Part One - Part Three - Part Four - Part Five
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Part Two: Report From Iron Mountain
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STATEMENT BY "JOHN DOE"
Contrary to the decision of the Special Study Group, of which I was a member, I
have arranged for the general release of our Report. I am grateful to Mr.
Leonard C. Lewin for his invaluable assistance in making this possible, and to
The Dial Press for accepting the challenge of publication. Responsibility for
taking this step, however, is mine and mine alone.
I am well aware that my action may be taken as a breach of faith by some of my
former colleagues. But in my view my responsibility to the society for which I
am a part supersedes any self-assumed obligation on the part of fifteen
individual men. Since our Report can be considered on its merits, it is not
necessary for me to disclose their identity to accomplish my purpose. Yet I
gladly abandon my own anonymity if it were possible to do so without at the same
time comprising theirs, to defend our work publicly if and when they release me
from this personal bond.
But this is secondary. What is needed now, and needed badly, is widespread
public discussion and debate about the elements of war and the problems of
peace. I hope that publication of this Report will serve to initiate it.
THE REPORT OF THE SPECIAL STUDY GROUP
LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL
To the convener of this Group:
Attached is the Report of the Special Study Group established by you in August,
1963, 1) to consider the problems involved in the contingency of a transition to
a general condition of peace, and 2) to recommend procedures for dealing with
this contingency. For the convenience of non-technical readers we have elected to
submit our statistical supporting data, totaling 604 exhibits, separately, as
well as a preliminary manual of the "peace games" method devised during the
course of our study.
We have completed our assignment to the best of our ability, subject to the
limitations of time and resources available to us. Our conclusions of fact and
our recommendations are unanimous; those of us who differ in certain secondary
respects from the findings set forth herein do not consider these differences
sufficient to warrant the filing of a minority report. It is our earnest hope
that the fruits of our deliberations will be of value to our government in its
efforts to provide leadership to the nation in solving the complex and
far-reaching problems we have examined, and that our recommendations for
subsequent Presidential action in this area will be adopted.
Because of the unusual circumstances surrounding the establishment of this
Group, and in view of the nature of its findings, we do not recommend that this
Report be released for publication. It is our affirmative judgment that such
action would not be in the public interest. The uncertain advantages of public
discussion of our conclusions and recommendations are, in our opinion, greatly
outweighed by the clear and predictable danger of a crisis in public confidence
which untimely publication of this Report might be expected to provoke. The
likelihood that a lay reader, unexposed to the exigencies of higher political or
military responsibility, will misconstrue the purpose of this project, and the
intent of its participants, seems obvious. We urge that circulation of this
Report be closely restricted to those whose responsibilities require that they
be apprised of its contents.
We deeply regret that the necessity of anonymity, a prerequisite to our Group's
unhindered pursuit of its objectives, precludes proper acknowledgment of our
gratitude to the many persons in and out of government who contributed so
greatly to our work.
FOR THE SPECIAL STUDY GROUP
[signature withheld for publication]
30 SEPTEMBER, 1966
INTRODUCTION
The Report which follows summarizes the results of a two-and-a-half-year study
of the broad problems to be anticipated in the event of general transformation
of American society to a condition lacking its most critical current
characteristics: its capability and readiness to make war when doing so is
judged necessary or desirable by its political leadership.
Our work has been predicated on the belief that some kind of general peace may
soon be negotiable. The de facto admission of Communist China into the United
Nations now appears to be only a few years away at most. It has become
increasingly manifest that conflicts of American national interest with those of
China and the Soviet Union are susceptible of political solution, despite the
superficial contradictions of the current Vietnam war, of the threats of an
attack on China, and of the necessarily hostile tenor of day-to-day foreign
policy statements. It is also obvious that differences involving other nations
can be readily resolved by the three great powers whenever they arrive at a
stable peace among themselves. It is not necessary, for the purposes of our
study, to assume that a general detente of this sort will come about---and we
make no such argument--but only that it may.
It is surely no exaggeration to say that a condition of general world peace
would lead to changes in the social structures of the nations of the world of
unparalleled and revolutionary magnitude. The economic impact of general
disarmament, to name only the most obvious consequence of peace, would revise
the production and distribution patterns of the globe to a degree that would
make changes of the past fifty years seem insignificant. Political,
sociological, cultural, and ecological changes would be equally far-reaching.
What has motivated our study of these contingencies has been the growing sense
of thoughtful men in and out of government that the world is totally unprepared
to meet the demands of such a situation.
We had originally planned, when our study was initiated, to address ourselves to
these two broad questions and their components: What can be expected if peace
comes? What should we be prepared to do about it? But as our investigation
proceeded, it became apparent that certain other questions had to be faced.
What, for instance, are the real functions of war in modern societies, beyond
the ostensible ones of defending and advancing the "national interests" of
nations? In the absence of war, what other institutions exist or might be
devised to fulfill these functions? Granting that a "peaceful" settlement of
disputes is within the range of current international relationships, is the
abolition of war, in the broad sense, really possible? If so, is it necessarily
desirable, in terms of social stability? If not, what can be done to improve the
operation of our social system in respect to its war-readiness?
The word peace, as we have used it in the following pages, describes a
permanent, or quasi-permanent, condition entirely free from the national
exercise, or contemplation, of any form of the organized social violence, or
threat of violence, generally known as war. It implies total and general
disarmament. It is not used to describe the more familiar condition of "cold
war," "armed peace," or other mere respite, long or short, from armed conflict.
Nor is it used simply as a synonym for the political settlement of international
differences. The magnitude of modern means of mass destruction and the speed of
modern communications require the unqualified working definition given above;
only a generation ago such an absolute description would have seemed utopian
rather than pragmatic. Today, any modification of this definition would render
it almost worthless for our purpose. By the same standard, we have used the word
war to apply interchangeably to conventional ("hot") war, to the general
condition of war preparation or war readiness, and to the general "war system."
The sense intended is made clear in context.
The first section of our Report deals with its scope and with the assumptions on
which our study was based. The second considers the effects of disarmament on
the economy, the subject of most peace research to date. The third takes up
so-called "disarmament scenarios" which have been proposed. The fourth, fifth,
and sixth examine the nonmilitary functions of war and the problems they raise
for a viable transition to peace; here will be found some indications of the
true dimensions of the problem, not previously coordinated in any other study.
In the seventh section we summarize our findings, and in the eight we set forth
our recommendations for what we believe to be a practical and necessary course
of action.
SECTION 1 - SCOPE OF THE STUDY
When The Special Study Group was established in August, 1963, its members were
instructed to govern their deliberations in accordance with three principal
criteria. Briefly stated, they were these: 1) military-style objectivity; 2)
avoidance of preconceived value assumptions; 3) inclusion of all revelant areas
of theory and data.
These guideposts are by no means as obvious as they may appear at first glance,
and we believe it necessary to indicate clearly how they were to inform our
work. For they express succinctly the limitations of previous "peace studies,"
and imply the nature of both government and unofficial dissatisfaction with
these earlier efforts. It is not our intention here to minimize the significance
of the work of our predecessors, or to belittle the quality of their
contributions. What we have tried to do, and believe we have done, is extend
their scope. We hope that our conclusions may serve in turn as a starting point
for still broader and more detailed examinations of every aspect of the problems
of transition to peace and of the questions which must be answered before such a
transition can be allowed to get under way.
It is a truism that objectivity is more often an intention expressed than an
attitude achieved, but the intention---conscious, unambiguous, and constantly
self-critical -- is a precondition to its achievement.
We believe it no accident that we were charged to use a "military contingency"
model for our study, and we owe a considerable debt to the civilian war planning
agencies for their pioneering work in the objective examination of the
contingencies of nuclear war. There is no such precedent in the peace studies.
Much of the usefulness of even the most elaborate and carefully reasoned
programs for economic conversion to peace, for example, has been vitiated by a
wishful eagerness to demonstrate that peace is not only possible, but even cheap
or easy.
One official report is replete with references to the critical role of "dynamic
optimism" on economic developments, and goes on to submit, as evidence, that it
"would be hard to imagine that the American people would not respond very
positively to an agreed and safeguarded program to substitute an international
rule of law and order," etc.
Another line of argument frequently taken is that disarmament would entail
comparatively little disruption of the economy, since it need only be partial;
we will deal with this approach later.
Yet genuine objectivity in war studies is often criticized as inhuman. As Herman
Kahn, the writer on strategic studies best known to the general public, put it:
"Critics frequently object to the icy rationality of the Hudson Institute, the
Rand Corporation, and other such organizations. I'm always tempted to ask in
reply, `Would you prefer a warm, human error? Do you feel better with a nice
emotional mistake?'"
And, as Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara has pointed out, in reference to
facing up to the possibility of nuclear war, "Some people are afraid even to
look over the edge. But in a thermonuclear war we cannot afford any political
acrophobia." Surely it would be self-evident that this applies equally to the
opposite prospect, but so far no one has taken more than a timid glance over the
brink of peace.
An intention to avoid preconceived value judgments is if anything even more
productive of self-delusion. We claim no immunity, as individuals, from this
type of bias, but we have made a continuously self-conscious effort to deal with
the problems of peace without, for example, considering that a condition of
peace is per se "good" or "bad." This has not been easy, but it has been
obligatory; to our knowledge, it has not been done before. Previous studies have
taken the desirability of peace, the importance of human life, the superiority
of democratic institutions, the greatest "good" for the greatest number, the
"dignity" of the individual, the desirability of maximum health and longevity,
and other such wishful premises as axiomatic values necessary for the
justification of a study of peace issues.
We have not found them so.
We have attempted to apply the standards of physical science to our thinking,
the principal characteristic of which is not quantification, as is popularly
believd, but that, in Whitehead's words, "...it ignores all judgments of value;
for instance, all esthetic and moral judgments." Yet it is obvious that any
serious investigation of a problem, however "pure," must be informed by some
normative standard. In this case it has been simply the survival of human
society in general, of American society in particular, and, as a corollary to
survival, the stability of this society.
It is interesting, we believe, to note that the most dispassionate planners of
nuclear strategy also recognize that the stability of society is the one bedrock
value that cannot be avoided. Secretary McNamara has defended the need for
American nuclear superiority on the grounds that it "makes possible a strategy
designed to preserve the fabric of our societies if war should occur." A former
member of the Department of State policy planning staff goes further. "A more
precise word for peace, in terms of the practical world, is stability. ... Today
the great nuclear panoplies are essential elements in such stability as exists.
Our present purpose must be to continue the process of learning how to live with
them." We, of course, do not equate stability with peace, but we accept it as
the one common assumed objective of both peace and war.
The third criterion-breadth-has taken us still farther afield from peace studies
made to date. It is obvious to any layman that the economic patterns of a
warless world will be drastically different from those we live with today, and
it is equally obvious that the political relationships of nations will not be
those we have learned to take for granted, sometimes described as a global
version of the adversary system of our common law. But the social implications
of peace extend far beyond its putative effects on national economics and
international relations. As we shall show, the relevance of peace and war to the
internal political organization of societies, to the sociological relationships
of their members, to psychological motivations, to ecological processes, and to
cultural values is equally profound. More important, it is equally critical in
assaying the consequences of a transition to peace, and in determining the
feasibility of any transition at all.
It is not surprising that these less obvious factors have been generally ignored
in peace research. They have not lent themselves to systematic analysis. They
have been difficult, perhaps impossible, to measure with any degree of assurance
that estimates of their effects could be depended on. They are "intangibles,"
but only in the sense that abstract concepts in mathematics are intangible
compared to those which can be quantified. Economic factors, on the other hand,
can be measured, at least superficialy; and international relationships can be
verbalized, like law, into logical sequences.
We do not claim that we have discovered an infallible way of measuring these
other factors, or of assigning them precise weights in the equation of
transition. But we believe we have taken their relative importance into account
to this extent: we have removed them from the category of the "intangible,"
hence scientifically suspect and therefore somehow of secondary importance, and
brought them out into the realm of the objective. The result, we believe,
provides a context of realism for the discussion of the issues relating to the
possible transition to peace which up to now has been missing.
This is not to say that we presume to have found the answers we were seeking.
But we believe that our emphasis on breadth of scope has made it at least
possible to begin to understand the questions.
SECTION 2 - DISARMAMENT AND THE ECONOMY
In this section we shall briefly examine some of the common features of the
studies that have been published dealing with one or another aspect of the
expected impact of disarmament on the American economy. Whether disarmament is
considered as a by-product of peace or as its precondition, its effect on the
national economy will in either case be the most immediately felt of its
consequences. The quasi-mensurable quality of economic manifestations has given
rise to more detailed speculation in this area than in any other.
General agreement prevails in respect to the more important economic problems
that general disarmament would raise. A short survey of these problems, rather
than a detailed critique of their comparative significance, is sufficient for
our purposes in this Report.
The first factor is that of size. The "world war industry," as one writer has
aptly caled it, accounts for approximately a tenth of the output of the world's
total economy. Although this figure is subject to fluctuation, the causes of
which are themselves subject to regional variation, it tends to hold fairly
steady. The United States, as the world's richest nation, not only accounts for
the largest single share of this expense, currently upward of $60 billion a
year, but also "...has devoted a higher proportion of its gross national product
to its military establishment than any other major free world nation. This was
true even before our increased expenditures in Southeast Asia." Plans for
economic conversion that minimize the economic magnitude of the problem do so
only by rationalizing, however persuasively, the maintenance of a substantial
residual military budget under some euphemized classification.
Conversion of military expenditures to other purposes entails a number of
difficulties. The most serious stems from the degree of rigid specialization
that characterizes modern war production, best exemplified in nuclear and
missile technology. This constituted no fundamental problem after World War II,
nor did the question of free-market consumer demand for "conventional" items of
consumption---those goods and services consumers had already been conditioned to
require.
Today's situation is qualitatively different in both respects.
This inflexibility is geographical and occupational, as well as industrial, a
fact which has led most analysts of the economic impact of disarmament to focus
their attention on phased plans for the relocation of war industry personnel and
capital installations as much as on proposals for developing new patterns of
consumption. One serious flaw common to such plans is the kind called in the
natural sciences the "macroscopic error." An implicit presumption is made that a
total national plan for conversion differs from a community program to cope with
the shutting down of a "defense facility" only in degree. We find no reason to
believe that this is the case, nor that a general enlargement of such local
programs, however well thought out in terms of housing, occupational retraining,
and the like, can be applied on a national scale. A national economy can absorb
almost any number of subsidiary reorganizations within its total limits,
providing there is no basic change in its own structure. General disarmament,
which would require such basic changes, lends itself to no valid smaller-scale
analogy.
Even more questionable are the models proposed for the retaining labor for
non-armaments occupations. Putting aside for the moment the unsolved questions
dealing with the nature of new distribution patterns---retraining for what?--
the increasingly specialized job skills associated with war industry production
are further depreciated by the accelerating inroads of the industrial techniques
loosely described as "automation." It is not too much to say that general
disarmament would require the scrapping of a critical proportion of the most
highly developed occupational specialties in the economy. The political
difficulties inherent in such an "adjustment" would make the outcries resulting
from the closing of a few obsolete military and naval installations in 1964
sound like a whisper.
In general, discussions of the problem of conversion have been characterized by
an unwillingness to recognize its special quality. This is best exemplified by
the 1965 report of the Ackley Committee. One critic has tellingly pointed out
that it blindly assumes that "...nothing in the arms economy--neither its size,
nor its geographical concentration, nor its highly specialized nature, nor the
peculiarities of its market, nor the special nature of much of its labor
force---endows it with any uniqueness when the necessary time of adjustment
comes."
Let us assume, however, despite the lack of evidence that a viable program for
conversion can be developed in the framework of the existing economy, that the
problems noted above can be solved. What proposals have been offered for
utilizing the productive capabilities that disarmament would presumably release?
The most common held theory is simply that general economic reinvestment would
absorb the greater part of these capabilities. Even though it is now largely
taken for granted (and even by today's equivalent of traditional laissez-faire
economists) that unprecedented government assistance (and con-comitant
government control) will be needed to solve the "structural" problems of
transition, a general attitude of confidence prevails that new consumption
patterns will take up the slack. What is less clear is the nature of these
patterns.
One school of economists has it that these patterns will develop on their own.
It envisages the equivalent of the arms budget being returned, under careful
control, to the consumer, in the form of tax cuts. Another, recognizing the
undeniable need for increased "consumption" in what is generally considered the
public sector of the economy, stresses vastly increased government spending in
such areas of national concern as health, education, mass transportation,
low-cost housing, water supply, control of the physical environment, and, stated
generally, "poverty."
The mechanisms proposed for controlling the transition to an arms-free economy
are also traditional--changes in both sides of the federal budget, manipulation
of interest rates, etc. We acknowledge the undeniable value of fiscal tools in a
normal cyclical economy, where they provide leverage to accelerate or brake an
existing trend. Their more committed proponents, however, tend to lose sight of
the fact that there is a limit to the power of these devices to influence
fundamental economic forces. They can provide new incentives in the economy, but
they cannot in themselves transform the production of a billion dollars' worth
of missiles a year to the equivalent in food, clothing, prefabricated houses, or
television sets. At bottom, they reflect the economy; they do not motivate it.
More sophisticated, and less sanguine, analysts contemplate the diversion of the
arms budget to a non-military system equally remote from the market economy.
What the "pyramid-builders" frequently suggest is the expansion of
space-research programs to the dollar level of current expenditures. This
approach has the superficial merit of reducing the size of the problem of
transferability of resources, but introduces other difficulties, which we will
take up in section 6.
Without singling out any one of the several major studies of the expected impact
of disarmament on the economy for special criticism, we can summarize our
objections to them in general terms as follows:
1. No proposed program for economic conversion to disarmament sufficiently takes
into account the unique magnitude of the required adjustments it would entail.
2. Proposals to transform arms production into a beneficent scheme of public
works are more the products of wishful thinking than of realistic understanding
of the limits of our existing economic system.
3. Fiscal and monetary measures are inadequate as controls for the process of
transition to an arms-free economy.
4. Insufficient attention has been paid to the political acceptability of the
objectives of the proposed conversion models, as well as of the political means
to be employed in effectuating a transition.
5. No serious consideration has been given, in any proposed conversion plan, to
the fundamental nonmilitary function of war and armaments in modern society, nor
has any explicit attempt been made to devise a viable substitute for it. This
criticism will be developed in sections 5 and 6.
(end part two)
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