Defense Intellectuals In Tow

Some thoughts about nuclear strategy and the incentives behind the careers of the people behind the theory.

I learned today that Robert Paul Wolff, anarchist and Marxist, passed earlier this year. He had a great blog, where he displayed the sort of mixture of acerbic Jewish humor and high moral seriousness that I associate with my favorite professors from my undergrad years. His passing caused me to reflect on a point I first read from him, and have since seen in a number of places, which I think is very interesting and under-discussed. He argues that after WWII, interbranch competition for budget within the U.S. military caused each branch to hire economists to create bespoke nuclear strategies that dovetail nicely with said branch’s interests and the technological constraints they were subject to. Wolff’s whole post is worth reading, and I’ll pull big chunks of it here.

Nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles posed a problem for the military entirely new in the history of warfare. No one had ever fought a war using them; indeed, no one had even test fired an IBM with a live nuclear warhead. What was more, the only rational national goal was to avoid a nuclear war, not to win one. Under these conditions, battlefield experience, which is the principal strength of generals and admirals, was worthless.

Into the gap opened up by this unique situation stepped a horde of civilians who claimed to know better than the generals how to plan for nuclear war. Leading the pack were economists, who argued that their techniques for analyzing the competition between two firms in the marketplace was just what the Defense Department needed. They were followed by mathematicians, sociologists, physicists, anthropologists, philosophers, and psychologists. Among the most prominent of these new Defense Intellectuals, as they came to be called, were a brilliant economist in the Harvard Economics Department, Thomas Schelling, and a flabby gasbag of a pseudo-physicist named Herman Kahn, located at the Rand Corporation. In 1960, Kahn published a big, fat, pretentious book called On Thermonuclear War [a bow to von Clausewitz's famous work], in which he purported to show that a vigorous civil defense could enable the United States to "prevail" in a nuclear war with an "acceptable" level of dead Americans - somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty million or so, if the wind was blowing in a favorable direction that day.

The book was an intellectual fraud, filled with scenarios and impressive looking charts and figures "for illustration only" that proved nothing at all. Kahn became a major figure in American debates about military strategy, funded by government contracts and gathering about him at the Rand Corporation an array of pseudo-intellectuals who had done well on the mathematics part of the Scholastic Aptitude Test.

And then the critical point:

The Army and Navy fought back bitterly to seize their share of the annual defense budget. When the first intercontinental ballistic missiles became operational, the Army gained control of them. An enormous effort was then made to secure the missiles against a surprise first attack, which meant burying them deep in concrete hardened missile silos positioned in the empty plains of the Dakotas and surrounding territories. This left the Navy in a seriously disadvantaged position, stuck with battleships and aircraft carriers that were now distinctly second-class weapons systems. So nuclear submarines were developed, each capable of carrying sixteen or more intercontinental ballistic missiles. The nuclear warheads on these missiles were small by comparison with those loaded into the ICBMs or carried by the SAC bombers -- half a megaton or a megaton at the most. But since the missiles, when fired from underwater positions, were only accurate enough to destroy cities, not hardened missile silos, that was more than enough destructive power.

Each of the armed services had think tanks of defense intellectuals in tow whose job it was to develop theories demonstrating that the weapons controlled by their employers were the essential components of the proper nuclear deterrence strategy. Kahn was a bought and paid for Air Force intellectual, which meant he had somehow to show that the ICBMs under their control could plausibly and not insanely be used to launch a first strike against Russia. This in turn required defending two manifestly implausible theses: First, that the ICBMs could knock out almost all of Russia's nuclear tipped missiles; and Second, that with proper air raid shelters, multiple command and control centers, and other preparations, America could survive the inevitable retaliation from Russia's remaining armory with no worse than "acceptable" death and destruction.

The Navy, with its submarine based nuclear missiles, could not plausibly adopt a first strike policy because its weapons were not accurate enough to seriously degrade Russia's ICBM capacity. Its defense theorists, of whom Schelling and his co-author Morton Halperin were far and away the most intellectually impressive, therefore developed a second-strike deterrence strategy. The idea was to make the Navy's missile force impossible to attack, by endlessly moving it about under water. A Russian first strike on America, even though it would completely obliterate the entire country, would then trigger a retaliation against Russian cities by the surviving fleet of nuclear submarines. To guard against Soviet nuclear submarines, underwater networks of sensing devices were laid down in the oceans and seas of the world. All of this, the Navy's defense intellectuals argued, would deter the Kremlin from doing anything self-destructively impulsive.

So the story is something like the following: the Navy wants budget, nuclear submarines are best suited to retaliatory warfare, so the Navy hires Shelling and others to create the second-strike theory of nuclear deterrence; the Air Force wants budget, SAC bombers have a comparative advantage at using nuclear weapons to destroy nuclear weapon silos, so the Air Force hires Kahn and others to create the first-strike strategy. To take these nuclear strategies at face-value is a mistake once you understand the institutional reasons behind their creation. This sort of genealogical story (namely, of political theory being fully determined by the incentives behind the political theorist) is probably more obvious to many than it is to me. If you believe in concepts like le savoir-pouvoir from Foucault, you probably see logic of this story immediately. My personal skepticism with meta-theories (i.e. theories about the creation of theories) is that they are persuasive on a conversational level but once you get into details they are circular and/or overly polemical. What I enjoy about Wolff’s story above is that the details as presented are persuasive, but it’s possible that those details are suspect. Wolff had a bone-deep hatred of nuclear weapons, of the people who tried to make their existence seem logical, and of the language created by those people to that end (his last blogpost was on this topic).

Since reading Wolff’s piece, I have found a number of different sources that supply corroborating details. Richard Rhodes, author of the astonishing The Making of the Atomic Bomb, on Dwarkesh Podcast says the following:

So after the war, when our bomb planners and some of our scientists went into Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just about as soon as the surrender was signed, what they were interested in was the scale of destruction, of course. And those two cities didn't look that different from the other cities that had been firebombed with small incendiaries and ordinary high explosives. They went home to Washington, the policy makers, with the thought that — “Oh, these bombs are not so destructive after all.” They had been touted as city busters, basically, and they weren't. They didn't completely burn out cities. They were not certainly more destructive than the firebombing campaign, when everything of more than 50,000 population had already been destroyed. That, in turn, influenced the judgment about what we needed to do vis-a-vis the Soviet Union when the Soviets got the bomb in 1949. There was a general sense that, when you could fight a war with nuclear weapons, deterrence or not, you would need quite a few of them to do it right. And the Air Force, once it realized that it could aggrandize its own share of the federal budget by cornering the market and delivering nuclear weapons, very quickly decided that they would only look at the blast effect and not the fire effect. It's like tying one hand behind your back. Most of it was a fire effect. So that's where they came up with numbers like we need 60 of these to take out Moscow. And what the Air Force figured out by the late 1940s is that the more targets, the more bombs. The more bombs, the more planes. The more planes, the biggest share of the budget. So by the mid 1950s, the Air Force commanded 47% of the federal defense budget. And the other branches of services, which had not gone nuclear by then, woke up and said, we'd better find some use for these weapons in our branches of service. So the Army discovered that it needed nuclear weapons, tactical weapons for field use, fired out of cannons. There was even one that was fired out of a shoulder mounted rifle. There was a satchel charge that two men could carry, weighed about 150 pounds, that could be used to dig a ditch so that Soviet tanks couldn't cross into Germany. And of course the Navy by then had been working hard with General Rickover on building a nuclear submarine that could carry ballistic missiles underwater in total security. No way anybody could trace those submarines once they were quiet enough. And a nuclear reactor is very quiet. It just sits there with neutrons running around, making heat. So the other services jumped in and this famous triad, we must have these three different kinds of nuclear weapons, baloney. We would be perfectly safe if we only had our nuclear submarines. And only one or two of those. One nuclear submarine can take out all of Europe or all of the Soviet Union.

…

The dream of every officer in the Air Force was to get out from under the Army, not just be something that delivers ground support or air support to the Army as it advances, but a power that could actually win wars. And the missing piece had always been the scale of the weaponry they carried. So when the bomb came along, you can see why Curtis LeMay, who ran the strategic air command during the prime years of that force, was pushing for bigger and bigger bombs. Because if a plane got shot down, but the one behind it had a hydrogen bomb, then it would be just almost as effective as the two planes together. So they wanted big bombs. And they went after Oppenheimer because he thought that was a terrible way to go, that there was really no military use for these huge weapons.

Similarly Fred Kaplan in The Wizards of Armageddon notes that in the 1940s the Navy argued that nuclear weapons are immoral in themselves, but they dropped this qualm once it became clear that it would be possible to break the Air Force’s monopoly on nuclear weapons.

So the biographical portions of Wolff’s story seem right enough, but should this cause us to dismiss nuclear strategy as sycophantic nonsense? I don’t know whether or not Hermann Kahn was an intellectual fraud, but von Neumann certainly was not. His writing on first-strike is terrifying but has an irresistible logic, as seen in his famous dictum: “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o’clock, I say why not 1 o’clock?” Not first-striking a nuclear adversary seems to rely on assuming their irrationality, making you irrational. Von Neumann died convinced that total nuclear war was imminent and would cause the human race’s extinction. As Richard Rhodes and other historians of nuclear weapons will note, it was the common assumption of hawks and doves alike that there were only two futures: total disarmament or total annihilation. Why didn’t the 20th century play out this way? It’s become common due to Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation to appeal to Tit-for-Tat as an explanation of how cooperation emerges out of competitive settings, but appealing to Tit-for-Tat to explain why we don’t live in first-strike-world does not work (first-striking ends the iterated prisoner’s dilemma by eliminating your adversary; and even if you ignore that, in TFT the magnitude of punishment for defection is constant across iterations, whereas in warfare punishing your adversary affects their ability to punish you). Alexander J. Field’s article Schelling, von Neumann, and the Event that Didn’t Occur describes the strength of the first-strike case on the basis of the theory of rational agency:

In the Prisoner’s Dilemma played once, defect (which in this instance means preventive war, preemption, or first strike) is the strictly dominant strategy for both players. As von Neumann argued, it is the only strategy a rational self-regarding player, assuming he is playing against a similar adversary, can choose. But it is evidently not the strategy chosen by either the United States or the Soviet Union through the four decades of the Cold War. For both sides, defection was trumped by a policy of restraint on first strike coupled with the threat of limited or massive retaliation, and this was true throughout both the atomic and thermonuclear eras and in spite of substantial shifts over time in the strategic balance between the two adversaries. How and why did this happen, and why did it prevent nuclear war?

From archival sources and interviews conducted by political scientists and historians we know a good deal about discussions that took place in the United States at the highest levels during the first two decades of the nuclear age, and we are learning more about similar debates that took place in the Soviet Union. In the U.S., the central disagreements were between those inclined toward preventive war/preemption/first strike and those recommending policies of deterrence or containment. Support for aggressive preemption was remarkably widespread. It was not limited to a “lunatic” fringe.

Schelling was unconvinced by this faction, and found that it was empirically difficult to get anyone, even leading strategists, to use nuclear weapons in wargames:

Schelling’s contribution to targeting debates during the heyday of strategic thinking is unclear, in part because he was often of two minds about many of the issues. He spent a year at RAND in 1959 and was thus connected to and familiar with the think tank out of which the ideas of graduated escalation and counterforce emerged. But Schelling was ultimately lukewarm toward these concepts. Certainly people like William Kaufman were more central in articulating and advancing the doctrine. Schelling ran war games at Camp David in September 1961, with Blue and Red Teams consisting of U.S. military strategists, including among others John McNaughton, Alain Enthoven, Carl Kaysen, McGeorge Bundy, and Henry Kissinger. The results, which might be considered an unusual form of behavioral research, revealed rather striking inhibitions against going nuclear, even in a small way.

I won’t discuss Schelling’s Strategy of Conflict here, but I’ll say for now that it does provide a number of plausible, nontrivial strategic explanations for why we are not living in first-strike-world. This pushes me to think that the logic of second-strike nuclear deterrence (which I’m taking to be Schelling’s work and its legacy) points to non-trivial truths about human nature, and that we shouldn’t go too far in accepting Wolff’s case for genealogical skepticism about nuclear strategy.