Who won the Cold War? Why, Jimmy Carter, of course!

At least, that’s the way Chris Miller tells it in Chip War The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, his best-selling but not always convincing story of the computer chip and how it “changed the world”. It seems that in 1977, Silicon Valley entrepreneur William Perry was brought in to serve as undersecretary of defense for research and engineering at the behest of Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of Defense, Harold Brown. According to Miller, Perry quickly fell under the spell (my words) of Pentagon legend Andrew Marshall, a sort of inhouse neocon who entered government employment during the Nixon Administration under then Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger.

According to Wikipedia, which I’m not sure Mr. Miller knows how to use, Schlesinger was, well, bored (my gloss) with the existing “Mutual Assured Destruction” (“MAD”) nuclear strategy. Both the U.S. and the Soviet Union possessed hundreds, if not thousands, of massive, city-destroying hydrogen bombs, each possessing the power of several million tons of TNT, several thousand times as powerful the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in World War II, which killed perhaps 150,000 people. There wasn’t the slightest chance that even the most “perfect” surprise attack would eliminate the other side’s nuclear arsenal, and thus no way to avoid a horrifying reply, which would almost surely cost tens of millions of lives and cover the landscape with disastrous levels of radiation.¹ There must be a “better way,” Schlesinger thought, to fight a nuclear war, one that would require lots and lots of brand new, expensive weapons!

Well, there was, if you tried to think of one real hard. How about attacking, not cities, but the other side’s military installations, using new, highly accurate missiles, “counterforce” weapons, ones with multiple warheads, and smaller, cuter, nimbler bombs? Would that be a lot more humane? Because you could keep the body count under 20-30 million! Well, you probably could!

I frankly don’t think Chris Miller even understands “MAD”, which was a truism back in the 1950s, and is reflected in John F. Kennedy’s statement in the early 1960s that in a nuclear war “the survivors would envy the dead”, for this is the way he spins Marshall’s “analysis”:

Marshall’s grim conclusion was that after a decade of pointless fighting in Southeast Asia, the U.S. had lost its military advantage. He was fixated on regaining it. Though Washington had been shocked by Sputnik and the Cuban Missile Crisis, it wasn’t until the early 1970s that the Soviets had built a big enough stockpile of intercontinental ballistic missiles to guarantee that enough of their atomic weapons could survive a U.S. nuclear strike to retaliate with a devastating atomic barrage of their own. More worrisome, the Soviet army had far more tanks and planes, which were already deployed on potential battlegrounds in Europe. The U.S.—facing pressure at home to cut military spending—simply couldn’t keep up.

In fact, the U.S. never had the “military advantage” that Marshall, in Miller’s telling, claimed the U.S. had lost. The U.S. was fearful of a Soviet attack as far back as the mid-fifties, installing anti-aircraft missiles in the U.S. in response, as well as running secret, mock emergency drills involving relatively high-level government officials only, that would supposedly allow the U.S. recover from a full-scale attack. My father, an employee with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, used to take part in these secret drills twice a year, drills that assumed the U.S. would suffer enormous damage from the Soviets.

As for the “more worrisome” fact that the Soviets had superior conventional forces in Europe, this had always been the case, for the U.S.S.R. “naturally” did not disarm after World War II and always possessed a huge army. It was this fact that prompted the doctrine of “massive retaliation”—a U.S. arsenal consisting largely of nuclear weapons delivered via long-range bombers (later, of course, via long-range missiles based both on land and in submarines)—proposed by the Eisenhower administration back in 1954 as a “cost effective” way to counter the massive Soviet forces and then rapidly put into effect. The Soviets naturally responded in kind, and this led to the MAD stalemate that people like Schlesinger, Marshall, and Perry all wanted to finesse—for no other reason, in my opinion, than to justify massive new spending programs, one that would make possible a new kind of nuclear war, one waged not against civilians but military installations—one that would, of course, require countermeasures to the counterforce measures, and counter counter measures, and so on, ad infinitum!

It's “interesting” that Marshall was proposing a U.S. first strike, one of such overwhelming size and accuracy that it would obliterate the entire Soviet capacity for response—aiming, frankly, for a winnable nuclear war, one that would eliminate the Soviet Union as a military power in the space of an hour. Hubris much, Andy? And wouldn’t be it a trifle de-stabilizing if the Soviets figured out, as they surely would, what we were up to? And wouldn’t they find it necessary to respond in kind? In fact, the U.S. never considered conducting the sort of first strike strategy that Marshall contemplated, dismissing it as both unworkable and hideously inhumane.

Well, who cares? As Miller tells it, in his typical, conclusive prose,

Led by Perry, the Pentagon poured money into new weapons systems that capitalized on America’s advantage in microelectronics. Precision weapons programs like the Paveway [the first “smart” bomb] were promoted, as were guided munitions of all types, from cruise missiles to artillery shells. Sensors and communications also began to leap forward with the application of miniaturized computing power. Detecting enemy submarines, for example, was largely a problem of developing accurate sensors and running the information they gathered through ever-more-complicated algorithms. With enough processing power, the military’s acoustic experts wagered, it should be possible to distinguish a whale from a submarine from many miles away.

It's “amusing” that Marshall’s neocon confrères outside the government—the “real” neocons like Paul Nitze, Irving Kristol, and Jeanne Kirkpatrick—had, of course, absolutely no time for the utterly insane notion that the Carter administration was making America’s defenses “stronger”! Hell no! Jimmy Carter was presiding over the disarming of America!

The “outside” neocons flipped Marshall’s analysis on its head. The danger wasn’t that the U.S. lacked an utterly obliterating first strike. The danger was that the U.S.S.R. might develop an almost obliterating first strike, use it, and then watch, chuckling evilly, as a “liberal” pantywaist president, whose initials might be “JC”, would timorously decide that it was nobler to accept defeat than to off a few million Russians in an already lost cause.

It became, in fact, neocon boilerplate that not only was this impossible scenario “possible”, the Soviets were planning it! They believed that a nuclear war was winnable, even if the U.S. was ballsy enough to reply. They had prepared a massive civil defense system that was perfectly capable of surviving a U.S. nuclear response, and the U.S. could and should do the same!

In the early days of the Reagan administration, Thomas K. Jones, then deputy under secretary of defense, argued that such a war would not constitute much of a hardship if proper precautions were taken: ““If there are enough shovels to go around,” he said, “everybody’s going to make it.” Furthermore, neocons like Richard Perle, an assistant secretary of defense under Reagan, argued that the Soviet Union literally did have enough shovels and conducted regular civil defense drills during which Soviet civilians dug shallow trenches and covered themselves with dirt, which would supposedly protect them from the 10 million-plus degree heat of nuclear fireballs.

All of this was and is utter nonsense, of course. As Fred Kaplan put it in his excellent (“excellent” as in “totally depressing”) book, The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War (2020),

There are rationales for these [“counterforce”] doctrines, drills, and exercises and for the retention of the first-use option. They are driven by politics, personalities, and bureaucratic rivalries, but also by a logic, which, once its premises are accepted, hurls its adherents—and the rest of us—into a rabbit hole of increasingly bizarre scenarios that seem increasingly, if strangely, rational the deeper they’re probed.

In fact—to disagree with Fred just a bit—none of these anti-MAD premises, rationales and wrinkles ever made any sense and never changed the MAD equation. There was no way to limit a nuclear war, no way to contain it, no way to win it. You cannot send a “message” with an atom bomb. The only possible response to the use of a nuclear weapon is the use of a more powerful one, and after the first response the escalation to a “table stakes” exchange would be impossible to avoid.² The supposed counterforce alternatives were just excuses to keep the dollars flowing, and to leverage different fannies into the seats of power. The Perry/Marshall “program”, which was actually well underway before Perry even arrived in DC,³ worked so well that in 1981 the Pentagon could proudly assure Ronald Reagan’s incoming CIA Director William Casey that U.S. forces could absolutely destroy the top 200 military targets in the Soviet Union under any circumstances. Casey was stunned at the “bad news”. Only 200! “That’s not enough!” he snarled. Democrats can’t save America! Only Republicans can save America! And so the Republicans poured hundreds of billions more into defense, without improving American security in the slightest, a process, of course, that continues to this day.

Afterwords
I can’t say that all of Miller’s book is this bad—although this might be because this the only subject I know a good deal about. I learned a fair amount from this book, particularly about chip bottlenecks, but the tone does shift sharply from chapter to chapter. On one page we’re learning that, in effect, China has to be stopped, and then, another 30 pages on, that we need them, and can’t go it alone. It’s certainly not good that all of the world’s advanced computers are dependent on chips made in one plant in all the world—in Taiwan, no less—but “even” Miller says there is no going back from a global economy. At any rate, it’s a little silly of Miller to give Mr. Perry a megaphone to tell the world how he won the Cold War all on his lonesome.

Perusing the New York Times’ obituary for Andrew Marshall suggests that William Perry was not the only Pentagon official with a self-serving memory, and also suggests that Mr. Marshall never lost his taste for threat exaggeration and wasting the taxpayers’ money. Marshall, as head of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment,” prepared, well, “net assessments”, which, amusingly, were distributed to only a handful of people and which never could be copied. So that no one could ever say something along the lines of “Gee, Andy, isn’t the exact opposite of what you said two years ago?”

The Times gives Marshall credit for “knowing” that the U.S.S.R. was spending much more of its GNP on defense than the CIA estimated. “The Soviet collapse in 1991 proved him right.”

But the reason the CIA was off was that they assumed that the Soviet economy was much larger than it actually was—almost undoubtedly because they knew that that was what the almighty neocons wanted to hear. I wonder if Marshall argued the opposite—I wonder if he argued that the Soviets were less of a threat than people assumed.

Somehow I think the answer to that would be “no”. The Times has more supposedly laudatory information on Mr. Marshall that also fails to impress:

Mr. Marshall’s defenders point out that the pathbreaking work he and his disciples did on military modernization had formed the pathway for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s program to transform the military during George W. Bush’s administration, emphasizing lighter and nimbler forces that would form the backbone of American military power during the Obama administration.

Yes, that worked out well, didn’t it. It’s also not surprising to learn that he was an early alarmist regarding China, obviously hungry for a new enemy. “Analysis” like this is nothing more than a self-fulfilling prophecy—at least Andy and his ilk certainly hoped it would be. This is not to say that relations with a compulsively nationalist superpower like China could ever be smooth. But thinking that we can and should treat China as nothing more than a “new” U.S.S.R. to be run into the ground via a new Cold War is a recipe for utter disaster. The United States is not “the” Indispensable Nation, as so many Blobites like to maintain. But it is an indispensable nation. And so is China.

I will add that my skepticism regarding Mr. Marshall’s acumen was greatly stimulated by the knowledge that, early in the Obama administration, he “pushed [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates to make the B-21 bomber a priority”. Worse advice has rarely been given.

Of course, this isn’t the first time that the NYT obits column has allowed some “genius” to take credit for ending the Cold War

1. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, a rather naïve Fidel Castro urged the Soviets to “solve” the problem by taking out the U.S. with a full-scale nuclear attack. The Soviets sent an “expert” to Cuba to explain to Fidel the fallout from a nuclear attack taking out America would take out Cuba too.

2. Defense Secretary Harold Brown, a brilliant man (Ph.D. in physics from Columbia at age 21), wrote a book, Thinking About National Security, which I reviewed, rather unkindly, here. Harold rather gave the game away regarding MAD when, trying, absurdly, to defend his decision to proceed with the development with “advanced” chemical weapons (because the Soviets had them), he acknowledged that in simulated war games, any substantial clash between U.S. and Soviet forces using conventional weapons, regardless of the type of weapons used, rapidly escalated into an all-out nuclear exchange. Why develop chemical weapons—which are, despite all the hype, likely to be less effective than good 0ld-fashioned bullets and bombs—whcn you’re just going to pull out the nukes in another fifteen minutes? Harold, despite his Ph.D., had no substantial answer. The Soviets had them, so we had to have them too.

3. See the Wikipedia entry for the MX missile, a supposed “superweapon”—Ronald Reagan dubbed it “the Peacekeeper”, though in fact it was thoroughly redundant—for a nice history of these developments.