by Ian Morris
The world woke up with a start to what it had wrought. In the liberal democracies of the American alliance, millions marched in campaigns for nuclear disarmament, sang protest songs, and lined up to see Dr. Strangelove. Coming of Age-ism’s assumption that war was good for absolutely nothing, under any circumstances, swept the field.
But none of this solved the planet’s problem. As in every earlier age, so long as anyone thought that force might be the least bad answer to their problems (or so long as anyone thought that someone else might be thinking that), no one dared forgo weapons, and as with every vicious new weapon since the first stone ax, once the bomb had been invented, it could not be “disinvented” (Eisenhower’s word). If all the warheads in the world were scrapped, they could be replaced in a matter of months—which might mean that banning the bomb would be the most dangerous action imaginable, because a treacherous enemy might secretly rebuild its arsenal and launch a devastating first strike before its rule-abiding rival could make enough bombs to deter it.
Despite the runaway success of “War” and dozens of lesser protest songs in the late 1960s, most people apparently agreed with this logic. No nuclear-armed electorate ever voted in a party preaching disarmament. When the British Labour Party did promise to ban the bomb, it went down to an epic defeat (one of its own Members of Parliament called its manifesto “the longest suicide note in history”).
The cold-eyed men who handled the realities of nuclear war looked for more practical solutions. Some of these, such as installing a direct phone line (via relays in London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Helsinki) between Washington and Moscow, were easy. Others, such as reducing the immense stockpiles of warheads, were not. The United States stopped expanding its arsenal in 1966, but the Soviets did not follow suit for twenty years. (As one American secretary of defense observed, “When we build, they build; when we stop, they build.”)
The most difficult step of all was finding strategies to contest the inner rim without bringing on the end of days. The American answer was a new policy of flexible response. Instead of threatening to kill hundreds of millions over any disagreement, the United States would react in proportion to the threat. But how would it decide what was proportionate? This definitional issue quickly raised its head in the wake of the European empires’ retreat from Southeast Asia. Americans agreed that keeping a foothold in the inner rim in this distant corner of the world was not important enough for nuclear war, but was it worth the bones of American soldiers? In his first year in office, Kennedy had grumbled, “The troops will march in; the crowds will cheer … Then we will be told we have to send in more troops. It’s like taking a drink.” All the same, he sent eight thousand advisers to South Vietnam. Two years later, there were twice as many. Four years after that, U.S. marines splashed ashore at Danang, and by 1968 half a million Americans were fighting in Vietnam (Figure 5.15).
Figure 5.15. Search and destroy: the U.S. 1st Air Cavalry Division scours the coastal lowlands of Binh Dinh Province, South Vietnam, in the endless hunt for insurgents (January or February 1968).
Putting boots on the ground just brought on a flood of further decisions. Was interning civilians, a tried-and-true method for cutting off supplies to insurgents, proportionate? Yes, the White House decided. What about bombing North Vietnam? Sometimes. Or invading North Vietnam? No, because that might provoke Soviet escalation. Bombing and raiding communist positions in supposedly neutral Cambodia struck President Nixon as proportionate, but many Americans disagreed. Riots broke out; the National Guard shot four dead in Ohio. Consequently, when it came to the bigger step of interrupting communist supplies by building a fortified line across Laos—a militarily obvious move, which, South Vietnamese generals argued, would “cut off the North’s front from its rear”—no president would say yes.
The war dragged on, ultimately killing three or more million people. But despite this unsatisfactory beginning, NATO applied flexible response to Europe too. Here, war would mean the mother of all blitzkriegs. Under cover of the biggest air and artillery bombardment in history, seven thousand Soviet tanks would smash into the thin defensive screen along the inner German frontier, while crack troops arriving by parachute or helicopter sowed chaos a hundred miles to the rear. As the opening battles raged, those NATO planes that survived the initial air raids would strike all the way to Poland to shatter the second, third, and fourth echelons of Soviet armor before they reached the battlefield, while infantry hunkered down to blunt the first wave of Soviet tanks before it could break through the Fulda Gap or across the North German Plain.
NATO generals pinned their hopes on the apparent lessons of Egypt and Syria’s attack on Israel in 1973, when, for a few days, poorly led and trained Arab infantry armed with wire-guided antitank missiles had fought superbly led and trained Israeli tank crews to a standstill. It took less than two weeks for the Israelis to adapt, counterattack, and annihilate the Arab armies, but NATO gambled that their troops could hold out longer—long enough, the hope was, for American forces to rush across the Atlantic, pick up pre-positioned heavy equipment, and drive the Soviets back.
This was much the way General John Hackett (a former commander of British forces in West Germany) imagined a war playing out in his widely read 1978 novel, The Third World War. In his story, flexible response worked perfectly. After seventeen days of conventional battle the Soviet offensive stalled, and with American troops arriving to stiffen the line and even push back, the Soviets escalated. They launched a single SS-17 missile with a nuclear warhead, destroying Birmingham, England. Three hundred thousand died. NATO responded proportionately, with a nuclear strike on Minsk. The unstable Soviet regime then collapsed.
I happened to be living in Birmingham in 1978 (about two miles from Winson Green, Hackett’s ground zero), and I did not like his prophecy one bit. But the reality, as the general knew perfectly well, would probably have been much worse. NATO anticipated being the first to go nuclear, using “tactical” devices (often equivalent to half a Hiroshima) to stop breakthroughs and also to signal that the attack must end. If Moscow ignored the message, bigger bombs, shells, and warheads (typically worth half a dozen Hiroshimas) would be used, and if there was still no response by the time Soviet tanks were sixty miles into West Germany, the gloves would come off.
Unfortunately, the Soviets showed not the slightest intention of thinking about H-bombs as subtle signals. Their plan called for tanks to reach the Rhine in two weeks and the English Channel and Pyrenees after another four. To accomplish this, the first echelon would use twenty-eight to seventy-five nuclear weapons to rip holes in the NATO line, and the second would fire another thirty-four to a hundred during its armored breakout. Expecting NATO to reply in kind, Soviet troops were equipped to fight on battlefields drenched in chemicals and radiation, concentrating quickly for attacks and then dispersing. West Germany would suffer several hundred Hiroshimas, killing most of the people who lived there. By that point, the ICBMs would be roaring over the North Pole. As Moscow saw it, a few days of total war would devastate both homelands, but once the warheads were used up, conventional fighting would continue until one side could go on no longer.
The official Soviet line was optimistic (probably, given what we now know about their atrocious infrastructure and organization, overoptimistic) about winning, but no one was actually looking forward to a war like this. Consequently, amid fierce debates, both superpowers started drifting toward an understanding (dressed up with the name “détente”) that would allow them to muddle through despite the inadequacy of flexible response as a strategy of deterrence. Talks about limiting nuclear weapons began in 1969, and in the 1970s the Soviets made concessions on human rights. Americans sold them grain and lent them dollars to make up for the mushrooming failures of collective farms and communist economies, and astronauts and cosmonauts joined hands in orbit.
It all looked good, but none of it altered the realities. Two semi-global empires with enough firepower to destroy civilization rem
ained locked in a competition over the inner rim; the inner rim continued to be run largely by unstable, unreliable proxies with their own agendas; and neither side could afford to lose.
The strategic tug-of-war surged first one way, then the other. In 1972, President Richard Nixon scored a gigantic coup when Moscow’s former client Mao decided that he did not hate the United States as much as he hated the Soviet Union. The strategic net tightened around Russia—but just a year later, the newest Arab-Israeli war wiped out many of the United States’ gains. Arab oil producers quadrupled their prices, tipping the American alliance into economic crisis while flooding the oil-exporting Soviet Union with cash. The economic slowdown, anxieties over how to handle nuclear parity with the Soviets, and recriminations over the Vietnam War formed a toxic brew, shattering America’s quarter-century-old strategic consensus over containment. Conservatives began arguing that only cutting back welfare spending and the bureaucracies that administered it could revive economic growth, without which containment would not work, and the Watergate scandal convinced many liberals that they did not hate the Soviets as much as they hated Nixon. With political gridlock paralyzing defense policies, the United States stood by as North Vietnam finally overran the South.
By the late 1970s, the United States was in retreat everywhere. Communists were winning civil wars (and even an election) in Africa and Latin America, as well as hearts and minds in Europe. One Christmas—1976, I think—one of my uncles, an unemployed steelworker, actually gave me a copy of Mao’s little red book. In 1979 noncommunist radicals in Iran got in on the game too, hurling the Great Satan out of yet another part of the inner rim. The final straw came as the year ended, with the Soviets invading Afghanistan—still the strategic bridge linking heartland and inner rim in South Asia, just as it had been when Russia and Britain had contested it a century earlier.
Détente collapsed. The United States rearmed furiously, deploying deadly new cruise missiles in Europe and talking up technologies that would slice through Soviet defenses like a knife through butter. Paranoia turned to panic in Moscow in 1982, when Israelis used American-made computerized weapon systems to destroy seventeen of Syria’s nineteen Soviet-made surface-to-air missile sites and to shoot down ninety-two of its Soviet planes for the loss of three (or six, depending who was counting) of their own. And while any sensible scientist could have told the Soviets that decades would pass before “Star Wars” (an American system for shooting ICBMs down with lasers) or Assault Breaker (a long-range rocket that scattered masses of computer-guided bomblets to destroy entire armored divisions before they got to the front line) would actually work, in the febrile atmosphere of early 1980s Moscow, assuming the worst was a way of life.
It all came to a head in November 1983, just six weeks after Stanislav Petrov had had to decide whether to believe his own computer algorithm when it said that the Americans were launching their missiles. Convinced that NATO was planning a first strike, the neurotic, diabetic Soviet premier, Yuri Andropov—confined to bed by his failing kidneys—pressured the KGB to find evidence of it. Ever dutiful, his spies reported back that a lot of American and British civil servants seemed to be working late in their offices. The only possible conclusion: the United States must be planning to use an upcoming military exercise in western Europe as cover for an attack. Soviet aircraft in East Germany were armed with live nuclear weapons. Leave was canceled. Even military weather forecasts were suspended, lest they give something away.
Fortunately, the one sure thing in the Cold War was that no one could keep a secret. “When I told the British,” a senior KGB officer later reminisced to interviewers, “they simply could not believe that the Soviet leadership was so stupid and narrow-minded as to believe in something so impossible.” Opinions vary as to whether Andropov really was this stupid and narrow-minded, but American fear of Soviet fear reached the point that Reagan felt the need to dispatch General (later National Security Adviser) Brent Scowcroft to Moscow to persuade Andropov to step back from the brink.
Once again, millions marched to ban the bomb. Bruce Springsteen released his remake of “War.” Anyone not worrying about the end of the world was not paying attention.
And yet here we are, thirty years on, safer and richer than ever. Against all the odds and in defiance of the trends of the last ten thousand years, the war to end war—and humanity itself—did not come. For every twenty nuclear warheads threatening our survival when Petrov picked up the phone in 1983, there is now (in mid-2013) just one. The chance of a megawar killing a billion people in the next few years seems close to zero.
How did we make it through these dangerous days? And how long will our luck hold out? These, it seems to me, are among the most important questions anyone can ask. The answers, though, lie in a place we rarely look.
Footnote
1That is, raise the trajectory of the barrel slightly.
6
RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW: WHY THE CHIMPS OF GOMBE WENT TO WAR
Killer Apes and Hippie Chimps
January 7, 1974
In the early afternoon, a war party from Kasekela slipped unseen across the border into Kahaman territory. There were eight raiders, moving silently, purposefully, on a mission to kill. By the time Godi of Kahama saw them, it was too late.
Godi leaped from the tree where he had been eating fruit and ran, but the attackers fell on him. One pinned Godi facedown in the mud; the others, screaming with rage, punched and tore at him with their fangs for a full ten minutes. Finally, after hurling rocks at his body, the war party headed deeper into the forest.
Godi was not dead, yet, but blood was pouring from dozens of gashes and punctures in his face, chest, arms, and legs. After lying still for several minutes, mewling in pain, he crawled into the trees. He was never seen again.
This was the first time that scientists had seen chimpanzees from one community deliberately seek out, attack, and leave for dead a chimpanzee from another. In 1960, Jane Goodall had set up the world’s first project to study chimpanzees in the wild at Gombe in Tanzania (Figure 6.1), and for a decade she had delighted readers of National Geographic and viewers of her television specials with stories of the gentle, wise David Greybeard, the canny Flo, the mischievous Mike, and all their chimpanzee friends. But now the chimps were revealed as murderers.
Figure 6.1. The cradle of war: sites in Africa mentioned in this chapter
Worse followed. Over the next three years, the Kasekelans beat to death all six males and one female in the Kahama community. Two more Kahaman females went missing, presumed dead; three more, beaten and raped, joined the Kasekelans; and finally, the Kasekelans took over Kahama’s territory. Godi’s death had been the first blow in a war of extermination (Figure 6.2).
Figure 6.2. Killer apes? Four chimpanzees (at left) bully, threaten, and charge a fifth chimpanzee (at right) in the primate park at Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands (late 1970s).
News of the Gombe War rocked the world of primatology. The implications, it seemed, were enormous. We humans share more than 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees. When two closely related species behave in the same way, there is always a good chance that they have inherited this trait from a shared ancestral species. Since we only have to go back 7.5 million years (not long to an evolutionary biologist) to find the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans, the obvious conclusion seemed to be that humans are hardwired for violence.
The 1970s were the golden days of Coming of Ageism, and, not surprisingly, this finding did not sit well with everyone. Some scholars blamed the messenger. Goodall, they insisted, had caused the war. In her efforts to get the chimpanzees comfortable around humans, she had fed them bananas, and competition over this rich food, the critics suggested, had corrupted the chimps’ naturally peaceful society and turned it violent.
The ensuing debate was just as bitter as the quarrels I described in Chapter 1 over the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon’s account of the fierce Yanomami, but Goodall did not have to w
ait as long as Chagnon to be proved right. In the 1970s and ’80s, dozens of other scientists plunged into the African rain forest to live among apes (my account of the Gombe War and much else in the opening section of this chapter draws on the book Demonic Males that one of these scientists, Goodall’s former graduate student Richard Wrangham, co-authored with Dale Peterson). Developing more sophisticated, less intrusive methods of observation, they soon showed that chimpanzees wage war whether humans feed them or not.
Even as you read these words, gangs of male chimpanzees are patrolling the boundaries of their territories everywhere from the Ivory Coast to Uganda, systematically hunting for foreign chimps to attack. They move silently and deliberately, not even taking time to eat. The most recent study, in Uganda, used GPS devices to track dozens of raids and twenty-one kills made by the Ngogo chimpanzee community between 1998 and 2008, ending in the annexation of a neighboring territory (Figure 6.3).
Figure 6.3. The Ngogo War, 1998–2009. Ngogo chimpanzees launched dozens of raids into neighboring territories (black lines on the map at left), killing twenty-one chimpanzees before annexing the area that had seen the heaviest fighting (shaded area on the map at right).