Postmodern Wars Imaginary and Real: World War III - Chris Hables ...

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Postmodern Wars Imaginary and Real [ 153 ] in-house think tank, the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), has done many studies on fighting nuclear war, including a series on reestablishing the U.S. government and economy after nuclear war. The Army's think tank, HUMRRO (the Human Resources Research Office), has contributed research on how to help soldiers fight after they've been attacked by nuclear weapons. Another key Army think tank, Research Analysis Corp., has developed scores of computer war games and also helped establish the principles for the tactical use of nuclear weapons (Dickson, 1971,pp. 71-151 passim). Whatever the catch phase—counter-force, no-cities, massive retaliation, assured destruction, finite deterrence—it always meant more nuclear weapons. The justification was always framed by SA, game theory, bargaining theory, and reams of numbers on computer printouts. The number crunching wasn't just in the planning and modeling aspects either. The SA and mathematical manipulation of the collected intelligence on the Soviets was crucial for opening the missile gaps and windows of vulnerability necessary to bring new weapons into reality. Jim Falk explains something of the underlying ideological structure of this discourse system: Whether it is in relation to strategic theorizing, strategic studies, or more generally strategic discourse, the analysis here suggests that the dominant discursive practices have been selected around an ideology which emphasizes the desirability and attainability of successfully modeling, predicting and controlling human affairs. (1987, p. 19) This desire to model, predict, and control human affairs, especially warfare, is never satisfied, especially in the horrific realms of nuclear war. Among nuclear theorists and war planners this leads to some interesting psychological reactions. Steven Kull, a practicing psychotherapist, interviewed scores of policy makers in an attempt to discover something of the psychological processes involved. In his book Minds at War, Kull (1988) quotes many top officials to the effect that nuclear weapons are not to be used, but at the same time the same men keep a commitment to fight nuclear war. According to Kull, these two strands of nuclear thinking—that nuclear weapons are for deterrence or they're for war fighting—coexist in the minds of Soviet/Russian policy makers and of most American policy makers. On the one hand, such officials could be very clear about the impossibility of fighting a nuclear war. Said one State Department officer: nuclear weapons are "to make yourself feel that you're doing your part." They aren't just to impress the enemy but "you build to impress yourself. ... We're building this so ... we'll feel better." A high-level Pentagon official said that his work on nuclear strategy was "quite schizophrenic," based mainly on bravado and public
[ 154 ] The Past relations, not "serious . .. military possibilities." Another State Department official admitted that Reagan policy for winning a nuclear war was not a real policy but was only really established "for perceptual reasons." It was meant to impress allies as much as enemies (Kull, 1988, pp. 232-233). On the other hand, most of the officials share the assumption that there will always be war. A Pentagon official: "[Nations] want to fight. . . [because of] these genetic factors and Oedipal factors and everything else like that." A presidential adviser: "My whole theory of history is based on patterns... . The most important pattern about war can be stated in two words: it's recurrence." Both stress that despite war being irrational, it will still happen. "Wars are just going to go on," claimed one. "For people to act rationally goes against all history," summarized the other. A State Department official put it more starkly: Tensions begin to build up with you and [leaders] start making decisions to release the tension . . . [so] at a certain point everyone just decides, "Fuck, let's go to war!" It's just easier... I mean, you're not worried about, well, should we, shouldn't we do it. It's not a rational decision, (quoted in Kull, 1988, p. 239) A main driving force of this logic is technology itself. As Kull notes, "several respondents said, in nearly reverential tones, 'You can't stop technology!' " 2 Kull explores in detail how every rationale was deployed to justify the nuclear arms race. A number of interview subjects admitted they couldn't justify their desire for more weapons when overkill was already surpassed ten times over. It was just a "visceral" need. Others, such as Colin Gray, justified more weapons because an arms race was less violent than actual war. Kull concluded that his subjects had a conception of humans as competitive and warlike and they (the subjects and all humans) could not go against what they thought was their very "nature of being." He adds: At the deepest level it seemed that the most fundamental motive was almost mystical in nature: the desire to align oneself and fulfill not only one's own deepest nature but the deepest nature of being itself, (p. 247) Kull argues that these men managed to maintain emotional equilibrium by either suppressing thoughts and emotions or rationalizing them. A major factor in nuclear discourse is prenuclear "conventional principles," often evoking as emotion-laden symbols such historical events as Pearl Harbor, the appeasement of Hitler, or the Soviet s Great Patriotic War. All three of these historical tropes is an argument for a level of military preparedness that is probably inappropriate for a nuclear arms race. This emotional logic is very compelling. Almost all of Kull's respondents admitted under his questioning
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