Five and a half years earlier, at the Chicago Conference on Atomic Energy Control in September 1945, Ed Shils, the Chicago sociologist who delivered one of the opening addresses, raised the question of how the existence of the atom bomb and the secrecy it entailed would affect intellectual life in America. “What kind of men,” he said, “will be willing to work in this centrally important field in peacetime when they know that all they do is intended for war and that all they can do can confer on mankind only the dubious benefits of a victory in an atomic bomb war?”
In the 1950s, nearly all these men that Shils talked about would find themselves writing, thinking and calculating in the RAND Corporation.
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ON THE BEACH AT RAND
ALONG THE jagged coastline of Southern California, past the green hills and forests of Malibu, five miles down and across from the Santa Monica Mountains, beyond the Pacific Palisades, just short of Muscle Beach and the small town of Venice, there sits some of the most quaintly decrepit oceanside property in America. The Santa Monica Beach hardly looks different from the way it appeared only a few years after World War II: the same huge archway along the entryway, the same calliope with the lighthouse-shaped apartment on top, the same small seafood diner.
At the edge of this underdeveloped strip of land, between Ocean Avenue and Main Street, stand two adjoining pink-and-white buildings—one two-storied, the other five—that, from the outside, appear as if they might hold nothing less innocuous than the business offices of the local telephone company. Once inside, appearances change: the security guard at the desk in the lobby, the locked doors that open only with the flashing of a special pass, the dimly lit corridors, the offices with papers and books and reports piled on desks and strewn all about, blackboards crammed with diagrams and complex mathematical equations, the library with its Top Secret section, the special-clearance room in the basement where war games are played.
This is the RAND Corporation, and during the peak of the Cold War, most of its occupants did little but sit, think, talk, write, pass around memos, and dream up new ideas about nuclear war. Isolated from the hurly-burly of the rest of the world, the men and women (mostly men) of RAND nurtured an esprit de corps, a sense of mission, an air of self-confidence and self-importance. It was, in large measure, this atmosphere, this intoxication, that induced the gradual creation of a doctrine concerning nuclear weapons, nuclear deterrence, nuclear war-fighting; that identified this doctrine with RAND, and that propagated the notion that “the RAND way” was the only legitimate way of thinking about the bomb.
RAND had its origins in the military planning rooms of World War II. It was a war in which the talents of scientists were exploited to an unprecedented, almost extravagant degree. First, there were all the new inventions of warfare—radar, infrared detection devices, bomber aircraft, long-range rockets, torpedoes with depth charges, as well as the atomic bomb. Second, the military had only the vaguest of ideas about how to use these inventions; thinking about new problems was not an integral feature of the military profession. Someone had to devise new techniques for these new weapons, new methods of assessing their effectiveness and the most efficient way to use them. It was a task that fell to the scientists.
The result was a brand-new field, called “operational research” in Britain, “operational analysis” when it was picked up in the United States. The sorts of questions its practitioners had to answer were crucial to the war effort: How many tons of explosive force must a bomb release to create a certain amount of damage to certain types of targets? In what sorts of formations should bombers fly? Should an airplane be heavily armored or should it be stripped of defenses so it can fly faster? At what depths should an anti-submarine weapon dropped from an airplane explode? How many anti-aircraft guns should be placed around a critical target? In short, precisely how should these new weapons be used to produce the greatest military payoff?
The operational research groups were composed of scientists from all fields—physics, astronomy, chemistry, physiology, zoology, economics, mathematics—and thus were called “mixed teams.” When P. M. S. Blackett, one of the founders of operational research, explained the British experience to American officers in the early years of the war, he told them that every type of profession had been tried for the job except lawyers. Misunderstanding the gist of the remark, the U.S. Army Air Force hired as its first OR chief John Marshall Harlan, a lawyer who later became an associate justice on the Supreme Court.
The scientists working on OR carefully examined data on the most recent military operations to determine the facts, elaborated theories to explain the facts, then used the theories to make predictions about operations of the future. In looking at the air campaign against German U-boats, for example, they analyzed past campaigns, looking at the number, tactics, defensive strength, offensive armament, geographic distribution, and state of training of the crews of the U-boats; the number and duration of sorties, search tactics, height of patrol, attack tactics, bomb load, accuracy, geographic distribution, performance, camouflage, radar performance, and training of the crews of the aircraft, and at the various weather conditions. By calculating the effect and importance of each of these variables, the scientists could predict what effect a change in any one of them—a new kind of radar, better accuracy, better camouflage, different altitude—might have on the outcome of the campaign.
For example, when Blackett first joined the British Coastal Command in the spring of 1941, the air campaign against U-boats was curiously unsuccessful. Command officers had observed, prior to this time, that as soon as a U-boat captain spotted an aircraft he dived as deep as possible to avoid getting hit. In reaction, the Coastal Command set the depth charges on its weapons to explode 100 feet below the surface of the water, assuming that the U-boat could sight the airplane two minutes before the attack and could, in that period, dive 100 feet. Yet they were damaging only a few submarines.
Blackett and some colleagues discovered from combat data that the Command’s assumptions were true on average, but not nearly all the time. Furthermore, in those cases where the U-boat dived 100 feet, the airplane pilot could no longer tell just where the submarine was and would, therefore, almost certainly be bound to miss. In some cases, however, the warning time was much less than two minutes, and the U-boat could descend only about 20 feet before the aircraft dropped its load; in those cases, the sub could still be located and hit. Therefore, if the depth charges were set at 20 feet, instead of 100, the percentage of submarines actually damaged or destroyed would be much higher.
The Coastal Command implemented the recommendations. The results were so spectacular that captured German U-boat crews thought that the British had started to use a new and more powerful explosive. Yet the cause of greater damage was simply a slight change in tactics, systematically calculated by OR scientists engaged in nothing more complicated than standard scientific methods of investigation—with the difference being that, for the first time in history, they were being applied to military tactics in wartime.
Similar techniques were developed to show that, contrary to conventional military wisdom, large naval convoys are safer than small convoys, that bombers should be diverted from strategic bombing of German cities to going after German U-boats, that fighter planes should fly every day they are serviceable regardless of whether enough can be put up in the air to fight in large formations.