The Best Defense

A fundamental question posed by the demise of the cold war is whether the superpowers' monumentally dangerous and costly arms buildup was necessary.

Was it inevitable that the United States and the Soviet Union acquire capabilities to destroy each other in a nuclear war? Or could they have agreed instead to address the nuclear danger through mutual emphasis on defenses? Might such an approach be a feasible option for nuclear powers in today's world?

Examining crucial episodes in U.S. security history from the Truman years through the Reagan administration, David Goldfischer considers how figures including J. Robert Oppenheimer, Donald G. Brennan, Freeman Dyson, and Jonathan Schell advanced compelling arguments for seeking an arms control agreement favoring defenses against nuclear attack. Goldfischer offers provocative explanations for why this approach, known as "mutual defense emphasis" (MDE), was rejected in favor of the offense-dominated strategies of nuclear warfighting or "mutual assured destruction" (MAD). The failure seriously to explore MDE, he shows, left supporters of arms control with a false choice between the extremes of MAD and a utopian search for complete nuclear disarmament. Goldfischer concludes with a discussion of how the "Strategic Defense Initiative" (Star Wars)-which used the rhetoric of MDE to mask a renewed search for a nuclear warfighting strategy-has since the 1980s undermined the prospect for serious debate over defense emphasis.

Policymakers, activists, political scientists, and scholars and students of security studies and postwar U.S. defense history will welcome this book.