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DAVID
T.
BAZELON
the best policy may prove to be inadequate; but then again, it will not
make any difference, since there will be no one left to care.) The shortest,
surest route to liquidation of the terror is merger, which is really a kind
of mutual unilateral surrender. Indeed, disarmament without a Russo–
American hegemony is conceivable
only
rhetorically, and for popular
consumption: the realistic imagination immediately perceives its
im–
possibility. On this very important point, John Strachey is exceptionally
persuasive.
Two-mindedness is the answer, the hard answer. (Of course, if
you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen-retreat to the dim
parlor of righteousness, where it is meaningful to say simply that the
Bomb is bad and to inform your friends that you are against it.) So
Strachey's book begins with a compelling statement and explanation of
the present state of the balance, of its necessity-and of the plain fact
that we are alive because of it. That is, I believe, the proper beginning
of a book on cold war strategy. But like all writers on the subject, he
lingers over the horrors of nuclear war. This is becoming a convention,
which has its value in that we will have to be sufficiently horrified to
prevent the disaster. But it is an intellectual waste, for the most important
part of the discussion
begins
on the assumption of original horror (which
has replaced original sin on our historically active eschatology).
Since Strachey is all for balance, he is against the SAC counterforce
view, for second-strike invulnerability and the build-up of conventional
forces-and very passionately for relieving these forces of the burden of
tactical atomic weapons, an absurd invitation to escalate. (His descrip–
tion of NATO doctrine and practice is almost as horrifying, in its own
way, as the details of nuclear blast.) Again emphasizing balance, what
he most fears is the spread of nuclear armament among more and
more sovereign states-what is known in the trade as the Nth country
problem. He thus believes in the superlative importance of a test-ban
treaty, which is distinguished from everything else
by
being genuinely
and immediately possible: each side has already been euchred into an
embarrassing agreement which then had to be reneged on. A test–
ban treaty will be so important not because it will solve the fall-out
problem, nor even because it will provide some practice in agreement,
but because it will require reciprocal or joint Russo-American action
against testing by others and thus constitutes the beginning of a practical
power-solution to the greatly feared Nth country problem.
The whole book is tight and brilliant, almost without let-up; but
probably the most original section is the discussion of disarmament.
He is, for example, exceptionally perceptive in separating propaganda
