It was not so much analytic prowess that gained Wohlstetter his eager following at RAND, especially among some of the younger economists. More, it was his tone, style and manner that seemed cultivated to convey the image of a man on top of everything. Even his office was designed to be distinctive, decorated in stark black with silk wallpaper and an Eames chair behind his desk. He knew math and statistics and economics, but he also knew about wine and fine food and he could talk about art, philosophy and classical music. To the amusement of many onlookers, a fair number of RAND economists—previously quite humdrum in life-style—started acquiring a taste for obscure and expensive vintages and had their wives trained as gourmet cooks because Albert’s wife, Roberta, was a gourmet cook.
The Wohlstetter home was the frequent scene of late-night dinners and strategic rap sessions, the RAND coterie and occasional outside guests and distinguished RAND visitors attending. Albert was the guru, Roberta the den mother, Albert holding court on his views of the world, Roberta dishing out delectable souffles and not missing a beat of the conversation. For a RAND economist or engineer who had spent much of his career crunching numbers for dry, dull estimates of how much a weapon will cost or figuring out how to stretch titanium over the cockpit of a jet fighter, those drives up the winding, hilly roads of Laurel Canyon, toward the Wohlstetter house, were the closest that any of them would ever come to approaching Mecca.
Outside the coterie, many at RAND thought Wohlstetter was something of a phony, pretentious, amusing at best. Many of the engineers and physicists particularly looked down on Wohlstetter. For one thing, they found his work much less important than he claimed. To them, strategic matters were ancillary to the real issues of science; the fact of the bomb’s existence and how it worked were considered much more important than the esoterica of how it might be used. They thought he talked in tones far too authoritative and even condescending about things he really did not know. Ernie Plesset, head of the physics division, came away from a Wohlstetter briefing at RAND muttering, “You’d think he was reciting from the Sermon on the Mount in there.”
Among Wohlstetter’s following he was indeed on the mount; and the sermon they embraced told of the coming vulnerability of the strategic retaliatory force.
Within the strategic set at RAND, there were some who had problems with the way that Wohlstetter did business, especially his sharp sensitivity to any criticism and the absolute loyalty he demanded from anyone who worked with him. Among the RAND strategists of an independent bent—Herman Kahn, Daniel Ellsberg, William Kaufmann, Andrew Marshall and others—admiration for Wohlstetter was genuine but grudging. They hesitated before depending too heavily on Wohlstetter’s work for the formulation of their own assumptions and conclusions. However, they could turn to Roberta Wohlstetter and her just-finished study of Pearl Harbor, which revealed how a surprise attack might be executed, how the absence of its detection might reflect not simple blindness or stupidity but careful measures taken by the aggressor and the confusion of the relevant intelligence traffic amid the “noise” of other, less relevant, perhaps even deceptively transmitted signals. Everyone liked Roberta Wohlstetter. She was wonderfully gracious, very bright but with a subdued ego.
In any event, by 1957 or 1958, a definite strategic community had formed within RAND. It had reached—by dint of small numbers, a common outlook, a (mostly) common academic background in mathematics and economics, and the forcefulness of a few strong personalities—a fairly tight consensus on the major issues, the most solidly held of which was the not unlikely prospect of a Soviet surprise attack against the increasingly vulnerable Strategic Air Command. For this new strategic community, these were heady days at RAND. They knew—some of them had invented—the tricks of the trade, the systems analysis, the method of calculation, that allowed them to deal rationally with the biggest issue of all time, the hydrogen bomb.
But these were grim times, as well. Wohlstetter and Hoffman may have written at the end of one chapter in R-290 that they “do not, of course, imply that a Russian attack is imminent”—only that “it is a painful fact that the risks to the Soviets of attempting a surprise attack on the United States are much lower than generally estimated.” The atmosphere at RAND, however, indicated differently. Many rational analysts were spending typically sixty- or eighty-hour workweeks frantically writing reports and computing calculations. To many, it appeared that the Russians might indeed attack sometime in the near future. The calculations indicated that it would soon be possible and even profitable for them to do so; therefore, given their aggressive aims and our vulnerability, that would be their rational strategy.
Alain Enthoven and Daniel Ellsberg were two of the brightest of RAND’s young economists who joined the Wohlstetter strategy clique. They both came to RAND in their mid-twenties in the immediate wake of Wohlstetter’s R-290 report. Both decided not to sign up for RAND’s highly lucrative retirement plan. They figured that, along with much of the rest of the Western world, they might not be around long enough to enjoy its benefits.
8
THE GAITHER COMMITTEE
IN THE LAST HALF of the 1950s, the specter of a Russian surprise attack against a vulnerable America became the central threat in the eyes of the strategic community not only in Santa Monica, but also in Washington, D.C., Cambridge, Massachusetts, and their surrounding environs. In this environment, Albert Wohlstetter and his R-290 report were a perfect fit, and played a critical role in the development of the consensus. R-290 legitimized a basic fear of the enemy and the unknown through mathematical calculation and rational analysis, providing the techniques and the general perspective through which the new and rather scary situation—the Soviet Union’s acquisition of long-range nuclear weapons—could be discussed and acted upon.
R-290 was top secret, like most of RAND’s more intricate analyses, but it was read by those, especially in the Department of Defense, with access to such information. The chief impact of R-290, however, came with the formation of a special blue-ribbon commission, under the auspices of the National Security Council but outside any staff or line command. Formally, the commission was called the Security Resources Panel of the Science Advisory Committee of the Office of Defense Mobilization. More commonly, it was called the Gaither Committee, named for its designated chairman, H. Rowan Gaither.
The Gaither Committee began life in the spring of 1957, when the National Security Council met to evaluate a proposal made the previous January to spend $32.4 billion over the next eight years, $28.6 billion of it in federal money, on a massive blast-shelter and fallout-shelter program that could save millions of American lives in the event of a Russian nuclear attack. Civil defense was becoming a cause célèbre among many who looked closely at defense problems generally, but this concern was fairly recent, dating back only a few years earlier when scientists started to learn about radioactive fallout. Calculations now suggested that about 20 percent of all deaths in nuclear war would be caused by blast and heat; the rest, by the residual radiation known as fallout. Suddenly, the notion of the Soviet Union’s amassing its own substantial arsenal of H-bombs took on a more menacing character: a nuclear attack would kill not just a few million Americans, but tens of millions, more than 100 million, maybe everybody—unless we buried ourselves in fallout shelters and stayed there, nourished by prestocked supplies, for weeks or months.