The United States and Canada, expecting a Soviet nuclear attack, evacuate all cities. Soviet missiles knock out early-warning radar and then destroy Detroit, Pittsburgh, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other U.S. cities. Khrushchev telephones the U.S. president, unnamed but presumably Kennedy, to say: “This is not nuclear blackmail. This is it. Only one-quarter of my force was launched. If you retaliate, I'll wipe out the rest of the U.S.” The president, who has sent Strategic Air Command bombers on retaliatory strikes, calls them back and agrees to negotiate with Khrushchev.
But, says the scenario, “two squadrons of B-52s, either through communication garble or madly enraged, pushed on—delivering 100 megatons on Moscow, Minsk, and Pinsk.” The Soviets answer this Steve Canyonesque mutiny with another wave of missiles. The United States sues for peace.
Soviet troops and officials arrive in the United States, which is divided for occupation. The old Confederacy states east of the Mississippi, plus Kentucky and Tennessee, are turned over to Castro. Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona are put under control of Mexico, which is a Communist nation. Alaska and Hawaii are directly annexed by the Soviet Union, along with the states of the Pacific Northwest. The Northeast and Midwest as far as the Rockies are largely a nuclear wasteland and are occupied by Soviet troops until a puppet government is set up.
The Cuban Confederacy, as it is called, gives American blacks new status as Cuban “blood brothers.” There are wholesale executions of whites in the Orange Bowl. But in this scenario there is hope—at least for the white Ameri-cans—for within a year, a “strongly organized underground of firm discipline” and “growing power” challenges the rule of the Cubans and the blacks. The new organization calls itself the Centennial Ku Klux Klan.
In the Democratic Peoples Federation of Mexico, “Spanish-speaking Americans of intelligence and standing” become local officials. In the Democratic Republic of Mid-America, an underground movement called the Sons of Liberty II has developed ray guns that can “stop nuclear and internal-combustion engines, paralyze or kill life, and possibly influence weather.” But freedom for them and all other Americans is only a dream. The End.
“Too downbeat,” one of the Olympians, presumably John Ford, says of this scenario, adding: “I'm not buying it for a motion picture….” Another brushes aside the dismal vision. Americans, he declares, “are not going to quit, and we are going to have arms all over that are hidden.” We must begin caching arms right now, the Olympians urge as they quickly veer from the hypothetical future to a present threatened by the enemy “at our doorstep.”
No weapon, an Olympian passionately declaims, “is better than the hand or the heart of the man who carries it. We urge that while one American lives who can pull a trigger, it is his duty to do so.” Only two months before, Khrushchev had been caught putting Soviet missiles in Cuba. Most Americans believed that Kennedy had won the nuclear showdown with Khrushchev, but the DAFT scenarios reflect a fear that Khrushchev's bold move in Cuba was far more significant than his retreat. The futures presented to the Olympians are haunted by nuclear confrontations even more ominous than the real Cuban Missile Crisis. The United States is imperiled on every side. Besides the Soviets, with their missiles, there is also “the indistinct shadow of the sleeping Chicom giant … a menace that needed to be chained.”
Caught up in this vision, the Olympians make recommendations that seem more suited to the 1962 present than the 1972 future. They want “subterranean armories of small arms scattered throughout the country and available to any civilian population.” They suggest that the United States go beyond its shores to set up “great secret armories.” The Olympians want missile-equipped submarines hidden in the Antarctic and remote “super-secret bases” manned by covert troops “who can retaliate” from overseas if “we are shot down in the street.” They advise the immediate building of “basic vaults of production units” to preserve vital apparatuses, such as communications equipment, along with the ingredients and blueprints for manufacturing nuclear weapons. Resistance forces, aware of these caches, then can make their own nuclear bombs to use against the Soviet occupiers.
To stave off this looming conquest, the Olympians say, American youth must be taught that “in case of enemy invasion,” everyone is “expected to carry on the fight,” from “the ash cans of the lower East Side of New York to the apple orchards of Oregon.” Special Forces and the CIA should “arm those who are with us behind the iron and bamboo curtains.” And America must prepare to “mercilessly introduce biological and meteorological warfare” against our enemies.
To preserve civilization, the Olympians create a new form of citizenship— “Canambrian,” which encompasses the people of the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, and Australia. Canambrian citizenship could even be extended to Latin Americans, as long as there are “educational safeguards.”
The second DAFT episode, weaving domestic politics with world affairs, opens in August 1963, when “the shamed representatives of the new African states went into virtual hiding” at the U.N. because “most Caucasians south of the Sahara to the Union of S. Africa had been wiped out in a gruesome cannabalistic [sic] orgy of Inter-tribal MauMau murder more shocking than anything in history.”
The U.S. ambassador to the U.N. (then Adlai Stevenson) “introduced only an insipid motion of censure against the responsible African governments.” So “the U.S. Congress, Press and public, surfeited with our namby-pamby reactive policy (dubbed ‘shrinkmanship’ by ex-governor Tom Dewey), blew up.”
Congress demands U.S. withdrawal from the U.N. and impeaches the president. In the new Cabinet, United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther is secretary of state and Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa is secretary of labor. (In real life, Hoffa, just convicted of jury tampering, was the major target of Attorney General Robert Kennedy's investigation of labor racketeering.) General Matthew B. Ridgway is recalled to active duty to head the new War Department as the one chief of staff. The scenario abolishes the office of the Joint Chiefs—the game's sponsor.
Under a resolute new president (presumably Lyndon Johnson), the U.S. Air Force destroys Cuba for no apparent reason. Panama and Puerto Rico jointly become the fifty-first state. All foreign aid is stopped. Taiwan is “turned over to Japan, with the concurrence of China.” American technicians help China build nuclear weapons. “Senator Wayne Morse made an impassioned plea for liberalism, claiming neutralism was really only isolationism, but retired, visibly shaken by his colleagues' roaring boos.”
Europe, with both NATO and Eastern bloc troops withdrawn, forms United Western Europe. A Syrian Muslim known as Saladin II forges a new Saracen empire that encompasses the Arab world. “The Mid-African continent was again ‘Darkest Africa,’ practically out of touch with the rest of the world, consumed by inter-tribal battles.”
Saladin, backed by the Soviet Union and China, conquers Israel. Senator Jacob Javits of New York, a firm supporter of Israel in real life, is mocked in the scenario, which has him demanding that “the United States immediately invade the Saracen Empire and restore a free Israel stretching from the Suez to the Dardanelles.” Only one nation, the Dominican Republic, offers asylum to Israeli refugees. The Saracens take over Israeli nuclear facilities and manufacture small weapons so that individual Arabs are able to carry nuclear bombs into the cities of the West.
When the Olympians respond to DAFT II, laughter greets one remark: “The Kennedy dynasty has been broken.” In that post-Kennedy America, fallout shelters and domed cities guarantee the nation will survive even with “tens of millions of casualties from a massive nuclear attack.” U.S. scientists are working on “a global satellite-borne anti-ballistic missile boost and mid-course intercept system” that uses laser beams to stop enemy missiles. And the Saracens who are toting nuclear bombs will be detected by “cheap portable fluoroscopes for surveillance in guarding against suitcase weapons.”
The Olympians also come up with a “substitute for aid funds”: an antifertility po
wder that can be secretly slipped into a needy nation's drinking water “if it is to our advantage somewhere to check the growth of a population.”
The Olympians revise the U.S. educational system. Old-fashioned patriotic messages are emphasized: “It's a wonderful thing to have the hackles of your neck come up when you see the Stars and the Stripes in front of you.” All highschoolers of a certain IQ are required by law to go to college or trade school. A national physical-fitness program will “make a potential Ranger out of every American boy and out of all American girls that are willing to go for it.” At the age of eighteen or nineteen, “this lad can be a Ranger just by putting on the uniform.” Then, say the Olympians, “we … give them their practice in using knives.”
DAFT III, the wildest of all, focuses directly on the man who is the commander in chief of all the military men in the Pentagon's Room 1D-957. In 1964 the Democratic Party,
committed to the candidacy of President Kennedy, could not inject any suspenseful counter to the battle royal joined between the Republican prospects…. Then, suddenly, … the Southern Democrats and Conservative Republicans agreed to hold a non-partisan convention in Dallas in September to discuss “National policy and the threat of the ‘far left’ to American existence.”
President Kennedy is reelected in 1964, but his running mate is Nelson Rockefeller. Vice President Lyndon Johnson has resigned and is running as the presidential candidate for the newly organized Constitutional Democrats party; Johnson's running mate is Barry Goldwater.
In his second term, President Kennedy drives up the national debt and launches several apparently meaningless small-scale wars in which 34,407 U.S. servicemen are killed and 107,743 wounded. Robert McNamara continues as secretary of defense, but his Pentagon is caricatured as a building full of recordkeeping machines and civilians concerned with motion studies and management analyses. Steve Canyon's beloved Strategic Air Command is put under civilian control.
In the 1968 election, Goldwater defeats Rockefeller, and subsequently, he meets Khrushchev at summit conferences in Moscow and Washington. The two leaders cease competitive aid to other nations, embargo military arms exports to China and Africa, and agree to negotiate a peace treaty. In November 1969, Goldwater and Khrushchev meet again in Moscow, along with leaders of Warsaw Pact and NATO nations.
At a grand ball in the Kremlin,
As the music of the Moscow symphony swelled, and the Bolshoi Ballet began its intricate and beautiful symbolism of Swan Lake, a disheveled subminister rushed in to Khrushchev and whispered something. The Premier, almost apoploctic [sic], removed his shoe and began beating on the arm of his chair. The music stopped. Khrushchev shrieked, “I've been betrayed! The capitalist war mongers have started a revolution in Hungary! It is supported by the Chinese from Albania, and aided by the traitorous Yugoslavs, who proclaim that they are going to restore the old Austro-Hungarian Empire with the help of the West!”
In the stunned silence that followed, communists and westerners edged apart; women fainted; into the ballroom came burp gun-carrying Red Army soldiers in field uniforms. In a wild rage, Khrushchev pointed at President Goldwater, “You have gone too far,” he hissed. “This time the American dogs are not in their kennels. They are here in my house. Remember Beria's death; declare yourselves now, before you die!”
The Olympians react to this cliff-hanger by finishing the scene: President Goldwater—“his white hair gleaming, his black tortoise shell glasses shining”—takes from a briefcase a black box manufactured by Westinghouse (one of whose executives is an Olympian). On the box are rows of buttons, including four labeled Homeland China, Albania, Hungary, Yugoslavia. Other buttons are labeled Total Destruction by Nuclear Devices, Partial Destruction by Conventional Means, Temporary Immobilization by Nerve Gas. (An Olympian later explains that in playing out their game, they had Kennedy secretly approve the development of earth-orbiting satellites “containing nerve gases, permanent death-dealing chemicals, nuclear and conventional weapons.”)
Goldwater shows the black box, which controls the satellites, to Khrushchev and says, “Mr. Chairman, as you can see, the capabilities for stopping the reported actions lies [sic] between the choices you see before you, and I now offer you, as a gesture of good faith, the opportunity of choosing the method of ending the circumstances which have caused your gore [sic] to rise.”
The report does not say which button Khrushchev selects.
The gaming ended on the afternoon of December 7 with Paul Nitze, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, speaking to the Olympians. War games like this are important, he says. “We've done what you've just been doing: gone through several Berlin war games, several disarmament war games…. We're going to read with interest the results of the work you've done.”
Nitze was not just being polite. Politico-military simulations were considered so important for policy planners that the lengthy reports were sent directly to Nitze and other high-ranking officials. During the game, the Olympians heard from General Maxwell D. Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; General Earle G. Wheeler, army chief of staff; General Curtis E. LeMay, air force chief of staff; and Admiral C. V. Ricketts, vice chief of naval operations.
The chiefs' remarks are not recorded in the Olympiad report, but the words of a Pentagon general are. He tells the Olympians that this game “is the initial effort to get some fresh and uninhibited minds from the leading walks of American life in here to add fresh ideas to the Department of Defense in the effort to enhance our U.S. interests.”
We know that the Pentagon has continued to enter the Twilight Zone of imaginary futures on the march toward Vietnam, toward Star Wars, toward whatever still lies beyond. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and commanders of U.S. forces use computer-run games for contingency planning. These games, somewhat more tuned to reality than those played out by the Olympians, have included scenarios based on the potential fall of the Marcos regime in the Philippines and a possible U.S. invasion of Nicaragua. Grenada was gamed long before the actual invasion. But because of the secrecy shrouding the games, we do not know the identities of other “fresh and uninhibited minds” who may have been summoned to Room 1D-957 and asked to help construct the American future.
The Right Man
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
For a figure of archetypical menace in the Cold War, it would be hard to beat General Curtis E. LeMay, his eternal cigar jutting pugnaciously from the right corner of his mouth. In its most dangerous years, he came to personify the merchant of death, the liberal nightmare of the American military. Part of his malign image was of his own making, and he probably could have cared less. “LeMay spoke too candidly and wrote too much,” Victor Davis Hanson notes in his striking reassessment of LeMay's career. He was almost too quotable. The man who turned the Strategic Air Command into a justifiably feared offensive instrument once said, “There are only two things in the world, SAC bases and SAC targets.” Another time he said that the only foolproof antisubmarine system was “to boil the ocean with nukes.” As for Cuba: “Fry it.” Or North Vietnam: Bomb it “back into the Stone Age.” Not surprisingly, LeMay became the object of antiwar sport, W. C. Fields brandishing a nuke. Indeed, Buck Turgidson and Jack D. Ripper, two characters in Stanley Kubrick's memorable send-up, Dr. Strangelove, seem almost a composite of the man. LeMay's reputation may never recover from those twin portrayals. But his detractors could never give him credit for what he was, a sure-handed tactician and unsentimental realist who happened to be one of the great captains of American history: a Ulysses S. Grant of the air, as it were.
LeMay's reputation could rest on his World War II record alone. In Europe in 1943, he developed new formations and tactics that dramatically increased the potency of the Allies' strategic bombing campaign and reduced its losses. In the Pacific in 1945, heading the XXI Bomber Command and, later, the Twentieth Air Force, he soon recognized that high-altitude bombing of Japan was not working. He stripped down his B-29s and sent th
em in low, making them in effect giant dive-bombers. He dumped incendiary bombs on Japan's major cities, which were built largely of wood. The two atomic bombs dropped in August were merely the strategic offensive taken to an extreme—and they worked. As the Japanese emperor Hirohito said, he did not want his nation “reduced to ashes.” LeMay's campaign against Japan is the single instance in which a sustained air offensive ended a war. (Curiously, at the time, he objected to the dropping of the bombs, maintaining that incendiary raids would have done the job as well—a position that was noteworthy in view of his later advocacy of nuclear weapons.)
“I suppose if I had lost the war,” LeMay once confessed, as if no one else mattered, “I would have been tried as a war criminal.” And then he added, “All war is immoral, and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier.” The cost in lives was terrible, but LeMay's air campaign ultimately saved lives, Allied and Japanese. We had to use the bomb. Time was running out. The projected American-led invasion would have been unimaginably bloody, despite what revisionist historians say. But the abrupt end of the Pacific War would have enormous, if not often considered, ramifications for the Cold War. It kept the Soviets out of the Japanese home islands. They were cobbling together an invasion of the northernmost island, Hokkaido, two months before we were ready to launch Operation Olympic, our invasion of the south island, Kyushu. If the Soviets had succeeded in making a landing, they would have had legitimate claim to the island, a significant (and no doubt troublemaking) role in the formal surrender preparations, and a zone of a partitioned Tokyo. Just think of the Cold War twists of a Berlin in the Pacific. To what extent would a Soviet presence have slowed the reconstruction of Japan? Or influenced our decision in 1950 to intervene in Korea, using Japan as a base? We have Curtis LeMay to thank for ending the war when it did end.
The Cold War Page 29