It would be helpful to hear the Presidential candidates’ thoughts—and Henry Kissinger’s—on engaging in a “small” nuclear conflict.PHOTOGRAPH BY AP
In the summer of 1957, Henry A. Kissinger, a Harvard faculty member, was featured in a front-page Times story that examined the idea that, with a new generation of smaller, more transportable atomic weapons, a “limited” or “little” nuclear war was not as outlandish as it sounded. Kissinger had just published a book called “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy,” which he then adapted, in the form of an article, for the quarterly Foreign Affairs; a year later, the young Kissinger—he was thirty-four years old then—appeared on “The Mike Wallace Interview,” and his long march to fame and influence had begun.
The notion of a small nuclear war was offered as an alternative to the policy of “massive retaliation” identified with John Foster Dulles, President Dwight Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, which held that an aggressor state risked an atomic barrage, language that in the thermonuclear age carried with it a suggestion of total annihilation. Kissinger was too clever to let himself be trapped by any thesis, even his own, and he couched his “strategic doctrine” in qualified, antiseptic language. “The tactics for limited nuclear war should be based on small, highly mobile, self-contained units, relying largely on air transport even within the combat zone,” he wrote. The right model for a limited nuclear war was, he said, naval strategy, “in which self-contained units with great firepower gradually gain the upper hand,” with the effect of keeping “the enemy constantly off balance.” In a triumph of understatement, he added that this “will require a radical break with our traditional notions of warfare and military organizations.”
That kind of thinking, framed with terms like “tactical” and “battlefield,” has never gone away. Sixty years later, in a sort of déjà vu, or perhaps déjà boom, the world’s major nuclear powers are developing what are being called “smaller, less destructive” nuclear arms. (Given that even the Hiroshima bomb destroyed everything within a one-mile radius, those terms are relative.) While President Obama, at the Nuclear Security Summit held in Washington, in April, warned that “ramping up new and more deadly and more effective systems” would mean a renewed escalation of the arms race, the United States, China, and Russia are about to spend many billions doing exactly that. One such deadly and effective system is the so-called hypersonic glide vehicle, which could deliver a nuclear warhead at a speed of seventeen thousand miles per hour. All this, reported in detail by the Times, signals a rebirth of interest in the whimsical, dangerous idea that a small nuclear war would be both possible and containable. To that, an alarmed skeptic might recall Eisenhower’s observation, made during one of several atomic-war scares, that “every war is going to astonish you in the way it occurred and in the way it is carried out.”
Just as the small-nuclear-war idea is still with us, so is Kissinger, who, after serving during the Vietnam era as national-security adviser and Secretary of State for Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, has gone on to personally counsel many politicians, including New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (in 2012 Kissinger urged him to run for President) and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who has said that she admires Kissinger and who, during the February Democratic debate, declared, with some satisfaction, that Kissinger admired her stewardship at State. Kissinger recently met with Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee, a meeting that must, on some level, have been fascinating. Trump, speaking Trumpanese, afterward said, “One of the biggest diplomats in the country, who is a friend of mine, you saw recently I actually met with him and it was all over the place, so you can figure it out.” He said that Kissinger told him, “ ‘Donald, I thought you were wrong in your approach. I thought it was too tough. But you know what? All of those countries are calling me and asking, What do we do, what do we do, how can we make him happy?’ ” Kissinger, through a spokesman, remembered it differently, saying, “On foreign policy, you identify many key problems,” and made no mention of any international cries for help.
Neither has said whether they talked about the Bomb. But then, nuclear issues have only rarely been mentioned in this year’s Presidential race, such as when Trump caused a stir by saying that it might be O.K. if Japan and Saudi Arabia got their own bombs, and that he would consider using them against the Islamic State. Clinton has said that Trump is “temperamentally unfit” for the Presidency, “dangerously incoherent,” and “not someone who should ever have the nuclear codes”—all reasonable assertions. At the same time, in 2007, when Obama, who was then a senator from Illinois and Clinton’s opponent in the Democratic primaries, declared that, in fighting terrorism in Pakistan and Afghanistan, nukes were “off the table,” Clinton responded with what the Washington Post described as an “implicit rebuke.” “Presidents since the Cold War have used nuclear deterrents to keep the peace, and I don’t believe any President should make blanket statements with the regard to use or non-use,” Clinton said.
Indeed, in a world with more than fifteen thousand nuclear weapons—more than four thousand deployed on warheads—nukes are never really off the table. Many years ago, Herman Kahn, a rand Corporation expert on thermonuclear war, liked to ask, “How many American dead would we accept as the cost of our retaliation?” He’d mulled that question with many Americans, he wrote (in “The Nature and Feasibility of War and Deterrence”), “and after about fifteen minutes of discussion their estimates of an acceptable price generally fall between ten and sixty million dead. Their temporary first reaction, incidentally, usually is that the United States would never be deterred from living up to its obligations by fear of a Soviet counterblow, an attitude that invariably disappears after some minutes of reflection.”
Seventy-one years after a relatively small nuclear device flattened Hiroshima, it would be helpful to hear the Presidential candidates address the concept of a small nuclear conflict and what they reckon would be an acceptable cost, for America or its enemies, in fighting in one. It would also be interesting to hear what Henry Kissinger might have to say.
Jeffrey Frank, a former senior editor of The New Yorker and the author of “Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage,” is working on a book about the Truman era.
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BY MARGARET TALBOT
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BY GEORGE SAUNDERS
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