Annihilation from Within Page 13

  A wide-ranging treatment of these issues may be found in Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans: Choosing Our Genes, Changing our Future (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003). But when he addresses the potential for a brain-computer relationship that would yield a higher level of intelligence, Gregory Stock also remains focused on individual human beings whose IQ is somehow to be raised by doing something within each brain (23–24). Though Stock (correctly in my view) rejects the idea of brain implants for this purpose (21–22 and 218).

  17. Michael Pillsbury’s magisterial research of China’s military doctrine and strategic planning has given him unique insight into the efforts of Chinese scholars to use elaborate quantitative methods for large-scale geopolitical analyses and forecasts. Among Pillsbury’s many books on China’s military thought, his China Debates the Future Security Environment (Washington D.C.: National Defense University Press, 2000) includes a chapter on “Geopolitical Power Calculations” (203–258). These “calculations” were prepared in exercises carried out by different military teams, using computers and human judgment. The undertaking might well be a precursor of the more recent “facility” (mentioned in Chinese journals) that is meant to “integrate” human judgment with advanced computers.

  18. Richard Danzig, Catastrophic Bioterrorism—What Is to Be Done? (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2003): page 9 on genetically engineered agents; page 2 on “reload.”

  The Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies has a Project on Technology Futures and Global Power, Wealth, and Conflict, directed by Anne G. K. Solomon, which published several reports relevant to dual use (e.g., Gerald L. Epstein, Global Evolution of Dual-Use Biotechnology [2005]).

  A well-researched history of biological weapons and arms control efforts to control them is Jeanne Guillemin, Biological Weapons: From the Invention of State-Sponsored Programs to Contemporary Bioterrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). The author covers pre–World War II programs, changes in U.S. policy, and other important developments. But she exaggerates the role of the pharmaceutical industry in the Bush administration’s rejection of the verification Protocol. That Protocol was rejected because it would not have helped verification in those countries that do not feel bound by so-called “legally binding” agreements.

  3. Five Lessons of the Nuclear Age

  1. Cited by McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival (New York: Random House, 1988): Acheson on page 141; Atlee on page 154.

  A rich source for the imagery and emotions evoked by nuclear weapons is Spencer R. Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). Weart mentions many of the public and literary responses since the physicist Fredrick Soddy wrote in 1915: “Imagine, if you can, what the present war would be like if such a [nuclear] explosive had actually been discovered.” Weart also covers novels and films of the 1950s and other psychological and literary reactions to the Bomb.

  2. Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 53.

  3. U.S. Department of State, Committee on Atomic Energy, A Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1946), 32. The Acheson-Lilienthal report became the basis for the Baruch Plan, which addressed more explicitly the refractory problem of verification and enforcement and became the definitive U.S. position that Bernard Baruch presented to the United Nations.

  4. Historical research based on archival documents, and memoirs that have become available since the end of the Cold War, make it clear that Stalin would never have agreed to the intrusive international controls that the American proposal required; he relied entirely on the Soviet Union’s own nuclear weapons program. See David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); and Bundy, Danger and Survival, 179–82.

  5. Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution: Statecraft and the Prospect of Armageddon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 70.

  Jacob Viner taught economics at the University of Chicago. His article, “The Implications of the Atomic Bomb for International Relations,” appeared in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (January 1946): 53–58.

  Alfred North Whitehead explained the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” in Process and Reality (New York: Harper, 1929), 11 and 200. Herman E. Daly deserves credit for pointing out how relevant this fallacy is in contemporary academic theorizing.

  6. American and Russian research on the Cuban missile crisis, based on newly available documents, reveals how close this crisis came to triggering a massive nuclear war. Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow, The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); and Philip Zelikow, Essence of Decision (New York: Longman, 1998).

  Keith Payne has written some of the most penetrating assessments of the hazardous reasoning about nuclear deterrence so rampant during the Cold War. One of his recent books is The Fallacies of Cold War Deterrence and a New Direction (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2001).

  7. My report has been declassified (and can be purchased from the RAND Bookstore): Fred C. Iklé, with Gerald J. Aronson and Albert Madansky, On the Risk of an Accidental or Unauthorized Nuclear Detonation, U.S. Air Force Project RAND RM-2251 (Santa Monica: The RAND Corporation, 1958).

  Peter Wyden, in a story on “The Chances of Accidental War,” Saturday Evening Post (June 3, 1961), provides considerable detail on the concerns about an accidental use of nuclear weapons and safety measures taken at that time. He wrote that my investigations in 1957 were “the first systematic thinking” about this problem. The coded locks for nuclear weapons were called “Permissive Action Links” (or PALs) by the Pentagon in order to convey that these devices are meant to make the weapons useable when permitted, not just to lock them up. The introduction of PALs proceeded slowly until 1961 when the Kennedy administration vigorously emphasized nuclear safety. See Dan Caldwell, “Permissive Action Links,” Survival (May–June 1987): 224–38.

  8. It was Donald Brennan who coined the acronym MAD for the strategy that embraces this thinking: “The concept of mutual assured destruction provides one of the few instances in which the obvious acronym for something yields at once the appropriate description for it; that is, a Mutual Assured Destruction posture as a goal is, almost literally, mad” (National Review, June 23, 1972, 689).

  While President Nixon and some of his senior advisors, especially Henry Kissinger, recognized that this MAD strategy inherited from the Johnson administration was deeply flawed, they felt the United States could not change course, given, on one side, the pressures by arms control advocates and their Congressional supporters, and, on the other side, the exigencies of the Vietnam War (which had also been inherited from the Johnson administration). So in 1972, Nixon and Brezhnev signed the ABM Treaty prohibiting missile defenses and the U.S. Senate ratified it with only one dissenting vote.

  9. During its last two years, the Clinton administration sought to obtain Russia’s consent to the deployment of limited missile defenses that would preserve the ABM Treaty and the MAD strategy. To this end it transmitted a memo to Moscow that explained Russia need not fear such limited U.S. defenses since the United States would have to assume Russia’s missiles “would be launched after tactical warning.” Arms control experts expressed dismay that U.S. negotiators would encourage Russia to maintain such a dangerous alert posture, as if it were something beneficial to the stability of deterrence. See Steven Lee Myers and Jane Pevlez, “Documents Detail U.S. Plans to Alter ’71 Missile Treaty,” New York Times, April 28, 2000, A1; also William J. Broad, “U.S.-Russian Talks Revive Old Debates on Nuclear Warnings,” New York Times, May 1, 2000, A8.

  10. Fred Charles Iklé, “Can Deterrence Last Out the Century?” Foreign Affairs (January 1973): 267–85.

  11. A care
fully researched study of accidents and near-accidents regarding nuclear weapons is Scott D. Sagan’s The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Also, my above-mentioned Foreign Affairs article lists several accidents in military command-and-control systems that should give pause to anyone favoring launch-on-warning. Bruce Blair has studied the Russian launch-on-warning policies of the 1990s and has warned about how these might dangerously interact with U.S. practices (The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War [Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1993]).

  12. Peter Hannaford describes this briefing session of Governor Reagan in greater detail in his book The Reagans: A Political Portrait (New York: Coward-McCann, 1983), 206–207. A photograph in Hannaford’s book (160) captures the episode to which I refer here.

  A few weeks after this meeting, Reagan (as presidential candidate) visited the underground command center of the North American Defense Command. There he was told the United States could not defend itself against a single Soviet missile that would have been detected on its way to destroy an American city. Martin Anderson, who had accompanied Reagan on this visit, recalls that Reagan reflected on the terrible dilemma a president would face if, for whatever reason, nuclear missiles were fired at the United States. “The only options he would have,” Reagan said, “would be to press the button or do nothing. They’re both bad. We should have some way of defending ourselves against nuclear missiles.” Martin Anderson, Revolution (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 83.

  13. Caspar Weinberger, Fighting for Peace (New York: Warner Books, 1990), 341. On Reagan’s attitude toward, and understanding of, nuclear weapons, Paul Lettow wrote the well-documented book, Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (New York: Random House, 2004).

  14. Bundy, Danger and Survival, 151–52. Churchill dissuaded Eisenhower from speaking publicly about a possible nuclear response to new aggression in Korea (244–45 and 271).

  The idea of using nuclear weapons first to respond to an attack with conventional forces—or rather to deter it—lived on as NATO doctrine till the end of the Cold War. But in fact, NATO’s members were so frightened by the enormous risks of this doctrine that they never dared to explore its consequences. Indeed, NATO war games were routinely stopped at the point where the use of nuclear weapons had to be decided. My critique of NATO’s first-use doctrine (Fred C. Iklé, “NATO’s ‘First Nuclear Use’: A Deepening Trap?” Strategic Review [Winter 1980]: 18–23) has been vindicated by published documents from Warsaw Pact archives that indicate the Pact was better prepared for “first use” than NATO.

  George H. Quester’s book, Nuclear First Strike: Consequences of a Broken Taboo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) explores the many ramifications and possible long-term impact if the dispensation of nuclear non-use suddenly ended.

  15. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 306, 336–37. Additional Soviet statements and sources can be found in John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 228–30.

  16. Peter G. Boyle, ed., The Churchill-Eisenhower Correspondence, 1953–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 123–24. Churchill’s stroke some nine months before he wrote this passage was far more serious than the public knew. (See David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War [London: Penguin Books, 2005], 440–41.)

  Churchill had favored direct negotiations with Stalin since 1950. As the renowned historian David Reynolds reveals (In Command of History, 436–39), Churchill even adjusted some of the passages in his Triumph and Tragedy so as to refer to Stalin and the Soviet Union with words more appropriate for a future negotiating partner. Stalin’s death of course convinced him more strongly that the time was ripe for a U.S.-British-Soviet summit.

  17. This effort, which became known as the Nunn-Lugar program, has been highly effective despite “waste and fraud” (that familiar downside of large government programs, including those run by the U.S. Government within the United States). On balance, the program is a splendid—and rare—example of members of Congress taking the lead in initiating an essential policy and seeing it through its implementation. Graham Allison, Director of the Belfer Center at Harvard University, has led a series of projects to alert American and Russian officials to the continuing risk of nuclear theft and smuggled nuclear bombs and to promote more effective countermeasures.

  In 2004 Graham Allison offered an update of the Nunn-Lugar program (and related efforts), concluding that nuclear materials, and even finished weapons, have not been adequately protected against theft by terrorist organizations (Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe [New York: Henry Holt, 2004]). I would agree with Allison’s judgment, but note that this serious negligence stretches over many U.S. administrations and that even the U.S. Government found that some of its own plutonium was unaccounted for. The “missing” U.S. plutonium amounts to almost three metric tons, enough to build several hundred atomic weapons of the 1945 design. See Robert L. Rinne, An Alternative Framework for the Control of Nuclear Materials (Stanford University, Calif.: Center for International Security and Cooperation, 1999), 3–5.

  18. Henry D. Sokolski, Best of Intentions: America’s Campaign Against Strategic Weapons Proliferation (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001), 30–33 and 36–37. Sokolski is the founder and Executive Director of the Nonproliferation Education Center.

  19. Richard L. Garwin and Georges Charpak, Megawatts and Megatons: The Future of Nuclear Power and Nuclear Weapons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 343 and 318.

  Henry Sokolski, has written extensively on the dangers of the planned global MOX economy (see www.npec-web.org).

  4. Annihilation from Within

  The Nietzsche quotation at the beginning of this chapter is from Beyond Good and Evil, part 4, #146 (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Viertes Hauptstück, 146). Nietzsche connects two sentences. The one quoted above (“Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein’’), and preceding it: “He who fights monsters should be on guard lest he becomes a monster himself” (“Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft mag zusehen, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird”)—a theme to which I shall return in the next chapter.

  The Unamuno quotation is from Tragic Sense of Life (Del Sentimiento Tragico De La Vida En Los Hombres Y En Los Pueblos) (New York: Dover, 1954), 107. The full sentence is: “Always it comes about that the beginning of wisdom is a fear” (“Siempre resulta que el principio de la sabiduria es un temor”).

  1. Well before 9/11, Tom Clancy and Russell Seitz published “Five Minutes Past Midnight—and Welcome to the Age of Proliferation,” The National Interest (Winter 1991–92). The post–9/11 anticipations of a terrorist-type attack with mass destruction weapons include Bill Keller, “Nuclear Nightmares,” New York Times Magazine, May 26, 2002; Fred Hiatt, “Ignoring the Unthinkable,” Washington Post, March 17, 2003; George F. Will, “Holocaust in a Suitcase,” Washington Post, August 29, 2004; Nicholas D. Kristof, “The Nuclear Shadow,” New York Times, August 14, 2004; Steve Coll, “What Bin Laden Sees in Hiroshima,” Washington Post, February 6, 2005. Scholars and writers in Europe have also contributed thoughtful anticipations of this calamity. A noteable example is Wolfgang Sofsky, “Diktatur der Angst,” Die Welt (Literaturische Welt), November 12 2005.

  For a comprehensive overview of Western predictions of cataclysmic disasters and decline, see W. Warren Wagar, Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). Wagar reviews the vast literature prophesying man-made calamities and nuclear warfare, from the nineteenth century to the 1980s. Still famous today is H. G. Wells’s The World Set Free, a story about a devastating nuclear war. Wells finished this book before World War I and lived to witness the nuclear attacks in 1945.

  I developed the central theme of this chapter eight years ago in my article “The Next Lenin: On the Cusp and Tru
ly Revolutionary Warfare,” The National Interest (Spring 1997). I am indebted to Owen Harries, then editor of The National Interest, for his encouragement to publish such an article, which was rather premature at that time.

  2. For the many definitions of “terrorism” that have been proposed, see Paul R. Pillar, Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2001), 12–18. Pillar reports that the U.S. Government, for keeping statistics on terrorism, classifies military personnel who are off-duty as “noncombatants” (14). Walter Laqueur, the preeminent scholar on the history and political dynamic of terrorism, predicted correctly that disputes about a definition of terrorism “will continue for a long time” and “will make no notable contribution towards the understanding of terrorism” (The Age of Terrorism [Boston: Little Brown, 1987], 72).

  3. Donald H. Rumsfeld in an editorial in the Washington Post, October 26, 2003, B7; President Bush in his speech at Quantico (Virginia), July11, 2005.

  4. Theodore B. Taylor’s ideas gained wider attention thanks to the book-length story by New Yorker writer John McPhee: The Curve of Binding Energy: A Journey into the Awesome and Alarming World of Theodore B. Taylor (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1973). The authors of America’s Achilles’ Heel offer a wealth of information on reports from the last few decades about all kinds of evildoers who used, or tried to use, biological agents, chemical poisons, and sham nuclear bombs (Richard A. Falkenrath, Robert D. Newman, and Bradley A. Thayer, America’s Achilles’ Heel [Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001], 29–47). For further data on nuclear theft and other opportunities for nuclear terrorism, see Robin M. Frost, Nuclear Terrorism After 9/11, Adelphi Paper 378 (London and New York: Routledge, 2005).