Hawks, doves and owls: an agenda for avoiding nuclear war.

• Author: Keller, Bill

Hawks, Doves and Owls: An Agenda for Avoiding Nudear War.

Hawks, Doves and Owls: An Agenda for Avoiding Nuclear War. Graham T. Allison, Albert Carnesale, Joseph S. Nye Jr. Norton, $14.95. Hawks, doves, and reporters tend to make the same mistake in thinking about the nuclear standoff. They dwell on the numbers (launchers, missiles, warheads, throw-weights) and propose policies (freeze, build-up, build-down) accordingly. This is a little like watching two hot rods tearing toward one another in a game of chicken and discussing the event in terms of wheelbases and horsepower. The point is to avoid a collision neither driver can survive.

This book is among the more accessible in a glut of recent academic writing on the problem, not of reducing or abolishing nuclear arsenals, but of minimizing the risk that they will be used.

Allison, Carnesale and Nye, all of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, provide an introduction and a list of specific proposals at the end. The meat is sandwiched in between in the form of essays by other academics. Each chapter spins out more or less plausible scenarios that fit one of the "five general paths to nuclear war'--escalation in Europe, nuclear accident, sneak attack, etc.--and then sets out to isolate factors that can be controlled.

As might be expected of a book that boasts "advance praise' from such polar opposites as Senator Edward Kennedy and the Pentagon's senior policy hawk, Dr. Fred Ikle, much of the book cuts a wide swath down the middle. For example, the authors are for better hotlines and more face-to-face meetings. Some of it is facile: "A verifiable agreement...