Nukes R Us

Two years after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945, the British physicist P.M.S. Blackett established the fundamental relationship between nuclear weapons and the Cold War. “So we may conclude,” he wrote in “Fear, War and the Bomb,” “that the dropping of the atomic bombs was not so much the last military act of the second World War as the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia now in progress.”

Whatever one thinks of Blackett’s hypothesis that nuclear weapons exacerbated the Cold War, it is impossible to deny his underlying observation: After Hiroshima, nuclear weapons and the Cold War were fraternal twins in the house of American history. It should not come as a surprise, therefore, as reading “Atomic Audit” suggests, that these difficult siblings shared that most basic of American family values: When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.

Indeed, shopping--specifically shopping for nuclear weapons systems--is what “Atomic Audit” is about. But in its descriptions and analyses of our compulsion to accumulate ever more and “better” nuclear weapons, “Audit” provides ample material for a deeper understanding of our national character. After all, in our society, we are what we buy, and we are also what we pay for our purchases. According to editor Stephen I. Schwartz, his nine co-editors and his several additional contributing authors, the nuclear arms race was largely an intramural affair, in which we raced against ourselves, buying more than we needed and paying too much for what we got. Americans appear to be suckers for nuclear arms salesmen.

As Michael Armacost, president of the Brookings Institution, which “hosted” the project, writes in his foreword, “a central finding” of this study is that “government officials made little effort to ensure that limited economic resources were used as efficiently as possible so that nuclear deterrence could be achieved at the least cost to taxpayers.” Not much of a surprise in an age when the Pentagon forked over thousands of dollars for a single coffeepot and toilet seat.

The information for this massive analysis of our frenzied nuclear shopping sprees over the last 5.8 decades was gathered from an extensive, though not quite complete, bibliography of secondary studies, a very long list of congressional documents and hearings and numerous Department of Defense documents that the authors had declassified--most prominently the “Future Years Defense Program” database. “Atomic Audit” offers answers to myriad economic questions, including the ones that were not answered (even when Congress asked for answers) during the Cold War. It is required owning (reading is another level of commitment) for anyone concerned with nuclear issues or interested in the economies of the paranoid possession of nuclear weapons by those who run our national security state. I would also recommend marketing the book in Islamabad and New Delhi.

The dollar amounts are staggering for anyone who thinks merely in terms of hundreds of millions of dollars. Since 1940, Americans have spent between $5.5 trillion and $5.8 trillion in 1996 dollars on nuclear weapons-related programs. To bring some perspective to this galactic number, the authors point out that if that sum had been distributed evenly at the start of 1998 to everyone living in the United States, each of us would have received a check for $21,646.

But if a dollar was a terrible thing to waste during the Cold War, what are we to think about the wasteful nuclear shopping that continues today? The Cold War may be officially brain-dead, but its reflexes continue to twitch. Witness not only the expansion of NATO but our nation’s estimated current spending of $35 billion annually on nuclear weapons. (I write “estimated” because the authors note that no procedure has ever been devised for ascertaining the full costs of nuclear weapons on an annual basis.)

Moreover, we still have 10,000 nuclear weapons that are only seconds away from being targeted at Russian cities. But what about the 1994 American-Russian treaty in which we agreed to aim our ballistic missiles at the Arctic Ocean? As we learn from one of the many interesting footnotes in “Atomic Audit,” switching targets takes about as much time as “changing television channels by using a remote control.”

Throughout the information-packed pages of “Atomic Audit’ are details about the costs, composition, procurement procedures, defense efforts, targeting practices, nuclear secrecy problems, congressional oversight failures and much else to satisfy the intellectual or political appetites of nuclear weapons information junkies. For those less gluttonous, there are helpful summaries in most of the 11 chapters that can be nibbled with sufficient benefit to justify the price of this encyclopedic tome. Important information also is elaborated and commented upon in the footnotes (don’t skip the footnotes) and, for those not graph- or chart-reading impaired, there are more details in the numerous bars, circles, curves and lists in separate boxes throughout the text and the appendixes.

Finally, for the older members of the Nuclear Toys R Us population nostalgic for a Life magazine-like presentation, there is a modest offering of marginally relevant photographs of bombs and bombers, scientists and soldiers, missiles, submarines and nuclear targets. My favorite photograph was taken in Red Square in May 1988 during President Reagan’s visit to Moscow. His aide, a Navy lieutenant commander, is standing near him with a strap that leads from his wrist to the “Football” (the briefcase that carries the details of the U.S. nuclear war plans). The many ironies (and idiocies) implicit in this photograph appear to have escaped the authors, a point that is unfortunately true for the study as a whole.

Although “Atomic Audit’s” subtitle promises revelations about the costs and consequences of U.S. nuclear weapons, it entirely avoids any consequences beyond the government’s numerous failures to control costs. But what is the relevance of an economic analysis that ignores the political, social and cultural consequences of its subject?

Consider Chapter 3, “Targeting and Controlling the Bomb.” It begins with a quotation from political scientist Robert Dahl. “No decision can be more fateful for Americans, and for the world,” Dahl notes, “than decisions about nuclear weapons. Yet these decisions have largely escaped the control of the democratic process.” The implication is that American citizens are not responsible for the excesses of American nuclear policy.

But that echoes too closely the argument that German citizens bore no responsibility for the Holocaust. Certainly the American public neither voted directly on particular weapons systems nor on which Soviet cities or Polish towns would be added to the nuclear weapons target list. Yet, since 1948, in every year divisible by four, the role of nuclear weapons was debated and voted upon--and the public supported the nuclear arms racers. In 1952 and 1956, Adlai Stevenson’s anti-nuclear positions clearly contributed to his defeat. And in 1980, on the other side of the Cold War and political spectrum, Reagan’s explicit commitments to expanding our nuclear arsenal contributed to his victories. In between, nuclear weapons enjoyed the support of the majority, and that majority consistently maligned the anti-nuclear movement, as Lawrence Wittner makes clear in his recent book about that movement, “Resisting the Bomb,” published last December by Stanford University Press.

Like the scientists who designed nuclear weapons, the industrialists who made them, the military that deployed them, the politicians who voted for them and the academics who rationalized them, the authors of “Atomic Audit” miss the point. It isn’t that we paid too much money for our nuclear weapons; it’s that we bought them, embraced them and loved them and appear all too willing to continue this relationship. The subtitle of Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant movie “Dr. Strangelove” (1964)--”How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”--says more about what is fundamentally wrong with our relationship to nuclear weapons than all the statistics in “Atomic Audit.” By focusing on the costs of nuclear arms, this audit never reveals the bottom line, the deepest consequences of their impact.

In March 1986, E.L. Doctorow wrote an essay on the American state of mind for the Nation magazine that did get to the essence of our obsession with nuclear weapons. “Everything I’ve noted here,” he concluded, “from the young writers impatient of a long creative life to the deconstruction of our critics; every variety of intellectual retreat, of conformism, every small loss of moral acuity, I see collectively as the secret story of American life under the bomb. We have had the bomb on our minds since 1945. It was first our weaponry and then our diplomacy, and now it’s our economy. How can we suppose that something so monstrously powerful would not, after 40 years, compose our identity?”

We, the American people, have paid a terrible price for our nuclear obsession, a price that we doggedly fail to confront, yet one that continues to distort our identity. Beginning in the 1950s, with such defense policies as the “New Look” and the doctrine of “Massive Retaliation,” the Eisenhower administration, with the consent and support of the majority of the American people, began the process of establishing a structure, a nuclear system, for killing six times 6 million people, should the Soviets cross one of the forbidden boundaries. The first use of nuclear weapons, not retaliation, was the bedrock of these policies. By the 1960s, the Strategic Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), which eventually targeted every town and city of any consequence behind the Iron Curtain, had become a doomsday machine.

What sort of society righteously plans to murder 200 million to 400 million people in the name of freedom? How will future generations of Americans deal with this part of their Cold War history? In 1994, the Smithsonian Institution demonstrated a pusillanimous political response: By refusing to display documents that described the decision-making process that led to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, America’s national museum adopted the quintessential denial tacit of the Nuclear Age, “Duck and Cover.” “Atomic Audit,” on the other hand, despite its narrow economic focus, is a giant step in the opposite direction--toward integrity. It is only through the unflinching study of our past behavior that we can expect to create a more humane and democratic future. That, at least, is what we told the Germans at Nuremberg.