Table Of ContentTHE
WIZARDS
OF
ARMAGEDDON
Fred Kaplan
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS STANFORD, CALIFORNIA
S N A S General Editor, Martin Sherwin
TANFORD UCLEAR CE ERIES
ADVISORY BOARD
Barton J. Bernstein. David Holloway, and Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky
FOR MY PARENTS
Stanford University Press Stanford, California
Copyright © 1983 by Fred Kaplan Foreword copyright © 1991 by the Board
of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University First published by Simon &
Schuster, Inc., in 1983 Reissued by Stanford University Press in 1991
Printed in the United States of America ISBN 0-8047-1884-9 LC 90-71236
Last figure below indicates year of this printing:
08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01
THE STANFORD NUCLEAR AGE SERIES
, delivered by the military, and adopted by
CONCEIVED BY SCIENTISTS
policymakers, nuclear weapons emerged from the ashes of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki to dominate our time. The politics, diplomacy, economy, and culture of
the cold war nurtured the nuclear arms race and, in turn, have been altered by it.
"We have had the bomb on our minds since 1945," E. L. Doctorow observes. "It
was first our weaponry and then our diplomacy, and now it's our economy. How
can we suppose that something so monstrously powerful would not, after forty
years, compose our identity? The great golem we have made against our enemies
is our culture, our bomb culture—its logic, its faith, its vision."
The pervasive, transformative potential of nuclear weapons was foreseen by
their creators. When Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson assembled a committee
in May 1945 to discuss postwar atomic energy planning, he spoke of the atomic
bomb as a "revolutionary change in the relations of man to the universe."
Believing that it could mean "the doom of civilization," he warned President
Truman that this weapon "has placed a certain moral responsibility upon us
which we cannot shirk without very serious responsibility for any disaster to
civilization."
In the decades since World War II that responsibility has weighed heavily
upon American civilization. Whether or not we have met it is a matter of heated
debate. But that we must not fail and, moreover, that we are also responsible for
preparing the next generation of leaders to succeed, can hardly be questioned.
Today, nearly half a century into the nuclear age, the pervasive impact of the
nuclear arms race has stimulated a fundamental re-evaluation of the role of
nuclear armaments and strategic polices. But mainstream scholarly work in
strategic studies has tended to focus on questions related to the development, the
deployment, and the diplomacy of nuclear arsenals. Such an exclusively
managerial focus cannot probe the universal revolutionary changes about which
Stimson spoke, and the need to address these changes is urgent. If the academic
community is to contribute imaginatively and helpfully to the increasingly
complex problems of the nuclear age, then the base of scholarship and pedagogy
in the national security-arms control field must be broadened. It is this goal that
the Stanford Nuclear Age Series is intended to support, with paperback reissues
of important out-of-print works and original publication of new scholarship in
the humanities and social sciences.
Martin J. Sherwin General Editor
CONTENTS
Foreword by Martin J. Sherwin 4
Year Zero 9
Living with the Bomb 24
Planning for War 33
On the Beach at RAND 51
The Superbomb 74
The Vulnerability Study 85
The Hydra-Headed Monster ///
The Gaither Committee J 25
The Report of Maximum Danger 144
The Missile Gap 155
The Massive-Retaliation Speech 174
The Limited-War Critique 185
Counterforce 201
Dr. Strangelove 220
The Real Rivalry 232
The Whiz Kids 248
Two Briefings 258
The SIOP and the Road to Ann Arbor 263
The Gap That Never Was 286
The Crises 297
Shelter Mania 307
Damage Unlimited 375
Vietnam: Stalemate 328
The ABM Debate 343
The New Generation 356
Dancing in the Dark 385
Notes 392
Interviews 431
Acknowledgments 435
Index 438
FOREWORD Martin J. Sherwin
of his brilliant and compelling study of the nuclear priesthood
NEAR THE END
and their classified world, Fred Kaplan describes the ambivalence of one of his
"wizards": "In retrospect, [he] saw that once he slipped into the deep, dark pit of
nuclear strategy, it was easy to become totally absorbed, living, eating, breathing
the stuff every hour of every day, but that once he departed from that realm for a
while and scanned it from a distance, it seemed crazy, unreal."
But no matter how clearly the madness of the enterprise appeared from afar,
the temptation was irresistable to play this game of the gods, to calibrate and
recalibrate the "delicate balance of terror." Thus, when the Pentagon summoned
he responded as before, and he "slipped slowly into the pit once more."
At the center of that pit was the RAND Corporation, the original cold war
Think Tank, funded by the Air Force and dedicated to the proposition that all
problems—including the problem of nuclear war— could be controlled by
rational analysis. Established in the late 1940's to "think about the unthinkable"
for the military service that appears to have thought about little else, RAND's
"defense intellectuals" invented a new language and vocabulary and, in the
process, taught an entire generation of political and military leaders (Russians no
doubt as well as Americans) to view the problems of war and peace in the
nuclear age as the economists, political scientists, and physicists at RAND
thought about them.
"What kind,of men will be willing to work in this centrally important field in
peacetime," sociologist Edward Shils asked on a conference on atomic energy in
September 1945, "when they know that all they do is intended for war and that
all they can do can confer on mankind only the dubious benefits of a victory in
an atomic bomb war?"
The Wizards of Armageddon answers Shils's question explicidy, and implicidy
poses another: In light of the strategic theories of the past (which Kaplan
describes in revealing and terrifying detail), how is it possible to avoid a nuclear
holocaust in the future? The answer may be found in the pages of this book, but
it is an answer that neither the strategists nor our government are willing to
accept.
Ever since the bomb became a reality it has been employed as an instrument of
policy and, as Kaplan's thorough research demonstrates, the purpose of all
strategic thinking has been to maintain it as such. The bizarre theories—Massive
Retaliation, Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), Counterforce, limited nuclear
options, "shot across the bow," first strike/second strike, and so on—were not
conceived merely as deterrents to war; they were designed as determinants of the
peace. As such, they did not have to conform with reality so much as they had to
help shape it. "All the gasping of horror which occurs every time the use of the
atomic bomb is mentioned," Bernard Brodie, the "father" of nuclear strategy
complained during the Korean War, "is extremely harmful to us politically and
diplomatically." After all, the purpose of the enterprise is to find "more
reasonable forms of using violence," explained RAND alumnus Herman Kahn,
author of On Thermonuclear War and Thinking About the Unthinkable.
Trapped between the reality of nuclear weapons and the politics of the cold
war, our political leaders have been increasingly attracted to the nuclear option
since 1945. As McGeorge Bundy has remarked, "Presidents and politburos . . .
may not themselves be persuaded by the refined calculations of the nuclear
gamesman—but they do not find it prudent to expose them for the political
irrelevance they are.. . . In consequence, the internal politics of the strategic arms
race has remained the prisoner of its technology.
The fusion of technology and theory in the service of diplomacy led to a
structure of peace that teetered precariously on the brink of nuclear disaster. In
the 1980's, the first Reagan administration's discussions of limited and protracted
nuclear war, its emphasis on first-strike weapons, and its concern with civil
defense brought this reality to public attention. But the bellicose language also
created an erroneous impression: that these attitudes and nuclear war theories
were something new. As Kaplan's inside history of nuclear strategy demon-
strates, it was only the public articulation of these views that was new—these
attitudes and theories had determined policies for decades. By unintentionally
precipitating the nuclear debate of the 1980's, the Reagan administration helped
to draw attention to the nu clear strategists' "deep, dark pit." But even though
Gorbachev pointed searchlights of sanity into the pit, it is still not possible to see
its contents clearly. The Wizards of Armageddon is an excellent probe for those
of us who are still trying to discover what has been stored in the pit.
YEAR ZERO
I A 7, 1945, a cool but sticky Tuesday morning in Bethany,
T WAS UGUST
Connecticut, a sleepy suburb resting on the northwestern edges of New Haven.
Bernard Brodie, a brilliant new addition to the Yale University political science
faculty, went driving with his wife. Fawn, to buy The New York Times at a
drugstore in the neighboring village of Woodbridge, roughly halfway between
the Brodie home and the Yale campus.
Bernard Brodie was fascinated by the weapons of war, especially the weapons
of naval warfare and how they affected the tactics and strategies of those great
battles on the high seas that had proved so decisive to the outcomes of war over
the past few centuries. For most of the present war, World War II, Brodie had
worked for the Navy in Washington, D.C., where he had been given, among
other assignments, the task of ghostwriting the biannual report of Admiral Ernest
J. King, Chief of Naval Operations and commander of the entire U.S. wartime
fleet. Brodie's book, A Layman's Guide to Naval Strategy, first published in
1942, was in its third edition. The Naval War College had persuaded the
Princeton University Press to drop the word "Layman 's " from the title so that
the school could assign the book as a standard text for officers without
embarrassment. Now, at age thirty-five, Brodie was acquiring a solid reputation
as one of the nation's foremost naval strategists.
Stepping inside the pharmacy, Brodie picked up a copy of the Times. The
banner headline riveted his attention: "First Atomic Bomb Dropped on Japan;
Missile Is Equal to 20,000 Tons of TNT; Truman Warns Foe of a 'Rain of Ruin.'
