Sometimes I am amazed that we are able to survive our own lunacy. From our not so distant past, Wired brings us the tale of Operation Giant Lance, the ultimate expression of Nixon and Kissinger's strategy of "premeditated madness."
In 1969, Nixon was frustrated that so little progress had been made on ending the war in Vietnam. So he and his buddy Harry came up with a plan: Use a squadron of nuclear-armed B-52s to scare the Russians into forcing the North Vietnamese to settle up.
Nixon decided to try something new: threaten the Soviet Union with a massive nuclear strike and make its leaders think he was crazy enough to go through with it. His hope was that the Soviets would be so frightened of events spinning out of control that they would strong-arm Hanoi, telling the North Vietnamese to start making concessions at the negotiating table or risk losing Soviet military support.
Codenamed Giant Lance, Nixon's plan was the culmination of a strategy of premeditated madness he had developed with national security adviser Henry Kissinger. The details of this episode remained secret for 35 years and have never been fully told. Now, thanks to documents released through the Freedom of Information Act, it's clear that Giant Lance was the leading example of what historians came to call the "madman theory": Nixon's notion that faked, finger-on-the-button rage could bring the Soviets to heel.Nixon and Kissinger put the plan in motion on October 10, sending the US military's Strategic Air Command an urgent order to prepare for a possible confrontation: They wanted the most powerful thermonuclear weapons in the US arsenal readied for immediate use against the Soviet Union. The mission was so secretive that even senior military officers following the orders -- including the SAC commander himself -- were not informed of its true purpose.
After their launch, the B-52s pressed against Soviet airspace for three days. They skirted enemy territory, challenging defenses and taunting Soviet aircraft. The pilots remained on alert, prepared to drop their bombs if ordered. The Soviets likely knew about the threat as it was unfolding: Their radar picked up the planes early in their flight paths, and their spies monitored American bases. They knew the bombers were armed with nuclear weapons, because they could determine their weight from takeoff patterns and fuel use. In past years, the US had kept nuclear-armed planes in the air as a possible deterrent (if the Soviets blew up all of our air bases in a surprise attack, we'd still be able to respond). But in 1968, the Pentagon publicly banned that practice -- so the Soviets wouldn't have thought the 18 planes were part of a patrol. Secretary of defense Melvin Laird, who opposed the operation, worried that the Soviets would either interpret Giant Lance as an attack, causing catastrophe, or as a bluff, making Washington look weak.
As the story goes on to detail, a strategy of "premeditated madness" was really just Game Theory come to life. Nuclear weapons, the game theorists argued, were useless if they were so scary that they couldn't be used as part of a bluff. This was the initial idea behind the strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), but a new generation of game theorists, Kissinger among them, thought that MAD didn't go nearly far enough. The problem, as they saw it, was simple: if the Soviets knew we weren't crazy enough to destroy the world, they would ignore our nuclear capability entirely, working bit by bit in different countries and different regions to roll back our sphere of influence. Accepting MAD, they argued, made the US weak, too weak to hold the Soviets off. What was needed, and what Giant Lance was intended to do, was an action that would convince the Soviets that we just might be crazy enough to blow up the world.
Here's a bit more from Wired on how all this works:
Consider a game that theorist Thomas Schelling described to his students at Harvard in the '60s: You're standing at the edge of a cliff, chained by the ankle to another person. As soon as one of you cries uncle, you'll both be released, and whoever remained silent will get a large prize. What do you do? You can't push the other person off the cliff, because then you'll die, too. But you can dance and walk closer and closer to the edge. If you're willing to show that you'll brave a certain amount of risk, your partner may concede -- and you might win the prize. But if you convince your adversary that you're crazy and liable to hop off in any direction at any moment, he'll probably cry uncle immediately. If the US appeared reckless, impatient, even insane, rivals might accept bargains they would have rejected under normal conditions. In terms of game theory, a new equilibrium would emerge as leaders in Moscow, Hanoi, and Havana contemplated how terrible things could become if they provoked an out-of-control president to experiment with the awful weapons at his disposal.
The nuclear-armed B-52 flights near Soviet territory appeared to be a direct application of this kind of game theory. H. R. Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff, wrote in his diary that Kissinger believed evidence of US irrationality would "jar the Soviets and North Vietnam." Nixon encouraged Kissinger to expand this approach. "If the Vietnam thing is raised" in conversations with Moscow, Nixon advised, Kissinger should "shake his head and say, 'I am sorry, Mr. Ambassador, but [the president] is out of control." Nixon told Haldeman: "I want the North Vietnamese to believe that I've reached the point that I might do anything to stop the war. We'll just slip the word to them that for God's sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can't restrain him when he is angry -- and he has his hand on the nuclear button' -- and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace."
Following a series of high level diplomatic meeting in which Nixon did everything possible to convince Soviet officials that he was in fact crazy enough to destroy the world. Nixon and Kissinger, convinced they had scored a huge diplomatic success, called the bombers off but continued their madman pose.
Now, aside from the fact that this is a fascinating historical anecdote, why pass all this along now? Wired:
More than 35 years after Giant Lance, I asked Kissinger about it during a long lunch at the Four Seasons Grill in New York. Why, I asked, did they risk nuclear war back in October 1969? He paused over his salad, surprised that I knew so much about this episode, and measured his words carefully. "Something had to be done," he explained, to back up threats the US had made and to push the Soviets for help in Vietnam. Kissinger had suggested the nuclear maneuvers to give the president more leverage in negotiations. It was an articulation of the game theory he had studied before coming to power. "What were [the Soviets] going to do?" Kissinger said dismissively.But what if things had gone terribly wrong -- if the Soviets had overreacted, if a B-52 had crashed, if one of the hastily loaded warheads had exploded? Kissinger demurred. Denying that there was ever a madman theory in operation, he emphasized that Giant Lance was designed to be a warning, not a provocation to war. The operation was designed to be safe. And in any case, he said, firm resolve is essential to policymaking
"Firm resolve is essential to policymaking." The names, dates, and faces may have changed, but the basic ideas have not. To this day, our foreign policy is set by people who believe that clever academic theories, combined with a manly pose of firm resolve and toughness, can solve the worlds problems. It is nonsense, of course, but that doesn't stop them from living it.
The world is not a game. We have but one planet, and in this life, but one chance to get things right. Call me crazy, idealistic, or naive, but I think the best way to solve our problems and settle or differences is to talk to one another, and not to see which one of us can scare the other into giving in first.
Premeditated madness? That's one way to describe it. State-sanctioned terror would seem to me to be more apt. And correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that what we are supposed to be against?
UPDATE: No sooner had I posted this than someone emailed me to say "what about Reagan?" Didn't we win the Cold War by scaring the Soviets into submission.
Erm.... No. We most certainly did not. We won the Cold War through a combination of diplomatic pressure, ongoing negotiation, and economic and military superiority. Reagan's ideas of "peace through strength" were an almost explicit rejection of Kissinger's policies. Reagan despised Kissinger.
So no, sorry... try again, conservative critics. You'll have to do better than that.
UPDATE III: One of my long-time readers rightly notes that I left a key element out of my explanation for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Namely, that the Soviet Communist system was unsustainable and collapsed in no small part all on its own. Very true, and very much worth mentioning. I know that I understand that was a large part of why Reagan's strategy succeeded, but I made no effort whatsoever to make that clear, and I should have. If I'm going to stress accuracy, I should be accurate!
UPDATE II: Or to put it all another way... Brad DeLong reports from a Thomas Schelling Symposium on Deterrence at Berkeley:
In the 1580s, Sir Francis Walsingham argued in Queen Elizabeth's Privy Council that England should have no hesitation in aiding the fundamentalist Protestant insurgents in the Low Countries. If the global superpower Spain against which the insurgents were fighting were to take offense and respond by sending a Spanish Armada into the English Channel, Jesus Christ and the Archangel Michael themselves would come down from heaven and fight on the side of the English. And Queen Elizabeth enthusiasically engaged in brinkmanship in the Low Countries in the 1580s.
If I were an Israeli or Iranian or Indian or Pakistani politician today, I would think of myself as primarily playing a cooperative, positive-sum game with my fellow politicians, a game in which the object is to minimize the risks that our own colonels will think like Sir Francis Walsingham, and believe that God will protect them whatever they do.
Nothing new under the sun....
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