Book Review Essay

"A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought." The words are Ronald Reagan's. While McGeorge Bundy, like many others, finds Reagan's thinking about nuclear weapons muddy and his administration's public presentation of nuclear reality disgraceful, this particular sentence is crystal clear. It echoes the conclusion of the only person ever to authorize a nuclear strike, Harry Truman: "Starting an atomic war is totally unthinkable for rational men."

These sentences reflect the central message of Bundy's magisterial history of decisions during mankind's half-century of living with atomic fire. The message is deceptively simple: since 1945 no nation has ever come close to using a nuclear weapon, not even the United States during what is now too often remembered as a golden age of nuclear monopoly, followed by a period of superiority.

From the start of the nuclear age, Bundy argues, any superpower crisis that involved the "scent of burning" also evoked the smell of nuclear danger, and so American and Soviet heads of government were impelled toward prudence. Confrontations thus turned on other factors: the dispute over Berlin on Khrushchev's appreciation that taking action beyond his nuclear bluster would only galvanize the NATO partners; the Cuban missile crisis on American conventional superiority.

The book reaffirms Bundy's credentials for writing on this momentous subject. In the first half, which covers the nuclear age through the Eisenhower Administration, his method is primarily historical, but he walks around and around his cases searching for how they might have turned out differently.

We have, for instance, Truman's testimony that the decision to drop the bomb on Japan was not a difficult one. Perhaps it was not for him, a newcomer to the atomic secret, preoccupied with finishing the job FDR had started. For the decision to have come out another way-a demonstration shot, a warning, or an invitation of neutral observers to New Mexico for the test-would have taken analyses that were not much at hand, arguments that were "iffy" and were not pressed hard. Ideas unthought of by advisers seldom spring from the heads of presidents, certainly not from Truman's, in his circumstances.

When Bundy turns to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations of which he was a central officer, his account is enriched by inside detail but not embroidered by self-justification. Throughout he is charitable to those with whom he disagrees, to a degree that underlines the sad shrillness of our recent public debates over nuclear issues. He does not shrink from admitting he still thinks he was right, but is also charmingly prepared to admit error. For instance, he regrets that the Kennedy Administration never made the case for civil defense; that by tiring so quickly of the swim against popular distaste for the idea it let what should have been simple prudence become identified as the craziness of those who were prepared to fight a nuclear war.

In discussing more recent administrations, Bundy cannot rely on the perspective of history or personal participation. As are many, he is hard put to fathom the Reagan White House, with its kindly board chairman as president. But he does have good sense, even about his own previously held views. In the conclusion he recants, without quite saying so, his earlier advocacy of a NATO pledge not to use nuclear weapons first. A retraction is not really needed, because the earlier advocacy now seems an effort to move debate at a point since passed. Yet Bundy acknowledges the liabilities of such a "made in America" solution, which deeply divided the Europeans it was intended to reassure.

His prose is compressed but clear and graceful. His insights about the behavior of officials in high office have the authority of one who knows whereof he speaks-for instance, he writes of FDR: "As presidents will, he talked more and listened less as he grew older." If Bundy's walks around his cases occasionally become tiring-in revisiting the Cuban missile crisis, for example-his observations are still wise and careful. So, too, if Bundy occasionally betrays an old Harvard dean's temptation to whittle the meaning of a sentence too finely with one too many negatives, the effect is to compel a pause for reflection.

The book is clear about what nuclear weapons have not done-unused, their threat has not determined the course of international crises-but it cannot be so clear about what they have done. With the exception of Israel, all the nations that built nuclear weapons after the United States did so less for immediate reasons of national security than for broader urgings of national identity. To paraphrase de Gaulle, if other nations had nuclear weapons, France could not be France without them. And while the good general would not have said it, possessing the bomb must have seemed all the more imperative because Britain had it, and all the more attractive because Germany did not.

None of the states that now have these weapons show signs of resigning from the nuclear club, even though Bundy is surely correct in saying that none have seen their international positions appreciably strengthened by their nuclear status. Indeed, only France under de Gaulle spoke as though it expected nuclear grandeur to translate into diplomatic leverage. Yet the symbol of national autonomy persists. The symbol is, to put it mildly, unattractive to non-nuclear allies, and so France falls back on telling West Germans that they ought to be comforted by French weapons, never mind precisely why.