The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

In writing on a subject as contemporary and controversial as nuclear strategy I expected to encounter critics among reviewers. But I was nonetheless surprised that a scientist of Lord Zuckerman’s reputation would be the author of such an ill-tempered and unfair review [NYR, July 18]. There are indeed errors in Counsels of War—as there are in any book. But those errors are not nearly as numerous, as “telling,” nor, indeed, as tangible as Lord Zuckerman would have your readers believe.

To cite his own examples: It is true that George Kistiakowsky taught chemistry—physical chemistry, incidentally—not physics at Harvard, as my book asserts, and it is technically claiming too much to credit him with “designing the plutonium core” of the Nagasaki bomb. But the memoirs from the Manhattan Project—as well as an interview Kistia-kowsky gave to Los Alamos shortly before his death—leave no doubt that “Kisty’s” scientific talents spanned several specializations, and that his contribution to the implosion design was key.

Regarding Lord Zuckerman’s dispute with William Borden’s sighting of a V-2 in flight: the reviewer’s quarrel is properly with Borden’s memory and not with my research. In his own book as well as in our interview, Borden was quite definite about the inspiration for his epiphany being a V-2 rocket and not a V-1 buzz bomb. (As a bomber pilot, Borden knew the difference. Incidentally, anyone who believes, as Lord Zuckerman evidently does, that it is impossible for a pilot to see a missile rising from its launch pad below would do well to speak to a veteran of the air raids over North Vietnam.) Also, contrary to the impression left by the review, it should be noted that Borden’s involvement in the Oppenheimer case is treated in detail in the book, and was one reason for the focus on Borden.

Concerning RE-8—the bomb-damage assessment center at Princes Risborough—it is certainly true that Lord Zuckerman is the best source for his opinion of that operation and its success, since he was one of its founders. However, the evidence in my book strongly suggests that his view conflicts with that of the Americans who were there, whose collective account (and whose admittedly Americanized spelling of “High Wickham,” by the way) was the source for that section of Counsels of War—which, lest anyone be confused, is a book about the civilian scientists and strategists on this side of the Atlantic.

This gets to my last and most serious objection to Lord Zuckerman’s essay. The errors—real and imagined—that he finds in Counsels of War can hardly account for the high dudgeon of his review. The explanation for that, I believe, becomes evident later in the piece.

Lord Zuckerman objects strongly to the book’s use of the term “expert.” According to his own definition, only he and the handful of others he names in the review—those “pragmatic scientists who knew the hard nuclear realities”—truly belong in that category. A definition so artificially constrained is not only ungenerous—I found Zuckerman’s dismissal of Bernard Brodie and the RAND strategists, for example, stunning—but irrelevant. “Expert” in Counsels of War merely refers to those who—for better or worse—have officially advised the American government on the subject of nuclear weapons. As readers of the book can discover for themselves, it is not necessarily a badge of honor. Seemingly, Lord Zuckerman’s real quarrel is not with the book itself but with one of its subjects—the civilian strategists—who, he plainly feels, have gotten more attention than the “pragmatic scientists,” and hence more than they deserve.

The other cause of Lord Zuckerman’s pique concerns the book’s neglect of the British side of the story. I plead guilty to this charge. Lord Zuckerman is entirely right when he claims that Prime Minister Harold Macmillan provided a vital impetus to the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963. However, Counsels of War—as is noted on its cover and in the Prologue—is a book about the scientists, strategists, and statesmen in this country who have influenced and helped to determine their government nuclear weapons policy. It does not pretend to be a compendium of national contributions to unclear strategy (which a countryman of Lord Zuckerman’s has already written), or an omnibus history of the worldwide nuclear arms race. While it is only proper to hold authors to account for what is in their books, it is unfair and at least a bit absurd to be pilloried for the book one didn’t write.

As an author in an area of literature and politics where polemic has become the rule, I took some ironic satisfaction from Lord Zuckerman’s complaint that he “could find no purpose or message” in my book—since my intent, from the outset, was simply to tell the story of the experts on the bomb and not to argue a case. In an unintended way, however, I feel his review gives support to the modest thesis of Counsels of War—which will be found in the Prologue, on page xvi, by the way—that the nuclear debate “is not primarily or even importantly a debate over secret numbers, mysterious acronyms, or rival technical analyses…[but] is, instead, a competition between deeply held and often unstated beliefs—some of which only tangentially concern nuclear weapons.”

Gregg Herken

Institute of Global Conflict and Cooperation

University of California, Santa Cruz

To the Editors:

So much nonsense has been published in recent times by reputable publishing houses and journals of review about RAND in general, and in particular the RAND 1951-1953 study of how to base strategic bombers in the 1950s that it is worth at least suggesting to readers (not to say editors) the comic extent of the confusion.

Gregg Herken’s Counsels of War seemed to reach the peak of absurdity until Lord Zuckerman’s review of it in The New York Review climbed daring new heights. Zuckerman notes Herken’s woozy way with even simple facts. He devotes over three long columns to Herken’s mistakes about the British (misspelling “High Wycombs,” putting Edmund Burke in the wrong century, attributing to Americans methods of bomb damage assessment which, Zuckerman says, were developed in a British unit co-founded by Zuckerman, etc.). Bad. But minor compared to Herken’s other gaffes: I counted over twenty howlers in three pages about the RAND Base Study, many on essentials.

Zuckerman, however, can’t get straight what Herken said even where Herken got it fairly straight. Where he adds his own twist to Herken’s errors, disentangling all the knots would be an awesome job. He misrepresents Bernard Brodie, Herman Kahn and others, but I will illustrate only some of his key absurdities about the research on strategic forces carried on by Fred Hoffman, Robert Lutz, John O’Sullivan, Harry Rowen and myself.

Zuckerman’s main charge is that such RAND work was done in isolation, far from military and other policy makers (especially at the “upper reaches”), by “instant experts” with no knowledge of “logistics…or the characteristic and limitations of weapons systems” who applied “game theory and probability calculations”; that such work affected “public opinion” but had “no effect whatever on nuclear arms policy or any other kind of policy” and that the Base Study said nothing that SAC didn’t already know. An old tale with new twists. About twenty-five years ago P.M.S. Blackett, a Nobel physicist and able wartime operational researcher, said much the same to an audience of wartime colleagues (C.P. Snow, R.H.S. Crossman, et al.) about the supposed dire effects of game theory and the military irrelevance of my and other RAND work; and I answered a fraction of his many misunderstandings in “Sin and Games in America.”¹

But Blackett knew nothing of the RAND Study on the basing of the 1950s bomber force; nor anything about the successor study, R-290, which dealt with protecting a mixed force of missiles and bombers in the 1960s against potential attack by missiles and bombers. He couldn’t. They were then Top Secret with No Foreign Distribution. The Base Study has been declassified since 1962, and R-290 for almost as long, but Zuckerman in 1985 displays no more knowledge of the subject of his comments than Blackett. It doesn’t help Zuckerman that Herken, his source on these two studies, also hasn’t read them. (Herken gets even the number of pages in the Base Study wrong, and Zuckerman repeats him.)

The Base Study responded to a question proposed by the Air Force’s Assistant for Bases in the spring of 1951 on how best to base the bomber force for the rest of the decade in order to meet targeting objectives generated by the need to defend Western Europe. For the programmed force to destroy projected targets while under attack by enemy bombers, fighters and local defenses clearly would be an enormously complex task. The force would consist mainly of about 1,500 B-47 jets with a combat radius of 2,100 nautical miles and much smaller numbers of B-36s or B-52s which were longer range but still of relatively short combat radius for the job they were to perform. The planned alternative target sets varied in distance from US bases along plausible routes of approach and penetration of enemy defenses from a little over 3,000 to over 6,000 nautical miles. One of our tasks was to evaluate the role of the tanker aircraft likely to be available and of overseas bases worldwide.

The questions we and the Air Force asked were not abstract—whether bombers were in general subject to attack on the ground by bombers as well as in flight by fighters and local defenses. Almost everyone knew that, though Herken suggests that they didn’t and Zuckerman that I thought they didn’t. The genuine questions concerned whether the actual bomber force as programmed with its projected bases, radar cover and mode of operation was adequately designed to avoid potential disruption by ground attack as well as to overcome the many other formidable obstacles to accomplishing its mission. And whether radically different methods of basing and operation could be substantially more cost-effective. Such questions could not be answered by casual observation or by counting the number of locations at which SAC was based, or by citing World War II anecdotes. They required concrete and sustained empirical investigation.

For two years, before issuing a summary report and exposing the results to the scrutiny of experienced officers in the Air Staff, SAC and other relevant field commands, and for three years before issuing the final report, we looked systematically and in great detail at the problem of bringing bombs, bombers, bomber crews and tanker aircraft together with equipment in combat-ready condition and getting bombers to targets and back along routes that minimized their exposure to defenses. That included problems of equipment reliability, radar warning, communications and control, and above all logistics. As the very first page of the study’s summary says, we examined the joint effects of these many factors on “the costs of extending bomber radius; on how the enemy may deploy his defenses, and the numbers of our bombers lost to enemy fighters; on logistics costs; and on base vulnerability and our probable loss of bombers on the ground.” We did not begin with any theory about the vulnerability of SAC. The second-strike theory of deterrence grew out of this empirical study; we didn’t start with it. And “game theory” (pace Blackett, C.P. Snow and Zuckerman) played no role at all.