THIS COULD HAVE BEEN A GOOD BOOK. It's nicely printed on high-quality paper, and written lucidly enough to prove that not all government professors have the literary sensibilities of a chimpanzee. Instead, Michael Mandelbaum, associate professor of Government, has given us a description of America's nuclear history that is worse than bad. It is dangerous.

The publisher describes The Nuclear Question as a "valuable book for anyone who wishes to understand better the nuclear issues of our time." Directed at the "general reader," the book looms threatening because Mandelbaum has written a history that reads like your sixth grade civics textbook. Like your sixth grade civics textbook, it consists of equal parts myth and omission.

Mandelbaum seems overawed by the basic stuff of his topic: the awesome and ever-increasing destructiveness of nuclear weapons--with some justification. But consequently Mandelbaum has treated all the actors as larger and simpler than life. The bomb death; the U.S. good; Clauswitz God.

Mandelbaum portrays his work as "the story of the evolution of the best of all possible nuclear worlds...." Mandelbaum says nuclear strategy to 961 evolved through a calm reasoned discussion by scientists, strategists, and even dispassionate top-echelon government personnel. And when Mandelbaum's United States faces nuclear challenges, it rises as a monolithic community combining unanimity on strategic questions with general agreement on foreign policy goals.

The picture that emerges from this peculiar understanding of the United States in the 40s and 50s is of a benignly disinterested country bent on furthering the interests of the world community. He writes:

No other nation embraced the tenets of liberal diplomacy with the enthusiasm of the United States...[But] liberal diplomacy ran counter to the deepest convictions of the Soviet leaders...The persistence at nuclear negotiations in the Eisenhower years, at least on the American side, was inspired by more than the hope of seizing an advantage in the conflict between East and West.

For Mandelbaum, the United States, whether demanding international control of nuclear arms, or bilateral restraint in their deployment, always acted from the purest of motives. And always the United States stands as an awesome benevolent entity facing the inscrutable and probably evil Soviet Bear. Mandelbaum sees American leadership as identical to America and thus assumes that their directions and motives reflect the unanimous sentiment of the American people.

And so, because nuclear strategy was developed by wise men in accordance with the wise and ancient principles of diplomacy and war, the real world does not intrude. Mandelbaum turns to Clauswitz, his hero, for a pigeonhole in which to sequester all the troublesome events of the last three decades, and uncovers the concept of "friction."

Mandelbaum defines friction as "the innumerable unforeseen and unpredictable difficulties that crop up..." Examples of this friction include Congressional concern with Soviet weapons deployment, bureaucratic infighting over weapons procurement, other countries' foreign policy goals, and even the different strategic theories of the U.S. military services.

That is, everything that does not fit into Mandelbaum's idyllic vision of a cabal of national security advisors and independent rational strategists setting policy gets relegated to the analytical ash-heap of "friction."

Hence, the rabid anti communism of the late 40s and 50s never appears in this book; presumably the widely-held belief that the world was rife with commies had no impact on U.S. military strategy. Presumably the Korean war raised no questions about the use of nuclear weapons; Mandelbaum asserts only that Eisenhower's veiled references to The Bomb helped end the war. Presumably, in writing the history of American strategic thought in the last three decades, the Vietnam war is worth no more than a paragraph of simplistic analysis; for Mandelbaum the war was "first a laboratory...then a full-fledged war, and finally a national disaster."

Well thank you for letting us know. Actually most of what happened since 1945 is given short shrift in this book as Mandelbaum focuses on the strategic role played by Kennedy and McNamara in the nuclear debate. But though Mandelbaum manages to give a fairly competent review of the bare bones of the strategic disputes of the Kennedy administration, he persists in understanding policy development as the province of a very few, very talented men. Thank heaven for the best and the brightest.

ULTIMATELY, Mandelbaum simply believes in different myths than most of the rest of us. He still believes, it seems from this book, that policy development is a coherent, discrete process; that America of the 40s and 50s was a disinterested defender of democracy and world peace; that America as a whole could be considered as a whole; that consensus still reigned in American politics in the crucial years of the nuclear debate.

This book, however, is more than just a reflection of that myth; it is an attempt to shore up its sagging walls. So Mandelbaum revives in over 200 pages a picture of American government that no longer plays even in Peoria. The Vietnam War happened for the rest of us, if not for Mandelbaum, and some of the basic ideas handed to generations of Gov. 40 veterans no longer ring true.

It would be nice if they did, for our own self image if for nothing else. But after Vietnam it is hard to argue that America's foreign policy or military strategy were ever the untainted products of American liberal values. It is a testament to Mandelbaum's naivete that it is only eight pages short of the end of the book that he realizes that while "Americans regarded their own intentions as self-evidently peaceful...the Soviets may not have shared this view."

Mandelbaum's work would just be trivial if directed solely at an academic audience. We could then leave it for the far more brutal reviewers of the professional journals. But at least in part, he has aimed it at a general readership. And to the degree that Mandelbaum's picture is false--to the degree that he recycles the myths that justified U.S. governmental expertise--this book is an extraordinarily scurrilous document.