Monthly Archives: August 2018

Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis

Book Review

Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, Yale University Press, 2014, 904 pages.

Reviewed by Michael F. Duggan

This book is about a time of climate disasters, never-ending wars, economic globalism complete with mass human migration, imbalances, and subsequent social strife—a period characterized by unprecedented scientific advances and backward superstition. In other words, it is a world survey about the web of events known as the 17th century. Although I bought it in paperback a number of years ago, I recently found a mint condition hardback copy of this magisterial tome by master historian, Geoffrey Parker (Cambridge, St. Andrews, Yale, etc.), and felt compelled to write about it, however briefly. I am drawn to this century because of its contrasts as the one that straddles the transition from the Early Modern to the Age of Reason and Enlightenment and more broadly marks the final shift from Medieval to Modern (even before Salem colonists hanged their neighbors suspected of witchcraft, Leibniz and Newton had independently begun to formulate the calculus).

In 1959, British historian H. R. Trevor-Roper, presented the macro-historical thesis of the “General Crisis” or the interpretive premise characterizing the 17th century as an overarching series of crises from horrible regional wars (e.g. the Eighty Years War, the Thirty Years Wars, the English Civil War and its roots and spillover into Scotland and Ireland) and rebellions, to widespread human migration and the subsequent spread of disease, any number of epidemics, global climate change, and a long litany of some of the most extreme weather events in recorded history (e.g. the Little Ice Age). When I was in graduate school, I had intuited this premise on my own (perhaps after reading Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, about the “Calamitous 14th Century”), but was hardly surprised to discover that Trevor-Roper had scooped me by 40 years.

Parker has taken this thesis and generalized it in detail beyond Europe to encompass the entire world to include catastrophic events and change throughout the Far East, Russia, China, India, Persia, the greater Middle East, Africa, and the Americas. Others, including Trevor-Roper himself, also saw these in terms of global trends and scope, but, to my knowledge, Parker’s book is the fullest and most fleshed-out treatment. It is academic history, but is well-written and readable for a general audience. It is well-researched history on a grand scales. For Western historians, such as myself, the broader perspective is eyeopening and suggestive of human commonality rather than divergence. We are all a part of an invasive plague species and we are all victims of events, nature, and our own nature.

Although I am generally skeptical of macro interpretive premises that try to explain or unify everything that happened during a period under a single premise—i.e. the more a theory or thesis tries to explain, the more interesting and important, but the weaker is usually is as a theory and therefore the less it explains (call it a Heisenberg principle of historiography)—this one is on to something, at least as description. The question(s), I suppose, is the degree to which the events of this century, overlapping or sequential in both geography and time, are interconnected or emerge from common causes or if they were a convergence of factors both related and discrete, or rather is the century a crisis, a sum of crises, or both? Correlation famously does not establish causation. To those who see human history in the broadest of terms—in terms of of the environment, of humankind as a singular prong of biology, and therefore of human history as an endlessly interesting and increasingly tragic chapter of natural history—this book will be of special interest.

In college I was ambivalent about the 17th century. More than most centuries, it was an “in between times” period, neither one thing, nor the other. All periods are artificial and intermediary, but the 17th century seemed especially artificial given the fundamental advances and shifts in intellectual history that occurred in the Europe between 1601 and 1700. In the West, the 18th century seemed like a coherent, unified world, the Newtonian paradigm. But the 17th century was a demarcation, a caldron from which the world of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason emerged. The 18th century was the sum and creation of the previous century, a world unified under Bacon, Locke, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Newton, and many others, and today I find the earlier period to be the more interesting of the two. This book only feeds this belief.

As someone who thinks that one of the most important and productive uses of history is to inform policy and politics, it is apparent that the author intends this book to be topical—a wide-angle yet detailed survey of another time, for our time. In general the 17th century is good tonic for those who believe that history is all sunshine and light or that human progress (such as it is) is all a rising road. It is also serves as cautionary example for what may be coming in our own time. A magnum opus of breathtaking breadth and ambition, this book is certainly worth looking at (don’t be put off by its thickness, you can pick it up at any point and read a chapter here or there).

Fat Man and Little Boy

I wrote this for the 70th Anniversary of the atomic bombings of Japan. It appeared in an anthology at Georgetown University. This is taken from a late draft, but the editing is still a bit rough.

Roads Taken and not Taken: Thoughts on “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” Plus-70

By Michael F. Duggan

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita… “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

-Robert Oppenheimer

When I was in graduate school, I came to characterize perspectives on the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan into three categories.

The first was the “Veterans Argument”—that the dropping of the bombs was an affirmative good. As this name implies, it was a position embraced by some World War Two veterans and others who had lived through the war years and seems to have been based on lingering sensibilities of the period. It was also based on the view the rapid end of the war had saved many lives—including their own, in many cases—and that victory had ended an aggressive and pernicious regime. It also seemed tinged with an unapologetic sense of vengeance and righteousness cloaked as simple justice. They had attacked us, after all—Remember Pearl Harbor, the great sneak attack? More positively, supporters of this position would sometimes cite the fact of Japan’s subsequent success as a kind of moral justification for dropping the bombs.

Although some of the implications of this perspective cannot be discounted, I tended to reject it; no matter what one thinks of Imperial Japan, the killing of more than 150 thousand civilians can never be an intrinsic good. Besides there is something suspect about the moral justification of horrible deeds by citing all of the good that came after it, even if true.¹

I had begun my doctorate in history a couple of years after the fiftieth anniversary of the dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, and by then there had been a wave of “revisionist” history condemning the bombings as intrinsically bad, as inhumane, and unnecessary—as “technological band aides” to end a hard and bitter conflict. The argument was that by the summer of 1945, Japan was on the ropes—finished—and would have capitulated within days or weeks even without the bombs. Although I had friends who subscribed to this position, I thought that it was unrealistic in that it interjected idealistic sensibilities and considerations that seemed unhistorical to the period and the “felt necessities of the times.” Was it realistic to interject 1990s moral observations onto people a half-century earlier in the midst of the most destructive war in human history?

This view is was also associated with a well-publicized incident of vandalism against the actual Enola Gay at a Smithsonian exhibit that ignited a controversy that forced the museum to change its interpretive text to tepid factual neutrality.

And then there was a kind of middle-way argument—a watered-down version of the first—asserting that the dropping of the bombs—although not intrinsically good—was the best of possible options. The other primary option was a two-phased air-sea-land invasion of main islands of Japan: Operation Olympic scheduled to begin on November 1, 1945, and Operation Coronet, scheduled for early March 1946 (the two operations were subsumed under the name Operation Downfall). I knew people whose fathers and grandfathers were still living who had been in WWII, and who believed with good reason that they would have been killed fighting in Japan. It was argued that the American casualties for the war—approximately 294,000 combat deaths—would have been multiplied two or three fold if we had invaded, to say nothing about the additional millions of Japanese civilians that would have likely died resisting. The Okinawa campaign of April-June 1945, the viciousness and intensity of the combat there and appalling casualties of both sides were regarded as a kind of microcosm, a prequel of what an invasion of Japan would be like.²

The idea behind this perspective was one of realism, that in a modern total war against a fanatical enemy, one took off the gloves in order to end it as soon as possible. General Curtis LeMay asserts that it was the moral responsibility of all involved to end the war as soon as possible, and if the bombs ended it by a single day, then using them was worth the cost.³ One also heard statements like “what would have happened to an American president who had a tool that could have ended the war, but chose not to use it, and by doing so doubled our casualties for the war?” It was simple, if ghastly, math: the bombs would cost less in terms of human life than an invasion. With an instinct toward the moderate and sensible middle, this was the line I took.

In graduate school, I devoured biographies and histories of the Wise Men of the World War Two/Cold War era foreign policy establishment—Bohlen, Harriman, Hopkins, Lovett, Marshall, McCloy, Stimson, and of course, George Kennan. When I read Kai Bird’s biography, Chairman, John McCloy and the Making of the American Foreign Policy Establishment, I was surprised by some of the back stories and wrangling of the policy makers and the decisions behind the dropping of the bombs.⁴ It also came as a surprise that John McCloy (among others), had in fact vigorously opposed the dropping of the atomic bombs, perhaps with very good reason.

Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy was nobody’s idea of a dove or a pushover. Along with his legendary policy successes during and after WWII, he was controversial for ordering the internment of Japanese Americans and for not bombing the death camps in occupied Europe, because doing so would divert resource from the war effort and victory. He was also the American High Commissioner of occupied Germany after the war and had kept fairly prominent Nazis in their jobs and kept out of prison German industrialists who had played ball with the Nazi regime. Notably, in the1960s, he was one of the only people on record who flatly stood up to President Lyndon Johnson after getting the strong-armed “Johnson treatment” and was not ruined by it. And yet this tough-guy hawk was dovish on the issue of dropping the atomic bombs.

The story goes like this: In April and May, 1945, there were indications that the Japanese were seeking a settled end to the war via diplomatic channels in Switzerland and through communications with the Soviets—something that was corroborated by U.S. intelligence.⁵ Armed with this knowledge, McCloy approached his boss, Secretary of War, and arguably father of the modern U.S. foreign policy establishment, “Colonel” Henry L. Stimson. McCloy told Stimson that the new and more moderate Japanese Prime Minister, Kantaro Suzuki, and his cabinet, were looking for a face-saving way to end the war. The United States was demanding an unconditional surrender, and Suzuki indicated that if this language was modified, and the Emperor was allowed to remain as a figurehead under a constitutional democracy, Japan would surrender.

Among American officials, the debates on options for ending the war included many of the prominent players, policy makers and military men like General George C. Marshall, Admiral Leahy and the Chiefs of Staff, former American ambassador to Japan, Joseph Grew, Robert Oppenheimer (the principle creator of the bomb), and his Scientific Advisory Panel to name but a few. It also included President Harry Truman. Among the options discussed was whether or not to give the Japanese “fair warning” and if the yet untested bomb should be demonstrated in plain view of the enemy. There were also considerations of deterring the Soviet, who had agreed at Yalta to enter the war against Japan, from additional East Asian territorial ambitions. Although it was apparent to Grew and McCloy, that Japan was looking for a way out, therefore making an invasion unnecessary, the general assumption was that if atomic bombs were functional, they should be used without warning.

This was the recommendation of the Interim Committee, that included soon-to-be Secretary of State, James Byrnes, and which was presented to Truman by Stimson on June 6.⁶ McCloy disagreed with these recommendations and cornered Stimson in his own house on June 17^th. Truman would be meeting with the Chiefs of Staff the following day on the question of invasion, and McCloy implored Stimson to make the case that the end of the war was days or weeks away and that an invasion would be unnecessary. If the United States merely modified the language of unconditional surrender and allowed for the Emperor to remain, the Japanese would surrender under de facto unconditional conditions. If the Japanese did not capitulate after the changes were made and fair warning was given, the option for dropping the bombs would still be available. “We should have our heads examined if we don’t consider a political solution,” McCloy said. As it turned out, he would accompany Stimson to the meeting with Truman and the Chiefs.

Bird notes that the meeting with Truman and the Chiefs was dominated by Marshall and focused almost exclusively on military considerations.⁷ As Bird writes “[e]ven Stimson seemed resigned now to the invasion plans, despite the concession he had made the previous evening to McCloy’s views. The most he could muster was a vague comment on the possible existence of a peace faction among the Japanese populace.” The meeting was breaking up when Truman said “No one is leaving this meeting without committing himself. McCloy, you haven’t said anything. What is your view?” McCloy shot a quick glance to Stimson who said to him, “[s]ay what you feel about it.” McCloy had the opening he needed.⁸

McCloy essentially repeated the argument he had made to Stimson the night before. He also noted that a negotiated peace with Japan would preclude the need for Soviet assistance, therefore depriving them of any excuse of an East Asian land grab. He also committed a faux pas by actually mentioning the bomb by name and suggesting that it be demonstrated to the Japanese. Truman responded favorably, saying “That’s exactly what I’ve been wanting to explore… You go down to Jimmy Byrnes and talk to him about it.”⁹ As Bird points out,

[b]y speaking the unspoken, McCloy had dramatically altered the terms of the debate. Now it was no longer a question of invasion. What had been a dormant but implicit option now became explicit. The soon-to-be tested bomb would end the war, with or without warning. And the war might end before the bomb was ready.” but increasingly the dominant point of view was that the idea of an invasion had been scrapped and in the absence of a Japanese surrender, the bombs would be dropped.¹⁰

After another meeting with what was called the Committee of Three, most of the main players agreed “that a modest change in the terms of surrender terms might soon end the war” and that “Japan [would be] susceptible to reason.”¹¹ Stimson put McCloy to work at changing the terms of surrender, specifically the language of Paragraph 12 that referenced the terms that the Japanese had found unacceptable. McCloy did not mention the atomic bomb by name. But by now however, Truman was gravitating toward Byrnes’s position of using the bombs.

After meeting with the president on July 3, Stimson and McCloy “solicited a reluctant invitation” to attend the Potsdam Conference, but instead of traveling with the President’s entourage aboard the USS Augusta, they secured their own travel arrangements to Germany. Newly sworn-in Secretary of State, James Byrnes, would sail with the president and was a part of his onboard poker group.¹² The rest, as they say, is history.

At Potsdam, Truman was told by the Soviets that Japan was once again sending out feelers for a political resolution. Truman told Stalin to stall them for time, while reasserting the demand for unconditional surrender in a speech where he buried the existence of the bombs in language so vague, that it is likely that the Japanese leaders did not pick up on the implications.¹³ Japan backed away. Truman’s actions seem to suggest that, under Byrnes’s influence (and perhaps independent of it), he had made his mind to drop the bombs and wanted to sabotage any possibly of a political settlement. As Bird notes, “Byrnes and Truman were isolated in their position; they were rejecting a plan to end the war that had been endorsed by virtually all of their advisors.”¹⁴ Byrnes’s position had been adopted by the president over the political option of McCloy. As Truman sailed for home on August 6, 1945, he received word that the uranium bomb nicknamed “Little Boy” had been dropped on Hiroshima with the message “Big bomb dropped on Hiroshima August 5 at 7:15 P.M. Washington time. First reports indicate complete success which was even more conspicuous than earlier test.” Truman characterized the attack as “The greatest thing in history.”¹⁵ Three days later the plutonium bomb “Fat Man” fell on Nagasaki. The Soviets entered the fighting against Japan on August 8. The war was over.

Given Byrnes’s reputation as a political operative of rigid temperament and often questionable judgment, one can only wonder if the dropping of the bombs was purely gratuitous. Did he and he president believe that the American people wanted and deserved their pound of flesh almost four years after Pear Harbor and some of the hardest combat ever fought by U.S. servicemen?¹⁶ Of course there were also the inevitable questions of “what would Roosevelt have done?”

With events safely fixed in the past, historians tend to dislike messy and problematic counterfactuals, and one can only wonder if McCloy’s plan for a negotiated peace would have worked. One of the most constructive uses of history is to inform present-day policy decisions through the examination of what has worked and what has not worked in the past, and why. Even so the vexing—haunting—queries about the necessity of dropping the atomic bombs remain as open questions. The possibility for a political resolution to the war seems at the very least to have been plausible. The Japanese probably would have surrendered by November, perhaps considerably earlier, as the result of negotiations, but there is no way to tell for certain.¹⁷ As it was, in August 1945, Truman decided to allow the Emperor to stay on anyway, and our generous reconstruction policies turned Japan (and Germany) into a miracle of representative liberal democracy and enlightened capitalism.

Even if moderate elements in the Japanese government had been able to arrange an effective surrender, there is no telling whether the Japanese military, and especially the army, would have gone along with it; as it was—and after two atomic bombs had leveled two entire cities—some members of the Japanese army still preferred self-destruction over capitulation, and a few even attempted a coup against the Emperor to preempt his surrender speech to the Japanese People.

This much is certain: our enemies in the most costly war in human history have now been close allies for seven decades (as the old joke that goes, if the United States had lost WWII, we would now be driving Japanese and German cars). Likewise our Cold War enemy, the Russians, in spite of much Western tampering within their sphere of influence, now pose no real threat to us. But the bomb remains.

Knowledge may be lost, but an idea cannot be un-invented; as soon as a human being put arrow to bow, the world was forever changed. The bomb remains. It remains in great numbers in at least nine nations and counting, in vastly more powerful forms (the hydrogen bomb) with vastly more sophisticated means of delivery. It is impossible to say whether the development and use of the atomic bomb was and is categorically bad, but it remains for us a permanent Sword of Damocles and the nuclear “secret” is the knowledge of Prometheus. It is now a fairly old technology, the same vintage as a ’46 Buick.

The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki broke the ice about the use of these weapons in combat and will forever live as a precedent for anyone else who may use it. The United States is frequently judgmental of the actions and motives of other nations, and yet the U.S. and the U.S. alone is the only nation to have used nuclear weapons in war. As with so many people in 1945 and ever since, Stimson and Oppenheimer both recognized the atomic bomb had changed everything. More than any temporal regime, living or dead, it and its progeny remain a permanent enemy of mankind.

Notes

For a discussion of the moral justification in regard to dropping the atomic bombs, see John Gray, Black Mass, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007, pp 190-191.
For an account of the fighting on Okinawa, see Eugene Sledge, With the Old Breed, New York: Random House, 1981.
LeMay expresses this sentiment in an interview he gave for the 1973 documentary series, The World at War.
Generally Chapter 12, “Hiroshima”. Kai Bird, Chairman, John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992, pp. 240-268.
Bird, p. 242.
Bird, p. 244.
Bird, p. 245.
Bird, p. 245.
Bird, p. 246.
Bird, p. 250.
Bird, pp. 247-248.
Bird, p. 249-250. Averell Harriman and Elie Abel, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin, 1941-1946, New York: Random House, 1975, 493.Bird, p. 251. It should be noted that most of the top American military commanders opposed dropping the atomic bombs on Japan. As Daniel Ellsberg observes: “The judgment that the bomb had not been necessary for victory—without invasion—was later expressed by Generals Eisenhower, MacArthur, and Arnold, as well as Admirals Leahy, King, Nimitz, and Halsey. (Eisenhower and Halsey also shared Leahy’s view that it was morally reprehensible.) In other words, seven out of eight officers of five star rank in the U.S. Armed Forces in 1945 believed that the bomb was not necessary to avert invasion (that is, all but General Marshall, Chief of Staff of the Army, who alone believed that an invasion might have been necessary.’ [Emphasis added by Ellsberg]. See Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine, New York: Bloomsbury, 2017, pp262-263. As it happened, Eisenhower was having dinner with Stimson when the Secretary of War received the cable saying that the Hiroshima bomb had been dropped and that it had been successful. “Stimson asked the General his opinion and Eisenhower replied that he was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hate to see our country be the first to use such a weapon. Well… the old gentleman got furious. I can see how he would. After all, it had been his responsibility to push for all of the expenditures to develop the bomb, which of course he had the right to do, and was right to do.” See John Newhouse War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989, p. 47. Newhouse also points out that there were numerous political and budgetary considerations related to the opinions of the various players involved in developing and dropping the bombs. One can only hope that budgetary responsibility/culpability did not (or does not) drive events.
Harriman, p. 293.
For his own published account of this period, see James F. Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, New York: Harper Brothers & Company, 1947.
See Robert Dallek, The Lost Peace, New York: Harper Collins, 2010, p. 128. Dallek makes hit point, basing it on the Strategic Bombing Survey, as well as the reports of Truman’s own special envoy to Japan after the war in October 1945.

Daniel Ellsberg

Book Review

Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine, Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, New York: Bloomsbury, 2017, 420 Pages, $30.00 (hardcover).

In the Shadow of the Mushroom Cloud (or: Bigger than the Pentagon Papers)

Reviewed by Michael F. Duggan

Before many centuries more… science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world.

-Henry Adams

As it turns out, Stanley Kubrick got it mostly right.

“We came out into the afternoon sunlight, dazed by the light and the film [Dr. Strangelove] both agreeing that what we had just seen was essentially a documentary. (We didn’t yet know—nor did SAC—that existing strategic operational plans, whether for first strike or retaliation, constituted a literal Doomsday Machine, as in the film.)” Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine, p. 65.

You should read this book, but not at bedtime.

As a nuclear strategist in the late 1950s and 1960s, this was the story Daniel Ellsberg wanted to tell, but that fact that “Vietnam is where the bombs are falling right now [1969]” forced his hand and diverted his attention elsewhere. The overarching theme of his recent book—the overwhelming feeling one comes away with—is that it is a miracle or a fortuitous aberration of probability that the United States and Soviet Union did not blow up the world during the Cold War. What is more is that the risk is still in place and that the threat of a nuclear war is greater than ever. A moral of the book is that wholesale war against civilians characterized by strategic terror bombing and which reached its apex in the omnicidal possibilities of nuclear war is not only immoral and a dubious means of winning wars. It is likely the grandest expression of the irrationality of war and of our aggressiveness as an animal.

In a sense, Ellsberg is a latter-day Siegfried Sassoon—the true believer-turned-apostate in the name of humanity, the patriot with a greater commitment to the truth, the man who saw insanity and folly and chose sense and sanity. Of course his name will always be associated with the Pentagon Papers that exposed the true motives of the war in Vietnam—a rivulet font that contributed to the deluge that eventually forced President Nixon from office. He is arguably the prototype of the modern whistle-blower. The present book tells an even bigger story and one that its author has waited a half-century to tell.

Ellsberg came close to telling this story at the time, but the thousands of pages he copied on nuclear strategy were lost in an almost comical sequence of events including the intervention of a tropical storm, and which by his own admission, likely spared him decades of hard prison time. He can now rely on his own memory corroborated by material declassified over the years without fear of breaking the law. Although much of the material here was previously known by historians of the Cold War, it is still likely to shock when presented so starkly by a person so intimately connected with the topic.

Ellsberg begins by recalling that as a thirteen-year-old, he and his ninth grade friends immediately latched on to the inherently problematic, the unavoidable and insurmountable implications of the mere existence of super-weapons that could destroy entire cities in a single blow, and of nations armed with such technology. These high school freshmen hit upon conclusions usually associated with physicists working on the Manhattan Project and epitomized with Robert Oppenheimer’s chilling paraphrase of the Bhagavad Gita: “I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Ellsberg’s social studies instructor, Bradley Patterson, was teaching the concept of “cultural lag,” or the idea that technology runs ahead of the cultural, social, political ability to handle it—i.e. “to control it wisely, ethically, prudently.” In the fall of 1944, the teacher had his students consider the idea of nuclear weapons (articles on the possibility of a Uranium 235 bomb had already appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and other magazines) as a kind of ultimate or paragon example of this concept. The students were given a week to write an essay on the implications of such a weapon.

“As I remember, everybody in the class had arrived at much the same judgment. It seemed pretty obvious: the existence of such a bomb would be bad for humanity. Mankind could not handle such a destructive force. It could not be safely controlled. The power would be “abused”—that is, used dangerously, with terrible consequences… A bomb like that was just too powerful.”

The first part of this book, “The Bomb and I”, deals with the ins and outs, the subtleties, caveats, conundrums, hypotheticals and counter-hypotheticals of the game theory logic imposed by nuclear weapons on strategists during the Cold War. It is a personal history of the implementation of nuclear strategy, unsettling breaches in the system, near accidents and potential for global thermonuclear catastrophe in the Manichean world of U.S.-Soviet relations. It is Ellsberg’s own story as a wiz kid, a consultant for the Air Force’s RAND (Research ANd Development) Corporation—its in-house think tank. As with the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg’s purpose is to present what he saw versus the official line.

Summarizing in his introduction, Ellsberg states eight realities of American nuclear strategy that set the theme of the book. These are:

“The basic elements of American readiness for nuclear war remain today what they were almost sixty years ago: Thousands of nuclear weapons remain on hair-trigger alert, aimed mainly at Russian targets” and that “the declared official rational” is to deter “an aggressive Russian first strike” is a “deliberate deception.” According to Ellsberg, “[d]eterring a surprise nuclear attack has never been the only or even the primary purpose of our plans and preparations.” Rather, “[t]he nature, scale, and posture of our strategic nuclear forces has always been shaped around the requirements of quite different purposes: to attempt to limit the damage to the United States from Soviet or Russian retaliation to a U.S. first strike against the USSR or Russia. This capability is, in particular, intended to strengthen the credibility of U.S. threats to initiate limited nuclear attacks, or escalate them—U.S. threats of ‘first use’—to prevail in regional, initially non-nuclear conflicts involving Soviet or Russian forces or their allies.”
“The required U.S. strategic capabilities have always been for a first-strike force,” neither a surprise attack nor one “with an aim of striking ‘second’ under any circumstances, if that could ne avoided by preemption.” In other worlds, [t]hough officially denied, preemptive ‘launch on warning’ (LOW)—either on tactical warning of an incoming attack or a strategic warning that nuclear escalation is probably impending—has always been at the heart of our strategic alert.”
Contrary to popular belief, nuclear weapons have been used “dozens of times in ‘crises’ since their actual combat use over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This has been done “mostly in secret from the American people (though not from adversaries). They have used them in the precise way that a gun is used when it is pointed at someone in a confrontation, whether or not the trigger is pulled. To get one’s way without pulling the trigger is a major purpose for owning a gun.”
“Posing as it does the threat of nuclear attack by the United States to every state that might potentially be in conflict with us (like North Korea), this persistent rejection by the United States of a no-first-use commitment has always precluded an effective nonproliferation campaign. “
“With respect to deliberate, authorized U.S. strategic attacks, the system has always been designed to be triggered by a far wider range of events than the public has ever imagined. Moreover, the hand authorized to pull the trigger on nuclear forces has never been exclusively limited to the president, nor even his highest military officials.” “Dead hand” systems of delegation of nuclear launch authority probably exist in the systems of all nuclear powers, most likely including North Korea.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, “events spiraled out of control, coming within a handbreadth of triggering our plans for general nuclear war” (and we should bear in mind that this was a crisis presided over by two rational leaders looking for a way out of the standoff).
“The strategic nuclear system is more prone to false alarms, accidents, and unauthorized launches than the public (and even most high officials) as ever been aware.” Ellsberg notes that false alarms did in fact occur in 1970, 1980, 1983, and 1995.
“Potentially catastrophic dangers such as these have been systematically concealed from the public.” Not even the Joint Chiefs of Staff realized until 1983 that the nuclear winter that followed a general nuclear war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. would probably kill every person on the planet.

He concludes the introduction by observing that “[i]n sum, most aspects of U.S. nuclear planning and force readiness that became known to me half a century ago still exist today as prone to catastrophe as ever but on a scale, as known to environmental scientists, looming vastly larger than was understood then” and more economically, “[t]ragically, I believe that nothing has fundamentally changed.”

It is hard to know where to begin with this book (the eight points above should give the reader a fair, generalized sample to chew on). It is fascinating history, and, like a hero of fiction, the young Ellsberg, always seems to be in the center of things. Following Harvard and a three-year hitch as a Marine Corps infantry officer, he is thrown in as a consultant with a brilliant generation of wiz kinds at RAND. From there he recounts episodes including an eye-opening interview a squadron leader of nuclear-armed aircraft on the front lines of the Cold War, hearing a confession of alleged pre-appointed nuclear authority by an Air Force theater commander, and discussions with other high-level generals including the cigar-chomping Curtis LeMay himself. He writes a speech intended for President Kennedy that meets with McNamara’s approval but which is given by Deputy Secretary of Defense, Roswell Gilpatrick instead. He warns the haughty incoming National Security Adviser, McGeorge Bundy about the numerous lapses in the system, including the usurpation of the chain of command and undermining of civilian control.

With academic and military credentials, Ellsberg had a Selig-like knack for being at the right place at the right time. He was well-qualified to be both a detective of chinks in the system and the deliverer of often shocking messages, but to no avail. The lesson seems to be that even the planners of nuclear strategy were just as much captive to the self-direct logic of what was seen as a bipolar world as the unsuspecting rest of the nation, and just as helpless to do anything about it. Although nuclear war is averted by human agency during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the larger game continues and seems mostly immune from the efforts of people who see the madness.

Although the book is well structured—and it is better to read it for oneself rather than have a reviewer recount it chapter by chapter—one comes away with a myriad of troubling facts and imagery, of things generally unknown at the time (and still unknown by most Americans): drummed-up fictions like the missile gap and bogus theatrical props like the nuclear “football”. One is initially shocked and then overwhelmed and eventually numbed by a sequence of revelations like the inevitability of pre-approved delegation of nuclear launch authority, the daily breakdown of communications between Washington and bases in the Pacific, how commanders and even pilots circumvented launch codes, how the Chiefs of Staff got around civilian control authority, and how civilian authorities were kept in the dark about nuclear war plans.

One is taken aback at the lack of clarity in the minds of the men who would actually be flying nuclear-armed aircraft and under what circumstances might they launch an unauthorized attack (e.g. if the last plane in a squadron crashed on takeoff, thus detonating a thermonuclear weapon on its own base, would the pilot of an aircraft that had already taken off assume that the base had been attacked by the Soviets or Chinese and proceed with an attack in what was intended only to be a drill?). It is all a stark reminder of how closely we came to blowing up everything and how a Guns of August sequence of events with greater-than Missiles of October technology is still a very real possibility (his retelling of the now well-known story of how close a Soviet submarine under depth charge attack from a U.S. ship on the blockade line came to launching a nuclear weapon during the Cuban Missile Crisis is particularly harrowing).

Having grown up in a military family during the Cold War, I learned of the nuclear standoff of super powers at the tender age of eight or nine. I was of a generation, the more sensitive members of whom could imagine the contrails of ICBMs imposed on clear nighttime skies. While I was working on my doctorate in history, I had read John Lewis Gaddis’s masterful Strategies of Containment, and had come away thinking that both sides had unnecessarily ratcheted-up tensions (first with Nitze’s NSC-68 and later with the “New Look” of the Eisenhower years), that the Cold War was an unnecessarily dangerous and “costly political rivalry.”¹ I did not know that, just in surviving the period, the world had in fact won a lengthy sequence of lotteries.

On the one hand, American triumphalists and boosters of their nation’s “victory” in the Cold War (now completely squandered) point to the zero-sum, game theory logic of deterrence, of Mutual Assured Destruction, and how it apparently worked. The idea, seemingly oxymoronic, is generally attributed to Bernard Brodie and the view that in order to prevent nuclear war, a nation must “be prepared to resort to atomic war” and to make it too terrible to be a viable option.² Making nuclear war mutually suicidal seems to have accomplished this to date. But on the other hand, being in a Mexican standoff with the most destructive weapons ever conceived is hardly an admirable position in which to find oneself, and it is a state of affairs that only has to fail once. Add to this the fact that human beings are naturally aggressive animals, that unhinged leaders come to power from time-to-time, the role of accidents in history, hair-trigger strategies of first strike, and an ever-increasing nuclear club, and the rational reader of Ellsberg’s book can be excused for wanting to get off of the planet.³

Part II. History of Bombing Civilians

The second part of the book, “The Road to Doomsday” is a history of strategic bombing as the natural predecessor to nuclear war. This part is obviously less personal but gives an impressive outline about how we got to where we are in terms of not batting an eye at accepting civilian deaths as “collateral damage” and seeing non-combatants as legitimate targets in war. In some respects, this topic is a later chapter, a continuation of the more general history of the growth of modern total warfare since Napoleon and certainly since the American Civil War. Even so, it is remarkable to compare the unconcealed disgust of commentators like Theodore Roosevelt at the intentional targeting of a (mostly) civilian liner like the Lusitania in 1915, with the causal acceptance of bombing of entire cities in the Second World War by American political leaders and their constituents.

Indeed, as a child in the 1970s reading of the air campaigns of the Second World War, there was no greater symbol of heroism for me than the gorgeous lines and the all-business armament configuration of the B-17 Flying Fortress (the far more effective and severely aerodynamic B-29 never achieved the same appeal), and the brave men who flew them. To this day, the sight of a B-17 arouses the child in me, although I am certain that German who were children in 1943 or 1944 in Hamburg, Munich, or Dresden, do not share my affection for this plane.

As a practical matter, it is not clear that wholesale strategic bombing is an effective basis for strategy. Theorists and planners between the wars, like Giulio Douhet, believed that if total war could be brought on the cities and heartlands of an enemy nation, wars could be brought to a quick and decisive conclusion.

As regards Germany, this does not appear to have been the case as aircraft and tank production continued to increase until the final month or two of the war. In fact, strategic bombing may have only been successful in Europe against oil production and transportation. In Japan bombing had turned most of the major cities to ashes, and yet American war planners still feared such fierce resistance by the civilian population that they felt justified in dropping two atomic bombs. Even here it is not clear whether or not the bombs were the decisive factor in ending the war in the Pacific or whether it was the simultaneous intervention of the USSR in that theater, or both.⁴ It would seem that Japan was mostly defeated on the great island-dotted battlefield of the South Pacific.

Douhet’s dream of aerial war breaking the will of an enemy people does not have a record of the decisiveness that he sought. One of the most severe bombings campaigns in history did not break the will North Vietnamese, nor did a similarly impressive campaign over North Korea force a surrender. Bombing does change people, and the behavior of the North Koreans since 1953 and the genocide in Cambodia during the 1970s are likely attributable in large measure to the strategic bombing campaigns launched against them.

In 1946, George Kennan suggested that the world revert back to the limited Jominian wars⁵—the “cabinet wars” of the eighteenth-century that followed in the wake of the total wars of seventeenth-century Europe. His idea was that the purpose of war should be to minimize and not maximize casualties, that “[v]iolence… could not be an objective.”⁶ Nuclear weapons and the logic of Bernard Brodie to make war too horrible to be tolerated in fact makes it obsolete as a practical matter, and the possibility of a war being launched by accident or miscalculation made it additionally intolerable. And yet as the Flexible Response to Mutual Assured Destruction has demonstrated time and time again in the many regional wars since the early 1960s, limited military options to keep war alive only make it more likely, if less suicidal.

It would seem that at best humans may be forever damned to a condition in which the possibility of complete destruction by total Clausewitzian war with nuclear weapons and subsequent fallout and nuclear winter, or else to embrace an updated version of Flexible Response—limited war that would “keep the game (and the human race) alive” but which makes conflict so easy that it become all but inevitable.⁷ The result of this return to limited war seems to be a never-ending, mostly unnecessary series of the “semi-war” that James Forrestal, and more recently, Andrew Bacevich, warned of.⁸

It seems that the latter is already well upon us and will be until it becomes financially unsustainable. As with total warfare, limited war has also reached new technical heights with drone technology, allowing for the campaigns of remote video game-like strikes of a character arguably intermediate between war and assassination, while the great majority of our people are as oblivious to it as they were to the fact that they were nearly incinerated on a number of occasions during the Cold war and might still be. In other words, we now have the worst of both worlds: an ongoing state of never-ending limited wars while the nuclear omnipresence remains and could conceivably be triggered by a limited war, a misunderstanding, accident, or deteriorating relations with our old Cold War foes⁹.

Conclusion

Regimes come and go, but The Bomb remains. The club of nuclear states continues to grow (South Africa being the only nation to have relinquished its nuclear weapons), and now includes nations who dislike and distrust each other perhaps even more than the U.S. and U.S.S.R. during the Cold War. If cautious, rational, and realistic leaders like John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev came within a wild card of blowing up the world in October 1962, what are the odds of intentional or accidental nuclear launches in an age with more fingers on more buttons, the virtually unlimited potential of computer hacking, and leaders of widely varying degrees of stability?

It is an open question of whether an accidental or intentional nuclear war is a greater threat to the world than global climate change and the intimately tied issues of human overpopulation and loss of habitat/biodiversity. The latter is already unfolding and potentially catastrophic climatological changes are already literally in the air and locked-in place. How fast and how severe these changes will manifest is the great unknowable. Possibilities between a gradual societal collapse due to environmental catastrophe and nuclear war followed by a nuclear war gives a potential full range of apocalypse from T,S, Eliot’s “bang” to “a whimper,” and Robert Frost’s “fire” to “ice”.¹⁰

Regardless, and as with Vietnam in the 1960s, climate change is actually happening while nuclear war remain only a possibility contingent on human folly, stupidity, and irrationality. As the smartest man who ever lived observed “[t]he unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe,” or in more picturesque terms “I don’t know how World War III will be fought, but Would War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”¹¹

Technology may be lost, at least for a time, but an idea cannot be intentionally destroyed or un-conceived. A weapon may not be un-invented. If you live long enough, you will see rival nations and even existential enemies become close allies (a 1970s wisecrack observed that if the U.S. had lost WWII, we would now all be driving German and Japanese cars). It is clear that The Bomb is a truer and more permanent enemy than any temporal regime. No conflict is worth destroying the planet over. Heavy-handed nuclear strategies in a time of declining U.S. economic and military power and an increasing number of nations with nuclear weapons and the rise of China as Eurasian hegemon will likely make the future even more dangerous than the past. Another negative effect resulting from the end of the Cold War is a sense of complacency that the threat of nuclear war is over.¹² Nothing could be farther from the truth.

It is a singular coincidence that the great physicist, Hugh Everett III was a contemporary of Ellesberg’s and was also a nuclear planner (although he did not work for RAND and is not mentioned in the book). Everett’s “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests the possibility of many parallel universes, each one splitting off as the result probabilistic events. If his model is correct, one can only wonder how many parallel tracks include worlds that were destroyed by nuclear war. To date this one has been lucky, but my experience in life has been that luck does not hold out in human events, not over the long run. Cue Vera Lynn?

In my opinion, this is a book that Americans should read, including young people when they are able to handle the gravity of the subject. Ellsberg writes in a strong, unpretentious style, but his book is best read closely and carefully from to beginning to end. It does not skim well.

One should consider reading this book in conjunction with Andrew Bacevich’s history of the Cold War and the rise of the national security deep state, Washington Rules, Stephen F. Cohen’s Soviet Fates, and John Lewis Gaddis’s more conventional history of Cold War strategy, Strategies of Containment.

Notes

Kennan, “Republicans won the Cold War?”, At a Century’s Ending; Reflections, 1982-1995, New York: W.W. Norton & Company 186, 1996.
John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan, an American Life, 233-234, 614. See also Bernard Brodie, ed., The Absolute Weapon, Atomic Power and World Order, 1946, as well as his later Strategy in the Missile Age, Princeton University Press, 1959.
See Edward O. Wilson, “Aggression,” On Human Nature, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 99-120, 1978.
As regards the origins of modern total warfare, see Stig Forster and Jorg Nagler’s On the Road to Total War, and David Bell’s The First Total War. As with the Japanese 80 years later, it has been argued that many Southerners would have willingly continued to fight even after the “hard war” campaigns of Grant, Sheridan, and Sherman that prefigure the total wars of the twentieth-century. See generally Jay Wink, April 1865, the Month that Saved America, New York: HarperCollins, Inc., 2001.
Gaddis, George F. Kennan. 234-235.
Gaddis, George F. Kennan,235.
In a sense, nuclear war—although obviously a form of total warfare—is actually antithetical to Clausewitz. War is policy “by other means” in Clausewitz’s formulation, but the complete mutual destruction of nuclear war would preclude the achievement of all policy goals. See John Keegan, A History of Warfare, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993, 381.
Andrew J. Bacevich, Washington Rules, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 27-28, 57-58, 2010.
On the reviving of Cold War tensions with Russia, see Stephen F. Cohen, Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: from Stalinism to the New Cold War, New York: Columbia Press, 2009, 2011. On the rise of China and the decline of the United States, see Alfred W. McCoy, In the Shadows of the American Century, Chicago, IL: Haymarket Book, 2017.
T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men, V,” Collected Poems 1909-1962, 92. Robert Frost, “Fire and Ice,: The Poems of Robert Frost, 232.
Ralph E. Lapp, “The Einstein Letter that Started it All,” The New York Times Magazine, August 2, 54, 1984.
Such major players of the Cold War as George Kennan, and Robert McNamara became supporters of the antinuclear movement during the 1980s. The end of the Cold War took much of the wind out of the sails of this effort. See generally, George F. Kennan, The Nuclear Delusion, New York, Random House, 1983. See also Robert S. McNamara, “The Nuclear Risks of the 1960s and their Lesson for the Twenty-first Century” In Retrospect, New York: Random House, 337-346, 1995.