The Wizards of Armageddon

Jeffrey Lewis 0:05

You are listening to the Arms Control Wong podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wong blog and a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:21

And I'm Dr. Aaron Stein, Director of Research at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. Jeffrey, it's good to see you.

Jeffrey 0:30

It's good to see you. Are you clear where I work? Listeners won't know this, but boy, it took a few goes to get that introduction down.

Aaron 0:38

I mean, Scott will perform as Voodoo Magic, but I think it took you seven times to get that intro going with the saying Middlebury.

Jeffrey 0:47

Boy, it's early here. I'm back in California, and we're recording at about 7.40 in the morning, and... Interestingly, not my first work call this morning.

Aaron 1:03

Guess who called me earlier? Who called you? I don't actually know.

Jeffrey 1:06

You won't believe it.

Aaron 1:06

No, no. I don't know. I know. Who? Fred Kaplan. Did he really? Yeah. Get out. Really? Yeah. Did he listen to the last show and hear we were going to plug his book after 40 years? Nope. That's even better.

Jeffrey 1:26

Is he writing a story or something? No, he had a question about some other thing. It was like, oh. I didn't tell him. I didn't tell him what we're telling you today, listeners, which is we're going to do a little brief podcast on Fred Kaplan's magisterial book, Wizards of Armageddon, at almost 40.

Aaron 1:46

Yeah, that sounds like me. Maybe it's older than me. I'm still younger than the book, but not quite 40.

Jeffrey 1:55

I remember when I was almost 40. When did you first read this book? I first read this book too young. I read it early when I got to DC and I didn't get it. So it was only in the last few months that I decided I wanted to go back to it. And I chose to go back to it for very selfish reasons.

The center of the book is a guy named Bill Kaufman, who's a professor at MIT. And I was actually feeling nostalgic because Bill Kaufman is my advisor's advisor, right? He's sort of my academic grandparent. So John Steinbrenner, my dissertation chair, was an incredibly important figure to me. And the equivalent in John's life was Bill Kaufman, who I never got to meet.

And so I had this idea that I would introduce myself to this academic grandparent I never met. Through Wizards of Armageddon. And boy, I was not disappointed.

Aaron 3:01

So this was assigned to me, I can't remember what year in college, for my favorite course in college was The World Since 1945. And it was just a chapter. But I remember I read the whole book. I can't remember what chapter was assigned, but I remember probably chapter one or something along those lines. And I just, I liked it so much, I finished it.

But like you, I didn't really understand it, right? You understand it, but like – I mean this in a very positive way. There's a lot packed into that book. And then I revisited it a couple of years ago and then oddly enough, just like you, I picked it back up about three months ago and was just leafing through it and reading it again.

Which in full disclosure for this podcast, I went looking for it, and it's somewhere buried in my house. But because my daughter is asleep, I decided not to look too thoroughly. So I'm going to go off memory from this podcast.

Jeffrey 4:02

Wow. Well, I mean, actually, I think that will be a really interesting dynamic because – So for listeners, if you haven't read Wizards of Armageddon, I mean, A, like you're listening to a podcast called Arms Control Wonk. What the fuck is wrong with you? You should go read Wizards. But if you haven't or if you read it like I did when you were too young to really process it before you knew some of the people and the institutions, it's really a history of nuclear strategy in the first 40 years told not through strategic concepts but through the – Individuals who came into the field and the work they did.

And what I think is so artful about it is while Kaplan takes their ideas seriously, part of taking them seriously means understanding those ideas in the very practical context in which they emerge. And so you really understand Rand and its early years of nuclear strategy and Not just intellectually, but as the act of advocacy for the Air Force and the nuclear mission that it was.

And when Albert Wohlstetter finally has his falling out with Rand, He moves over to an army-funded institution and you understand his advocacy of missile defense for the act of army advocacy that it was. I think that blending of parochial service interests, the individual research interests and personalities of the people involved And then the kind of big concepts at play, that to me, it's a very sophisticated telling of the history of nuclear strategy in a way that 20-year-old Jeffrey was not quite ready to pick up.

Aaron 5:55

Agreed all around. The book in many ways is a history of not just nuclear strategy, but a history of The men and they were mostly – they were all men at Rand who helped derive and make those strategies.

Jeffrey 6:10

I think Roberta Wohlstetter gets half a page. Yeah. I mean it's – She's apparently just much nicer than Albert and that's – it's like, oh wow, she's smarter and nicer. Let's not talk about her anymore.

Aaron 6:24

One of the other things that appeals to me about the book was that as somebody from Los Angeles, it was this idea that these dudes were hanging out at Rand in Los Angeles and basically coming up with the concepts that would define security on the nuclear side in the 20th and how salient they are continuing in the 21st century.

We're still talking about very much the same things that these guys were talking about. In the late 1940s, 1950s, 60s, 70s, moving on. And I think the book was first published in 83. So it's basically the history of that strategy up until I would say 1983.

Jeffrey 7:02

Yeah, I have a perfect example of the salience of the book. And I think no matter when you read it, you will have examples like this because you read things and then the things you read about, those arguments are still happening. So you read about this argument happening in a particular time and place and then, you know, maybe a week later, you'll run into that same argument and you'll be like, Jesus, nothing has changed in 60 years.

And the example I was actually thinking about was, I was at this meeting, and it was held under Chatham House rule. So this is like, you know, a couple weeks ago. And he's saying, you know, you can't, if you target leadership, there will be no one to negotiate with. So you have to think about vulnerability and holdbacks and how you intend bargaining to play out.

Otherwise, you're just going to have to You know, plaster them. And I just, it was such a bizarre experience because 62 years before one of the early counterforce briefings and the city hold back briefings made the same argument, right? That if you don't want them to target our cities, we can't target their cities. And furthermore, you don't want to target leadership if you can avoid it because you want somebody to be able to negotiate with.

And, and, And it's just like, wow, making the same argument 62 years later. I mean, just that idea that we are still having conversations today about leadership targeting, about the morality, legality, and then ultimately, you know, what mattered for Rand, the strategic wisdom of targeting cities in counter value ways. And these are like unresolved things. It's not like you read this book and you're like, oh, what quaint ideas they had back then.

It's like, Jesus, we've managed to turn the same three arguments into 70 years of croissants and coffee at Brookings? That's great. Katari-funded croissants. Why is MacArthur leaving the field? I can't possibly imagine having bought the same study for 70 years.

Aaron 9:15

Oh, yeah. But that's going to be – when MacArthur chose to leave the field, I think I compared it to the Red Wedding scene and Game of Thrones in terms of – Oh, it's going to be brutal.

Jeffrey 9:27

Yeah. Speaking of niche and – It will be hurtful. Hurtful. It will definitely be harmful. I don't mean to make light of that situation. But I do understand how somebody coming to this debate from the outside – Would justifiably stare at it and be like, why are you having the same argument? What I think Wizards of Armageddon does so well is it Explains how these arguments arose, what the natural environment to which they were adapted was, and that environment is service prerogative and technology and just, you know, how American academics look at the world.

And you can see the persistence of these ideas as a function of the persistence of some environmental factors, which doesn't necessarily mean that they're the right ideas, but they're highly adapted to our world.

Aaron 10:30

I mean, I would say like the first – Maybe like the first peak of the book, right? And is the first peak of the book really talks about this idea that we grapple with on this podcast all the time, which is that of vulnerability, right? It was the vulnerability study to the sack bombers, right? And that this idea that perhaps like our basing modes and the way that we conceptualize how to use nuclear weapons and then ultimately deployed them made us vulnerable to, to strike is, And how that was poorly received in SAC at a time when I think there was countervailing pressures from how to deploy nuclear weapons on missiles.

And so it's this interplay between how you deploy nuclear weapons and then even within the same service, how you conceptualize how to use them.

Jeffrey 11:26

You know, it actually unlocked for me a curious conversation I had with Tom Schelling, where I will admit I was seriously damaged by a little too much wine. I had made some comment about Albert Wohlstetter, who I generally, I don't care for his academic or his, I won't even really call it academic. I don't tend to care for Wohlstetter's work.

And Tom defended it and in particular defended Wohlstetter. And I never really understood why he was doing that because he didn't really agree with Wohlstetter on kind of the big macro strategic concepts, at least certainly not by the time I, you know, by the time, well, Wohlstetter was dead, but by the time I was talking to Schelling.

And what really came out of Wizards for me was the explanation. So you have this early period where the Air Force is paying Rand to be advocates for nuclear strategy because they want justifications for more bomber-delivered nuclear weapons, and in particular, more bombers to deliver the nuclear weapons. And, you know, Wollstetter makes this very unpopular argument with Sack, which is that your forces are vulnerable and that you should take some of the money that you are going to spend on more bombers and you should spend it on shelters for those bombers.

And Sack hates this. And so I think I understood better Tom's sense that whatever arguments that he and Wohlstetter may have had about strategic concepts, I think that entire generation of Rand strategists who's covered a pretty broad political spectrum, I think all felt like they were engaged in a common effort to impose rational civilian control over On a military, I won't really even say force, like a commander, right?

A particular person and then his proteges who had extremely simple and probably wrong ideas about nuclear war and who were motivated by parochial service concerns. And so, you know, We can talk about McNamara and no cities and counterforce and all of those debates that come later. But I was focused on those debates. And I saw those as real dividing lines.

And I did not appreciate the commonality for that first generation of Rand strategists who were like literally fighting with the Air Force over like, How about we actually just do real math and see what the right number of bombers is compared to shelters and what a monumental lift that was to try to get the Air Force to take that seriously?

Aaron 14:32

That's very true. And that's a thing that we still deal with today, right? Is that whether it be the Army or the Air Force doesn't want to invest in shelters, even in places that are acutely exposed to ever-growing… The proliferation of more persistent guided missiles, even by lesser tiered adversaries in favor of more offense. I'm jumping ahead a little bit, but it's sort of like this idea that you need to spend on offense rather than defense is one that permeates still.

In our debates.

Jeffrey 15:05

Because offense is cool.

Aaron 15:07

Offense is cool. We build concepts around it. But the thing I wanted to come back to that you talked about was this idea of hyper-rationality and math. So it was trying to conceptualize nuclear weapons around math and principles. And so one of the things that always struck me about that book is looking back at who was making nuclear strategy way back in the beginning.

And I am going to venture a guess – I know that we've talked about this before – The current sort of generation, which I think we would put ourselves in, right, would be very difficult for us to replicate those studies, you know, in terms of how they were conducted. But those studies are ultimately what underpin how we conceptualize nuclear strategy in aggregate.

And so, like, if we can't – you know what I'm saying? It's like how the field has changed around it.

Jeffrey 15:56

Yeah. One of the things that struck me is, I mean, Kaplan is at his – Most biting. I mean, he, he, he, he writes it pretty straight and even keeled, right? So the, when you get a little hint of editorializing it's pretty, it's pretty dry. But it's there, right? And, and the place I think that comes out the most is in his sense that the mathematical inclinations of a lot of these analysts Were affectations, that they weren't really connected to the real world.

I mean, they wanted a pretty model, and so they did what they did to make a pretty model, but it wasn't necessarily the case that they really had the data to support that, or that the simplifications that they were making were accurate. And instead, it was really driven by they were using these tools and techniques because that's what they liked to do.

Many of them were mathematicians. Many of them were economists. They had this particular type of training. And so they had hammers. And so they conceived of the nuclear enterprise as a bunch of nails.

Aaron 17:14

And I don't want to cut you. They also looked down on social scientists. I remember that from the book. Rand only hired mathematicians and economists to do this work because they thought of people like you and I as Neanderthals.

Jeffrey 17:29

Right. Well, and they tried to hire some of these people and there were sort of internal conflicts. I mean, my favorite moment in that is when Herman Kahn is asked about Nathan Leitis, who writes Operational Code of the Politburo, which I think is a very, very sophisticated way of trying to think about foreign decision making, right? Which is to imagine, to analogize the foreign leadership to a computer.

And he wouldn't have used this term, but to write out the algorithms that they use to make decisions, right? A hierarchy of simple principles. And if you've ever talked to an actual high-level policymaker, I find that very compelling. Because if you spend any length of time with the kind of person who could be elected like President of the United States, that person has to be an expert on everything.

And the way that person is an expert on everything is by having a few simple, tried and true ways of understanding the world. And once you hack that, you know, today we'd say algorithm, you understand how to make decisions. And Kahn has asked about Leitis' work. And he says, you know, why would I read Nathan Leitis when I have the New York Times?

Aaron 18:40

Right, exactly. And I think we'd call it heuristic back then. I guess we'd call it algorithm now.

Jeffrey 18:45

I suppose algorithm is an analogy, but today we're very comfortable with this kind of reasoning. The idea that you're going to have a bunch of data and you need some kind of logical structure to organize, arrange, prioritize, and then ultimately decide on the basis of that data. It's like, why do I think that? Well, it's not a fucking coincidence that my dissertation advisor, who is Bill Kaufman's student, writes a book called The Cybernetic Theory of Decision.

Right. I mean, I'm a John Steinbrenner. And what really came through as I was reading the book is how many things I think that I thought I came up with that I now realize I must have stolen from John, who stole them from Bill Kaufman. So Kaufman will be confronted with some problem that I've never thought about.

And I'm like, oh, that's easy. The answer is this. And like, you know, two pages later, Kaufman's like, the answer is this. And it's like, oh, I guess that wasn't my idea.

Aaron 19:44

Bringing this back, one of the things is like, I guess Schelling and Kauffman were sort of like opposites of the political – they wouldn't agree politically, right? And so I guess – I'm not saying this very artfully. But they came to like ultimately have like share and respect work for one another, which shows like the transcendence of these ideas like across like how you think of like I guess politics and stuff like that.

So when you talk about yourself is like parroting some of like Kaufman's work down the way, I don't think you two would see eye to eye on a lot of other stuff.

Jeffrey 20:25

Well, I mean, he changed significantly over the course of his career. That's true. And I think that goes back to this question of, are your ideas adapted to a particular environment? So, I mean, one thing I would say, which I found very similar, is Kaufman is looking at kind of the insanity of SAC's nuclear strategy. And I don't think that he is looking at it from the perspective of you know, some bloodthirsty lunatic.

He, he's actually looking at their strategy and saying, you're bloodthirsty lunatics. We could rationalize this and make this like not quite as insane. And he really embraces counterforce, right? The idea that, you know, you, if you're, if, if, if we're going to target their cities, they're going to target our cities. And that, that sucks, right? So we need to do a hold back and now we need to think about how we're going to bargain and like what the right targets are.

And it's funny because I got in an argument recently. Argument is strong. I was commenting on a paper written by another mentor of mine who I respect. And that paper was about trying to go back to counter value as a strategy, going back to hitting cities. Yeah. I found myself making all the Bill Kaufman arguments. I am someone who thinks that we should treat nuclear weapons as weapons and we're going to find them wanting and we're not going to end up with that many.

I do think that I would be curious, genuinely curious about whether we would disagree in the current moment. Whether his views would have adapted to the moment in the way kind of mine have. You know, but he was not a particularly ideological thinker, you know.

Aaron 22:17

I think for listeners who haven't read the book and maybe were casual arms control listeners, like counter value is like essentially targeting cities, right? And then counter force is attacking the other person's nuclear forces with the idea of taking them off the board, holding some back so that you don't get to the big booms. You can try and keep it under some sort of control so that leader to leader can stave off complete and total annihilation.

Say I encapsulate that? Yeah.

Jeffrey 22:46

Yeah. And I was going to say that's perfect. And I would then say to give you like a thumbnail description of like the history of the first 40 years of nuclear strategy as described in the book, it's the air force starts with really simple ideas, which is we're going to throw everything we possibly can at the Soviets and their allies on day one of the war.

And if that means killing everybody in Albania, even if they're not parties to the war, that's what the plan says. And that's what we're going to do. And the academics who came in from the outside, motivated by different factors, including money, right? You know, the Navy wants to get in the piece of the action. They go through a series of arguments to try to restrain or contain or exert civilian control over SAC.

And the big rand idea is counterforce. Yeah. It's, no, you're not going to throw everything at them. You're going to target military targets as much as you possibly can. You're going to avoid cities. And we're going to impose some kind of rational bargaining structure. And McNamara is initially in the Kennedy administration taken by this, which is their ascendancy.

But then the services adapt.

Aaron 24:02

Yes, they do.

Jeffrey 24:02

And so McNamara sees this as a way of getting control of them. And the service is like, well, that's great. And by the way, if all I'm allowed to strike is military targets instead of cities, here is my enormous list of military targets. And so then McNamara has to come back with assured destruction, which in many ways is intention with counter value or with counterforce.

Aaron 24:22

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 24:24

In order to try to cap the number. And so you see McNamara go from no cities to assured destruction as a sizing criteria. And these two things are, you know, I think you can massage them so they can coexist, but they really are fundamentally in tension. Those are motivated by exerting civilian control over the nuclear enterprise, and those tensions still exist within the community.

We don't want our war plans to be based on the premise of a war crime, but we also don't want to have 30,000 nuclear weapons again, and we have never, I think, found a satisfactory Argument against service parochialism that doesn't run afoul of one of those two big rocks that we have to sail between.

Aaron 25:12

Yeah. Well, I mean, that's a theme of the show. If you've listened back to – I can't even remember which episodes we talked about it, but mutually assured destruction was – people sort of use that as an interspersed term with what deterrence is supposed to be. But like it That's actually what it wasn't. Do you know what I mean?

Like assured destruction was a way to try and – as you just said – That's what McNamara wanted it to be for a couple of years before he lost badly. That's right. So it was actually kind of a bad word. The other thing that I think actually applies completely to today, right, is that with this idea of counterforce and the holdback, right?

The holdback was always, you know, this getting back into mathematical and game theory and all that stuff. But the holdback was always, this leads yourself into like the rungs of escalation, right? Which is like how you can escalate, how you can do this, how you can do that, all this crazy stuff that gets put out about civil defense.

And that goes into deep, deep, deep, deep detail in the book, which is how you can improve American deterrence by improving civilian resiliency to nuclear strike. But it has residents now over Ukraine, right? Like we're still talking about this, which is like if Putin lights one off as a show of force or use one like at some place in eastern Ukraine, where does that take us on the escalation ladder?

And this is the same sorts of debates that play out over low yield. Tried with low yield, escalate to de-escalate. These entire concepts that we've talked about ad nauseum on this podcast are entirely wrapped up, I would argue, in this sort of debates. It's sort of the offspring of counterforce.

Jeffrey 26:54

Yeah, and I think ultimately it explains a bunch of problems that we have in our public policy debates about nuclear weapons because so many of these ideas are Complex and mathy. And to your earlier point, people can't do that math anymore, at least not in the community and certainly not in the policymaking community that would consume it.

But there are also these arcane arguments that were created in order to deal with this narrow issue of service prerogative, right? How do we come up with a number to make the Air Force, to cap the Air Force's arsenal? How do we come up with a strategy that lets the Navy get in the business? And so they're very, very esoteric arguments.

And what I think that means in practice is that by the time those concepts go to policymakers or academics or reporters, They don't really understand how these arguments were highly adapted to this bizarre budgetary environment. Not to pick on NPR, but every time a reporter on NPR starts talking about deterrence, it's clear that they have no idea that Tom Schelling invented deterrence and compelence as two different forms of coercion.

Like they literally are not using the terms correctly.

Aaron 28:11

And you can sort of – Not even NPR. Run this out to like people who talk about deterrence more broadly outside the nuclear spectrum and like how you deal with Iranian proxies. People don't understand the term.

Jeffrey 28:23

Right. So we have this situation I think where the mental models that policymakers have – Are fundamentally divorced from the deterrence models that nominally justify or explain or constrain this force, which I think then are in turn divorced from like What the military actually plans to do with the weapons. That's an enormous problem because people don't really understand deterrence at a high level.

They certainly don't understand how it is expressed in actual strategic concepts and then as best we can tell the way that the military plans to go about this is some total third universe of things.

Aaron 29:13

Should we like describe Schelling's idea of deterrence and compelence for the listeners? Can you do it in 10 seconds? I'm timing you.

Jeffrey 29:22

OK. I can. But before you start the timer, let me say I'm not sure that I fundamentally agree with Tom. I think this is a very useful construct he has created. But maybe Tom was right.

Aaron 29:34

OK. I'm going to start the timer. So let's see if I can do it in 10 seconds. 10 seconds. Go. Go.

Jeffrey 29:41

We use nuclear weapons for coercion, to make others do what we want. It is probably important to distinguish between two types of coercion. Deterrence, which is that you threaten to punish someone if they do something that they are not currently doing. And compelence, which is you threaten to punish someone if they do not stop something they are currently doing.

Those are probably different problems, and it's, I suspect, much easier to deter someone than to compel someone. If you believe these two things are, in fact, analytically distinguishable, and they may not be.

Aaron 30:17

45 seconds, but that's correct. Because, you know, that's it in a nutshell. It's said very well.

Jeffrey 30:28

By the way, we have a second problem that arises, which I think Wizards really helps explain.

Aaron 30:32

Okay, take it.

Jeffrey 30:32

This is why our field can't get any money. Oh, that's true. Because it's extremely hard. To explain to people who are not already deep in this field that, that how these deterrence concepts work because they don't get it. Like if you, like if you look at any of the work that the effective altruism community does on nuclear risk, it's, As misguided as SAC's original, you know, approach to nuclear weapons.

And you would need an entire ran-sized outreach effort. And, you know, there are some people who have tried to do this, like Peter Skoblik wrote, who's, I think, fundamentally a member of that community, wrote a really nice piece responding to some of the, like, not great effective altruism assessments of nuclear risk in Ukraine. So I don't want to, you know, like, Criticize the entire community, but whether like I, I experienced this at a cocktail party, which is if once I start talking to someone about nuclear weapons and deterrence, if they don't do this stuff full time, the popular ideas they have about it are like, a, they might be super bored, but if they're willing to listen, the popular ideas they have about it are so misguided. Yeah.

That it becomes impossible to make enough progress in a reasonable time. And that's death when you're asking somebody to write you a big check. Right? Like that's much harder than like, hi, I want to buy some mosquito nets, right, to reduce malaria deaths. Like that's really straightforward.

Aaron 32:12

This is complex. So looping this back to wizards, like the Air Force is the primary benefactor of these early studies. Like, Rand's Project Air Force. It still sticks around. They still do great work, by the way. Like, they're still around. These guys deserve some credit, I would say, for actually bucking the trends and going against the Air Force.

Do you know what I mean? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I hope that comes through in the podcast. One is that the funding does, in some respects, push you to rationalize how to use nuclear weapons, right? That's the exercise. That's the point of this exercise. But in the process of studying it, they realized, and I think quite correctly – Putting aside sort of the horrors of nuclear use in general, that Rand's original plan, which was fundamentally based on how they conceptualized the success of bombing in World War II, right, was bonkers.

And they really pushed hard. And it wasn't easy. I think maybe we glossed over this. It wasn't easy to tell them that their plans were bonkers and to convince them to move, right? And so it's this incremental change. And that's how we end up where we're at today. With is with how we conceptualize nuclear weapons today, even if it's very much based on sort of the work in the 1950s.

Yeah.

Jeffrey 33:40

I mean, I think it should be absolutely clear that what starts as a naked act of advocacy, the Air Force cannot fundamentally control. You get – one reason I think you get a lot of people going into the Kennedy administration. Obviously, they're ambitious and they want like bigger gigs. But they're also saying things the Air Force doesn't necessarily like.

Yes. And, you know, there turns out to be a really complicated set of interactions between these ideas that Rand has about counterforce and – The Air Force is falling out of love with them because it means they're going to have to – they're probably going to have to give up their bombers in favor of missiles. But then they sort of make their peace with it.

But they're kind of unhappy with Rand. And then the Navy comes along and at least early on, right, Navy systems can't do counterforce. And so then the Air Force gets excited again about counterforce as a cudgel against the Navy. So, you know, I do think that the services are adapting. As well. I think the Rand arguments in that period, although I think in some cases they're wrong, I think in some cases they're too precious or they're too fragile in terms of the number of assumptions that go into them and they're brittle in the face of reality, that they are still principle.

And the reason that a lot of that work holds up is conceptually it is very consistent. And even if you disagree with it, you know something when you work out why you disagree. And that is different than a lot of advocacy work, which is just, you know, throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. And that was not what the early Rand work was.

No. It's good stuff and it sucks that people can't do that same kind of work today even if, again, it's a little – the style is a little affected.

Aaron 35:36

People can do it but I just think the field moved away. This is documented in the book too. The field moves away from its mathematician origins. Rand does change its hiring processes, right? You do get more social scientists moving in.

Jeffrey 35:48

Rand is a very different place today.

Aaron 35:50

Rand is a very different place today. It has a great view.

Jeffrey 35:54

This is why if I do another historical fiction novel, I think I would set it at Rand, but I would set it at Rand in the 50s and 60s. In Los Angeles? Not today.

Aaron 36:07

In Los Angeles on Olympic Island.

Jeffrey 36:08

In Santa Monica. In Santa Monica.

Aaron 36:10

It's the place I always wanted to work, full disclosure, because who doesn't want to work in Santa Monica?

Jeffrey 36:16

Yeah, but it's got to be in the 60s. It's got to be in the 60s. You don't want to do it now.

Aaron 36:20

And you need that Mad Men vibe and sort of like these Hollywood Hills. I guess they would be like – I guess you can live in the Hollywood Hills and commute over there. You know, live up in the hills.

Jeffrey 36:29

Yeah, there was no traffic back then.

Aaron 36:30

Yeah, they lived in the Palisades, I guess.

Jeffrey 36:31

And like these views and they sort of like – Nancy Nimitz lived in like Topanga Canyon and somehow commuted to Santa Monica every day.

Aaron 36:39

Before the 405 was built. Well, no, this was right after the 405 was built. Yeah.

Jeffrey 36:46

I might have that wrong.

Aaron 36:47

That's close enough. Because if you go to Rand, D.C. today, you have a great view of the Pentagon City food court. Pentagon City Mall food court. But only on the fourth floor. It's the other ones I'm not allowed on. The last thing I'm going to say on this, right? These concepts in many ways underpin arguments for arms control.

Particularly at the lower levels. And what I mean by that is if you're going to do the holdback, right, to be real simplistic about it, the holdback and counterforce is that they naturally lead into arguments about limiting the number of targets, right? And if you limit the number of targets, You want reciprocal reductions. And the other thing that I would say that also led into this was the decline of SAC in general as sort of like the big macho man of the Air Force.

And I would argue that the decline of SAC was sort of like punctuated with the failures of the Air Force in the Vietnam War and changes that were made thereafter. And so culturally, the Air Force is a much different place. And it also leads into arms control. But I would say my concern now, right, is that with Ukraine and sort of the salience of nuclear weapons and popular culture returning without people really understanding the concepts, you can see the arguments, the crude arguments for nuclear weapons coming back and being more poignant as a political cudgel.

We have to build more because they're threatening us. And if arms control goes away, it's kind of like we reset the clock. You know what I'm saying?

Jeffrey 38:31

Yeah, it is absolutely the case that the simple ideas or the simplistic even ideas, right, are – they're the easiest ones to adopt. They're the easiest ones to explain. They appeal most directly to people's prejudices. And so they're the default ideas. And what that entire generation of academics, not just at Rand, but, you know, people like Tom Schelling at Harvard.

I guess Tom was at Rand at some point. But that whole crowd – Engaged in what I think was fundamentally an educational process to get people to think about the importance of deterrence or to foreground deterrence, deterring things stably, Producing the risk of surprise attack, creating incentives that reduce the risk of war. I mean, there was a whole educational process, which, you know, in Schelling's mind, leads to the ABM Treaty.

You know, and so this is like an educational thing they do, where they're like, very patiently over many years, like, yes, General, I know you think of it this way, but actually, it's this other way. And they got there. And I'm not sure we're there anymore. I fear, you know, we have to do that entire educational process again.

And it's daunting and it's a very different political environment. It's a very just different – Environment in terms of attitude toward elites and the services don't have the same prerogatives and competition and vulnerabilities that they did then, which created the opportunities for that work and that education. So, I think we have to redo that educational effort and I'm not sure that we're in as fertile a period.

As, as they were then. I mean, it may also be that I'm just not as smart as Tom Shelley and Bill Kaufman, but I, I'm going to tell myself you know, it's like a much, it's a much steeper hill this go round.

Aaron 40:37

Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that's also a plug that if the Air Force would like to fund this podcast, we don't ever say no.

Jeffrey 40:48

We'll take your money. We'll take your money. I mean, you may not like the resulting study, but you know.

Aaron 40:56

All right. Well, with that, my daughter is up and screaming her head off, wanting me to go get her from her nap. So did we hit everything and get on the positive note?

Jeffrey 41:07

I think we did. I think we did. I think we just want to remind people that for $5 a month, only three if you're a student, you can be an Arms Control Wonk patron at patreon.com forward slash ACW podcast. That's it. And you get access to all kinds of amazing and cool stuff like our Slack channel, which is consistently a revelation to me.

There's actually more content on there about our field than I can reasonably process in any given day. It is the Rand of our times, he says, with his tongue only slightly in cheek. They're good.

Aaron 41:49

They're good.

Jeffrey 41:50

They're good, the people. You just have to – They're freaking good.

Aaron 41:53

Yeah. In the metaverse, they would be in that Pacific Palisades condo with the Sputnik lamp, albeit the original. So with that – Aaron, thanks for joining me. Thanks, everybody, for listening. I have to go grab my screaming daughter.