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THE GREAT DEBATE by Raymond Aron. 265 pages. Doubleday. $4.95.

With lucidity and quiet understatement, the distinguished French pundit sifts the various theories of nuclear deterrence--U.S., Soviet, European--that have transformed the nature of war and diplomacy. In the past, Aron points out, war was simply the last stage of strategy, Clausewitz' "extension of politics." Now, as in the 1962 Cuban confrontation, the great powers are committed to a war of bluff in which strategists insist that the bluff must never be called or war declared. "For the first time in history," writes Aron, "entire weapons systems, developed at the cost of billions of dollars, are retired without ever having been put to any but purely diplomatic use; or we might say that their purpose is precisely to render their military use superfluovis." As for Charles de Gaulle's force de frappe, Aron argues that it reflects a new Maginot Line psychology, seeking security behind a pitifully inadequate nuclear arsenal that could conceivably invite attack. Aron is not necessarily opposed to France's nuclear force if it is accepted as a hedge against the "unpredictability of future diplomacy," but he scoffs at the notion that this "symbol of patriotic pride" could ever be a credible substitute for the U.S. deterrent.

AMERICAN ASPECTS by Denis W. Brogan. 195 pages. Harper & Row. $4.

Astonishingly enough, neither Oxford nor Cambridge offers a course in U.S. history alone. But Britain has D. W. Brogan, 64, an amiable Americanolopist-at-large who has exhaustively studied the U.S. past and present, has spent years working and traveling through the land, and has written some of the most perceptive books about the Republic (The American Character, Government of the People) by any British author since Lord Bryce. In this discursive, diverting collection of essays, Brogan discusses the Civil War, Henry Adams, Teddy Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower. He is surprisingly tolerant of such institutions as the freeway, perhaps overgenerous in ascribing to U.S. foreign policy a kind of global Good Samaritanism. But Brogan also avuncularly warns that from Africa to Asia, "very imperfect solutions are all that can be hoped for, and the pursuit of perfection can end--and usually will end--in deception and disillusion."

THE CLOWN by Heinrich Boell. 247 pages. McGraw-Hill. $5.

Thanks to West Germany's 20-year statute of limitations, Nazi war criminals will be safe from prosecution after May. Then responsibility for the nation's conscience will rest largely in the hands of Germany's postwar novelists, whose attempts to comprehend the unsavory past have produced such memorable fiction as Guenter Grass's The Tin Drum and Heinrich Boell's Billiards at Half-Past Nine. In The Clown, Boell tells the story of Hans Schnier, a young professional pantomimist who specializes (like his author) in satirizing German complacency. Schnier is in desperate straits: his mistress Marie has left him, his bookings have dried up, he is broke. For almost the entire novel he sits by the telephone, appealing to his family and friends. But when he asks for help--a loan, a job, information about Marie, a kind word--he gets nothing. Thus the novel assembles a bitterly accurate rogues' gallery of German types, all so cheerily conniving to forget how they once so cheerily connived with the Nazis. Yet Boell lacks the slashing, ultimately healing fury of Guenter Grass. The Clown comes to an abrupt end when the hero, stripped of hope, puts on his whiteface makeup and goes out to beg among the costumed crowds of the Rhineland's Fasching revels.

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