Lincoln P. Bloomfield

Computers and policy-making: the CASCON experiment

Most observers of US foreign policy decision-making would probably agree that, whatever the virtues or defects of a particular policy choice, the process by which decisions are reached on crisis or incipient crisis situations leaves something to be desired. Despite good intentions, there persists an all-toofrequent tendency to be taken by surprise, to lurch from crisis to crisis, to under-use instruments of preventive diplomacy, and to be faced with situations in which only undesirable military options are available. The Nixon administration has identified some aspects of this problem, and announced various organizational and methodological means to overcome them. The results to date are, to say the least, not entirely convincing. And while as Americans our first concern is with US policy, the problem is by no means confined to the US decision-making apparatus. Rather, this tendency represents a weakness of governments in general, and of in-

From ideology to program to policy: Tracking the Carter human rights policy'

The Carter human rights policy was grounded in American historic oscillation between pragmatism and idealism. It represented a major change, yet was prefigured in congressional initiatives, which continued thereafter. After an initial honeymoon, human rights like all “new” policies became a contentious bureaucratic and diplomatic issue, was modified to fit changing realities, and was eventually obscured by crises in Iran and Afghanistan. Criticized from left to right abroad and at home, the Carter human rights policy illustrated the impossibility of avoiding inconsistency in global policies-but also the certainty that, given the American tradition, it will continue to emerge on the policy stage.

Outer Space and International Cooperation

On October 4, 1957, when Sputnik I was successfully orbited, it was popular to say that mankind had entered a new age—the Age of Space. If this was not just hyperbole, perhaps we are entitled to make a few judgments about the Space Age as it moves toward the end of its first decade. For, even from this short a perspective, the Space Age sharply illustrates the portentous conflict in our time between the forces of neonationalism and, for want of a better word, internationalism.

Arms Control and International Order

A visitor from another, more advanced, planet would find many extraordinary paradoxes on earth, but surely the most extraordinary would be the fantastic destructive potential of nuclear weapons which contrasts starkly with the primitive and near-impotent institutions of global peacekeeping. He might marvel that a breed capable of producing the wealth for a

Arms Control and the Developing Countries

185 billion armory of lethal devices, let alone the technology for killing several hundred million humans in a single exchange of nuclear weapons, had not also produced a workable international order capable of regulating such apocalyptic man-made power.

Headquarters-Field Relations: Some Notes on the Beginning and End of ONUC

THE detonation of Pekings first atomic devices in recent months has provoked renewed widespread discussion of the dangers of the further spread of nuclear weaponry. Speculation has flourished about who would be next-Sweden? Japan? Israel? Or perhaps India, which has become the first nonnuclear country to build a chemical separation plant? Cost estimates put nuclear weapons within reach of the poorest nations within a few years.1 Governments have issued solemn pronouncements about the need to design further international agreements to prevent nuclear proliferation. The President of the United States made use of a high-level committee to advise him how to deal with the problem. There is good reason to become nervous about the prospect of a five-, six-, seven-, ten-, or twenty-nation nuclear world, notwithstanding minority arguments that such a situation might increase stability. There seems to be a consensus that such an environment would furnish to individual political and military leaders, of varying degrees of personal stability, integrity, or responsibility, new and potentially disastrous opportunities for mischief on a grand scale. The present proclivity of some small states to invoke the possibility of thermonuclear war if they do not have their way could turn from rhetoric to reality. So to have a threatening disease under control at one site, as we now temporarily do, by no means guarantees preventing its outbreak at a variety of other sites. In short, the further spread of nuclear weapons cannot be regarded by responsible nations as anything but a profound complication at best, a lethal menace at worst. But even though the impulse to suppress the further spread of nuclear weapons to the smaller countries is a sound one, it is not clear that it has been well thought out in a broader political and strategic context. Prescriptions that focus only on nuclear weapons, or only on

American Policy Toward the UN—Some Bureaucratic Reflections

Of the many aspects of the UN operation in the Congo (ONUC) that gave rise to controversy, some were unique and can reasonably be chalked up to novelty and inexperience. One, however, is as old as military history itself. This is the matter of political control of a force once it is in the field. Two levels are involved: first, control of the field operations by headquarters; second, control of the military force in the field by the civilian authority—in this case the representative of the Secretary-General.

Transvalued values and common sense

Students of international organization, like students of domestic government, usually focus their attention on problems of formal organizational structure and arrangements and quite often neglect the substratum of informal operations and relationships. The study of public administration, in its quest for greater depth of perception, has in recent years gained rich insights through analysis of the informal and human aspects of policymaking. But international organization, still a parvenu from the American standpoint, has scarcely felt the scalpel of this particular form of dissection.

Nuclear crisis and human frailty

A mbassador Kirkpatrick once again furnishes an articulate conceptual underpinning for the foreign policy impulses of President Ronald Reagan. Far from criticizing that role, we recognize the indispensable intellectual function performed similarly for President Carter by Zbigniew Brzezinski, and for Presidents Nixon and Ford by Henry Kissinger. I propose to examine Kirkpatricks argument at two levels, one abstract, the other concrete.

After Neo-Isolationism, What?

While costly efforts are underway to offset physical threats to the technical management of future nuclear crises, the human component is the least analyzed or even acknowledged.