From MAD to Madness

This is an unusual as well as powerful book, based on 20 years' experience of the upper echelons of US intelligence from the late 40s to the late 60s. It is essential reading for understanding the underlying patterns of thought and war mentality that still prevails in the Pentagon. Paul Johnstone describes many studies in which he was involved with issues involving air targets, nuclear war, strategic weapons and the Berlin crisis of the early 1960s. There are some chilling phrases in his analysis, including 'blast effect' and 'bonus damage'. Just as Thomas Merton argued, target = city, and people become just numbers. It becomes clear that intelligence is designed to support beliefs and doctrines and hence political decisions, as we saw clearly in connection with the Iraq war - however, ambiguities always remain: clarity and certainty are hard to achieve. In any event, the human is always the determining factor. Psychologically, a threat is required in order to create and enemy that justifies nuclear build-up and even a pre-emptive first strike. This Manichaean worldview sees the US as the good guy needing to get tough with the bad guy, whether Russia, China or ISIL - from Soviet threat to Muslim threat. The war mentality requires an evil enemy in order to justify total destruction and sustained military budgets. (I arranged a Network conference on the enemy image 30 years ago!)

The book shows how the use of the atomic bomb in Japan was essentially a political rather than military decision – the senior military advised against it. However, it was an immense show of power and it is interesting to learn that Hiroshima was a uranium bomb and Nagasaki a plutonium one - they wanted to check that both worked, and this then formed the basis of the Cold War relationship with Russia, which had been an ally during the Second World War. A key insight in our own time is the implementation of the neoconservative Wolfowitz doctrine embodied in the Project for a New American Century of 1998. It is all about preservation of American hegemony and therefore the undermining of potential enemies. It also gives the US the right to intervene where it chooses and criticise other countries who do the same. And as John Pilger also argues, NATO has moved bases right up to the Russian border with a predictable response from Putin, who is then demonised (one has to remember the triumphalism of the 1990s and the humiliation of Russia, also remarked on by Gorbachev). Meanwhile, even under the Obama regime, the development of new tactical nuclear weapons continued, with improved warheads and delivery systems designed to sustain nuclear primacy. The Federation of American Scientists estimates that the US now deploys 200 ready to fire nuclear warheads in Europe based on the perceived right to carry out a nuclear first strike. This enemy-centred foreign policy is a continuation of the thinking of the 1940s and based on a dualistic worldview of good and evil justifying potential destruction. As Diana Johnstone observes, the pursuit of absolute domination is unsustainable, and we must regard each other as partners and move towards 'a new world order based on cooperation rather than fear.'