"ALL IS fair in war, and starvation is one of the weapons of war," was vice-chairman of the Nigerian governments's comment on the policy that resulted in the death by starvation of two million people. In The Brutality of Nations, Dan Jacobs steers us away from Chief Awolowo's Machiavellian viewpoint. The more significant and shocking issue raised by the book is identified by its long subtitle: "How, in pursuit of political objectives in the Nigerian Civil War, a number of great and small nations, including Britain and the United States, worked to prevent supplies of food and medicine from reaching the starving children of rebel Biafra."

The Brutality of Nations

by Dan Jacobs

Alfred A. Knopf; 368 pp; $22.95

By 1966, Nigeria had been independent for six years, but "a nation in name only." Tension among the Yoruba, Ibo, and some two hundred other tribes came to a head when an aborted coup led by lbo army officers resulted in the death of a Moslem leader. The call reverberated throughout Nigeria: "One million Ibos must die to avenge the death of the Saudana." In October, 1966, the Federal Military Government of Nigeria began a blockade of the Eastern Region--seven months before Biafra would secede.

Relying on the principle of national sovereignty, Nigeria argued that no relief could be provided to the secessionist territories without Nigerian consent. The rest of the world could only respond, in the words of one senior officer, "If children must die first, then that is too bad, just too bad."

THE LAWS of national sovereignty are themselves based on the fundamental principle of self-determination. The same principle that underlay Nigerian claims to independence decades earlier could have been invoked to legitimate outside intervention on the Ibo's behalf. Indeed, the French government of Charles de Gaulle, before initiating covert military assistance to the rebels, declared: "The bloodshed and suffering of the Biafran people for more than a year shows their will to affirm themselves as a people."

A second, more explicit, legal basis to violate Nigerian sovereignty had been incorporated into a body of international human rights law in the aftermath of World War II. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, for example, prohibits "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. "The Geneva Conventions states: "Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited."

The spirit of these agreements--to prevent civilian death on a massive scale--is clear. Yet the relevant third parties determined that the Nigerian government was not guilty under the letter of international law: not enough Ibos were imperiled to qualify as genocide, the starvation was not intentional, merely collateral.

THE TRUTH is that the United Nations, Great Britain and the United States had to justify inaction with narrow and legalistic reasoning; each had particular political reasons to avoid antagonizing the military government in Lagos.

U.N. Secretary General U Thant feared that befriending the Biafrans would undermine his status with Nigeria and other member nations that felt threatened by tribal secession. Great Britain had extensive economic ties to her former colony and envisioned huge profits for British petroleum interests from the oil deposits recently discovered under Nigeria's Eastern Region--Biafra. Small wonder, then, that Prime Minister Harold Wilson "remarked that if a million lbos had to die to preserve the unity of Nigeria, well, that was not too high a price to pay."

The Brits had one more reason not to antagonize the one shared by the State Department professionals who determined a noninterventionist U.S. policy despite President Nixon's expressed support for humanitarian aid: fear of expanding Soviet influence.

Although the Nigerian leaders' fervent anti-communism hardly made credible a close alliance between Nigeria and the Soviet Union, the possibility of a rapprochement between the two nations was sufficient to cause one State Department official to threaten: "the United States government will do everything in its power to block" private citizens from organizing a relief effort.

To be sure, the Nigerian Civil War was not the first instance that implacable fear and hatred of the Soviets outweighed all other concerns--moral and otherwise--in the making of U.S. foreign policy. And as the current fiasco in Nigeria illustrates, nor was it the last.

FOR THIS REASON, The Brutality of Nations is an important and timely book, even though Biafra collapsed in January 1970, when its soldiers "laid down their rifles and faded away." Dan Jacobs writes from an intimate knowledge of the events, having served as U.N. spokesman on Biafra before resigning in protest over U.N. inaction. His story, while sometimes devolving into an overly detailed account of who-said-what-to-whom, is informative and compelling.

Jacobs' greatest flaw, however, is his excessive faith in international law. His hopeful epilogue that the future will see greater realization of the potential inherent in extant international law is more sanguine than the balance of the book warrants.

Current international human rights law is not entirely ambiguos, holds that human rights affairs are not solely a domestic concern. It is inevitably limited, however, by the lack of an effective enforcement mechanism in an Hobbesian world of sovereign states. For the U.S., the necessary infusion of ethics into international relations requires a recognition that geopolitical gains and losses for each superpower are a fact of life in a dynamic, interrelated world.