A Hearing for the Hawk : MINDS AT WAR Nuclear Reality and the Inner Conflicts of Defense Policymakers <i> by Steven Kull (Basic Books: $19.95; 341 pp.)</i>

The difficult challenges of the nuclear age have created deep divisions in America over how to protect our country. Hawks attack doves as naive and weak and are attacked in turn for playing macho games that could destroy the planet.

Steven Kull has set out to bridge this gulf of mutual recrimination. In large measure, he has succeeded. Through a number of interviews, conducted with considerable intelligence and sensitivity, the author--a dove--has explored the thinking of hawkish nuclear policymakers. The result is a book that will teach hawks as well as doves a great deal. Kull himself, however, remaining too attached to his dovish preconceptions, has not learned all that his respondents had to teach him.

Kull identifies two streams in contemporary military thinking. One, which he calls the “adaptive” stream, recognizes that nuclear weapons have wrought a profound change in the military relations between states. The other, the “traditional” stream, “resists the notion that the condition of mutual vulnerability implies a fundamental change in the way the United States relates to military force.”

To Kull, it is clear that the adaptive stream is “motivated by security interests.” As for the traditional stream, however, “it is harder to understand how some persisting traditional policies serve security”; and this is just the mystery that Kull, in this impressive book, tries to solve: Why do many intelligent and humane people, entrusted with our national defense, formulate policies as if the atomic bomb were just another weapon?

Do these policymakers simply not understand what Kull calls “nuclear reality”? No, he says: On one level at least, these people understand full well the ways that nuclear weapons cannot be used for self-protection like previous weapons. Yet, knowing this, they pretend not to know. With great lucidity, Kull discloses these “minds at war,” investigating the meaning of the persistent contradictions in their thinking.

One contradiction concerns their insistence on matching the Soviets at every level, even though they recognize that militarily there is such a thing as overkill.

Another contradiction involves the idea of winning a nuclear war. Even though, when pressed, Kull’s respondents often concede that victory in a nuclear exchange probably means nothing, they persist in making plans as if “advantageous termination” were possible.

In each case, Kull’s respondents “shifted back and forth between recognizing nuclear reality and supporting inconsistent policies with little apparent awareness of the inconsistency.”

Kull is certainly right that there is much irrationality in this. The theater of weaponry is sometimes used to enact dramas of self-reassurance unconnected with objective security needs. As one of the interviewees says, “Self-confidence comes from sources that are not wholly rational.” So our sense of security may require weapons that are objectively unnecessary.

Another respondent admits that merely saying that we would “not lose wasn’t strong enough” to make Americans feel a sense of competitive vigor. This contributed to policies for “prevailing” in a nuclear conflict. There is a strong temptation for military men to ignore nuclear reality: They don’t like these weapons, says one, “because they prevent us from getting on our horses and shroving our lances and charging the enemy.”

The Star Wars program seems particularly founded upon irration-ality, denying the reality of our vulnerability. “Somewhere in the American viscera,” a former Pentagon official tells Kull, “we don’t want to believe that some son-of-a-bitch on the other side can destroy us.”

But Kull oversimplifies when he assumes all these contradictory policies to be maladaptive. The problem lies in his holding too simple a view of the nuclear reality, and thus of what it takes to adapt to it.

Doves like to quote Einstein’s statement that nuclear weapons have changed “everything but our way of thinking.” But not everything has changed. Nations still confront each other, unprotected, in an anarchic system. Disputes are still resolved and vital interests still protected by the threat and use of raw power.

The new weapons and the old struggle are both part of nuclear reality. One may not adapt to the one and disregard the other. The absolute importance of preventing total war between the superpowers is unprecedented. But there can be dovish as well as hawkish fallacies on how to keep the peace.

What does it take to deter an adversary? This requires a psychological, not a purely logical, answer. Some doves talk of minimal deterrence, as if logic dictates that a certain number of warheads will deter attack. But for one adversary, one warhead might be enough, while another might attack in the face of a million.

Our warriors have had to adapt to a situation fraught with contradictions. The Cold War required them to deter aggression. Deterrence has required them to threaten credibly to use weapons whose only rational use is as a bluff. Paradoxically, reason can require us to appear prepared to do the unreasonable, for what is rational about a nation in its death throes pulling its foe down with it into the grave?

Acting “as if” we thought nuclear war could be won, the strategic community came to believe, “was necessary for our deterrent to attain its credibility.” There is strategic value, Kull was told, “in being perceived by the adversary as not fully grasping the significance of nuclear reality.” And conceivably, just pretending to believe what we know is not true may not be persuasive enough.

The “mind at war” reflects two sides of nuclear reality: We can’t use these weapons, and we have to appear not to know that. Thus, the contradictions to which Kull objects may be not a failure to adapt but a true adaptation to a reality fraught with paradox.

Kull is thoroughly familiar with these arguments. But, strangely, he never refutes or even confronts them. His own assumptions about adaptation to nuclear reality seem to go unquestioned. That “these policies reflect resistance to fully addressing nuclear war and its fundamental implication” he never doubts. But, if making credible an incredible threat has been necessary, can we be sure that policies dictated wholly by what Kull calls “adaptive” thinking would have kept us secure?

Of course, our cold warriors--in their fearfulness and bellicosity--may have exaggerated the requirements of a credible deterrent. I believe they have. But we are not justified in assuming, as Kull seems to, that the policies of traditionalists are dictated by motives in conflict with security.

True empathy between hawks and doves requires that we acknowledge that, with so much uncertainty and so much at stake, it has been extraordinarily difficult to know what posture would protect our security best.

The Cold War was surely dangerously maladaptive for humankind as a whole. But that does not prove that a more adaptive course was available to a single actor such as the United States.

Now, as the Soviet Union changes its posture, a deterrence based more on cooperation than threat may become possible. If American thinking on nuclear defense now becomes more “adaptive” and less “traditional,” this would not necessarily be, as Kull assumes, the recognition of an unchanging “nuclear reality.” Rather, the emergence of a new reality may allow better means of adaptation.