A Most Awful Responsibility

If you’re worried about nuclear war, you should probably worry some more:

The missile also gives China the capability to hold major military facilities across the Pacific at risk, including fleet support facilities in Honolulu, San Diego, and Seattle.

Attacking these bases would dramatically weaken US power-projection capacity.

However, in practice, the effect would likely be to force the United States to disperse its missile defense assets across a wider set of targets. 

There is a reason countries generally don’t build conventionally capable ICBMs designed to operate alongside nuclear-capable ICBMs.

The ability of national and military leadership to distinguish between a nuclear and a conventional attack is one of the most critical firewalls keeping a conventional conflict from becoming nuclear.

If the United States cannot differentiate between a nuclear missile headed in the direction of Seattle and a conventional missile headed for the submarine pens at Bangor, the President might feel compelled to respond with nuclear force to the attack. Such concerns can be mitigated by careful design of communication protocols and the launch process, but they nonetheless pose a real danger of escalation. 

And for the longest time I had worried that my children would never know the fear of nuclear annihilation… Tangential to this, I wanted to follow up on Cheryl’s post from yesterday regarding our podcast on Alex Wellerstein’s A Most Awful Responsibility. As you’ll be aware if you listened to the pod, I absolutely love this book. Three takeaways that build on our conversation:

• The psychology of Truman and the bomb is enormously complex. As Wellerstein shows, there’s not much evidence that Truman had any real idea what the bomb would do to Hiroshima, in part because Truman probably didn’t know anything about Hiroshima before he received a briefing and saw some photos day after. More on this in a sec, but there is basically no way to meaningfully say that Truman made a decision to drop either bomb, although he certainly made the decision to stop dropping bombs after Nagasaki. It’s interesting to me that Truman never seems to have meaningfully attempted to avoid or transfer this misaligned responsibility for the bombs, as evidently he thought the idea of displacing blame would be more dangerous both in policy terms and to his legacy than simply accepting that responsibility and offering justifications for a decision that he never made.
• At one point in the discussion of Truman I got shivers down my spine because it felt, in some important sense, that NO ONE had made the decision to drop the bombs; the operation had simply unfolded as part of a broader bureaucratic logic regarding the use of force against Japan. And I found that thought utterly terrifying. As I thought about it more, tho, it seemed not quite right; even if Truman was out of the loop we can still accord primary responsibility for the decision to destroy Hiroshima to Stimson and Groves, for better or worse.
• As discussed in the pod and reiterated in the comment section, there was no real stark divide among either soldiers or civilians regarding whether the bomb was the BOMB or just another, somewhat bigger bomb. Many folks seem to have held to both views at the same time, even though they directly contradict one another. And for those with coherent views there was no clean distinction in terms of the military thinking one thing and civilians thinking the other; there were dissenting views on both sides.
• Reading this just after teaching National Security Policy put me in the mind of thinking about evolutions of the American Republic, something that Paul has mentioned a few times. In extraordinarily rough terms we can think of the First Republic as lasting from 1787 until 1860… the Second from 1865 until 1945, and the Third from 1950 until 2016 (all of these are fuzzy on the edges). Wellerstein’s book and a lot of associated national security literature make clear that the process of birthing the Third Republic wasn’t just about the New Deal, although the New Deal was obviously extremely important to how American governed itself. The establishment of the idea that the President of the United States had sole control of the choice to use nuclear weapons, and consequently the power of life and death over everyone on Earth, is lowkey transformational of the American constitutional order in ways that are becoming starkly apparent at this very moment.