Half The Population

Back in the 1960s war planners wanted to know how many nuclear weapons they “needed.” Buying some of RAND’s brilliant thinking, the Pentagon decided that if a nation, any nation, faced the certainty that half its population would die, it would decline going to war. (Dangerous Ground - America’s Failed Arms Control Policy, From FDR To Obama, Scott Ritter, New York: Nation Books, 2010, p. 103)

Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who in old age declared that his nuclear weapons decisions had been “insane,” asked RAND how many nuclear war heads it would take to kill half the Soviet population. RAND thought 400 warheads would do the job. McNamara rounded up to 500 and doubled, and proposed to the Soviets a mutual top figure of one thousand warheads for each country. The U.S. Air Force at the time was proposing that this country acquire 2400 ICBMs, in addition to bombers and submarine missiles.

Security policies in both the U.S.S.R. and the United States have been contorted away from logical analysis for sixty years, by politics, weapons profits, military planners, technological “advances,” and geo-political considerations. Ritter, and David Hoffman in The Dead Hand, describe endless U.S. and Soviet Union war strategies, negotiating strategies, sincere proposals, insincere proposals, threats, bluffs, ploys, and stratagems, and lies, decade after decade, born variously of political ambitions, elections based on accurate or inaccurate public assessments, accidents, and ambitions.

John F. Kennedy won the Presidency partly by claiming that there was a “missile gap” between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which the secret U-2 overflights had told incumbent President Eisenhower was incorrect. Kennedy came into office to find no missile gap, but preparations far along for the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. After this embarrassment, Viet Nam beckoned as an alternative battleground where Kennedy might fight Communism with more success and acclaim. Meanwhile, the Soviets wanted to close off Berlin because it served Eastern Europe as a window into more successful capitalist countries. The Cuban Missile Crisis was just around the corner.

Later, Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, who was running for a second term, partly due to public misconception of which candidate would try harder to achieve nuclear arms control. Reagan staffed key posts with arms control opponents, then decided that God had spared his life when John Hinckley tried to assassinate him, so that he could “reduce the threat of nuclear war,”(Dangerous Ground, p. 253). He proceeded to further postpone mutual arms control because he dreamed up the illogical, unscientific, impossible Star Wars defense to nuclear attack.

So much was still ahead - so many risks, so much expense, so many proxy wars, so little preparation for the ambitions of countries like today’s Iran and North Korea. The Dead Hand and Dangerous Ground describe countless occasions when this or that event, change of personnel, new invention, budgetary factor, political ambition, and pure chance blocked progress toward a world based on law instead of weapons. The nations were almost entirely war oriented. Little wonder that citizens, who as the targets ought to have been driving the agenda, wound up as nothing more than a measuring rod for overkill.

Accidents Happen

Rand Paul says that British Petroleum ought not be harshly judged over the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, because “accidents happen.” Another fatal accident that he says “happened” was at Kentucky’s Dotiki Mine, often cited for safety violations. (Huffington Post, 5/21/10, byline Kimberly Freeman Brown). Paul has done the country a favor by voicing Libertarian beliefs so clearly. Libertarians prefer the rules of chance to rules of law. Oil drilling and coal mining ought not be the subject of safety regulations, they think, whether imposed to protect the employees, the public, or the environment.


Criticisms of nuclear disarmament efforts are analogous. Two former Defense Department officials now with the Hudson Institute, excoriate President Obama for championing the goal of Zero Nuclear, suggesting that enforcement of a Zero Nuclear regime would constitute world government (Douglas J. Feith and Abram N. Shulsky,WSJ, 5/21/10) Enforcement - here we go again - more rules and regulations. Better everyone stays armed and we pray that no accidents, like, say, nuclear war, will happen.

These folks are out of date. They have missed a couple of revolutions: the Industrial Revolution and the Technology Revolution. All right, they might say, maybe we need some speed limits, at least on city streets, and maybe a little food and drug testing, and possibly even a few criminal laws to discourage bank robbers and certainly, illegal immigrants. But, no one will misuse firearms, from pistols to ICBMs, unless an accident happens. Freedom from rules and regulations comes ahead of security.

Folks who think like this are winning elections, which means acquiring power, which in the nuclear age means endangering every one of us and centuries of human progress. What do our survival instincts prompt the rest of us to do - wait until the next presidential election then maybe go to the polls? We got a pretty good President last time, but clearly security, whether from war, terrorism, safety violations, or accidents, takes more than a President.

Complex or Neglected?

Today’s Sunday Times has a feature piece by David Segal asking whether society will collapse because it is too complex. Examples of complexity are drawn from the financial melt down, the BP oil spill, and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Seems some professors have been saying that the Romans and other historical has-beens declined and fell due to their complexities, and we will, too. Segal sums up, “There is no point in hoping for a new age of simplicity. The best we can do is hope the solutions are just complicated enough to work.”

I disagree with Segal’s conclusion. The modern public policy imbroglios that he cites are due to policies, laws, and rules being surrendered by the citizenry to private opportunists. The opportunists resort to complexity as they camouflage profits, political reward, ideological crusades, and so on. Instead of a rational system, the outcome is non-functional, jerry-built monstrosities that collapse, explode, leak, and all the rest.

My book, City, Save Thyself! Nuclear Terror and the Urban Ballot concentrates on a single public issue, the WMD threat, but my conclusions apply as well to the screw-ups that Segal cites. I offer three recommendations, and others that flow from these.

First, instead of trying to figure out what we should do today or this year to meet crises, we should think ahead fifty years, imagine a secure world, imagine the essential components of that world, and formulate policies for today and this year that will produce security. One inevitable conclusion will be to substitute enforced law for war as the route to security, after adopting some form of the global democracy that must precede the delegation of international enforcement powers.

Second, instead of playing one’s democratic hand solely in national and state elections, where outcomes are determined by money, media, and the gerrymander, or in lobbying power holders who answer to private interests, some number of concerned citizens, a large number but it would not require a majority, should self-select themselves to fight for their share of power, and to do so in the arena where power still is obtainable, in their cities and towns. Joining NGO peace groups, marching, and writing letters to editors is fine if one has time, but does not produce the power to simplify our security problems (or our financial, or energy, or other issues whose outcomes are in the hands of the self-interested).

Third, instead of serving as they have for sixty years as passive targets in a complex and civilization threatening web of ICBMs and nuclear armed submarines, the cities and towns of the world should form a global security congress of municipalities that would pressure their nations to transform the complex war system into a rational and therefore inherently simpler system of enforced law.

Contributing to our peril is the distrust that professors and media people have for democracy and citizens, which takes us back to self-selection and the necessity to contest for power.