Foreign Policy Case Studies: Iran Hostage Crisis

{This week, we will take a look at the Iran Hostage Crisis, as incoming Trump national security advisor, John Bolton, has expressed hawkish views towards the aforementioned country in his advocation of a preemptive military strike as the best path to a regime change beneficial to the United States' foreign policy interests (BBC News, 2018). The Iran Hostage Crisis of 1980 was a major example of how the lack of an effective coordinator and a comprehensive, coherent plan for multiple moving pieces in any foreign policy operation (especially those brought on during periods of significant domestic or foreign political pressure) significantly reduces the success of the mission and can actually do more damage in the end. Similar considerations must be taken into account before the United States decides to set aside diplomatic tools in favor of blunt, military force, as we shall see below.}

Background:

The public opinion dynamics surrounding the Iran Hostage Crisis of 1980 were heavily influenced by the larger context of the Cold War and the foreign policy shifts outlined in NSC-68. The fear engendered in the American public by NSC-68 in regards to communism and the Soviet Union’s expansionary aspirations thus impacted their perceptions of President Jimmy Carter’s handling of the Iran Hostage Crisis. Moreover, to a great extent, domestic public opinion pressure drove Carter’s subsequent decision to go ahead with an ill-fated covert military operation to rescue the hostages. After all, Carter was elected in 1977 on a platform of assertiveness against the Soviet Union, with a high point of 75% approval. NSC-68’s portrayal of Russia as a communist power threatening world domination meant that Carter, as with his predecessors Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, had an imperative to take decisive action against the Soviet Union and their perceived proxy states. Thus, the Iran Hostage Crisis shows the extent of the United States’ reliance on their containment strategy, with Iran serving to check Soviet expansion in the Middle East and North Africa, as Marxist rebels gained ground in 1979 in Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, and Afghanistan.

One of many examples of the United States supporting non-democratic leaders for strategic objectives in the Cold War, in the case of Iran the United States sought to counter the Soviet Union by supporting the CIA-installed and increasingly unpopular moderate regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The previous 1953 coup had ousted democratically-elected Mohammed Mossadegh, creating considerable tensions. The burgeoning Iranian Revolution insurgency in 1979 against the Shah’s rule would complicate this strategy, as hard-liner Ayatollah Khomeini gained significant followers. However, the national intelligence apparatus failed to foresee trouble in the infamous 1978 annual National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which predicted the Shah would be in power for another ten years. Contradicting the NIE’s erroneous thinking, the Shah was ousted in 1979 by Khomeini’s supporters, creating significant political instability in a country that Carter termed in 1978 an “island of stability,” seeking to reassure Americans of the success of the United States’ containment foreign policy. Worse yet, on November 4th 1979, Iranian radicals supporting Khomeini seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran, taking sixty-six Americans hostage, including many CIA operatives in the area. Thus, the administration was left in the dark about the evolving situation on the ground.

Domestically, Carter faced considerable criticism for having admitted the Shah into the United States, an action that contributed significantly to the storming of the embassy by the Iranian radicals protesting the United States’ interventionism in their country. Facing considerable electoral pressure in the election year of 1980 as various attempts at setting up direct negotiation channels failed (with his approval ratings hovering in the low 30% range), Carter faced a critical decision point in deciding whether or not to use military force to free the hostages. In the end, while the rescue mission (dubbed Operation Eagle Claw) temporarily boosted Carter’s approval ratings, as the mission went terribly wrong those ratings inevitably tanked, as the mission’s failure on multiple fronts signaled a weak America in the face of a belligerent Soviet Union and Ayatollah Khomeini.

Evaluation:

For me, this case is explained best when considering the international paradigms of realism and the foreign policy perspective of homo bureaucraticus, as I argue in my analysis that electoral pressures reflecting the realist views of America’s Cold War foreign policy projecting onto the bureaucracy led to the mission’s failure. Operation Eagle Claw was conceived not only as a rescue mission for the trapped American hostages, but also to reassert United States strength in its realist containment policy for the domestic constituency, as Carter had run a 1976 campaign similar to his predecessors primarily on being assertive towards Soviet Union expansionism. However, with the failure of previous diplomatic attempts to secure the release of the hostages, including reaching out to Iranian moderates via the United Nations as well as economic sanctions, President Carter was desperate in 1980 to project an image of American democratic strength in the face of an increasingly belligerent Soviet Union.

Thus, a military operation to rescue the hostages held increasing appeal to the Carter administration to both check communist expansion and shore up Carter’s approval ratings, but disagreement about the size and coordination of the rescue force among the different military leaders cooperating ultimately led to various logistical failures fatal to the mission: the failures of the helicopters to fly in and out of Tehran airspace under cover of the night, the failure to anticipate the hazardous visibility created by the helicopters and transport planes at the rescue point Desert One, and the fact that the rescue point itself was too close to a main road to maintain mission secrecy. In the immediate aftermath of the failed April mission, President Carter’s approval ratings sat at began to drop further from 40% again after an initial bump inspired by the decisiveness with which voters perceived the actions of the administration.

What went wrong with the mission? There were various organizational interests in play that hampered established standard operating procedures (SOPs). The military won out in the preliminary meetings against the objections of presidential advisers Walter Mondale, Jody Powell, and Hamilton Jordan concerned with the effects of a rescue mission on Carter’s electoral fortunes. Moreover, State Department officials Warren Christopher and Cyrus Vance supported similar misgivings concerning Operation Eagle Claw, concerned that their people among the hostages in the Tehran embassy would be harmed if negotiations were not conducted first. However, an uneasy alliance formed between the hawks eager to prove their capabilities and regain the presidential trust after the Bay of Pigs and the closest presidential advisers after Carter’s presidential approval ratings were still trending downward from 40%. Already on shaky foundation as the decision to go ahead was largely one made out of electoral desperation, Operation Eagle Claw came to represent a patchwork of competing branches of the military itself. Four military commanders were chosen underneath the leadership of Major General James Vaught (Army) according to Pentagon standard operating procedures (SOPs) in missions of joint military cooperation: Colonel James Kyle (Air Force), Lt. Colonel Edward Seiffert (Marines), and Lt. Colonel Beckwith (Army). Here the SOPs that bureaucracies rely on to function efficiently in the face of high uncertainty ultimately failed, as Vaught was not physically present to coordinate the rescue mission, leading to an unclear chain of command when it came to decision-making.

Ultimately, the failure of the hostage rescue operation came down to potent public opinion pressures exerted on the Carter administration and the bureaucracy, in which bureaucratic SOPs were overcome by the inherent weaknesses of the bureaucratic patchwork assembled for the mission.

{The above forces cited in the case study are still at work today. Any foreign policy apparatus must take particular care to minimize as much as possible these pressures on key decision-makers, from politicians to those concerned with logistical operations, in order to make the best call for a country's overall domestic and foreign interests. In today's current domestic political environment and in consideration with rumblings in some corners about the need for unilateral, preemptive military operations in hotspots like Iran and North Korea, this need for clear-mindedness in our leaders is more needed than ever in U.S. foreign policy.}

 
Works Cited:

BBC News. (2018, March 23). "John Bolton: Five Things New Trump Security Adviser Believes." Retrieved March 23, 2018, from http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43512175.

Gallup, Incorporated. (2016). “Presidential Approval Ratings: Gallup Historical Statistics and Trends.” Retrieved October 19, 2016 from http://www.gallup.com/poll/116677/presidential-approval-ratings-gallup-historical-statistics-trends.aspx.

Houghton, David Patrick. (2013). The Decision Point: Six Cases in U.S. Foreign Policy
Decision Making. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Ikenberry, G. John, and Peter L. Trubowitz. (2015). American Foreign Policy: Theoretical
Essays. 7th Edition. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Sigelman, L., & Conover, P. (1981). “The Dynamics of Presidential Support During International Conflict Situations: The Iranian Hostage Crisis.” Political Behavior, 3(4), p. 303-318. Retrieved October 17, 2016 from http://libweb.uwlax.edu:2101/stable/pdf/586105.pdf.

United States State Department: Office of the Historian (n.d.). “The Iranian Hostage Crisis.” Retrieved October 17, 2016 from https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/short-history/iraniancrises.

Foreign Policy Case Study: The Bay of Pigs

{In the vein of Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine, this week I will be providing additional background concerning the United States' Cold War policy (the foreground of the U.S.'s military buildup, including increased nuclear capabilities) by examining the failed Bay of Pigs operation in closer detail.}

Background:

The overall context for the Bay of Pigs case ultimately rests on NSC-68 (1950), the document in which the United States re-articulated its foreign policy via advocation of rearmament in response to a perceived Soviet plot of world domination (and thus the concurrent spread of communism) in the midst of the Cold War. Arguably, NSC-68 adopts a very realist view of the international system in acknowledging the uncertainty the United States had about the international aspirations of the Soviet Union. It is in this vein that the Kennedy administration considered carrying out Eisenhower’s CIA-developed amphibious invasion of Cuba (dubbed Operation Zapata) to topple the Communist-sympathizing regime of Fidel Castro. Going hand-in hand with NSC-68 and rearmament was the domino theory (which heavily influenced the realist foreign policy thinking expressed in NSC-68) in which if one country fell to communism at the hands of the Soviets, then more countries would inevitably fall, jeopardizing America’s hegemonic interests in the world. Seemingly demonstrative of this was the establishment of the communist People’s Republic of China (PRC), which seemed to confirm NSC-68’s predictions in that Asia seemed to have been compromised. Thus, America turned towards Latin America.

Cuba was perceived as an even greater threat because it was in America’s backyard and thus strategically compromised the United States’ ability to maintain a defensive buffer between it and the Soviet sphere of influence. Complicating matters further was the possible Soviet buildup of nuclear weapons in particular predicted by NSC-68 and the possibility of Cuba being a symptom of further breakdown of the United States’ defensive buffer in the Western Hemisphere, with multiple Latin American regimes potentially sympathetic to the communist cause.

Thus, President Kennedy and his administration faced pressures from multiple fronts politically in regards to the rise of the Castro regime in Cuba in 1961, a country that had previously enjoyed regular diplomatic relations with the United States under the Batista regime. Meanwhile on the home front, Kennedy’s campaign had capitalized on domestic fears of communism and could not renege on its promises to stand up to the Soviets. The Democratic president faced considerable political pressure from a vocal Republican coalition in Congress as well as from his own party to not be “soft” regarding the spread of communism. Seen in this context, Operation Zapata becomes a potentially plausible and very effective counter-political demonstration against critics in sending the message that the administration was not afraid to use military force to secure United States interests, even when possibly provoking an opposing great power like the Soviet Union into war. Up until this point, the United States and the Soviet Union had largely fought each other in proxy conflicts within various allied regions of the world and fought diplomatically through institutions like the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), where they wielded veto power that was often used to send political messages to the other party. In the end, the prospect of a direct confrontation between the two great world powers in the bipolar international system became that much more of a possibility with Kennedy’s decision-making in the Bay of Pigs case (and the subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis).

Outcomes:

In understanding Bay of Pigs case, I turned to the homo psychologicus and realist theoretical perspectives to analyze how the administration acted before and during Operation Zapata. Insofar as the external environmental conditions at the time were important, I argue that it is essential to understand how key foreign policy events at the time and in the past were assimilated into the existing mental schema and other cognitive structures of the Kennedy administration. Therefore, I argue that analogical reasoning and cognitive errors along with realist thinking heavily influenced the decision-making of Kennedy’s administration to go ahead with the ultimately flawed operation. To summarize, Operation Zapata was a catastrophic failure, with the US-backed resistance forces ultimately routed by Castro’s military because of a failure of a second air strike by U.S. planes (an order that the CIA assumed President Kennedy would make, lest he ultimately betray the resistance fighters). A retreat of the fighters to the Escambray Mountains was essentially nullified because of the geographical location chosen for the operation allowed Castro’s forces to easily flank and capture the resistance fighters.

Starting with the analogical reasoning that the administration used, I wish to highlight the following foreign policy analogies espoused by the administration: Munich, China (Eisenhower’s domino theory), and Guatemala. The Munich case goes hand in hand with the domino theory idea coined by the Eisenhower administration in that the Soviet Union and its allies were representative of a dictatorial and expansionary adversary that would not be open to a strategy of diplomacy or appeasement. This closely follows the line of realist theory in which states will often use force to provide for their security rather than diplomatic cooperation. In the case of the United States, the Kennedy administration felt that Operation Zapata would perhaps deter the spread of communism better in Latin America, in particular El Salvador and Nicaragua, than a similar Chamberlain-esque appeasement strategy of Castro, and thus showcase U.S. leadership in halting the spread of communism in the process (and perhaps make up for the losses the U.S. suffered in Asia).
Following this line of realist reasoning, the administration thus had the perfect justification for the use of American military force (albeit covertly, as was planned) in Cuba, essentially portraying Castro as another potentially expansionist dictator. However, the fateful analogy that doomed the operation was the 1951 case of Operation PB Success in Guatemala, in which the U.S. was successful in deposing communist sympathizer Jacobo Arbenz. In the end, Arbenz was ultimately cowed by the threat of US military force and fundamental logistical flaws in the operation that would ultimately pass to Operation Zapata were hidden because the plan did not need to be fully executed. Despite any similarities that could be drawn from Operation PB Success to Cuba in terms of the operational plans (a US-trained force of exiles and a strike against government forces under guise of a popular uprising), the one difference involved the fact that Operation Zapata was an amphibious operation. Therefore, its potential success was very uncertain.

Tying together these commonly-shared worldviews and accompanying foreign policy analogies is the concept of cognitive consistency. The Kennedy administration ultimately succumbed to this cognitive error in rejecting any contrary intelligence that did not necessarily conform to their preconceived realist worldviews and analogies, such as the operational differences between the Cuba and Guatemala cases. Especially relevant to this case is the CIA’s reliance on Kennedy’s use of military force to support the exiles if anything went awry and the assumption that the success of a revolt would be assured because of Castro’s unpopularity. Their intelligence proved contrary. Ultimately, the mission’s further infeasibility was ignored as key mission plans were published in the New York Times beforehand, ruining the intended covert nature of the operation.

In the end, the Kennedy administration failed to overcome cognitive consistency and foreign policy analogies in the Bay of Pigs case, which ended in catastrophic failure and perhaps ultimately countered U.S. security interests in Latin America and elsewhere. 

{Foreign policy is always filled with uncertainty, which undoubtedly is magnified when one takes into account the people in charge during everyday or crisis situations who may not have all the information needed to make informed decisions. It is further complicated when an idea turns into a mindset that puts blinders on foreign policy-makers (like that a certain country/countries/religious group is/are out to achieve world domination). Does the United States have the ability to minimize these latter risks inherent in the conduct of today's foreign policy, especially in the present age of more powerful nuclear weapons, a proposed Cold War-like military build-up, and toxic anti-immigrant populism? We shall see.}


Sources Cited:

Ikenberry, G. John, and Peter L. Trubowitz. (2015). American Foreign Policy: Theoretical
Essays. 7th Edition. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Houghton, David Patrick. (2013). The Decision Point: Six Cases in U.S. Foreign Policy
Decision Making. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

United States State Department: Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs. (2015, July 21). “U.S. Relations with Cuba”. Retrieved September 28, 2016, from http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/2886.htm.

United States State Department: Office of the Historian. (n.d.). “A Guide to the United States’ History of Recognition, Diplomatic, and Consular Relations, By Country, Since 1776: Cuba.” Retrieved September 24, 2016, from https://history.state.gov/countries/cuba.

United States State Department: Office of the Historian. (n.d.). “Milestones: 1945–1952: NSC-68.” Retrieved September 23, 2016, from https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/NSC68.

United States State Department: Office of the Historian. (n.d.). “Milestones: 1945–1952: The Chinese Revolution of 1949.” Retrieved September 27, 2016, from https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/chinese-rev.

Book Review: Dr. Amy Chua's "Political Tribes"

Humans are social creatures. We need the company of a group in order to feel a sense of belonging and purpose. In some cases, groups can also serve as important social safety nets. However, groups can serve both good and more nefarious purposes, creating uncomfortable gray areas in human relations because of the multiple identities people necessarily inhabit and the moral, ethical, political, social and perspective issues surrounding group identity and function. Enter politics, which makes these kinds of group or tribal dynamics much more complicated. In the current era of divisiveness in the country, it is hard not to feel like Donald Trump's election as president exposed many fractures among the different groups that make up the United States. Are these fractures going to get worse, to the point of unsustainability (e.g. a potential break-up of the country and a larger heralding of a decline of the current international order built upon universalist notions of individual human rights)? Dr. Amy Chua takes up these questions in her latest book Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations. 

Because the book was published in 2018 after all of the chaos and tension surrounding the 2016 election and others around the world, which appeared to herald a new (or not so new) era of intolerant populism, Chua has a fascinating starting point from which to start her analysis of political tribes and their policy impacts and implications. Her book's anchor is the United States through the first part of the book, where she chronicles the impact of our universalist notions about human rights, democracy and free market economics on the implementation of foreign policy, to the second part where she takes a critical look at the homeland. Her main argument is that American foreign policy, from southeast Asia (Vietnam) to Latin America (Venezuela) and the Middle East (Iraq, Afghanistan) has failed to be effective because of the discounting of the role of tribal dynamics in these countries (and in our own).

Why has America been, to use Chua's terminology, so "group-blind" (Chua, 2018, p. 19)? According to Chua, it is because the United States belongs to a rare breed in group dynamics she terms a "super-group," in which group membership can be claimed by peoples of many different backgrounds without necessitating the sacrifice of such unique "subgroup identities" (Chua, 2018, p. 15). What holds a super-group together is a "collective identity" that binds these people together with common purpose, experiences, loyalties and values (Chua, 2018, p. 15). In the case of the United States, this social glue for American citizens is our common quest of working towards the achievement of the American Dream despite our backgrounds, as we are a nation of immigrants. Because the American citizenry is so diverse and bound by a relatively strong national identity, the U.S. has become both a world power and super-group.

But Chua sees this same strength as our Achilles heel, making policymakers overoptimistic about the ability of mostly developing countries to recognize and bridge salient group divides with a similarly strong, overriding collective national identity. This also means the U.S. sees foreign policy largely in grander, more ideological struggles (e.g. capitalism versus communism, democracy versus authoritarianism). In Vietnam it was our failure to recognize the centrality of Vietnamese identity as a larger anti-colonial struggle against countries like France and China (who held disproportionate power over the masses) rather than an embrace of communism. Similarly, in Iraq it was the story of Shia Muslim majorities being oppressed by a dominant Sunni Muslim minority. Dismissing the power of these group identities and their fraught histories and the way these animosities can be amplified rather than subsumed by democracy, Chua believes, has doomed U.S. foreign policy adventures in democratization and nation-building.

Similarly, policies by American political elite (on both liberal and conservative sides) of deliberate group-blindness at home have led to toxic political dynamics reminiscent of these developing countries U.S. foreign policy has tried to help, such as anti-establishment, ethno-nationalist brands of populism. It is the very same paradox that hampers our foreign policy: how to create an identity that transcends group divides but at the same time recognizes and seeks to ameliorate those inequalities. In America, the left and right have increasingly become polarized and with it, have embraced identity politics to problematic levels. The left has become enmeshed in what Chua sees as the increasing divisiveness from the misuse of the understanding of "oppression operating on multiple [and] overlapping axes of identity" simultaneously where it is used to drive even further wedges between people based on the very subgroup identities a collective identity is meant to smooth in binding people together (Chua, 2018, p. 230-231). Meanwhile, the right has retreated into anti-immigrant sentiment and embrace of white identity in response to the left's celebration of other non-white minorities' differences in popular and political culture and a perceived gradual loss of power to those same minority groups that by mid-century could supplant them as a majority in the United States. In summation, the rhetoric of inclusiveness and diversity on both sides can be hypocritical in its exclusion of certain groups in the process (on the left, marginalization of group rights in favor of individual rights; on the right, a rejection of affirmative action in favor of equal opportunity for all). Either way, it ends up being us versus them, a destructive dynamic in any political system, especially a democracy that depends on various groups finding common ground in order to effectively govern.

How then to get out of this vicious cycle of increasingly zero-sum politics (whether or not you agree with Chua's premise that it is primarily political tribes that have gotten us into this mess)? Chua does not explicitly conclude Political Tribes with a concrete answer to this question. Admittedly, I was disappointed by a lack of specialization after such an insightful (yet somewhat uncomfortable) analysis into the failings of both sides, in which she answers that we have to find a new American Dream that acknowledges the historical failings of the United States while keeping us all striving towards the ultimate ideal of a "promise of freedom and hope for every individual" (Chua, 2018, p. 264). Nevertheless, I did see her overall point in this deliberate lack of specificity in that we must all work to make our collective identity and the American Dream more inclusive and egalitarian in order to restore faith and efficiency in the democratic process.

Essentially, this process of redefinition as our nation gets increasingly diverse will take a lot of work. While I am not as optimistic as Chua in our chances of successfully bridging the divides (I am probably not alone in that), that does not mean we should not continue to strive towards achievement of the ideals of equality and freedom our country was founded upon.


Works Cited:

Chua, Amy. (2018). Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations. New York: Penguin Random House LLC.

Book Review: Daniel Ellsberg's "The Doomsday Machine"

There are many examples of when technological progression outstrips society's ability to adjust swiftly to the social, cultural, economical and political consequences brought about by such change. In the current era, the most visible instance of society's slow rate of adaptation is in response to the Internet and the explosion of social media with positive effects like connecting people around the world clashing with more negative consequences like mental illness and electronic addiction. It's also the same today with climate change, as the fossil-fuel based technologies we built our civilization around are also altering the ecological balance of the planet and threatening more extreme weather events. Nevertheless, underneath these more visible trends that could go towards catastrophe if we fail to take collective responsibility for these issues is a similarly potentially apocalyptic problem: the development of nuclear weapons and the shadowy policy surrounding them. Daniel Ellsberg, who first gained notoriety for leaking the classified Pentagon Papers that revealed a troubled history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, takes on a concurrent investigation into the history of American nuclear policy in his 2017 book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.

While having lost the official documents copied alongside the Pentagon Papers to Mother Nature (and having to compensate with recently declassified documents in both American and Russian archives as well as his notes and recollections from his defense work), Ellsberg still gives the reader an important and chilling window into the development of American nuclear policy and the larger geopolitical consequences of secrecy through his time as a government worker and contractor at the RAND Corporation and the Pentagon during the Cold War. In other words, Hiroshima and Nagasaki haven't been the only times America has threatened to or actually used nuclear weapons in order to end a prolonged conflict or prevent one from breaking out in the first place. These weapons have permeated American foreign and military policy (and continue to do so presently) despite a significant reduction of superpowers America and Russia's nuclear arsenals through many international and bilateral nonproliferation treaties primarily due to a hybrid strategic doctrine that has been in vogue since WWII: strategies that deliberately target cities in their capacity as the production centers of the enemy (note: targeting noncombatants is illegal and considered morally reprehensible under international law) in order to end wars quickly with less risk to one side's military and security objectives in combination with the principles of nuclear deterrence and mutually assured destruction (MAD).

Having studied theories of decision-making under uncertainty, I found its combination with nuclear weapons in an era of threats of non-state terrorism and continued proliferation (such as President Trump's proposed build-up of America's nuclear arsenal) to be troubling (to put it mildly). This book proved the insanity of trusting the planet's fate to such a strategy. There's a point where the supposed strategic value in MAD is lost because of the vulnerability of these nuclear arsenals to a variety of actors (outside of the state actors possessing nuclear weapons, like the United States, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, North Korea, Israel, India, and Pakistan) and seemingly random institutional and situational factors.

Starting with the institutional factors, one of the more troubling vulnerabilities of our nuclear infrastructure (known as "the Doomsday Machine") are the seemingly lax security measures around communication and weapons-lock codes that delegate the authority and access to nuclear weapons to many subordinates underneath the president and their commanders (Ellsberg, 2017, p. 274). Centralized control would make a strike on HQ devastating to a nation's response to such a strike, but...this policy also leads to more fingers on the proverbial nuclear button. As for situational factors, Ellsberg found that America's command centers around the world regularly experience communications outages for hours at a time due to atmospheric conditions, which can lead to dangerous assumptions by commanders or individual pilots to go-ahead with a retaliatory nuclear strike after a false alarm in a situation of heightened alarm (such as a runway crash involving a nuclear-armed aircraft on a base where such attack drills are not routine) after not hearing from Washington (Ellsberg, 2017, p. 51). After all, HQ probably couldn't send communications to launch if they'd been destroyed by a nuclear attack (even if it actually was an accident and they are in that narrow window of non-communication with Washington and will regain it soon) and the pilots could then act as if nuclear war was underway. (Did I mention that such orders to launch cannot be taken back, because of military fears of America compromising its ability to survive a nuclear strike because of hesitation by civilian leadership?) Additionally, the same aforementioned communications issues mean a simultaneous, coordinated response to stop a nuclear war from escalating becomes near impossible. Oh and there are poor password protections on the safety locks on the weapons themselves.

Okay, so far we have a nuclear policy in which the U.S. can potentially survive a nuclear war by launching all their weapons first (in order to prevent their defense capabilities from being destroyed), such launch orders (accidental or not) cannot be taken back, and there are a lot of fingers on the red button who are often acting underneath situations of uncertainty and a greater degree of incomplete information than their commanders. (In fact, this naiveté about nuclear war plans and their implications was fostered by the smoke-screen of secrecy about the most sensitive aspects of the plans by the military, leaving the commander-in-chief and lower parts of the military in the dark.) These latter factors all played a role in both known and unknown nuclear crises from Vietnam to Cuba (in the latter, a Russian submarine almost fired a nuclear missile at an American naval group in the area whom they thought was attacking them, the first time humanity came the closest to all-out nuclear war). Ellsberg shows there is no shortage of dangerous situational factors like the latter that can throw off what seems to be the most sound of plans when he zooms out to show that America's use and threatened uses of nuclear weapons has made other countries feel increasingly insecure, essentially pushing them to escalate by developing their own nuclear arsenals and equivalent Doomsday Machines (and then following America's example by engaging in dangerous levels of secrecy about such programs in the name of strategic ambiguity which paradoxically undermines the value of strategic deterrence in doing so as enemies would be in the dark to exactly what an attack on the homeland would do to the other side, making them more confident in their similarly dangerous escalations). Especially dangerous are partially or fully-automated "Dead Hand" systems that would launch all nuclear weapons if HQ were destroyed by a strike, assuring everyone on the planet would die immediately or over time from starvation and fallout. Human error can be catastrophic. Death by automation? Even more dangerous. Both the latter and former penchants for dangerous escalation due to misreadings of various situations is an especially sickening combination.

Bad enough yet? I wish it had stopped there. Scientists working on the Manhattan Project discovered the phenomenas of "atmospheric ignition" and "nuclear winter" (Ellsberg, 2017, p. 17, 275). The latter idea may be one that is more known to the public as it has slipped out into popular culture, in which the smoke and soot from the burning remains of nuclear-bombed cities and other terrestrial sites would be carried into the stratosphere where it would "remain for a decade or more, enveloping the globe and blocking most sunlight" leading to mass crop death and starvation by any survivors of the nuclear strikes (Ellsberg, 2017, p. 17). With the development of the more powerful cousin to the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki known as the hydrogen bomb (H-bomb), the heat generated by such explosions resulting from the fusion of hydrogen atoms (itself a reaction due to the ignition of a fission-based atomic bomb core, which supplies the necessary heat for a fusion reaction) had the theoretical potential to overcome "the Coulomb barrier between atoms of hydrogen in water and nitrogen in the air...and ignite...all the hydrogen in the oceans and set the air around the globe afire" (Ellsberg, 2017, p. 274-275). Cheery thought, eh? I shiver to think if the technology already harnessed for such evil purposes of annihilation starting with the A-bomb through the H-bomb could be "improved" further for another generation of super-weapons.

Ultimately, The Doomsday Machine proves the insanity of relying on ever-expanding arsenals of any weapons, especially nuclear weapons, to preempt war between two or more adversarial parties. Therefore, Ellsberg's concluding non-proliferation message is an important clarion call for the global public, who ideally could put pressure on their policymakers and militaries to dismantle the Doomsday Machines around the world. But can we overcome decades of institutionalized policies that risk annihilation of all life on the planet in the name of potentially securing the chance of survival in a nuclear conflict? Ellsberg acknowledges the seemingly insurmountable odds of overcoming a very profitable venture for existing military-industrial-political complexes, suggesting first a commitment to not launch nuclear weapons preemptively in any situation (a "no first strike" policy), then proceeding in an incremental reduction of nuclear arsenals until they are ultimately eliminated (Ellsberg, 2017 p. 249). This will take an unprecedented effort from all sectors of society to address all threats to life on Earth, from nuclear weapons to climate change. Can we all muster the will to overcome what Friedrich Nietzsche described as the collective "insanity" (read: dangerous group-think) of societies (Ellsberg, 2017, p. 348)? I sure hope so, for our world depends on it.

Works Cited:

Ellsberg, Daniel. (2017). The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. New York: Bloomsbury.