Three Not‐So‐Obvious Contributions of Psychology to Peace

There are two things in this world that don’t quite fit together. One is that mushroom cloud. We try not to think about it-but it’s there, rising, enormously, behind everything else we do. And then there’s the other thing: the whole complicated spectacle of all the old causes of war going on as usual. There’s the arms race, and ABM, and-much worse than ABM-that hydraheaded monster, MIRV. Most of all, there’s the war in Vietnam. It stands there as a continual, glaring reminder that the United States-our own peace-loving United States-is capable of the kind of bungling that got us into that war. And then comes the thought: ijeven the peace-loving United States could bungle itself into a little war like Vietnam, what guarantee is there that we won’t bungle ourselves into a big war-a nuclear war? It might be possible to exorcize the specter of that mushroom cloud if the Vietnam war did not exist. But it does exist. The sense of bafflement is especially great perhaps among psychologists, because a good many psychologists feel that the bungling that got us into the Vietnam war, and could get us into a nuclear war, consists largely of ignoring certain fundamental Psychological truths. Most of our American policy-makers (both Johnson and Nixon, for instance) behave as if they don’t recognize certain things that we psychologists take for granted-things such as the necessity of empathy (including empathy with our