'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.

'How to Make Nuclear Weapons Obsolete'

This review appeared first in the New York City Tribune on Wednesday, May 21, 1986.

BOOKS / RICHARD SINCERE
Jastrow’s Worthy Attempt To Vindicate ‘Star Wars’ Lacks the Laser Touch

How to Make Nuclear Weapons Obsolete, by Robert Jastrow, Little Brown, and Company, $15.95, 175 pp.

March 23 marked the third anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s speech introducing the nation to his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). This “Star Wars” speech was a watershed in official American thinking on nuclear weapons policy. Although technological and political conditions had for some time been pressing the U.S. defense establishment to abandon the dangerous and outmoded deterrence doctrine called Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD, Reagan’s initiative caught many Americans by surprise.

What came as no surprise was the negative reaction to SDI by certain sectors of the elite -- the scientific community, the academy, the media, and liberal political circles.

Dubbed “Star Wars’ (initially by pro-SDI columnist David Wilson in the Boston Globe, but later co-opted as a pejorative term), certain groups -- the Union of Concerned Scientists, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Common Cause, the cabal of Carl Sagan — insisted that the Strategic Defense Initiative was a fantasy, much like George Lucas’s highly popular film trilogy.

The message Robert Jastrow wishes to impart in this book is that the Strategic Defense Initiative is far from fantasy and closer to reality than even the president and his advisors may imagine.

Jastrow, founder of NASA’s Institute for Space Studies and professor of earth sciences at Dartmouth College, tries to focus his arguments on the fact that much of the technology necessary for building a successful, effective space-based defense system is available now, “off-the-shelf.” Once a system built from these already- developed technologies is in place, he says, the United States can concentrate some of its energies on building more exotic defense systems — for example, X-ray lasers, particle beams, and free electron lasers.

The net effect of both the available and the developing systems will be to produce a near leakproof (Jastrow says 80% effective is a “conservative estimate”) missile defense system. By thus guaranteeing the invulnerability of American land-based ICBMs, we can maintain a credible threat to retaliate against any Soviet attacks. That, in turn, will prevent the Soviets from attacking in the first place. Ergo, stable deterrence is maintained.

That said, it must he noted that Jastrow has expressed his views quite poorly in this particular book. If he means to convince the opponents of SDI, he will quite probably fail; if he means to persuade those unconverted to either side of the debate, they will fail to pay attention.

Why? How to Make Nuclear Weapons Obsolete is a badly written book. It suffers from redundancy and oversimplification. It seemed to me to be written for a reader with an eighth-grade education, yet few people at that reading level are likely to open a book on this subject in any case.

This is not to underestimate the necessity of transplanting difficult scientific concepts into terms understandable to laymen. But the tendency of Jastrow (or his editors, who are probably the real culprits) to “dumb down” the text throughout the book is unconscionable, as the following examples will indicate.

Redundancy: On pages 98 and 99, a discussion of “other technologies” for space-based defense boils down to this: Before 1990 or so, “it should be possible to build an effective defense against missiles with the off-the- shelf, mature and unexotic technology of the smart bullet propelled by an ordinary rocket.”

Page 100 begins a new chapter, but a paragraph nearly word-for-word the same appears: “This limited defense will be based on the off-the-shelf technology of the smart bullet. That technology is mature and unexotic…”

Oversimplification: Turning to the list of illustrations, a reader will find “The Land-Based Arsenals of the Two Superpowers.” Expecting to see a bar graph or chart showing the different numbers of SS-18s, Minutemen, or Titan missiles and silos — a meaningful measure of the nuclear balance or imbalance — one finds instead a photograph that shows how much bigger (and blacker) Soviet missiles are than American ones (which are painted white).

This type of imagery plays right into the hands of critics like Helen Caldicott, whose kooky psycho-sexual theory of the arms race posits that American and Soviet military leaders suffer from pathological “missile envy” based on size. It is hard to believe that Jastrow allowed this type of illustration to be used without qualification.

Because of these reservations, How To Make Nuclear Weapons Obsolete is far from the definitive book on space defense that one would have hoped from the author.

His pamphlet by the same title (Orwell Press, 1981) does the same job more concisely and more persuasively. As disappointing as the book is, however, the points Jastrow makes cannot be ignored. They promise to be central to the “Star Wars” debate over the next decade.

There is no question in my mind that he portrays accurately the possibilities for anti-ballistic missile defenses in the twentieth centur3 Some details-such as his suggestion that space-based systems could defend against low-flying bombers and cruise missiles — are debatable, but the bulk of his analysis can withstand the scrutiny of even the Union of Concerned Scientists.

More important, perhaps, is his conclusion that an effective ABM system will result in severe restrictions in nuclear arsenals and perhaps their abolition.

Jastrow’s full body of work helps us to keep in mind President Reagan’s question, “Wouldn’t it be better to save lives than to avenge them?” It is morally reprehensible to depend on more numerous and more destructive offensive weapons for the defense of our country; it is morally laudable to pursue the technology that will render these weapons useless.

Richard Sincere, vice president of the American Civil Defense Association, works for the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center.

'Justice and War in the Nuclear Age'

This book review was first published  in The Washington Times on May 11, 1983.  Another version of it appeared in in the May 19, 1983, edition of the Arlington Catholic Herald, the newspaper of the Roman Catholic diocese of Arlington (Virginia); it is that version that appears below.

A Book Review...
Applying Catholic Doctrine to Contemporary Issues

“Justice and War in the Nuclear Age,” edited by Philip F. Lawler. University Press of America, 1983. 113 pages, includes bibliography. Cloth $16.95, paper $5.25.


By RICHARD E. SINCERE, JR.*

Questions of morality and politics inevitably transcend particular political events. “Justice and War in the Nuclear Age” is a collection of essays by five scholars, all actively religious and concerned to examine their tradition — in this case Roman Catholic — and apply its ancient principles to contemporary issues.

Each writer succeeds in producing a useful and thought-provoking analysis of the premier problem of our time: how to secure peace with justice in an age of nuclear weapons. All agree ‘that nuclear deterrence is a moral good simply because it has prevented a general European war for the past generation. All, however, reject the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) which has governed deterrence policies since the Kennedy administration. Instead they seek “a deterrent in which our preparations match our risks, and our potential for destruction is proportionate to the evils we seek to avoid.”

It is a curious paradox that those who accept deterrence begrudgingly often argue that the only way to prevent nuclear war is to make the weapons big and dirty and to target civilians (i.e., MAD). The prospect of war then becomes so awful that no sane leader would risk using nuclear weapons. Those who support deterrence, on the other hand, have since the end of the brief era of “massive retaliation” tended to find the idea of targeting civilians morally repugnant and strategically dubious. Therefore, they have made every effort to reduce the size of nuclear weapons, make them more accurate, and devise defenses against missiles and bombers — all in order to prevent collateral damage, save innocent lives, and mitigate suffering — and concomitantly to strengthen deterrence.

Only recently, culminating with the Catholic bishops’ pastoral letter on peace and war, have we heard arguments from the anti-deterrence side of the debate that counter-city targeting doctrine is intrinsically immoral. However, instead of expressing support for a counterforce or counter-military strategy, these critics have set about undermining the moral basis of deterrence itself. By some trick of logic they have decided if we can’t target people, we can’t target anything.

This volume persuasively shows the correctness of the pro-deterrence, pro-defense position from the perspectives of several disciplines: politics (Robert R. Reillyexamines “The Nature of Today’s Conflict”), philosophy (James V. Schall, S.J., on the “Intellectual Origins of the Peace Movement”), arms control (Thomas F. Payne discusses “The Amorality of Arms Control”), military strategy (Angelo Codevilla integrates “Justice, War, and Active Defense”) and theology (Bishop John J. O’Connor turns to “Traditional Western Criteria for Justice in War”). Together these five essays establish essential foundations for an intellectual defense of flexible deterrence policies and a moral argument for active defenses that will render nuclear weapons obsolete.

Professor Schall and Bishop O’Connor remind us that peace is not the mere absence of war — any tyranny, through coercion and mind control, can stamp out conflict. Peace is more, says Schall, and “always a consequence, not a direct object of our strivings, (but) a result of truth and mercy and charity.” Reilly says that in today’s struggle with the Soviet Union — whose leaders lack mercy, truth, and charity — our duty is to assess accurately “what is at stake in a war, otherwise we cannot judge what exertions are justified for defense.” As Pope Pius XII taught, “There are greater evils than the physical death and destruction wrought in wars.” Relating religious ethics to an empirical view of the global crisis leads to the conclusion that the quest for peace with justice does not automatically exclude the use or threat to use nuclear weapons: neither does it exclude any other means of conflict resolution.

On this subject. the more technical essays — Payne’s and Codevilla’s — have special relevance. Those who argue that any use of nuclear weapons would be immoral must reckon with technological developments over the past 20 years. Weapons can be more precisely targeted now than they were in 1962, when both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. had to rely on bombers and primitive missiles, which were effective only against population centers. Today, we also have the means to ward off incoming nuclear weapons if necessary. Codevilla states: “The assertion that nuclear war must be either mass murder or suicide, or both, cannot be founded on fact.”

A 20th-century Voltaire might quip that Mutual Assured Destruction is neither mutual, assured, nor destruction. Recognizing the limited power of nuclear weapons is the first step toward eliminating their horrors. Ballistic missile defense and civil defense are moral and practical alternatives to self-generated vulnerability. The technology exists; only the will to use it seems absent.

Justice, peace, and freedom will be secured when we realize that the ethical foundations of our society face human, not merely technological, threats. Until humanity no longer suffers from sin, technology guided by charity and justice must stave off the evil that overshadows us.


*Richard E. Sincere, Jr., is research assistant for church and society at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and serves on the board of directors of the American Civil Defense Association.

'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.