A weekly commentary on war, weapons, and waste in an increasingly dangerous world
Welcome to the Armed Madhouse coffee break. As the U.S. Congress considers adding another $100 billion to the U.S. defense budget, pushing the total past $1 trillion, I am launching a weekly Coffee Break feature on the weaponry, politics, economics, and consequences of armed conflict. I owe the title to a book by Greg Palast. True to the spirit of NC, the posts will be factual, rational, and non-ideological. Like the other new Coffee Break features, this one will be guided by reader interest and feedback, so comments are encouraged.
The Bundle of Death
Let’s start with a bang and contemplate what I consider to be one of the most evil artifacts in the world, the U.S. “nuclear football.”
It is a small package, but it is loaded with mega-death. This bag travels with the President always, and it contains a nuclear launch authorization code and a set of nuclear attack plans. The plans provide the president with a set of options, ranging from selective strikes to a massive attack causing unprecedented destruction and a possible nuclear winter. The plans are classified and periodically updated in a manner that is also classified.
If the President opens the bag, selects an attack plan, and issues the authorization code, no one is legally empowered to stop the attack. The role of the Vice President is limited to confirming that the President has given the attack order. In theory, the Vice President could invoke the 25th Amendment, but this would require consultation with the cabinet and approval by Congress. It is doubtful that the military would wait for this process to be completed in a crisis. Only direct military disobedience, subject to extreme penalties, could immediately stop the presidential attack order.
How Did We Get Here?
How is it that the U.S. put the power to destroy much of mankind in the hands of one person, and more importantly, why do the citizens of this country not wish to know the contents of the attack plans? The answers are found in the dark events of the final years of WWII.
In 1939, at the start of WWII, President Roosevelt wrote to the leaders of Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and Poland appealing to them to refrain from bombing civilian populations. In the letter, FDR said:
The ruthless bombing from the air of civilians in unfortified centers of population during the course of the hostilities which have raged in various quarters of the earth during the past few years, which has resulted in the maiming and in the death of thousands of defenseless men, women and children, has sickened the hearts of every civilized man and woman, and has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity.
The foreign leaders initially replied positively, but by 1945 much had changed. “Strategic bombing,” notionally directed at military and industrial targets, had evolved into area raids destroying large portions of cities.
Firestorms
In bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in school– Randall Jarrell
The first man-made firestorm occurred in Hamburg in 1943. A multi-day bombing campaign against Hamburg culminated in an incendiary attack on July 27 that created a thousand-foot-high tornado of fire that consumed eight square miles of the city. Over 37,00 people died. This feat was repeated in Dresden in March 1945, where an estimated 25,000 died. However, despite multiple attempts, the allied air forces were unable to regularly create firestorms when attacking German cities.
The practice of city burning was perfected in Japan by U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay. With the assistance of Captain Robert McNamara, a former accounting professor at the Harvard Business School, LeMay and McNamara determined that high-altitude bombing of Japanese cities had been ineffective, and that low-altitude incendiary bombing would wreak far more destruction. This change of tactics and the use of napalm-based cluster munitions led to a devastating bombing campaign that burned 64 Japanese cities in 1945 before the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks.
In one night alone, an incendiary bombing attack on Tokyo killed 90-100,000 civilians and destroyed 267,000 buildings, leaving over 1 million homeless. These casualty figures are roughly the same as those for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings combined. Indeed, the total number of Japanese casualties of LeMay’s incendiary bombing campaign is estimated to be substantially greater than the casualties of the atomic bombings.
Charred remains of civilians in Tokyo 1945
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were an extension of an existing campaign of indiscriminate killing of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians, and far from “sickening the hearts” and “shocking the conscience” of Americans as once assumed by FDR, these attacks were celebrated as great wartime achievements. LeMay later became the head of the Strategic Air Command, and McNamara, after a stint in industry, became the Secretary of Defense in the JFK and Johnson administrations. McNamara stated in a documentary interview that he and LeMay would have been tried as war criminals had the U.S. been defeated by Japan.
Something very important had changed: the American public had become willing to burn enemy cities, and it welcomed the power and efficiency of nuclear weapons, which create a firestorm every time. What nuclear war planners in the Cold War did not foresee is that many burning cities could put so much ash into the stratosphere that global temperatures would drop for an extended period resulting in a nuclear winter that would cause crop failures, species die-offs, and worldwide famine.
The Chief Executioner
President Truman, having shrugged off the warnings of the Manhattan Project scientists regarding the epochal change to warfare that the atomic bomb would cause, soon came to realize that decisions to use this weapon could not be left in the hands of the military and established absolute presidential control over the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The problem of this narrowing of responsibility for initiating nuclear war to a single person remains with us today.
See No Evil
During the cold war, and up to the present day, U.S. attack plans have included “counter-value” strikes, the purpose of which is to destroy the entire economic potential of an enemy nation. This would entail inflicting enormous civilian casualties. I believe that the reason why the American public and their Congressional representatives have no desire to see the nuclear attack plans is that they do not wish to acknowledge consenting to committing mass murder on an historically unprecedented scale. Plausible deniability is no longer an exclusive perquisite of the political elite; it has become democratized so that every American can be sheltered by ignorance of what is in the nuclear football.
Where Are We Now?
Close brushes with nuclear calamity in past decades have not deterred ambitious and costly U.S. efforts in recent years to improve strategic weapons systems. The U.S. has been striving to maintain “full spectrum” dominance in military capability, i.e., the ability to defeat any adversary or combination of adversaries in an armed conflict. Along the way, it has discarded most of the existing arms control treaties established after the trauma of the Cuban Missile crisis.The U.S. built anti-ballistic missiles, increased the accuracy of its ICBMs, and established a Space Force to put military systems in orbit.
Russia and china have responded to the U.S. weapons initiatives with their own new programs in a revival of the arms racing that characterized the Cold War era. Politicians, military leaders, and arms makers have perverse incentives to continue this race, heedless of the increasing risk of regional or global nuclear war. The Doomsday Clock is now set at 89 seconds to midnight, the closest to midnight it has been since its creation.
The reasons why we are getting closer to doomsday are:
- There are active war zones in Ukraine and the Mideast, and a potential war zone in the South China sea, any one of which could trigger escalation into a nuclear war.
- The collapse of nuclear arms control treaties has led to the deployment of destabilizing weaponry with unpredictable strategic consequences (e.g., hypersonic missiles, anti-satellite weapons, and long-range nuclear torpedoes)
- The irresponsible behavior of political leaders who demonize their adversaries, believe that military confrontation is preferable to diplomacy, and dismiss the risk of nuclear war
Russian Poseidon nuclear torpedo
The bundle of death remains with us, and so does the plausible deniability explaining the reluctance to examine its contents. The attack plans remain out of public view, and if they are executed, with horrific consequences, survivors will not take comfort in saying, “we did not know.”
In future Armed Madhouse Coffee Breaks, I will explore the devilish details and unfortunate consequences of the unrelenting quest for superior weaponry, a counter-productive endeavor that is squandering the world’s wealth and increasing the risk of the greatest calamity ever to befall mankind.
