by Peter Byrne
Disgusted, President Eisenhower asked Nelson Rockefeller to head a commission composed of military and business men to fix the dangerous situation. The politically savvy scion of the Rockefeller oil dynasty was charged with rationalizing the Pentagon’s internal power struggle over control of nuclear policy and budgets. As part of Rockefeller’s remake, WSEG was transformed into a division of a newly created non-profit company operated by a consortium of universities, the Institute for Defense Analyses, known as “IDA.”11 University affiliation gave WSEG intellectual cachet, and its non-governmental status enabled it to pay corporate-level salaries to civilian scientists while, presumably, taking it out of the loop of inter-service rivalry.12 IDA was a secret organization of the national security state, not beholden to civil society.
To smooth the transition from purely military-to somewhat civilian-run, IDA hired Shockley of Bell Laboratories as WSEG director of research. Shockley was to be a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics the following year for his work on the Bell Labs team that invented transistors, but that achievement, and his OR work, are not the only things for which he is remembered. A fervent eugenicist, he loudly promoted his “statistical” theory that white people are more intelligent than non-white people. He also saw a bright side to nuclear war, which he thought had a “fifty-fifty” chance of occurring. He once told a reporter from the Minneapolis Tribune:
But if there is a nuclear war man would at least have to begin to control his own genetics. I think the present situation in the civilized world is anti-evolutionary. The people who reproduce in the largest numbers may be far from the most competent. The more competent people practice birth control and have smaller families. If there were a nuclear war, there would be so much genetic damage that man would be forced to plan populations—yes, control breeding, that’s what it would amount to. If we began sensible population measure now, it would make nuclear war less likely.13
Working with James R. Killian, Jr., Eisenhower’s science advisor, Shockley set about recruiting young scientists of the intellectual caliber of Everett and Misner (who spent a summer working at WSEG). In 1956, thanks to a half million dollar pump-priming grant from the Ford Foundation, WSEG expanded from 25 to more than 100 full-time civilian scientists, supplemented by outside consultants. The group’s physicists, mathematicians, economists, historians, psychologists, and philosophers were required to have very high level security clearances. The new blood revitalized WSEG’s scientific work, but many of the “best and brightest” were prima donnas—teamwork did not come easily to them.14
WSEG was arranged in six inter-locking groups: Tactical Warfare, Strategic Warfare, Air Defense, Command and Control, Costs, and Mathematics (Everett’s group).15 Its top secret-strewn office at the Pentagon was cramped, known as “The Cage.” Researchers’ telephone and computer lines were sealed off from the rest of the Pentagon.16 The staff also included 100 military officers, whose role was mostly advisory. Not surprisingly, they spent most of their time promoting the partisan needs of their own services, (so that part of the reinvention was a failure, and resulted in the demise of WSEG in the 1970s).
When Everett joined WSEG, it was analyzing the cost-benefits of global and limited nuclear warfare. Ongoing studies examined nuclear blast and fallout kill ratios; the impact of jamming the electronics of guided missiles and airplanes; and the disturbing problem of the “nuclear blackout,” i.e., massive electrical disturbances unleashed by nuclear bombs exploded high in the atmosphere.17 Other areas of research included undersea warfare, homeland security, and “social studies” that investigated the “effect of civilian morale on military capabilities in a nuclear war environment.”18
WSEG was also charged with assessing the relative strength of the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons system, and this issue became a hot coal, politically.
Missile gap?
In 1957, Eisenhower empowered a commission packed with military contractors, Wall Street financiers, and media magnates to investigate the nuclear threat posed by the Sino-Soviet bloc. The Gaither Commission was headed by H. Rowen Gaither, Jr., a Ford Foundation official who was also a founder of RAND. Other members included banker Laurance Rockefeller; Frank Stanton, the president of CBS; pollster Elmer Roper; John Cowles, owner of the Cowles Newspapers chain; and Vice President Richard M. Nixon.19
WSEG scientists acted as staff to the commission, which made a top secret report that the U.S. was in danger of falling behind the Soviets on the deployment of ballistic missiles. After this startling and completely inaccurate conclusion was leaked to the press, the political hysteria generated by the media’s hyping of the so-called missile gap helped propel John F. Kennedy into the presidency in 1960. In reality, however, the gap was reversed: the Soviets possessed the capability of fielding about ten intercontinental ballistic missiles, whereas the U.S. had triple that number and was geared up to manufacture thousands of “ICBMs.” Plus, the Strategic Air Command’s long-range bomber fleet vastly out-numbered the Soviet’s fleet.20
Nonetheless, based on a combination of faulty intelligence and pro-business bias, Gaither’s report recommended adding $44 billion dollars to the military budget.21 In doing so, it echoed Wall Street financier Paul Nitze’s paranoid National Security Memorandum of 1950, which had also used misleading and inaccurate estimates of Soviet intentions and capabilities to scare Congress into pumping up military appropriations slated for corporate contracts.
And the following year a similar report appeared: the Rockefeller Brother’s Report overseen by Nelson Rockefeller’s protégé, Henry Kissinger. Repeating the misnomers of the Gaither Commission, Kissinger claimed that the Soviets were beating Americans at manufacturing and deploying nuclear arms. Years later, Everett told his friend, Donald Reisler,
that he seemed to have been the one responsible for the missile gap that helped get Kennedy elected. He had done the analysis that shows the missile gap. And it turned out the data was wrong, and there really wasn’t a missile gap, but what the hell, he elected him. It was based on the intelligence data, and the data just wasn’t right.22
Sputnik
Eisenhower was infuriated when the Gaither Commission’s alarmist report was leaked, as he had correctly concluded that it overstated Soviet capabilities. The leak occurred shortly after the Russians landed a one-two political punch: they test-launched an intercontinental ballistic missile, followed by blasting Sputnik, the first satellite, into orbit. Politicians, the media, and ordinary folks reacted as if Sputnik’s robotic “beep-beep” from outer space—broadcast on corporate radio—signaled the end of days. But nobody in the know was surprised; in fact, RAND had predicted the Soviet achievement almost to the day. And a WSEG official had correctly warned Congress that the Soviets would soon launch a satellite. He even wrote a memo about “risks of psychological damage if the Russians were the first to launch.”23
Although these Russian achievements appeared to support the erroneous missile gap theory, Eisenhower was secretly gratified by Sputnik’s debut because the U.S. was preparing to rocket spy satellites into orbit. He allowed Sputnik to fly over North America without making a serious protest in order to set an international precedent for satellites to circle the planet, snapping photographs at will. And the visceral fear it generated in the minds of the populace eased the passing of ever-larger military research and development budgets through Congress.
In his memoirs, George F. Kennan said that Sputnik, “caused Western alarmists … to demand the immediate subornation of all other national interests to the launching of immensely expensive crash programs to outdo the Russians.”24 One result of Sputnik and the series of paranoid commission reports was that the U.S. detonated 77 nuclear weapons above ground in 1958. One blast, 700 miles from Hawaii, knocked out the local telephone system and observers on the Big Island saw the mushroom cloud, such was the power of the explosion.25
Soviet leaders viewed the U.S. escalation with absolute horror. They knew all too well that their nuclear arsena
l and delivery mechanism was dwarfed by the power and reach of America’s war machine, and that the Air Force was just itching to blast the U.S.S.R. and China into radioactive dust.
It was Everett’s job to calculate just how radioactive that dust would be.
21 From Wargasm to Looking Glass
Reality resists imitation through a model.
Erwin Schrödinger, 19351
First strike
During the 1950s, the operating nuclear war plan of the United States was all or nothing. General Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command, told a Gaither commissioner that a surprise attack by Soviet bombers would destroy the bulk of his B-52 bombers on the ground. He said that the official doctrine of deterrence by threatening a “second-strike,” or “massive retaliation,” was an improbable dream. He announced that SAC airplanes flew over the Soviet Union 24 hours a day picking up radio transmissions, and, “If I see that the Russians are amassing their planes for an attack, I’m going to knock the shit out of them before they take off the ground.”2 And he intended to do this under his own recognizance, regardless of the opinions of civilian leaders, such as the president. Deterrence, for LeMay meant striking first and without warning.
Neither American nor Soviet war planners suffered from the illusion that a “counter-force” strategy of targeting only enemy military installations would not escalate into blasting cities. Until the development of the Single Integrated Operating Plan (SIOP) in 1961, the only “plan” was for every officer with a nuclear weapon under his belt to fire it at the nearest perceived enemy upon command, or his own recognizance should headquarters go poof. And even if Soviet armies attacked Europe with conventional weapons, SAC’s intention was to “deter” them with a massive nuclear “retaliation” that would lay waste to Russia and China, as well as most of Eastern and Western Europe.
In 1962, Richard Fryklund reported in his popular book 100 Million Lives, Maximum Survival in Nuclear War,
SAC commanders do not relish the prospect of suicide, but no one has shown them a convincing alternative…. The only future they see is to build more and more weapons to destroy more and more of the enemy…. They resent people who tell them they are devoting their careers to arrangements for their own country’s funeral. They say the alternative to Devastation is surrender, and they would rather go down killing.3
But as the bombs got bigger and more expensive, RAND’s Herman Kahn, a pioneer of operations research, and a firm advocate of winning a nuclear war, began disparaging the doctrine of massive retaliation as a “Wargasm.”
Meet Everett’s friend: Dr. Strangelove
Kahn, a physicist, was Everett’s friend and colleague for many years. The corpulent, fast-talking RAND consultant was the real-life model for the character of Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film about “learning to love The Bomb.” (Dr. Strangelove was Everett’s favorite movie, he watched it repeatedly on his home VHS machine.)4 In 1960, Kahn became famous with the publication of his 650 page tome, On Thermonuclear War. In this rambling, disjointed paean to the idea of winning a nuclear war, Kahn did not question the necessity of murdering millions of communists as worth the sacrifice of millions of American lives.
His only question was how many American lives?
Kahn’s shocking book laid out scenario after scenario of how to prepare, launch, and survive a thermonuclear war. He averred that after the passing of thousands of years, American-style capitalism would re-emerge from the radioactive ash heap, reinvented by genetically altered, but still patriotic, shopping citizens. The gory details underpinning these nightmare scenarios flowed from years of “thinking about the unthinkable” by RAND game theorists, including Kahn, Albert Wohlstetter, Thomas Schelling, and Bernard Brodie. (Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, was also part of the dystopian, yet politically influential RAND group; unlike his colleagues, Ellsberg was to disavow the principle that it is rational to consider launching a thermonuclear war.)
Reviews of Kahn’s book were mixed, ranging from plaudits in The New York Times to James Newman’s memorable review in Scientific American:
The style of the book … is by turns waggish, pompous, chummy, coy, brutal, arch, man-to-man, Air Force crisp, energetic, tongue-tied, pretentious, ingenuous, spastic, ironical, savage, malapropos, square-bashing and moralistic. Solecisms, pleonasms and jargon abound; the clichés and fused participles are spectacular … This evil and tenebrous book, with its loose-lipped pieties and its hayfootstrawfoot logic, is permeated with a bloodthirsty irrationality such as I have not seen in my years of reading.5
Kahn’s perverse, neoconservative streak was revealed in his suggestion that a benefit of fighting a nuclear war would be “that people would get along with less government services than they did before the war. That is, large welfare programs would be cut back.”6 Kahn was taken very seriously by operations researchers charged with designing thermonuclear events; Everett admired him tremendously.7
In 1957, Kahn wrote two handbooks for newcomers to operations research, “Military Planning in an Uncertain World” and “Ten Common Pitfalls.” In these guides to planning nuclear war, Kahn cautioned researchers against “modelism,” i.e. becoming enamored of their computer models at the expense of forgetting about the “real” world.8
Researchers, he said, should avoid tackling overly complex problems. Rather than predicting how many airplanes the Russians could produce in a given time, it was more important to predict what percentage of their gross national product the Russians could spend on armaments without bankrupting the state. Describing a core strategy of the Cold War that, not incidentally, benefited American arms manufacturers, Kahn remarked,
Anything that subjects the enemy to large costs may be worth doing. It effectively reduces his strength by causing him to divert and waste resources.
For example, people sometimes make the statement that, ‘We shall not strike the first blow.’ They then take this statement so seriously that they advocate giving up completely all the elements of our offensive strength that are useful only if we initiate hostilities. They forget that the enemy has a tendency to look at your capabilities and not your intentions.9
Deterrence, said Kahn, can be measured by the amount of desperation and fear you can cause in the enemy’s collective mind; but do not overestimate the enemy’s capacity for risk tolerance: “There may be circumstances in which the enemy would not take a 65% chance of suicide but is desperate enough to take a 30% chance.”10 Having a first strike capability, Kahn said, is an invitation for the other side to strike first. But, to survive a first strike and retaliate, a second strike capability has to be at least as strong as a first strike force, so you need a first strike force no matter what (including keeping first strike as a strategic, perhaps preferred option). Consequently, the doctrine of deterrence is structurally “unstable,” he admitted.
But all was not lost. The dangerous instability embedded in the arms race would be offset if the enemy went broke trying to keep up with the international Joneses.11 Provided, of course (the Big If), that war did not break out. But that was a risk worth taking in Kahn’s abstract model of a world that he did not truly comprehend, nor, apparently, desire to preserve in all of its marvelous diversity.
The researcher’s job, according to Kahn, was to reduce uncertainty. Referring to an important new work by the Bayesian statistician, Leonard J. Savage, The Foundations of Statistics, Kahn argued that,
uncertainty arises from the fact that people believe in different assumptions, have different tastes (and therefore objectives), and are (more often than not) ignorant…. It is possible for individuals to assign subjectively evaluated numbers to such things as the probability of war or the probability of success of a research program, but there is typically no way of getting a useful consensus on these numbers. Usually, the best that can be done is to set limits between which most reasonable people agree the probabilities lie.12
That preparing for war was the only way to prevent
war was the only moral certainty that Kahn recognized. Cooperation between competing societies held no value for Kahn except as a matter of diplomatic expediency masking an intent to launch a first strike at the first opportune moment, deterrence be damned.
However, because the number of possible scenarios for nuclear war are uncountable, Kahn urged mathematicians to derive ways of reducing the number of “possible world futures” to a manageable number of outcomes. Inventing a many worlds-type model, Kahn strove to predict the shape of “The postwar world spun into a desultory tangle of multiple paths issuing from a single stem of the many-branched potentials of civil defense.”13 In other worlds, our future depends upon what we do now, and with the proper planning, a branch of Armageddon could be a passable place to live.
As a proponent of his own many worlds theory, Everett was intrigued by the intersection of probability and belief in a universe where nuclear holocaust was distinctly possible. Like Kahn, he did not view disarmament as a rational option.
In contradistinction to Kahn and Everett, Dr. Herbert F. York, who oversaw WSEG in the late 1950s, was repelled by Kahn’s branching Hells—the “balance of terror,” he called it. As a major architect of the Cold War during his early career, York turned his back on operations research after deciding that the technical approach was futile.14 In 1963, he determined that the arms race was uncontrollable, and that only forces external to the defense establishment could prevent war. He stated publicly that there were no technical solutions to what was a political problem. “The result [of deterrence] will be a steady and inexorable worsening of this situation …. I believe that there is absolutely no solution to be found within the areas of science and technology.”15 He viewed arms control and disarmament as the only viable road forward, and he urged negotiating with the Russians before it was too late.