BOOKS
269
which is why you need a computer to play), an "acceptable" number of
people on your side will die.
If
so, you win-I guess.
If
not, you deal
another hand. (Acceptable
to whom
has never been made clear, which
indicates it is not an important part of the game.)
The scientific rationality which is so finely honed in the course
of playing these games turns out to be not quite so stable as it seems.
For example, at the time of the Cuban crisis, a high official of the
Hudson Institute addressed a letter to
The New York Times
warning
180,000,000 Americans not to be too pleased that the Russians were
showing themselves to be what we knew they were all along anyway–
that is, chicken. The pleasure might provoke reactions to actions that
had not been scripted in, in which case you have to throwaway the
whole scenario and start over again.
The English will probably never be so rational as we are. Certainly
John Strachey is not so rational in his appraisal of American nuclear
thinking. Strachey is a leading social-democratic spokesman on military
matters in England, connected with the Institute for Strategic Studies
(which publishes a bulletin happily entitled
Survival)
, and is a former and
perhaps a future Secretary of State for War. But in order to study these
matters thoroughly, he had to come over here 'and talk to Brodie and
Kahn, Morgenstern and Wohlstetter, and many others. Appropriately
enough, we are the leaders in nuclear thinking. But this book convinced
me that the English have a great deal to contribute to what should
be a joint political and intellectual effort. This is particularly so since
the British, who no longer are a world power, have a remarkable
understanding of the nature of power.
The English (especially under a socialist government) are in a
position to develop the basic
two-mindedness
that must constitute a
realistic approach to the nuclear dilemma. The dilemma might
be
summed up in this way: Unilateral surrender is either politically im–
possible or inadvisable or both, and which it is hardly matters under
the realistic approach. Yet the present balance of deterrent terror,
which has kept us alive this long, is clearly too dangerous
to
be ac–
cepted as adequate, and no simple refinements of the balance can
correct the danger. Disarmament as a practical matter is coequal with
some rough form of world hegemony, and so it is no less difficult than
it is necessary. Or, to be very simple, the balance must be preserved
and thus perfected while at the same time being liquidated. Popularly
speaking, this is inconceivable. From the point of view of the realistic
imagination, it is the
sine qua non
of even the possibility of continued
existence. (I say possibility, since very clearly time is against us, and
