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When the Fighting Has to Stop: The Arguments About Escalation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2011
Extract
In a great many wars—perhaps in most wars since the Middle Ages—one or both of the belligerents could have done significantly more to fight his enemy but chose not to do so. Whether we want to call all these wars “limited,” or only those in which both sides hobbled their military effort, is perhaps a minor matter of terminology.
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- Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1967
References
1 He occasionally mentions some, e.g., level of violence versus geographic expansion (p. 68) and ceasing to use nuclear weapons versus repealing a declaration of war (p. 217).
2 Kahn distinguishes a geographic expansion adjacent to the local threater of conflict from an expansion into a more distant theater. For the latter, he coins a special term (“compound escalation”—a somewhat infelicitous label!), but says little about its interesting peculiarities.
3 Klein, Burton H., Germany's Economic Preparations for War (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), 201 and passim.Google Scholar
4 “More About Limited War,” World Politics, x (October 1957), 118Google Scholar.
5 A detailed discussion of the complexities and problems of a tactical nuclear defense for NATO can be found in Kaufmann, William W., “The Crisis in Military Affairs,” World Politics, x (July 1958), 579–603.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 Limited War in the Nuclear Age (New York 1963).Google Scholar
7 The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), chap. 8Google Scholar. For Schelling's most recent discussion of this idea, see his Arms and Influence (New Haven 1966), 105–16.Google Scholar
8 This feeling is evident, for instance, when he stresses the new technological possibilities for “specialized bombs” and recommends studies on the “small-scale, controlled use” of nuclear weapons (pp. 22–23).
9 Brodie makes it abundantly clear that he considers such aggression exceedingly unlikely and that he is addressing himself to a contingency postulated by others. One would have to read his book upside down to find that he is calling for “a giant, one-sided, American escalation, without provocation”—as Etzioni, Amitai did in the New York Times Book Review (October 30, 1966)Google Scholar. With a whole chapter on “the status quo as a standard,” Brodie conveys even to the most hurried polemicist that the hypothetical crisis, for which he recommends greater reliance on the threat of escalation, is a crisis with enormous Soviet provocation. How, then, did Etzioni justify his allegation that Brodie recommended escalationwithout provocation} By saying that “Mr. Brodie is unable to realize that it is a major provocation to decrease conventional forces and increase the reliance on nuclear weapons . . .” (ibid., November 27). That is, Etzioni first blames Brodie for recommending that we escalate while there is no provocation from the Russians; then he tries to smear over this untruth by blaming Brodie for recommending a “provocation” on our side!
10 Arms and Influence, 114.
11 “Controlling the Risks in Cuba,” Adelphi Papers, No. 17, Institute of Strategic Studies (London 1965), 15Google Scholar. The only time Bernard Brodie seems to agree with Secretary McNamara is when he quotes him as attributing Khrushchev's withdrawal in 1962 to our nuclear weapons (p. 52). But as the Wohlstetters point out, “this single encounter where the United States had both the capability to dominate in a conventional conflict and also to inflict overwhelming nuclear damage could not demonstrate . . . that conventional superiority will always have a major utility; still less could it show that it might be easily dispensed with” (p. 17).
12 The only public writings focusing on possible uses of strategic weapons short of a large-scale attack (or retaliation) are a couple of chapters in Kahn's present book and Knorr, Klaus and Read, Thornton, eds., Limited Strategic War (New York 1962)Google Scholar.