The Militarization of American Science
https://socialistaction.org/2020/07/28/the-militarization-of-american-science-2/
July 28, 2020
To celebrate our comrade Cliff Conner’s new book “The Tragedy of
American Science,” out now from Haymarket Books, we re-publish an early
excerpt published in Socialist Action in April 2018. You can purchase
the book at Haymarket’s website or wherever fine socialist books are
sold. Cliff will be speaking at an online book launch event this
Thursday, July 30 @ 5pm ET.
By CLIFF CONNER
Following World War II, a think tank named the RAND Corporation took the
lead in formulating policies guiding military-industrial Big Science.
Some of the titles of books and articles about RAND provide a hint of
what it represented in the public imagination: “The Think Tank that
Controls America,” “America’s University of Imperialism,” “Dr.
Strangelove’s Workplace,” and “Wizards of Armageddon.”
RAND’s signature initiative was its hypotheoretical venture into
“thinking the unthinkable.” Its legendary Nuclear Boys Club waded into
the topsy-turvy world of megatons and megadeaths in a quixotic effort to
put nuclear warfare strategy on a rational, scientific basis. Spoiler
Alert: The end of the world begins with a “Fuck You, Buddy.”
The logical foundation of the American strategy for waging nuclear
warfare was constructed by a man best known as a paranoid schizophrenic.
As surreal as that sounds, it is the truth. Paranoid schizophrenia is a
devastating mental illness whose victims deserve the utmost compassion,
but it is terrifying to realize that the fate of the human race could
rest on a theoretical framework built upon paranoiac delusions.
One of the RAND Corporation’s leading nuclear strategists was John Nash,
a gifted mathematician whose descent into psychosis was the subject of
the Oscar-winning film “A Beautiful Mind.” However beautiful Nash’s
purely mathematical conceptions may have been, their application to the
real world of human society have produced the most hideously ugly
consequences imaginable.
Nash was a pioneer of mathematical game theory, which analyzes the rules
of games in order to devise winning strategies. Among its theoretical
progeny was James M. Buchanan’s Public Choice Theory, which set the
agenda for the Koch brothers’ efforts to “dismantle the administrative
state” (i.e., eliminate trade unions, privatize the social security and
health-care systems, constrain governmental regulatory power, and the
destroy the public education system).1 But its original application
provided the basis of Cold War nuclear brinkmanship policies, including
the one aptly acronymed MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction.
“All Is Number?”
It is not unusual for mathematicians to profess a philosophy of science
based on the proposition that “All Is Number,” a variety of
philosophical idealism that gained an early champion in Plato. It makes
“number” the essence of all reality and mathematics the arbiter of all
truth and knowledge.
The scientific method associated with that philosophy is a priorism—the
notion that the details of science can be derived from “first
principles” by deductive logic. Its adherents insist that knowledge of
nature is not to be gained by observation and experimentation, but by
pure reason. Hey, if it works for geometry, why not physics? Why not
biology? Why not economics and political science?
Plato’s antiempirical method served to derail scientific inquiry into
the actual workings of nature for 1400 years. Although his followers
thought they had solved all of science’s general problems, the onset of
the Scientific Revolution a few hundred years ago revealed that those
solutions were worthless.
Fast forward to the 20th century, where we find John Nash applying
Platonic a priorism to the problem of how to prevent the thermonuclear
incineration of the planet Earth. His contribution was to derive
strategic solutions from mathematical game theory.
A “game” of global risk and peril
In 1945, when American policymakers made the decision to drop atomic
bombs on Japan, the game was simple. They did not have to fear
retaliation because they knew Japan could not respond in kind. The more
farsighted among them were aware, however, that the United States’
monopoly of nuclear weapons could not last forever.
American policymakers had no choice but to adjust to that reality. A
debate among them ensued over how best to assure that the fearsome power
they had unleashed upon the world would not be turned back against the
United States. Their deliberations posed the complex problems that the
RAND Corporation’s nuclear strategists took on.
In fact, following the dropping of the bombs on Japan, it was only four
years before the Soviet Union had become the second member of the
nuclear club. On Aug. 29, 1949, the USSR exploded its first nuclear
weapon. This was (ahem) a game-changer.
The Soviet nuclear test in August 1949 prompted the United States to
immediately up the ante. President Truman announced the intention to
create a thermonuclear weapon, or “superbomb,” with explosive power that
would dwarf that of the bombs dropped on Japan. In response, the Soviet
Union vowed to do the same. An arms race to Armageddon was underway.
The United States performed its first hydrogen bomb test in November
1952, releasing the energy equivalent of 10.4 megatons of TNT—more than
700 times that of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. In less than a
year, in August 1953, the USSR replied with a much smaller (400 kiloton)
fusion device test, but it was enough to demonstrate that Soviet
scientists knew how to make hydrogen bombs. In 1961 the Soviet Union
tested the largest bomb ever detonated—a 50-megaton behemoth with the
explosive force of 3800 Hiroshima blasts.
Planning to win the game that ends in Doomsday
Early in the course of the Cold War, American policymakers saw the world
in stark terms: Two implacable superpowers face-to-face, armed to the
hilt with weapons on hair-trigger alert that could conceivably destroy
all human life. What could be done—what steps should be taken—to prevent
the world from ending in thermonuclear conflagration?
lemay
Tough-talking General Curtis Lemay, in charge of U.S. nuclear strike forces.
General Curtis LeMay, as head of the Strategic Air Command, was in
charge of the U.S. nuclear strike forces. His proposal typified the
kill-it-in-the-cradle instincts of the military mind: He called for
massive preemptive nuclear strikes against the USSR. He advocated that
policy despite the Strategic Air Commands’ estimates that it would
annihilate more than 77,000,000 people in 188 targeted cities.
Fortunately, President Eisenhower had the final word and ruled against
preemptive strikes.
The official nuclear policy of the Eisenhower administration was the
Doctrine of Massive Retaliation, an explicit warning to the Soviet Union
that the United States would not hesitate to meet any Soviet act of
aggression by unleashing the full force of its nuclear arsenal. The
bigger the threat, it was assumed, the more effective the deterrent.
Meanwhile, the RAND Corporation’s “national security analysts” had taken
on the assignment of thinking more deeply about the problem and promptly
identified fatal flaws in the Massive Retaliation strategy.
RAND’s war strategists acquired a number of colorful nicknames,
including the Nuclear Boys Club and the Megadeath Intellectuals. The
most famous member of the group was an ebullient grandstander named
Herman Kahn, a man with a Santa Claus demeanor who gained celebrity as a
tireless popularizer of doomsday prophecy. His provocative, whimsical
ruminations about the end of the world made him the target of Stanley
Kubrick’s wickedly satirical film “Dr. Strangelove.” Kahn presented his
views in a 1960 book entitled “On Thermonuclear War.” He insisted that
an all-out nuclear war between the superpowers was preventable, and even
it were not prevented, it could be survivable, and even winnable by the U.S.
It was Kahn’s view that stability arises from a scenario wherein neither
side has reason to believe they could destroy their enemy without
putting themselves in grave danger. To achieve that, both sides must
amass such fearsome nuclear arsenals that both are afraid to use them.
The quest for security in a “balance of terror,” however, was illusory.
What actually occurred was a frenzied nuclear arms race that made the
world ever less secure. While not exactly what Kahn had in mind, the
official U.S. deterrence strategy became known as MAD, or Mutually
Assured Destruction. MAD, most independent commentators concluded, was
indeed madness.
A critique of RAND science
Kahn and his RAND colleagues insisted that their analyses and policy
recommendations were derived scientifically, and from science alone.
Their professions of dispassionate objectivity, however, were worthless.
Their methodology was founded on the ideological proposition that
nations have no choice but to regard each other as absolutely,
unyieldingly hostile enemies.
Historian of science Peter Galison called this the Cold War “ontology of
the enemy.” It required a view of the Soviet Union as simply a
“cold-blooded, machinelike opponent” with no ideals, values, or goals
beyond an absolute desire to win the nuclear showdown game.2
The McCarthyite premise upon which the entire edifice of RAND nuclear
strategy stood was the assumption of the Soviet Union’s unalterable
enmity toward the United States. Historians William Appleman Williams,
Walter LaFeber, Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, and Gar Alperovitz, among
others, have marshaled powerful arguments against that proposition.
The animosity between the United States and the Soviet Union was not a
foregone conclusion when World War II came to an end. The two countries
had been allies throughout the war. There is ample evidence that Stalin
naïvely expected to preserve that alliance indefinitely, but the United
States and its European allies had opposite intentions.
Even before the war’s end, American policymakers looked upon the Soviet
Union as the primary obstacle to their dream of an “American Century.”
In February 1946, George Kennan, an American diplomat in Moscow,
articulated a policy of “containment” of the Soviet Union and “strong
resistance” based on military muscle rather than diplomacy. Less than
two weeks later, a declaration of open hostility was issued in a speech
by Winston Churchill as he stood beside Truman in Fulton, Missouri.
Churchill declared that an “iron curtain” had descended across Eastern
Europe, separating “Soviet Russia and its Communist international” from
the “Western Democracies.”
The Soviet leaders, Churchill declared, aimed at “indefinite expansion
of their power and their doctrines.” His warning that “throughout the
world, Communist fifth columns are established and work in complete
unity and absolute obedience to the directions they receive from the
Communist center” provided the themes of McCarthyism that instilled an
all-pervasive “us-against-them” mindset in the American public for
several decades.
While it would be absurd to entertain illusions of Stalin’s benevolence,
the McCarthyist warnings of worldwide communist subversion were based on
a deliberate misreading of the Soviet leader’s motives. Stalin and the
highly conservative Soviet bureaucracy he represented were anything but
radical revolutionaries. It was not in their interest to rock the global
boat by fomenting rebellions around the world. The expansionism
Churchill decried was antithetical to their desire to be left in peace
to exploit their own realm.
The Kremlin’s frequent expressions of support for international
revolutionary movements were grist for the McCarthyist mill, but
historians should not take them at face value. The guiding Stalinist
slogan “Socialism in One Country” meant that the Communist International
under their command was not charged with extending the world socialist
revolution, but with stifling it. That their opportunism was not always
successful does not disprove their intentions.3
Nonetheless, the RAND analysts reduced the messy complexity of
international relations to a one-dimensional duel-to-the-death between
intransigent foes. And with that we have arrived at the doorstep of the
magical realm of mathematical game theory.
John Nash: “Fuck You, Buddy”
If Herman Kahn was king of the Nuclear Boys, John Nash was the creative
power behind the throne. Nash played a crucial role in creating the
mathematical framework that underpinned the RAND analysts’ deterrence
strategies.
April 2018 John Nash
John Nash, receiving the Abel Prize in Norway in 2015.
Mathematical game theory was not the brainchild of Nash alone. John von
Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern inaugurated the field with a 1944 book
entitled “Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.” It was a bold attempt
to put economic theory on a rigorous, axiomatic base derived from
mathematical models of economic decision making.
Professional economists at first ignored game theory, but other social
scientists began to notice its potential applications in other fields.
Most significantly, it was picked up and transformed by the Nuclear Boys
Club at RAND into their primary tool for the analysis of military
strategy. Nash’s critical contribution was to transcend the limitations
of Von Neumann and Morgenstern’s simplified model by generalizing and
validating their conclusions for more complex games of strategy.4
More ominously, Nash also influenced the social agenda of game theory by
inventing a number of games to illustrate its potential usefulness for
the social sciences. Nash’s games, based on the classic Prisoner’s
Dilemma, were explicitly noncooperative in nature as opposed to games
that encouraged or at least permitted cooperation among players.
The most notorious of Nash’s games was one provocatively named “Fuck
You, Buddy.” (To avoid further repetitions of the coarse term here, the
game will henceforth be referred to as “FYB.”) FYB was a four-person
game in which a player can only progress by forming coalitions with
other players. But a player can only win the game by betraying those
with whom he or she had coalesced. “When this game was tried out at
dinner parties,” a website for board game aficionados says, “a common
outcome (reportedly) was that couples were so angered by the betrayals
that they went home in separate taxis.” One commenter added a warning:
“Do not play with people who take things personally.”5
The antisocial attitude encapsulated in the game’s title reflects a
misanthropic view of human nature that is built into its rules: that all
human behavior is motivated only by self-interest, and that rationality
demands all players consider each other to be absolutely untrustworthy.
FYB established a pattern for games in which trickery, backstabbing, and
blunt force are winning strategies, and trustworthiness is the currency
of losers. That its primary author, John Nash, suffered from a
pathological condition characterized by irrational suspiciousness of
others is not irrelevant. Games of this genre served as models shaping
American military strategy in the thermonuclear era, substituting
paranoiac reflexes—“FYB!”—for thoughtful diplomacy.
How the RAND secretaries played the game
The RAND Corporation submitted Nash’s games to empirical test.
Experimental trials were performed using secretaries as players. The
trials did not support the experimental premises, and in fact tended to
refute them. This is one of numerous accounts that have appeared in print:
“The RAND scientists believed that mutual distrust should rule the day.
… They tested their ideas on RAND’s own secretaries, creating all sorts
of different scenarios in which the women could cooperate with or betray
one another.
“In every single experiment, however, instead of making choices in the
self-interested way that RAND expected, the secretaries chose to
cooperate. … Nash blamed the failed experiments on the secretaries
themselves. They were unfit subjects, incapable of following the simple
‘ground rules’ that they should strategize selfishly.”6
Because the secretaries were women, this story seemed to beautifully
confirm feminist claims that female sensibilities are essentially
altruistic and cooperative in contrast to masculine egocentric
aggressiveness. There is evidence in RAND documentation to support the
story, but the evidence is not very strong. The experimental sample size
was far too small to yield significant results. Only two experimental
trials were performed, and only two RAND secretaries served as subjects.
Nevertheless, the outcome was by no means without value. The author of
the study pointed to a crucial insight that deserved to be heeded: “The
main lesson from this limited experiment is that the social relationship
between the subjects can have a controlling influence on their choices.”7
The tale of the two secretaries also illustrates a fundamental violation
of scientific procedure on the part of Nash and his colleagues. When
confronted with evidence, however meager, contradicting their
ideological biases, they were unwilling to rethink their premises. From
that point forward, their research rushed unimpeded toward conclusions
that shoehorned human social behavior into absurdly oversimplified schemas.
The fallacy propagated by the RAND game theorists resides in their
misapplication of formal logic to real-life situations that lie far
outside its scope. They err at both ends of the process by starting with
abstract mathematical postulates unmoored from space, time, and material
reality, and ending up with mathematical models that model nothing that
actually exists.
The Impossibility Theorem
A crucial early step along the road was a premise called the
Impossibility Theorem, which was devised at RAND in 1948 by Kenneth
Arrow. Arrow’s theorem declared the impossibility of any workable
political system based on such notions as “the public interest” or “the
public good.” The Impossibility Theorem, however, was based on extreme
assumptions about human behavior. Arrow’s imaginary social universe
reduced all human motivation to individual self-interest. There was no
place in it for altruism, compassion, concern for others, or notions of
social equality.
Because no such society has ever existed anywhere on Earth, Arrow’s
assumptions obviously were not derived from empirical observation. They
were purely hypothetical constructs with no basis in social reality.
Nonetheless, his Impossibility Theorem resonated with the RAND Nuclear
Boys, who integrated it and its assumptions into their strategic thinking.
RAND’s construction of nuclear military strategy on a foundation of game
theory is perhaps the single most consequential example of mathematical
malpractice in the long span of human history. One-dimensional models
that reduce human interactions to one-against-all antagonism produce
inflexible strategies heavy on trickery and blunt force, and light on
intelligent efforts to resolve disagreements. By creating a framework
within which U.S. policymakers could only treat the USSR with unyielding
hostility, RAND rationalized a Cold War that humanity has thus far been
fortunate to survive.
Notes:
1. For more on James M. Buchanan, see Cliff Conner, “The Lenin of
Libertarianism,” Socialist Action, socialistaction.org, Dec. 26, 2017.
2. Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Weiner and the
Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry, journals.uchicago.edu, Autumn 1994.
3. The most consequential example of Stalin’s policy of discouraging
socialist revolutions in other countries was its application in China in
the 1920s, which was chronicled by Harold Isaacs in his classic work,
The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution (1938). The Chinese Communists
eventually succeeded in taking power in 1949 despite decades of betrayal
by Stalin’s Communist International.
4. For a more thorough exposition of Nash’s theoretical contributions to
mathematical game theory, see Roger A. McCain, Game Theory and Public
Policy, 2nd edition, 2015.
5. “So Long, Sucker (1964),” Board Game Database,
boardgamedatabase.blogspot.com, April 17, 2016.
6. Douglas Rushkoff, Life, Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and
How to Take It Back, 2009.
7. Merrill M. Flood, “Some Experimental Games,” U.S. Air Force Project
RAND Memorandum RM-789-1, June 20, 1952.
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--
___
Richard Dawkins
“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all
decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this
sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running
for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from
within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation,
thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this
very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the
natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons
and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people
are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find
any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has
precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no
purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
― Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life