Kissinger on NATO

The measured cadence, the sepulchral timbre and the Teutonic-accented English were all familiar. But there was a rare note of urgency in Henry Kissinger's keynote address at the Brussels conference on NATO. Excerpts:

We must face the fact that it is absurd to base the strategy of the West on the credibility of the threat of mutual suicide. We live in a paradoxical world; it is precisely the liberal, humane, progressive community that is advocating the most bloodthirsty strategies.

Nobody who knows anything about how our Government operates will believe that it is possible for our President to get the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and director of the Central Intelligence Agency onto a conference call in the 15 minutes that he has to make a decision, much less issue an order that then travels down the line of command in the 15 minutes. So the only way is by delegating the authority down to some field commander, who must be given the discretion that when he thinks a nuclear war has started, he can retaliate. Is that the world we want to live in? Is that what assured destruction will finally take us to?

Don't you Europeans keep asking us to multiply assurances that we cannot possibly mean; and that if we mean them, we should not want to execute; and that if we execute, we'll destroy civilization. That is our strategic dilemma, into which we have built ourselves by our own theory and by the encouragement of our allies.

To be tactless, the secret dream of every European was, one, to avoid a nuclear war but, secondly, if there had to be a nuclear war, to have it conducted over their heads by the strategic forces of the United States and the Soviet Union.

Our strategic doctrine has relied extraordinarily, perhaps excessively, on our superior strategic [nuclear] power. The Soviet Union has [instead] always depended more on its local and regional superiority. Therefore, even an equivalence in destructive power, even assured destruction for both sides, is a revolution in NATO doctrine as we have known it.

I contributed myself to some of these theories, and so I am not casting blame here on any particular group -- because everyone here who knows me knows that the acceptance of blame is not what I will go down in history for.

It is not to say that we have no possibilities. If we do what is necessary, all the odds are in our favor. We can only defeat ourselves. The kind of world in which we want to live is largely up to us.

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