The Wizards of Armageddon

 

The Wizards of Armageddon

Peter Schultz

 

                  From the book The Wizards of Armageddon by Fred Kaplan, being an account of the alleged wisemen and women who “for thirty years [were] a small group inside the U.S. strategic community [who] devised the plans and shaped the policies on how to use the bomb.” The book bills itself as “their untold story.”

 

                  Kaplan’s summation of the work of the likes of Albert Wohlstetter, et. al.: “These sorts of studies were scientific, so it was thought; there were numbers, calculations, rigorously checked, sometimes figured on a computer. Maybe the numbers were questionable, but they were tangible, unlike the theorizing, the Kremlinology, the academic historical research and interpretation produced by social science. Wohlstetter snootily denigrated all such works as being in ‘the essay tradition.’” [p. 121]

 

                  And so, allegedly, Wohlstetter et. al. did science; they were scientific realists and were, in their own minds, superior to those who worked in the essay tradition, political theorists, Kremlinologists, historians, and social scientists. And yet the “strategic community … formed at RAND … had reached … a … consensus … which was the not unlikely prospect of a Soviet surprise attack against the increasingly vulnerable Strategic Air Command. To many, it appeared that the Russians might indeed attack sometime in the near future.” [pp. 123-24]

 

                  Note well: These allegedly hard-headed scientists viewed the political at the time as a morality tale, with “good guys” and “bad guys” engaged apocalyptic battles. And, of course, the RANDites like Albert Wohlstetter would be the heroes of this morality tale, and so, unsurprisingly, Wohlstetter was described by one colleague as if he sounded like “he was reciting the Sermon on the Mount.” [123] Wohlstetter, et. al., saw themselves as standing at Armageddon and battling for the Lord, armed with their science and their rationality. Nuclear weapons were, apparently, divinely sanctioned. Indeed, so too was nuclear war.  

 

                  And so, these scientists, these alleged realists, affirmed the political, while being blind to their affirmation, its consequences, and its controversies. Apocalyptic battles are especially appealing to the self-righteous, but they are universally destructive especially in a nuclear age. It is questionable whether they should be embraced as divinely or scientifically sanctioned.

 

                  So, while science “added … legitimacy to the general feeling among many in government that the arms race must be continued and accelerated at all costs,” [131] the realists’ affirmation of the political as a morality tale fed their aggressiveness vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. It was their politics, not their science, that explained their understanding of and opposition to the Soviet Union. So, while “Wohlstetter snootily denigrated” social science and social scientists, his own politics were easily denigrated as blind to the “real Soviet Union.” Had he not viewed politics as a morality tale, Wohlstetter might have been able to achieve a more nuanced view of the Soviet Union than as an “evil empire” ready to strike the U.S. at its earliest opportunity in order to achieve its ultimate goal of world domination. Such a view would have helped moderate the arms race that these scientists thought must be continued and accelerated at all costs, including of course the embrace of thermonuclear weapons capable of destroying the world and humanity. These scientists had become capable of, as Robert Oppenheimer knew, destroying worlds.