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PARTISAN REVIEW
engaged in attempting to sway West European public OpInlOn
against the NATO decision. In politics, good intentions are not
sufficient. The objective effect of West European neutralism is to
favor Soviet objectives.
It
is probably true that anti-Americanism in Western Europe
would be less vociferous were it not for what Leon Wieseltier has
aptly termed "the Sovietization of American nuclear strategy."
Claiming that the Soviets were preparing to fight and win a nuclear
war, some American strategists have urged that the United States
adopt a similar "concept of victory." Others have advocated a
strategy of nuclear "decapitation" by deploying accurate missiles
for "surgical" strikes against KGB and Communist party
headquarters in the Soviet Union . These strategists fail to mention
that attacking the Soviet "state" with nuclear weapons would also
mean killing millions of Russian civilians. They have contributed to
the undermining of nuclear deterrence while failing to convince
anyone that the use of nuclear weapons would not lead to ultimate
catastrophe.
If
the Western public turns against nuclear deterrence,
the American nuclear strategists will be partly to blame.
But only partly. The conservative strategists do have a point
when they argue that neither history, the anarchic system of
nation-states, nor human nature give us much hope that the
doctrine of mutual assured destruction will always work. Should
deterrence fail, some operational plans for the use of nuclear
weapons short of immediate attacks on civilian targets must be
available. As long as nation-states possess nuclear weapons, nuclear
holocaust will remain a possibility. But the nuclear strategy of the
West should not make it inevitable. Hence the idea of deterrence at
the lowest possible levels with accurate weapons that the new
strategists have proposed need not lead to the actual use of nuclear
weapons on a wider scale.
It
is to be hoped that arms-control agreements will bring about
a military balance in Europe that can be stabilized at much lower
levels of nuclear and conventional armament than is the case today.
But if the West European democracies devoted more of their
considerable economic resources to their own defense, the nuclear
threshold would be raised and the Soviets would understand that the
costs of any aggression would outweigh the benefits. In the past one
of the great advantages of nuclear weapons was their relatively low
cost. Raising the nuclear threshold today will not be cheap, but the
alternatives are far more costly.
