The Vietnam War Debate by Zimmer Louis B.;

Author:Zimmer, Louis B.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 862635
Publisher: Lexington Books

“To make all-out war seem an unattractive course”! The understatement is indeed baffling, and so is the perverse logic on which it is based. Could either limited nuclear war—let alone all-out nuclear war—ever be considered anything but horrendous and a calamity from which, in all likelihood, there could be no recovery? In a much-abbreviated version of Nuclear Weapons, Kissinger published, in 1958, a sixty-two page paperback in which he summarized the need for an increased military defense capability this way: “The willingness to engage in nuclear war, when necessary, is part of the price of our freedom.”21

Three years later, in a September 1961 Commentary article titled “Death in the Nuclear Age,” Morgenthau writes: “To defend freedom and civilization is absurd when to defend them amounts to destroying them. To die with honor is absurd if nobody is left to honor the dead.” What is Morgenthau’s answer to what he calls the possibility of “universal destruction,” which “signifies the simultaneous destruction of tens of millions of people, of whole families, generations, and societies, of all things they have inherited and created . . . their visible achievements, and therefore reducing the survivors to barbarism?” The only answer is through diplomacy. He writes: “As all-out war is tantamount to suicide, so successful diplomacy provides the only certain chance for survival.” He adds: “A nation which under present conditions is either unwilling or unable to take full advantage of the traditional methods of diplomacy condemns itself either to the slow death of attrition or the sudden death of atomic destruction.”22

The members of Kissinger’s study group who contributed to Kissinger’s Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy included Hamilton Fish Armstrong and McGeorge Bundy. Listed as officers and directors of the Council were Armstrong, John J. McCloy, David Rockefeller, and CIA Director Allen Dulles among others; a “committee on studies” included Armstrong, Gordon Dean, Chairman of the Council, Columbia University President Grayson Kirk, and Harvard historian William L. Langer, among others. Gordon Dean wrote the forward to Nuclear Weapons, which contains these words: “We believe that on this fast-shrinking globe our freedom is somehow bound up with the freedom of all people and particularly of those who have it today or are determined to have it some day.”23 Thus, here on the first page of this book, is the kind of abstract theorizing about an abstract freedom that has nothing to do with the problem of making foreign policy in the nuclear age or, for that matter, in any age.

The roster of participants and Council members among the Rockefeller Special Projects Study that led to Kissinger’s 1958 paperback titled Prospect for America: The Rockefeller Panel Reports included Nelson Rockefeller, Governor of New York, listed as Chairman of the panel; Henry Luce, editor-in-chief of Time, Life, and Fortune; Dean Rusk, then president of the Rockefeller Foundation; Gordon Dean, noted earlier and listed here as senior vice-president, “nuclear energy, General Dynamics Corporation”; Chester Bowles, former Ambassador to India; and Edward Teller, professor of physics at Berkeley and director of the University of California Radiation laboratories.

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