It was the start of the postwar peak for the Institute of International Studies when Bill Kaufmann returned to graduate school. Besides Ted Dunn and Arnold Wolfers and Percy Corbett, there were also the Chicago émigrés—Klaus Knorr, William T. R. Fox, Gabriel Almond, Jacob Viner on occasion, and especially Bernard Brodie. Brodie was already attracting attention as one of the few civilians to think about the strategic implications of the atom bomb in a sophisticated way. And it was under the influence of Brodie, who became friend and mentor, that Kaufmann grew serious about the study of international relations and national-security problems. His perspective became the same as Brodie’s—the Chicago/Yale School of International Realism, with its focus on the causes of war, the inevitable failure of all peace plans that rely on dreams of world government, the essential role that power plays in all political systems, and the peculiar twist that the existence of the atomic bomb, “the absolute weapon,” puts on all these maxims.
In 1949, a group of six Institute professors, including Bernard Brodie and Kaufmann, was hired by the social science division of the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica to do part-time work analyzing psychological warfare. At Yale’s Sterling Library, Kaufmann had one day run across a set of the Nuremberg war-crimes hearings and read them with fascination. He grew particularly intrigued with what the transcripts revealed about the Barbarossa campaign, Nazi Germany’s massive June 22, 1941, invasion of Russia that took Stalin so much by surprise. Kaufmann’s contribution to the Yale group’s RAND work was a case study on Barbarossa.
Kaufmann’s paper was one of the few admired by Hans Speier, director of RAND’s social science division, and Speier asked him to come spend the summer of 1951 in Santa Monica as a consultant. At the end of the summer, Speier offered Kaufmann a full-time job. Kaufmann was about to take it, but was talked out of the idea by Ted Dunn, director of the Institute of International Studies. The Institute had just left Yale the previous April—owing to disagreements between Dunn and Yale’s new president, Whitney Griswold—and was now taking up a new residence at Princeton under the new name of the Center of International Studies. Bernard Brodie had already taken off, first to the Air Force Staff on leave, then to RAND for good; if Kaufmann left too, it could mean the beginning of the Institute’s ultimate splitting up. Out of loyalty to Ted Dunn, Kaufmann stayed.
At Princeton, besides teaching history and associating with his fellow Yale refugees, Kaufmann began to elaborate on the work that he had started at RAND. His research on the Nazis’ Barbarossa plan led him to formulate general propositions on the various ways in which nations respond to military threats and the specific circumstances under which they tend to respond. From this approach, he began to rethink the basic question that he had picked up from Bernard Brodie at Yale: how does one deter an enemy from aggression in an age when both sides would have plenty of atomic bombs?
Kaufmann toiled with the dilemma off and on through the early 1950s, and then in January 1954 came the massive-retaliation speech by John Foster Dulles. Because that speech so comprehensively summarized a strategy that almost blithely relied on nuclear weapons to deter aggression—and, therefore, utterly neglected the dilemmas of the atomic age that Bernard Brodie and Bill Kaufmann had pondered—Kaufmann considered it the ideal foil to attack, the perfect vehicle through which he could clarify and express his own thinking.
In The Absolute Weapon, Brodie’s seminal work of eight years earlier, Kaufmann’s mentor had concluded that nuclear war could be deterred by the threat to “retaliate in kind” in the event of direct attack on the United States. Now, when both the U.S. and the Soviet Union were acquiring a formidable arsenal of atomic—and soon thermonuclear—weapons, Kaufmann saw, in a twist on Brodie’s reasoning, that if Soviet aggression in, say, Asia provoked the United States to retaliate massively against Soviet territory with our full atomic arsenal, then the Soviets would almost certainly launch an atomic volley of their own right back against the United States. “As a consequence of these developments,” Kaufmann would write, “it may no longer be desirable to treat nuclear weapons as adjuncts to conventional military power; nor may it be possible for us to consider using them without anticipating retaliation in kind.”
A policy of deterrence, Kaufmann recognized, inevitably carried a potentially costly risk—“that, despite our best efforts, the antagonist will challenge us to make good on our threat. If we do so, we will have to accept the consequences of executing our threatened action. If we back down and let the challenge go unheeded, we will suffer losses of prestige, we will decrease our capacity for instituting effective deterrence policies in the future, and we will encourage the opponent to take further actions of a detrimental character.” If the threat is massive retaliation and if deterrence for some reason fails, then the only way to avoid perilous humiliation is to go ahead and drop atom bombs; yet the Soviet Union can also massively retaliate in return. “In other words,” Kaufmann concluded, “we must face the fact that, if we are challenged to fulfill the threat of massive retaliation, we will be likely to suffer costs as great as those we inflict.” And that is unacceptable.
Kaufmann’s basic conclusion was identical to that reached two years earlier by Bernard Brodie when he and his RAND colleagues, Charlie Hitch and Ernie Plesset, examined the implications of the hydrogen bomb. Brodie had drawn insight from the nineteenth-century Prussian warrior-philosopher Karl von Clausewitz, who argued that war is violence but controlled violence in pursuit of some national objective. Brodie, realizing that “national objectives cannot be consonant with national suicide,” thus concluded that “there is no use talking about a mutual exchange of nuclear weapons,” especially in the age of the H-bomb, “as being anything other than national suicide.” Brodie had spelled out these basic thoughts publicly in the January 1954 issue of Foreign Affairs, which Kaufmann must have read.
From that general observation, however, Kaufmann branched off into a series of arguments and conclusions quite different from Brodie’s. In 1951, while working for General Hoyt Vandenberg on the Air Staff, and in 1952, in connection with the H-bomb project at RAND—and, though much less explicitly, in the 1954 Foreign Affairs article, entitled “Nuclear Weapons: Strategic or Tactical?”—Brodie had found a solution to the dilemma in the controlled use of nuclear weapons on the battlefield. Brodie did not embrace this idea with joy or enthusiasm, but he felt—in the early 1950s anyway—that it was the only alternative, given the Soviet Union’s putative superiority in manpower and conventional arms.
Kaufmann, on the other hand, thought it was unwise and dangerous, except under the most extraordinary of threats to America’s security, to use nuclear weapons at all. If the Soviets outnumbered us on the ground, then that meant only that the United States, even if at great expense, had to build up a vastly strengthened conventionally armed military force. The essential aspect of deterrence is that the threat be credible, to the enemy and to ourselves. An examination of American foreign policy over the years would suggest that “it is quite out of character for us to retaliate massively against anyone except in the face of provocations as extreme as Pearl Harbor.” In a democratic country especially, the potential costs of an interventionist policy “must seem worth incurring.” In short, “there must be some relationship between the value of the objective sought and the costs involved in its attainment. A policy of deterrence which does not fulfill this requirement is likely to result only in deterring the deterrer.” Especially as more becomes known about the effects of nuclear weapons, Kaufmann observed, “we must immediately face the prospect that the leaders of the Soviet Union and Red China would hardly endow… a doctrine [of massive retaliation] with much credibility.”