Albert James Wohlstetter Main Writtings
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
Albert Wohlstetter's Legacy: the Neo-Cons, Not Carter, Killed
SPECIAL REPORT: NUCLEAR SABOTAGE ALBERT WOHLSTETTER’S LEGACY Wohlstetter was even stranger than the “Dr. Strangelove” depicted in the 1964 movie of that name. An early draft of the film was titled “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” the same title as Wohlstetter’s best-known unclassified work. Here, a still from the film. tives—Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Zalmay Khalilzad, to name a few. In Wohlstetter’s circle of influence were also Ahmed Chalabi (whom Wohlstetter championed), Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-Wash.), Sen. Robert Dole (R- Kan.), and Margaret Thatcher. Wohlstetter himself was a follower of Bertrand Russell, not only in mathematics, but in world outlook. The pseudo-peacenik Russell had called for a preemptive strike against the Soviet Union, after World War II and before the Soviets developed the bomb, as a prelude to his plan for bully- ing nations into a one-world government. Russell, a raving Malthusian, opposed economic development, especially in the Third World. Admirer Jude Wanniski wrote of Wohlstetter in an obituary, “[I]t is no exaggeration, I think, to say that Wohlstetter was the most influential unknown man in the world for the past half century, and easily in the top ten in importance of all men.” “Albert’s decisions were not automat- ically made official policy at the White House,” Wanniski wrote, “but Albert’s The Neo-Cons, Not Carter, genius and his following were such in the places where it counted in the Establishment that if his views were Killed Nuclear Energy resisted for more than a few months, it -
Discriminate Deterrence
DISCRIMINATE DETERRENCE Report of The Commission On Integrated Long-Term Strategy Co -C. I lairmea: Fred C. lkle and Albert Wohlstetter Moither, Anne L. Annsinmg Andrew l. Goodraster flenry /1 Kissinger Zbign ei Brzezinski fames L. Holloway, Ur Joshua Lederberg William P. Clark Samuel P. Huntington Bernard A. Schriever tV. Graham Ciaytor, John W. Vessey January 1988 COMMISSION ON INTEGRATED LONG-TERM STRATEGY January 11. 1988 MEMORANDUM FOR: THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE THE ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT FOR NATIONAL SECURITY AFFAIRS We are pleased to present this final report of Our Commission. Pursuant to your initial mandate, the report proposes adjustments to US. military strategy in view of a changing security environment in the decades ahead. Over the last fifteen months the Commission has received valuable counsel from members of Congress, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Service Chiefs. and the Presdent's Science Advisor, Members of the National Security Council Staff, numerous professionals in the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency, and a broad range of specialists outside the government provided unstinting support. We are also indebted to the Commission's hardworking staff. The Commission was supported generously by several specialized study groups that closely analyzed a number of issues, among them: the security environment for the next twenty years, the role of advanced technology in military systems, interactions between offensive and defensive systems on the periphery of the Soviet Union, and the U.S, posture in regional conflicts around the world. Within the next few months, these study groups will publish detailed findings of their own. -
Preempting Emergence: the Biological
PRE-EMPTING EMERGENCE – THE BIOLOGICAL TURN IN THE WAR ON TERROR Melinda Cooper 2 In 2004, three years after the sporadic and still unresolved anthrax attacks that followed September 11, the Bush administration became the first in US history to implement a national defence strategy against biological threats. In the same year, US Congress also approved the largest ever funding project for biodefence research, to be carried out over the following decade. The legislation, going under the name of Project Bioshield, authorized $5.6 billion for the purchase and stockpiling of vaccines and drugs against bioterrorist threats, granted the government new authority to initiate research programs and special dispensation to override drug regulations in the face of a national emergency. At the same time, a more secretive initiative was underway to establish four research centres for the testing of biological weapons defences. The US, it seems, was preparing itself for an attack of epidemic proportions. But what exactly was the US arming itself against? In his public addresses on the topic, George Bush seemed unsure whether the deadliest threat would be more likely to emanate from a deliberate bioterrorist attack or from any one of the resurgent or drug-resistant infectious diseases that now regularly afflict urban hospitals. Official documents declared that infectious disease outbreak and bioterrorism should be treated as identical threats, in the absence of any sure means of distinguishing the two. The confusion was further reflected in the allocation of resources. Much of the new funding for biodefence went to institutions that had previously been engaged in public health and infectious disease research, while the ailing biotech start-ups of the genomics era were encouraged to reinvest their energies in the new arena of military applications. -
Copyright by Paul Harold Rubinson 2008
Copyright by Paul Harold Rubinson 2008 The Dissertation Committee for Paul Harold Rubinson certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Containing Science: The U.S. National Security State and Scientists’ Challenge to Nuclear Weapons during the Cold War Committee: —————————————————— Mark A. Lawrence, Supervisor —————————————————— Francis J. Gavin —————————————————— Bruce J. Hunt —————————————————— David M. Oshinsky —————————————————— Michael B. Stoff Containing Science: The U.S. National Security State and Scientists’ Challenge to Nuclear Weapons during the Cold War by Paul Harold Rubinson, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2008 Acknowledgements Thanks first and foremost to Mark Lawrence for his guidance, support, and enthusiasm throughout this project. It would be impossible to overstate how essential his insight and mentoring have been to this dissertation and my career in general. Just as important has been his camaraderie, which made the researching and writing of this dissertation infinitely more rewarding. Thanks as well to Bruce Hunt for his support. Especially helpful was his incisive feedback, which both encouraged me to think through my ideas more thoroughly, and reined me in when my writing overshot my argument. I offer my sincerest gratitude to the Smith Richardson Foundation and Yale University International Security Studies for the Predoctoral Fellowship that allowed me to do the bulk of the writing of this dissertation. Thanks also to the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale University, and John Gaddis and the incomparable Ann Carter-Drier at ISS. -
Kahn Used the Metaphor of an 'Escalation Ladder'
Preventing Nuclear Use: Internationally-Controlled Theater Missile Defenses Among Non- Super-Arsenal States1 Carolyn C. James, PhD University of Missouri, Columbia INTRODUCTION The current debates over missile defenses in the United States all have a common aspect - the systems are meant to provide a defense for US territory, allies, or troops abroad.2 This article proposes a different view with significant security potential. Specifically, theater missile defenses (TMD) should be considered as an international tool to prevent nuclear weapons use among proliferated states.3 Internationally-controlled TMD placed at potential flash points could prevent conflicts and crises from escalating to nuclear levels. These areas include borders with so-called “rogue” states, such as North Korea, Iran and Iraq, all of whom have seemingly aggressive ballistic missile programs and are embroiled in protracted conflicts with their neighbors.4 Similar to the goal of peacekeeping, reducing and limiting conflict in regions such as the Middle East clearly is in the US national interest. How, then, can nuclear use be prevented? Currently, there are seven declared nuclear weapon states (US, Russia, China, Great Britain, France, Pakistan, India), one non-declared “opaque” nuclear weapon state (Israel), and several states with known or suspected nuclear aspirations (including Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Libya and Taiwan). Two of these, the US and Russia, have established a legacy of Cold War deterrence policies. Nuclear deterrence, in particular, has been credited with maintaining crisis stability during those years.5 Today, a major debate in the field of security studies surrounds the question: Does nuclear deterrence really work? A common failure in most of these discussions about successful deterrence and avoiding nuclear use is the lack of distinction among nuclear force levels.6 The debate tends to be clarified by asking whether it was nuclear weapons, or mutual assured destruction (MAD), that kept the Cold War cold. -
Omnicide “Here Is What We Now Know: the United States and Russia Each Have an Actual Doomsday Machine.”
Omnicide “Here is what we now know: the United States and Russia each have an actual Doomsday Machine.” By Daniel Ellsberg From The Doomsday Machine, published by Bloomsbury. The book is an account of America’s nuclear program in the 1960s drawn from Ellsberg’s experience as a consultant to the Department of Defense and the White House, drafting Secretary Robert McNamara’s plans for nuclear war. Ellsberg is the author of Secrets, a book about his experiences leaking the Pentagon Papers. At the conclusion of his 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick introduced the concept of a “Doomsday Machine”—designed by the Soviet Union to deter nuclear attack against the country by automating the destruction of all human life as a response to such an attack. The movie’s Russian leader had installed the system before revealing it to the world, however, and it was now being triggered by a single nuclear explosion from an American B-52 sent off by a rogue commander without presidential authorization. Kubrick had borrowed the name and the concept of the Doomsday machine from my former colleague Herman Kahn, a Rand physicist with whom he had discussed it. In his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War, Kahn wrote that he would be able to design such a device. It could be produced within ten years and would be relatively cheap— since it could be placed in one’s own country or in the ocean. It would not depend on sending warheads halfway around the world. But, he said, the machine was obviously undesirable. It would be too difficult to control— too inflexible and automatic—and its failure “kills too many people”— everyone, in fact, an outcome that the philosopher John Somerville later termed “omnicide.” Kahn was sure in 1961 that no such system had been built, nor would it be, by either the United States or the Soviet Union. -
Suspected Soviet Cell Wrote Reagan's Long-Term Strategy
Click here for Full Issue of EIR Volume 15, Number 23, June 3, 1988 �TIillFeature Suspected Soviet cell wrote Reagan's long-tenn strategy by Jeffrey Steinberg A tightly organized cell of suspected Soviet moles wrote the Reagan administra tion's "semi-official" long-term strategy for dealing with the U.S.S.R. and also played a major hand in drafting the disastrous Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force (INF) treaty that a deluded President Reagan now hopes will earn him and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachov the Nobel Peace Prize. As shocking as this may sound, Dr. Albert Wohlstetter and Dr. Fred Ikle, the two principal authors of the presidential report, Discriminate Deterrence. have beenidentified to this news service by highly reliabJe U.S. intelligence sources as prime suspects in a Soviet-Israeli "false flag" spy ring first exposed with the November 1985 arrest of Jonathan Jay Pollard and the December 1987 arrest of Shabtai Kalmanowitch. On Feb. 19, 1988, Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodwardpublished a front-page story detailing the Pentagon and CIA's futile search for "Mr. X," the designation for a high-level intelligence community mole who was believed to be providing Pollard with top secret code numbers of classified military documents that Pollard, a counterterrorist analyst at a Naval Investigative Service facility in Suitland, Md., would then pilfer and pass on to Israeli and Soviet intelligence. Shabtai Kalmanowitch, a Russian-born Israeli multi-millionaire, soon to be tried in Israel as a KGB spy, is widely believed to have been one of the Israel-Soviet "back channels" through which the "Mr. -
Neoconservatism Hoover Press : Berkowitz/Conservative Hberkc Ch5 Mp 104 Rev1 Page 104 Hoover Press : Berkowitz/Conservative Hberkc Ch5 Mp 105 Rev1 Page 105
Hoover Press : Berkowitz/Conservative hberkc ch5 Mp_103 rev1 page 103 part iii Neoconservatism Hoover Press : Berkowitz/Conservative hberkc ch5 Mp_104 rev1 page 104 Hoover Press : Berkowitz/Conservative hberkc ch5 Mp_105 rev1 page 105 chapter five The Neoconservative Journey Jacob Heilbrunn The Neoconservative Conspiracy The longer the United States struggles to impose order in postwar Iraq, the harsher indictments of the George W. Bush administration’s foreign policy are becoming. “Acquiring additional burdens by engag- ing in new wars of liberation is the last thing the United States needs,” declared one Bush critic in Foreign Affairs. “The principal problem is the mistaken belief that democracy is a talisman for all the world’s ills, and that the United States has a responsibility to promote dem- ocratic government wherever in the world it is lacking.”1 Does this sound like a Democratic pundit bashing Bush for par- tisan gain? Quite the contrary. The swipe came from Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center and copublisher of National Interest. Simes is not alone in calling on the administration to reclaim the party’s pre-Reagan heritage—to abandon the moralistic, Wilsonian, neoconservative dream of exporting democracy and return to a more limited and realistic foreign policy that avoids the pitfalls of Iraq. 1. Dimitri K. Simes, “America’s Imperial Dilemma,” Foreign Affairs (Novem- ber/December 2003): 97, 100. Hoover Press : Berkowitz/Conservative hberkc ch5 Mp_106 rev1 page 106 106 jacob heilbrunn In fact, critics on the Left and Right are remarkably united in their assessment of the administration. Both believe a neoconservative cabal has hijacked the administration’s foreign policy and has now overplayed its hand. -
How Scenarios Became Corporate Strategies: Alternative Futures and Uncertainty in Strategic Management
HOW SCENARIOS BECAME CORPORATE STRATEGIES: ALTERNATIVE FUTURES AND UNCERTAINTY IN STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT Bretton Fosbrook A Dissertation submitted to The Faculty of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Science and Technology Studies York University Toronto, Ontario December 2017 © Bretton Fosbrook, 2017 ABSTRACT How Scenarios Became Corporate Strategies tracks the transformation of scenario planning, a non-calculative technique for imagining alternative futures, from postwar American thermonuclear defense projects to corporate planning efforts beginning in the late 1960s. Drawing on archival research, the dissertation tells a history of how different corporate strategists in the second half of the twentieth century attempted to engage with future uncertainties by drawing heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory rational and intuitive techniques together in their developments of corporate scenario planning. By tracing the heterogeneity of methodologies and intellectual influences in three case studies from corporate scenario planning efforts in the United States and Britain, the dissertation demonstrates how critical and countercultural philosophies that emphasized ‘irrational’ human capacities like imagination, consciousness, and intuition—often assumed to be antithetical to the rule- bound, quantitative rationalities of corporate planning efforts—became crucial tools, rather than enemies, of corporate strategy under uncertainty after 1960. The central argument -
The Game Theory Narrative and the Myth of the National Security State
Game Theory Narrative | 333 The Game Theory Narrative and the Myth of the National Security State Steven Belletto With the Soviet Union, you did get the sense that they were operating on a model that we could comprehend in terms of, they don’t want to be blown up, we don’t want to be blown up, so you do game theory and calculate ways to contain. —Barack Obama, September 2004 ou can never underestimate the willingness of the state to act out its own massive fantasies.” So says Eric Deming in the novel Underworld (1997), Don DeLillo’s weighty stocktaking of postwar “Y 1 U.S. culture. As Matt Shay listens, Eric, stoned and introspective, repeats this statement: “You can never unterestimate the villingness of the shtate . to ahkt out its own massif phantasies.” The accented repetition signals that this is a clichéd phrase, likely lifted from some half-remembered antifascist B movie. But the following day, as Matt thinks about the phrase, he wonders if it was not “paying tribute” to “all those émigrés from Middle Europe [who] came to do science in New Mexico during the war.” This speculation is occasioned by a rambling reference Eric wedges between the first statement and its rep- etition: “Eric went on in his stupid voice, talking about problem boxes and minimax solutions, all the kriegspielish stuff they’d studied in grad school, theory of games and patterns of conflict, heads I win, tails you lose.” With this pairing, DeLillo implies a connection between game theory—“minimax solutions, all the kriegspielish stuff”—and fantasies of state control. -
"Fat Man," the New Yorker (2005): on Herman Kahn and Nuclear Strategy
3/8/2017 Fat Man - The New Yorker BOOKS JUNE 27, 2005 IUE FAT MAN Herman Kahn and the nuclear age. By Louis Menand erman Kahn was the heavyweight of the Megadeath Intellectuals, the men who, H in the early years of the Cold War, made it their business to think about the unthinkable, and to design the game plan for nuclear war—how to prevent it, or, if it could not be prevented, how to win it, or, if it could not be won, how to survive it. The collective combat experience of these men was close to nil; their diplomatic experience was smaller. Their training was in physics, engineering, political science, mathematics, and logic, and they worked with the latest in assessment technologies: operational research, computer science, systems analysis, and game theory. The type of war they contemplated was, of course, never waged, but whether this was because of their work or in spite of it has always been a matter of dispute. Exhibit A in the case against them is a book by Kahn, published in 1960, “On Thermonuclear War.” Kahn was a creature of the Corporation, and was a creature of the Air Force. In 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs nicknamed Little Boy and Fat Man on Japan, the Air Force was still a branch of the Army. The bomb changed that. An independent Department of the Air Force was created in 1947; the nation’s nuclear arsenal was put under its command; and the Air Force displaced the Army as the prima donna of national defense. -
Untitled Essay, 1946 Intelligence Overload These Days
CONTENTS OVERVIEW ................................................................. vi INTRODUCTION: The Name of the Game: Let’s Define Our Terms ........... vii CHAPTER 1 HOW TO DECEIVE: Principles & Process 1.1 Deception as Applied Psychology....................................... 1 1.2 The Basic Principle: Naturalness........................................ 6 1.3 The Structure of Deception ............................................ 7 1.4 The Process of Deception............................................ 13 CHAPTER 2 INTERFACE: Deceiver versus Detective 2.1 Weaving the Web .................................................. 16 2.2 Unraveling the Web................................................. 17 CHAPTER 3 HOW TO DETECT: 10 General Principles 3.1 Cognitive Biases that Inhibit Detection .................................. 20 3.2 Overcoming Information Overload...................................... 20 3.3 The Analysts: Minimalists versus Compleatists ........................... 22 3.4 The Analyst’s Advantage............................................. 23 3.5 Categories ........................................................ 24 3.6 Know Your Enemy: Empathy & Inference................................ 32 3.7 Channels ......................................................... 34 3.8 Senses & Sensors.................................................. 35 3.9 Cultural Factors.................................................... 39 3.10 Asymmetries: Technological & Cognitive ................................ 40 CHAPTER 4 HOW TO DETECT: 20