A
NEW KIND OF WAR
545
Perhaps our great defeat to date in the cold war has been our
failure to see how multiform it was becoming, and that it must eventual–
ly become total, encompassing all imaginable forms of competition,
from medical care to mighty rockets, from Taiwan to the South Pole,
and beyond this planet altogether a quarter of a million miles to the
moon.
In America, the cold war has been widely misunderstood to con–
sist primarily of the balance of nuclear terror, and something called
"propaganda"-which need not be taken seriously because it is "just
words." The early debate in this country concerning our inadequacy in
the cold war was carried on mostly in terms of budgeteering over con–
ventional armament and scientific research. This narrow perspective,
in conjunction with self-exhilarating noises about "liberation" of Eastern
Europe and "massive retaliation" as the noblest form of suicide, have
been our substitutes for policy and realistic conception since Korea.
Any real policy must begin with the proposition that nuclear war
shall be considered an impossibility. The contrary proposition is not
policy at all, but literal madness. Even assuming that after such a war
the planet and part of the civilization on it continued, what would
have been achieved? It is not even clear that there could be a "winner"
in the sense of one of the great powers surviving in a position to dictate
the terms of the reconstruction-or even to participate in it effectively.
Could such a war be fought for "freedom"?
If
there are no other ways
to fight for freedom, then probably it is a lost cause.
Unfortunately, it is not a belaboring of the obvious to reiterate
the underlying assumptions of the stalemate of annihilation in which
we are caught and which so many of us call the cold war. A Con–
gressional report estimated sudden death to fifty million Americans
in a surprise nuclear attack, and serious injury to an additional twenty
million. Our own department of annihilation has assured us all along
that a lot of Russians would accompany us to the other side. And what
if, somehow, there were more than one attack?
If
the war lasts longer
than half an hour? This image of destruction is real. It must be ac–
cepted as a primary structural fact in any conception of our new
world-the permanent background of everything that men hereafter
do or fail to do on the stage of history.
Our understanding of history is, from this moment, totally re–
written. The future has arrived.
The present balance of power consists of a mutual exchange of
homicide-pIus-suicide threats. The threat is indispensable, the war is
impossible. So we are faced with the reality of impossible alternatives.
