Volume 8, Number 6 · April 6, 1967
Recent Fiction
By Ronald Steel
American Strategy: A New Perspective
by Urs Schwarz
Doubleday, 178 pp., $4.50
Escalation and the Nuclear Option
by Bernard Brodie
Princeton, 148 pp., $4.50
Arms and Influence
by Thomas C. Schelling
Yale, 293 pp., $7.50
On the Uses of Military Power in the Nuclear Age
by Klaus Knorr
Princeton, 185 pp., $5.00
If war is too serious to be left to the generals, is strategy safe in the hands of the strategists? Nobody, to be sure, knows more about such mysteries as 'deterrence,' 'options,' and 'escalation' than the coterie of intellectual technicians we call defense strategists. At a hundred universities and research institutes—from dingy laboratories in Manhattan to leafy retreats in Cambridge and Santa Monica—they plot the vectors of nuclear mishap and balance the threat of disaster against the opportunities of atomic diplomacy. They are the mentors to generals, the advisers to statesmen, the new elite of our global military establishment. Our reliance on them is exaggerated and seemingly inescapable, for when confronted with the awful complexity of the atom there seems nowhere else to turn but to the 'experts' for advice.
Review, 2888 words
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