Must the psychology of avoiding nuclear war remain free and insignificant?

Abstract

of the participants--but by no means in directions suggested by Blight's sexy label.As his citation of ScheUing reflected, Blight identified whole-hog with the received wisdom of threat and deterrence in the military and arms control policy community. This is my second complaint.Third, and I could make a diagnostic depth psychological point of it were I so inclined, Blight declared himself for a naively conceived sociobiology of war. "The more we learn about our mammalian ancestors, the less optimistic we ought to become about somehow expunging human aggression" (p. 24)--as if computerized megadeaths were somehow understandable in terms of biological aggressiveness! Of course, I agree with him that the Hobbesian world of nation states cannot be wished away.Fourth, Blight prematurely dismissed either top-down (from the national leadership) or bottom-up (e.g., the Freeze movement) approaches to reversing the arms race and the escalation of threat. The collapse of recent U.S. policies in the Reagan administration, the shift in the domestic political atmosphere, and the novel initiatives from Gorbachev's Soviet leadership-all new since Blight's writing-leave the political situation a good deal more open now than it can have seemed to Blight. This is no time for psychologists, behavioral scientists, and citizens to give up the attempt to turn things around in Soviet-American relations.Blight is obviously correct that immense barriers stand in the way of we psychologists getting our most cogent analyses taken seriously by the policy establishment. Also, we can readily stipulate that psychological knowledge or modes of analysis are not by themselves sources of salvation. We urgently need to educate a generation of psychologists to know the arms control community and its arcane lore from the inside so that they can address these issues more competently and persuasively.In the meantime, as antidotes to Blight's view, I suggest a close reading of Ralph White's (1984) Fearful Warriors: A Psychological Profile of US.-Soviet Relations (White did his homework in mastering the international relations literature) and of Lloyd Can Governments Learn? American Foreign Policy and Central American Revolutions. Etheredge's portrayal of the assumptive world of "hard-ball politics" that prevails by self-selection and mutual confirmation in the policy community is a better guide than Blight provided to the obstacles that lie in the path of good policy.We have no grounds for optimism about the role of psychology in reducing the odds for nuclear war, but fortunately we can be more hopeful than Blight was (Smith, 1986). We had better be if we are to do all that we can on this extraordinary issue that involves us all.