Abella, Alex;
Soldiers of Reason: The Rand Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire
Harcourt, Incorporated, 2008, 388 pages
ISBN 0151010811, 9780151010813
topics: | science | military |
The RAND Corporation's the boon of the world They think all day long for a fee They sit and play games about going up in flames For Counters they use you and me. —"The RAND Hymn," by Malvina Reynolds [doubtful attribution: Pete Seeger song]
On October 1, 1945, General Henry Harley "Hap" Arnold convened a meeting with the former test pilot and scientist, Franklin R. Collbohm, who was then the right-hand man of Donald Douglas, head of Douglas Aircraft, America's largest airplane manufacturer. Arnold and Collbohm had met in 1942, when Collbohm procured nascent radar technology being developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the Army Air Force. [During the war,] Washington had recruited talent from far and wide for its crusade against the Axis. The production capabilities and sheer output of the country's industries (General Motors, Ford, U.S. Steel, General Electric) had been harnessed by the best and the brightest minds from the country's top scientific research centers (MIT, Princeton, Columbia), giving the world radar, jet fighters, the atom bomb. In the span of four years, the country had grown from a second-rate power to the greatest military behemoth in history. It was the dawn of the American New Order. Like ancient Athens and her league, it would be an empire of the willing—America's allies willed her to rule the world and rule the world she would.
[Now that the battle was won, Collbohm was concerned with the imminent dispersal of the best brains the United States could hire... Arnold had also been worried along the same lines. When Collbohm came to Arnold's office in Washingtong two days back,] he did not even have to finish describing his idea for setting up an advisory group of independent scientists consulting for the military ... the general slapped his desk and exclaimed, "I know just what you're going to tell me. It's the most important thing we can do." He told Collbohm to call Douglas right away to enlist his cooperation; they were to meet at California's Hamilton Air Force Base in two days. Collbohm was to have a list of all the things required to make the project come to fruition —- the men, the machines, the money. p.12 So Collbohm hurriedly gathered some Douglas officials for the meeting and then looked for a plane to get them to the San Francisco Bay Area. The only aircraft available was President Roosevelt's private plane, a Douglas C-54 dubbed "The Sacred Cow," so Collbohm and his people grabbed that and flew to Hamilton in it, arriving at the base just an hour ahead of Arnold, with barely enough time to round up a luncheon for the meeting.
One of the chief concerns at the meeting was how the new organization would help develop the technology of long-distance missiles, which Arnold was convinced was the wave of the future. Arnold and his group were adamant that only the Air Force and no other branch of the armed forces should control the new weapon. By the time he finished his coffee, Arnold had pledged $10 million from unspent wartime research money to set up the research group and keep it running independently for a few years. Arthur Raymond suggested the name Project RAND, for research and development. [but the wags have been saying since its inception, RAND actually stood for "Research And No Development."] Collbohm nominated himself to head the group while he looked for a permanent director. (His temporary stay would eventually stretch to more than twenty years.) And so was RAND conceived.
At first, Project RAND had no specific definition of purpose other than the very general outline hashed out in Hamilton Field—a civilian outfit to come up with new weapons. ... the final details were not worked out until General Curtis LeMay came into the picture in late December. Named Air Force Deputy Chief of Air Staff for Research and Development, LeMay included among his responsibilities the supervision of the new research group. Whether purposely or by the sheer serendipity that can accompany government work, LeMay turned out to be the ideal candidate to shepherd the fledgling organization. With typical impatience, he tore through the red tape hindering the birth of RAND—at one point gathering all the Air Force bureaucrats needed for budget approval in one room and refusing to let them leave until they signed off on Project RAND's exact mission. Finally, on March 1, 1946, RAND officially was delivered. Its charter was clear: "Project RAND is a continuing program of scientific study and research on the broad subject of air warfare with the object of recommending to the Air Force preferred methods, techniques and instrumentalities for this purpose." p. 6
RAND started with four full-time employees: Collbohm; James E. Lipp, who headed the Missiles Department; J. Richard Goldstein, a longtime colleague of Collbohm's, as associate director; and L. E. Root, who had been one of Douglas Aircraft's leading engineers. They had already received their first assignment from LeMay: an inquiry into the possibility of launching an orbiting satellite by spaceship. Within a month, RAND's four employees, with the help of consultants, wrote a farseeing report, breathtaking in its intellectual daring and self-assured to the point of arrogance. Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship was the world's first comprehensive satellite feasibility assessment. [Santa Monica Plant, Engineering Division, report number SM-11827, Contract W33-038 (Santa Monica, CA: Douglas Aircraft Company, Inc., 2 May 1946). ] [The report focused on the physics and the technological feasibility of space flight, but also speculated on a number of issues including the possibility of man in space.] [Despite this head start, the US did not pursue these ideas, and the expenditure on the military went down in the 1960s. James Lipp of RAND’s Missile Division wrote in a paper nine months later: Since mastery of the elements is a reliable index of material progress, the nation which first makes significant achievements in space travel will be acknowledged as the world leader in both military and scientific techniques. To visualize the impact on the world, one can imagine the consternation and admiration that would be felt here if the United States were to discover suddenly that some other nation had already put up a successful satellite.” This was exactly what happened whtn Russia successfully launched the Sputnik in 1957...
[The main character in the book is Albert Wohlstetter, who is also perhaps the most famous personality at RAND. Abella focuses on the story of his work on nuclear strategy, and his becoming the cold war's top nuclear strategist. Wohlstetter was one of the inspirations for the film Dr. Strangelove which focuses on the nuclear first use dilemma.] Whether there was war or peace, whether millions would live or die, whether the world would continue as it was or die from a suffocating nuclear winter—the fate of humanity truly hinged on the efforts of this small band of self-anointed experts. And Albert Wohlstetter was its acknowledged leader. 55 Albert Wohlstetter would become the leading intellectual figure at RAND. Wohlstetter's wedding of technological expertise to a finely honed sense of political theater also helped him define the national defense discipline that RANDites dominated for decades: nuclear strategy. ...Tall, fair, and self-assured to the point of arrogance, he personified the imperial ethos of the mandarins who made America the center of power and culture in the postwar Western world.
In a review of this book, Chalmers Johnson, describes a trip to India with Wohlston: Starting in 1967, I was, for a few years — my records are imprecise on this point — a consultant for RAND (although it did not consult me often) and became personally acquainted with Albert Wohlstetter. In 1967, he and I attended a meeting in New Delhi of the Institute of Strategic Studies to help promote the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which was being opened for signature in 1968, and would be in force from 1970. There, Wohlstetter gave a display of his well-known arrogance by announcing to the delegates that he did not believe India, as a civilization, “deserved an atom bomb.” As I looked at the smoldering faces of Indian scientists and strategists around the room, I knew right then and there that India would join the nuclear club, which it did in 1974. India remains one of four major nations that have not signed the NPT. The others are North Korea, which ratified the treaty but subsequently withdrew, Israel, and Pakistan. Some 189 nations have signed and ratified it.) Today this inequality at the heart of the non-proliferation treaty has become untenable. As Nina Tannenwald of Brown University's Watson Institute writes in "Justice and Fairness in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime" [Ethics & International Affairs, v.27(3), 2013, pp. 299-317 the issues facing the nonproliferation regime are overwhelmingly about the justice and fairness of the regime’s norms, rules, and procedures. Indeed, it is difficult to identify a security regime today where equity issues are more central to debates about its future than the nuclear nonproliferation regime. Of the three regimes for controlling weapons of mass destruction (chemical, biological, and nuclear), it is in the nuclear regime that issues of justice and fairness appear most critical to long-term sustainability and viability. At the core of the crisis is the fundamental asymmetry of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and looming doubts among nonnuclear states about whether this situation is destined to be permanent. Nonnuclear states have long castigated the double standard embedded in the treaty that permits the five “declared” nuclear states to possess nuclear weapons but denies such weapons to the majority of the world. In contrast, the nuclear powers, for their part, have generally seen the primary problems of the regime to lie in the weakness of the rules and enforcement mechanisms surrounding dual-use technology, which have allowed states such as Iran and North Korea, and earlier Iraq and Syria, to pursue nuclear weapons clandestinely under the veil of the treaty.
Over the past few years, an increasingly serious branch of American history, sometimes called allohistory or counterfactual history, has devoted itself to what might be called the what-if. What if the Confederacy had defeated the Union in the Civil War? What if Archduke Ferdinand had not been assassinated and World War I never happened? What if Hitler had invaded England? What if Al Gore had won Florida in 2000? It is a wonderful kind of speculation, meant to explore the essential capriciousness of fate, to examine the rationale for people's actions and the way certain forces are considered by historians to be immutable. (For instance, most believe that even if the South had won, slavery eventually would have faded away, just as if Hitler had conquered England, the United States would have stayed out of the conflict, becoming a "Fortress America" in a world controlled by Fascist allies.
[Would like to consider the question of] what would have happened to America if Albert Wohlstetter, the principal architect of the nuclear deterrence policy that determined when, where, and how thermonuclear weapons were used, had been exposed as a former Communist. Had Wohlstetter's radical past been exposed, most likely he would have been fired and in all likelihood his crucial study on the placement of nuclear bombers, known as the basing study, would have never been written. Although today it may seem hard to believe, without the remedies advocated by the basing study, an annihilating nuclear attack by the Soviet Union would have been not only conceivable but also highly doable. Had another RAND analyst written the study, it is also doubtful the report would have had as great an impact, for few scientists anywhere could match the theatricality and efficacy of Wohlstetter's presentation. With his basing study, not only did he forfend a possible nuclear first strike by the Soviet Union, he also promoted his own career and RAND's fortunes, becoming the principal adviser to the Air Force and its Strategic Air Command. Theirs was an idyllic existence, marred only in the 1950s by the political witch hunts fostered by Senator Joseph McCarthy in his drive to purge the country of all Communists and Communist sympathizers, their "fellow travelers." The FBI had already hounded Charlie Chaplin... [Wohlstetter had a radical past, but it was never exposed.]
An open homosexual, McKinsey had been in a committed relationship for years when the FBI decided he was a security risk. When told that his sexual orientation could subject him to blackmail, McKinsey complained to Roberta Wohlstetter, "How can anyone threaten me with disclosure when everybody already knows?" A few years after his clearance was revoked and Frank Collbohm himself had fired him, McKinsey committed suicide. p.66