Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Two Sagas of the Cold War
Having finished listening to an audible book of The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan and the History of the Cold War, by Nicholas Thompson, I have begun A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon, by Neil Sheehan. The first book traces the lives of two policy "wonks" who agreed that the United States needed to counter aggressive Russian intentions after World War II, but differed on how to do it. They both influenced the formation of U.S. policy. Kennan would have emphasized political containment while Nitze was for more and more nukes. Sheehan begins by saying that both seriously misinterpreted Russian intentions, which were defensive rather than aggressive in nature, before presenting a history of the arms race and its consequences, focusing on the doers rather than the thinkers. How do we think about this contrast in interpretations? Does it contain anything useful for thinking about the multi-polar nuclear world we now inhabit? Has anybody else read one or the other of these books and can comment? Or comment from knowledge of the era's history?
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J. Peter Scoblic's review of Sheehan in The New Republic Dec 2 edition labelled it "an obsessive and melodramatic tale of gadgets and gadgeteers" .. "without an explanation of why the talent mattered."
ReplyDeleteSome factors that affect national action on arms policy:
Complex policy has too few politically useful sound bites;
The military does not defend against an opponent's intentions, but against his capability;
More weapons is always easier to explain to the voters than fewer;
Arms merchants have strong vested interest in building more and better of anything;
America sees itself as the alpha dog that admits of no superior.
Scoblic's critique reiterates "doers" vs. "thinkers." The book is a story of bureaucratic politics in the Air Force, given that the civilian policy makers had determined that the U.S. would follow a policy of military containment of the Soviet Union. For veterans of any large bureaucracy, the plots are familiar but the stakes are larger.
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