Choose Your Weapons, Gentlemen

IN THE VERBAL THEATER, I can testify, the Pentagon has an impressive retaliatory capability. My gentle first strike against three of the fashionable weapons systems (“Nostalgia and Weapons,” August 20) provoked a counterattack on a scale massive enough to flatten a three-volume study by the Rand Corporation.

The authors (mostly well-informed military men, active or retired) were concerned to defend one or all of the systems (the new tank, the supersonic bomber, the giant nuclear carrier), and they did so ably and persuasively. Nearly all their letters are lengthy, so that it is impossible to print them in full. However, extensive excerpts from a representative sample appear in the letters section of this issue (see p. 1096). I won’t try to “reply”—actually I agree with most of the specific points—but to make a few more comments related to the general idea I am somewhat erratically circling.

JB

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James Burnham

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IN THE VERBAL THEATER, I can testify, the Pentagon has an impressive retaliatory capability. My gentle first strike against three of the fashionable weapons systems (“Nostalgia and Weapons,” August 20) provoked a counterattack on a scale massive enough to flatten a three-volume study by the Rand Corporation.

The authors (mostly well-informed military men, active or retired) were concerned to defend one or all of the systems (the new tank, the supersonic bomber, the giant nuclear carrier), and they did so ably and persuasively. Nearly all their letters are lengthy, so that it is impossible to print them in full. However, extensive excerpts from a representative sample appear in the letters section of this issue (see p. 1096). I won’t try to “reply”—actually I agree with most of the specific points—but to make a few more comments related to the general idea I am somewhat erratically circling.