Spasm war:
Powers, Thomas
Of several minds: Thomas Powers SPASM WAR WILL BOTH SIDES SHOOT THE WORKS? LAST FALL I went to see the deputy undersecretary of defense for strategic and space systems in the Office of the...
...In some respects this might be even worse than an all-out war, over in a day, if only because initial recovery efforts-the establishment of new hospitals, transportation centers, emergency tent cities, military rendezvous points, and the like-would offer new targets for attack...
...The third major characteristic of big wars in our century has been their level of gratuitous destruction...
...In terms of money, the war was merely ruinous...
...Whole generations of young men were cut in half...
...One act of destruction elicits another...
...THOMAS POWERS 27 March 1981:169AS POWERS 27 March 1981:1699...
...The awful cost of war is reason to shrink back before it begins...
...Most writing about war treats it as the solution to a problem-the rational (albeit dangerous) pursuit of a tangible (albeit arguable) goal...
...Fleets and armies are destroyed...
...We may take it as a given that the occasion for war would be a substantial one-access to oil in the Persian Gulf, perhaps...
...Not yet, he tells himself the night before his last day...
...Whatever knowledge I have of war is of that sort, or comes from reading and from thinking about what I have read...
...no more do I-Dr...
...But as I say, Dr...
...Tolstoy once said that anyone who has seen a street fight can understand a great battle...
...Cities are the one target which cannot become lost in the confusion of war...
...The logic of war seems to be that if a belligerent can fight he will fight, that leaders will not surrender until surrender is academic...
...During World War II something under three million tons of conventional explosives were dropped by Allied bombers over Europe...
...A single order by the president could fire all of the 1,052 land-based ICBMs within two or three minutes...
...But with all these excellent reasons for halting the war in mid-battle, no leader on either side ever seriously suggested doing so...
...He thought I had misconceived the probable course of any new war involving the MX or other modern strategic weapons systems...
...The Second World War was even more replete with opportunities for surrender...
...It is tough enough to live in fear of arms in peacetime...
...Apparently very little...
...The loss of cities and armies is not taken as reason for quitting, but as reason for risking the rest...
...The 2000 warheads of the MX system could deliver the equivalent of 700 million tons of conventional explosives...
...In my imagination-and at this point imagination is all any of us has to go on-the war follows a different course...
...Whole cities were destroyed in an attempt to break civilian morale...
...The arsenals we have built are very great...
...How is a national leader to explain the sacrifice of so much for nothing...
...Its consequences would of course be catastrophic, something well understood by the political leaders and military men of both sides...
...The techniques of combat reveal little about the spirit of combat, which exists on a different plane...
...there is no time to think...
...But even if a war should begin-he does not know how this might happen...
...afterwards, it serves as goad...
...The victor has the luxury of deciding what the war was about after it is over...
...Not yet, when there is still one step to climb...
...The United States assumes it would lose a conventional war without recourse to nuclear weapons...
...We may assume that one side had committed itself to X, and the other to resisting X. Could either side lightly drop its commitment once the shooting started...
...Once the belligerents have joined in combat the occasion fades in significance and the struggle itself becomes paramount...
...When I feel like that I get away for awhile," he said, "take a ride in an airplane, go out to an Air Force base somewhere and kick a few tires...
...Zeiberg...
...Bombing rallied Britain in 1940-41, and had the same effect in Germany thereafter...
...Once, in the biblical city of Tyre on the coast of southern Lebanon, a friend and I thought we heard artillery in the distance, but it was only a single, isolated boom in the night...
...Things happen quickly...
...The approach did not work...
...Not yet, he says in the morning...
...But this strikes me as unlikely...
...About the only thing one might hope to gain from such a war is freedom from the fear of having to go through it again...
...The fate of neither Poland nor the Balkans can plausibly be said to have justified the immense suffering, death, and destruction of the wars for which they served as occasion...
...You're too hung up on spasm war," he said...
...The Soviets could do the same...
...I don't, for reasons which must have been apparent from the questions I asked...
...Like the rest of the defense community, he feels the best we can hope for is a Mexican stand-off...
...Zeiberg thinks otherwise, and God willing, he'll turn out to be right...
...A man does not have to die until the noose draws tight...
...The military answers, No, not today, we are not beaten yet...
...The leaders of neither side can bear to have lost so much for nothing . And yet the horror is all contained in messages on bits of paper...
...So it is with war...
...The same might be said of the conflict over Poland in 1939...
...This is why Dr...
...The four great belligerents-Britain, France, Russia and Germany-all but destroyed themselves for what amounted in the end to illusory reparations, an illusory hegemony in Europe, minor colonial acquisitions, and inconsequential changes in European frontiers...
...In war the threat becomes actual, and is more than the spirit can bear...
...Not yet, as he is led to the door...
...During the First World War Bertrand Russell was briefly sent to jail for having suggested that the war couldn't possibly win anything worth the sacrifice involved, and that it ought to be ended immediately on any terms available...
...That spirit is not easy to put down...
...This is what Kahn was referring to in the first instance-a brief, instinctive, unrestrained assault which would doubtless bring the same in return...
...In theory arms are acquired in order to defend something one has got, but arms cannot defend without threatening...
...The truth of the matter is that Dr...
...Their beginnings have one kind of logic, their ends another...
...Dr...
...Nuclear weapons, of course, offer an ideal means for inflicting pain...
...Spasm war" is a phrase invented by the civilian strategist and defense consultant, Herman Kahn...
...Nor have I been in government-or in any large institution, for that matter-at a moment of crisis...
...title to a chunk of Central Europe-tends toward an open-ended struggle to free oneself from the threat of arms by destroying them...
...The war does not have to end now...
...Even a first strike-that is, a Pearl Harbor type of surprise attack on military targets- would probably be limited in the hope of mitigating the response...
...Clearly war has its rational side, but this is limited to the mechanics of military operations...
...Zeiberg considers a spasm war very unlikely...
...The practical reasons for strategic bombing, as it was called, were two: air defenses were too effective by day, and cities were the only targets big enough to find at night...
...A nation does not have to surrender until it is beaten...
...Russia, of course, gained nothing at all-not even illusions...
...Not yet, as he reaches the stair to the scaffold...
...No one did so...
...Either side might have backed down without an iota of diminishment of tangible strength...
...What does this suggest about the course of a war between the United States and the Soviet Union...
...Once that is achieved all else follows...
...It is the moment the condemned man dreads...
...We might describe the latter as a spasmodic war-a succession of salvos, one wave of attacks eliciting another in response, as each side tried to bend the other to its will...
...What else are those weapons for...
...Thus began the darkening of the modern mind...
...We talked about the MX missile complex which the Air Force wants to build in an area of central Nevada and Utah called the Great Basin...
...Some years earlier, in Athens the night of the colonels' coup in 1967, my wife and I sat up late on a pleasant terrace, listening to occasional bursts of machinegun fire and wondering what was happening...
...An occasion is just that-a moment for beginning, not a reason for carrying on to the end...
...Panic spreads, communications are strained, confusion rises...
...LAST FALL I went to see the deputy undersecretary of defense for strategic and space systems in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, a man with a crewcut and horn-rimmed glasses named Dr...
...The ghastly loss of life in combat during the First World War was not repeated in the Second, but civilian casualties increased enormously...
...It is possible that one side or the other, reading the logic of the situation in a cold light, would abandon all restraint and reach for whatever advantage is to be obtained from a sudden, spasmic firing of everything in its arsenal...
...The result is a notion of war quite different from that of Dr...
...The real object of war seems to be something quite different, an end to the threat posed by hostile arms...
...Would either side be in a mood for compromise once the shooting had already cost more than X was worth...
...Time foreshortens terribly...
...In war ontology is everything...
...He used it to refer to an all-out, unrestrained, fire-everything war between the United States and the Soviet Union-in effect, a war of annihilation conducted in a mood which might be described as murderous and suicidal in about equal measure...
...I take a different view, and ever since our conversation I have been trying to figure out why...
...When whole societies have been devoted to preparation for war we can expect conflict to be on a commensurate scale...
...Seymour Zeiberg...
...But the infliction of pain on this scale is hard to understand as anything except a response to anger, suffering, and frustration-all of which are in the nature of war...
...Let me begin with a confession: I have no direct, personal experience of war...
...there were no reports of casualties the following day...
...Both sides are armed, and threaten each other, beyond all precedent...
...Perhaps the first thing to be said of big modern wars-and in particular of the two great wars of our century-is that their violence has been dramatically out of proportion to their original goals...
...The second thing we might say about big modern wars is they do not end when one side surrenders, but when one side is beaten...
...Germany and Japan were both beaten by the end of 1944...
...The First World War began in a hopeless muddle of aims-the confused desire, on both sides, to emerge from a conflict of will over a trivial matter with that enhancement of prestige, that aura of confident strength, which comes from getting your way with everybody watching...
...The loss of an entire city, unimaginable before the war, still leaves many others...
...Civilian bombardment in WWII was on an altogether different scale...
...Nuclear weapons carried by conventional aircraft would take the longest of all, but even so the United States could deliver just about all of its warheads in less than twelve hours...
...It is like chess in more ways than one...
...American and Soviet strategic weapons systems are extraordinarily responsive to central direction...
...We might sum up, then, by saying that big modern wars are violent out of all proportion to goals, are fought to the bitter end, and encourage gratuitous destruction...
...It is weapons which threaten us, and weapons which we fight to destroy...
...Big Bertha, the huge German railroad gun which fired on Paris in 1918, scared more people than it injured...
...Not yet, as the hour draws near...
...The oil of the Persian Gulf might serve as an occasion for war between the United States and the Soviet Union, but that isn't what it would be about...
...Zeiberg thinks both sides would agree to call a halt in the war's early stages, not go all the way...
...Victory may be ashes, but at least it is something...
...The losers were beaten-hammered down until they could fight no longer...
...It would take somewhat longer to fire the SLBMs from nuclear submarines because of communications difficulties...
...But the real point at issue here is not whether a substantial majority of our strategic weapons will be fired on the first day (a spasm war in its archetypal form), but whether the war will continue until they are pretty much used up...
...Russia seemed all but beaten in the late summer of 1941, but did not surrender...
...I suppose I must have sounded as if I thought the results would be 200 times worse than the results of WW II...
...Arms, in short, are both cause and result of arms...
...the way it is played determines who will win, but has nothing to do with the larger question-why the game is undertaken in the first place...
...Once the war had begun in earnest-once we had truly begun to suffer-it seems to me the shooting would continue in spasmodic waves until technological exhaustion asserted itself, and we could no longer get at each other...
...I've been thinking about this ever since...
...It is more than they can bring themselves to do...
...Zeiberg favors the MX...
...Thus a war which might begin over something small-a bullying reply to a diplomatic note...
...The psychology is that of the man condemned to be hanged, described by Dostoevsky...
...Zeiberg, like just about every other professional defense expert, does not expect any sort of nuclear exchange, ever-much less a spasm war-between the United States and the Soviet Union...
...Neither surrendered...
...If we can maintain at least a rough balance of forces then we can avoid war...
...Other belligerents-especially China and West Germany-might enter the war at an early stage...
...This was a sensible suggestion...
...He is not unmindful of the dangers of nuclear war, nor immune to moments of gloom...
...The-military is asked, Must we surrender today...
...Even at the very end the Germans could not bring themselves to surrender, but dithered until a revolution at home settled the matter...
...Zeiberg is a thoughtful man...
...Even France waited until it was clear its army was incapable of fighting before accepting an armistice...
...Clausewitz defines the object of military operations as destruction of the enemy's capacity to fight...
...But this does not explain why so many possible occasions for war are passed up, nor why the fighting is so hard to stop once begun...
...We might say that the reason wars are fought-as opposed to the reason they begin-is to see who will be left with weapons at the end...
...I never set foot in Vietnam...
...In terms of life, it beggared the horrors of history...
...The cost would be great from the opening shot...
...But in modern wars the prize-territory, reparations, access to material resources-is dwarfed by the cost of winning it...
...Zeiberg takes a more relaxed view...
...This appears to be a corollary of the immense cost of modern war...
...Britain had no hope of winning in June, 1940, but she did not surrender...
...Zeiberg thinks the MX is a good idea...
Vol. 108 • March 1981 • No. 6
