ABSTRACT
The distinction between limited war and total war appears to be academic. The limited nuclear war strategy turns out to feed a whole range of potentially unlimited consequences. By questioning the reality of a nuclear revolution, counterforce implies that war can have its place in atomic international relations. The danger is that someday plans like counterforce will encourage the US or the U.S.S.R., in times of great conflict, to think that nuclear war can have some positive effect for an international systems change. As a nuclear doctrine and employment policy, accentuates the possibility of war by miscalculation without providing any hope that nuclear war could be controlled or brought to a trenchant conclusion. Of course that thinking would be caused by misperceptions leading to miscalculations, and the subjective ignorance of the awesome uncertainties of nuclear decision-making and thermonuclear destruction. The growth of counterforce has been the result of direct attempts by conventionalists, under successive Administrations, to engineer conventional nuclear strategy.
