Deterrence, Disarmament and the Rocky Road Between

Abstract

UNTIL recently most of the books by disarmers said little about the dirty business of nuclear strategy and most strategists made only occasional references to the Utopia of disarmament. And so it also was with the actual policies—military vs. disarmament—of the nuclear nations. So long as this split persisted there was little chance of disarmament being seriously considered, and so long as the best military analysts considered nuclear weapons useful and even vital to Western defense—as a great many of them did—there was little hope for nuclear disarmament. But in the last few years this split between armers and disarmers has begun to be bridged by an increasing number of men who analyze from both perspectives at once, and by a shift in the consensus on the specific question of the usefulness of nuclear weapons— a shift largely reflecting the steady increase in Soviet nuclear power. These trends were given a considerable assist from these two excellent works by eminent Englishmen, both of whom assume that nuclear parity (and therefore, they believe, nuclear uselessness) is upon us, and both of whom are concerned with deterrence and disarmament, and how to get from one to the other.