PROFESSOR AT THE BLACKBOARD

A Noted Cold-War Scholar Analyzes the Long Struggle with Russia

THE threat of war is still the ultimate argument of the diplomat; the conduct of war is still the business of the soldier. But in the nervous decades of nuclear adventure, the infinite implications of armed combat have made a military authority of the scholar. It is the scientist with his slipstick who measures the effects of untried weapons in future battles. It is the professor at the blackboard who defines the dilemmas that complicate each new scheme for building a practical deterrent. One acknowledged dean of this new breed of cold-war scholars is Political Scientist Henry A. Kissinger. 37. Director of Harvard's Defense Studies Program and Pentagon adviser. His new book. The Necessity for Choice (Harper; $5.50). has become required reading in the Pentagon. State Department and White House.

Avoiding Temptation

Kissinger joins in the urgent warning that the buildup of Russian missile strength calls for a drastic overhaul of U.S. defense policy. While somewhat nervously overstating the imminent peril of the missile gap ( TIME. Feb. 17). Kissinger argues convincingly that U.S. forces, in order to deter, must be able to absorb a first strike and still retaliate with the promise of damage which the Soviets will find unacceptable.

Anything less than this--for example a situation where the U.S. depends on nuclear bombers based at easy-target airfields--will provide an almost irresistible temptation for a potential enemy to strike while he has an edge in missiles, and thus eliminate U.S. nuclear forces with only a minimal risk of retaliation. At the very least the U.S. must strive for nuclear forces that can withstand a first blow--by dispersing and protecting its bombers, rushing missile bases underground, and mobilizing such missiles as Minuteman (on trains) and Polaris (in submarines). At best, all the U.S. can hope to achieve is a situation of "mutual invulnerability." And under mutual invulnerability the threat of all-out nuclear war--the threat that lay behind the longstanding U.S. strategy of "massive retaliation"--will "lose its credibility and its strategic meaning--particularly against aggressions which are explicitly less than all out. The preposterous aspect of the U.S. military policy is that even in the face of first the missile gap and then the approaching mutual invulnerability, we continue to rely on the threat of all-out war as our primary deterrent.'' With invulnerable ICBMs providing a nuclear standoff, says Kissinger, the only way the U.S. can deter less-than-total aggression is by having strong limited-war forces. In a small war pressures will be strong on both sides to avoid the use of nuclear weapons. Hence the U.S. should build up its conventional forces. "The conventional capability of the free world should be sufficiently powerful so that a nuclear defense becomes the last and not the only recourse . . .There is no reason except lack of will why Western Europe and the United States cannot create local forces capable of arresting almost any scale of Soviet aggression."

Changing NATO

Kissinger holds that the missile standoff will ultimately make obsolete the U.S. commitment to launch all-out war in the event of a Soviet attack on any NATO nation. "If NATO can be defended only by all-out war. it will face a hopeless dilemma: to yield to pressure will set up a pattern of Soviet blackmail, while to resist will involve catastrophic devastation." Hence the need for strong conventional forces is most evident in Western Europe. "None of our European allies is capable of creating from its own resources a retaliatory force capable of defeating the U.S.S.R., even by strik ing first." Nor is any European country alone "capable of withstanding Soviet pressure. Security is therefore insepara ble from unity . . . NATO should have every incentive to develop a strategy which does not force the United States to have to choose between all-out war and inaction in the defense of Europe." Independent European nuclear powers -- such as France and Britain -- only increase the temptation for Russia to destroy European retaliatory power piecemeal. "To be sure," writes Kissinger, a united Europe "could not win an all-out war with the U.S.S.R. But it might deter, through the ability to extract an exorbitant price in case of aggression ... A Eu ropean Atomic Force -- provided it was well protected --might not only deter a nuclear attack; it could also furnish an umbrella for a conventional defense."

Searching for Strength

Kissinger sets off his concern about power relationships with a historian's sensitive exploration of general U.S. aims and purposes. He warns that it is fatuous to think that Soviet Russia will evolve into a less belligerent nation as it grows in industry and education. ("Industrialization did not make Germany less militant.") Since the U.S. is in for a long struggle, it must dig deeply into its own moral and spiritual resources for strength. It cannot, for example, form policy by trying to appeal to the so-called "uncommitted" nations. ("A cult of noncommitment will doom freedom everywhere.") Nor is it enough for the U.S. to simply try to prove that it can outproduce the Russians. It must learn to "infuse the values of human dignity and freedom with enough vitality so that the younger generation all over the world will feel obliged to come to grips with them emotionally and intellectually."

"We must," he writes, "be willing to face the paradox that we must be dedicated both to military strength and to arms control, to security as well as to negotiation, to assisting the new nations towards freedom and self-respect without accepting their interpretation of all issues. If we cannot do all these things, we will not be able to do any of them. Our ability to master the seeming paradoxes will test even more than our ability to survive; it will be the measure of our worthiness to survive."

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