2013 Virginia Festival of the Book: Eisenhower

Two veteran journalists-turned-biographers spoke at the Virginia Festival of the Book on Friday to talk about their recent books about President Dwight Eisenhower and his administration.

The book festival's web site offers background notes on the speakers for the panel entitled "Eisenhower: The Presidency." First, Evan Thomas, who

was a writer and editor at Time and Newsweek magazines for 33 years. There he wrote more than 100 cover stories and won a National Magazine award. He is the author of 8 books, including 2 New York Times best sellers. He teaches writing and journalism at Princeton University.

and also Jeffrey Frank, who

was a senior editor at the New Yorker, the deputy editor of the Washington Post's Outlook section, and is the author of four novels, including the Washington Trilogy

The moderator of the panel was journalist and author Earl Swift, whom I interviewed last year at the book festival about his history of the interstate highway system, The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways.

Evan Thomas discussed Ike's Bluff: Eisenhower's Secret Battle to Save the World, which focuses largely on foreign policy but also addresses Eisenhower's personality -- warm on the outside, cold as steel on the inside -- and his way of working with other government officials.

Here is video of Thomas's opening remarks:

For his part, Jeffrey Frank discussed Ike & Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage, which looks into Eisenhower's relationship with his vice-president and eventual successor, Richard Nixon.

Here is the video of Frank talking about Ike & Dick:

The near-simultaneous publication of books about Ike by Evan Thomas and Jeffrey Frank suggests that Eisenhower's presidency is undergoing a historical reassessment, just as Calvin Coolidge's administration is getting a similar treatment.

The panel on Eisenhower's presidency took place on the upper level of the University of Virginia Bookstore, overlooking the bustling commerce on the ground floor.

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Sole Booklength Biography of SecDef Nominee Chuck Hagel Leaves Much to Be Desired

Today's confirmation hearing by the Senate Armed Services Committee to review President Obama's nomination of former Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel as the new Secretary of Defense is drawing plenty of attention from the press and public alike.

Outside of Nebraska and rarefied policy-wonk circles, most Americans are not familiar with Hagel or his career. Consequently, they are looking for information about him so that they can make up their own minds about his qualifications to be the successor to Leon Panetta.

Some will turn to their local libraries or book shops to find a biography of Hagel. They will find there is just one available: Charlyne Berens' 2006 book, Chuck Hagel: Moving Forward (University of Nebraska Press), scheduled to be published by Bison Books in paperback this year on July 1 (a publication date that may, given the current circumstances, be moved up).

Berens, described on the book's jacket flap as a professor of journalism at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, wrote this fawning, uncritical biography of her state's then-senior senator during a period in which Hagel was being widely discussed as a potential Republican presidential candidate for 2008. Ultimately, Hagel decided against a run – the nomination went instead to his fellow Vietnam veteran, John McCain – but Berens' book is little more than a brief for supporters of a draft-Hagel movement.


Comic relief
Sadly, Chuck Hagel: Moving Forward, despite being brisk and breezy, reads like a book-length answer to a job interviewer's question: “What would you say are your shortcomings?”, with the reply being, “I work too hard and give too much money to charity.”

Relying on interviews with Hagel's family members, friends, and political colleagues, there is not an unkind word said about him – and even the few (slightly) negative comments are spun positively.

Berens is the kind of biographer who seeks out early mentors of her subject who are prone to say things like, what he lacked in raw talent he made up in scrappiness.

That is not a direct quotation, but this (p. 18) is:

Hagel played football and basketball and went out for track. He was on student council and in the honor society as well as in Sodality, a Catholic young people's organization. "He was a kid you never could keep busy because he was so busy," his football coach Dean Soulliere, now retired, said.

And this, from the next page:

Anything he lacked in athletic ability he made up in effort. For instance, [younger brother] Tom Hagel said Chuck really didn't have a lot of talent in basketball, but he wanted to play so badly that he just drove himself until he made the team. "He was kind of the comic relief in some games,' Tom recalls, 'moderately good, at best, but just entirely focused on it."

Slapdash hagiography
It is hard to begrudge Hagel's success in the armed services (a decorated infantryman, with two Purple Hearts to his credit), business (he built up a multimillion-dollar fortune by investing his life savings in the nascent cell phone industry), philanthropy (he rescued the USO from near bankruptcy in the 1980s), and politics (he defeated a popular sitting governor in the 1996 U.S. Senate race, having never run for office before). But Berens writes about Hagel as if he were an angel. This is a Hagel hagiography entirely lacking academic detachment.

The book is also a slapdash effort that should embarrass both the academic press that published it and the professor who wrote it.

For instance, in discussing Hagel's first first major assignment in the U.S. Army, Berens writes on page 28:

So he was sent to Fort Ord, California, and the White Sands Missile Range. He was nearly twenty-one years old, and it was the first time he had seen the ocean. It was only the second time he'd been out of Nebraska; the first time was for basic training at Fort Bliss.

Yet just a few pages earlier, Berens quotes Hagel as saying that, as a teenager, “I spent way too much time with my buddies, driving up to Yankton, South Dakota,” to meet coeds and drink in a state with a lower drinking age than Nebraska's (p. 23). And two paragraphs later on the same page, Berens reports that Hagel had spent a year in Minneapolis, Minnesota, attending the Brown Institute of Radio and Television, where he also worked several jobs – all this before he began his military service.

Then, much deeper into the book, in a discussion of environmental policy and legislation, Berens explains that the Kyoto Protocol (on climate change) “would have required industrial plants – but not automobile manufacturers – to cut pollution from burning fossil fuels to 2000 levels by 2010” (p. 104). Two pages later, Berens describes a bill that Hagel opposed as one that “would have required U.S. industrial plants – but not auto manufacturers – to cut pollution from burning fossil fuels to 2000 levels by 2010.” The only difference is “automobile” becomes “auto.”


Amateurish
This is amateurish stuff, but Berens worst sin, in terms of academic rigor, may be the way she sources her quotations and paraphrases. Her end notes are all in this form: “Omaha World-Herald, August 16, 1999” or “Washington Post, November 15, 2004” – no page numbers, no article titles, no author bylines. If a high-school student turned in a term paper with that kind of format, he would barely get a passing grade. For a college professor to do it in a book published by a university press is simply horrifying.

All those criticisms aside, there are some interesting tidbits found within the text.

Who knew, for instance, that in the early 1990s, before he returned to Nebraska after two decades as a Washington insider, Republican activists tried to recruit Hagel to run for governor of Virginia? He was, Berens reports, “mildly interested but never pursued the option” (p. 72).

It is also largely forgotten that Hagel was talked about as a potential vice-presidential candidate for George W. Bush as early as 1999, and also as a possible running mate (crossing party lines) for John Kerry in 2004.

With a certain prescient irony, Berens recounts that it would be “safe to say Hagel never seriously considered pursuing a spot on the ticket with Kerry. But the suggestions he might serve in a Kerry cabinet were a different matter. 'I'd see that in a different light,' Hagel said in May 2004.”

Continuing, she writes,

Of course, he added, if he, a Republican, were to serve s a member of a Democratic president's cabinet, that would eliminate any possibility he could ever run for president himself. "I'd have to think about that," Hagel said. "Would it be worth it to give up that option" to serve as secretary of state or defense in a Kerry cabinet? Only if he were convinced the position would allow him to make a real difference, he said. As things turned out, the question was moot.

As things turned out, it was only temporarily moot.

Hagel chose not to run for re-election in 2008, fulfilling a promise he had made to voters in 1996 that he would serve just two terms. He went on to become chairman of the Atlantic Council of the United States, in keeping with his lifelong interest in international affairs. And on January 7, 2013, Republican war veteran Chuck Hagel was nominated for Secretary of Defense by a Democratic president.

Will this foreclose future plans for the now-66-year-old Hagel to run for President himself? That remains to be seen but one can only hope that, if that day comes, a better, more analytical biography of him by a less sycophantic author will have been published.  For now, Chuck Hagel: Moving Forward is not that book.

(This book review appeared, in slightly different form, on Examiner.com.)

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Author Interview: GU philosophy professor Jason Brennan on 'The Ethics of Voting'

“Every day you see the same message: ‘get out the vote, get out the vote, get out the vote,’” says philosophy professor Jason Brennan.

Jason Brennan

“What if all the sentiments underlying that were just wrong?” he asks. What if they “could be shown to be wrong pretty easily?”

According to Brennan, his new book, The Ethics of Voting, in fact shows those underlying sentiments to be wrong.

Brennan, an assistant professor of business and philosophy at Georgetown University, recently summarized his book at a Cato Institute forum. After his presentation, he spoke with me about what motivated him to write The Ethics of Voting, how the book has been received by academics, and his new research on private behavior and the common good.

Brennan has long been interested in the topic of the ethics of voting.

“Growing up,” he said, “I kept hearing, over and over again, the American civic religion [says] that voting is special, that political participation is special, that serving in the military makes you an especially good person.”

These claims were not satisfying to Brennan, he explained.

“I never found myself gripped by that,” he said. “I always wondered: What were the grounds underlying that? Why did people believe it?”

He also discovered, he continued, that “at the same time, there’s a kind of interesting philosophical question about what you should do in situations where we as a group are doing something bad but that your individual input doesn’t make a difference. That happens a lot in politics.”

Those two different but related things brought him to this topic.

He had read some of the literature about voter behavior but George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan’s 2008 book, The Myth of the Rational Voter, provided extra stimulus to write his own book.

“After reading that, I asked myself, suppose he’s right that voters are irrational. What does that mean about what they should do?”

The answer is not simple, he said. One cannot simply say, “Well, if they’re rational they shouldn’t vote, because individual votes don’t make a difference.” Instead, “it’s actually a real philosophical puzzle as to why it would even matter at all [with regard to] what an individual does and why they should vote well or not.”

Caplan’s book, Brennan said, was “like the last straw” in how it “pushed me over the edge to have to write something more about the philosophy behind” the ethics of voting.

Brennan has received feedback from other academic philosophers, as well as from political scientists. Most of it has been positive.

The reaction he has had from philosophers, he said, “has been overwhelmingly very positive. Even if they disagree with the conclusions -- and many of them do -- what they’ve tended to like about it is that it takes on common sense. What it does is start with rather simple, plausible premises and leads to counterintuitive results. Philosophers tend to like that.”

Moreover, he added, “what a lot of philosophers have recognized, too, is that there are just a lot of unfounded assumptions about how politics works and what we should do. At the very least, I’m being a devil’s advocate in challenging” those assumptions, and that challenge makes philosophers “recognize that common sense [claims] about voting need to be justified, if they are justified” at all.

The reaction of political scientists, he said, “has largely been the same,” but faculty in political science departments who do political theory, “which is sort of philosophy but done in political science,” have a tendency “to be more skeptical because they tend to have a much more strongly emotional attachment to democracy than philosophers do.”

Brennan is now conducting new research on how private behavior contributes to the public good, something “that ended up being a major premise even in this book.”

He explained that “we can express civic virtue anywhere: by running a good business that helps people [and] makes them richer, by coming up with inventions, by making art, and so on.”

All these things, he said, help “promote the common good. They’re doing as much good as politics is doing, perhaps even more.”

The practical effect of this for individuals is that, “if you’re a person who is publicly spirited and you want to promote the common good, that doesn’t mean you have to get out of the market and go to the forum,” Brennan explained. “It might instead mean you should stay in the market and work there.”

Giving two prominent examples, Professor Brennan pointed out that “Thomas Edison did a lot more for us with his inventions than he ever would have done as a voter. Michelangelo did a lot more with his art than he ever would have done as a voter.”

He concluded by noting that “private civil society is really important for promoting the common good. If civic virtue is about promoting the common good, then private civil society might be the way to do it.”

Brennan wrote The Ethics of Voting while he taught at Brown University; it was published in April by Princeton University Press.

(An earlier version of this interview appeared on Examiner.com on July 31, 2011.)

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'The War Powers Resolution: Its Implementation in Theory and Practice'

This book review appeared initially in the New York Tribune on Monday, September 3, 1983.

BOOK / RICHARD E. SINCERE JR.
The War Powers Resolution: a siege on presidential power
 
The War Powers Resolution: Its Implementation in Theory and Practice by Robert F. Turner, Philadelphia: Foreign Policy Research Institute, 1983, 147 pages, $4.95.

Clement J. Zablocki, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told The Milwaukee Journal on July 3: “The Wars Powers Resolution is uniquely crafted in that it accommodates to the reality of our modern, nuclear world. . . However, the distinctive virtue of the resolution is that it reserves to the Congress its constitutionally mandated responsibility of ultimately deciding the full legality of a presidential action. “In short,” said Zablocki, author of the 1973 law, “the War Powers Resolution is too fundamental in both its constitutional anchorage and its practical benefit to be dismantled” by the recent Supreme Court ruling that the so-called legislative veto is unconstitutional.


Inaccurate optimism
Zablocki’s assertions are wrong, according to attorney Robert F. Turner, formerly a legislative assistant to a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  Turner argues in “The War Powers Resolution: Its Implementation in Theory and Practice” that the law “is — in essence — unconstitutional, ineffective and unwise.”

Experience of the past decade demonstrates that the War Powers Resolution is not only ineffective, it is probably harmful. “Rather than fostering an atmosphere of cooperation partnership in decisions to commit U.S. forces to hostile situations, the War Powers Resolution has had the opposite effect: it pits the two branches against each other on essentially procedural grounds at the precise time that national unity is needed to deal with a potential crisis.”

The War Powers Resolution was doomed from its beginning. It was passed by a Congress that refused to acknowledge the congressional role in the conduct of the Vietnam War. Pretending that the near- unanimous vote in 1964 for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution (which granted sweeping discretionary powers to the president for prosecuting the war) never occurred, Congress gave the false impression that its constitutional responsibilities had been usurped by the president. So the law’s purpose was grounded in a historical fiction.

Nixon’s veto
Furthermore, the law’s effectiveness was immediately cast into doubt because it had to be passed over President Nixon’s veto. Sen. Jacob Javits, who co-sponsored the resolution, had hoped that Congress would work out a “methodology’’ for join presidential-congressional action in committing American troops abroad and that the president would then sign it — essentially making a compact between the president and Congress. That hope was not realized when the resolution was, for good reason, vetoed.

The War Powers Resolution requires, among other things, that 60 days after American forces are introduced into “situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances,” the president must terminate American involvement unless Congress explicity acts to continue it. Thus, vital American military aid to a nation under siege could legally be ended simply because the Congress cannot make up its mind! More important, an enemy aware of the president’s time limits could easily delay an offensive or refuse to negotiate peace terms until the 60 days of American military presence had ended.

Turner shows that the War Powers Resolution is unconstitutional for several independent reasons, including those cited by the Supreme Court in its recent Chadha decision. Among the others, Turner says, are the resolution’s provisions limiting the power of the Commander-in-Chief to “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces” [Section 2 (c)]. ‘Turner argues: “Any attempt to give legal effect to this provision would be patently unconstitutional.”

Critical omissions
The resolution fails to make the crucial distinction between the Congress’s constitutional power to declare war and the president’s powers to make war. Since after 60 days Congress must affirmatively act to authorize use of U.S. armed forces, the resolution deprives the president of "a fundamental expressed constitutional power,” something “incompatible with our system of separation of powers.”

Turner’s work is a valuable lesson in history and government. It will increase in value as President Reagan and Congress continue to dispute the presence of U.S. forces abroad, particularly in Central America, where fears of “another Vietnam” obscure the realities of the situation.

Congress and the public should take heed of Turner’s analysis, as Sen. John Tower already has, calling the War Powers Resolution “probably the most potentially damaging of the 1970s legislation” that altered the relationship between Congress and president. Tower most surely agrees with Robert Turner’s concluding recommendation:

“Now that its failure has been demonstrated and the acrimony resulting from Vietnam has receded, Congress should take a valuable first step in the direction of improved legislative-executive cooperation in this vital area — and in the process reaffirm its commitment to constitutional government — by repealing the War Powers Resolution.”

Richard E. Sincere, Jr., serves on the board of directors of the American Civil Defense Association and on the staff of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

'Maritime Strategy for Medium Powers'

This review appeared originally in the New York City Tribune on Wednesday, September 9, 1987.


RICHARD SINCERE
Global Naval Strategy Not Confined to Superpowers

Maritime Strategy for Medium Powers, by Rear Adm. J. R. Hill, Croom Hill, London, 247 pp.
Discussions of maritime strategy in the the nuclear age often neglect the role of the medium powers except in the context of their alliances with the superpowers. What is omitted is the notion that medium powers have interests and military reach that do not fit into the moral conceptualization of the East-West struggle.

In this concise book, British naval officer and theorist J. R. Hill has provided the standards by which medium powers — he isolates Australia, Brazil, France, India, Israel, and Japan as examples, although there are others — may assess their maritime interests and capabilities. Much of what he says has relevance for the planning of the superpowers, China, and smaller powers as well. For instance, he derides those military and civilian planners who insist on having a threat scenario to plan, arguing instead that they should define and categorize the nation’s interests.

These are in addition to the normally reckoned vital interests of territorial integrity and political independence.

It is important to make assessments of threats to these interests by degree, and not just absolutely, and to respond to threats proportionately. In another context Hill asks, “Does it really matter to India that one Indian tanker is bombed at Kharg Island? Would it matter if all Indian tankers going to Kharg Island were singled out for bombing?” In other words, “Which interests are to be regarded as vital?”

On the question of alliances, Hill admits himself to be something of a Gaullist in his thinking, believing that a loosening of the NATO alliance would both strengthen — through increased flexibility — the alliance itself and allow for firmer and more independent action on the part of alliance members when defending their interests outside the scope of alliance responsibility.

Hill argues that perhaps the British insistence, since at least 1966, that all military and naval strategic planning be done exclusively in an alliance context, with solely the Soviet threat in mind, hampered the effort to resecure the Falklands in 1982 and could have been disastrous, were it not for even worse planning in Buenos Aires.

These are the general points of Hill’s book. He leads up to them with an extensive discussion of modes and models for the use of maritime power.

He notes the distinction between “sea-use” and “sea-denial” strategies, concepts that are linked yet different. He notes the applicability of the international laws of the sea and draws attention to the uncertain future attached to the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, due to the unwillingness of the United States, the United Kingdom, and West Germany to sign it.

He discusses changing technologies in submarine and anti-submarine warfare and the advances in space-based surveillance and the effect these may have on medium- power strategies.

In a brief discussion of anti-missile defenses, he slyly expresses doubts about the United States Strategic Defense Initiative — though not in so many words.

Hill concludes his study by discounting both the fashionable view of the early 1970s that the world had become multipolar and the up-and-coming view of the 1980s that there will be no role for medium powers at sea in the future because of overwhelming superpower dominance. While “superpower at sea” will continue, he says, “the mutual constraints on it will also increase and the pressure needed to pull its trigger will be correspondingly greater.”

Meanwhile, as the resources available to the superpowers increase, so will those available to the small and medium powers. “Handy” weapons systems will “increase in number and effectiveness, often at manageable cost.” Therefore, the medium powers’ capacity “to take independent action in support of their interests at sea will not significantly diminish” — and, I might add, may actually be enhanced.

Maritime Strategy for Medium Powers makes a useful addition to the growing shelf of books on naval strategy.

Richard Sincere, a Washington-based policy analyst, is currently pursuing post-graduate studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

'How to Make Nuclear Weapons Obsolete'

This review appeared first in the New York City Tribune on Wednesday, May 21, 1986.

BOOKS / RICHARD SINCERE
Jastrow’s Worthy Attempt To Vindicate ‘Star Wars’ Lacks the Laser Touch

How to Make Nuclear Weapons Obsolete, by Robert Jastrow, Little Brown, and Company, $15.95, 175 pp.

March 23 marked the third anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s speech introducing the nation to his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). This “Star Wars” speech was a watershed in official American thinking on nuclear weapons policy. Although technological and political conditions had for some time been pressing the U.S. defense establishment to abandon the dangerous and outmoded deterrence doctrine called Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD, Reagan’s initiative caught many Americans by surprise.

What came as no surprise was the negative reaction to SDI by certain sectors of the elite -- the scientific community, the academy, the media, and liberal political circles.

Dubbed “Star Wars’ (initially by pro-SDI columnist David Wilson in the Boston Globe, but later co-opted as a pejorative term), certain groups -- the Union of Concerned Scientists, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Common Cause, the cabal of Carl Sagan — insisted that the Strategic Defense Initiative was a fantasy, much like George Lucas’s highly popular film trilogy.

The message Robert Jastrow wishes to impart in this book is that the Strategic Defense Initiative is far from fantasy and closer to reality than even the president and his advisors may imagine.

Jastrow, founder of NASA’s Institute for Space Studies and professor of earth sciences at Dartmouth College, tries to focus his arguments on the fact that much of the technology necessary for building a successful, effective space-based defense system is available now, “off-the-shelf.” Once a system built from these already- developed technologies is in place, he says, the United States can concentrate some of its energies on building more exotic defense systems — for example, X-ray lasers, particle beams, and free electron lasers.

The net effect of both the available and the developing systems will be to produce a near leakproof (Jastrow says 80% effective is a “conservative estimate”) missile defense system. By thus guaranteeing the invulnerability of American land-based ICBMs, we can maintain a credible threat to retaliate against any Soviet attacks. That, in turn, will prevent the Soviets from attacking in the first place. Ergo, stable deterrence is maintained.

That said, it must he noted that Jastrow has expressed his views quite poorly in this particular book. If he means to convince the opponents of SDI, he will quite probably fail; if he means to persuade those unconverted to either side of the debate, they will fail to pay attention.

Why? How to Make Nuclear Weapons Obsolete is a badly written book. It suffers from redundancy and oversimplification. It seemed to me to be written for a reader with an eighth-grade education, yet few people at that reading level are likely to open a book on this subject in any case.

This is not to underestimate the necessity of transplanting difficult scientific concepts into terms understandable to laymen. But the tendency of Jastrow (or his editors, who are probably the real culprits) to “dumb down” the text throughout the book is unconscionable, as the following examples will indicate.

Redundancy: On pages 98 and 99, a discussion of “other technologies” for space-based defense boils down to this: Before 1990 or so, “it should be possible to build an effective defense against missiles with the off-the- shelf, mature and unexotic technology of the smart bullet propelled by an ordinary rocket.”

Page 100 begins a new chapter, but a paragraph nearly word-for-word the same appears: “This limited defense will be based on the off-the-shelf technology of the smart bullet. That technology is mature and unexotic…”

Oversimplification: Turning to the list of illustrations, a reader will find “The Land-Based Arsenals of the Two Superpowers.” Expecting to see a bar graph or chart showing the different numbers of SS-18s, Minutemen, or Titan missiles and silos — a meaningful measure of the nuclear balance or imbalance — one finds instead a photograph that shows how much bigger (and blacker) Soviet missiles are than American ones (which are painted white).

This type of imagery plays right into the hands of critics like Helen Caldicott, whose kooky psycho-sexual theory of the arms race posits that American and Soviet military leaders suffer from pathological “missile envy” based on size. It is hard to believe that Jastrow allowed this type of illustration to be used without qualification.

Because of these reservations, How To Make Nuclear Weapons Obsolete is far from the definitive book on space defense that one would have hoped from the author.

His pamphlet by the same title (Orwell Press, 1981) does the same job more concisely and more persuasively. As disappointing as the book is, however, the points Jastrow makes cannot be ignored. They promise to be central to the “Star Wars” debate over the next decade.

There is no question in my mind that he portrays accurately the possibilities for anti-ballistic missile defenses in the twentieth centur3 Some details-such as his suggestion that space-based systems could defend against low-flying bombers and cruise missiles — are debatable, but the bulk of his analysis can withstand the scrutiny of even the Union of Concerned Scientists.

More important, perhaps, is his conclusion that an effective ABM system will result in severe restrictions in nuclear arsenals and perhaps their abolition.

Jastrow’s full body of work helps us to keep in mind President Reagan’s question, “Wouldn’t it be better to save lives than to avenge them?” It is morally reprehensible to depend on more numerous and more destructive offensive weapons for the defense of our country; it is morally laudable to pursue the technology that will render these weapons useless.

Richard Sincere, vice president of the American Civil Defense Association, works for the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center.

'Waging Nuclear Peace: The Technology and Politics of Nuclear Weapons'

This review originally appeared in the Washington Times on Thursday, May 2, 1985. This is probably the first time it has been readily available in digital form.  (Versions of this book review also appeared in the New York City Tribune on September 3, 1986, and in the spring 1985 issue of Strategic Review.)

BOOK REVIEW/Richard E. Sincere Jr.

A textbook look at our nuclear strategies

Waging Nuclear Peace: The Technology and Politics of Nuclear Weapons
By Robert Ehrlich
University of New York
$12.95 paper, 397 pages

When George Mason University physics professor Robert Ehrlich began to teach a course in arms control and nuclear weapons policy a few years ago, he could find no adequate, single-volume text that was conducive to class discussion and that provided sufficient technical and political background for his students. So, Mr. Ehrlich has produced a readable, detailed and useful primer on nuclear strategy that will also be an excellent reference book for those who are already in the field.

Page 1 introduces the purpose of the book with the question, “Are we discussing the real issue?... Nuclear war is a highly emotional issue,” Mr. Ehrlich points out. “It would be almost irrational not to become emotional when reflecting on the horror that a nuclear war could bring. However, the whole point of thinking analytically about nuclear war is to try to see facts objectively, not as we might wish them to be. It is only by clearing away these misconceptions that we can best assess the most likely course of action to avert catastrophe.”

The practical applications of this view become clear later in a discussion of the 1979 Office of Technology Assessment study, The Effects of Nuclear War, a report often cited as a primary source on the immediate and long-term effects of a nuclear attack upon the United States. Mr. Ehrlich compares the advantages and disadvantages of the United States and the U.S.S.R. that bear on their prospects for survival following a nuclear exchange. He notes that the OTA report concluded that there is no evidence “that the Soviets face a lower risk [than the United States] of finding themselves unable to rebuild an industrial society at all.”

Mr. Ehrlich argues, however, that an objective reader may come to different conclusions from those reached by the OTA report’s authors, and conclude that the Soviet Union is better prepared to survive a nuclear attack than the United States: “It is possible that the authors of this [OTA] study did not want to encourage the belief that nuclear war might be survivable -- especially the notion that it might be more survivable in the Soviet Union than in the United States.”

If Soviet military leaders do believe in the survivability — or winnability — of a nuclear war, the United States is faced with a major problem for strategic policy. And Mr. Ehrlich’s analysis of this problem deserves more prominence in, his book than he gives it.

Among many other issues that Mr. Ehrlich sheds light on, two are of particular current interest, antiballistic missile defense (ABM) and civil defense. One of his views on ballistic missile defense may surprise some pundits: “It would make little sense’ the author argues, “to build an expensive and exotic ABM system of uncertain feasibility without first investing in a much cheaper civil defense system. Such a course of action would be akin to installing an expensive photovoltaic solar-energy collection system n your roof and not bothering first to add insulation in your ceiling -- a much more cost-effective measure.”

This approach is unusually relevant, since the Reagan administration has cut the civil defense budget for fiscal 1986 from $181 million to $119.1 million. There appears to be a trend in administration thinking toward putting all of its eggs in the Strategic Defense Initiative basket -- a prospect that chills arms-control advocates as well as civil defense professionals.

While acknowledging the arguments of Physicians for Social Responsibility and other groups that there may be “insurmountable obstacles” to surviving nuclear war, including long-term climatic damage and the destruction of our national infrastructure, Mr. Ehrlich remains firm in his support for population-protection measures. At the conclusion of his discussion of the effectiveness of civil defense, he writes:

“While there are major obstacles to survival following a nuclear war, it is by no means clear that these obstacles are insurmountable. In the nuclear age the goal of preventing nuclear war must, of course, take priority over surviving one. Nevertheless, because a nuclear war could occur despite our best efforts at prevention, prudence requires that some attention be devoted to the problem of survival.”

The book is rich in its exposition of the myriad issues that students, citizens, and policymakers must face in the crowded debate over nuclear weapons policy. It is well- structured, with divisions into four topical sections: “Introduction to the issues,” “Nuclear Arms and Nuclear War,” “The Effects of Nuclear War” and “Policy Options and Objectives.”

These are further divided into chapters with headings such as “Public Opinion and the Media,” “Long-Term Worldwide Effects of a Nuclear War,” and “Arms Control and Disarmament.” Two appendixes address “The Physical Principles of Nuclear Energy and Radiation” and “Survival After Nuclear War.” Each chapter and appendix is followed by study questions to help instructors conduct class discussions or to devise midterm and final essay questions.

The fact that this book is designed for classroom use should not deter readers who are past the age of worrying about term papers, grades, and spring break in Florida. Waging Nuclear Peace is an important contribution to the catalog of nuclear-strategy books.

Richard E. Sincere Jr. is vice president of the American Civil Defense Association.