ABSTRACT
The drama lay in the demonstration that Hans J. Morgenthau, long criticized by some as Machiavellian, is no “power” man at all in our contemporary world of MARVs and megadeaths. Nowhere has Morgenthau’s humane dimension been more evident than in his acute and long-standing criticisms of counterforce strategy: that USAF-RAND Corporation concept now become established United States strategy, and targeting, which purports to offer controllable war-fighting options via a new generation of ever more accurate strategic nuclear weapons. Counterforce became the reigning strategy of weapons and targeting without any real debate having been conducted before the fact, by the Congress or among the American people, as to its benefits, costs, and risks. The growth of military thinking heightens tendencies to see the worst case and to overinsure. The military operates by nature within a distorting “threat environment.”
