Command and Control

Iklé’s dissertation attracted the attention of the RAND Corporation, and he was soon invited to join its social sciences division. Created in 1946 as a joint venture of the Army Air Forces and the Douglas Aircraft Company, Project RAND became one of America’s first think tanks, a university without students where scholars and Nobel laureates from a wide variety of disciplines could spend their days contemplating the future of airpower. The organization gained early support from General Curtis LeMay, whose training as a civil engineer had greatly influenced his military thinking. LeMay wanted the nation’s best civilian minds to develop new weapons, tactics, and technologies for the Army Air Forces.

RAND’s first study, “Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship,” outlined the military importance of satellites, more than a decade before one was launched. RAND subsequently conducted pioneering research on game theory, computer networking, artificial intelligence, systems analysis, and nuclear strategy. Having severed its ties to Douglas Aircraft, RAND became a nonprofit corporation operating under an exclusive contract to the Air Force. At the RAND headquarters in Santa Monica, California, not far from the beach, amid a freewheeling intellectual atmosphere where no idea seemed too outlandish to explore, physicists, mathematicians, economists, sociologists, psychologists, computer scientists, and historians collaborated on top secret studies. Behind the whole enterprise lay a profound faith in the application of science and reason to warfare. The culture of the place was rigorously unsentimental. Analysts at RAND were encouraged to consider every possibility, calmly, rationally, and without emotion — to think about the unthinkable, in defense of the United States.

While immersed in a number of projects at RAND, Fred Iklé continued to study what happens when cities are bombed. His book on the subject, The Social Impact of Bomb Destruction, appeared in 1958. It included his earlier work on the devastation of Hamburg and addressed the question of how urban populations would respond to nuclear attacks. Iklé warned that far more thought was being devoted to planning a nuclear war than to preparing for the aftermath of one. “It is not a pleasant task to deal realistically with such potentially large-scale and gruesome destruction,” Iklé wrote in the preface. “But since we live in the shadow of nuclear warfare, we must face its consequences intelligently and prepare to cope with them.”

Relying largely on statistics, excluding any moral or humanitarian considerations, and writing with cool, Swiss precision, Iklé suggested that the Second World War strategy of targeting civilians had failed to achieve its aims. The casualties were disproportionately women, children, and the elderly — not workers essential to the war effort. Cities adapted to the bombing, and their morale wasn’t easily broken. Even in Hiroshima, the desire to fight back survived the blast: when rumors spread that San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles had been destroyed by Japanese atomic bombs, people became lighthearted and cheerful, hoping the war could still be won.

A nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union, however, would present a new set of dilemmas. The first atomic bomb to strike a city might not be the only one. Fleeing to the countryside and remaining there might be the logical thing to do. Iklé conjured a nightmarish vision of ongoing nuclear attacks, millions of casualties, firestorms, “the sheer terror of the enormous destruction,” friction between rural townspeople and urban refugees, victims of radiation sickness anxiously waiting days or weeks to learn if they’d received a fatal dose. It was naive to think that the only choice Americans now faced was “one world — or none.” Nuclear weapons might never be abolished, and their use might not mean the end of mankind. Iklé wanted people to confront the threat of nuclear war with a sense of realism, not utopianism or apocalyptic despair. A nation willing to prepare for the worst might survive — in some form or another.

Iklé had spent years contemplating the grim details of how America’s cities could be destroyed. His interest in the subject was more than academic; he had a wife and two young daughters. If the war plans of the United States or the Soviet Union were deliberately set in motion, Iklé understood, as well as anyone, the horrors that would be unleashed. A new and unsettling concern entered his mind: What if a nuclear weapon was detonated by accident? What if one was used without the president’s approval — set off by a technical glitch, a saboteur, a rogue officer, or just a mistake? Could that actually happen? And could it inadvertently start a nuclear war? With RAND’s support, Iklé began to investigate the risk of an accidental or unauthorized detonation. And what he learned was not reassuring.

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