Some people say there are two policies in the executive branch … one is mine and the other is the president's, which is marginally so. Some of the th… - Paul Nitze

Why would someone who spent so many years negotiating with the Soviet Union about the size of our nuclear arsenal now say we no longer need it? I know that the simplest and most direct answer to the problem of nuclear weapons has always been their complete elimination. My walk in the woods in 1982 with the Soviet arms negotiator Yuli Kvitsinsky at least addressed this possibility on a bilateral basis. Destruction of the arms did not prove feasible then, but there is no good reason why it should not be carried out now. … It is the presence of nuclear weapons that threatens our existence.

In our view, all-out war promises the least success in achieving the objectives we have outlined. First, it would not necessarily discourage other potential aggressors. Defeating Saddam Hussein promptly in an all-out war would send an unequivocal signal that this aggression had not been tolerated. But if casualties were high, U.S. sentiment probably would be driven toward a more isolationist posture. Many Americans would be dismayed by the carnage and resentful that our allies were not paying a similar price. (The seeds of such resentment already exist.) They could be expected to oppose any comparable U.S. role in the future. The message would be that the United States had neither the inclination to work in concert with other nations nor the stomach to repeat the anti-Iraq action. Many of our current collaborators, who are ambivalent at best about the war option, might also lose interest in future cooperation with us. A world of growing brutality and chaos would become a likely prospect.

There have been, from time to time, changes in the degree of destructiveness of weapons and of war. These changes, until recent decades, generally have been considered not to have invalidated the precepts of Western civilization and its antecedent cultures of the moral obligation to defend its freedoms, diversity, and cultural growth from tyranny, reaction, and cultural stagnation or death. But with the advent of the nuclear age, we are faced with a change in degree that threatens to become one of kind. The destructive nature of nuclear war dictates that we no longer regard war as merely the continuation of policy by other means. The deterrence of nuclear war, until such time as technology provides a more reliable and stable method, must, for the United States, be based upon the capability to prevail if deterrence should fail. But this must be combined with an effort to join with other nations in the creation of a just international order.