I was attracted to this "defense" of the "Weinberger Doctrine" because I remember all too well something that is missing from the discussion of Reagan-era discussions of military policy - the Pentagon's proposal to sacrifice Europe to fight what it considered a winnable, limited nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union.
It may be difficult to remember the atmosphere of relentless tension between the US and the Soviets of a generation ago. It was made worse by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the subsequent decision by the Reagan Administration to deploy medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe, against the express wishes of the people of the various countries where those missiles were put. Part of the problem complicating relations between the US and the Soviets were the interregnum between the death of Leonid Brezhnev and the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev there, and President Reagan's first-term rhetorical belligerence, made plain in a now-infamous 1983 speech in Miami in which he called the Soviet Union "the focus of evil in the modern world."
In the midst of the hair-trigger between the two superpowers, it was revealed that Weinberger's Defense Department was seriously studying the possibility of fighting and "winning" a limited nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. Of course, it would mean limiting that exchange to the newly-deployed medium-range nuclear missiles, making of western and Central Europe a vast, unlivable wasteland for centuries to come.
When the document outlining this particular bit of craziness was revealed, Theodore Draper took to the pages of The New York Review of Books to scold then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger not only for setting aside the post-war alliance with western Europe, and stating boldly that it might be in the US national interest to allow it to die in a nuclear oven if it meant "defeating" the Soviet Union; in so doing, Draper contended that this was an explicit rejection of the policy of deterrence that, for all its faults, had managed to limit confrontation with the Soviets to the margins, rather than full-on war. Weinberger replied, and the on-going exchange opens Draper's 1983 collection Present History: On Nuclear War, Detente, and Other Controversies. I read this book in the fall of 1984, at the same time I was taking a survey class in international relations as an undergraduate, and it shaped much of my thinking on that subject.
While there are, indeed, many good things to be said about the "Weinberger Doctrine" as it is presented at Democracy Arsenal, leaving out this particular bit of craziness misses a crucial aspect of late-Cold War Defense and Foreign Policy. At least in the early years of its existence, the Reagan Administration not only accepted the idea that nuclear war could be something "fought" and "won", it actively sought to lay out scenarios in which this would be so.
