Morgenstern, “The Question of National Defense” (1960)

Morgenstern’s essay treats national defense as a strategic problem whose conditions have been transformed by nuclear weapons, delivery systems, and the speed of technological change. Its central premise is that defense policy cannot be judged by ordinary hopes for unilateral restraint or by inherited military categories. In a nuclear rivalry, each side’s choices alter the other’s incentives; the problem is therefore reciprocal, dynamic, and inseparable from uncertainty about future weapons.

both efforts are high neither can slacken without promptly inviting disaster. Unilateral action to reduce the arms race is impossible and not compatible with the desire for national survival.

The argument is not a celebration of militarization but a warning against moral or economic reasoning that ignores strategic interdependence. Morgenstern presents the arms race as a grim equilibrium: if both adversaries possess the capacity to destroy, neither can safely reduce effort unless reductions are mutual, credible, and enforceable. National survival becomes a constraint prior to normal budgetary calculation. Expenditure may be economically burdensome, but inadequate defense is treated as a catastrophic failure rather than a marginal inefficiency.

The essay’s analytical style reflects Morgenstern’s game-theoretic background. Defense is not a matter of choosing the single best weapon, but of comparing strategies under adversarial response. A system that seems effective in isolation may fail once the opponent adapts. Hence the relevant question is not simply what the United States or any state can build, but what combination of offense, defense, dispersal, retaliation, warning, and protection remains viable when both sides optimize.

If we make this symmetrical for both sides we are led to the determination of the optimal strategies for both sides. This is done further below. But first another point of prime importance.

Much of the essay attacks complacency about technical fixes. Morgenstern stresses that defensive screens, interception systems, and stopgap arrangements are always temporally vulnerable: they may answer yesterday’s threat while the next generation of weapons is already being designed to evade them. This makes defense planning fundamentally anticipatory. A country that builds only against known weapons risks investing in obsolescence.

already mentioned screens, but effectively only against weapons of the recent past, not against those already in development.

He is especially skeptical of makeshift schemes that appear plausible in strategic debate but break down under logistical scrutiny. Keeping aircraft continuously airborne, for example, may seem to preserve retaliatory capacity, but it runs into fuel, maintenance, basing, and operational limits. Morgenstern’s method repeatedly moves from abstract strategic necessity to concrete feasibility, insisting that deterrence must survive contact with engineering and logistics.

Neither can carrier planes be used for the stopgap system of keeping a significant part constantly in the air. Logistic considerations forbid this: there is no way of solving the problem of the great fuel consumption.

Civil defense enters the essay in the same sober register. Morgenstern does not imagine shelters as a complete answer to nuclear war, but he distinguishes among targets and forms of vulnerability. Large cities present the severest problem because they are valuable targets and difficult to protect quickly; smaller and more dispersed communities are less likely blast targets and may require different priorities. The larger implication is that defense must be differentiated rather than symbolic: shelter policy, dispersal, warning, and retaliatory forces must be matched to actual strategic incentives.

Overall, “The Question of National Defense” is a Cold War argument for rigorous strategic realism. Morgenstern rejects both panic and wishful thinking. He treats national defense as an interactive system in which technology, economics, logistics, and enemy choice cannot be separated. The essay’s deepest claim is that survival in the nuclear age depends less on any single weapon than on disciplined analysis of incentives, feasible capabilities, and the dangerous asymmetry between slow political hopes and rapid military innovation.