The Best of I.F. Stone

by I. F. Stone

  No doubt the purpose is to make our threat of going to war over Berlin credible to Khrushchev, as indeed it should. Our ultimate weapon, Madison Avenue, may be able to sell anything to the American people, even the notion—why fool around with aspirin?—that one little bullet through the head and that headache will disappear. Some years back, the Pentagon and popular magazines were advertising how many Russian cities we could “take out” if necessary. Now the same moral imbecility is being applied to our own cities. “About five million people,” Life says lightly, “less than 3% of the population, would die.” It adds hastily, to anticipate any vestigial humane twinges, “This in itself is a ghastly number. But you have to look at it coldly. . . .” Life has been telling us righteously that the godless Chinese Reds put little value on human life. Mao is willing to see millions die to wipe out capitalism but Henry Luce is willing to see millions die to wipe out communism. Kennedy, like Khrushchev, prepares the public mind to gamble all, if necessary, on Berlin. This is the real mobilization. Our moral scruples and our good sense must first be conscripted.

  Worse than the horror is the levity, the transparent mendacity and the eager commercialism. A happy family with three children is shown by Life in their well-stocked, assemble-it-yourself, prefabricated steel shelter, only seven hundred dollars from the Kelsey-Hayes Company (and soon to be marketed by Sears, Roebuck). A picture shows a girl laughingly talking on the phone from an underground shelter, as if to her beau, who is presumably in his own shelter and ready to take her to the latest movie as soon as the all clear sounds. Grandmother’s old-fashioned remedies turn out to be best after all even in thermonuclear war. “The best first aid for radiation sickness,” Life advises, “is to take hot tea or a solution of baking soda.” Suddenly thermonuclear war is made to seem familiar, almost cozy. All you need is a shelter, a well-stocked pantry, some new gadgets like Geiger counters. The budding boom in these products promises to stimulate badly lagging magazine linage. Life’s editorial hopes Khrushchev notices “our spontaneous boom in shelter-building” and concludes euphorically, “He cannot doubt our ability to wage nuclear war, or to erase his cities.” Aren’t we getting our people ready to accept the erasure of ours? We used to think thermonuclear war likely only if lunatics came to power. Well, here they are.

  I am not arguing for surrender, a runout on Berlin, dishonor, national cowardice, appeasement or better-red-than-dead. I am trying to say that when a nation faces problems as complex as those which now face ours in Germany, the United Nations, the Congo, Laos and the resumption of nuclear testing, there is a duty on every publisher and every writer to help inculcate sobriety and the need for reflection. The President’s power to maneuver and negotiate is not helped by piling delusion upon hysteria, by making people feel not only that we face a simple choice of death-or-surrender but that most of us won’t die anyway—so why bother to negotiate?

  Why should President Kennedy lend his name to Life’s wicked stunt? Nowhere does Life tell us what level and kind of attack it assumes which need kill only 3 percent of our people. The latest Rand study in the new Holifield committee hearings shows 3 percent dead as the result of “a very small attack delivering 300 megatons” on military targets exclusively. Even this small attack, if aimed at our cities, would put inescapable death (with everyone in some shelter) up to 35 percent. The same study (p. 216, House Government Operations, Civil Defense, August, 1961) shows a 3,000-megaton attack on cities would put inescapable deaths up to 80 percent. The new Holifield report on these hearings says than an attack half this size, as assumed by Secretary McNamara, would kill fifty million Americans and seriously injury twenty million more. The report warns that the existing basement space on which the Secretary relies to save ten to fifteen million lives won’t do. “All deaths from fallout can be prevented,” the report says, “but not in existing buildings, even when improved. Nationwide, the largest number of structures do not afford even the bare minimum factor considered necessary to bring the radiation hazard down to tolerable levels.”

  Stewart Alsop’s “Report Card” on Kennedy in the Saturday Evening Post September 16 disclosed that the President told congressional leaders a new war would cost 70,000,000 dead Americans. Even Dr. Teller did not go beyond saying that 90 percent of our population could be saved. Where did Life get that 97 percent? Was it a copywriter’s bright flash? Just as Ivory Soap is sold as 99 percent pure, is thermonuclear war to be sold as 97 percent safe?

  * * *

  *“What about money?” asks U.S. News & World Report. “Instead of destroying all old bills that are taken out of circulation, the Government is storing money away in strongboxes around the country. Enough $1 bills have been saved to last 8 months. . . . Bank accounts safe? Plans are being worked out to enable you to write checks on your bank account—even if the bank itself were destroyed.”

  The Mythology of the Anti-Missile Missile

  This article exemplifies the remarkable quality of déjà vu that the contemporary reader repeatedly experiences when revisiting Stone’s writings from the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. It wouldn’t take much rewriting for this column to apply to the recent controversies over the Strategic Defense Initiative (often dubbed “Star Wars”) initially launched by the Reagan administration and still being kept on life support by the second Bush administration two decades later. Stone would not have been surprised; as he notes, the logic behind such imagined technological cure-alls is not novel but is simply “the mutually disastrous logic of any arms race.”

  . . .

  February 19, 1962

  THE ANTI-MISSILE MISSILE, which has become the excuse for resumption of nuclear testing, may usefully be examined from the standpoint of mythology, as a relic of belief in the supernatural. The anti-missile missile is only the latest of those ultimate weapons on which our hopes have rested for a military miracle, in this case for something like the invisible and impenetrable cloak which enables the hero in the fairy tale to emerge victoriously unscathed from amid enemy swords and lances. This belief in an ultimate magical weapon, like other superstitions, survives all demonstration to the contrary. We had the atom bomb years before the Russians and they had both the H-bomb and the ICBM before we did, but none of these earlier ultimate weapons enabled one side to force the surrender of the other. To the delusions of the irresistible offensive is now added the delusion of the insuperable defense. We think of the anti-missile missile in terms of Buck Rogers. We see the tense comic strip panel in which our side (or theirs) says, “Their (or our) missiles are landing but our (or their) missiles have been halted in mid-flight by some mysterious new anti-missile device. There is nothing left to do but phone Khrushchev (or Kennedy) to surrender. Capitalism (or communism) has conquered the world.”

  This delusion reflects a faith in science which has nothing to do with a faith in the methods of experiment and reason. It is a faith in the magical potency of science, and thus little different from any primitive tribesman’s belief in his witch doctor. We believe our wonder workers, if only given ample funds, will come up with some new weapon that will once and for all smash our enemies. From a sober military point of view, this faith in any one weapon is ludicrous. As General Bradley said in that speech at St. Alban’s here in Washington November 5, 1957, which was so hastily buried by our opinion makers, “Missiles will bring anti-missiles, and anti-missiles will bring anti-anti-missiles. But inevitably this whole electronic house of cards will reach a point where it can be constructed no higher.” The hope of an anti-missile rests on the fact that the ballistic missile follows a fixed trajectory. The hope of an anti-anti-missile rests on the possibility of changing that trajectory in mid-flight. The hope of both rests on the experience that for any weapon of war there is always a counter weapon to be found, and so on ad infinitum, that is, if the human race lasts.

  All this is worth a closer explanation because the business of arranging a meeting in mid-air between a missile and an anti-missile is more complex even than arranging a meeti
ng of minds between the White House and the Kremlin. This is how you start to construct an anti-missile. You know the missile follows a fixed curve. Therefore once it rises far enough above the radar horizon to enable you to map the beginning of the curve, you can determine the rest of the curve. The problem is to build an electronic device capable of computing this in the few minutes available, and automatically aiming your anti-missile to some intermediate point on that curve where it can hit the oncoming enemy missile before it reaches your territory. It is, as has been said crudely, like hitting a bullet with a bullet. This problem is hard enough. The real problem of the anti-missile however is much harder. It is the problem of designing an electronic network of anti-missile batteries which can cope not with one missile but with a flood of missiles accompanied by several times as many decoys, distinguishing the real from the false, and determining in split seconds which of your anti-missiles is going to be aimed at which missile.

  Nobody knows whether this belongs in the realm of electronics or in Grimm’s Fairy Tales as revised by General Dynamics. Dr. Hans Bethe, in that speech at Cornell on January 5 which set the arms race crowd gunning for him, said he did not think “any really effective” anti-missile was possible. “It is not very difficult,” he said, “to design a defensive missile which will come close enough to an ICBM to destroy it by means of an atomic explosion. There is also no problem about providing atomic warheads for anti-missiles. But the offense can send decoys along with their missiles which are almost impossible to distinguish from the missiles, and they can send many missiles simultaneously which saturate the radars of the defense. Thus I think the AICBM [anti intercontinental ballistic missile] virtually hopeless.” It is for this heresy, which threatens the biggest military boondoggle ever dangled before the electronic industry, that Dr. Bethe is under attack. The development of the Nike-Zeus anti-missile system would provide from fifteen to twenty billion dollars’ worth of business. Who cares that it might be rendered obsolete before its completion by the next development, a means to change the trajectory of the missile in mid-flight, which would frustrate all the intricate computing and targeting mechanisms of Nike-Zeus?

  It is in the perfection of these targeting and computing mechanisms, not in the warhead, that the secret of an anti-missile system lies. The warhead is essentially no different from the warhead of the missile. This is what makes doubly nonsensical the reports being leaked out of evidence that the Russians were testing an anti-missile. First, there is no way to determine from the debris or waves set off by a bomb whether it was being tested for missile or anti-missile purposes. Secondly, the testing of a warhead does not mean that either we or the Russians have solved the enormously intricate problem of targeting and computing for an anti-missile system. The explanations leaked out to the United States and British press are so varied as to create doubt. As in a criminal trial, too many alibis are worse than none. An accused who claims to have been (1) home in bed, (2) at a night club, and (3) only accidentally passing the scene of the crime when it happened is obviously a liar. One paper (the London Sunday Times, February 11) says “suspicions [i.e., of an anti-missile] have increased since the discovery that two of the Russian tests on Novaya Zemlya appear to have involved relatively small nuclear weapons above the atmosphere” while another paper (the London Sunday Observer, February 11) says the evidence of a Soviet anti-missile is “circumstantial.” Since the United States last December successfully got a Nike-Zeus anti-missile to hit a Nike-Hercules missile “high above the White Sands proving ground in New Mexico” it is assumed (the Observer reports) that the Russians can do likewise!

  The truth is that this anti-missile excuse for resuming testing is, as one scientist phrased it privately to us, “a publicity gimmick.” The real rationale for test resumption was expressed by Assistant Secretary of State Harlan Cleveland on February 10 at Rollins College, Florida. “Given the technology of nuclear weapons,” Mr. Cleveland said, “the first requisite of orderly change is to prevent our Soviet rivals from getting ahead, or thinking they can get ahead, in the hidden and costly game of nuclear deterrence.” The logic is the mutually disastrous logic of any arms race. If each side aims to show the other it can never get ahead, this must push both into ever bigger arms expenditure and further along the way to garrison states; Russia, back toward Stalinism; we toward a parallel revival of paranoid suspicion and repression. But this Administration, like the Democratic party as a whole, remains committed to the arms race as the line of least resistance, as a grandiose WPA for perpetual prosperity until the bombs go off. This is what lies behind the President’s impossible new condition that we will enter no new moratorium without a means to detect Russian preparations for new tests. (Would we be prepared to open our laboratories for surveillance?) We fear any proposal which might interfere with another round of testing now that the Russians have had theirs. This has to stop somewhere but we don’t really want the arms race to stop. This explains the press briefings immediately held here to make sure that the release of Powers was not interpreted as an improvement in Soviet relations, and the near panic visible in the wake of Khrushchev’s suggestion that the top leaders meet on disarmament. All that talk about our waging a peace race is blarney, a gift with which Mr. Kennedy is richly endowed. It is not a Russian anti-missile that the dominant alliance of the military and arms industry fears. It is their old enemy, relaxation of tension.

  Fresh Light on the

  Mystery of the Missiles

  Written after a visit to Cuba just three months after the near-disaster of the missile crisis, this essay offers an unusual perspective on the U.S.-Cuban standoff, analyzing it in the light of the growing rifts within the Communist bloc—an alliance that many hard-line Western observers still regarded as monolithically unified. Pointing out the strategic, ideological, and personal differences among Russia, China, Cuba, and the Eastern European nations, Stone calls for a “flexible and pragmatic” American policy as the best long-term hope for peace.

  . . .

  January 21, 1963

  THE ONLY TOP LEADER I SAW in my ten days in Havana was Armando Hart, the Minister of Education. But this energetic and devoted young man spoke only of the successful campaign against illiteracy and his mounting problems as more and more Cubans began to go to school, and to stay there for a higher education, all safely nonpolitical topics. I did not succeed in talking with Prime Minister Castro or any other top leader capable of discussing foreign policy questions. Knowledgeable persons told me Fidel was going through an agonizing reappraisal in the wake of the missiles affair, that until he spoke on January 2 no one knew what the new line would be, and that lesser men would hesitate to discuss such delicate matters. I found my old friends in Havana asking the same question about the missiles affair that I heard in Washington: Why did Khrushchev put them into Cuba in the first place if he was so ready to take them out again? The consensus among reporters with whom I spoke—and these included men from Soviet bloc, uncommitted and Latin American countries—was that Khrushchev had made a mistake. Nobody spelled this out but obviously the mistake was to believe that he could get away with placing nuclear missiles in Cuba.

  The removal of the missiles stirred anger among the Fidelistas, and I was told that Fidel had gone several times to the University to appeal to the students to be quiet. Cubans made up a little poem which went like this:

  Nikita, Nikita,

  Lo que se da,

  No se quita

  i.e., Nikita, Nikita, what you gave, you can’t take back. In the eyes of the Fidelistas, the purpose of the missiles was simply to deter an American attack; they turned against us our own favorite theory of deterrence. But if I had had a chance to talk with top leaders I could have raised the questions which did not occur to the ordinary Fidelista: Did the Cubans realize that these missiles could be quickly observed, that theirs would be soft bases which could fairly easily be put out of commission by conventional attack, that their presence in Cuba would make Cuba a first targe
t in the event of war between the United States and the U.S.S.R., that the missiles would raise tension and increase risk? The political questions were as delicate as the military. The Russians had agreed to remove the missiles without consulting Castro. For a man—and a people—as sensitive about their national dignity, this was an affront. An island besieged by the United States, and so dependent on the U.S.S.R., could hardly afford open discussion of such questions.

  Now that Castro has made his long-awaited speech of January 2 and discussed the missiles affair, some illumination can be found by comparing the three versions now available, the Russian, the Chinese and the Cuban. Khrushchev’s version, as set forth in his foreign policy address to the Supreme Soviet December 12, was that the missiles were placed there at Cuba’s request, for “exclusively humanitarian motives.” Khrushchev said, “Our aim was only to defend Cuba.” The United States, he said, was trying “to export counterrevolution” and threatening Cuba with invasion. “We were confident,” he said, “that this step,” i.e., placing the missiles, “would bring the aggressors to their senses.” Realizing “that Cuba was not defenseless,” they would be “compelled to change their plans” and “then the need for retaining rockets in Cuba would naturally disappear.”

  This was the kindergarten version. What if the United States, once the missiles were removed, changed its plans again and invaded? If the Cubans were satisfied with this version, they would hardly have published the full text of Khrushchev in their press only to follow it up a few days later by printing first a partial and then the full text of the reply made by the Chinese in the Peking People’s Daily, December 15.