roman Kolkowicz, "The Arab-Israeli Wars of 1967 and 1973," in Diplomacy of Power: Soviet Armed Forces as a Political Instrument, ed. Stephen S. Kaplan et al. (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1981), pp. 435-438.

24. Stephen S. Roberts, "The October 1973 Arab-Israeli War," in Soviet Naval Diplomacy, ed. Dismukes and McConnell, p. 193; Alexander L. George, "The Arab-Israeli War of October 1973: Origins and Impact," in Managing U.S.-Soviet Rivalry, ed. George, p. 140; Bruce Porter, The U.S.S.R. in Third World Conflicts: Soviet Arms and Diplomacy in Local Wars, 1945-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 142, 118n, 124; George, "Arab-Israeli War," p. 140. George notes that "the Soviet Union's policy of restraining Sadat was not without serious diplomatic and political costs for the U.S.S.R.'s position in the Middle East" (p. 140). He also adds that ''though Soviet leaders still hoped that Sadat would not plunge into war, this possibility could not be excluded, and at some point they appear to have given reluctant approval for Egypt's use of force, if necessary, to recover its territory" (p. 145).

25. George, "Arab-Israeli War," p. 146. George reports several possible, but ambiguous, Soviet warnings of the Arab attack. One was their evacuation of Soviet civilians from Egypt just before the attack, which given Soviet obligations to their allies was "noteworthy." Several reports also "allege that Soviet ambassador Dobrynin advised Kissinger on October 5 that the Arab attack would be launched on the following day" (see pp. 145-147).

26. Jabber and Kolkowicz, "Arab-Israeli Wars," p. 442; Porter, U.S.S.R. in Third World Conflicts, pp. 126, 140.

27. Abram N. Shulsky, "The Jordanian Crisis of September 1970," in Soviet Naval Diplomacy, ed. Dismukes and McConnell, pp. 169-171. He adds, "At the very least, the fact that Soviet military advisers were present in Syria suggests that the Soviets probably had some knowledge of the Syrians' intentions" (pp. 170-171), which of course is not the same thing as instigating or encouraging them.

28. William B. Quandt, "Lebanon, 1958, and Jordan, 1970," in Force

Without War, ed. Blechman and Kaplan, pp. 280-281, 279, 280n; Riad, Struggle for Peace, p. 165.

29. George W. Breslauer, "Soviet Policy in the Middle East, 1967-1972: Unalterable Antagonism or Collaborative Competition?" in Managing U.S.-Soviet Rivalry, ed. George, p. 77; Bradford Dismukes, "Large-Scale Intervention Ashore: Soviet Air Defenses in Egypt," in Soviet Naval Diplomacy, ed. Dismukes and McConnell, pp. 221, 226; Breslauer, "Soviet Policy," p. 76; George, "Missed Opportunities,'' p. 191; William B. Quandt, Decade of Decisions (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), p. 95.

30. Dismukes, "Large-Scale Intervention," pp. 229-230. The Soviet movements did violate the cease-fire. But although the Egyptians may be accused of duplicity, the Soviets cannot be, at least technically. As Quandt notes, the Soviets had not signed the cease-fire agreement: "One might have wondered what obligation the Soviet Union had to respect the terms of an American-arranged cease-fire to which it had not been a party. The Soviet bid for a cooperative approach had been rebuffed in early June, and the United States had proceeded unilaterally. The Soviet Union was not violating any agreement to which it was a party." Quandt also notes that according to the New York Times Israel had reinforced its own canal positions and thereby violated the agreement as well. See Quandt, Decade of Decisions, p. 108.

31. McConnell and Calhoun, "Indo-Pakistani Crisis," pp. 186, 184. They argue, however, that "the U.S.S.R. had followed a course that made war possible." Such a course hardly qualifies as aggression or expansionism and could be said of both superpowers in 1971 and most other Third World wars.

32. David K. Hall, "The Laotian War of 1962 and the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971," in Force Without War, ed Blechman and Kaplan, p. 197; Raymond L. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1985), p. 279.

33. Mazhar Ali Khan Malik, letter to the editor, New York Times, March 1O, 1988, p. A30.

34. Moreover, the same drive for power in the Third World that led to the overt crises discussed in this book underpins everyday American foreign policy and has fostered dozens of other military interventions and threats that ran some incalculable risk of erupting into superpower confrontation. Most, of course, did not become crises, in many cases simply because the Soviets did not seriously challenge American actions. A few became pseudo-crises destined for historical footnotes, as we mentioned in Chapter 6. The great majority will not be recorded as nuclear danger points at all. That is an error, because like any low-probability event, nuclear crisis usually does not happen when the risk is run. One does not usually fall and break a hip when walking on an icy road either, but only the foolhardy conclude that they are immune to the danger. A comparable mentality justifies the continuation of American foreign policy as usual, even in the face of urgent historical warnings.

Eisenhower and Kennedy expect an atomic showdown when they tried to topple the Cuban revolutionary government through assassination, sabotage, subversion, and ultimately invasion of the Bay of Pigs. Kissinger did not realize that his casual permission for Israel to violate the cease-fire he had just negotiated in Moscow would also end at Defcon III in 1973. Nor did Johnson and Nixon foresee this in 1967-1973, when they provided Israel with enormous quantities of arms without pressing for the return or independence of the Arab territories captured in 1967, even though the occupation was widely understood to make another Arab-Israeli war, with all its dangers, almost inevitable. And so on. A full discussion of the nuclear risks of U.S. foreign and military policy since 1962 is beyond the scope of this study, though it would be a vitally important contribution to the nuclear debate and to a meaningful history of the nuclear age. Basic changes are required if routine militarism is not to crash-land in superpower confrontation in the future, as it periodically has in the past.

35. See Jerome N. Slater, "The Dominican Republic, 1961-66," in Force Without War, ed. Blechman and Kaplan, pp. 306, 315, 335, 336.

36. Philip Geyelin, cited in Richard J. Barnet, Intervention and Revolution (Cleveland: World, 1968), pp. 169-170; Slater, Dominican Republic, pp. 326-327, 303, 307-308.

37. Barnet, Intervention and Revolution, pp. 161, 174; Slater, Dominican Republic, p. 338.

38. Slater, Dominican Republic, pp. 321-322, 339, 342; Amnesty International, Report on Torture, cited in Edward S. Herman, The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda (Boston: South End Press, 1982), p. 118.

39. Barnet, Intervention and Revolution, pp. 229-230.

40. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Political Economy of Human Rights, vol. 1, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Boston: South End Press, 1979), p. 276; Barnet, Intervention and Revolution, pp. 234-235; Chomsky and Herman, Political Economy of Human Rights, p. 274.

41. Blechman and Kaplan, Force Without War, pp. 48, 51.

42. Herman, Real Terror Network, p. 118; "The Dark of Guatemala," Boston Globe, March 17, 1988, p. 16.

43. All Tom Atlee quotations come from "Who Owns the Game?" Thinkpeace 2, no. 3 (May-June 1986): 5-6. Atlee includes, along with weapons systems and arms control, specific U.S. foreign adventures as items that the MICE cook up to keep the peace movement ineffectively occupied. We have omitted the references to these because this part of the argument is far-fetched. The United States normally intervenes for specific reasons of foreign policy and sometimes to whip up broad public support for the administration. In any case, it is precisely these interventions that the government considers critical and tries to shield from protest. Atlee is correct in suggesting that the peace movement cannot merely oppose individual acts of military intervention by the United States, but must attack the ideologies and interests that produce them. But unlike nuclear weapons systems, each specific intervention normally results in death and injury to many innocent people in the victimized country and sometimes

either sustains or emplaces unpopular governments that rule by terror and force after the United States withdraws.

44. Carl Conetta, "Nuclear Protest at an Impasse," Zeta Magazine, February 1988, p. 83; Robert Schaeffer, "The 5% Solution," Nuclear Times, September-October 1987, p. 26.

45. Michael Howard, "Is Arms Control Really Necessary?" (lecture delivered at the Council for Arms Control, London), excerpted in Harper's 272, no. 1632 (May 1986): 14.

46. Scott D. Sagan, "Nuclear Alerts and Crisis Management," International Security 9, no. 4 (Spring 1985): 137; H. W. Brands, "Testing Massive Retaliation: Credibility and Crisis Management in the Taiwan Strait," International Security 12, no. 4 (Spring 1988): 150; Nixon, RN, pp. 486, 488.