Coming to Terms with Nukes

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

It was Britain's dour Field Marshal Douglas Haig in World War I who confessed he never went to the front lest the squalid horror of trench warfare diminish his will to send armies to their death, an act he thought not only necessary but inviolable.

There is in the current protests against our nuclear arsenals at least the faint echo of the question raised more than half a century ago about Haig. Are the men and women in the White House, Pentagon and State Department grown so callous from their endless war games and box scores of missiles and megatonnage that the potential human tragedy has receded in their deliberations?

There are no pictures of the aftermath of Hiroshima or even nuclear test explosions hung on the walls of the White House Situation Room, where crises are deliberated by the National Security Council. There are no formalized briefing manuals or movies shown to a President that deal specifically with the annihilation of the world should the nuclear weapons of the Soviet Union and the U.S. be unleashed. Maybe there should be. The elite cadres in the armed services who are trained to handle nuclear weapons have been briefed on the destructive power they oversee, and according to some of them, the glimpses of the real thing make The Day After seem tepid.

It is acknowledged by most authorities in this field that the peace of the past 40 years has been maintained by the controlled use of fear. The horror of nuclear war has greatly troubled every President, and yet all of them since 1945 have conditioned themselves to plan nuclear strategy coolly and prudently. The experts tend to agree that too much fear in the Oval Office would warp judgments and make crises more likely.

The recent Presidents all have gone through emotional swings on the issue. If Jimmy Carter arrived in Washington determined to banish nuclear weapons from the face of the earth, he ended his term supporting a new MX system, as well as Pershing and cruise missiles. If Ronald Reagan took power as a nuclear saber rattler, he at least has now toned down his language some and learned a lot about the world's desire to search for a way to reduce arms.

Former President Richard Nixon offers an important reminder in his book Real Peace: A Strategy for the West. Says Nixon: "We must not allow our understandable fear of a nuclear war to blind us to the increasingly awesome destructiveness of conventional weapons. Conventional weapons killed 15 million in World War I and over 54 million in World War ll."

The fact is that the people now in the White House, and those who preceded them of both political parties, have all become tempered, cautious and properly fearful stewards of our destructive might. But none has had nightmares over his nuclear responsibility.

Edward N. Luttwak, a senior fellow at the Georgetown University Center for Strategic and International Studies, argues that every President becomes fully sensitized to the awesome power at his command through the military budget process. Virtually all spending calculations, explains Luttwak, are based on a weapon's destructive effects: how many millions would be killed, cities destroyed, regions contaminated. There is no way a President could succumb to reflexive nuclear revenge, even if he is surrounded by old cronies who, after a couple of bourbons, suggest it is time to "nuke 'em." From the man who carries "the football," the briefcase containing the launch codes, to the officers who push the buttons, a President must deal with an impersonal and coldly rational chain of command. A comforting irony is that military leaders are not the Strangelovian warriors imagined by many civilians. Those who prepare for nuclear war know it best--and fear it most. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.