Thermonuclear Thucydides : DANGER AND SURVIVAL Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years<i> by McGeorge Bundy (Random House: $24.95; 692 pp.; 0-394-52278-8) </i>

In “Danger and Survival,” McGeorge Bundy traces the history of decisions about nuclear weapons from 1941, when Franklin D. Roosevelt first ordered a serious effort to build an atomic bomb, down to 1988, when the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to limit intermediate-range missiles in Europe.

Bundy has extraordinary qualifications. He collaborated on a half-memoir, half-biography of Henry L. Stimson, the secretary of war partly responsible for building the bombs and deciding to use them against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the early 1950s, Bundy worked with J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who had managed the atomic bomb project, preparing advice on nuclear weapons for the new Eisenhower Administration. In the 1960s, he was assistant for National Security Affairs for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Afterward, he became president of the Ford Foundation. Since 1979, he has been professor of history at New York University.

“Danger and Survival” is both a history and a memoir. Often it manages to be both at the same time. When writing about events not in his own experience, Bundy sometimes inserts first-person comments. When writing about events he observed, he relies at least as much on documents and findings by other historians as on his own memory.

Throughout the book, Bundy’s technique is to reconstruct actual decisions and then to speculate about how they might have gone otherwise. His special experience enables him to speculate with a degree of confidence and success not given to ordinary historians. For example, he argues persuasively that in 1950 a President more subtle and sophisticated than Harry Truman might have decided not to proceed with a hydrogen bomb. A committee headed by Oppenheimer had recommended against proceeding. “These opinions never attracted Truman’s attention,” Bundy writes. “They might have attracted another man’s. My own view is that the chances would have been much better with Roosevelt or Eisenhower or Kennedy . . . .”

Bundy is not uniformly critical of Truman or, indeed, of almost anyone. The astringent cleverness of Bundy the conversationalist is only occasionally apparent in Bundy the historian. It occurs chiefly when he refers to champions of American nuclear superiority such as Paul Nitze and Eugene Rostow, or to his former Harvard colleague and later White House successor, Henry Kissinger.

Regarding agitation of the late 1970s for larger and more accurate American missiles, for example, Bundy writes: “The most eloquent prophet of peril may have been Henry Kissinger, who argued that long years of neglect--here he generously included his own time in office-- . . . had produced a situation in which the Soviet Union was bound to have a general strategic superiority in the years just ahead . . . Kissinger surprised many who had heard him make very different arguments while in office, and his explanations of his change of mind raised questions, but they need not detain us because what matters here is simply that when he predicted the same years of maximum danger as Nitze and Rostow, he joined them in getting it wrong.”

The argument running through The argument running through The argument running through The argument running through “Danger and Survival” is that “nuclear danger” has powerful deterrent effects quite independent of the size or makeup of nuclear arsenals. Bundy finds no evidence that a threat to use nuclear weapons ever produced a useful result. Against the claim that a nuclear threat caused the Chinese to agree to a truce in Korea, for example, Bundy argues in persuasive detail that the Chinese decision came before the threat, not after, and was mostly to be explained by the death of Stalin. On the basis of both research and observation, he feels sure that fear of nuclear war deterred Eisenhower and Kennedy from adventurousness in the Berlin crises and in the Cuban missile crisis even though they knew that the United States had overwhelming nuclear superiority.

Elegantly written and powerfully argued, “Danger and Survival” is in most respects a wonderful book. It does, however, have one weakness. Whatever the period of whatever the capital--Washington, Moscow, London, or Paris--Bundy writes only about the type of decision-making he knows at first-hand. Heads of government make choices after consulting in near privacy with their principal diplomatic and military advisers.

This focus causes Bundy only fitfully to take account of legislators, journalists, or ordinary citizens. Through most of the book, he seems to take congressional and public opinion as something Presidents can manage. He seldom pauses to pursue the question of what might have happened or might happen if this were not true. This contributes to his impatience with Nitze, Rostow, and others who argue that the nuclear balance matters in part because people believe it matters. Bundy’s counter-factual history does not extend to scenarios in which Presidents make decisions in face of majorities in Congress and the country convinced of American nuclear inferiority.

This comment is not intended as a challenge to Bundy’s general thesis. It is only to make the point that “Danger and Survival” is about high-level policy-making. It is not about politics. For that, it needs complementation from works such as Strobe Talbott’s recent study of Nitze, “The Master of the Game.”

But I cannot conclude on a note of criticism. Few books successfully combine careful historical reconstruction with wise, experienced commentary. Thucydides’ “History of the Peloponnesian Wars” is one. “Danger and Survival” is another; everyone ought to read it.

“Kissinger . . . was disposed to believe that nuclear advantage would translate into usable political pressure; the ‘weaker’ side would find it prudent to give in to the ‘stronger.’ But Eisenhower believed that no marginal advantage would translate the shared catastrophe into victory for anyone; he also believed the Soviet leaders understood this too--this was the shared understanding that had been registered at Geneva in 1955--so he thought any threat could safely be treated as a bluff. Just as Eisenhower understood the operational uncertainties that Khrushchev must face . . . , so he understood the cautious realism that pervaded the Kremlin and that Kissinger neglected when he talked of blackmail. But again, Eisenhower did not adequately explain himself. His failure to give a full explanation of his disbelief in a prospective missile gap was reinforced in its unfortunate effects not only by his failure to spell out publicly his view of the deterrent strength of the forces on both sides, but also by his failure to press on his countrymen the understanding he had expressed so clearly back in 1954, that in matters of this magnitude Soviet leaders would predictably be most cautious. So while he did sensible things and resisted foolish ones, he allowed the ensuing public argument to be led by men who did not understand matters as well as he did.”

From “Danger and Survival.”