Our military doctrine is oriented on a weapons system too powerful and too nearly suicidal to use, except in an. extreme case not likely to occur. Our foreign policy consequently loses all flexibility. Cut off from supporting military roots, our diplomacy operates in a void. Our conceptions allowing for no lasting postures between all-out war and all-out disarmament, the military services prepare feverishly for the one while our diplomacy frenetically pursues the other.
Granted our prevailing ideas, we are being immobilized by the incredible power of our own weapons, like a cabinet-maker whose only tool was a sledge-hammer. Our entire military effort focuses on the massive retaliatory arm designed to smash the physical structure of Soviet power in a quick, catastrophic showdown. Even while we had an atomic monopoly, the vastness of our own power inhibited its use. No actual or probable provocation could seem to justify such a scale of destruction. This earlier inhibition is now (or in the near future will be) reinforced by the certainty that American as well as Soviet cities will be destroyed in a thermonuclear showdown, however begun.
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