David Hamburg Interview (1986); Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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One of the areas that the Carnegie Corporation has identified to pursue conflict studies is related to Soviet behavior and the avoidance of nuclear war. Why this focus on these problems at this time?
When I came to the foundation three years ago, it seemed to me then, and it still does, that there is a sense in which the central fact of our time is the consequence of nuclear war. It's very hard to grasp, the enormity is such that we've never had any experience with a metric that involves killing of tens or hundreds of millions of people in an hour's time. We've never been able to make the earth virtually uninhabitable before; we didn't have that capacity. So that it seemed to me that we have to face up to the break with our past inherent in the scale of disaster that nuclear war involves, and therefore there is an overriding necessity to bring more talent, more ideas, and more possibilities to bear on ways of reducing the risk of nuclear war.
Seeing superpower conflict as a major problem, how does Carnegie mobilize intellectual resources to focus on this issue?
The first phase of our program was to try to stimulate and foster, in a number of universities around the country, great scientific universities, a kind of mobilization of talent from all different sectors of the university: physical, biological, behavioral, and social sciences, that have something to contribute to our understanding of this problem and how we might get out of the problem. We have tried to do that as phase one. Clarifying the consequences, but more than that, concentrating very heavily on constructive, useful steps to be taken. For instance, by understanding the paths to war, how could it actually happen? And then by thinking about interventions in terms of policy change or procedures that would have a bearing on each path that would make it less likely that we would slide down the slope.
When you're talking about the Soviet Union, I'm reminded of a quote which I found in a recent essay of yours called "Prejudice, Ethnocentrism, and Violence in an Age of High Technology." You wrote, "Enduring hostility between groups is likely to arise when the groups preserve a conflict of fundamental interest, a depreciating difference in status, or differences of beliefs that jeopardize self-esteem." Doesn't that define much of U.S. - Soviet relations?
Yes it does. I think we do have that situation, fundamental conflicts of interest and habitual depreciation of each other in a way that jeopardizes self-esteem in both countries. Our sense of being really worthwhile and able to earn respect in the world, all that is jeopardized and therefore it seemed to me that it would be a while before any fundamental change in the U.S. - Soviet relationship could occur. Although I would like to see that happen, and we may want to come back to that subject, but what to do until the doctor comes? Until you could have a therapeutic outcome of a basic change in the relationship, could you do some things that would reduce the risk of nuclear war? That's where we took up the crisis prevention approach, since the scholarly studies seem to suggest, from Berkeley and Stanford and various other places, that it's extremely difficult to manage a nuclear-type crisis, and that we ought to be thinking about ways to stand back a bit from the brink. That we and the Soviets could both recognize it's in our national interest, however we may compete, and however high the stockpile of nuclear weapons may be, it's still in our national interest to stay back a step or two from the brink of nuclear crisis, because it's all too easy to slip into the chasm if we get right up to that brink.
Do you think that some of our insights about problems of self-esteem in the individual can be applied to social groups in this particular case?
I think it's worth exploring, particularly when we come to think about how, if at all, we might change the U.S. - Soviet relationship on a time scale of decades. Is it conceivable that in ten or twenty or thirty years some fundamental change could occur that would be roughly, very roughly speaking, akin to the change that's been taking place with China, with Yugoslavia, and, in a different way, with Germany and Japan? It's worth thinking about, and a way to get into that problem is to ask what are some of the strong desiderata of decent human relations at the individual level, the small-group level, and the community level. And ask, does that give you at least a clue of how you might proceed at the international level?
The program description for the Carnegie in this particular area includes projects that study the Soviet Union and projects that ask questions about avoiding nuclear war. What about projects that look at the United States' role in this? Will they come later? Or do we know all the answers there?
No, I don't think we know all the answers. We've tried to formulate the projects more in an interactional way, a kind of dynamic interplay, over the years, between us and the Soviets. And indeed, increasingly between us and the Soviets in the context of a really multi-centric world. After all, what's China going to be like in 20 or 30 or 40 years? What's Japan going to be like, what's India going to be like, not to speak of Europe? So that I do really believe that we have to think of ourselves together with the Soviets, going back and forth all the time, influencing each other, and taking account, increasingly, of the world around both of us.
In your essay you mention one strategy for conflict avoidance or transcendence is multiple relations, multiple loyalties that can educate one about the other's thinking. Are scientific exchanges between the Soviet Union and the United States very important in this process?
I think they are important. Scientific and scholarly exchanges are important, cultural exchanges are important, growing trade with business contacts would be important, as well as the governmental contacts at a variety of levels. Now, most recently President Reagan has suggested a drastic extension of all that by trying to exchange large numbers of young students. And I believe he's inclined to push it back as young as he could get the Soviets to agree. The effect of all that, over a period of years, could be that you'd have a kind of a multifaceted set of connections with a lot more understanding, on our part of them, and on their part of us. I don't think it would be, you know, a "hotsy-totsy" world in which they would think we were great and they would think we're great. I'd like to believe that they would find a lot that would be attractive here. At least it would tend to make it a more human situation. I think that one of Gandhi's great contributions was to keep in mind the common humanity of the adversary, even in time of competition or great stress.
I wonder, in thinking about Soviet - American relations, whether the political side is almost equivalent to a patient's neurosis in the sense that it always rears its head to obfuscate whatever knowledge and understanding you're developing. I have in mind, for example, the incident with Flight 007, the Korean Airline, and the way that was handled politically. I mean, it was a traumatic experience and a real disaster, but it was also used as a way to fuel the fires of animosity toward the Soviet Union. How do we get over these kind of hang-ups that our politicians seem to have, both on the left and the right?
The problem of stereotypes is always a difficult problem. They have stereotypes of us and we of them. There was, from 1977 to 1979, a joint history project in which U.S. and Soviet scholars were trying to see how history was taught in each country and work toward some shared understanding of what would be decent. In fact, it was clear that there were pretty severe stereotypes, depreciatory stereotypes, in both countries. We suffer from it. I have to say, I think the Soviets suffer from it even more. Their media carry almost a grotesque caricature of the United States, and have for many years. Now there's a question which I think President Reagan has gotten interested in, whether this new generation of Soviet leadership might be prepared to move toward the easing of those stereotypes. If they are, we should make serious efforts to reciprocate in the easing of our stereotypes.
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