A Scholarly Look at War by Ex-Aide to Presidents

Dressed in a blue-and-brown plaid jacket and preppie cordovan loafers, McGeorge Bundy hardly seems to have emerged from a war room, even a hypothetical one. Not only that, the former adviser to Presidents comes across as an even-tempered, pleasant man who wears his past of controversy and involvement in global confrontation easily. He even jokes that he seldom thinks about the past because he has been contemplating the dangers of his 70th birthday in March, when he might “turn senile.”

Yet this particular afternoon, Bundy has just wound up a war game at Rand Corp. in Santa Monica, working out with other experts the possible consequences of a clash between Libya and Egypt--such as whether the United States and the Soviet Union might be drawn into the regional conflict.

Balance of Terror

The open-ended game centered on the fate of nations--and perhaps the world--is one example of Bundy’s intellectual diet for much of the last 10 years. Since 1979, the former national security adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson has plumbed the minds of those who think about the unthinkable--the heads of government and other officials who created and have maintained the nuclear balance of terror for the last half century. The result is a 600-plus-page book--”Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years,” published by Random House.

His choice of subject did not weigh heavily on him, Bundy said. “Once you decide the subject is important and that it’s worth doing, it’s like any other task of research,” he said.

However, Bundy was not glibly shrugging off the megatonnage of his topic. He is an optimist, believing that the chances of nuclear war have grown smaller with the passage of each decade since World War II, despite such periods of high tension as the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which he knows as an insider of the Kennedy White House.

Nuclear War Risk Small

During that crisis, he believes the risk of nuclear war--while greater than at any time before or since--actually was fairly small because both Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev were painfully aware of the consequences of a nuclear exchange. (A recent conference in Moscow on the missile crisis did not fundamentally change his view of that event, even though it revealed a marked numerical inferiority in Soviet strategic missiles, Bundy said in a follow-up telephone interview.)

Perhaps more surprising, Bundy believes that it is possible to step off the nuclear brink--and step back up again. In a short section at the end of “Danger and Survival,” Bundy speculates on “the neglected proposition . . . that if ever a nuclear war begins, no matter how or by whose choice, the ending of that war will become an enormously important objective for both sides.”

Although Bundy included the passage as “kind of an afterthought,” it has provoked comment from readers, he said, because the horrifying topic usually is considered only in novels--not as a matter of policy, no matter how theoretical.

Among other things, Bundy argues that a relatively small nuclear attack by an enemy should be met by a smaller response from the attacked nation. The smaller response would be enough “to demonstrate the urgency of an immediate cease-fire, and such an immediate cease-fire--no matter who had gained or lost what before the nuclear exchange began--is the best available next step for both sides,” he writes.

Elaborating, Bundy said, “The assumption that everybody would reach for a full-scale war plan (following a limited exchange of nuclear weapons) is in doubt.”

Part of Bundy’s thinking about nuclear history hinges on his assessment that the threat of nuclear war has been a constantly powerful deterrent, even though one country or another may seem to have a “first strike” capability from time to time.

In fact, Bundy says, so-called “missile gaps” and other alarms of the Cold War represent a dangerous mind-set. “The notion that you can think about bombs the way you think about battleships is disturbing,” he said.

“Danger and Survival” covers the early history of development of the nuclear bomb, the decision to use the weapon on Japan during World War II and then expands in scope to detail the political thinking and actions of the two superpowers, as well as other members of the nuclear club, up to the late 1980s. The book pays particular attention to how Presidents make choices about nuclear policy and during crises.

Although he has been at the heart of history-making, Bundy said his experience is minor compared with the pressures on a President.

Presidential responsibility on nuclear matters “feels very serious,” he said. “They all, I think, get it very clear in their heads that while this is not the most likely choice they’ll have to make, it is the most important one.”

“Danger and Survival” has been greeted with what seems to be unanimous praise, a marked turnaround from the days of the Vietnam War when Bundy was vilified by opponents of that conflict for his role in shaping U.S. policy. Moreover, Bundy said the book represents a return to his roots as a scholar, a calling that fell behind him when, in his early 30s, he became dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Harvard University. Later, in addition to serving in the White House, he was for 13 years president of the Ford Foundation. He is now a professor of history at New York University.

“By 1979 I had been in management for 25 years and I reached the conclusion that when I turned 60 I would quit the Ford Foundation” and immerse himself in a research project, Bundy said.