From Nuclear Military Strategy to a World Without War: A History and a Proposal

Sooner or later, if the world keeps following its current course, there will be a nuclear war. Roger Hilsman, who played a significant role during the Cuban Missile Crisis, is convinced that the only way to prevent an eventual nuclear conflict is to abolish war itself. This study examines and critiques all of the various proposals to date for incorporating nuclear weapons into strategic doctrine and concludes that these efforts have failed. Plans for abolishing only nuclear weapons are, according to Hilsman, good-intentioned but ill-advised attempts to rehabilitate war. Instead, he proposes a gradual transition to world government, which will perform the traditional social and political functions that were in the past served only by war. War will not disappear immediately. The world must still be prepared to deal with three types of war: wars that have the potential for escalating to a nuclear World War III; wars that are self-confining; and civil wars that cry out for peacekeeping intervention on humanitarian grounds. While the United States will have to be responsible for dealing with potentially nuclear wars, an entirely new force structure will be necessary. Self-confining wars, such as Bosnia, pose a particular problem as far as world public opinion for intervention is concerned; this study proposes solutions to such dilemmas. Finally, because national forces are ill-suited to peacekeeping missions in countries ravaged by civil war, the UN must recruit and maintain an international force along the lines of the French Foreign Legion.

Table of Contents:
Preface The First Attempts at Nuclear Strategy The Manhattan Project and Early Strategic Thinking Nuclear Strategy and the Attack on Korea The New Look, Massive Retaliation, and Flexible Response The H-Bomb and the Balance of Terror The Debate on Nuclear Strategy The Cuban Missile Crisis: A Case Study of Nuclear Strategy The Crisis The Significance Post-Crisis Attempts at a Nuclear Strategy McNamara II, the Schlesinger Doctrine, and Star Wars No First Use, Counterforce,and MAD as a Strategy The Breakup of the Soviet Union and the Bush-Yeltsin Agreement The World Turned Upside Down Developments in Weapons The Members of the Nuclear Club and Their Arms Soviet, Chinese, and European Nuclear Strategy Armageddon: Six Scenarios of Nuclear War For Arms Control and Disarmament The History of Arms Control The Prospects Why War? The Social and Political Functions of War Nationalism A World Political Process without World Government? A Curious Creature Conclusions A Long-Term Solution, a Medium-Term Compromise, and a Short-Term Stopgap The Lessons of the "Small Wars" Since World War II Humanitarian and Peacekeeping Forces Conventional Forces for the Medium-Term Compromise Nuclear Forces for the Short-Term Stopgap Index

About the Author :
ROGER HILSMAN has been Professor of Government and International Politics at Columbia University since 1964. Before that he was President Kennedy's Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research, then Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs. He is author of more than a dozen books on world politics and military strategy, including The Cuban Missile Crisis: The Struggle over Policy (Praeger, 1996).