entire book - Chris Hables Gray

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