Brodie wrote two reports for Vandenberg, one after his first two weeks on the job, the other in March 1951. The second concentrated on the idea of slowing down the proposed delivery rate of atomic bombs, of deliberately avoiding the destruction of Soviet cities, at least in the first phase of the war. The reasoning harkened back to Brodie’s 1948 speech in Chicago: there was “more strategic leverage to be gained in holding cities hostages than in making corpses.”
Brodie reasoned that the final surrender of the Japanese in the Pacific war resulted not from the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but from the implicit threat of more atom bombs on their way if the Japanese did not give up then. (That the United States actually had no more bombs beyond the first two was inconsequential, since the Japanese could not possibly have known this.) Likewise, the Soviets would more likely stop fighting after receiving some destructive blows, knowing that if they did not stop, their cities would be the next targets to get hit. If, however, we blew up their cities at the very outset of the war, the bargaining lever would be blown up along with them. Hostages have no value once they are killed. Consequently, the Soviets would feel no inhibitions about blowing up American cities in return, hardly an outcome that would serve the interests of American security.
Finally, Brodie connected these ideas with a theme he had developed in The Absolute Weapon—that for this strategy to work, SAC must survive an enemy attack. If after a war has broken out, the United States tries to threaten the Soviets with weapons yet undelivered, there must be absolute assurance that the Soviet Union cannot destroy those weapons before they are used.
Brodie admitted that this whole concept would mean “sacrificing the prospect of total victory, but,” he added, “for the future that might be a small price to pay for the sake of avoiding total war.”
Brodie was not opposed to the use of atomic weapons. On the contrary. In December 1950, not long after he arrived in the Pentagon, before the Chinese entered the Korean War, Brodie wrote in a memo: “We have thus far given the Chinese every possible assurance that they could intervene with impunity… [We] should begin publicizing right now the fact that strategic bombing does not necessarily mean mass slaughter. All the gasping of horror which occurs every time the use of the atomic bomb is mentioned is extremely harmful to us politically and diplomatically.”
In short, Brodie’s ideas about the bomb were meant as suggestions on how the bomb might be used more effectively. His Vandenberg memorandum presented the first analytical case for limitations on the use of the atomic bomb in a war against the Soviet Union. It was the first suggestion that nuclear deterrence does not necessarily end once war begins; that if threatening the destruction of Soviet cities tends to deter Soviet aggression (as he had argued in The Absolute Weapon), then the same threat might deter the Soviets from attacking American cities even once a war has broken out. It marked the beginnings of a formulation of a military strategy that fully took into account the fact that an atomic war would be a two-way affair—that destroying the enemy would very likely prompt the enemy to destroy us—and that, therefore, the horrendous magnitude of the A-bomb imposed as many limitations as it created opportunities. In criticizing the official target plans, Brodie offered no new wisdom on what better targets SAC might hit. However, he saw “an enormous area for wisdom and science in determining what not to hit” and “in determining what can be achieved by war, and in what way, other than by unloosing destruction on an unlimited basis.”
More than a quarter century later, Brodie would look back on the reports he wrote for Vandenberg as “the most important and best thought out documents I ever wrote.” In 1950, however, inside the Pentagon, the documents were not so roundly admired. In most quarters, Brodie and his reports were scorned. First, most military officers generally thought that outside civilians had no business looking at targeting plans, much less tampering with them. Second, the idea that all future wars would not necessarily be total wars, that in a war with the Russians, total war was something to avoid rather than to “prevail” in, the idea that you might not want to tear up as much Soviet property and kill as many Communists as you possibly could, seemed naive and foolish. That they violated just about every “principle of war” devised was the reception given Brodie’s memoranda by most true-blue SAC and Air Force types.
It is unclear what Vandenberg thought of the substance of Brodie’s work, but he sufficiently admired Brodie’s intelligence to ask him, on March 23, 1951, to organize and chair a Special Advisory Panel on Strategic Bombing Objectives. The panel would study the issue for four months, with a possible extension at Vandenberg’s request. Brodie readily accepted the task, but before the end of May, six months sooner than originally planned, Brodie was out of the Pentagon, his employment for Vandenberg—as Brodie put it in a letter many years later—“rather abruptly terminated.”
Brodie was never popular with most of the Air Force officers with whom he had to work. His job with Vandenberg was made possible by the urgings of Larry Norstad. Toward the last days of Brodie’s Pentagon period, Norstad was transferred from Vice Chief of Staff to Commander of the U.S. Air Force in Europe, then headquartered at Fontainebleau, just southeast of Paris. With Brodie’s chief sponsor out of the country, Vandenberg’s other principal aides—including General Charles Pearre Cabell, the director of Air Intelligence, whose analyses Brodie had dared to criticize—had Vandenberg’s ear and confidence to an even greater degree than before.
The Special Advisory Panel on Strategic Bombing Objectives, to be chaired by Bernard Brodie, was aborted. Brodie saw Vandenberg for the last time as a special consultant on the morning of May 18, and was out of the Pentagon before the end of the month.[1]
Brodie could have gone back to Yale to teach international relations again, but he chose not to. For one thing, the Institute of International Studies had broken up. Whitney Griswold had replaced Charles Seymour as Yale president the previous fall, and almost immediately let Ted Dunn, director of the Institute, know that he disapproved of the Institute’s sort of work. In April, Griswold abolished the Institute.
Ted Dunn arranged with the Milbank Foundation an endowment that would allow him and five other Institute faculty members to move en masse to Princeton. On April 2, 1951, Princeton University announced the creation of the new Center of International Studies. An editorial in the next day’s New York Herald Tribune noted that the whole affair “calls up memories of medieval days, when scholars wandered from university to university amid the free cities of Europe.”
Bernard Brodie turned his back on this academic chaos. He had seen the secrets and could not imagine now returning to the outside, especially to the comparatively staid existence of campus life. In 1949, while still at Yale, he and some others at the Institute—Bill Fox, Ted Dunn, Bernard Cohen and a young political scientist who had only recently received a Ph.D. from Yale, William Kaufmann—had done some consulting work on psychological warfare for the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research institute in Santa Monica, California, that worked on many classified projects for the Air Force. Brodie had made an impression, and Hans Speier, the head of RAND’s social science division, recruited him. Brodie joined up—and stayed for the next fifteen years.
1
Another likely reason for Brodie’s departure was the lobbying efforts of his old friend and adviser from Princeton, Edward Mead Earle. Earle did not like Brodie’s article in the August 15
On April 30, 1951, Earle wrote to his friend Secretary of the Air Force Thomas Finletter that he would be in Washington the week of May 7 and would like to “have a word with you” about some news that he had heard “from various sources” that Bernard Brodie, “whom I have known for about twelve years,” was “about to undertake a study [for the Air Force] of very considerable importance.”
Earle presumably saw Finletter on May 7 and at half past noon definitely talked with General Vandenberg. There is no record of what was said, but it seems unlikely that Earle would be placed on the busy calendar of the Air Force Chief of Staff just to recommend Brodie for a project to which Vandenberg had already appointed him in mid-March. Eleven days later, Brodie saw Vandenberg for the last time.
For the ten years since Brodie had been at Princeton, he and Earle had been frequent correspondents. After Brodie left the Pentagon and for the next three years, until Earle died, they never exchanged a single letter.