War, Peace, and Victory: Strategy and Statecraft for the Next Century.

• Author: Yarmolinsky, Adam

War, Peace, and Victory: Strategy and Statecraft for the Next Century Colin S. Gray. Simon and Schuster, $24.95. Ten years ago, Colin Gray wrote an article arguing that the United States could and should plan to fight and win a nuclear war against the Soviet Union. Now he has written a big book arguing that the United States must develop a strategy or strategies to win a variety of wars.

In the course of the argument, Gray displays extraordinary erudition about past wars, from the Peloponnesian to the Napoleonic, and about past exponents of strategic theory, notably Clausewitz and Jomini, and he makes a number of sensible observations. But every time Gray comes down on one side of a specific current issue, he seems to come down wrong. He can barely contain his contempt for arms control efforts. He specifically opposes a treaty to limit the development of antisatellite weapons. He rejects the idea that some nuclear weapons contribute to strategic instability. And he seems still to be pursuing the will-o'-the-wisp of Star Wars.

Yet, Gray's thinking has moved some distance over the past 10 years. His chapter on "Nuclear Weapons and Strategy" no longer offers the dubious consolation that U.S. casualties in a nuclear exchange could be limited to 20 million. Instead, he recognizes that the principal purpose of nuclear weapons is to discourage the other side from using nuclear weapons as well as to damp down potential conflicts that might escalate into conventional and then into nuclear wars, and he justifiably chides the proponents of "flexible response"--gradual escalation from conventional weapons to "tactical" nuclear weapons to larger-scale nuclear exchanges--for not thinking seriously about where flexibility can lead.

Gray goes on to suggest that the principal deterrent "in the foreground" to discourage Soviet leaders from waging war on the Western Alliance in Europe, or upon its "vital interests elsewhere," would be the fact of "an economically vastly superior enemy coalition" persistent in...