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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2011
A Characteristic of warfare is that it has changed with the arrival of new weapons and concepts to produce a series of distinct pasts, each of which in its time proved surprising in terms of the past once removed. Although critics have generally been able to observe that the generals were prepared for the last war, they might with greater insight have noted that the generals were prepared not just for the last war, but for all the past wars, and hence were seldom at a loss except on encountering foes better equipped than themselves. Cortez was prepared for Montezuma; Montezuma, up against new notions and gadgets, was not prepared for him.
1 In “Nuclear Sharing: NATO and the N + 1 Country,” he says: “.… even for the United States, getting a responsible deterrent to Russian attack is far from easy. It is vital and feasible, but hard.” (XXXIX, April 1961, p. 362.) See also his “Delicate Balance of Terror,” ibid., XXXVII (January 1959), pp. 211–34.
2 But Bonn would remain more important to us than, say, Attu. As a rational matter, we should probably not react with our full thermonuclear power unless convinced that the enemy had attacked our national élan vital or threatened extinction of our basic values.
