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YEAR ZERO

IT WAS AUGUST 7, 1945, a cool but sticky Tuesday morning in Bethany, Connecticut, a sleepy suburb resting on the northwestern edges of New Haven. Bernard Brodie, a brilliant new addition to the Yale University political science faculty, went driving with his wife, Fawn, to buy The New York Times at a drugstore in the neighboring village of Woodbridge, roughly halfway between the Brodie home and the Yale campus.

Bernard Brodie was fascinated by the weapons of war, especially the weapons of naval warfare and how they affected the tactics and strategies of those great battles on the high seas that had proved so decisive to the outcomes of war over the past few centuries. For most of the present war, World War II, Brodie had worked for the Navy in Washington, D.C., where he had been given, among other assignments, the task of ghostwriting the biannual report of Admiral Ernest J. King, Chief of Naval Operations and commander of the entire U.S. wartime fleet. Brodie’s book, A Layman’s Guide to Naval Strategy, first published in 1942, was in its third edition. The Naval War College had persuaded the Princeton University Press to drop the word “Layman’s” from the title so that the school could assign the book as a standard text for officers without embarrassment. Now, at age thirty-five, Brodie was acquiring a solid reputation as one of the nation’s foremost naval strategists.

Stepping inside the pharmacy, Brodie picked up a copy of the Times. The banner headline riveted his attention: “First Atomic Bomb Dropped on Japan; Missile Is Equal to 20,000 Tons of TNT; Truman Warns Foe of a ‘Rain of Ruin.’” His eyes moved quickly down the right-hand column of the page, scanning smaller headlines reading: “New Age Ushered,” “Day of Atomic Energy Hailed by President, Revealing Weapon,” “Hiroshima Is Target,” “‘Impenetrable’ Cloud of Dust Hides City After Single Bomb Strike.”

Brodie read just two paragraphs of the story that followed, looked up for a few seconds, turned to his wife and said, “Everything that I have written is obsolete.”

Brodie was not the only one for whom everything turned obsolete that morning. The whole conception of modern warfare, the nature of international relations, the question of world order, the function of weaponry, had to be thought through again. Nobody knew the answers; initially, not many had even the right questions. From these ashes an entire intellectual community would create itself, a new elite that would eventually emerge as a power elite, and whose power would come not from wealth or family or brass stripes, but from their having conceived and elaborated a set of ideas. It was, at the outset, a small and exceptionally inbred collection of men—mostly economists and mathematicians, a few political scientists—who devoted nearly every moment of their workaday thoughts to thinking about the bomb: how to prevent nuclear war, how to fight nuclear war if it cannot be deterred.

In the first months following Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Yale University would become a prime mover on the thinking about how to live with the bomb, and Bernard Brodie was at the center of that movement. When the Yale group started to split up around the end of 1950, Brodie spent a few months near the heart of the war machine, in the Air Staff of the United States Air Force, where he examined the nation’s war plans, the targets inside enemy Russia that the U.S. would incinerate in the event of another war. From there, Brodie moved to Southern California, to the RAND Corporation.

RAND was where the ideas came together. It was an Air Force creation, independent in title but contracted to do research for the Air Force. The Army and Navy had their bands of hired intellectuals too, but through the 1950s American military policy and defense budgeting emphasized nuclear power, and the Air Force had the big bomb. The Air Force was where the money was funneled and the thinking was concentrated; RAND was where the thinkers coalesced.

They were rational analysts, and they would attempt to impose a rational order on something that many thought inherently irrational—nuclear war. They would invent a whole new language and vocabulary in their quest for rationality, and would thus condition an entire generation of political and military leaders to think about the bomb the way that the intellectual leaders of RAND thought about it.

The themes of such classic films of the nuclear age as Dr. Strangelove and Fail Safe, the catch phrases of the popularized strategic debates of the 1960s and 1970s—“counterforce,” “first-strike/second-strike,” “nuclear war-fighting,” “systems analysis,” “thinking about the unthinkable,” “shot across the bow,” “limited nuclear options”—would all have as their source the strategists of the RAND Corporation in the 1950s.

In the sixties, with the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy and the appointment of Robert S. McNamara as Secretary of Defense, the new “defense intellectuals” would move into positions of power, either as administration officials or as influential consultants. One British journalist would describe them in the London Times Literary Supplement as men who “move freely through the corridors of the Pentagon and the State Department rather as the Jesuits through the courts of Madrid and Vienna, three centuries ago, when we in Europe were having our own little local difficulties.”

By the 1970s and especially into the eighties, the ideas of these thermonuclear Jesuits would have so thoroughly percolated through the corridors of power—and through their annexes in academia—that, at least among fellow members of the congregation, their wisdom would be taken almost for granted, their assumptions worshiped as gospel truth, their insight elevated to an almost mystical level and accepted as dogma.

Throughout this period, most of the defense intellectuals—with a few notable exceptions—would stay out of the limelight, preferring the relative anonymity of the consultant, the special assistant. Yet this small group of theorists would devise and help implement a set of ideas that would change the shape of American defense policy, that could someday mean the difference between peace and total war. Though virtually unheard of by most of even the very well read among the general population, they knew they would make their mark—for they were the men who pondered mass destruction, who thought about the unthinkable, who invented nuclear strategy.

Bernard Brodie hardly seemed the type to become the pioneer of nuclear strategy when he walked through the portals of the University of Chicago in 1933. He was twenty-three, the product of an upwardly mobile but still quite poor Jewish family on Chicago’s South Side. He was rather short, with glasses and wavy hair, very bright but awkward, unmannered, badly dressed.

Brodie had gone to work for the Weather Bureau, which had barometers stationed in the University of Chicago quad. He had thought he would make a career of meteorology, but after one look at the grandeur of that campus, he changed his mind. Still working for the Bureau to support himself, he made plans to enroll at the University of Chicago. The early years of Robert Hutchins’ influence as university president were heady ones and during them Brodie inaugurated a lifelong love of classical music, art, fine literature and history. He courted a fellow student, Fawn McKay, a Mormon girl from the backwaters of Utah, for whom the university was equally liberating.

Brodie loved horses and at sixteen lied about his age to join the National Guard, which trained its soldiers on horses. (“Horses will always be used to tow the artillery,” his officers proclaimed.) While there, he grew increasingly fascinated with the technology of weapons, particularly firearms, and read as much about their history as he could find.