Word: nuclear
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Organized by SANE (National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy), demonstrators and speakers argued that neither side has made any serious attempt to settle the war in Viet Nam, urged the U.S. to make the first move. By way of proving its good faith to Hanoi, they maintained, the Administration should immediately end the American buildup in the South and halt the bombing of North Viet Nam. Before marching around the White House, leaders of the demonstration-among them Old Socialist Norman Thomas, Mrs. Martin Luther King Jr., Pediatrician Benjamin Spock-expressed their opinions to White House Aide Chester Cooper...
...should have set such standards. For his own credentials to presidential greatness certainly do not rest on success in achieving his objectives or in getting significant legislation through Congress. By his own terms, Kennedy's marked successes can be counted all too quickly: the Cuba missile confrontation, the nuclear test ban treaty, the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, the Peace Corps. No one, of course, can say what he might have accomplished had he lived out his first term and been re-elected to a second. As it is, Kennedy's biggest achievement lies in the spirit...
...order to survive we must jettison our indifference and our traditional biases. He sees the present as a period of transition to a more stable international order, in which escalation will be "the midwife of history." If we wish to influence the course of this transition and avoid nuclear war, we must learn to use carefully controlled violence--or threats of escalation--as a rational means of achieving our ends...
Kahn's abstract analysis fits only those international crises which are similarly "abstract;" the direct confrontations between nuclear superpowers which revolve around relatively non-ideological issues such as Berlin or missiles in Cuba. The danger, which we see unfolding in Vietnam, is that Kahn's approach will be used in situations where to ignore concrete reality is to play with disaster...
...itself has been lecturing," wrote Clausewitz of the Napoleonic period. Kahn would like to take this as his own motto. Kahn's studies, however, have yielded valuable insights only about the special forms, effects, and implications of the hypothetical horror of nuclear war. Such work is extremely valuable within its limits. But to understand the war which America is fighting, we should listen to the macabre lectures now being delivered in the highlands of Vietnam