Nuclear FOMO Might Kill Us All
This is the most important part of the introduction to The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower. Even if you ignore the rest of this review, read this passage:
In 1961 I had learned as an insider that our secret nuclear decision-making, policy, plans, and practices for general nuclear war endangered, by the JCS estimate, hundreds of millions of people, perhaps a third of the earth’s population. What none of us knew at the time—not the Joint Chiefs, not the president or his science advisors, not anyone else for the next two decades, until 1983—were the phenomena of nuclear winter and nuclear famine, which meant that a large nuclear war of the kind we prepared for then or later would kill nearly every human on earth (along with most large species). (See chapter 18.)
It is the smoke, after all (not the fallout, which would remain mostly limited to the northern hemisphere), that would do it worldwide: smoke and soot lofted by fierce firestorms in hundreds of burning cities into the stratosphere, where it would not rain out and would remain for a decade or more, enveloping the globe and blocking most sunlight, lowering annual global temperatures to the level of the last Ice Age, and killing all harvests worldwide, causing near-universal starvation within a year or two.
U.S. plans for thermonuclear war in the early sixties, if carried out in the Berlin or Cuban missile crises, would have killed many times more than the six hundred million people predicted by the JCS. They would have caused nuclear winter that would have starved to death nearly everyone then living: at that time three billion.
The numbers of warheads on both sides have since declined greatly—by over 80 percent!—from their highest levels in the sixties. Yet by the most recent scientific calculations—confirming and even strengthening the initial warnings of more than thirty years ago—even a fraction of the existing smaller arsenals would be more than enough to cause nuclear winter today, on the basis of existing plans that target command and control centers and other objectives in or near cities. In other words, first-strike nuclear attacks by either side very much smaller than were planned in the sixties and seventies—and which are still prepared for instant execution in both Russia and American—would still kill by loss of sunlight and resulting starvation nearly all the humans on earth, now over seven billion.
If the above claims are correct, people who build private nuclear bunkers to wait out fallout are wasting their resources. Even if they store enough supplies to wait out a decade or two of nuclear winter, it’s not clear how they could survive once their supplies run out. Even experienced farmers with seeds and tools might not figure out how to grow food in a post-nuclear-winter ecosystem soon enough to avoid starvation.
This tells me the best place to be during a nuclear strike is in a city which is guaranteed to be targeted in a United States-Russian Federation nuclear war. That way I’ll die quickly.
But why the heck should I make choices like this? Why should you? Why put energy into figuring out how to react to a nuclear winter instead of preventing it?
We worry a lot about a ‘madman’ getting control of nuclear weapons.
A madman with nuclear weapons might, in fact, cause nuclear winter. But Ellsberg makes the case that we don’t need madmen to start a nuclear war. Normies alone may plausibly kill 99.99% of humanity in under two years.
Over and over, Ellsberg found ‘normal’ people who said that as soon as they believed a nuclear war was underway, they would launch their nukes. If they delayed even ten minutes to check for obvious mistakes in whatever report made them believe a nuclear war was happening, they might die and thus lose their one chance of making a nuclear attack. What’s worse than dying in a nuclear war? Dying in a nuclear war without shooting your own nukes!
They have nuclear Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO).
Ellsberg devotes two chapters to the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which he played a part. I was born after the crisis and never learned about it in history classes. It was just something I heard about once in a while. Instead of summarizing these chapters, I’m pulling out the instance of nuclear FOMO which almost killed a few billion people.
Ellsberg quotes Vadim Orlov’s testimony about what he witnessed on a Soviet submarine which, unable to surface to replenish its oxygen, had such a high concentration of carbon dioxide that some people fainted:
After this attack, the totally exhausted Savitsky, who, in addition to everything, was not able to establish connection with the General Staff, became furious. He summoned the officer who was assigned to the nuclear torpedo and ordered him to assemble it to battle readiness. “Maybe the war has already started up there, while we are doing somersaults here”—screamed emotional Valentin Grigorievich, trying to justify his order. “We’re going to blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all—we will not disgrace our Navy!”
This commander, who believed there might be a nuclear war going on (but wasn’t sure), wanted to fire his nuke so that he wouldn’t ‘disgrace’ the Soviet Navy. Nuclear FOMO!
You’ve already deduced that they didn’t actually launch the nuke. But maybe you want more details about what happened next. Ellsberg explains:
At least two officers were required to agree on the firing of the special weapon: the captain and the political officer, in this case Maslennikov. According to Orlov, Maslennikov agreed with Savitsky’s order to fire. On another sub that would have been sufficient. These two each had half of a key that was required to fire the special weapon…
… But on this submarine, a third concurrence was required, because the chief of staff of the brigade, Vasili Arkhipov, was traveling with them… for this decision, because of his role in the brigade, Arkhipov’s agreement was also required. And he withheld it. He did so on the grounds—which Savitsky and Maslennikov understood as well as he, but which they chose to ignore under the circumstances—that Moscow had not authorized it.
Had Arkhipov been stationed on one of the other submarines (for example, B-4, which was never located by the Americans), there is every reason to believe that the carrier USS Randolph and several, perhaps all, of its accompanying destroyers would, within minutes of the agreement by Savitsky and Maslennikov, have been destroyed by a nuclear explosion. Or if not destroyed, then drenched in a lethal bath of radioactive water that would incapacitate crew members almost immediately and kill them soon after.
The source of this explosion would have been mysterious to other commanders in the Navy and officials on the ExComm, since no submarines known to be in the region were believed to carry nuclear warheads. The clear implication of the cause of the nuclear destruction of this antisubmarine hunter-killer group would have been a medium-range missile from Cuba whose launch had not been detected. That is the event that President Kennedy had announced on October 22 would lead to a full-scale nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.
Had Arkhipov fainted before he could stop Savitsky and Maslennikov from firing the nuke…
Americans believe that only the POTUS can authorize the use of the United States’ nuclear weapons. Before I read this book, I never questioned this belief. Heck, I never thought about it.
Just a few minutes of thought reveals a problem: if an enemy wants to prevent the United States from launching nuclear weapons, all they have to do is assassinate the POTUS. Okay, it’s more complicated than that. They also have to assassinate the VPOTUS and anyone else to whom the military could deliver ‘nuclear codes’ in the short term.
Thus, if someone like the Soviet Union wanted to prevent the United States from using nuclear weapons, all they had to do was bomb Washington D.C. when the POTUS, VPOTUS, Speaker of the House, etc. were all in town.
The solution is obvious: pre-delegate the authority to use nuclear weapons to people in multiple locations, either locations the enemy can’t predict, or so many locations the enemy can’t attack them all.
Ellsberg says this is exactly what the U.S. military has done, and he believes this is still true today. That only the POTUS has the authority to trigger the launching of the United States’ nuclear weapons is a lie. Ellsberg dedicates many pages to his evidence; I won’t repeat it.
Any of those people who are authorized to initiate the use of nuclear weapons can trigger a war—not just the POTUS.
Then Ellsberg asks: why keep this secret? If the enemy believes that they can prevent a nuclear attack by bombing Washington D.C., especially if they believe it’s their only hope of survival, doesn’t that give them an incentive to try that? An enemy might even believe they could initiate a nuclear war and survive. Wouldn’t announcing pre-delegation of nuclear weapons authority discourage that stunt?
It gets worse.
U.S. nuclear war planners assumed that, even though they had sub-delegated authority to start nuclear war, the Soviet Union had not. Thus, their plans focused on ‘decapitating’ the government in Moscow.
Actually, as Ellsberg reveals in the Cuban Missile Crisis section, Khrushchev had placed nuclear warheads in Cuba and “the Presidium [of the Soviet Union] had agreed to delegate authority to local commanders to use them against an invasion fleet, without direct orders from Moscow.” (Italics are Ellsberg’s, not mine). Nobody in the U.S. government had a clue about this for 25 years. During the Cuban missile crisis, when Khrushchev figured out just how screwed up this situation was, he ordered that the nuclear warheads in Cuba be dismantled.
But removing the nukes in Cuba didn’t end Soviet delegation. The Soviet Union created a ‘dead-hand’ system which would automatically launch nuclear weapons if Moscow were destroyed (yep, the very place the U.S. military had plans to ‘decapitate’). The man who designed the system, Valery Yarynich, claimed it increased nuclear safety. If such a system had not been put into place, leaders in Moscow would be tempted to launch nuclear weapons preemptively lest they were about to ‘lose’ the opportunity (nuclear FOMO!) The ‘dead-hand’ system assured them that, even if the destruction of Moscow stopped them from launching nuclear weapons personally, the Soviet Union’s arsenal would never miss out on a nuclear war.
Ellsberg says:
Here then, is the actual situation that has prevailed for more than half a century. Each side prepares and actually intends to attack the other’s “military nervous system,” command and control, especially its head and brain, the national command headquarters, in the first wave of a general war, however it originates. This has become the only hope of preempting and paralyzing the other’s retaliatory capability in such a way as to avoid total devastation; it is what must above all be deterred by the opponent. But in fact it, too, is thoroughly suicidal unless the other side has failed to delegate authority well below the highest levels. Because each side does in fact, delegate, hopes for decapitation are totally unfounded. But for the duration of the Cold War, for fear of frightening their own publics, their allies, and the world, neither side discouraged these hopes in the other by acknowledging its own delegation.
So basically, Ellsberg thinks that these political leaders prioritized PR over strategy or, uh, reducing the risk of killing hundreds of millions of people.
The Russian Federation has publicly stated that it still has a system for launching nuclear weapons if Moscow is destroyed, and “the command for an attack may come from the system, not the people.” Given that the Soviet Union had such a system, it’s highly plausible that the Russian Federation is telling the truth. So have U.S. nuclear planners updated their beliefs and given up on the idea of a ‘decapitation’ strike against the Russian government? Nope. U.S. nuclear war plans still emphasize taking out ‘Russian and Chinese Political and Military Leadership’ as if the execution of such a plan didn’t have high odds of killing 99.99% of all humanity.
As General Holloway expressed it in 1980, he had confidence that with such a decapitating strategy, a U.S. first strike would come out much better for the United States than a second strike, to the point of surviving and prevailing. He was right about the hopelessness of the alternative forms of preemption. But in reality, the hope of successfully avoiding mutual annihilation by a decapitating attack has always been ill-founded as any other. The realistic conclusion would be that a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviets was—and is—virtually certain to be an unmitigated catastrophe, not only for the two parties but for the world. But being unwilling to change the whole framework of our foreign and defense policy by abandoning reliance on the threat of nuclear first use or escalation, policy makers (probably on both sides) have chosen to act as if they believed (and perhaps actually do believe) that such a threat is not what it is: a readiness to trigger global omnicide.
The leaders want to believe so badly that it’s possible to start a nuclear war and survive that they cling to myths such as ‘decapitation can prevent the other side from launching nuclear weapons’ even when evidence to the contrary is obvious.
Or maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe they just don’t want to admit that they’re wrong.
These people control nukes.
That’s just talking about official authorization of launching nuclear attacks. Surely no normie anywhere in the world would launch a nuclear attack without official authorization. Those people aboard the Soviet submarine which almost launched a nuke during the Cuban missile crisis weren’t ‘normies’ since carbon dioxide poisoning impaired their ability to think (but people aboard submarines armed with nukes sometimes breathe too much carbon dioxide, it’s not even strange). Normies who are breathing healthy concentrations of oxygen and carbon dioxide would ensure they had proper authorization before launching a nuke.
Yeah right.
While working as a RAND consultant in the late 1950s, Ellsberg investigated how military bases in the Western Pacific with nuclear weapons conducted drills. Airline pilots performed daily drills in which they got into the cockpits of their nuclear-loaded planes. They were trained to be ready to take off within ten minutes of an alert. Ellsberg says:
But we found it hard to get a clear answer whether pilots on actual standby alert ever took off, in a practice drill, from their alert pads with weapons aboard. Certainly not very often, if ever, we were told. Probably never.
That said to me that if they were ordered to take off from those pads, it would be an extraordinary, perhaps unprecedented, experience for the alert pilots. Even if it was in fact—unknown to them—only a drill, the first time or two that it happened would almost surely lead them to infer that “this was it.”
One reason they didn’t taxi during drills is that commanders feared that if all the planes took off together in a rush, they could crash and have a nuclear accident. But if, because of a warning (just a warning, not an authorization to use nuclear weapons, possibly a false alarm) a commander ordered the nuclear-weapon-loaded planes to take off, and one of them had an accident, and the pilots of the planes already in the air noticed a mushroom cloud over their base, what would they think?
If launches happened at many bases simultaneously, possibly because of an alert based on a false alarm, wouldn’t that increase the risk of such an accident happening?
If pilots couldn’t communicate with their base because a nuclear accident destroyed it, would they scrupulously avoid using nukes because they couldn’t get authorization? Many commanders told Ellsberg that, in that situation, they would expect some pilots to follow the war plan and launch the nukes—without an ‘Execute’ order.
Thus, normie pilots might start a nuclear war without authorization.
Ellsberg interviewed the commander of a base in South Korea near the North Korea border. This specific base was under orders to never let planes with nukes take off without a direct order from the headquarters of the Pacific Command in Tokyo. The commander acknowledged this, then said, “… every commander has an inherent right to protect his forces. That is a fundamental law of war. It’s the oldest principle of war that as a military commander I have the right and authority to protect my forces, and if I believed that they were endangered by anything, I would send them off.” After further probing, he admitted that if communications were cut off (weather caused the communications to go out about once a day) during an international crisis, he might order his planes to get off the ground—without an order from Tokyo.
Then Ellsberg asked what would happen if he ordered the planes to take off. The commander replied they would go to a rendezvous area and if they didn’t get an ‘Execute’ message, they were supposed to come back—because orders.
They would be out of communications with the base at their rendezvous area, he’d told me earlier. If they were there as part of a theater-wide alert, there would be a coordinating plane with them at the rendezvous with stronger communication gear, sent from another base. But if he had sent them up himself, they would be circling up there by themselves, unable to send any messages out.
I asked, “How do you think that would work?”
The major said, “If they didn’t get any Execute message? Oh, I think they’d come back.” Pause. “Most of them…”
… He added, “Of course, if one of them were to break out of that circle and go for his target, I think the rest would follow.” He paused again; then he added reflectively, “And they might as well. If one goes, they might as well all go.”
Nuclear FOMO!
Ellsberg describes many layers of codified secrecy he encountered when he was a RAND consultant. There were classification levels above ‘Top Secret’ you only knew about if you had the right classification to know it existed.
Layer upon layer of secrecy makes error checking difficult—or impossible.
Even when, as a RAND consultant, Ellsberg discovered mistakes, he had difficulty correcting them. Sometimes the people who could correct the mistake didn’t have the proper classification to learn relevant information, so when Ellsberg said, ‘you should do this,’ it made no sense to them, and they didn’t do it.
Per treaty with Japan, the United States wasn’t allowed to put nuclear weapons anywhere in Japanese territory (Okinawa was under U.S. rule in the 1960s and thus didn’t count). The Japanese really, really cared about this. They cared so much that, if the United States put nuclear weapons in Japanese territory, Japan might cut off diplomatic relations with the United States and pivot to China.
The Marines had secretly put nuclear weapons permanently on Iwakuni, an obvious violation of the treaty. It brought no military or strategic benefit to the United States. So why do it? They wanted to be able to get nukes in minutes instead of hours during a general war alert. Otherwise, they might have to sit out a nuclear war (nuclear FOMO!)
Some planners believed Communist spies already knew about this, and it was only a matter of time until they sabotaged Iwakuni in such a way it would trigger an investigation by the Japanese government. That would reveal the nukes. So why didn’t someone order the Marines/Navy to get the nukes out? Well, it was a closely guarded secret because, if it leaked, it would blow up relations with Japan. That limited who knew about it in the first place, as well as who the planners could inform. If they told the people above them it was a problem, they could put their careers at risk. Ellsberg believes this is why they confided in him, a RAND consultant with high security clearances. They hoped he could fix the problem without getting them involved.
Ellsberg informed someone working for the Secretary of Defense. It turned out that the ship which stored the nukes was listed as being in Okinawa, not Iwakuni. Further investigation revealed that this was a lie. The ship was at Iwakuni most of the year. The Navy and Marines falsely listed it as being in Okinawa to avoid scrutiny. Thus… the Navy and Marines had lied to the Secretary of Defense about the location of nuclear weapons. (During a crisis, the Secretary of Defense believing that nukes were in Location A, when they were in fact in Location B… might cause problems).
By coincidence, when the people under the Secretary of Defense learned this, the ship was actually in Okinawa for maintenance. So they ordered it to stay there.
This happened next:
[Admiral] Burke made no attempt to deny the facts of the reports to justify anything. The only thing he had to say, in a fury, was “What did you think you were doing, as a civilian, interfering with the operations of ships of the U.S. Navy?”
The fact that this ship was in violation of one of our most important security treaties and was posing enormous diplomatic risks, that it was carrying nuclear weapons in violation of regulations on their whereabouts and in deliberate deception of the secretary of defense, that the special assistant to the secretary had been lied to by the Navy—none of these points was addressed by Burke, nor was he willing to hear about them. He maintained that it was absolutely unacceptable that the secretary of defense should presume to tell the Navy where to put its ships.
Secretary of Defense McNamara backed off, and the nukes went back to Iwakuni.
This isn’t the biggest mistake in nuclear planning Ellsberg describes from his time as a RAND consultant. I chose this one because I can explain it in fewer words.
Imagine the mistakes Ellsberg never found.
Every one of our many thousands of H-bombs, the thermonuclear fusion bombs that arm our strategic forces, requires a Nagasaki-type A-bomb as its detonator. I doubt that one American in a hundred knows that simple fact, and thus has a clear understanding of the difference between A- and H-bombs, or of the reality of the thermonuclear arsenals of the last fifty years.
Our popular image of nuclear war—from the familiar pictures of the devastation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—is grotesquely misleading. Those pictures show us only what happens to humans and buildings when they are hit by what is now just the detonating cap for a modern nuclear weapon.
Before I read this book, I belonged to the 99 out of 100 Americans who didn’t know that simple fact.
The United States, in war, never targets civilians, especially not high concentrations of civilians, such as cities.
Do you believe that?
If yes, explain why the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japanese cities instead of uninhabited Japanese islands.
Because no Japanese would be around to observe it? Then why not tell the Japanese where and when the bomb would be dropped so they could send observers? If the United States had dropped an atom bomb on one of the uninhabited islands between Hokkaido and Sakhalin, they could’ve invited Soviets too.
So why drop atom bombs on cities?
Ellsberg says:
When Truman later mentioned that neither the prospect nor the actual use of the atom bomb ever gave him a moment’s hesitation or a night’s troubled sleep, that seemed odd to many Americans, including myself when I first read it. After all, he might have said that it was a difficult, in fact anguishing, moral problem, a grave decision, but that there was just no way around it. How could it not be a moral challenge?
But Truman sometimes went on to mention something that was scarcely clear to many Americans then, and still is not: that we had long been killing more people than that in the course of our non-nuclear fire-bombing attacks.
On the next page, Ellsberg says, “there was no no moral agonizing at all among Truman’s civilian or military advisors about the prospect of using the atom bomb on a city. That moral threshold had been crossed long before.”
When had it been crossed? Ellsberg devotes two chapters to the history of how Western nations went from ‘targeting civilians is wrong’ to ‘targeting civilians is good.’
The principles of “just war,” codified by international jurists starting with Hugo Grotius in the seventeenth century, reflected a “civilizing” response to the more destructive religious wars of the past, particularly against deliberate killing of noncombatants—were contrasted to the wars of the barbarians, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, and others, who had regularly put cities to the sword, killing all males, killing or enslaving all women and children, sometimes even constructing pyramids of the skulls of their victims.
I’m not entirely convinced that European societies and their offshoots (such as the United States) abstained from targeting noncombatants in war to the degree Ellsberg claims. Even Ellsberg admits that, during the 17th-thru-early-20th-century era, the principle of ‘just war’ still permitted killing noncombatants in cities under siege which refused to surrender. But maybe this norm was strong enough to reduce violence against civilians by 90%.
Just when I was arguing with Ellsberg in my head ‘what about General Sherman’s march through Georgia?’ he cites General Sherman’s march through Georgia as one of the first examples of the U.S. military intentionally targeting civilians on a mass scale (indigenous peoples’ historians may refute this claim).
And the innovation that he introduced—which was observed from Europe as an act of barbarism and is so remembered in the South to this day—was to allow his troops to attack the city of Atlanta as a whole, destroying most of its stores and burning the city. He then moved from Atlanta to the sea, burning stores, fields, and logistic supplies as he went, partly to destroy the supplies of the armies opposing him, and partly—quite explicitly and openly—to punish and terrorize the population, to make them realize that they must pay a price for supporting this secession or in allowing their leadership to continue the war.
World War I had little targeting of civilians. What I’ve read about WWI history before I read this book confirms this. Ellsberg claims this was because the norm of ‘don’t target noncombatants’ was still in place. Millions of soldiers died in trench warfare, but noncombatants were spared from direct violence. This made Europeans ask: are soldiers’ lives worth less than noncombatant lives? If you could save a million soldiers’ lives by killing ten thousand civilians, was targeting civilians justified?
If I were certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that my only two options were to kill a million soldiers or kill ten thousand civilians, yes, I would kill the ten thousand civilians.
But why did Europeans and Americans after World War I believe killing civilians could prevent the horrors of trench warfare? The idea was that airplanes could bypass trenches and bomb cities, which would ruin the economy and terrorize the population so much that they would surrender.
The Japanese military was the first to fly aircraft to bomb a city intending to kill civilians. They attacked Shanghai’s International Settlement in 1932. (I don’t know whether the Japanese government had ever accepted the ‘targeting noncombatants in war is wrong’ norm). In 1937, Japanese aircraft bombed Shanghai again, and Italian and German fascists bombed Guernica, Spain. In 1940, the Germans bombed London.
Then the British and American militaries adopted the ‘bomb factories for the win’ strategy.
Fewer people would be killed overall, on both sides, from this approach.
This justification was based on the assumption that the bombing would be effective quickly with relatively small numbers of bombs. And that belief depended on several other beliefs that British and American planners held:
Each of these assumptions, every one of them—all articles of faith among strategic-bombing enthusiasts—was decisively disproven by experience in the first years of World War II. But the bombing continued, and greatly increased.
Why did the British and American militaries continue to target dense civilian population centers even after this strategy failed to accomplish their objectives?
Because their intentions changed.
February 14, 1942, the British military issued a directive which called for targeting entire cities. The chief of the Air Staff added the addendum, “I suppose it is clear that the aiming points are to be the built-up areas, not, for instance, the dockyards or aircraft factories.” From then on, the British Royal Air Force singled out the places which had the highest density of civilians, not the factories.
Ellsberg quotes Freeman Dyson, who helped the RAF plan bombing campaigns:
In every big raid we tried to raise a fire storm, but we succeeded only twice, once in Hamburg and once two years later in Dresden… We attacked Berlin sixteen times with the kind of force that attacked Dresden once. We were trying every time to raise a fire storm… Unfortunately Dresden had little military significance and anyway the slaughter came too late to have any serious effect on the war.
Say what? The RAF tried to create a Dresden-level fire storm in Berlin SIXTEEN times? Nazi Germany lost the war despite the lack of fire storms in Berlin, so it obviously wasn’t necessary for the Allies to win. Ellsberg makes a convincing case that the outcomes of city bombings earlier in the war should have persuaded military leaders that killing tens of thousands of civilians in air raids led to tens of thousands of dead civilians, not to victory.
Then there was the American bombing of Japan.
… By the time the XXI Bomber Command—based on the Marianas in October 1944—was at last in range of the paper-and-wood housing in Japan, it still pursued “precision attacks” against Japanese industrial targets, particularly the aircraft industry. Its commander, Brigadier General Haywood S. Hansell, was a major architect of the Air Force doctrine of daytime high-altitude precision bombing. Hansell opposed firebombing as morally repugnant and militarily unnecessary. But his replacement on the Air Staff in Washington, Major General Norstad, came to prefer massive destruction of Japanese cities by firebombing to precision bombing. On January 6, 1945, Norstad visited Hansell’s headquarters in Guam and abruptly relieved him of command, replacing him with LeMay.
General Curtis E. LeMay led the fire raid of Tokyo on March 9-10, 1945. This killed between 80,000 and 120,000 people. In an interview in 1965, LeMay justified this raid (and others) by saying that without the fire raids, the Americans would’ve needed to invade Japan, which might have killed a million American soldiers, and that it was better to kill Japanese than let Americans die.
Was that LeMay’s reason? A push to make Japan surrender so that fewer Americans—and maybe even fewer Japanese—would die in the long run? Was Hansell’s judgment that it was ‘militarily unnecessary’ incorrect? Ellsberg doesn’t provide evidence one way or another, besides his previous implications that fire raids don’t break the will of the people enough to end wars.
I believe Hansell was right: it wasn’t militarily necessary. According to the Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum, over 100,000 civilians, about one third of Okinawa’s civilian population, died in the Battle of Okinawa. That was in large part because the Japanese Imperial Military was indifferent towards protecting civilians—in fact, they used civilians as human shields, killed some themselves, and ordered many more to commit suicide (and gave them hand grenades to blow themselves up). The Japanese Imperial Military may have been more inclined to protect Japanese civilians than Okinawans, but overall, given how willing they were to kill civilians on their own side, targeting civilians seemed like an ineffective way of pushing them to surrender.
Ellsberg interviewed John T. McNaughton, who had been General LeMay’s “weather officer” on the night of the raid. He told Ellsberg:
I briefed that day, as usual, on the weather to be expected over the target, and he asked me a question I’d never heard before. He asked, ‘How strong are the winds going to be at ground level? I started to tell him we could predict the winds at high altitudes, with reconnaissance flights, and even at intermediate altitudes if we dropped balloons, but we had no way of knowing what the ground winds would be. But he broke in and asked me, ‘How strong does the wind have to be so that people can’t get away from the flames? Will the wind be strong enough for that?’… It was the first time it had entered my head that the purpose of our operation was to kill as many people as possible.
Why did LeMay want to kill as many people as possible in the Tokyo raid? In an interview with Michael Sherry, LeMay said, “There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore.” To me, this is tantamount to LeMay saying that his goal hadn’t been to make the Japanese Imperial Military to surrender, but to kill Japanese people, including babies (‘there are no innocent civilians’).
Did I cherry-pick that quote to make LeMay look like a baby-killer? Yes. I’m sure Ellsberg also cherry-picked LeMay quotes which make him seem genocidal. Nonetheless, LeMay killed many babies whom Hansell would’ve spared. In one quote Ellsberg includes, LeMay specifically refers to the “little kids” (LeMay’s words) he wanted to (and did) kill.
Then the United States got atom bombs.
Ellsberg says, “LeMay himself was convinced that fire bombing had brought the Japanese to the point of surrender and that the atom bomb was in no way necessary.” Ellsberg says that, out of the eight officers of five-star rank in the U.S. Armed Forces in 1945, seven of them believed the atom bomb was unnecessary to avert invasion, and later military studies backed this up. Some believed that the fire-bombing had broken the Japanese people’s will, and some believed that the submarine blockade cutting off supplies was sufficient. I believe the submarine blockade was sufficient, and if that belief was wrong, at least the military should’ve waited for the submarine blockade to fail/succeed before fire-bombing. I also believe that Japan would’ve surrendered by the end of 1945 even without invasion or dropping atom bombs, but what I believe isn’t as significant as the fact that the United States’ top military officers believed this yet they still dropped the atom bombs.
If they didn’t believe that dropping the atom bombs was necessary for victory against Japan, why did they do it? One answer—and answer that Ellsberg backs up with evidence—is that they wanted to threaten the Soviet Union. But why not spook the Soviet Union by dropping an atom bomb in an uninhabited area where Soviets could observe the explosion?
Simple: LeMay (and the people who decided to put LeMay in power and Hansell out of power) had already made killing Japanese people their goal. Dropping an atom bomb on an uninhabited island might not kill anyone. Truman had become so habituated towards targeting dense concentrations of civilians that he didn’t bother to consider the pros and cons of dropping atom bombs on cities vs. any target that wasn’t a city.
In World War II, many parties violated the moral prohibition against targeting noncombatants. For some, it started with the humane impulse to prevent the trench warfare of World War I. But when the first few bombings of cities failed to lead to victory, instead of correcting their ‘killing civilians in cities persuades enemies to surrender’ belief, they believed that they just hadn’t killed enough civilians in cities, and needed to attack the cities harder.
Articulating the thought, ‘I killed a bunch of civilians on purpose and it didn’t work, oops’ is hard. Once someone has committed premeditated murder against civilians, their ego is highly motivated to justify that. So military leaders told themselves that mass murder of civilians is effective, even in the face of contrary evidence.
Of course Truman claimed that dropping the atomic bombs was necessary to make Japan surrender without ground invasion. Could he have told the public anything else without committing political suicide?
That means generations of Americans have grown up believing we won a war by using nuclear weapons—and thus, we associate nuclear weapons with success. Heck, we associate targeting the highest concentrations of civilians in flammable housing with military success.
The “dropping nukes = success” association may contribute to nuclear FOMO.
Maybe I should change my position on the ‘killing a million soldiers vs. killing ten thousand civilians’ dilemma. Maybe the taboo against targeting noncombatants saves so many lives in the long run (especially given the existence of nuclear weapons) and is so difficult to restore once it has been breached that, for the sake of preserving the taboo, killing a million soldiers is less awful than killing ten thousand civilians.
Since Astral Codex Ten features prediction markets so often, I must throw out this quote as a teaser:
Most accounts of the Trinity test on the early morning of July 17, 1945, recount that Fermi offered to accept bets the night before as to whether atmospheric ignition would occur. He said, “I feel I am now in a position to make book [that is, to accept bets at fixed odds] on two contingencies: 1) that the explosion will burn New Mexico; 2) that it will ignite the whole world.”
Too bad that the actual odds Fermi offered that night on these events are lost to history. Whether anyone placed money with Fermi and what odds he did offer seem never to have been reported. There are strong hints that his odds for total atmospheric ignition were much higher than three in a million. He would hardly have offered to “make book” on the basis of odds like that…
… As Peter Goodchild recounts, Fermi’s expression of uncertainty about the occurrence of atmospheric ignition had been neither a joke nor a last minute tremor.
If you want to know more about the bets this quote refers to, read the book. It dedicates an entire chapter to this.
Ellsberg claims that the United States has used nuclear weapons many times since the end of World War II—and he doesn’t just mean the tests. He says that the U.S. government’s primary use for nuclear weapons is not deterrence—that’s a lie for the public—but threatening first-use strikes to bully other governments into caving to U.S. government demands. He even says, “All American presidents since Franklin Roosevelt have acted on that motive, at times, for owning nuclear weapons.”
Ellsberg lists evidence to support this claim, then says:
What I wish to focus on here is that several presidents believed their threats had succeeded; and all of them since 1945 have acted throughout their time in office as if they believed that current or future first-use nuclear threats would be legitimate, could be effective, and might be necessary. That is true even of those who may have personally and privately abhorred the notion of launching nuclear weapons under any circumstances—I believe this includes John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson (along with Robert McNamara, who served both as secretary of defense), and probably others…
Though the first-use threats the United States has used against other countries (such as North Vietnam) have been kept somewhat secret, it’s no secret that much U.S. diplomacy in recent decades has been ‘make a demand’ and then, if the other side doesn’t immediately accept it, ‘throw a tantrum.’ That’s why I have little trouble believing Ellsberg’s claim. In fact, it helps explain why the U.S. is so bad at diplomacy more complicated than ‘expect compliance.’
First-use nuclear threats are a cheat code. Learning the context for every international situation is hard—you might have to learn another language (or find trustworthy translators/interpreters), study a lot of history, learn the personal quirks of the political agents involved, mull over the geography of somewhere on the other side of the world, make sense of religious controversies, etc. all before you can craft a bespoke diplomatic strategy which is likely to work. Making first-use nuclear threats requires much less effort.
Others will only cave to your demands if your nuclear first-use threats are at least slightly credible. For example, if I threaten to nuke Berkeley if Scott doesn’t make me the winner of this book review contest, he’ll assume I’m bluffing. Though many people have their fingers on a nuclear trigger, it’s improbable that I’m one of them. Even if my finger is on a nuclear trigger, it’s extremely improbable I would want to kill billions of people just because I lost a book review contest. If such a threat had any influence on Scott, it would be for him to disqualify me from the contest and make me a pariah in the SSC community. (For the record, my fingers are nowhere close to any nuclear triggers).
Some presidents have tried to add credibility to their first-use nuclear threats by making themselves seem like madmen. One POTUS has been more success in this than others—Trump. During the 2016 campaign, some interviewers, including Chris Matthews, tried to get Trump to reject the option of first use. On this, Ellsberg says:
Matthews’s pursuit of this issue, like that of nearly every other interviewer, seemed to reflect the simple, widespread ignorance of the reality that Trump was taking the same position of every president since Truman, and of every major candidate in that long period, definitely including his rival Hillary Clinton. She would surely have given essentially the same answers to Matthews’s questions as Trump did if she had been in that same forum, consistent with her stand in 2007…
… Trump hinted strongly to Matthews, and he even came close to saying outright—“I’m not going to use nuclear, but I’m not taking any cards off the table”—that he would be bluffing. Most, if not all, of the time. Nevertheless, the last bargaining strategy mentioned above… is especially worrisome to many in America and elsewhere because of a growing sense that this particular president actually may be mad.
To be honest, I’m more scared of a POTUS like Hillary Clinton than Trump. At least Trump got some scrutiny over his nuclear strategy. People gave Hillary Clinton—and many other presidential candidates—a free pass for doing the same thing. I can’t pin down the logic, so maybe this is just some knee-jerk reaction which isn’t based on reality, but my feeling is that the presidential candidate who is NOT condemned for keeping the ‘option’ of a first-use nuclear strike is more likely to commit omnicide.
Given that most presidents can’t make first-use threats as credibly as Trump, they have to increase credibility for the threats to deliver results they want.
If the sole purpose of the United States’ nuclear arsenal was to deter a hostile nuclear attack, we would only need a few nuclear weapons.
In the last year of the Cold War, Herbert York cited Bundy’s statement in a talk at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory… York posed the question, how many nuclear weapons are needed to deter an adversary rational enough to be deterred? Concurring with Bundy’s judgment—as who would not?—he answered his question, “somewhere in the range of 1, 10, 100… closer to 1 than it is to 100.”
In 1986, the U.S. had 23,317 nuclear warheads and Russia had 40,159 for a total of 63,836 weapons.
Having over 20,000 nuclear warheads doesn’t increase deterrence more than having merely 100 nuclear warheads—but if you want to use first-use nuclear threats, having a ridiculous number of nuclear warheads at your disposal makes your threats more credible. Having tens of thousands of nuclear warheads around—and ready to be triggered on short notice—also makes nuclear winter possible.
If making first-use nuclear threats increases the risk of nuclear winter by only 1% over never making such threats, that risk is unacceptable.
I completely agree with this Ellsberg quote (to be fair, this is something I would have agreed with even before I read this book, though I hadn’t applied it to nuclear war strategies):
We humans almost universally have a false self-image of our species. We think that monstrous, wicked policies must be, can only be, conceived and directed and carried out by monsters, wicked or evil people, or highly aberrant, clinically “disturbed” people. People not like “us.” That is mistaken. Those who have created a continuing nuclear threat to the existence of humanity have been normal, ordinary politicians, analysts, and military strategists.
In other words, madmen aren’t the only ones who might commit omnicide. Normies might do it too.
Ellsberg says that we have widespread failure to grasp ‘moral reality.’ We are so caught up in our immediate goals, such as getting the budget for our branch of the military increased, pushing another nation to capitulate to our demands, defending our homeland’s honor, or refusing to admit we made a mistake, that we fail to step back and ask ourselves, ‘is this thing we’re about to do worth risking omnicide?’
One might call this the difference between soldier mindset and scout mindset.
The subtitle for this book is ‘Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner’ because Ellsberg himself failed at moral realism. In the 1950s, he was such a dedicated Cold Warrior that he didn’t step back and ask, ‘wait, would causing a nuclear war actually be better than surrendering to the Soviet Union and letting them take over the world?’
Ellsberg ends the section on the Cuban missile crisis with this quote from something Khrushchev said a few months after the crisis:
When I asked the military advisors if they could assure me that holding fast would not result in the death of five hundred million human beings, they looked at me as though I was out of my mind, or what was worse, a traitor. The biggest tragedy, as they saw it, was not that our country might be devastated and everything lost, but that the Chinese or the Albanians might accuse us of appeasement or weakness.
So I said to myself, “To hell with these maniacs. If I can get the United States to assure me that it will not attempt to overthrow the Cuban government, I will remove the missiles.” That is what happened, and now I am reviled by the Chinese and the Albanians…
They say I was afraid to stand up to a paper tiger. It is all such nonsense. What good would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that though our great nation and the United States were in complete ruins, the national honor of the Soviet Union was intact?
Khrushchev got one thing wrong: those military advisors weren’t maniacs. They were normies.
As I was getting to the end of this book, I wondered what Ellsberg wants us to do. After all, what’s the point of knowing that governments have put in place Doomsday Machines which could commit omnicide over a mistake if we can’t do anything about it? Better to continue living in ignorant bliss (until the omnicide happens).
Ellsberg wants the abolition of all nuclear weapons. He believes this is impossible in the short term. So instead, he calls for taking down both America’s and Russia’s Doomsday Machines—that is, to take down so many nuclear weapons that nuclear winter is impossible. This can be done even if all current Nuclear Weapons States (NWS) maintain a small nuclear arsenal for deterrence—“the danger of near-extinction of humanity—a continuous possibility for the past sixty-five years—can be reduced to zero by dismantlement of most existing weapons in both the United States and Russia (and smaller dismantlement in all other NWS).”
By the time I reached the end, this seemed like a sensible, even obvious goal.
Even having only one Doomsday Machine would be an improvement over having two on hair-trigger alert. If the United States develops the will to take down its Doomsday Machine before the Russian Federation, it should do so unilaterally, since that would reduce the risk of nuclear winter (it may also increase political will in the Russian Federation to reciprocate).
I agree with Ellsberg that, for this to become politically feasible, we need much more public awareness. Submitting this to a book review contest is a small contribution to that.
Thanks to this book, as a U.S. citizen, I will stop voting for POTUS candidates who consider first-use nuclear threats to be a legitimate option. If the only POTUS candidate who renounces first-use is a fringe figure, I will vote for the fringe figure. If no candidate on the ballot renounces first-use nuclear threats, I will write in a name, even if the vote won’t count.
Hollywood, or any other media behemoth, should make riveting movies/TV shows/etc. about the American and Russian Doomsday Machines. We can encourage this in all the usual ways we influence Hollywood. Yes, we have Dr. Strangelove, but the public believes that’s absurdist satire, not reality. We need easily-believable dramas too.
Speaking of Dr. Strangelove...
Harry Rowen and I had gone into D.C. from the Pentagon during the workday to see it “for professional reasons.” We came out into the afternoon sunlight, dazed by the light and the film, both agreeing that what we had just seen was, essentially, a documentary.
I’m no expert on nuclear anything. Maybe I’m too ignorant to evaluate this book.
Maybe something in this book is so wildly inaccurate it knocks out the foundations of Ellsberg’s arguments—I might not notice. If this is the case, I hope someone in the SSC community catches it.
Choosing which details to include in this review was hard. Some things I didn’t mention at all feel important too. Heck, I omitted some things which got entire chapters. I wonder if I chose the wrong points.
This Amazon review says The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy by Lawrence Freedman and Command and Control by Eric Schlosser are better books on this topic. I haven’t read them. Maybe they are better.
I fear this review is inadequate.