Lessons from the Cold War
The View from Oregon — 319: Friday 13 December 2024
Last week I watched a Cold War film that I hadn’t previously seen, Fail Safe (1964). While On the Beach (1959) was a deeply sad film (discussed in a PS last week), even heart-wrenching at times, Fail Safe was more a film about frustration, anger, and despair. There is no redemption at the end of either film, but while On the Beach is sad and perhaps even sweet (if I may use that word for an apocalyptic tale), Fail Safe communicated a palpable sense of hopelessness that I didn’t feel with either the book or the film version of On the Beach. Fail Safe was very good at ratcheting up the tension through the film, and the characters were believable human beings pushed to their limits by situations one hopes one will never have to confront. It was this human drama that made the film compelling. But there were exceptions, of course. It is often said that Dr. Strangelove in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) was a composite character partly based on Herman Kahn, but the character in Fail Safe played by Walter Matthau, Professor Groeteschele, was unambiguously a smear of Herman Kahn. While other characters in the film show complexity and are believably human, Professor Groeteschele is a two-dimensional caricature without any essential human interest.
Fail Safe followed the film adaptation of On the Beach by five years, and in that five years we went from mutually assured destruction resulting in the extinction of humanity, to a horrible choice that destroys two cities but does not escalate to human extinction. Another three years on, in 1967, there was the Star Trek episode “A Taste of Armageddon,” in which an ancient war is being fought entirely as a simulation, and those “killed” in the simulation voluntary report to disintegration machines to die (as Nietzsche once said that, among the Last Men, anyone who disagrees with the status quo goes voluntarily into the madhouse), so that the war can go on with the least amount of damage. Captain Kirk, as always, must interfere, notwithstanding the apparent prosperity of the society, because their way of war is unacceptable to him. He sabotages disintegration machines, so the war must be fought in the real world, presumably making it too horrible to continue. And so we find ourselves back at a conception of war held by W. T. Sherman, who said that, “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.”
We can distinguish two theses in Sherman’s claim, such that 1) war is cruelty, and 2) war cannot be refined. The two are bound up with each other in fact, but are isolatable in principle. The two theses also beg the question of what constitutes cruelty and what constitutes refinement. I could argue that the war depicted in “A Taste of Armageddon” is more refined but no less cruel than the war depicted in Fail Safe, and that the war depicted in Fail Safe is more refined but no less cruel than the war depicted in On the Beach. I also could say that “A Taste of Armageddon” constitutes an extreme example of war being sanitized, and that the sanitization of war is a refinement, even if war in this sanitized form remains cruel. Arguably, the shift in warfare from the presumptive mass destruction of the Cold War to the effective abandonment of mass warfare in favor of precision warfare is a sanitization and refinement of warfare, which again remains cruel even as it minimizes collateral damage. There is even something gruesome, if not creepy, about white-gloved professionals engaged in drone warfare from a safe distance — precisely the unsettling creepiness that the above-named films wanted to communicate with the characters of Professor Groeteschele and Dr. Strangelove, now displaced into a new kind of warfare.
Within Sherman’s second thesis, that war cannot be refined, we can distinguish the refinement of sanitizing war and the refinement of waging war with greater rationality. I suggested above that “A Taste of Armageddon” represents the extreme example of war sanitized. Another possible example of the sanitization of war (acknowledging that some will disagree) was the neutron bomb. It can be plausibly argued that the sanitization of war that the neutron bomb represents is also a rationalization of war. It would make no sense to gratuitously destroy, so that a less destructive nuclear weapon is a more rational form of maintaining strategic deterrence. One of the scientists who worked on the neutron bomb had served in the Korean War, and he said that his work on the project was partially inspired by a desire to mitigate the level of destruction he witnessed in Korea. When the neutron bomb project was cancelled, it was implied in the legacy press at the time that the neutron bomb was ultimately rejected out of a kind of public revulsion over a weapon that would primarily kill human beings while sparing what could be spared of infrastructure, and I gave this some credence.
Back in the day when I believed news organizations to have some credibility, I accepted in at least rough outline the framing of the legacy media. (In my defense, I was rather young and naïve.) Since then I have learned to my sorrow that what is reported by the legacy media is, as Napoleon is supposed to have said about history, “lies agreed upon,” and it is, moreover, lies agreed upon by a class of persons utterly lacking in any moral or intellectual integrity. Today I suspect that there was a lot more going on in the decision not to build the neutron bomb than public revulsion, or perhaps it was built as a black program. If it was built as a black program, nothing will be known about it in my lifetime. Some research could probably reveal that many factors that influenced the neutron bomb program, but I’m insufficiently motivated to understand this, as the opportunity cost for understanding this would be not understanding something of much greater interest and importance to me. So it is that we get by as best we can without even knowing what is going on in our own time, unless fate places us in a position to know.
The smears directed again Herman Kahn in multiple films, and the vilification of the neutron bomb program, demonstrate the hurdles facing any attempt to wage war more rationally. And in the subsequent decades we have seen how the strategy of making something unspeakable has been used to obfuscate and manipulate. Herman Kahn implicitly rejected the principle that war cannot be refined, and he would routinely refer to his work as “thinking the unthinkable,” so he was well aware of the forbidden ground he was treading, and he also routinely used black humor in an attempt to soften the blow. It was this black humor that was turned against him in the forms of Dr. Strangelove and Professor Groeteschele. Many of the same people who complain about the dumbing down of our society are perfectly fine with the dumbing down of warfare, because to talk about unpleasant things like how to win a nuclear war is as much as to admit that Herman Kahn was right. But Herman Kahn represented the Age of Thermonuclear Warfare, and all the nuclear armed nation-states have disassembled their larger bombs, never built cobalt bombs (unless they were built as a black program), and have reduced their stockpiles. Now we live in the Age of Precision Warfare. Technology is still a driving force, as it was during the Cold War, but it is technology re-purposed to drones and remotely piloted vehicles and precision munitions. With each change in technology, there is a change in doctrine, and the generations of changes in technology have meant generations of changes in doctrine. Mutually assured destruction is still possible, but it’s not what’s occupying military planners today. Still, the idea of mutually assured destruction continues to exercise a certain fascination, though today it is only one of many possibilities in a systematic account of existential risks.
Since I wrote about the role of suicide in last week’s PS about On the Beach, it is interesting in this connection to consider the vote of Brown University students in 1984 to have the school stock suicide pills in the event of nuclear war. (Student activism in 1984 was just as inane as student activism in 2024; forty years have changed nothing.) This was only six years after the mass suicide at Jonestown, though in the press coverage at the time I don’t recall anyone pointing out the creepy continuity of the two — the Jonestown suicides employed cyanide (among other poisons) and the students called their movement “Cyanide for Peace.” Of course, it would have been perceived as being a bit awkward to label Brown University as a death cult, as the People’s Temple came to be called. The university ultimately decided against stocking suicide pills — they were under no obligation to respect the vote of the student body — but several other student bodies held a similar vote at their universities in an attempt to drive the point home.
Again, this is a strategy of silencing rational debate. Instead of discussing nuclear war rationally, the decision has been made that life without modern conveniences is not worth living, and questioning this absurd argument made one persona non grata. If they had discussed their suicide pills in any kind of rational way, they would have been faced with some interesting problems. How large would a nuclear war have to be to trigger the suicide pill protocol? In On the Beach, it is the inevitable death of everyone from radiation. But suppose a nuclear war erupted between Pakistan and India, but did not involve the US or the USSR: would the students of Brown University have committed mass suicide? What about a tit-for-tat “war” of one city for one city, as in Fail Safe? Would the loss of two cities to nuclear weapons be sufficient reason to commit suicide? Here we are on firmer ground, because we have already experienced the loss of two cities to nuclear weapons, and no government was handing out suicide pills en masse, nor was there a mass public demand for them.
No doubt there were individuals who committed suicide because of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but nothing like a mass movement of “revolutionary suicide” (as Jim Jones called it) was on the table. Here there are definite shades of Adam Smith’s observation that, “If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.”
On the Beach leaves the world devoid of human beings, but Fail Safe somehow manages to feel more hopeless although only two cities are destroyed and humanity presumably still has a future, albeit a future inevitably traumatized by the events of the film. Comparing the two films I was reminded of Derek Parfit’s trichotomy among: 1) peace, 2) a nuclear war that kills 99 per cent of the world’s existing population, and 3) a nuclear war that kills 100 per cent. The point Parfit wanted to make was that there seems to be little difference between 2 and 3, but that this is the truly substantive difference. On the Beach represents 3, but Fail Safe, despite its horrors, doesn’t even come close to 2. Fail Safe is more like 4) a nuclear war that kills 1 percent of the world’s existing population. A rational assessment would clearly identify 4 as being preferable to 2 or 3, but since we’ve seen the challenges faced by a rational analysis of war, and especially of nuclear war, Fail Safe manages to depict a palpable sense of hopelessness despite being the least awful imaginable nuclear war. Your response to these films may be different from mine, so don’t take my word for it. Watch them for yourself.
