Word: garthoff
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Dates: during 1958-1958
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...down to a time lag on the part of the Russians; they were believed frozen in the experience of World War II, unable to face the implications of the new nuclear weapons. This week, in a coldly penetrating study* of modern Soviet military doctrine, Russian-speaking Raymond L. Garthoff, 29, Defense Department analyst and specialist on Soviet military writings, enters a strong dissent. Since the death of Stalin in 1953, says he, Soviet military doctrine "has made a quantum jump from the bayonet age to the thermonuclear...
This jump has not brought the U.S.S.R.'s generals closer to current U.S. military doctrine. It has in fact taken them in an independent direction. Garthoff, whose book is authoritatively studded with hundreds of references to Soviet military periodicals, backed up by personal conversations with Soviet officers, sums up the "Soviet image of future war" thus...
...tends to stop at the point of reciprocal nuclear holocaust. Why does the Soviet imagination leap this hurdle? Through continued ignorance of the effects of thermonuclear weapons? This can hardly be the explanation, now that the Russians have had years in which to test and ponder their own weapons. Garthoff suggests two other explanations...
...kinds of wars in which they might gain, with less risk to Soviet survival. They have not allowed nuclear weapons to overshadow conventional arms, and have thus retained their enormous superiority to fight non-nuclear wars, big or little. They say publicly that limited nuclear wars are impossible, but Garthoff believes they have, in theory and in practice, the capability of fighting these...
Another difference is in civil defense. The U.S. has.not even got around to thinking seriously about a nuclear shelter program. Garthoff is convinced that the Russians are taking the far more radical step of decentralizing their industry to minimize damage of nuclear attack. He thinks Khrushchev's program of industrial management decentralization is accompanied by physical decentralization for military purposes...