The Nuclear Future (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 259 applaud Kennan's efforts to define the United States' proper world role. Narrow in scope, these analyses have typically addressed specific policy-related aspects of Kennan's writings and over time have become increasingly redundant. In Contending with Kennan, Barton Gellman eschews this much-traveled route of analysis, aspiring instead to a more ambitious and novel goal: a broad, systematic discussion of Kennan's political thought. Having immersed himself in Kennan's life work—an impressive collection of lectures, books, articles, and private papers—Gellman constructs what he calls Kennan's philosophy of American power. This is no small task, considering Kennan's aversion to systematic expression. After a brief biographical sketch, Gellman examines Kennan's perspectives on five central themes: strategy and the national interest; morality in world affairs; democratic decision making; tactics and the tools of power; and the decline of the West. With lean, graceful prose, Gellman explores each theme, imposing a measure of theoretical coherence on Kennan's many works, and admirably portraying the subtlety and consistency of his views on American power. Gellman covers much terrain, though his brisk review of Kennan's ideas on the arms race and nuclear weapons leaves the reader feeling cheated. In his most combative moment, Gellman defends Kennan, taking on those—and there are many—who maintain that Kennan, since publishing the famous "X" article, has evolved from a "cold warrior" with militaristic conceptions of containment to a present-day pacifist with strong isolationist tendencies. Gellman marshals his evidence convincingly, arguing that Kennan's "X" article and perspectives on containment have been distorted by others for their own partisan purposes. A more critical reading of Kennan's writings in the late 1940s, Gellman contends, reveals that Kennan downplayed the military dimension of containment while favoring the doctrine's psychological and political elements— a balance of emphasis that Kennan has held to this day. Although at times Gellman seems to be in awe of Kennan's formidable intellect, he is not reluctant to challenge him. He chides Kennan for being evasive and vague in identifying America's national interests and purpose in world affairs, as well as for being overly pessimistic and unconstructive in predicting the decline and eventual fall of Western civilization. Like the rest of this slim volume, Gellman's criticism of Kennan is thoughtful and is elegantly presented. The Nuclear Future. By Michael Mandelbaum. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1983. Reviewed by John Garofano, M.A. candidate, SAIS. There is an inherent tension in the attempt to "enable the general reader to understand the ongoing debate about nuclear weapons" and to do so in a monograph that is both brief and balanced. The endeavor is successful in that Mandelbaum's skill at condensing the various sides of the arguments has produced a series of unclouded essays on the subject. Stimulating insights are offered on the dynamics and comparative structures of the antinuclear movements, and the various influences on the pace of nuclear proliferation are explained in a delicate manner. 260 SAIS REVIEW But some of the expansive issues that Mandelbaum tries to clarify simply do not lend themselves to compressed exposition. His discussion of the political doctrines that govern the weapons systems of the superpowers is one such treatment that appears to have been pruned to fit the format of the book. The significance of the concepts of escalation dominance and limited nuclear war are not duly critiqued; the author concentrates on the terrible costs of any nuclear exchange—of which the general is probably conscious—rather than the likelihood of "phenomenal" escalation, and so he concludes that the risk of nuclear war will cause the superpowers to act cautiously enough to avoid it at least until the turn of the century. The potency of military doctrines and leader's acceptance or rejection of them have no place in this work, nor is there any mention of significant structural trends such as the progressive integration of intelligence with warning systems and launch strategies. Thus Mandelbaum's message that the nuclear future will, as in the past, follow a middle road between destruction and disarmament, follows from his estimation that the arms race, nuclear...