The Inherent Flexibility of the Human Moral Compass: Part 1

The following is a large excerpt from the Prologue from The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, by Daniel Ellsberg (above), published by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2017 (it is very long, but I hope it counts as fair use in the circumstances):

”One day in the spring of 1961, soon after my thirtieth birthday … I was handed, in a White House office, a single sheet of paper with a simple graph on it. It was headed “Top Secret—Sensitive.” Under that was “For the President’s Eyes Only.”

…

The deputy assistant to the president for national security, Bob Komer, showed it to me. A cover sheet identified it as the answer to a question that President Kennedy had addressed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff a week earlier. Komer showed their response to me because I had drafted the question, which Komer had sent in the president’s name.

The question to the Joint Chiefs was this: “If your plans for general [nuclear] war are carried out as planned, how many people will be killed in the Soviet Union and China?”

Their answer was in the form of a graph. The vertical axis showed the number of deaths, in millions. The horizontal axis showed the amount of time, in months. The graph was a straight line, starting at time zero on the horizontal, with the vertical axis indicating the number of immediate deaths expected within hours of our attack, and then slanting upward to a maximum at six months—an arbitrary cut off for the deaths that would accumulate over time from initial injuries and from fallout radiation.

The lowest number, at the left of the graph, was 275 million deaths. The number on the right-hand side, at six months, was 325 million.

That same morning, I drafted another question to be sent to the Joint Chiefs over the president’s signature, asking for a total breakdown of global deaths from our own attacks, to include not only the Sino-Soviet bloc but all other countries that would be affected by fallout as well. Komer showed it to me a week later, this time in the form of a table with explanatory footnotes.

In sum, another hundred million deaths, roughly, were predicted in Eastern Europe, from direct attacks on Warsaw Pact bases and air defenses and from fallout. There might be a hundred million more from fallout in Western Europe, depending on which way the wind blew (a matter, largely, of the season). But regardless of the season, another hundred million deaths, at least, were predicted from fallout in the mostly neutral countries adjacent to the Soviet bloc and China, including Finland, Sweden, Austria, Afghanistan, India, and Japan. Finland, for example, would be wiped out by fallout from U.S. ground-burst explosions on the Soviet submarine pens in Leningrad.

The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed at the Soviet Union, its Warsaw Pact satellites, and China, would be roughly six hundred million dead. A hundred Holocausts.

I remember what I thought when I first held the single sheet with the graph on it. I thought, This piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project ever. There should be nothing on earth, nothing real, that it referred to.

One of the principal expected effects of this plan—partly intended, partly (in allied, neutral, and satellite countries) undesired but foreseeable and accepted “collateral damage”—was summarized on that second piece of paper, which I held a week later in the spring of 1961: the extermination of over half a billion people.

From that day on, I have had one over-riding life purpose: to prevent the execution of any such plan.”

The emphasis is mine, but it should not be necessary for the elemental wickedness of the thinking in the minds the people that undertook such a calculation to be obvious. These words had an immediate and horrifying effect on my psyche just as it had to Daniel Ellsberg’s all those years ago – I read it, and then had to stop reading, and wander around in a daze for a while as it continued to sink in.

It gets worse, later in the book it becomes apparent that:

• ‘first use’ of force on such a scale was regarded as justifiable, if the US felt sufficiently 'threatened'

• that is would not matter if such a ‘threat’ came only from, say, Russia, and not China – as it was also considered justifiable and ‘prudent’ to launch all nuclear missiles aimed at both of the country’s communist enemies in such circumstances.

Thus, it becomes clear, that the US nuclear war planners were quite willing to launch an unprovoked attack (feeling 'under threat' not being the same either as an outright provocation or a nuclear attack) on their Russian ‘enemy’ - despite the fact that it would inevitably obliterate not only some 50m Russians (on 1961 figures), but also 275m Chinese, as well as 100m Swedes, Austrians, Afghans, Indians, and Japanese and incidentally (as it happens) the entire population of Finland.

This ‘calculation’ reminded me of the Ford Pinto trial in 1972. Ford had designed a low-end subcompact saloon with the petrol tank, to save cost, situated behind the rear axle as opposed to above it. In a rear end shunt, as a result of the siting of the petrol tank, the car immediately caught fire - the driver died of burns and a teenage passenger was so badly burned he needed 10 years of gruesome and painful operations.

The jury awarded the passenger $2.5m damages as compensation, but – outraged by the evidence that whilst tests had demonstrated the petrol tank could cause such incidents if not moved, Ford’s senior management were not willing to incur the additional manufacturing costs of $15.30 to make it safer – also awarded $125m in punitive damages.

Ellsberg is the man who, being so morally outraged overall by what he was reading while seconded to the Pentagon (and thence to the White House) as an analyst from the RAND Corporation, copied thousands of pages of documents, including the entirety of the McNamara-commissioned analysis of the history of the Vietnam War, and gave them to the Washington Post in 1971. The ‘Pentagon Papers’, as they were called, were explosive materials as they disclosed that the US military and successive governments had misled Congress and the American public for decades about the progress of, methods used and the likelihood of success, of the Vietnam War.

He has written about the Pentagon Papers incident before, in ‘Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers’ in 2002, and it is as well conveyed dramatically by the excellent Spielberg film The Post, last year.

In this book, however, he is more concerned with his primary role in the Pentagon, which was as an advisor on nuclear war policy in general, and the command and control systems used to manage that policy, in particular. He was, and is, an expert in game theory.

Much of the book is taken up with consideration of the historical ‘progress’ towards the kind of thinking that resulted in inhuman calculations of the sort demonstrated in that Top Secret paper, and laid even more plain in the answer to his ‘follow-up’ question.

It is fascinating to consider, in passing, why no-one else in the Pentagon or the White House at that time had thought of asking his ‘follow-up’ a question – and whether it would ever have been asked if he hadn’t thought of it.

Rather than consider the entire development of ‘morally acceptable’ wartime strategies since the concept of ‘just war’ was first promulgated by Saint Augustine in the 5th Century, and developed by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th, and Grotius thereafter - as Ellsberg does, we will start with World War II.

He notes that there is clear historical evidence that before the war started, the then current thinking – from all belligerents (including Nazi Germany) was that the bombing of civilians was (for want of a better word), ‘wrong’.

As he notes:

“On September 1, 1939, the day Hitler invaded Poland—marking the official outbreak of World War II—President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed this appeal to all the belligerent states:

“The ruthless bombing from the air of civilians in unfortified centers of population during the course of the hostilities which have raged in various quarters of the earth during the past few years, which have resulted in the maiming and death of thousands of defenseless men, women and children, has sickened the hearts of civilized men and women and has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity.

If resort is had to this form of human barbarism during the period of the tragic conflagration with which the world is now confronted, hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings who have no responsibility for, and who are not even remotely participating in, the hostilities which have now broken out, will lose their lives.

I am therefore directing this urgent appeal to every Government which may be engaged in hostilities publicly to affirm its determination that its armed forces shall in no event, and under no circumstances, undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or of unfortified cities, upon the understanding that these same rules of warfare will be scrupulously observed by all of their opponents. I request an immediate reply.”

The very next day, Britain (before it had formally declared war on Germany) gave that affirmation, declaring that the British and French would “conduct hostilities with a firm desire140 to spare the civilian population” and had already sent explicit instructions to the commanders of their armed forces prohibiting the bombardment “of any except strictly military objectives in the narrowest sense of the word.”

This was shortly followed by a similar agreement from Germany. In fact, none of these governments, at least at the highest levels, had any plan or intention at this time to pursue the deliberate bombing of cities. That included the government of Adolf Hitler.

Roosevelt’s message was not an appeal to a new standard of conduct in war. Quite the contrary, he was reaffirming the importance of what was regarded as an international norm, part of the common law of international relations, despite recent violations of it by fascist powers that had been widely and strongly condemned.

The British instructions, referenced in their reply to FDR, included the following three principles, “enunciated in Parliament by the Prime Minister in June 1938”:

1. “It is against international law to bomb civilians as such and to make deliberate attacks on the civilian population”;

2. “Targets which are aimed at from the air must be legitimate military objectives and must be capable of identification”; and

3. “reasonable care must be taken in attacking those military objectives so that by carelessness a civilian population in the neighbourhood is not bombed.”

Britain introduced these three principles in a League of Nations Assembly resolution, which was unanimously adopted on September 30, 1938.”

FDR’s reference to the “hostilities which have raged in various quarters of the earth during the past few years” was undoubtedly a reference to Shanghai and Guernica, which – at the time – were regarded as atrocities.

However, these unanimous, clear and unambiguous declarations as to the accepted norms of behaviour towards civilian politicians did not last long – on either side.

Germany started it, as John Cleese might have put it, in 1940 with their Blitz on London and the provinces; but then, they were the bad guys, weren’t they?

However, only two years later, without any public announcement as to a change in policy, or even a justification that ‘they did it first’, the RAF and then USAAF started implementing exactly the same policy. Nobody - said - anything. That is how easily an entire population’s moral compass can get re-orientated from North to South, like the spontaneous terrestrial magnetic pole-switching that takes place every million years or so, only faster. They had not only silently changed their own recent stated policy, but – at a stroke – swept aside over 600 years of Augustinian and Aquinian philosophy.

We could review at length, as indeed Ellsberg does with skill, all of the ways that the concept of a ’just war’ has been chipped away at over the centuries, including Sherman’s notoriously, and deliberately, cruel ‘March to the Sea’ in 1864, but we do not have the time or space – I commend to you the book.

Instead, we will proceed straight to Hiroshima and Nagasaki (as we must), by way of Dresden, then back to where we started, and finally bring us up to date with the sanctioned drone bombings of entire Afghani Wedding Parties in order to ‘take out’ one key terrorist.

But that is for Part 2 of this Blog…