(8 of 10)
The distinctions are to some extent academic. Each side can now substantially destroy the other even without striking the first blow, and marginal changes in either quantity or quality of weapons will not change that fact. Hence a rough balance exists. Both sides are also spending heavily. However, proportional to gross national product, the military burden weighs less on the U.S. than on Russia. Mutual escalation could only end in a new balance at a higher and more expensive level.
Kissinger has a long record of pronouncements on nuclear issues; it was in this field that he first made his name. Yet his work has at times been open to varying interpretations. In his first major book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, he said that limited nuclear war was containable and therefore conceivable. He later backed away from that theory; yet for a time colleagues mirthfully referred to him as "Dr. Strangelove, East" (Physicist Edward Teller held the Western title). But his main argument, which eventually became U.S. policy, was that the old massive-retaliation approach of the middle-'50s was irrational because it offered no real alternative between surrender and wholesale annihilation: "It does not make sense to threaten suicide in order to prevent eventual death." John Foster Dulles' policies in general seemed "onedimensional" to Kissinger.
A Legitimate Order
In the first book, and in The Necessity for Choice (1960), he seemed to be highly skeptical of the chance for successful negotiations with the Russians and of U.S. capacity to bargain with a power that viewed the world so differently. "To us," he wrote, "a treaty has a legal and not only a utilitarian significance, a moral and not only a practical force. In the Soviet view, a concession is merely a phase in a continuing struggle." He also has doubts about the notion that as Russia evolves into a more liberal society, it will necessarily be more tractable. "In some respects," he said recently, "it was easier to deal with Stalin than with this timid, mediocre leadership that lets crises develop and has missiles."
Particular decisions to arm or disarm, to talk or to remain silent, must, in his view, be keyed to current opportunities rather than past failures. What remains constant is his concern with the fundamental uses of strength. The U.S. has not quite grasped an axiom that European statesmen had long ago mastered: peace is not a universal realization of one nation's desires, but a general acceptance of a concept of an "international order." It may chafe all concerned, but irritation is acceptable if no one's survival is threatened. In his history of the post-Napoleonic period, A World Restored, and in writing of the later fusion of German states, Kissinger displayed admiration for Metternich of Austria, Castlereagh of Britain and Bismarck of Prussia.