When asked to describe his recently published book, Mystic author Jonathan Stevenson said, “It’s about what lessons we can draw from the way in which Cold War strategists thought about the world’s strategic problems, in particular the nuclear standoff, and apply them to current problems that are very different.”
Stevenson’s title, Thinking Beyond the Unthinkable, stems from a book published by Herman Kahn in 1962 titled Thinking About the Unthinkable, which brought nuclear strategy closer to the mainstream.
The process of strategic thinking during the era of the Cold War is what Stevenson has researched and was the topic of his discussion at Bank Square Books last Thursday, drawing a connection from the past to current world issues.
Stevenson said he tried to illuminate in the book what strategists did right during the Cold War. Though he admits there were things strategists did wrong, he strongly believes in using what they did well and applying their tactics to current situations.
Stevenson researched and wrote the book from 2005 to 2008 in the hours between his day job as a professor of the Strategic Research Department at the United States Naval War College in Rhode Island. He explained that he started to create the book as a different project, but it derived from an observation he made—one he doesn’t think he was alone in noticing.
“During the Cold War, the people who wanted to be on the leading edge of strategic thought coalesced around a certain very definable group of thinkers,” he said.
But in the post-Cold War environment, particularly after 9/11, Stevenson believes that no authoritative cadre of strategic thinkers has materialized.
“I think one of the reasons was because we [the United States] were at a state of strategic confusion,” he said. “We had been buffeted and kind of traumatized by 9/11, and before that, taken by surprise by the abruptness of the Soviet Union’s collapse. We didn’t really have a chance to reset,” he added, referring to the Soviet Union’s collapse into independent nations in 1991.
He suggested that there was a need to redesign the United States’ strategic posture to deal with the different circumstances.
“It took us a while to get our pants up after WWII and deal with the new threats of atomic warfare, too,” Stevenson candidly said.
As a graduate of the University of Chicago in 1978, earning a degree in philosophy and economics and obtaining a law degree from Boston University School of Law, Stevenson said he practiced law for seven years at LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae (now Dewey & MacRae) in New York and realized his heart was in conflict and international relations.
“I have had a strange career path,” he said, “but I have always liked to write.”
After leaving LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae, he moved to Kenya, becoming a freelance journalist covering Somalia, among other places, and eventually writing a book of the shortcomings in of the American-led intervention there in 1992 and 1993. Looking back, he says the book wasn’t particularly good.
“But it was a good start,” he added. He continued to travel, flying to Northern Ireland and then living in the United Kingdom for five years, all the while chasing conflict and international relations, deepening and broadening his intellectual base surrounding strategic studies.
Born in New London and living as a young boy in Stonington, it was in 2005 that Stevenson decided to move to Mystic and start to write his book with his new knowledge.
“I have a strong base here,” he added.
The Rand Corporation, he said, is a model he focuses on within his book. The corporation was established after World War II and, in Stevenson’s opinion, was the fertile breeding ground for the most essential ideas pertaining to nuclear deterrence surrounding the Cold War and other matters in the 1950s and ’60s.
Stevenson has intellectually profiled Herman Kahn, Albert Wohlstetter, and Thomas C. Schelling in his book, calling them three main strategists from the Cold War era.
“All three of those guys were at one point or other in their careers at Rand,” Stevenson explained. “The three of them together, along with several other people, essentially refined the theory of nuclear deterrence and figured out to stabilize the nuclear confrontation between the United States and Soviet Union, so there was less chance that a given conflict would spiral into nuclear war...Kahn was a very theatrical guy and he liked to be provocative, so I would say, to the general public, he was the most famous strategic figure but he did exert not the heaviest influence on policy,” Stevenson said, smiling. “That would have been Albert Wohlstetter. Nor was Kahn the most innovative thinker. That would have been Tom Schelling.
“An important thing to take away is that successful national policy has to be founded on deliberate, searching thought about the country’s entire situation,” Stevenson continued. “It can’t just be jerry-built on a series of reactions to crises and exploitations of perceived opportunities…You need a grand strategy as well as the operational and tactical capabilities required to respond to emergencies and threats that materialize suddenly…Current threats may be very different than the ones that we faced during the Cold War, but we can still learn from the way in which we handled the Cold War threats—and, using our reflections on that recent history, step back, take a look at current threats calmly and deliberately, and arrive at a grand strategy that works better than what we’ve been doing for the last seven years.”
Copies of Stevenson’s book are available at Bank Square Books, 53 West Main St., Mystic, which can be reached by phone at 860-536-3795 or online at www.banksquarebooks.com.