rational defense

RD has been founded on the belief that defense issues, like any issue of governance or policy, can — and must — be understood and debated beyond the walls and closed doors of the department or ministry of defense. The choices a society makes in order to defend itself reflect its deepest moral values. If a democratic society does indeed govern over and command its defense establishment, that society must be able to intellectually grasp and intelligently debate the doctrines and policies that govern its military.

A defense establishment is every bit as subject to excess and institutional inertia as any other governmental department or agency — matters only compounded by heightened senses of security, institutional loyalty and deference to authority. Without public debate and understanding, poorly monitored or understood defense policy can implicate a society in matters of the utmost significance — matters that society may not have even recognized as at issue, much less debated and come to informed conclusions about. On the more benign end of the spectrum, this can take the shape of vast sums of money being wasted on weapon systems that are for one reason or another inappropriate by the time they reach fruition (immense opportunity costs notwithstanding). At the other end of the spectrum, a society may fail to grasp — much less meaningfully participate in — policy decisions of the gravest consequence.

Case in point: on the last day of January in 1950 President Harry Truman publicly announced that the United States was pursuing “the technical feasibility of a thermonuclear weapon.”[1] This decision — to attempt to build nuclear weapons orders of magnitude more destructive than the 300 or so fission bombs then currently in the American arsenal — was undertaken completely behind closed doors.

The potential for a thermonuclear weapon was raised in secret during World War II within the Manhattan Engineering District (the American effort to build the world’s first atomic bombs) but was at that time deemed too advanced to be weaponized in time to affect the outcome of the war and thus a detraction from the more obtainable fission efforts.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist that led the Manhattan ‘Project,’ also opposed this pursuit after the war on ethical grounds. At that time probably the most widely-recognized and highly-regarded scientist in the world (second, perhaps, to Albert Einstein himself), he spoke to the nation on Eleanor Roosevelt’s Sunday morning talk show less than two weeks after Truman’s announcement:

These are complex technical things, but they touch the very basis of our morality. It is a grave danger for us that these decisions are taken on the basis of facts held secret. [2]

His opposition to Truman’s policy was interpreted by some not as principled and informed policy advocacy, but literally as treason (and his was one of the few voices even broaching the subject in the public sphere). It was a position that would ultimately see Oppenheimer — a deeply patriotic man intimately knowledgeable about the American nuclear weapons enterprise — stripped of his security clearance and branded a communist at the height of the Red Scare.

Admittedly, Oppenheimer and many of the other intellectual leaders of the Manhattan Project had flawed conceptions. Oppenheimer, for one, was a deeply idealistic man. These men’s very deep — perhaps unique — grasp of the profound implications of the weaponization of atomic theory gave way for many of the nation’s preeminent physicists to what were ultimately naive notions of world government.

Indeed, Oppenheimer’s warnings of “a grave danger” are not presented here to be an argument that the pursuit of thermonuclear weapons was necessarily the wrong policy — and certainly not that the nuclear arms race could have been completely averted (though it had been Oppenheimer’s — and his compatriots — hope since before the culmination of the Manhattan Project to do just that).

Even Oppenheimer acknowledged the immense danger of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. And the 1980s arms build-up orchestrated by President Ronald Reagan’s administration (including the Strategic Defense Initiative that became known as “Star Wars” and the development of the LGM-118A Peacekeeper heavy intercontinental ballistic missile, its precision Mk-21 re-entry vehicles their high yield-to-weight W87 warheads) helped drive the utterly massive Soviet military-industrial engine into the ground — ultimately helping win the Cold War for the United States.

Only five months prior to Truman’s announcement, on August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its very first atomic bomb in Kazakhstan — modeled suspiciously precisely on the plutonium implosion design of “Fat Man,” the American bomb used against Nagasaki in 1945. Stalin’s Soviet Union was absolutely ruthless and dangerous, and the nascent Soviet nuclear weapons program obviously made it imperative for Washington, if it could no longer maintain its nuclear monopoly, to take decisive steps to establish and sustain a generational lead over what had become the second center of gravity in the international system.

But only after Truman’s announcement in 1950 would the United States subsequently spend $5.5 trillion to build more than 70,000 nuclear warheads.[3] The Soviets ultimately spent and built even more. Yet it was not until the late 1970s that the Soviet nuclear arsenal overtook the American’s in quantitative terms — and only in the early 1980s would the Soviets match and then exceed the absolute peak in warhead numbers that the United States achieved in the mid-1960s.

The emergence of that arms race cannot be pinned to a single policy decision. But in 1950, no arms race had yet begun. Early Soviet nuclear tests were heavily dependent upon espionage — essentially replicating the work the United States had already done. Meanwhile, the American people were essentially left in the dark in terms of understanding and debating the potentially genocidal implications of their government’s nuclear war plans.

(RD absolutely acknowledges the imperatives of technical — and especially operational — security. Secrecy and classification are inherently necessary in matters of defense and are absolutely justifiable when it comes to the technicalities of a nation’s nuclear weapons enterprise.)

In the critical early years after the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, America wielded the atomic bomb with no real debate of either the larger foreign policy or the wider moral implications. Steeped in a culture of not only the strictest secrecy — a wartime secrecy that, though it endured well beyond the surrender of Japan in 1945, was admittedly not without basis — but also a deep paranoia of communism, seminal decisions in American military policy were made without public debate.

The perpetual threat of a global nuclear holocaust did not exist in 1950. Then, it was a nightmare scenario that only subsequently became a reality — in large part based on the strategic choices made by a U.S. national command authority and the defense establishment from behind closed doors based on facts held secret.

That arms race may very well have been unavoidable. Power is a relative measure, and the atomic bomb was only a coercive tool to keep the Soviet Union in check only so long as the Kremlin did not have one. Thermonuclear weapons were the next step in maintaining a generational lead.

But nuclear weapons are a tool. Admittedly in the 20th century, they proved to be more of a political tool than a meaningful military one. But what happened after the Second World War was that the tool itself — from behind inscrutable layers of security — began to dictate policy, even as its implications were still being understood.

The public debate and outside expert analysis that gives definition and perspective — and provides a sort of check — to internal decisions being made behind closed doors ‘on the basis of facts held secret’ was not permitted. Yet this is the role of democratic government. This is not to say that the masses should make — much less are capable of making — such precise decisions on necessarily highly-classified matters. That is the role of elected officials and the relevant institutions. But the culture of secrecy and compartmentalization that pervaded after the end of the Second World War extended far beyond the technical aspects of weapons development and operational planning to underlying strategic assumptions and moral judgments. This largely prohibited meaningful public debate over the wider policy and ethical implications of America’s nuclear weapons policies. By the time the Soviets tested their atomic bomb – four years after the end of the Second World War and the culmination of America’s nuclear weapons efforts — the country was ill-prepared and ill-equipped to understand, much less debate, the implications of taking the next giant leap down the road of nuclear weaponization.

With this in mind, RD seeks to make defense issues and military policy choices, their underlying motivations and their implications accessible and understandable, with the underlying belief that a democratic society must be an educated and informed society in order to survive.

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1 Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. New York: Vintage Books, 2006 (1st Ed. 2004). 428.
2 ibid. 430.
3 ibid. 429.