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Soldiers of Reason: The Rand Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire

Alex Abella

Abella, Alex;

Soldiers of Reason: The Rand Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire

Harcourt, Incorporated, 2008, 388 pages

ISBN 0151010811, 9780151010813

topics: |  science | military |



	The RAND Corporation's the boon of the world 
	They think all day long for a fee 
	They sit and play games about going up in flames 
	For Counters they use you and me.
			—"The RAND Hymn," by Malvina Reynolds
		  	[doubtful attribution: Pete Seeger song]


ch.1 A Great Beginning


On October 1, 1945, General Henry Harley "Hap" Arnold convened a meeting with
the former test pilot and scientist, Franklin R. Collbohm, who was then the
right-hand man of Donald Douglas, head of Douglas Aircraft, America's largest
airplane manufacturer.

Arnold and Collbohm had met in 1942, when Collbohm procured nascent radar
technology being developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for
the Army Air Force.

[During the war,] Washington had recruited talent from far and wide for its
crusade against the Axis. The production capabilities and sheer output of
the country's industries (General Motors, Ford, U.S. Steel, General
Electric) had been harnessed by the best and the brightest minds from the
country's top scientific research centers (MIT, Princeton, Columbia),
giving the world radar, jet fighters, the atom bomb. In the span of four
years, the country had grown from a second-rate power to the greatest
military behemoth in history. It was the dawn of the American New
Order. Like ancient Athens and her league, it would be an empire of the
willing—America's allies willed her to rule the world and rule the world
she would.

Retaining the talent for the Armed Forces

[Now that the battle was won, Collbohm was concerned with the imminent
dispersal of the best brains the United States could hire...  Arnold had also
been worried along the same lines.  When Collbohm came to Arnold's office in
Washingtong two days back,] he did not even have to finish describing his
idea for setting up an advisory group of independent scientists consulting
for the military ...  the general slapped his desk and exclaimed, "I know
just what you're going to tell me. It's the most important thing we can do."

He told Collbohm to call Douglas right away to enlist his cooperation; they
were to meet at California's Hamilton Air Force Base in two days. Collbohm
was to have a list of all the things required to make the project come to
fruition —- the men, the machines, the money.  p.12 

So Collbohm hurriedly gathered some Douglas officials for the meeting and
then looked for a plane to get them to the San Francisco Bay Area. The only
aircraft available was President Roosevelt's private plane, a Douglas C-54
dubbed "The Sacred Cow," so Collbohm and his people grabbed that and flew
to Hamilton in it, arriving at the base just an hour ahead of Arnold, with
barely enough time to round up a luncheon for the meeting. 

Long-distance missiles

One of the chief concerns at the meeting was how the new organization would
help develop the technology of long-distance missiles, which Arnold was
convinced was the wave of the future. Arnold and his group were adamant that
only the Air Force and no other branch of the armed forces should control the
new weapon. By the time he finished his coffee, Arnold had pledged $10
million from unspent wartime research money to set up the research group and
keep it running independently for a few years. Arthur Raymond suggested the
name Project RAND, for research and development.  

		[but the wags have been saying since its inception, RAND
		actually stood for "Research And No Development."]

Collbohm nominated himself to head the group while he looked
for a permanent director. 
(His temporary stay would eventually stretch to more than twenty years.)

And so was RAND conceived. 

General Curtis LeMay


At first, Project RAND had no specific definition of purpose other than the
very general outline hashed out in Hamilton Field—a civilian outfit to come
up with new weapons. ... 
the final details were not worked out until General Curtis LeMay came into
the picture in late December.

Named Air Force Deputy Chief of Air Staff for Research and Development,
LeMay included among his responsibilities the supervision of the new
research group. Whether purposely or by the sheer serendipity that can
accompany government work, LeMay turned out to be the ideal candidate to
shepherd the fledgling organization. With typical impatience, he tore
through the red tape hindering the birth of RAND—at one point gathering all
the Air Force bureaucrats needed for budget approval in one room and
refusing to let them leave until they signed off on Project RAND's exact
mission. Finally, on March 1, 1946, RAND officially was delivered. Its
charter was clear: "Project RAND is a continuing program of scientific
study and research on the broad subject of air warfare with the object of
recommending to the Air Force preferred methods, techniques and
instrumentalities for this purpose." p. 6


Project RAND

RAND started with four full-time employees: Collbohm; James
E. Lipp, who headed the Missiles Department; J. Richard Goldstein, a longtime
colleague of Collbohm's, as associate director; and L. E. Root, who had been
one of Douglas Aircraft's leading engineers. 

They had already received their first assignment from LeMay: an inquiry into
the possibility of launching an orbiting satellite by spaceship.

Within a month, RAND's four employees, with the help of consultants, wrote a
farseeing report, breathtaking in its intellectual daring and self-assured to
the point of arrogance. 

Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship was the
world's first comprehensive satellite feasibility assessment. 
[Santa Monica Plant, Engineering Division, report number SM-11827, Contract
W33-038 (Santa Monica, CA: Douglas Aircraft Company, Inc., 2 May 1946). ]

[The report focused on the physics and the technological feasibility of
space flight, but also speculated on a number of issues including the
possibility of man in space.] 


[Despite this head start, the US did not pursue these ideas, and the
expenditure on the military went down in the 1960s.  

James Lipp of RAND’s Missile Division wrote in a paper nine months later: 

	Since mastery of the elements is a reliable index of material
	progress, the nation which first makes significant achievements in
	space travel will be acknowledged as the world leader in both
	military and scientific techniques. To visualize the impact on the
	world, one can imagine the consternation and admiration that would be
	felt here if the United States were to discover suddenly that some
	other nation had already put up a successful satellite.” 

This was exactly what happened whtn Russia successfully launched the
Sputnik in 1957...


Albert Wohlstetter


[The main character in the book is Albert Wohlstetter, who is also
perhaps the most famous personality at RAND.  Abella focuses on the story
of his work on nuclear strategy, and his becoming the cold war's top
nuclear strategist.  Wohlstetter was one of the inspirations for the film
Dr. Strangelove which focuses on the nuclear first use dilemma.]

Whether there was war or peace, whether millions would live or die, whether
the world would continue as it was or die from a suffocating nuclear
winter—the fate of humanity truly hinged on the efforts of this small band
of self-anointed experts. And Albert Wohlstetter was its acknowledged
leader. 55

Albert Wohlstetter would become the leading intellectual figure at
RAND. Wohlstetter's wedding of technological expertise to a finely honed
sense of political theater also helped him define the national defense
discipline that RANDites dominated for decades: nuclear strategy. 
...Tall, fair, and self-assured to the point of arrogance, he personified the
imperial ethos of the mandarins who made America the center of power and
culture in the postwar Western world. 

Wohlstetter, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and India

In a review of this book, Chalmers Johnson, describes a trip to India 
with Wohlston: 

	Starting in 1967, I was, for a few years — my records are imprecise
	on this point — a consultant for RAND (although it did not consult me
	often) and became personally acquainted with Albert Wohlstetter. In
	1967, he and I attended a meeting in New Delhi of the Institute of
	Strategic Studies to help promote the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
	Treaty (NPT), which was being opened for signature in 1968, and would
	be in force from 1970. 

	There, Wohlstetter gave a display of his well-known arrogance by
	announcing to the delegates that he did not believe India, as a
	civilization, “deserved an atom bomb.”  As I looked at the smoldering
	faces of Indian scientists and strategists around the room, I knew
	right then and there that India would join the nuclear club, which it
	did in 1974.
	
	India remains one of four major nations that have not signed the
	NPT. The others are North Korea, which ratified the treaty but
	subsequently withdrew, Israel, and Pakistan. Some 189 nations have
	signed and ratified it.)


Today this inequality at the heart of the non-proliferation treaty has become
untenable.  As Nina Tannenwald of Brown University's Watson Institute writes
in "Justice and Fairness in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime"
[Ethics & International Affairs, v.27(3), 2013, pp. 299-317

	the issues facing the nonproliferation regime are overwhelmingly
	about the justice and fairness of the regime’s norms, rules, and
	procedures. Indeed, it is difficult to identify a security regime
	today where equity issues are more central to debates about its
	future than the nuclear nonproliferation regime. Of the three regimes
	for controlling weapons of mass destruction (chemical, biological,
	and nuclear), it is in the nuclear regime that issues of justice and
	fairness appear most critical to long-term sustainability and
	viability.

	At the core of the crisis is the fundamental asymmetry of the 1968
	Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and looming doubts among
	nonnuclear states about whether this situation is destined to be
	permanent. 

	Nonnuclear states have long castigated the double standard embedded
	in the treaty that permits the five “declared” nuclear states to
	possess nuclear weapons but denies such weapons to the majority of
	the world. In contrast, the nuclear powers, for their part, have
	generally seen the primary problems of the regime to lie in the
	weakness of the rules and enforcement mechanisms surrounding dual-use
	technology, which have allowed states such as Iran and North Korea,
	and earlier Iraq and Syria, to pursue nuclear weapons clandestinely
	under the veil of the treaty.


ch. 5 The Secret Keepers


Over the past few years, an increasingly serious branch of American history,
sometimes called allohistory or counterfactual history, has devoted itself to
what might be called the what-if. What if the Confederacy had defeated the
Union in the Civil War? What if Archduke Ferdinand had not been assassinated
and World War I never happened? What if Hitler had invaded England? What if
Al Gore had won Florida in 2000? It is a wonderful kind of speculation, meant
to explore the essential capriciousness of fate, to examine the rationale for
people's actions and the way certain forces are considered by historians to
be immutable. (For instance, most believe that even if the South had won,
slavery eventually would have faded away, just as if Hitler had conquered
England, the United States would have stayed out of the conflict, becoming a
"Fortress America" in a world controlled by Fascist allies. 


McCarthy era

[Would like to consider the question of] what would have happened to
America if Albert Wohlstetter, the principal architect of the nuclear
deterrence policy that determined when, where, and how thermonuclear
weapons were used, had been exposed as a former Communist.

Had Wohlstetter's radical past been exposed, most likely he would have been
fired and in all likelihood his crucial study on the placement of nuclear
bombers, known as the basing study, would have never been written. Although
today it may seem hard to believe, without the remedies advocated by the
basing study, an annihilating nuclear attack by the Soviet Union would have
been not only conceivable but also highly doable. Had another RAND analyst
written the study, it is also doubtful the report would have had as great an
impact, for few scientists anywhere could match the theatricality and
efficacy of Wohlstetter's presentation. With his basing study, not only did
he forfend a possible nuclear first strike by the Soviet Union, he also
promoted his own career and RAND's fortunes, becoming the principal adviser
to the Air Force and its Strategic Air Command.  

Theirs was an idyllic existence, marred only in the 1950s by the political
witch hunts fostered by Senator Joseph McCarthy in his drive to purge the
country of all Communists and Communist sympathizers, their "fellow
travelers."

The FBI had already hounded Charlie Chaplin...
[Wohlstetter had a radical past, but it was never exposed.]

JJC McKinsey

An open homosexual, McKinsey had been in a committed relationship for years
when the FBI decided he was a security risk. When told that his sexual
orientation could subject him to blackmail, McKinsey complained to Roberta
Wohlstetter, "How can anyone threaten me with disclosure when everybody
already knows?" 

A few years after his clearance was revoked and Frank Collbohm himself had
fired him, McKinsey committed suicide.  p.66



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This review by Amit Mukerjee was last updated on : 2015 Aug 27