Too Little, Way Late, Mr. Kissinger

Posted by Alexander Zaitchik at 4:12 PM on January 5, 2007.

In 1958, Harvard Professor Henry Kissinger published Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. The book argued that people should relax about the use of those newfangled hydrogen bombs, which didn't necessarily spell doom for humanity, let alone vast continental powers like the United States and the Soviet Union. Because manageable, limited nuclear war was possible, the nuclear option should be kept on the table during crises, argued Herr Professor. In certain cases, the nuclear option was preferable to a prolonged conventional war.

As in, say, the latter stages of the Vietnam War. Nixon and Kissinger famously and seriously contemplated using nukes against North Vietnam; "madman theory" hype aside, they really did think about it.

But there was the same Henry Kissinger -- who, together with Edward Teller, was one of the inspirations for Dr. Strangelove -- arguing in the Wall Street Journal yesterday for the abolition of nuclear weapons. The essay -- entitled "A World Free of Nuclear Weapons" and co-authored with George Shultz, William Perry and Sam Nunn -- lays out a commonsense and urgent plan for American leadership to stop and reverse proliferation, with the ultimate goal of complete abolition. Fifty years after writing a sanguine book about thermonuclear charges being detonated over cities, Kissinger is worried that things have gotten out of hand.

Describing a post-Cold War world in which reliance on nuclear weapons for deterrence is "becoming increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective," Kissinger et. al. site Reagan's vision of a world without nukes and put forth a laundry list of steps to get us there. They are taken largely from the Ted Turner-funded Nuclear Threat Initiative, which Nunn co-chairs. The main elements include immediately reducing the size of nuclear arsenals, taking weapons off of hair-trigger alert, and halting the production of all weapons-grade fissile material. The last of these is arguably the lynchpin. To paraphrase Stalin: no material, no problem.

Kissinger's late conversion to abolitionism is not the first time a hawkish doyen of Cold War strategy has seen the nuclear light in his sunset years. Paul Nitze, author of the foundational Cold War document NSC-68, became a passionate crusader against nuclear weapons in his last years. Former Sec. of Defense Robert McNamara is another vocal proponent of abolition.

Nitze and McNamara had almost zero influence when they began penning their anti-nuclear op-eds in the 1990s. But Kissinger, if Bob Woodward is to be believed, still has the ear of George W. Bush. One wonders if the real Dr. Strangelove has taken a moment to admonish what is likely his last student on the folly of his nuclear ways.

It's possible, but I tend to doubt it.

Alexander Zaitchik is a journalist in Washington, D.C.