A Critique and a Caricature

By Strobe Talbott

THE NUCLEAR DELUSION by George F. Kennan; Pantheon; 208 pages; $13.95 WITH ENOUGH SHOVELS by Robert Scheer; Random House; 285 pages; $14.95

Americans have been living with the Bomb for more than 35 years, but not until 1982 did many begin reading about it. This year there are some 250 books about nuclear weaponry available, more than ten times as many as a decade ago. The Reagan Administration is largely responsible for the sudden, widespread interest. Frequent statements from senior officials that nuclear war may be not only thinkable but winnable have had almost exactly the opposite of their intended effect. Instead of rallying the nation to the cause of stronger defense, the Administration's policy has attracted new voters for freeze resolutions and new readers of histories on how nuclear weapons came to be, and what would happen if they were fired in anger.

George F. Kennan's answer is that these deployments have become such a dangerous fact of life because American leaders have too often failed to think realistically about their consequences. Even a "limited" nuclear conflict would, in his opinion, quickly lead to a transcendent catastrophe. "There is no issue at stake in our political relations with the Soviet Union ... which could conceivably be worth a nuclear war," writes the dean of American Kremlinologists. Therefore the vow to retaliate against Soviet aggression with the American nuclear arsenal quite simply does not make sense to him. It is either a bluff or a suicide threat--in neither case a basis for sound policy.

Kennan, now 78, will probably be best remembered by future historians for the 1946 cable he wrote while a diplomat in Moscow, urging that the U.S. dedicate itself to the containment of Soviet expansionism. He published a version of the cable in Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym "X." He has spent much of his life since then criticizing the way in which eight successive Presidents have followed his advice. Significantly, he has not included that famous Long Telegram in this collection of past writings. Instead, he reprints a 1950 memorandum to Dean Acheson warning against putting much faith in nuclear weapons as instruments of policy.

Kennan believes that American leaders have excessively "militarized" policy toward the U.S.S.R. partly because they have "dehumanized" their Soviet counterparts. He views the Politburo as "a group of troubled men--elderly men, for the most part--whose choices and possibilities are severely constrained." They are driven by a paranoid, secretive and conspiratorial view of the world rather than by a master plan for its domination. He urges more and closer analysis of Soviet objectives and less preoccupation with Soviet capabilities. Despite the vast numbers of tanks and missiles in the Warsaw Pact, Kennan argues, the U.S.S.R. has "no intention" of attacking the countries of Western Europe precisely because doing so would almost certainly trigger World War III and catastrophic destruction on all sides. For all their propensity to bully, the Soviets have, particularly in the past 15 years, been exceedingly cautious about risking direct military confrontation with NATO.

Nevertheless the Kremlin has every intention, if possible, of neutralizing Western Europe and driving the American military presence from the Continent. Kennan is too sanguine about the extent to which Soviet power has been--and might be again--an effective instrument of intimidation. But he is quite right that strident, bellicose countermeasures have played into the hands of the Soviet propaganda and diplomatic campaign to split NATO.

The demonization of the Soviet enemy and the militarization of the American response have reached their apotheosis in the Reagan Administration. It sometimes seems to Kennan that we are "already in a state of undeclared war--an undeclared war pursued in anticipation of an outright one now regarded as inevitable."

That chilling conclusion seems only slightly overstated in the light of Robert Scheer's interviews with Ronald Reagan, George Bush and some high officials of the Pentagon. Scheer, who works for the Los Angeles Times, is one of those reporters who can get even the most experienced and cautious public officials to make the most unguarded and self-damaging disclosures, particularly when they are running for President. He got Jimmy Carter to confess lust in his heart in 1976, in Playboy, no less. Scheer induced Reagan, whom he interviewed in 1980, and others now in the Administration to talk with a degree of candor matched only by their imprudence and, sometimes, ignorance.

The title of Scheer's book, With Enough Shovels, derives from a particularly bizarre interview with Thomas K. Jones, a Deputy Under Secretary of Defense. Jones is an enthusiast for civil defense and do-it-yourself bomb shelters. "Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top," he said. "It's the dirt that does it... If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody's going to make it."

With absurdities like that, Scheer has no trouble making his subjects sound like Dr. Strangelove. His thesis is that Reagan and his men have carried the U.S. across a threshold: after years of reliance on the doctrine that nuclear weapons can deter the Soviets, the American Government is now in the hands of those who believe in the far more dangerous notion that such weapons can be used to defeat and destroy the Soviet Union.

Scheer's book leaves the false impression that never before have senior officials sought to develop a "nuclear-war-fighting capability." Since the dawn of the atomic age, and particularly since the mid-1960s, American strategists and political leaders have had to ponder an inescapable dilemma: unless the U.S. has a credible answer to the question of what it would do if deterrence fails, deterrence itself is not credible.

To be sure, the Reagan Administration has badly mismanaged the presentation of this paradox. It has talked far too often, too simplistically and too provocatively about nuclear war. It has pursued rearmament indiscriminately and disarmament unconvincingly. Thus it has created a backlash against even legitimate efforts to strengthen U.S. defenses--and rendered itself vulnerable to caricatures like Scheer's.

--By Strobe Talbott

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