How to Fail at Being Safe

...In this respect, a contemplation of nuclear annihilation becomes mankind's last hope...

...Thirty-five years ago the nuclear weapon was supposed to herald the end of civilization...

...second, the populations of countries must be vulnerable to attack...

...Indeed, it helps prove an "existential" point in a way that death alone cannot...

...rather, it has been policy, and at least some parts of an international legal regime for the "management" of nuclear weapons...

...Except that the solutions, viewed at a certain distance, tend to become increasingly i r r a t i o n a l , more rooted in pessimism, seemingly intent on pushing us closer to the condition that we ostensibly seek to avoid...

...romantic and heroic...

...Though the paradigm appears rather abstract, it showed itself to be a powerful analytic tool, a means of determining "how much is enough" when introduced into the Department of Defense during the tenure of Secretary Robert McNamara...

...After concluding that c e r t a i n e s s e n t i a l anti-ballistic functions of the new systems they examine are "extraordinarily difficult if not impossible to perform," Tsipsis and Parmentola conclude that it is "highly questionable that such a system could function at all, let alone be operationally effective...

...School children participated in air-raid drills, even if the desk in an elementary school seemed to offer only pathetic protection...

...indeed, probably few Americans know that their government is now pledged never to defend them against this particular form of atiack...

...I t began with the development of a strategic theory, built up from unexceptionable premises...

...It has not been utopian speculation which they have produced...

...But for this system to work we must constantly keep the abyss in sight, constantly hover about it without quite falling into it...

...One could imagine, over time, that new technologies might appear which would make these weapons less menacing...

...at the least, we have scarcely examined how we might best live in such a world (even though the questionable prospects of the SALT II treaty 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1980 may make such an examination a pressing, not a theoretical, concern...

...So much, indeed, has been invested in the study of arms control that we find it hard to imagine a world where some measure of strategic arms control is not operative...

...He was succeeded by Neil McElroy, formerly president of Proctor and Gamble...

...The laws of supply and demand which created the doctrine would soon make it vulnerable...

...But this is precisely what our arms control policy has sought to avoid...

...To believe that we are in our current predicament primarily because "economics" was allowed to override all other considerations is to wonder whether the "business ethic" has anything much to contribute to the management of our strategic problems...

...The theory of "deterrence" or "war avoidance" is easily summarized...

...A particular approach to the question of our survival, although' patently "absurd" (in twentieth century parlance), is nonetheless embraced as an absolute good by scholars, poets, and, especially, clergymen...

...Naturally, we have been affected by them, but what we know of war through first-hand experience is less than what the Germans or the Japanese or the Soviets or the Chinese know...

...It need not be all of the partner's population, nor even the larger part of it...

...For such men, economics was hardly the dismal science...

...Our culture accepts a "solution" to the problems created by the existence of nuclear weapons which embodies a refutation of everything we think ourselves to be...

...For such pessimistic imagery has dominated our approach to almost every aspect of the problems raised by the existence of nuclear weapons--even those political approaches which, on the surface, stress that this, too, is a problem amenable to rational solutions...

...Thus, the nuclear weapon helps to define the "human condition...

...For all the supposed legalism and rationalism and positivism that animates our arms control efforts, for instance--for all the physics, arithmetic, and algorithms in them--there appears to be an almost vested interest in catastrophe...

...For if there is any relationship between contemporary arms control doctrine and traditional Christian theology, the comparison is deeply unflattering to the latter...

...Thus, in the 1960s a doctrine was created which argued that "superiority" could be safely abandoned, that a new condition of "parity" would be not only cheaper but, more important, safer...

...What is less reasonable, however, is the a priom" assumption that nothing can work and, even if it could be shown to work, t h a t "something" would prove more dangerous than otherwise...

...For example, it is not self-evident that the nuclear weapon is the ultimate weapon, ultimate in the sense that there is no defense against it...

...Nuclear forces embody technology which is now about 40 years old...

...Thus, the magazine has launched a campaign of sorts against high-technology missile defenses...

...That he therefore brought to this methodology the authority of big business and modermty was important, for "assured d e s t r u c t i o n " as a s t r a t e g i c doctrine seemed to derive from the application of management science to military problems...

...As the dominant concern of the academic community, it has likewise dominated most thinking and publishing in the field...

...They are essentially elaborations on the atomic bomb and the V-2 rocket...

...There is no logical reason the treaty ought to have been written this way, except to protect a certain vision of how a nuclear-armed world must perforce exist...

...By contrast, Carnes Lord, writing in the May, 1980, Commentary, takes a view which seems more in accordance with our "common sense" of technological possibility: What may prove truly revolutionary in this connection, however, are unconventional ABM systems, based on so-called directed-energy technology, particularly high-energy laser tech: notogy...

...If that was a bad thing then, modern deterrence theory has transformed it into a good thing...

...But it was hailed by those who wrote it not merely for this, but for the permanence it gives to the "assured destruction" model...

...Instead, in deciding how to deal with the conventional military superiority enjoyed in key theaters by the Soviets and their allies the Chinese, nuclear weapons were seen as the cheapest, most efficient, alternative...

...Once this paradigm is accepted, an upper limit on nuclear forces can be defined, at least in theory...

...But the real irony is this: By making nuclear war "unthinkable," the strategists themselves have made it more likely...

...Those who possess nuclear weapons must come to understand that their use is futile...

...Massive retaliation" as a strategy was grounded in basic economics...

...In retrospect, the economic vulnerability of the strategy of the 1950s led to a great insight in the early 1960s...

...But nuclear warfare is only one leitmotif in a broader genre...

...There was an awesome danger in the "demystification" of the nuclear weapon which businessmen and likeminded generals and admirals did not grasp...

...Yet there is hardly a widespread understanding of what has happened...

...A subsidiary irony has to do with the fact that if one side is seen making preparations to defend its people from nuclear attack, it may be a reasonable presumption on the other side that such defense implies a willingness to attack, a willingness to deprive the other of the hostages on which the peace depends...

...But recent tests in this country have also shown that laser weapons could be considerably more lethal against Soviet ballistic missiles than had previously been thought...

...10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1980...

...There has never been one...

...But what has given American arms control theorizing a profound impact on government policy is the way the theoreticians have found a practical method of implementing their ideas...

...The representative proponent of this point of view was Charles E. Wilson, President Eisenhower's first Secretary of Defense, formerly Chief Executive Officer of General Motors...

...to succumb to gamma radiation is ugly and, ultimately, futile...

...It seemed that nuclear war was a real possibility and preparations were made after a fashion...

...The conviction that nothing will work is now written into law in the form of the SALT I ABM treaty of 1972, ratified in the Senate by a vote of 88-2...

...Literary treatments seem to have derived from John Hersey's brilliant reporting, first printed in the New Yorker in August of 1946, and to multiply Hiroshima by the number of nuclear explosions that a nuclear war would involve is to imagine unprecedented death and devastation...

...Instead, tt began to take on all the character of a credo, beginning with the idea that Safeguard could not work, but ending with the conviction that nothing else will work--ever...

...It would be necessary, in other words, to place the dismal science at the service of a more despairing strategic doctrine...

...Now, it is not the "reasonableness" of this approach as such which need be examined, so much as the conditions it presumes...

...The peace can be kept, provided both parties have confidence in each other's fundamental hostility...

...Indeed, there are better and worse ways die, and some of them are wonderfully Charles Homer is adjunct professor in the school of foreign service at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C...

...Call it tough-minded or pragmatic or middleAmerican, it was the attitude that, whatever one might say about nuclear war philosophically, it was, for the United States, economical...

...What concerned them was that a national strategy which accepted the fighting of a nuclear war as a real possibility served only to make nuclear war more likely...

...We pride ourselves on being an innovative, dynamic, moral people, and yet our collective intelligence has produced a situation where we must rely, for a national strategy, on concepts which imply stagnation, stasis, and barbarism...

...Perhaps this "Safeguard/Sentinel" system really was the "white elephant" it was said to be...

...One understands immediately t h a t nuclear war is a different matter...

...This is probably what makes the subject so very depressing...

...They have produced ideas as influential as any in recent times, yet how they did it, and how they came to implement them--and what those ideas are and what they imply--are relatively unknown...

...Our foreign wars have involved, directly, only a small fraction of our population...

...The analogy is useful but, in the deepest sense, profoundly misleading...

...For most of us to know what war is "really like," therefore, we must rely on art--on literature and films especially...

...It has become fashionable, almost obligatory, to argue, for example, that the emergence of nuclear forces has helped to maintain the peace, that the strategic nuclear balance as currently constituted--on the basis of the possibility of mutual annihilation, that is--is far more "stable" than people might suppose...

...For thirty years ago, the emerging "existential" concern with nuclear weapons encountered a prior American attitude that would not be easily displaced...

...For, in the 1950s, the damage that might be done to the United States in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union was quite minimal compared with the damage that would certainly be done today...

...All this is but the briefest sketch of what is, in fact, one of the more important topics in the recent cultural history of the United States...

...Two physical conditions must be met: First, the nuclear forces themselves must be invulnerable to attack or "preemption...

...They will realize this if strategic nuclear forces are of such a character that the initiation of nuclear war will result in the "assured destruction" of the party who initiates the war...

...McNamara, like Wilson before him, had been an automotive executive, the p r e s i d e n t o f Ford...

...The dominant school in contemporary arms control doctrine may be theological in its method, but it is not theological in its content...

...But it would all have to be done, once again, in characteristically American fashion...

...To die of a broken heart or by a bullet or by a well-aimed arrow is one thing...

...The prospect of Armageddon is the best deterrent...

...Various ballistic missile defense schemes have been proposed, of course, and just as it is reasonable to suppose that some could not have worked, it is just as reasonable to suppose that some might have...

...For the most conspicuous aspect of this paradigm is the permanence it presumes...

...Preparedness, traditionally thought of as a deterrent to war, would become in the nuclear age a stimulus to war...

...All this is very grim, and yet there must be something deeply satisfying about it...

...Strategically, however, it could make sense only so long as the United States was prepared to maintain the strategic nuclear balance which made it "credible," that is, American superiority...

...Within this most prestigious chronicler of the world's scientific and technological p r o g r e s s t h e r e is c o n s i s t e n t l y p r e s e n t e d the a priori argument that nothing can work against ballistic missiles...

...As late as the early 1960s in fact, an American "first strike" would almost certainly have deprived the Soviets of their ability to damage us at all...

...Nuclear war should be avoided and, therefore, its avoidance should be the primary focus of our energies...

...All of us are potential casualties, but none of us gives to the rest any sense that our demise in a nuclear war will ever be regarded as beautiful by anyone, either in the immediate or long-term future...

...Yet for all these obvious defects, this paradigm has become the strategy in our own country for dealing with thermonuclear weapons...

...The development of lasers as anti-missile weapons is by now relatively far advanced, and they are likely to prove useful eventually in a variety of air defense roles...

...The best way to limit war is to link it to " t o t a l " war on a scale hitherto unimagined...

...Wilson, who served from 1953 to 1957, is remembered for the dictum, "more bang for the buck...

...But the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1980 9 argument did not stop there...

...Implicit in this is a grave threat: If one country attempts to preempt the nuclear forces of the other, the victim of that attack will respond by destroying the "hostages" in the other country...

...diminish the prospect and people will cease to be serious...

...In its prideful adherence to its past product, it offers a mythology of "perpetual peace" based on only the haziest outline of the future...

...for the chronology of "theory" first, "economics" second at least has the benefit of imputing some serious, larger concerns to those who brought about this significant revolution in our affairs...

...In 1969, when an anti-ballistic missile system was proposed, the debate over it was heated and, ultimately, overwhelming--for the system was approved but the argument was lost...

...They must become hostage to each country's good intentions...

...The paradigm is not s e e n as a temporary condition imposed on us, enjoining us to devote energy and resources to finding a way out of its brutal logic, but rather as something which ought to be institutionalized...

...In it, chemicals and machines tend to destroy civilization "as we have known it," one way or the other...

...It is a treaty o f unlimited duration...

...It may be readily argued, of course, that the chronology of these events has been reversed, that a particular strategic theory was merely a post hoc rationalization for prior economic and managerial impulses, that mere "efficiency" had to be justified by an elegant nuclear "ideal...

...The key insight of the arms control theoreticians was their recognition that their formulations had to have the appearance of genuine "tough-mindedness...

...As a subject for art, war seems as old as civilization itself, and there is, therefore, a good deal to imagine...

...At a time when the "economics" of nuclear war favored us by an enormous margin, we were most disturbed by another kind of calculation...

...to die in such bleak surroundings is never especially ennobling...

...It may appear to be grappling with "ultimate questions, '~ but what it is producing is not theology at all, but mythology...

...To borrow a phrase from the title of a 1960 book by Charles Hitch and Roland McKean, this is what has become of the Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age...

...McElroy was succeeded by Thomas S. Gates, an investment banker...

...Thus, fictional treatments of nuclear war have tended to take as their theme "the end of the world...

...It seeks to define a condition which is true more or less forever, a condition which cannot be changed, a condition born of the immutable irony of the nuclear age...

...there is no real e x p e r i e n c e , only a r t i s t i c imagination, sometimes disguised as scientific analysis...

...In particular, the society of the future sketched in science fiction is almost invariably totalitarian...

...Its faith is the faith of a believer who has no sense of either science or history...

...Those who gained ascendency over strategic policy at that time were dissatisfied with the state of thinking about the subject for reasons which really had little to do with mere dollars...

...They argue that the existence of the nuclear weapon has had a transforming effect on the practice of politics, but they do not prove that it has...

...After all, the literature of science fiction has always been dreary...

...The United States has had a rather limited experience of war...

...having created the means of destroying all life, man has made of "human achievement" a reductio ad absurdum...

...True, they are refined and enhanced, more destructive, speedier, more reliable, and more expensive versions of these devices, but they are, still and all, almost 40 years old...

...What constitutes this "assured destruction" is, of course, arbitrary...

...The "arms control" problem has come to permeate almost all intellectual activity related to the larger problem of nuclear weapons...

...Toward the beginning of his memorable book on SALT I, Cold Dawn, John Newhouse likens the discussion of the s t r a t e g i c arms control t h e o r i s t s to the disputes among medieval scholastics...

...Through the nuclear weapon, we have found a way of making war so horrible that war becomes unthinkable...

...But whatever these conclusions teach us, they nonetheless present us with as many questions as they answer...

...The problem of nuclear war could be seen, therefore, as a problem of controlling nuclear weapons and, evenreally, of eliminating them...

...No one has conducted organized warfare on our territory since we ourselves did in the mid-nineteenth century...

...But the older view would not be so easily overthrown if the attack upon it partook in any way of the "sissified" or "muddleheaded" approaches of scientists or clergymen or left-leaning apologists for the Soviet Union...

...some would say it defines a primary responsiTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1980 7 bility in the "modern condition," namely, the avoidance of a catastrophic nuclear war, by keeping the possibility of it quite alive...

...They had shown themselves flippant and, therefore, dangerous...

...Here we leave the realm of economics and enter the realm of faith...

...But the maintenance of such a balance would become increasingly expensive over time...

...It commits us not to undertake a physical defense of the United States against nuclear attack--ever...

...One hopes that this is not what happened, however...

...No one will paint us into an immortal " G u e r n i c a . " Our s u f f e r i n g will be n e i t h e r inspirational nor r e d e m p t i v e . Thus, nuclear war has acquired a special role in defining the "human condition" It places twentieth century technology at the service of a twentieth century philosophy...

...No one has yet established a satisfyingly poetic mode of death in a nuclear war...

...Because it is seen as being derived from physical law, it is thought to warrant the force of man-made law, to the extent possible...

...This arrangement is held to be an "irony" of modern times...

...Both by implication and by necessity they argue against any new technological solution to what is now an old "nuclear question...

...If all this seems simple-minded in retrospect--and we are now supposed to think that it was simple-minded--it seems so only because of a simple historical fact: At that time, when the instinct for "preservation" was greatest, the prospect of nuclear war was least...

...It implies that we are helpless by maintaining not only that there is no way out of the nuclear predicament, but, even more, that it is good that we are in it...

...For example, even Scientific American, which introduces each of its issues with extracts of items which appeared in its pages both 100 and 50 years ago, applies an ahistorical dogmatism to this particular realm of human ingenuity...

...And one could imagine f u r t h e r that someone concerned with the devastating potential of nuclear war would want to make the appearance of such technologies easier, not more difficult...

...And they acquired "legitimacy" for their notions by employing that most American of virtues: good business sense...

...To believe at any point that one's partner in this arrangement will not rapidly make use of his capability to annihilate millions is to dissolve the t r u s t - - a trust in the eagerness of man to do the worst of which he is capable, of course--that holds the world together...

...One needed, accordingly, a paradigm which could establish an upper limit on the number of nuclear weapons in the world, not a paradigm which could establish no such ceiling, let alone a basis for reductions and ultimate elimination...

...Thus, unlike the theology it nominally emulates, it numbs the mind and corrodes the soul...

...It is this prior assumption which underlies the oftentimes furious r6sponse which greets any suggestion that this is not so, and ought not to be so...

...Charles Homer HOW TO FAIL AT BEING SAFE In a world of nuclear weapons, our strategists say, preparedness is aggression and strategic superiority is a threat to peace...

...A good example of this is an article by Kosta Tsipsis and John Parmentola in the April, 1979, Scientific American which in its affect was reminiscent of ancient arguments that no heavier-than-air craft could ever fly...

...It is the number required to destroy a certain fraction of the partner's population, assuming that the worst happens to one's own nuclear forces...

...Civil defense programs were taken seriously, even if their results were meager...

...In particular, they do not tell us very much about either the "operational code" or the ideology of a totalitarian Marxist state which is itself acquiring nuclear weapons in everincreasing numbers...

...Ostensibly, the treaty prevents the construction of systems like Safeguard...

...Instead--and here was the insight--the attack against older attitudes would first have to be made on the same basis which had established them...

...I n the 1950s, when it was not yet "understood" that prior remedies were futile, the reaction to nuclear weapons was remarkably simple...