entire book - Chris Hables Gray

Postmodern Wars Imaginary and Real [ 151 ]
were augmented with submarine missiles. "Mutually assured destruction"
(MAD) was superseded by counterforce doctrines of controlled response.
Strategic nuclear weapons were joined by tactical ones. All of these expansions
were justified by elite research institutes.
Jonathan Schell comments on an important reason that strategic theory
was relegated to these "think tanks":
This term, evoking a hermetic world of thought, exactly reflects the
intellectual circumstances of those thinkers whose job it is to deduce from
pure theory, without the lessons of experience, what might happen if
nuclear hostilities broke out. (1982, p. 140)
U.S. strategic doctrine sprang from the think tanks founded after World War
II, especially RAND Corp. In Wizards of Armageddon, a history of strategic
doctrine, Fred Kaplan (1983) traces the military roots of most of the key
theorists:
• RAND founders Arthur Raymond and Larry Henderson were with
the B-29 Special Bombardment Project and the Office of Scientific Research
and Development.
• Albert Wohlstetter worked for the Planning Committee of the War
Production Board doing OR and scientific management. At RAND he did
SA and game theory.
• Ed Paxson invented SA, by which he meant asking which system did
the job best instead of asking how can this system (operation) be made to
function most efficiently. This meant becoming a military planner instead of
being just an efficiency expert. The terms are now almost interchangeable
except among adepts. Kaplan describes Paxson's fascination with planning
World War III:
His dream was to quantify every single factor of a strategic bombing
campaign—the cost, weight and pay load of each bomber, its distance from
the target, how it should fly in formation with other bombers and their
fighter escorts, their exact routing patterns, the refueling procedures, the
rate of attrition, the probability that something might go wrong in each
step along the way, the weight and accuracy of the bomb, the vulnerability
of the target, the bomb's "kill probability," the routing of the planes back
to their bases, the fuel consumed, and all extraneous phenomena such as
the weather—and put them all into a single mathematical equation.
(1983, p. 87)
These men were joined at RAND by Herman Kahn, who became an SA
expert and then applied "his peculiar brand of logic, mathematical calculation,
[and] rationality" to the fighting of nuclear war (Kaplan, pp. 221-226).