RE-8’s techniques were clever, if nothing else. Its analysts first obtained overhead photos of British buildings that had been bombed by Germany. They analyzed the roof damage, correlated that with readily available data on the economic effects of the bombing—in terms of decline in war production, casualties and worker absenteeism—and, from all this, worked out a mathematical formula that would translate an assessment of roof damage into an estimate of the bomb’s overall effect.
When analyzing the bombing over Germany, they reversed the procedure. They had the roof damage from the photoreconnaissance flights. They assessed that damage, and then plugged in the formula that they had worked out from the British data to estimate the probable effects of the bombing on the German economy. They coupled this with a statistical index devised by R. E. Fisher, an Oxford don and prominent biological statistician. Called the “mean area of effectiveness,” this index used the estimates of bomb damage to measure how far from the target a bomb had exploded.
It was hardly the most reliable or solid statistical technique ever conceived, but it was the best that RE-8 could do under the circumstances. Many of their reports foretold what the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey would more conclusively observe after the war: that, in the British night bombing over Germany, only between one-third and one-half of the bombs dropped hit the right city, much less any particular industrial complex; that, except for the bombing of transportation and liquid fuels toward the very end of the war, those bombs that did strike targets damaged the German war economy only slightly. (Years later, after reading the Bombing Survey, Hitch would judge that in retrospect RE-8, for all its pessimism, had generally overestimated the effects of the bombing.)
From this experience, Hitch learned that there was a role for this sort of analysis outside the classroom, that even fairly crude economic and statistical computations could contribute substantially to the formulation of strategic military policy. It was with this in mind that Hitch accepted John Williams’ invitation to come to New York in September.
There was a good turnout at the New York Economic Club the first day of the RAND conference. Thirty scholars of various sorts showed up, along with several RAND employees. Among the curious were Bernard Brodie, Bill Fox and Harold Lasswell of Yale, Charles Hitch, Hans Speier, political scientist Franz Neumann and anthropologist Ruth Benedict of Columbia, Jacob Viner, then at Princeton. Leo Rosten, who planned the conference, could not make it: he had to attend a sneak preview of The Velvet Touch.
John Williams saw the conference as a way of sizing up people who might be good for RAND and then trying to recruit them. It would also be an opportunity, as he put it, “to discuss any research relevant to the broad topics of the identification, measurement and control of factors important in (1) the occurrence of war, and (2) the winning of war if it should occur.”
John Williams’ mentor and idol, Warren Weaver, who was also a RAND consultant, delivered the opening address. He talked about his having spent nearly one-fourth of his life working for the military in two world wars. He talked about the work in operations research during the last war. He explained that RAND was greatly interested in the concept of “military worth,” in seeing “to what extent it is possible to have useful quantitative indices for a gadget, a tactic or a strategy, so that one can compare it with available alternatives and guide decisions by analysis….”
After the conference, John Williams urged Hans Speier and Charlie Hitch to join RAND and become the first directors of the social science and economics divisions, respectively. Speier agreed. Hitch was more difficult, but after what he would later call the most agonizing decision in his life, Hitch agreed to quit academia in December and come to RAND.
At that conference the previous September, there was one particularly revealing remark that Warren Weaver made very early on in his opening address. “I assume that every person in this room is fundamentally interested in and devoted to what can broadly be called the rational life,” he said. “He believes fundamentally that there is something to this business of having some knowledge… and some analysis of problems, as compared with living in a state of ignorance, superstition and drifting-into-whatever-may-come.”
“The rational life” might have served well as an emblem of the RAND style. And with a social science and an economics division, RAND was about to start pursuing it along a slightly different dimension. Before, RAND had confined itself essentially to studying the technical aspects of the instruments of warfare. Now, some of those at RAND, anyway, would start to study the strategy of warfare, would try to impose the order of the rational life on the almost unimaginably vast and hideous maelstrom of nuclear war.
5
THE SUPERBOMB
LATE IN 1951, a very small number of physicists at the RAND Corporation started to learn a great deal about a new and fantastic weapon that would dwarf all weapons before it. Some called it the “Super,” because it could release 1,000 times as much explosive energy as the atomic bombs that were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the war. It was a thermonuclear weapon, the hydrogen bomb.
Only through a great deal of effort and a bit of luck did RAND learn of this development at all. Information about anything related to atomic weapons was tightly held. A “Q” clearance—the very restrictive Atomic Energy Commission code word for all atomic-energy data—was required before one could even hear the magic phrase “intercontinental ballistic missile.” Special subsets of Q were needed to learn much more. Before 1947, the AEC denied these special clearances to anyone at RAND, a state that would have made research in the area of atomic bombs impossible. In July of that year, however, after General LeMay turned on some pressure, the AEC gave in and granted clearances to a few analysts. By October, the Air Force made it clear to the AEC that RAND would be increasingly active in studies on weapons design, weapons effects and targeting. The restrictions were loosened still further.
Early in 1948, a physics division was set up at RAND, with initially a staff of three—the director, David Griggs, Ernst Plesset and Sam Cohen. Shortly after, Griggs went to teach at UCLA (though he stayed at RAND part-time), Plesset took over the division and others joined. During the war, Plesset had done instrumentation work at Douglas Aircraft and was the only physicist in the company. He joined RAND in its all but earliest days. In 1949, he took some time off to work at the JCS Weapons Systems Evaluation Group in Washington. Plesset was in Washington the day the Russians exploded their first atomic bomb. So, by coincidence, was Edward Teller, a brash, brilliant, charismatic Hungarian émigré who had been a physicist on the Manhattan Project, and who was devoting most of his time trying to convince people that the United States should actively pursue research on fusion technology, the process that would make a hydrogen bomb implode. It was Plesset who brought Teller in touch with several high-ranking Air Force officers, just after the Soviet explosion, to talk about atomic energy and the Super.
Plesset remained close friends with Teller, and—like most of the RAND physicists—had fairly close contacts at the Los Alamos weapons laboratory. Through these connections, and especially through Teller, Plesset learned in 1951 that the H-bomb appeared feasible; that Teller and another mathematician, Stanislaw Ulam, had worked out its physics and its design, at least theoretically; that certain implosion devices had been tested; that it would almost certainly be only a matter of time (and money) before an operational Superbomb became a major part of the U.S. Strategic Air Command arsenal.