Nuclear war, nuclear peace /

Wieseltier writes regularly for the New Republic, where this essay, the longest in the magazine's history, appeared in January 1983. His cause is deterrence theory, which he believes must be defended against the doves and the hawks. ""Arguing for deterrence, as I hope sadly to show, is no longer like arguing for motherhood."" One target is the ""party of peace,"" represented by Jonathan Schell and E. P. Thompson. Sehell's Fate of the Earth, says Wieseltier, ""is a classic of irresponsible idealism""--but Thompson's writings (Beyond the Cold War, etc.), infested with neutralism, are worse. ""Neutralism is an admission of philosophical exhaustion. . . . Staying above the war of ideas is not a spiritual triumph; it is a spiritual collapse."" As for the ""party of war,"" Wieseltier chides them for their mistaken notions of nuclear superiority or inferiority, notions that have no reality in nuclear warfare. The belief in such ideas is a symptom: ""Something terrible is happening in the defense community of the United States, and it is the Sovietization of American strategy."" The final section is entitled, ""And So, Deterrence."" There, Wieseltier avers that ""the only thing more menacing to our security than nuclear strength is nuclear weakness,"" and argues for deterrence as both the only coherent nuclear view of the world and the proper framework for considering a reduction in nuclear arsenals. This old idea has recently been defended with less flourish and more solid argument by Theodore Draper (Present History, p. 347); Wieseltier is deft, but not a little facile. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.