With the decline in importance of the Fellows' program in the early '60's, the significance of the Center's scholarly activity shifted to the field of arms control. The major specialists in this field were Schelling and Morton H. Halperin, a close associate of Henry A. Kissinger (also on the Center staff) who joined Kissinger and the Nixon administration as a part-time consultant to the National Security Council in 1969. Their major contribution to arms control theory was the incorporation of diplomatic strategy as a factor in non-proliferation. Here again, however, their work was inevitably undertaken within the context and limitation of American arms policy.
In Schelling's judgment, the arms control work at the Center in theearly '60's had several positive effects on government policy:
the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) defense system might have been developed years ago "except that something got into Secretary McNamara." That something, he said, was that CFIA associates had made contact with several key people working under him;
at the prodding of the Center, Walt Rostow and Henry Rowen persuaded the American negotiator at Geneva, Llewelyn Thompson, to propose the "hot line" to the Russian delegate; the proposal was accepted ("Neither is known as being a dove," Schelling said of Rostow and Rowen, "but both were very strong for arms arrangements with the Russians. I would guess Rowen did more to keep nuclear weapons out of Western Europe than anyone you can name.");
a series of seminars including Rostow, Bowie, and Carl Kaysen (deputy to Bundy in the Kennedy administration, now director of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton and often mentioned as a candidate for Harvard's presidency), which studied ways to "rationalize arms control within the nation's security policy (italics supplied)."
But how did these policies, which on their surface undermine the possibility of a massive American arms buildup, actually serve America's "defense"? The answer lay not so much in the strategy as in the conditions under which the strategy could be applied.
BY FAR the most relevant policy tool which the Kennedy government inherited from the Cold Warriors was the doctrine of preventive warfare. This doctrine, in turn, was conceived with the psychological potentialities of the atomic bomb fully in mind. To repeat an important point, there is growing evidence that the decision to use the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was made within the framework of the Potsdam negotiations, not the then-foreseeable Japanese capitulation.
There followed a time, during the fanatical period of the early '50's, when Americans believed the most effective use of the bomb lay in increasing the physical stock of atomic weapons. By the end of the '50's, however, this policy was rejected in place of the older political approach; the stockpiling had reached frightening proportions on both sides, and far exceeded the amount necessary for total annihilation.
This fear was part of the rationale for also seeking to prevent other nations from becoming nuclear powers; but behind that rationale was the more basic theorem that the possession of atomic weapons, even in their nonuse, was an incalculable political asset. In a proliferating world community, the U. S. and the Soviet Union would have grown progressively less powerful and influential; but if nuclear weapons could be kept out of everyone else's hands, the two would continue to flourish. The new application of the balance of power concept was indeed conceived, as Schelling pointed out, in terms of a mutual U. S. -Soviet interest.
What is more, the new arms control policy did not apply to conventional warfare, through which the atomic powers could enforce their will on non-nuclear nations by virtue of their prior nuclear monopoly. In a study undertaken at the bidding of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1965, Halperin applied this doctrine to the Chinese Communists. The Chinese, he writes,
... have been and remain committed to the use of force and the threat of force as a major instrument of foreign policy. This will require the United States to engage repeatedly in a test of will and nerve with the Chinese Communists in which an important component will be the need to communicate restraint combined with an indication of what the United States is prepared to do in the event of Chinese expansion of a local conflict in a way that seems detrimental to American interest.
An arms agreement inhibiting Chinese nuclear development would be desirable, he added, but
If the West is able successfully to launch guerrilla actions and to promote counter-insurgency measures, there is a real question as to whether arms control agreements inhibiting insurgency would be in Western interests.
It does not take much imagination to guess where such a doctrine might have led policy planners in the early days of Johnson's Vietnam escalation, and whether or not it was the author's conscious intent to encourage land war in Indochina, his research on the subject raises the most crucial possible question about the work of the Center: What is its objective role within the context of American policy?