The Wizards of Armageddon (Stanford Nuclear Age Series)

Another wonderful Kaplan book to read along with “1959”. Together they constitute a great history of the period from 1947 (formation of RAND) to about end of the Viet Nam war in the 1970s. It was during approximately these years that were established policies effecting and affecting much about how our nation works presently and in future, in armed conflict. Let alone a pattern of how the USA came to dominate technological developments to the present through RAND. In particular, in the case of ‘Wizards’, how our international relations and USA military applied new methods to quantitatively analyze policies and programs in planning eventuality of war. This was an era begun in use of quantitative methods (at the time named systems analysis or operations research) using which one could reduce complexities of armed conflict to realistic courses of action. For all those new technological (computers and communications) and analytical (statistics and economics for example) methods this book is worth reading. However I found of much greater significance how quantitative ‘systems analysis’ methods tended to be misleading when based on flawed intelligence. There are two conspicuous examples in the Cold War and Viet Nam. In the Cold War studies by RAND most e analysis was based on intelligence information indicating the USSR had a lead in both heavy bombers and nuclear weapons. In both cases later intelligence data seemed to prove they really did not have thousands of intercontinenal nuclear ballistic missiles, they actually had four. A similar misinterpretation of heavy bomber intelligence showed there neither was as many airfields for this airplane as decided nor apparently as many bombers as estimated. This all came to light when Powers was shot down in a U-2 spy plane. Then films from previous flights revealed more exactly how many air fields, bombers, and ICBMs the USSR really had. There are undoubtedly any number of reasons, perhaps even good ones, why these errors were made. Assuming conclusions had otherwise been entirely accurate I wondered whether this better information would have improved on military performance due to divisive infighting between military services. Gen Curtis LeMay illustrates the monomaniacal propensity for each service to believe their strategies and weapons in nuclear conflict would be most decisive. Certainly the Air Force had some justification to that claim based on their successes in World War II. But that war was concluded as result of many conflicts, involving a range of military services and weapons. It is specious to claim dominance of one service as conclusive to results desired or obtained in any war. Furthermore the monstrous bombing of cities was subsequently proven to be far more ineffective than would have more focus on fields of operation, communcation lines, and the railroad system. Viet Nam seemed to seriously challenge realistic reliance on extensive systems analysis of conflicts. We did the analysis only to see simplistic carpet bombing in Viet Nam as chosen strategy for success. In addition creating our own intelligence, and resulting news about such as the ‘Bay of Tonkin incident’. Other analysis actually included looks at unconventional strategies and tactics to counter the guerilla war being waged in Viet Nam. Again the larger underlying information led to conclusions, and reason for involvement in Nam, that the fundamental international force driving our involvement was threat of Communist takeover of the world, a domino effect driven by USSR and China. Viet Nam was believed only a toe hold of their ideology for further world domination. The false claims for Viet Nam tactics and strategies were harsely revealed in the Pentagon Papers, about 7,000 pages of actual onsite reports of action and their consequences. Daniel Ellsberg was a major RAND analyst and also the one who released the papers through public media. A bitter, decade long war without any decisive conclusion traceable to military tactics or strategy. Billions of tax dollars were spent by the military on the basis of this type of generally weak intelligence information and chosen action. The expenditure levels were made worse by military arms contending against each other so that weapons budget included redundancies. The force for building budgets for each military service thus were partially justified by systems analysis resulting in growth of military expenditures as share of the national budget. Eventually when hired by the System Development Division of RAND, along with many others, I was to work on the SAGE system. The existence of SAGE and work of SDD, soon after to become the Systems Development Corporation, was generally based on the same exaggerated intelligence data. Thus more millions of dollars were spent. At least SAGE eventually turned out to be useful in air traffic control, a function perhaps beneficial to any real armed airborne attack against continental USA. A perhaps more distinct benefit of RAND and SDD was the difference in personnel between the two. RAND analysts performed at a very high level of specialist sophistication with advanced degrees, experience in government, universities and business, and with consequent range of useful personal contacts. SDD on the other hand hired personnel that, in aggregate, fell into a widely diverse background education, experience and training. Eventually SDD had perhaps a thousand employees. Many of them, as myself for example, went through the SDD programming school, the first of its kind in the world. It was believed this ‘school’ trained a large proportion of programmers in the USA. Out of that group came a number of experts whose work would subsequently be found in MITRE labs, ARPANET, creating programs such as Jovial and universities in Southern California, and ultimately in the world wide web.

One of the textbooks for my class on Nuclear Security at the University of California Berkeley paired with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It is slightly disconcerting to read about press coverage being planned years in advance about ‘nuclear crises’, are these ‘crises’ really just nothing more than empty threats and attempts at coercion with intent to gain social control.

Book runs all over the place, author has an agenda, I suppose most of us do about thermonuclear war however he picks one person and runs with him.His constant use of superlatives is too irritating for my taste-keeps beating you over the head with them. The subject has enough gravitas already. There is a story to be told but not found here.

Fred Kaplan, who today writes for Slate.com, twenty years ago, wrote this excellent intellectual history of a distinct group of policymakers who emerged after World War II. This group of intellectuals, centered on the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, used mathematical equations and statistical analyses to attempt to rationalize and control nuclear weapons and their possible use in combat.Kaplan found that after forty years, from the later 1940s until the early 1980s, when the book was published, intellectual thought went from assurances that nuclear war could be controlled; to a belief in the 1960s that controlling such a weapon is impossible. When the Berlin and Cuba crises of the early 1960s erupted and these intellectuals were actually confronted with the possibility of nuclear war that the rationalizations ended.However, in the early 1980s the idea began to emerge again that nuclear weapons could be used in war. If the Cold War had gone on much longer it is unknowable where the latest generation of defense intellectuals would have taken nuclear strategy. Thankfully, we never got the chance to find out.

It will scare the life out of you to read just how the whole cold war went down, how policy was developed, and the dearth of information used to make massive theoretical models. truly horrifying.

Essential reading for anyone interested in the US warfighting plans and policies in the nuclear age.

Insight into possible future events.

I got on. It's the book I ordered. 5 stars!

A fascinating story of damaged, and damaging, men who were ruled by fear and arrogance but thought themselves calm and rational: intellectuals writing their childhood experiences into the matrices of game theory, businessmen who would incinerate their customers to protect their profits, airmen who could not see the charred children rotting in the acres of their Armageddon.

Die Methoden des Kalten Kriegs werden im Detail als Forschungsergebnisse im wesentlichen der Wissenschaftler der RAND Corporation (die Wizards) im kalifornischen Santa Monica dargestellt. Ihr gehörte auch Daniel Ellsberg ("Doomesday Machine - Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner") an, der dieses Buch empfiehlt. Die Kernaussage des Buchs ist: der Kalte Krieg war ein komplexes (vorwiegend von Rand entwickeltes) Spiel, das Weltpolitik und Gesellschaften in seinen Fesseln hielt. Nach Ellsberg war (und ist) sein Hauptziel, die für die Beteiligten profitable irrwitzige Produktion von Massenvernichtungswaffen und deren Träger (zuerst Interkontinentalbomber und dann ICBMs) zu ermöglichen. Die beteiligten hochbegabten Wissenschaftler waren damals Täter und Opfer zugleich, und Stanley Kubricks Film "Strangelove" ist nach Ellsberg eigentlich eine Doku über die unerträglich wahrscheinlichen Folgen dieses Spiels. Meine Erfahrung als Physiker, der Jahrzehnte an der Langzeitlagerung von hochradioaktivem Abfall gearbeitet hat, lehrt mich, dass diese Korruption des Geistes auch für andere Wissenschaftler gilt, die im Kraftfeld der Politik arbeiten. Deswegen empfehle ich jungen Kollegen, die Methoden genau zu studieren, die Fred Kaplan in seinem "Wizards of Armageddon" gewissenhaft aufdeckt und dabei sogar einen kritisch erfreulichen Lesestoff produziert.

This book is a history of the American so-called defense intellectuals who developed strategies for deterring and fighting a nuclear war against the soviet union. It gives an account of how national US policy was influenced by their ideas. This story is told shrewdly and in detail. The author presents insider knowledge without an insider's view. His critique of nuclear strategy is unequivocal and well argued. Everyone who wants to know how the American plans for using the bomb developed during the Cold War should read this book.

For anyone wanting to know the series of events from the 'thinkers' after Hiroshima and Nagasaki up to the Reagan administration, this is the book.