Thinking About Nuclear War . . . and Other Things
Brian M Downing
Like many people, Alex Abella first learned of the RAND Corporation amid the passions of the Vietnam War, to which the famous think tank contributed many analyses. He realized then that the period was not conducive to a sound assessment of RAND, and the intervening decades have provided him some perspective. His wait has resulted in a fine study of the renowned and reviled think tank on national security matters.
RAND was created shortly after World War Two, mainly by the military, to bring outside expertise to bear on the various new challenges in the post-WW2 world. No one knew what the new technologies such as ballistic missiles and the geopolitical dynamics of facing the Soviet Union would bring, so notable academics and strategic thinkers were assembled, eventually in Santa Monica, to provide counsel. An assembly of bright people had created the atom bomb, a similar assembly would help us face the age the bomb made. Many of RAND’s studies seem off-putting if not horrifying, but such was the US strategic situation of the Cold War.
Foremost among those objects of study was nuclear war, as unknown a matter as humankind has ever faced. Which targets in the USSR would lead to the most damage to the economy and to the ability to retaliate? How many deaths would nuclear war entail – and how many were acceptable? Should the US deliver a first strike? If so, under what circumstances? And what procedures would minimize US deaths?
RAND’s studies of nuclear war resulted in at least two creations that are now parts of everyday life. First, game theory and rational choice theory were developed to scrutinize the thoughts and actions of strategic actors. Anyone who has attended graduate school in the last thirty years or so will recognize them, fondly or angrily, as the frameworks of much of economics and the other social sciences. Second, RAND came up with a center-less communications network that would allow various parts of the far-flung defense world to communicate, even if a command center had been destroyed. This became the Internet.
Theory became practice as the Vietnam War unfolded. RAND helped design Rolling Thunder, the bombing campaign of the North. (The campaign failed to stop North Vietnamese infiltration and supply. The Pentagon resented civilian meddling whether from Washington or Santa Monica.) RAND also helped plan the campaign of assassinations and kidnappings known as the Phoenix Program. (Phoenix was notorious, but defectors asserted that it decimated the Viet Cong political cadre.) In order to determine the nature of the insurgency, RAND conducted a series of interrogations and concluded that nationalism rather than communism was the critical motivating force – a finding that caused considerable rancor with the Johnson administration and within RAND. (I recall with amusement and bemusement one VC prisoner asserted that once his side won, he would be able to drive around his village in a big American car. These studies remain among the finest examinations of an insurgency.) One RAND analyst became so angered by the war that he collected a cache of secret documents and leaked them to newspapers. That was Daniel Ellsberg and the documents became known as the Pentagon Papers.
Along the way, from the post-WW2 days to the post-Cold War ones, the author gives us vignettes of key RAND thinkers, including Herman Kahn, Thomas Schelling, Bernard Brodie, and Kenneth Arrow. Perhaps most interesting among the thinkers was Albert Wohlstetter, a key thinker in nuclear weaponry and confronting the Soviet Union. His acolytes, though at the University of Chicago not RAND, include Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pearle, and Zalmay Khalilzad. (I would offer that Wohlstetter was far more influential in the rise of neoconservative foreign policy than was the rather abstract Leo Strauss.)
I often found myself considering various RAND analyses and wondering how much of the general public back then, most of whom (liberal and conservative) supported the premises and goals of the Cold War, would have found them as abhorrent as many people might today. The author closes his splendid work by suggesting that not many would. As tempting as it is to shake one’s fist at perceived embodiments of evil, RAND in many respects reflected the American people at that time. I would add that given the public’s longstanding approval of armed confrontation in the world and the wide array of institutions in and out of government similarly imbued, RAND is only a modest part of a militarized country that came into being during and after World War Two.
Copyright 2008 Brian M Downing
Brian M Downing is a national security analyst who has written for outlets across the political spectrum. He studied at Georgetown University and the University of Chicago, and did post-graduate work at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs.