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This is the untold story of the small group of men who have devised the plans and shaped the policies on how to use the Bomb. The book (first published in 1983) explores the secret world of these strategists and the nuclear age and brings to light a chapter in American political and military history never before revealed.

This is the third volume in the "Stanford Nuclear Age Series."

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THE WIZARDS OF ARMAGEDDON

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Foreword by Martin J. Sherwin.............................41 Year Zero...............................................92 Living with the Bomb....................................243 Planning for War........................................334 On the Beach at RAND....................................515 The Superbomb...........................................746 The Vulnerability Study.................................857 The Hydra-Headed Monster................................1118 The Gaither Committee...................................1259 The Report of Maximum Danger............................14410 The Missile Gap........................................15511 The Massive-Retaliation Speech.........................17412 The Limited-War Critique...............................18513 Counterforce...........................................20114 Dr. Strangelove........................................22015 The Real Rivalry.......................................23216 The Whiz Kids..........................................24817 Two Briefings..........................................25818 The SIOP and the Road to Ann Arbor.....................26319 The Gap That Never Was.................................28620 The Crises.............................................29121 Shelter Mania..........................................30722 Damage Unlimited.......................................31523 Vietnam: Stalemate.....................................32824 The ABM Debate.........................................34325 The New Generation.....................................35626 Dancing in the Dark....................................385Notes.....................................................392Interviews................................................431Acknowledgments...........................................435Index.....................................................438

Chapter One

It was August 7, 1945, a cool but sticky Tuesday morning in Bethany, Connecticut, a sleepy suburb resting on the northwestern edges of New Haven. Bernard Brodie, a brilliant new addition to the Yale University political science faculty, went driving with his wife, Fawn, to buy The New York Times at a drugstore in the neighboring village of Woodbridge, roughly halfway between the Brodie home and the Yale campus.

Bernard Brodie was fascinated by the weapons of war, especially the weapons of naval warfare and how they affected the tactics and strategies of those great battles on the high seas that had proved so decisive to the outcomes of war over the past few centuries. For most of the present war, World War II, Brodie had worked for the Navy in Washington, D.C., where he had been given, among other assignments, the task of ghostwriting the biannual report of Admiral Ernest J. King, Chief of Naval Operations and commander of the entire U.S. wartime fleet. Brodie's book, A Layman's Guide to Naval Strategy, first published in 1942, was in its third edition. The Naval War College had persuaded the Princeton University Press to drop the word "Layman's" from the title so that the school could assign the book as a standard text for officers without embarrassment. Now, at age thirty-five, Brodie was acquiring a solid reputation as one of the nation's foremost naval strategists.

Stepping inside the pharmacy, Brodie picked up a copy of the Times. The banner headline riveted his attention: "First Atomic Bomb Dropped on Japan; Missile Is Equal to 20,000 Tons of TNT; Truman Warns Foe of a 'Rain of Ruin.'" His eyes moved quickly down the right-hand column of the page, scanning smaller headlines reading: "New Age Ushered," "Day of Atomic Energy Hailed by President, Revealing Weapon," "Hiroshima Is Target," "'Impenetrable' Cloud of Dust Hides City After Single Bomb Strike."

Brodie read just two paragraphs of the story that followed, looked up for a few seconds, turned to his wife and said, "Everything that I have written is obsolete."

Brodie was not the only one for whom everything turned obsolete that morning. The whole conception of modern warfare, the nature of international relations, the question of world order, the function of weaponry, had to be thought through again. Nobody knew the answers; initially, not many had even the right questions. From these ashes an entire intellectual community would create itself, a new elite that would eventually emerge as a power elite, and whose power would come not from wealth or family or brass stripes, but from their having conceived and elaborated a set of ideas. It was, at the outset, a small and exceptionally inbred collection of men—mostly economists and mathematicians, a few political scientists—who devoted nearly every moment of their workaday thoughts to thinking about the bomb: how to prevent nuclear war, how to fight nuclear war if it cannot be deterred.

In the first months following Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Yale University would become a prime mover on the thinking about how to live with the bomb, and Bernard Brodie was at the center of that movement. When the Yale group started to split up around the end of 1950, Brodie spent a few months near the heart of the war machine, in the Air Staff of the United States Air Force, where he examined the nation's war plans, the targets inside enemy Russia that the U.S. would incinerate in the event of another war. From there, Brodie moved to Southern California, to the RAND Corporation.

RAND was where the ideas came together. It was an Air Force creation, independent in title but contracted to do research for the Air Force. The Army and Navy had their bands of hired intellectuals too, but through the 1950s American military policy and defense budgeting emphasized nuclear power, and the Air Force had the big bomb. The Air Force was where the money was funneled and the thinking was concentrated; RAND was where the thinkers coalesced.

They were rational analysts, and they would attempt to impose a rational order on something that many thought inherently irrational—nuclear war. They would invent a whole new language and vocabulary in their quest for rationality, and would thus condition an entire generation of political and military leaders to think about the bomb the way that the intellectual leaders of RAND thought about it.

The themes of such classic films of the nuclear age as Dr. Strangelove and Fail Safe, the catch phrases of the popularized strategic debates of the 1960s and 1970s—"counterforce," "first-strike /second-strike," "nuclear war-fighting," "systems analysis," "thinking about the unthinkable," "shot across the bow," "limited nuclear options"—would all have as their source the strategists of the RAND Corporation in the 1950s.

In the sixties, with the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy and the appointment of Robert S. McNamara as Secretary of Defense, the new "defense intellectuals" would move into positions of power, either as administration officials or as influential consultants. One British journalist would describe them in the London Times Literary Supplement as men who "move freely through the corridors of the Pentagon and the State Department rather as the Jesuits through the courts of Madrid and Vienna, three centuries ago, when we in Europe were having our own little local difficulties."

By the 1970s and especially into the eighties, the ideas of these thermonuclear Jesuits would...