Social Science and the Cold War

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Notes

¹ Hamilton Cravens and Mark Solovey (eds.), Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2012); Mark Solovey, Shaky Foundations: The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2013); Joy Rohde, Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research during the Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 2013); Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2002).

² Eric Schlosser, ‘Deconstructing “Dr. Strangelove”’, New Yorker, 18 Jan.2014, <http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/deconstructing-Dr-Strangelove>.

³ Michael Seth Starr, Peter Sellers: A Film History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland 1991), 100.

⁴ ‘The device is protected from enemy action (perhaps by being put thousands of feet underground) and then connected to a computer which is in turn connected, by a reliable communications system, to hundreds of sensory devices all over the United States. The computer would then be programmed so that if, say, five nuclear bombs exploded over the United States, the device would be triggered and the earth destroyed’. Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton UP 1960), 144. Kahn was careful to explain that such a device was never likely to be adopted by a government, although this appears to be for reasons of expense as much as operational considerations.

⁵ The novel also had a happier ending. Published in the US as Peter Bryant, Red Alert (Rockville, MD: Black Mask 1958). Peter Bryant was a pen name for Peter George who originally published the book in the UK as Two Hours to Doom. In Fail-Safe, a novel with a similar theme, accused of plagiarising Red Alert, there is a sinister figure Dr Groeteschele, who in the film version advocates a first strike and seems to be based more transparently on Kahn. Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, Fail-Safe (New York: McGraw-Hill 1962). Somewhat chillingly the novel appeared as a three-part serial in the Saturday Evening Post in Oct. 1962, coinciding with the Cuban Missile Crisis before being published the next year as a book.

⁶ Fred Kaplan suggests it was more of a documentary than Kubrick realised. ‘Truth Stranger Than ‘Strangelove’, New York Times, 10 Oct. 2004.

⁷ The quotes come from James Newman’s eviscerating review of Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War in Scientific American (March 1961). Newman published this and some other pieces in The Rule of Folly (London: Allen & Unwin 1962), with a preface by Erich Fromm. Kahn had a mischievous sense of humour to the point that one biographer considers his potential as a stand-up comic. Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard UP 2005).

⁸ Thomas Schelling, ‘Meteors, Mischief, and War’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 16 (1960), 292.

⁹ Erickson et al., How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind, 1–2.

¹⁰ The term ‘think tank’ had been used colloquially to refer to the brain since the nineteenth century and then adopted for the secure rooms where military planners could discuss coming operations. The first actual use of the term in connection with civilian research institutions (at least in the New York Times) was with reference to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Palo Alto, California in 1958. ‘49 Scholars Hold Man Up to Mirror: In Sequestered Coast Base They Start Deep Delving Into Behavior Factors’, New York Times, 21 Sept. 1958. Until 1960 the term was used largely in connection with CASBS. Thomas Medvetz, Think Tanks in America (Univ. of Chicago Press 2012), 26.

¹¹ The first book on RAND was Bruce L. R. Smith, The RAND Corporation; Case Study of a Nonprofit Advisory Corporation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1966). The personal rivalries come out in Fred Kaplan, Wizards of Armageddon (Stanford UP 1983).

¹² Erickson et al., 3–4.

¹³ Ibid., 43.

¹⁴ Frederick W. Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management (Digireads.com 2008), 14, first published 1911; Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (New York: Viking Penguin 1999).

¹⁵ Judith A. Merkle, Management and Ideology: the Legacy of the International Scientific Movement (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press 1980), 44–5.

¹⁶ Oscar Kraines, ‘Brandeis’ Philosophy of Scientific Management’, Western Political Quarterly 13/1 (March 1960), 201.

¹⁷ George Steinmetz, The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and Its Epistemological Others (Durham, NC: Duke UP 2005).

¹⁸ Rebecca S. Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press 1997).

¹⁹ The term had been around for some time without getting much purchase. It was used by the Ford Foundation to describe its major programme to invigorate the social sciences in the early 1950s. Jeff Pooley, ‘A “Not Particularly Felicitous” Phrase: A History of the “Behavioral Sciences” Label?’, ANR Symposium on cross-disciplinary research ventures in post-war American social science, ENS Cachan, Nov. 2012.

²⁰ See Solovey, Shaky Foundations..

²¹ Hunter Heyck, ‘Producing Reason’, in Cravens and Solovey, Cold War Social Science, 109.

²² Hunter Heyck, ‘The Organizational Revolution and the Human Sciences’, Isis 105/1 (March 2014), 1–31.

²³ S.M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Univ. of Chicago Press 2003).

²⁴ - I make this point in my discussion of William Riker in Freedman, Strategy: A History (New York: Oxford OUP 2013), 578.

²⁵ David Ekbladh, ‘Present at the Creation: Edward Mead Earle and the Depression Era Origins of Security Studies’, International Security 36/3 (Winter 2011/12), 107–41.

²⁶ Gertrude Samuels, ‘Where Einstein Surveys the Cosmos’, New York Times,19 Nov. 1950 This was Albert Einstein’s academic home.

²⁷ Gene Lyons, ‘The Growth of National Security Research’, Journal of Politics 25/3 (Aug. 1963), 489–508.

²⁸ In practical terms the main channel for non-military expertise into government on nuclear weapons policy was the President’s Scientific Advisory Committee.

²⁹ Oskar Morgenstern, The Question of National Defense (New York: Random House 1959).

³⁰ Barry Bruce-Biggs, Supergenius: The Megaworlds of Herman Kahn (New York: North American Policy Press 2000), 120. See Freedman, Strategy, 160–1. On Schelling see Robert Ayson, Thomas Schelling and the Nuclear Age: Strategy as a Social Science (London: Frank Cass 2004).

³¹ In the case of Britain this reflected the socialist, and even communist, leanings of key members of the scientific group. See Stephen Budiansky, Blackett’s War: The Men Who Defeated Nazi U-Boats and Brought Science to the Art of Warfare (New York: Alfred Knopf 2013).

³² It has been suggested that von Neumann applied game theoretic techniques to operational problems. Michael A. Fortun and Silvan S. Schweber, ‘Scientists and the Legacy of World War II: The Case of Operations Research (OR)’, Social Studies of Science 23/4 (Nov. 1993), 595–642.

³³ Ibid., 624, 628–9.

³⁴ Erickson et al., 78.

³⁵ Although Erickson et al. do not cover this study its importance is highlighted in Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy, Chapter 1, and in James A. Smith’s discussion of RAND in his book on thinktanks. James A. Smith, The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite (New York: The Free Press 1991), 119–21. A discussion of Wohlstetter and his writings can be found in Robert Zarate and Jenry Sokolski (eds), Nuclear Heuristics: Selected Writings of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College 2009).

³⁶ Fred Kaplan, Wizards of Armageddon, 108.

³⁷ ‘Would not a general thermonuclear war mean “extinction” for the aggressor as well as the defender? “Extinction” is a state that badly needs analysis. Russian fatalities in World War II were more than 20,000,000. Yet Russia recovered extremely well from this catastrophe. There are several quite plausible circumstances in the future when the Russians might be confident of being able to limit damage to considerably less than this number – if they make sensible strategic choices and we do not’. Albert Wohlstetter, ‘The Delicate Balance of Terror’, Foreign Affairs 37/2 (Jan. 1959), 211–34.

³⁸ Schelling, ‘Meteors, Mischief, and War’., 292–6, 300. For his role in Dr Strangelove see Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn, p. 276.

³⁹ Schelling’s main influence on Vietnam policy came through his friendship with John McNaughton, an Assistant Secretary of Defense. Lawrence Freedman, ‘Vietnam and the Disillusioned Strategist’, International Affairs 72 (1996), 133–51.

⁴⁰ Herman Kahn et al., Can we win in Viet Nam? (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger 1968).

⁴¹ Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP 2003); Mark Solovey, ‘Project Camelot and the 1960s Epistemological Revolution: Rethinking the Politics–Patronage–Social Science Nexus’, Social Studies of Science 31/2(April 2001), 171–206. See also the Cold War chapter of Ido Oren, Our Enemies and US: America’s Rivalries and the Making of Political Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2003).

⁴² Schelling’s own ideas had developed out of oligopoly theory and trade policy.

⁴³ Kenneth J. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (New Haven, CT: Yale UP 1953).

⁴⁴ Erickson et al., 131.

⁴⁵ Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Disssonance (Stanford UP 1957).

⁴⁶ Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, ‘Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk’, Econometria 47 (1979), 263–92.

⁴⁷ Irving L. Janis, Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascos (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1983). Erickson et al. point out that the concept of ‘groupthink’ took on a life of its own, though it started off as a narrow concept (p.101). They also note that it did not do well when subject to experimental testing.

⁴⁸ Erickson et al., 181.