High Honor for High Service

Increasingly, American Presidents have reached outside government for innovation in defense strategy--particularly in the fields of nuclear deterrence and arms control. Thanks in major part to Roberta and Albert Wohlstetter and the late Bernard Brodie, Southern California defense analysts have had a major influence on U.S. policy for the past 35 years.

On Thursday President Reagan recognized the contributions of the Wohlstetters by awarding them the Medal of Freedom, the highest honor that the American government can give to a civilian.

The Los Angeles-based husband-and-wife team were key advisers to President John F. Kennedy during the 1962 missile crisis, and have been in the intellectual forefront of almost every major defense debate since the early 1950s.

Albert Wohlstetter, president of the European-American Institute for Security Research, long ago rejected arguments that the best way to prevent nuclear war is to threaten to blow up Soviet cities in retaliation for any Soviet attack, no matter how limited. He believes that deterrence is more likely to work if the United States has a more credible response, emphasizing the use of smaller nuclear weapons and sophisticated conventional weapons. The same logic has led him to support the concept of strategic defense systems--a factor that may have commended him to Reagan.

Roberta Wohlstetter is the award-winning author of a study on U.S. intelligence failures at the time of Pearl Harbor. Both husband and wife were pioneers in the movement to halt the spread of nuclear weapons in the Third World.

There are those who think that Albert Wohlstetter oversold the idea of U.S. vulnerability to a Soviet first strike, and who believe that his sympathy for strategic defense is misplaced. But nobody denies that for well over a quarter-century the Wohlstetters have been towering figures in a field in which nobody has a monopoly on truth or righteous intent.