Edward Teller, a refugee from Hungary, loved to play the piano. While at Los Alamos working on the H-bomb, he kept his colleagues awake at night playing Beethoven. Vaughn Williams penned symphonies. His “The Lark Ascending” contains the most pacific notes ever written, at least to my ear. Williams was an ambulance driver during World War I. Some innocent victims become hawks and some who served on the front lines become doves. But generalizations are usually short cuts for the simple-minded.
Why do we become Hawks or Doves? Graham Allison, Albert Carnesale and Joe Nye co-edited Hawks, Doves and Owls (1985), a book that worked better at defining the essence of these camps than explaining why individuals are drawn to them. Hawks and Doves in the United States are both missionaries at heart, proselytizing for the hearts and minds of the voting public. One camp is out to save the world from the scourge of nuclear arms control, the other from the scourge of nuclear weapons. They engage in a bloodless debate over abstract constructs on what could become a very bloody subject.
In most walks of life, authoritative views are based on real world experience. When it comes to the Bomb, anyone can sound authoritative because, thankfully, no one has had battlefield experience since 1945. Consequently, strongly held arguments can’t be disproven, since they are taken on faith. All of the central propositions on both sides of debates over nuclear weapons and arms control have been formulated by very authoritative civilians. Steven Cady neatly encapsulated this divide in “Saving the World,” an essay that appeared in the Air University Review (1981): “The first group looks at mankind and hopes for the best; the second group looks at man and plans for the worst.” Arms control treaties become the vessels in which optimists and pessimists play out their hopes and fears.
Henry Kissinger wrote retrospectively about these dynamics with respect to the policy of détente that he and President Richard Nixon engineered, in an Adelphi Paper essay published in 1982:
There was what may be called the ‘psychiatric school’ that dealt with the Soviet Union by the precepts of personal relations. This school believed that fundamentally the Soviet Union reacts to the American threat, that therefore reassurance is the answer and negotiations the mechanism. Then there was the ‘theological school’ that saw relations with the Soviet Union as an aspect of a general ideological liturgy and resisted any contamination represented by the implication of compromise inherent in negotiation. This school concentrated on pointing out the benefits to the USSR of any agreement that might be made, as if the USSR would ever make an agreement in which she had no benefits.
It’s striking how much these dynamics continue to play out over New START, two decades after the Cold War ended. Skeptics of the Treaty argue, with good reason, that Moscow can only be trusted to follow its own interests. But this assumes, unwisely, that nuclear dangers are a zero-sum game and that there are insufficient common interests in New START. Treaty opponents worry about verification – another sound instinct – but would weaken U.S. monitoring capabilities by shelving New START. They place their trust in nuclear weapons and national missile defenses, two declining instruments of U.S. strategic power in the 21st Century. One works only too well; the other very poorly against a sophisticated attack. The requirements of treaty ratification would shore up funding in both areas, but if irreconcilable Senators have their way, they would invite a coalition of liberal Democrats and deficit hawk Republicans to look harshly at these expenditures. Hawks and Doves actually need each other to calibrate deterrence and reassurance, but they are too busy arguing to notice.