The Best of All Possible Nuclear Worlds

The BeSt of All Possible Nuclear Worlds A Review Essay Michael Mandelbaum, The Nuclear Question: The IMcGeorge Bundy United States and Nuclear Weapons, 1946-1976, Cambridge, U.K., Cambridge University Press, 1979, 273 pp. G i v e or take a year or so, the history of nuclear weapons now stretches over four decades. Some would begin with the discovery of nuclear fission in Berlin by Hahn and Strassmann at the end of 1938, and hardly anyone could put the startingdate after the latter part of 1941, when the arguments of American enthusiasts for rapid development were made finally persuasive by the British MAUD Report. There is no year since then without its important contribution to an increasinglycomplex record. Of making many books there has been no end. Yet except for the admirable official historians and the writers of memoirs, most of those who have dealt with nuclear problems since 1945, as Michael Mandelbaum remarks in the preface to The Nuclear Question, have been concerned more with what is to be done than with what happened and why. In the middle of 1980, with SALT I1 delayed and major new deployments in prospect, the what-is-tobe -done problem has a new urgency, but I think Mandelbaum is quite right in believing that the historical record can help with that problem. In The Nuclear Question he has made a bold effort to draw lessons from the record. Some of his results are open to argument, but his book demonstrates plainly that he is working a rich vein. Perhaps he should not have described it as ”a history of nuclear weapons policy.” He is not primarily a historian. One cannot look to him for the exact month of the Soviet nuclear explosion of 1949 (he mistakes the U.S.announcement for the date) or the exact month of the Truman approval of NSC 68 the next year (he mistakes authorized circulation for approval.) Nor do his footnote references lead us to the most authoritative sources of the evidence he cites. Indeed the reader in search of NSC 68 would not easily find it from Mandelbaum’s referencesurely the right and authoritative source is Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950, Vol. 1, (pp. 234-292 for McGeorge Bundy is Professor of History at New York University. From 196166, Mr. Bundy semed as Special Assistant for National Security Aflairs under Presidents Kennedy and johnson. He was President of the Ford Foundation, 1966-1979. 172 Possible Nuclear Worlds I 173 NSC 68 of April 14, 1950, and p. 400 for the President’s eventual approval of its conclusions, on September 30). Such complaints may be little more than the proofs of pedantic virtue that I am led to offer as an apprentice historian myself. But only a little more. Properly considered-and perhaps its bulky apparatus of notes might have been streamlined accordingly-this is not a work of basic history, but an extended essay: a set of reflections on the development of American thinking about the problem of nuclear weapons. In Mandelbaum ’swords, the essay describesthe “evolution of the best of all possible nuclearworlds.” This descriptionof what has happened is refreshinglyhopeful , and it rewards attention. Prophets and the Nuclear World The theme is developed mainly in a contrapuntal assessment of the relation between two prophetic judgments made very early, and of the behavior of the Kennedy Administration. More than half the book, indeed, is devoted to the Kennedy years. Those of us who had a part in that administration should perhaps not be the first to complain about this allocation of space, but others will find its excessive, and with some reason. I am less hesitant in applaudingMandelbaum’schoiceof prophets: Bernard Brodie, on the strategic meaning of the weapon, and Henry L. Stimson, on its primary politicalimplication. MandelbaumcorrectlyidentifiesTheAbsolute Weapon, and in particular Brodie’s own essays in that volume, as the most important contribution of the immediate post-war period to thinking about the meaning of the bomb. Brodie understood and explained with authority why this was not just another weapon. Then he took two further steps: the bomb would not long be a monopoly, and it would not be easy to...