The Gift of Time The Case for Abolising Nuclear Weapons Now By Jonathan Schell Metropolitan. 240 pp. $25 The Minuteman Restoring an Army of the People By Gary Hart Free Press. 188 pp. $23 Reviewed by Joeseph S. Lye, dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and co-author of "Why People Don't Trust Government" Sunday, July 26, 1998; Page X03

In the early 1980s Jonathan Schell wrote two books calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons, but during the Cold War it was widely believed that abolition was impossible. Now with the Cold War over, Schell argues that the barrier of impossibility has fallen. He admits that there is a paradox of fear: What is now possible seems less urgent than when a million people assembled in New York's Central Park in 1982 in support of a nuclear freeze. But now history has given us a "gift of time" to cross the "great threshold" of abolition.

Schell makes his case by interspersing his own views with a set of interviews with luminaries such as Mikhail Gorbachev, Helmut Schmidt and Robert McNamara, as well as lesser-known figures. The result is more disjointed and less lapidary than his earlier The Fate of the Earth. Nonetheless, he has produced a readable and interesting excursion through such problems as cutting numbers, taking weapons off alert status, defining what zero really means when knowledge of how to make weapons cannot be disinvented, and figuring out how to respond if a nation cheats and breaks out of the nuclear-abolition treaty.

It is not enough, in Schell's view, to reach very low numbers of weapons such as advocated in a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences. Similarly, the goal of weaponless deterrence or virtual arsenals, which rest on the possibility of reconstituting weapons, is merely a stage along the path to "the truly final goal of abolition that is prohibition." Schell wants nothing less than abandonment of the concept of nuclear deterrence.

Is the post-Cold War world ready to abandon both nuclear weapons and the concept of deterrence? In its 1994 Nuclear Posture Review, the Clinton Administration said no. It called for major reduction of nuclear weapons but maintained a posture of nuclear deterrence as a hedge against a potential reversal of reform in Russia. Schell quotes then-Deputy Secretary of Defense John Deutsch as saying "we're not looking for abrupt changes; we're looking for adaptation to change." Schell admits surprise when he encounters a Russian liberal arms controller, Alexei Arbatov, who agrees with Clinton's hedging argument: "The victory of Yeltsin doesn't mean the victory of democracy . . . but even if we have democracy here, this in no way means there will be no geopolitical competition."

For Schell, the gift of time means abolishing nuclear weapons now. Others are less sanguine. They include Americans and Europeans who can imagine a Russia led by a radical nationalist leader, Israelis and the others who believe that Saddam Hussein did not use his chemical and biological warfare capabilities in 1991 because of implicit nuclear deterrence, and Japanese who believe that the rise of China's conventional power can be more easily incorporated into a stable East Asia if an American nuclear guarantee remains. And for those who believe that one of the greatest threats to American security in the post-Cold War world lies in terrorists using biological, nuclear or radiological devices to carry out Oklahoma City-type attacks, Schell's prescription of governmental abolition of nuclear weapons represents old rather than new thinking.

For Gary Hart, the former senator from Colorado, the opportunity we are missing at the end of the Cold War is not nuclear abolition. Rather it is "the necessity of converting our large, standing, Regular Army to a smaller, rapid deployment, expeditionary-intervention force backed up in the event of longer term deployments by a larger better trained, and better-equipped citizen reserve army." Currently, the United States has about 1.5 million active-duty and 1 million reserve personnel in the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. Hart would cut the active-duty forces by two-thirds to 500,000 while retaining the million-person reserve force.

Why propose such a radical change? Hart argues that a changed ratio of reserves to permanent forces will restore classic republican principles of civic virtue by making citizens share more in defense. It would increase public debate and influence over military matters and reduce the cost of the military budget. It would also reduce the latitude of the president in foreign and defense policy. Large professional forces invite international overcommitment and public detachment. Ironically, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War a number of military planners came to a similar conclusion and insisted on a "total force" concept that included reserves so that future presidents could not commit the military to a foreign conflict without popular support. In the aftermath of the Gulf War and questions about the readiness of some reserve units, the Army moved away from the total-force concept, but even today reserves are part of the American forces serving in Bosnia.

Hart argues that what constitutes actual danger to the United States must be redefined for a post-Cold War world. Conflicts of the future will be more immediate, local and dynamic. But foreign and defense policy also deals with shaping the long-term environment and reducing future threats against Americans. For example, how the rising power of China is incorporated into a stable East Asian balance of power will be one of the key issues in the early 21st century. Hart is largely silent on such questions. Yet the overseas presence of American forces – 100,000 each in Europe and Asia and 20,000 near the Persian Gulf – has an important effect on shaping other countries' policies and expectations in such critical regions. It is not clear how Hart's scaled-down active-duty forces (in a framework that further constrains the president) will carry out these important foreign-policy roles.

Neither of these books provides a credible map for navigating the post-Cold War world, but both should be read as stimuli to stretching our imagination so that we do not succumb to the inertia of the structures we have inherited from the past.