Kaufmann now saw in counterforce a chance for these principles of limited war to be carried over into the arena of nuclear war. If the U.S. confined the “scope and method of the initial attack” to a purely counterforce strike, then perhaps the Soviets, if they retaliated at all, would follow in suit and keep their strikes purely counterforce in nature as well. He was also attracted to the idea of preserving a large, nearly invulnerable reserve force, to be used as a bargaining lever. He had written in 1955 that nuclear weapons were the “Constant Monitor”—in the words of his mentor, Bernard Brodie—that loomed over all limited war, providing the incentive for both powers to keep the conflict limited. Now, Kaufmann saw the reserve force, aimed at enemy cities, as the Constant Monitor that might keep both sides playing a game of limited nuclear war, constraining their strikes to counterforce targets only.
In this sense, Kaufmann went further than Loftus or Marshall. In The Deterrence and Strategy of Total War, Marshall and Herbert Goldhamer had concluded that, under several circumstances, an attack on Soviet military targets with high-yield, ground-burst nuclear weapons—spreading radioactive fallout to nearby cities, killing people as a “bonus”—would be the preferable strategy. To Kaufmann, killing civilians was not a “bonus.” The point of the counterforce attack was to set precedent, to define limits under which the rest of the war would be waged. Kaufmann saw a need for an ability to destroy enemy cities, but only as a reserve force, to be used only in the last resort, in case the Soviets attacked American cities.
To Kaufmann, the NATO riddle was solved, and to Marshall and Loftus the doctrine of counterforce had found an articulate spokesman. Kaufmann was not the only one who was formulating new ideas at RAND in the late 1950s. It was a time of great excitement and urgency, the giant Russian bear looming over the West with its threatening missile gap. The hallways, blackboards, seminar rooms of RAND, arsenal of the U.S. Air Force, were filled with syntheses of concepts, calculations, notions of sending signals and bargaining with force, of ultimately imposing order on the Bomb. The man who most fiercely sought to make nuclear war rational and reasonable, and who, more than anyone else from RAND, gained global fame for his efforts, was a mordantly jolly physicist named Herman Kahn.
14
DR. STRANGELOVE
HERMAN KAHN had reached essentially the same conclusions about nuclear strategy that William Kaufmann did, but the two could not otherwise have been more different. Kaufmann, born and raised on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, educated at prep schools, trained in history and political science at Yale, mild-mannered, well ordered; Kahn, born of Jewish emigrants in Bayonne, New Jersey, reared in the Bronx, majored in nuclear physics at UCLA and Cal Tech, brazenly theatrical, long-winded, overflowing with a thousand and one ideas.
At age ten, Kahn’s parents divorced and he moved with his mother and sister to Los Angeles. Several years later, he enrolled at UCLA and, later, graduate school at the California Institute of Technology. Needing money, he planned a career in real estate, when in 1948, a friend of his from junior-high days, a fellow physicist named Sam Cohen, told him to apply for a job where he was working, a place in Santa Monica called Project RAND. Cohen urged Ernie Plesset, director of the RAND physics division, to hire Kahn. At first, Plesset couldn’t tell whether Kahn was a genius or just crazy, but he gave in to Cohen’s request.
Kahn first knew that he had come to the right place in 1950, when he served on a technical advisory board studying nuclear-powered airplanes. It was in these sessions, he wrote later, that he “first came in contact with the philosophy which is willing to ask any question and tackle any problem.” The more exotic and unimaginable the technological wonders involved, the more eager Kahn was to jump in and apply his peculiar brand of logic, mathematical calculation, rationality.
In 1952, the Livermore Laboratory outside Berkeley—Edward Teller’s living dream of a second national weapons lab to compete with Los Alamos, which Teller feared was deliberately dragging its feet on fusion research—was just getting under way. Through their intimate contacts with John von Neumann, Edward Teller and Hans Bethe, three of the giants in nuclear physics, the physicists at RAND were among the few anywhere who knew anything about fusion. During Livermore’s first year, a group of these scientists—among them Ernie Plesset, David Griggs, Albert and Richard Latter, and Herman Kahn—commuted to Berkeley every week to lead the way on calculating how to design an H-bomb.
Herman Kahn played a major role in this effort. His earliest work at RAND had involved mathematical theory, an attempt to simplify Monte Carlo calculations, a technique of statistically systematizing random variables so that they can be taken into account in the analysis of physical properties. In connection with his work for Livermore, Kahn applied Monte Carlo techniques to calculations on the workings inside a hypothetical hydrogen bomb, especially the diffusion of heat and the collision of neutrons.
At one point, Kahn had calculations on bomb designs plugged into all twelve high-speed computers then operating in the United States. Acquiring a Wunderkind reputation as a mathematical physicist both at RAND and among weapon scientists at Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Livermore, Kahn frequently held court among interested colleagues for hours at a time on the wonder of calculations, and how they could solve every problem. He left Cal Tech before finishing his Ph.D. He dropped all plans of going into real estate.
More gregarious and interdisciplinary than most of his colleagues in the physics division, Kahn roamed the RAND hallways in search of other interesting activities. One thing he noticed was that many of the engineers in various other departments were making egregious errors in dealing with nuclear weapons. Some in the RAND aircraft division, for example, were working on the design of an airplane that could carry a five-foot-long 100,000-pound bomb. Kahn knew that this could be done in a much smaller airframe and tried to convince his friend Sam Cohen, who was the aircraft division’s liaison in the physics division, to inform them. Cohen refused: the physics division was operating under regulations of the Atomic Energy Commission, which had an entirely different system of classified information from that of the Air Force contract under which the rest of RAND was operating. Ernie Plesset told Kahn the same thing.
But Kahn had no tolerance for such rules. He moved around the building on his own, telling other analysts where they were going wrong in certain assumptions. He became more intensely involved with studies utilizing the systems analysis that Ed Paxson and others had innovated, eventually presenting a series of lectures that many who had been practicing the art for much longer heralded as the best lectures ever given on the subject.
And from his interest in systems analysis, Kahn fell in quite naturally with the crowd contemplating nuclear strategy. He was enthusiastic about Albert Wohlstetter’s method of analysis in the overseas-base study, and grew to adopt Wohlstetter’s conclusions on SAC vulnerability and his recommendations on dispersing and hardening bomber and missile bases. He began to sit in on the sessions of the Strategic Objectives Committee, became close friends with Andy Marshall, and talked at great length with Bernard Brodie about the latter’s work on nuclear targeting for General Hoyt Vandenberg and his study, with Charlie Hitch and Ernie Plesset, on the implications of the H-bomb.