The Modes of the Hemispheres IIIB
Since February 2021, I have been posting on Substack weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets”—in You Might Want to Know. To see other entries that might be of interest, see the Archive.
A talent for speaking differently, rather than arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change. Richard Rorty
Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, the movie released in 1964, the year after the assassination of President Kennedy, is of course a fiction. It portrayed events no one of the time—okay, almost no one—would have thought impossible, or even unlikely. As far as our leaders were concerned, much that was portrayed, were it not fictional, would have been considered a matter of “national security,” requiring the most “closely held” secrecy.
When some Air Force officers visited the set in London, however, they marveled at how the film’s makers had managed to get the details of the B-52 bomber’s cockpit so right.
What about a Doomsday Machine that launched Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles automatically if a nuclear weapon were to be detonated on one’s territory—that part was “totally” fictional, wasn’t it?
In 1964, when the movie was released, it was. But by the end if the 80’s, both the United States and the Soviets had built and installed our very own Doomsday Machines. We were the first to get one built, if that’s a comfort. Our system was called the Emergency Response Communications System. Theirs was called Perimeter, or Dead Hand. Different designs, not surprisingly. Same purpose. Deterrence by threatening the automated annihilation of the other side.
Not a testable system, of course, but then many in the Cold War were not.
Deterrence theory says that the annihilation of the other side must be made to seem inevitable. Just not necessarily automated.
Another “real-life” example of what the ungoverned left hemisphere of our brains can produce is the nuclear war plan we developed during the Cold War. The Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP, was first formulated at the end of the Eisenhower administration by our newly established Joint Strategic Targeting and Planning Staff, located at Strategic Air Command Headquarters at Offutt AFB in Omaha. For the next three decades, the SIOP was held by the JSTPS in such secrecy that even the President never got to see it. When near the end of the Cold War, it was finally pried loose by our civilian leaders, it was obvious that had the SIOP been executed as planned and diligently trained for, human life on earth would have been extinguished. It was a Doomsday Machine too, just not “automated.”
All along, our presidents or their designees, like the Secretary of Defense, could have insisted that they be allowed to see the SIOP to make sure it followed and did not overstep Presidential Guidance. Our Constitution makes the President the Commander in Chief of our military forces. But the Presidents would have had to insist on it and until 1991, none had.
Another example.
William Kaufmann was an adviser to the Kennedy administration on nuclear matters. Kaufmann was sent to brief General Thomas Power—the Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command who followed Curtis LeMay—about the new administration’s plan for the SIOP. Instead of doing the massive all-out attack, we would employ a “counterforce” strategy that would have us attack military targets first, sparing cities. At first, anyway. If possible.
After the briefing, General Power replied,
Why do you want us to restrain ourselves? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. Look. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win!
Kaufman is said to have responded that it had to be hoped that at least one of the survivors would be a woman.
You really do need to think these things through if you want to plan for the future.
There is some evidence that Kubrick planned a sequel with Dr. Strangelove living underground after doomsday with the 10 to 1 ratio of women to men he had recommended at the end of the first movie. But Kubrick died in 1999 before a sequel could be made.
Another actual example of the ungoverned LH in action:
In earlier entries in You Might Want to Know, I told some of the story of General George Lee Butler, the last Commander in Chief of our Strategic Air Command. Two years after his retirement from the Air Force in 1994, Butler had, to general astonishment, begun to advocate for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons. He got many invitations to speak. Among them, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War had invited him to New Zealand to deliver the “Geiringer Oration.” The IPPNW had established the Oration to honor Erich Geiringer, a member of the IPPNW who had managed to get from the International Court of Justice an advisory opinion that raised questions about the legality of nuclear weapons.
In the remarkable—I would say, astonishing—speech Butler delivered in Wellington, he pointed out how the “comforting and deceptively simple” doctrine of deterrence had “failed completely as a guide in setting rational limits on the size and composition of U.S. and Soviet nuclear forces. To the contrary, its appetite was voracious: its capacity to justify new nuclear weapons, new delivery systems and larger stocks of each was unrestrained.” He noted the ironic but altogether predictable feature of deterrence policy that every measure taken by one side to increase “deterrence” was seen by the other side as increasing the threat to itself, which called for increased build-ups on their side. Uncommon Cause (2017, Vol. II, pp. 255-71).
Of course. Right?
In New Zealand and afterwards, Butler always acknowledged the fact that throughout his multi-dimensional thirty-year career in the Air Force, he had supported “the nuclear mission.” He retained, he said, the deepest respect for the people with whom he had served. To come out now in support of eliminating nuclear weapons and the nuclear mission was not an easy thing for him. Not easy partly because of friends and old colleagues who now parted ways with him.
But he had been brought by his “conscience,” he said, and sense of morality to this pass. The fact that this had not been an easy thing for him added to the force of the arguments he was now making, I would say—not to mention his deep knowledge from the inside about all aspects of “the nuclear mission.”
After his speeches, he often received not just applause but standing ovations.
In Chapter 26 of The Matter with Things, Iain McGilchrist shows that value and moral understanding come into play for us by virtue of the right hemisphere. To the extent that in military operations, the “values” are “power” and “utility,” it is the left hemisphere that governs. In the frame provided by McGilchrist’s work, we might want to say that what brought Butler to the eloquent and powerful understandings offered in the Geiringer Oration was a restoration to his world of the affordances of the right hemisphere.
This conversion, this change of heart, had happened, Butler said, not in a flash of insight—the scales falling from his eyes—but in moments over time. The restoration of the RH can happen in that way too, it seems.
The hemisphere hypothesis demonstrates very clearly, I believe, that the prevailing account of the ‘All’ is the product of an unbalanced, untempered and characteristically domineering, go-it-alone left hemisphere view of the world, one that is false, impoverished, and dangerous; and that a form of attention to the world that allows into the picture what the right hemisphere discerns produces a truer, richer account of the ‘All’, without which we shall perish.
Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things (2021), p. 1329
Next: