Fred Kaplan - The Wizards of Armageddon

But his chapters in this new book went beyond merely rehashing those already-developed themes. They also contained new material, reflecting the resolution of Brodie’s earlier ambivalence about the impact of the bomb’s existence on the likelihood of war or peace, the synthesis of his own thinking with Viner’s insight about surprise attack, and the fitting of these ideas into an intellectual construction grounded in lessons about power that he had learned in his school days at Chicago and that every day were reinforced in the halls he occupied at Yale. The product was a pair of essays that would be heralded for many years as the first fully developed, sophisticated treatise on the subject of an appropriate military policy for the nuclear age, the first conception of nuclear deterrence.

In these chapters, Brodie made three essential points. First, “superiority”—either in number of air forces or in number of bombs—“is not itself a guarantee of strategic superiority in atomic bomb warfare.” This conclusion was based on the assumption that fissionable materials were relatively scarce and that, therefore, “the primary targets for the atomic bomb will be cities. One does not shoot rabbits with elephant guns, especially if there are elephants available.” The destructive power of each bomb, given the technology of the day, was too great “to warrant its use against any target where enemy strength is not already densely concentrated.”

From this premise flowed a novel conclusion: “the number of critical targets is quite limited…. That does not mean that additional hits would be useless but simply that diminishing returns would set in early; and after the cities of, say, 100,000 population were eliminated, the returns from additional bombs would decline drastically.” Brodie had learned about “diminishing returns” from economics; it was a concept indicating the point at which the demand for a certain good begins to fall off with each additional unit supplied. “If 2,000 bombs in the hands of either party is enough to destroy entirely the economy of the other, the fact that one side has 6,000 and the other 2,000 will be of relatively small significance.” Bill Fox coined the term “the absolute weapon,” but the elaboration was Brodie’s.

Second, deterrence of war is the only rational military policy for a country in the nuclear age. Brodie had by now accepted Viner’s argument about the futility of surprise attack. If one side, wrote Brodie, “must fear retaliation, the fact that it destroys the opponent’s cities some hours or even days before its own are destroyed may avail it little…. Under those circumstances, no victory, even if guaranteed in advance—which it never is—would be worth the price.”

From that observation, Brodie outlined the essence of a national-security policy for the future: ensuring that the strategic retaliatory arsenal survives an enemy attack. The airplanes or rockets designed to deliver the retaliatory blow must be completely separated from the cities that would be targeted in nuclear war; they must be placed on “dispersed reservations,” stored underground, in any case sharply isolated from urban centers for supply or support. The implications for the future of warfare were profound:

The first and most vital step in any American security program for the age of atomic bombs is to take measures to guarantee to ourselves in case of attack the possibility of retaliation in kind. The writer in making that statement is not for the moment concerned about who will win the next war in which atomic bombs are used. Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose.

The implications for world order were as considerable as those for military policy. If a world government can exist only in fantasy because no nation has incentive to join or obey it, then the threat of atomic retaliation will in effect serve as a substitute for world government, as the force from above looming over all international activity, working itself into every calculation of the risks and benefits of aggression, at least between the great powers. Efforts to outlaw the use of the bomb through treaty might still be worth working for; but “without the existence of the state of balance—in terms of reciprocal ability to retaliate in kind if the bomb is used—any treaty… would have thrust upon it a burden far heavier than such a treaty can normally bear.”

The nature of war had changed drastically, and so had the conditions of peace. The atomic bomb would forevermore dominate both. “Everything about the atomic bomb is overshadowed by the twin facts that it exists and that its destructive power is fantastically great,” wrote Brodie. Key here was the phrase “it exists.” To Brodie and the others at Yale, a plan for ensuring peace had first to come to grips with the fact of everyday living with the bomb.

THE WORLD was a turbulent place those first few years after the end of the Second World War. Western Europe lay exhausted from the convulsions of battle, its economies in disarray, local Communist parties growing in strength as a consequence. Inspired by nationalist independence movements, the old colonies were rebelling, inspiring into vogue the term “power vacuum.” In 1947, under the by-line “X,” George Kennan, the nation’s foremost Soviet expert, wrote an article in the widely read journal Foreign Affairs arguing that the Soviet Union was governed by an intrinsically expansionist ideology, and that the United States must adopt “a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” In 1948, the Soviets toppled the democratic government of Czechoslovakia and, later that year, attempted a blockade of Berlin. Tensions between East and West mounted. The “Cold War” was on.

Living with the bomb suddenly became more awkward, difficult and perturbing than ever. The Soviets were too far away to launch a direct attack against the United States and, for the moment anyway, there was only a small chance of their invading Western Europe. For one thing, the United States had the bomb—not many, but some—and the Soviets did not. However, it would only be a matter of time before they too started assembling an arsenal of atomic weapons. Meanwhile, almost immediately after World War II, the United States had rapidly demobilized its non-nuclear military might. As Bernard Brodie wrote in the fall of

1948, “the fact remains that the atomic bomb is today our only means for throwing substantial power immediately against the Soviet Union in the event of flagrant Soviet aggression.” The atom bomb would still serve as a powerful deterrent to Soviet aggression, but things do sometimes get out of hand, conflicts do escalate. The international situation, wrote Brodie, “requires appraisal of the atomic bomb as an instrument of war—and hence of international politics—rather than as a visitation of a wrathful deity.” An epigram Brodie had composed two years earlier was immediately relevant: “War is unthinkable but not impossible, and therefore we must think about it.”

Moreover, it seemed that one of Brodie’s main assumptions in The Absolute Weapon was now unraveling—the notion that superiority in atomic weapons offered no strategic advantage. Brodie read articles in The New York Times by military correspondent Hanson Baldwin, and heard corroborating reports from some military friends, that the materials for making atom bombs might be even scarcer than was previously thought. There was no way for an outsider to know this for sure; the size of the atomic stockpile was among the most highly classified bits of data in government files. But it was known that only eight bombs had been tested since the bombing of Nagasaki, and it was now widely rumored that uranium ores were extremely scarce.