If you picked up a newspaper and read the screaming headline “Are We —- or Is Our Strategy — MAD?”, you would probably think you were reading a sensational tabloid. Would you believe — such a headline was recently splashed across the dignified NEW YORK TIMES?
The contents of the article were just as blunt. It came to grips with two life-and-death problems: the threat to the very survival of the United States from the tremendous buildup of Soviet military power, and whether U.S. national strategy for dealing with this threat might be totally wrong.
The NEW YORK TIMES, with respect if not outright endorsement, cites statements from the LONDON TIMES and LONDON ECONOMIST indicating that the Soviet Union will have “valid strategic superiority by the end of this year” and that the Kremlin leaders believe they could then destroy America without suffering unacceptable reprisals.
For the past 15 years, U.S. strategy has relied on the idea that the Soviets won’t attack us because they know we would retaliate and kill millions of Russians. This theory of deterrence was once accurately explained by Professor Henry Kissinger as the result of three factors: military strength, the will to use it, and the assessment of those factors by a potential aggressor. But please note: since deterrence is a product, not a sum, if any one of these factors is zero, deterrence fails.
The deterrence theory might have been true in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis when we had an 8-to-1 lead in nuclear power. But 14 years later, the strategic balance is reversed, and the theory is perilously obsolete.
Many experts believe that, because of Soviet bases in Cuba and our many cities with which we can be hit from Soviet submarines, the United States is at least ten times as vulnerable as the U.S.S.R. is today. Foy Kohler, our former Ambassador in Moscow, said it up like this: “Instead of a ‘balance of terror’ which equally restrains both sides, the ‘terror’ would be liability on the part of the United States.”
British and American experts now say that the Kremlin leaders believe they will this year have enough military superiority, combined with such elaborate civil defense, installations and preparations, that they will be able to destroy their enemies without suffering unacceptable retaliation. If this is true, deterrence has failed, our strategy is indeed mad, and so are the architects who devised it.
In the understatement of the century, the TIMES concludes: “Surely the American people have a right to be informed about the truth of the statements … so that they can debate whether it is necessary to revise our strategic assumptions. Mere national survival should he the paramount issue of this autumn election.”
It’s too bad we weren’t told this early in the year, before 19 presidential primaries, so that the electorate candidates would have all been forced to present their strategy for ‘dealing with this’ paramount issue. However, we still have two months left before the election, and it’s not too late to force policy committees, from the candidates who remain in the race, on the matter of building adequate anti-missile and civil defenses.
