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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2009
1 Quoted in Weinberg, Gerhard L., The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany (Chicago and London, 1970), 27.Google Scholar
2 Arendt, Hannah, On Violence (New York, 1969), 3–8Google Scholar; Barnet, Richard, Roots of War (New York, 1972Google Scholar), chap. 5; Pilisuk, Marc, International Conflict and Social Policy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1972Google Scholar), chap. 5; Rapoport, Anatol, Strategy and Conscience (New York, 1964Google Scholar); Green, Philip, Deadly Logic (New York, 1968Google Scholar).
3 Deterrence and Defense (Princeton, 1961), 25. For similar understandings of rationality see Kahn, Herman, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton, 1960Google Scholar) and On Escalation (New York, 1965); Knorr, Klaus and Read, Thornton, eds., Limited Strategic War (New York, 1962Google Scholar); Kissinger, Henry, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (New York, 1957Google Scholar); Schelling, Thomas, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, Mass., 1960Google Scholar). While I recognize that strategists consider military/political issues in various ways and from different perspectives, for my purposes their similarities are more important than their differences. In particular, they share a common understanding of deterrence logic and its applicability to state policy.
4 Snyder, Deterrence, 25.
5 Sherwin, Chalmers W., “Securing Peace Through Military Technology,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, V, XII (May 1956), 160Google Scholar, quoted in Philip Green, Deadly Logic, 159.
6 Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 13.
7 Kaufmann, W.W., The McNamara Strategy (New York, 1964), 17Google Scholar, quoted in Green, Deadly Logic, 160.
8 (New Haven and London, 1967), 37–43.
9 The distinction is suggested by Nagel, Thomas in a discussion of “War and Massacre” in Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1, no 2, (1972), 123–44.Google Scholar
10 Neustadt, Richard E., Presidential Power (New York, 1960), 2.Google Scholar I have quoted Neustadt not because his language suits my purpose, but because he is the pre-eminent deterrence strategist for us domestic politics. At this point I can only suggest the outline of an argument supporting this position and not elaborate upon it. What must a president do to be effective? He “determinedly… seeks power,” and the more he seeks the more likely he is “to bring vigor to his clerkship” (p. 185). How shall we know if he is seeking power? By his success in “boost[ing] his chances for mastery [of Congress] in any instance, looking toward tomorrow from today” (p. 2). Why should the president look toward tomorrow? His “own choices are the only means in his own hands of guarding his own prospects for effective influence” (p. 57, emphasis in text). Why doesn't the president stop choosing? “[H]is choices of what he would say and do, and how and when, are his means to conserve and tap his sources of power. Alternatively, choices are the means by which he dissipates power. The outcome, case by case, will often turn on whether he perceives his risk in power terms and takes account of what he sees before he makes his choice” (p. 179). I would submit that even in this skeletal version of Neustadt's argument we have the basic ingredients of deterrence thought: rationality as causal logic, contest for success not purpose, and ceaseless seeking of power to manipulate the future.
11 “My own bias rears itself in the view that, strategy being essentially the pursuit of success in certain types of competitive endeavor, a pragmatic approach is the only appropriate one. The basic pragmatic principle is, I suppose, that ‘Truth is the idea that works.’ Thus, one weighs a strategic concept or idea by investigating as thoroughly as possible the factors necessary to its successful operation.” Brodie, Bernard, Survival, V, no VII (August, 1965), 208CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quoted in Green, Deadly Logic, 221.
12 The Essence of Security (New York, Harper and Row, 1968), 57–8, emphasis added. McNamara emphasizes the capabilities of the Soviet Union, but assumptions about intentions are inescapably part of capability analysis. See Brodie, Bernard, Escalation and the Nuclear Option (Princeton, 1966), 85–8.Google Scholar
13 I raise this point not to suggest that, given the opportunity deterrence strategists would recommend a preventive strike, but rather to highlight the dilemma created for them by their own form of rationality.
14 The figure of six tons is given in Melman, Seymour, Pentagon Capitalism (New York, 1970), 165.Google Scholar
15 The Nixon administration is committed to three maior systems: bombers, land-based missiles, and sea-based missiles. This is why the FY 1973 budget calls for continuation of the MIRV program, (through Poseidon missiles at sea and Minuteman III on land), strengthening ICBM silos and installing ABMS to defend land-based missiles, increased development of the B-1 bomber, undersea long-range missiles, and a new airborne warning and control system.
16 These are “rungs” 38 and 44 on Kahn's, Herman escalation ladder in On Escalation (Baltimore, 1968Google Scholar).
17 Ibid., 274.
18 Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr., A Thousand Days (Boston, 1965), 796.Google Scholar
19 Ibid., 811.
20 The speech is reprinted in Kennedy, Robert, Thirteen Days (New York, 1969), 131–9.Google Scholar
21 The Washington Post (18 December 1962), quoted in Allison, Graham, The Essence of Decision (Boston, 1971), 51.Google Scholar
22 “Endgame,” New York Review of Books, XII (13 March 1969), 15–22, as well as his exchange with Roger Hilsman in ibid., XII (8 May 1969), 36–8.
23 Kennedy, Thirteen Days, 33. See also Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, 803, and Sorensen, Theodore, Kennedy (New York, 1966), 761.Google Scholar
24 Sorensen, Kennedy, 776. See also Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, 806; Hilsman, Roger, To Move A Nation (New York, 1967), 205Google Scholar; Albert, and Wohlstetter, Roberta, Controlling the Risks in Cuba (London, 1965), 16.Google Scholar
25 Ibid.
26 Kennedy, Thirteen Days, 33. Also Sorensen, Kennedy, 111.
27 Kennedy, Thirteen Days, 49. One effect of the meeting with Sweeney was that the president placed himself on record as having consulted fully with the Air Force. But there is nothing to indicate that this was the intent of the meeting, as implied by Allison, Essence of Decision, 249, and Hilsman, To Move A Nation, 205.
28 Kennedy, Thirteen Days, 83.
29 Ibid., 75. See also Hilsman, To Move A Nation, 227, and Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, 830. Allison argues that the missiles were withdrawn because of an “explicit threat of invasion” (Essence of Decision, 65). Schlesinger reports that in a conversation on Monday morning, 29 October, the president remarked that “one thing this experience shows is the value of sea power and air power; an invasion would have been a mistake – a wrong use of power. But the military are mad. They wanted to do this” (A Thousand Days, 831). But the president wanted to do it also, and Schlesinger himself felt that if missile construction had continued “the United States would have had no real choice but to take action against Cuba” (Ibid., 830).
30 As reprinted in Kennedy, Thirteen Days, 136.
31 Kahn, On Escalation, 80.
32 Controlling the Risks in Cuba, 18.
33 pp.40–1.
34 Arms and Influence, 95–6, emphasis added.
35 Hilsman, To Move A Nation, 227.
36 Sorensen, Kennedy, 808.
37 Snyder, Deterrence and Defense, 25.
38 The phrase is Clifford Brown's.