'Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years'

This book review was first published in the monthly Journal of Civil Defense in June 1989.


DANGER AND SURVIVAL: CHOICES ABOUT THE BOMB IN THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS by McGeorge Bundy. New York: Random House. Publication Date: December 12, 1988. Pages: xiii + 735 (including bibliography, notes and index). Price: $24.95 (hardcover).

— Reviewed by Richard Sincere.

McGeorge Bundy, who gained national prominence as President John F. Kennedy’s national security advisor more than twenty-five years ago, now is a professor of history at New York University. As a historian, he has produced a readable if lengthy chronicle of the nuclear age, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years.

Because of the book’s sheer length — over 600 pages of text alone — it is difficult in a short review like this to do it justice. For that reason, let us look at just two topics that Bundy handles that have special interest for readers in 1989: civil defense and the Strategic Defense Initiative.

For a Kennedy administration alumnus, Bundy’s discussion of civil defense is surprisingly spare. After all, in real dollar terms, federal spending on efforts to protect civilians against enemy attack reached its peak in the Kennedy years and has steadily fallen since. President Kennedy had a genuine commitment to civil defense, as he noted in several public statements. “To recognize the possibilities of nuclear war in the missile age,” Kennedy said in June 1961, ‘without our citizens knowing what they should do or where they should go if bombs fall, would be a failure of responsibility.”

Bundy notes that he agreed with Kennedy on the need for civil defense as a sort of “insurance policy” against the dangers of nuclear war. He also says that both he and Kennedy underestimated the political realities of trying to get an effective civil defense program off the ground. Kennedy was troubled by his failure to establish a good program, and Bundy reports the president attributed this failure to the ebbs and flows of politics: “These matters have some rhythm,” said Kennedy in a 1962 press conference. “When the skies are clear, no one is interested. Suddenly then, when the clouds come. . . then everyone wants to find out why more hasn’t been done about it . . I think the time to do it is now.”

Similar views have been expressed from time to time by other national leaders: Nelson Rockefeller, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan. For some reason (sociological? political?), their opinions in favor of civil defense have not influenced national policy. Bundy notes — although some strategic thinkers, including myself, might disagree with him — that “civil defense is not a reinforcement of deterrence; it is not a tool of crisis management; it certainly does not demonstrate will or confer superiority. But” — and here I do agree with Bundy — “neither is it belligerent or provocative.”

Bundy’s discussion of civil defense ends with the Kennedy administration, despite the fact that civil defense became a controversial national issue during both the Carter and Reagan presidencies. He neglects the creation (under Carter) of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the sometimes comic events under Reagan that led to a diminished commitment to civil defense in spite of repeated promises of support from the White House. Perhaps Bundy has fallen prey to his own assessment of why civil defense lacks public support: “The subject may be too dreadful for rational discussion.”

Professor Bundy compares Ronald Reagan’s March 1983 decision to announce the Strategic Defense Initiative with Franklin Roosevelt’s October 1941 decision to embark on the atom bomb research program. Yet, advancing from the historic nature of these decisions, Bundy remains skeptical. “What is clear,” he writes, “is that any limited defense will leave essentially unchanged the strategic stalemate we now have — one that rests in the end on mutual vulnerability. The leakproof space shield that is Ronald Reagan’s dream will not become real for decades, if ever.”

Bundy’s skepticism is based on the testimony of technological and scientific experts who downplay the possibilities of SDI and emphasize its shortcomings. Although he discusses extensively the political play that has accompanied the strategic debate since 1983, he seems to ignore certain implications of the evidence that he brings up himself. The conclusion I draw — and others, too — from such evidence is that the practicability of strategic defense is more a function of political will than of technical advance.

I expect that McGeorge Bundy’s Danger and Survival will find its way into many college classrooms as a basic text on the history of nuclear weapons. An interesting and enjoyable work, it will probably be very useful to students of diplomatic history, the Cold War, and strategic thinking. It does not, however, tell the whole story. No single book could.

'With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War'

This book review appeared originally in The Washington Times on Friday, February 4, 1983.  It was also published in The News World (a New York City newspaper) on Tuesday, February 15, 1983.


RICHARD SINCERE / BOOK REVIEW
Shoveling appeasement

With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War.
By Robert Scheer, Random House, $14.95, 124 pages + 155 pages of 
notes and appendices.

Eugene Rostow’s resignation from his post as head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency underlines the pressures inherent in the arms-control process. Battered by both the right and the left, the Reagan administration has spent the past two years trying to bring order out of chaos, attempting to achieve sensible balance in the competition between the superpowers.


In “With Enough Shovels,” Los Angeles Times correspondent Robert Scheer shamelessly accuses Reagan and his advisers of wild (just stopping short of insane) views of nuclear war. Resting his accusations on unproven assumptions, Scheer pulls no punches in advancing his theory that the present administration is the puppet of a conspiracy called the Committee on the Present Danger.

Scheer is disturbed, and sometimes amused, at Reagan’s determination to stem the threat of communism. Scheer considers the Soviet threat a hallucination — or more accurately, he finds it a puzzling anachronism that lives on only in Reagan’s memories of Communist subversion of Hollywood trade unions. The few readers who could share Scheer’s conclusions are those who share his fundamental and wrongheaded assumption: The Soviet Union is a benign and defensive superpower.

Despite the many hours of extensive interviews with nuclear weapons specialists and civil defense experts, Scheer closes his eyes in this book to the possibility that there is a defense against nuclear weapons. T.K. Jones, deputy undersecretary of defense for strategic and theater nuclear forces, is portrayed as a wild- eyed maniac, a man with no human sensibilities. Scheer ignores the extensive empirical data gathered by Jones which demonstrate that, with proper preparations, the devastation from nuclear weapons can be significantly mitigated. He brushes it off with mockery rather than criticism of Jones’s case.

Clearly Scheer has fallen into the trap of believing in the apocalyptic premise preached by Jonathan Schell in “The Fate of the Earth” and by other doomsayers. Nothing will alter his assumptions. All challengers are dismissed as madmen, no matter what their qualifications.

In his criticism of the Committee on the Present Danger, Scheer carefully documents how this group of intellectuals — established in 1976 to study American defense needs and promulgate their findings that a dangerous imbalance in military preparedness exists — has moved its members into influential government off ices. Scheer calls it their “seizure of state power.” He reserves special disdain for committee members because so many of them are former (or present) Democrats from the Hubert Humphrey wing of the party. Scheer argues that they have betrayed their roots.

Yet it is no accident that people like Max Kampelman, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Michael Novak support U.S. military strength. They have observed firsthand the usurpation of political and social influence by muddle-headed utopians. They remember the lessons of Munich and are willing to take risks to prevent another global conflagration. A commitment to the liberal values of the Democratic Party — even to the values of Norman Thomas and Eugene V. Debs — requires a commitment to preserve those values against totalitarianism.

Thus the founders of the Committee on the Present Danger were willing to face public criticism when they rebutted CIA studies on Soviet military power. In asking, “Is the United States No. 2?” they answer an emphatic yes; their purpose was to influence the public debate on how to rectify that dangerous situation.

By concentrating exclusively on how members of the Committee on the Present Danger now are influencing the U.S. government, Scheer begs the question as to whether there is some sort of conspiracy at work. Since committee members helped to get Ronald Reagan elected, have advised him for many years, and since he agrees with most of their views, it is hardly surprising they are now in positions of influence. But to read that as a conspiracy is equivalent to saying that the Brookings Institution exercised conspiratorial control over the American economy during the Johnson and Carter administrations. It smacks of political naivete and fundamental distrust of American democracy.

And that is the root of Scheer’s attack on the Reagan administration’s nuclear weapons policy. A policy designed to fight and survive a nuclear war, even one designed primarily to deter war (as the Reagan policy clearly is), must — in Scheer’s view — be misguided, because there is nothing worth fighting for. American institutions are not superior to Soviet institutions. American government is as corrupt as Soviet government. Freedom is not preferable to slavery. Scheer’s repugnant view is not unique — it has been expressed in the recent appeasement demonstrations in both Europe and America.

On balance, “With Enough Shovels” presents a strikingly biased, negative view of the Reagan administration. Its only positive value is documentary: Scheer prints informative interviews with several present and former government officials. Unfortunately, Scheer is incapable of interpreting that information in a manner conducive to rational discourse. That would make a worthy addition to the literature of nuclear policy.

Richard E. Sincere Jr. is president of the Washington chapter of the American Civil Defense Association, a nationwide public education group.

'The Counterfeit Ark: Crisis Relocation for Nuclear War'

This review appeared originally in the New York Tribune on Friday, January 20, 1984.


Book ignores Soviet peril in attack on civil defense
RICHARD E. SINCERE

The Counterfeit Ark: Crisis Relocation for Nuclear War, edited by Jennifer Leaning and Langley Keyes, Cambridge, Mass., Ballinger Publishing Co. (A Physicians for Social Responsibility Book), cloth $29.95, paper $11.95, 300 pages. 

Civil defense in the United States has relied primarily on “crisis relocation planning” (CRP) since the late 1970s, a sound concept derived from the best way to avoid death or injury from a nuclear weapon: being far away from it when it explodes. CRP is bureaucratic shorthand for “we must evacuate our cities and other potential target areas when nuclear war seems imminent.”

While there is still some controversy in the civil defense community over CRP, few civil defense specialists reject it outright. Advocates of civil defense argue for more CRP funding, point out its flaws, seek improvements and offer alternatives. On the other hand, Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), in its ongoing struggle to keep America vulnerable to nuclear attack, has made CRP’s flaws a platform for attacking all civil defense.

Conflicting morals

In The Counterfeit Ark the gulf separating PSR from pro-civil defense groups like The American Civil Defense Association (TACDA) becomes wider than ever. For example, in Jerome Weisner’s foreword, he says CRP (and by implication all forms of civil defense) “is morally wrong: it is strategically wrong; and it is operationally wrong.” In contrast, TACDA testified before Congress last April, “Civil defense against nuclear attack is a moral imperative, a political obligation, and a strategic necessity.”

Some specific criticisms of CRP by the various authors in this book deserve further examination. There are, indeed, valid points that draw attention to some faulty assumptions made by Federal Emergency Management Agency planners in devising evacuation plans. Nevertheless, these criticisms should be taken into account not in the way editors Leaning and Keyes would like — that is, to give up the idea of crisis relocation entirely — but rather as a starting point for solving real problems that may exist.

The book lacks perspective; It examines civil defense in a political and social vacuum. Incredibly, the book discusses nuclear war without acknowledging our chief adversary the Soviet Union. The authors make their arguments as though the threat comes either from nuclear weapons or perhaps the Oval Office — but never the Kremlin.

It is amazing to read 300 pages of the text about nuclear war and find no recognition that Soviet military doctrine stresses not only that thermonuclear war can be fought and survived, but that it can be won. (Several writers do imply, however that this is the belief of the Reagan administration. This is so far removed from reality that it renders questionable any legitimate critical faculties on the part of Leaning and Keyes, et al.)

Former Adm. Noel Gayler In the only discussion of Soviet civil defense, makes no substantive argument against it but instead ridicules It. Laughing does not detract from Soviet leaders’ faith in civil defense, a faith that deployed 100,000 skilled workers in full-time civil defense work and spends billions of dollars each year on population protection. Gayler further makes the ludicrous assertion that should we evacuate our cities, the Soviets will “retarget” evacuated populations — an idea incompatible with Soviet military doctrine.

On the level of absurdity, in a touching essay on the dangers posed to children during evacuation or war, Irwin Redlener argues that gangs of children “might band together” and contribute to “massive social disintegration.” Again, this ridiculous argument deserves attention only to the degree it spurs us to make more thorough and effective civil defense plans.

Philip Herr notes the spontaneous evacuation of Three Mile Islandin 1979, but fails to make the obvious conclusion that crisis relocation planning is therefore necessary to prevent such chaos in a future crisis. He strangely assumes that the only clue Americans will have that a crisis is imminent are statements from the White House — as if American citizens would be oblivious to TV news reports about Soviet troops marching into West Berlin.

Herr also repeats a common PSR assertion that civil defense “could reduce the political urgency of achieving real means of avoiding rather than ameliorating the consequences of nuclear conflict” and that if we had an effective and credible civil defense, our leaders’ “reluctance to risk nuclear escalation might be reduced.” As always, these statements are made without proof. Nowhere has Herr (or any of his colleagues) drawn analogies from history, evidence from military strategy or examples from current conflicts that protecting innocent civilians makes war more likely.


Preserving peace

There is no contradiction between a commitment to civil defense and a commitment to conflict resolution. Defense, deterrence, disarmament and diplomacy are all tools in the same arsenal to preserve international peace and stability while enhancing liberty and justice here and abroad.

Under the pretense of scientific objectivity, the PSR mask their own biases, The Counterfeit Ark is a shallow book that raises many questions but offers no answers or suggestions; in this it is more destructive than constructive.

Richard E. Sincere is a research assistant for church and society at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

'Waging Nuclear Peace: The Technology and Politics of Nuclear Weapons'

This review originally appeared in the Washington Times on Thursday, May 2, 1985. This is probably the first time it has been readily available in digital form.  (Versions of this book review also appeared in the New York City Tribune on September 3, 1986, and in the spring 1985 issue of Strategic Review.)

BOOK REVIEW/Richard E. Sincere Jr.

A textbook look at our nuclear strategies

Waging Nuclear Peace: The Technology and Politics of Nuclear Weapons
By Robert Ehrlich
University of New York
$12.95 paper, 397 pages

When George Mason University physics professor Robert Ehrlich began to teach a course in arms control and nuclear weapons policy a few years ago, he could find no adequate, single-volume text that was conducive to class discussion and that provided sufficient technical and political background for his students. So, Mr. Ehrlich has produced a readable, detailed and useful primer on nuclear strategy that will also be an excellent reference book for those who are already in the field.

Page 1 introduces the purpose of the book with the question, “Are we discussing the real issue?... Nuclear war is a highly emotional issue,” Mr. Ehrlich points out. “It would be almost irrational not to become emotional when reflecting on the horror that a nuclear war could bring. However, the whole point of thinking analytically about nuclear war is to try to see facts objectively, not as we might wish them to be. It is only by clearing away these misconceptions that we can best assess the most likely course of action to avert catastrophe.”

The practical applications of this view become clear later in a discussion of the 1979 Office of Technology Assessment study, The Effects of Nuclear War, a report often cited as a primary source on the immediate and long-term effects of a nuclear attack upon the United States. Mr. Ehrlich compares the advantages and disadvantages of the United States and the U.S.S.R. that bear on their prospects for survival following a nuclear exchange. He notes that the OTA report concluded that there is no evidence “that the Soviets face a lower risk [than the United States] of finding themselves unable to rebuild an industrial society at all.”

Mr. Ehrlich argues, however, that an objective reader may come to different conclusions from those reached by the OTA report’s authors, and conclude that the Soviet Union is better prepared to survive a nuclear attack than the United States: “It is possible that the authors of this [OTA] study did not want to encourage the belief that nuclear war might be survivable -- especially the notion that it might be more survivable in the Soviet Union than in the United States.”

If Soviet military leaders do believe in the survivability — or winnability — of a nuclear war, the United States is faced with a major problem for strategic policy. And Mr. Ehrlich’s analysis of this problem deserves more prominence in, his book than he gives it.

Among many other issues that Mr. Ehrlich sheds light on, two are of particular current interest, antiballistic missile defense (ABM) and civil defense. One of his views on ballistic missile defense may surprise some pundits: “It would make little sense’ the author argues, “to build an expensive and exotic ABM system of uncertain feasibility without first investing in a much cheaper civil defense system. Such a course of action would be akin to installing an expensive photovoltaic solar-energy collection system n your roof and not bothering first to add insulation in your ceiling -- a much more cost-effective measure.”

This approach is unusually relevant, since the Reagan administration has cut the civil defense budget for fiscal 1986 from $181 million to $119.1 million. There appears to be a trend in administration thinking toward putting all of its eggs in the Strategic Defense Initiative basket -- a prospect that chills arms-control advocates as well as civil defense professionals.

While acknowledging the arguments of Physicians for Social Responsibility and other groups that there may be “insurmountable obstacles” to surviving nuclear war, including long-term climatic damage and the destruction of our national infrastructure, Mr. Ehrlich remains firm in his support for population-protection measures. At the conclusion of his discussion of the effectiveness of civil defense, he writes:

“While there are major obstacles to survival following a nuclear war, it is by no means clear that these obstacles are insurmountable. In the nuclear age the goal of preventing nuclear war must, of course, take priority over surviving one. Nevertheless, because a nuclear war could occur despite our best efforts at prevention, prudence requires that some attention be devoted to the problem of survival.”

The book is rich in its exposition of the myriad issues that students, citizens, and policymakers must face in the crowded debate over nuclear weapons policy. It is well- structured, with divisions into four topical sections: “Introduction to the issues,” “Nuclear Arms and Nuclear War,” “The Effects of Nuclear War” and “Policy Options and Objectives.”

These are further divided into chapters with headings such as “Public Opinion and the Media,” “Long-Term Worldwide Effects of a Nuclear War,” and “Arms Control and Disarmament.” Two appendixes address “The Physical Principles of Nuclear Energy and Radiation” and “Survival After Nuclear War.” Each chapter and appendix is followed by study questions to help instructors conduct class discussions or to devise midterm and final essay questions.

The fact that this book is designed for classroom use should not deter readers who are past the age of worrying about term papers, grades, and spring break in Florida. Waging Nuclear Peace is an important contribution to the catalog of nuclear-strategy books.

Richard E. Sincere Jr. is vice president of the American Civil Defense Association.