The Scientist as Rebel

by Freeman J. Dyson

  Germany was an extreme case of military professionalism run wild, and the judgment at Nuremberg was an exceptional nemesis. But every country which gives an exalted status to its military leaders runs a risk of catching the German madness. There, but for the grace of God, go we. Something of the German madness infected the American South at the time of the Civil War. Like Germany, the states of the Confederacy made a cult of soldiering. It was no accident that the most brilliant generals of the Civil War were all fighting on the Southern side. Long before the war began, the Southern states had established a cultural tradition which encouraged their best minds to become professional soldiers. The tradition of exaggerated respect for military prowess was doubly disastrous for the South. It led to the overconfident enthusiasm and the illusions of military superiority with which the South went to war at the beginning. And it produced the spirit of sacrificial dedication in which the Southerners fought on to the bitter end, when the prolongation of the war was bringing to their country nothing but ruin and destruction. Robert Lee was a great general and a great gentleman, but all his tactical skill and strength of character only made the sufferings of his people heavier. The people of the Southern states, daily enduring death and destruction as a result of his activities, continued until the end to lavish upon him their unbounded love and admiration. When he returned to his home in Richmond after his surrender, he was greeted by an immense throng of cheering citizens. There was much in Lee that was noble and worthy of respect, but the hero-worship which surrounded him during and after the war was altogether disproportionate. The mystique of Lee distorted the Southerners’ view of the world for a long time. Robert Lee was a greater general than Hermann Balck and a finer human being than Alfred Jodl, but his role in history was the same as theirs, to lead his beloved people to disaster. Any society which idolizes soldiers is tainted with a collective insanity and is likely in the end to come to grief.

  England has been luckier in its choice of heroes. The British navy has been for hundreds of years the senior service, and the popular heroes of England have been admirals rather than generals. As a child in England, I learned to take it for granted that anybody making a career in the army must be intellectually subnormal. Army officers, on the stage or in real life, were figures of fun. Naval officers were also subject to occasional ridicule, but jokes about navy people were friendly rather than contemptuous. The navy commanded a certain respect even from the irreverent young. We were told that our Admiral Jellicoe, commander of the Grand Fleet during World War I, was the only man on either side who could have lost the war in one afternoon. He did not, after all, lose the war. Even though he was not very bright, and his one great battle, Jutland, was not a brilliant success, at least he did better than the generals on the western front. He kept cool and did not waste his ships in fruitless and unnecessary attacks.

  The English language reflects the English bias in favor of sea captains. We have no word for soldierly virtue corresponding to the German Soldatentum. But we use naturally the word “seamanship,” which has the same emotional resonance as Soldatentum, transferred from soldiers to sailors. Seamanship means not just technical competence in handling a ship; it includes also steadiness of nerve and strength of character, the virtues which Alfred Jodl subsumed under the heading Soldatentum. In England these virtues are perceived as belonging to sailors rather than to soldiers.

  The English have not been exempt from the vice of military idolatry. A hundred years ago, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote an essay with the title “The English Admirals,” eloquently expressing the feelings of pride and glory which were then driving the worldwide expansion of the British Empire:

  Their sayings and doings stir English blood like the sound of a trumpet; and if the Indian Empire, the trade of London, and all the outward and visible ensigns of our greatness should pass away, we should still leave behind us a durable monument of what we were in these sayings and doings of the English Admirals. Duncan, lying off the Texel with his own flagship, the Venerable, and only one other vessel, heard that the whole Dutch fleet was putting to sea. He told Captain Hotham to anchor alongside. “I have taken the depth of the water,” added he, “and when the Venerable goes down, my flag will still fly.” And you observe that this is no naked Viking in a prehistoric period; but a Scotch member of Parliament, with a smattering of the classics, a telescope, a cocked hat of great size, and flannel underclothing. In the same spirit, Nelson went into Aboukir with six colours flying; so that even if five were shot away, it should not be imagined he had struck.… And as our Admirals were full of heroic superstitions, and had a strutting and vainglorious style of fight, so they discovered a startling eagerness for battle, and courted war like a mistress.…

  Trowbridge went ashore with the Culloden, and was able to take no part in the battle of the Nile. “The merits of that ship and her gallant captain,” wrote Nelson to the Admiralty, “are too well known to benefit by anything I could say. Her misfortune was great in getting aground, while her more fortunate companions were in the full tide of happiness.” This is a notable expression, and depicts the whole great-hearted, high-spoken stock of the English Admirals to a hair. It was to be “in the full tide of happiness” for Nelson to destroy five thousand five hundred and twenty-five of his fellow-creatures, and have his own scalp torn open by a piece of langridge shot. Hear him again at Copenhagen. A shot through the mainmast knocked the splinters about; and he observed to one of his officers with a smile, “It is warm work, and this may be the last to any of us at any moment,” and then, stopping short at the gangway, added with emotion, “But, mark you, I would not be elsewhere for thousands …” The best artist is not the man who fixes his eye on posterity, but the one who loves the practice of his art. And instead of having a taste for being successful merchants and retiring at thirty, some people have a taste for high and what we call heroic forms of excitement. If the Admirals courted war like a mistress; if, as the drum beat to quarters, the sailors came gaily out of the forecastle, it is because a fight is a period of multiplied and intense experiences, and by Nelson’s computation, worth thousands to anyone who has a heart under his jacket.3

  This is the stuff on which English children of the 1890s were raised. It is no better and no worse than the German patriotic literature of the same period. England and Germany were both in a mood of exuberant nationalism. Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler grew up under its influence. Churchill and Hitler were both military romantics; both acted out their private dreams of glory by becoming great war leaders. And yet the effects of such glorification of the martial spirit in England and in Germany were vastly different. Churchill, and the English society which he represented, remained fundamentally sane, while Hitler’s military visions led him and his society to paranoia and destruction. There were many historical and social reasons for the difference. No single factor by itself can explain such a profound divergence between neighboring cultures. But it may be that the most important cause of the difference between English and German destinies was the technical difference between the circumstances of sea and land warfare. War at sea, throughout the long period of British maritime ascendancy, was war for limited objectives. The technical limitations of sea power limited the human consequences of victory and defeat. None of Nelson’s great victories resulted in the ruin of a province or the unconditional surrender of a country. The means of naval warfare determined the ends. Since the means were modest, the ends stopped short of insanity. No similar limitation of the means kept land warfare from escalating into wholesale conquest and genocide.

  It is easy to go back into history and find other examples of sound and unsound military professionalism. Particularly illuminating in this respect is the contrast between the careers of Washington and Napoleon. Washington, fighting a war of limited objectives with means which were even more limited, laid the foundations for a durable and stable government in America. Everything which Washington built has lasted for two hundred years. Napoleon, fighting wars of unl
imited objectives with armies greater than Europe had seen before, built an empire which crashed in ruins even before he was dead.

  What can we learn from this picture gallery of soldiers, beginning with Jodl and Balck and Lee and ending with Washington and Napoleon? Professional soldiers and sailors have a necessary and honorable role to play in human affairs. The traditional respect which nations pay to military valor cannot be denied. As every country has a right to self-defense, every country has a right to give honor to its military leaders. But the honoring of military leaders brings deadly danger to mankind unless both the moral authority granted to them and the technical means at their disposal are strictly limited. Military power should never be confused with moral virtue, and military leaders should never be entrusted with weapons of unlimited destruction.

  Nineteenth-century England was lucky to have military heroes who were modest both in their moral pretensions and in their material resources. Robert Louis Stevenson expressed in a nutshell the philosophy which allowed England to acquire an empire without losing a sense of proportion: “Almost everybody in our land, except humanitarians and a few persons whose youth has been depressed by exceptionally aesthetic surroundings, can understand and sympathize with an Admiral or a prize-fighter.” This is the limit beyond which the pursuit of military glory should not go. A successful general or admiral should be honored no more and no less than a successful boxer.

  The cult of military obedience and the cult of weapons of mass destruction are the two great follies of the modern age. The cult of obedience brought Germany to moral degradation and dismemberment. The cult of weapons of mass destruction threatens to bring us all to annihilation. It was, regrettably, the airmen of England who led the world into the cult of destruction. The Italian Giulio Douhet first preached the gospel of strategic bombing in the 1920s, but the British Sir Hugh Trenchard was the first to put Douhet’s gospel into practice. England turned decisively away from the civilized nineteenth-century tradition of limited-objective warfare when Trenchard persuaded his government to build a force of heavy bombers with the deliberate aim of attacking the German civilian economy. The limited character of naval armament had made the exercise of British sea power in the nineteenth century peculiarly benign. The exercise of air power is subject to no such limitations. A strategy of strategic bombardment ensures that war will be total. And where England led the way into the era of strategic bombing, the United States was quick to follow. Already in the 1930s, England and America were set on the path which led to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The cult of destruction possessed our bomber generals, and as a result of their activities we have been living under the threat of destruction ever since.

  Every soldier who commands strategic forces, and every civilian strategist who theorizes about them, should from time to time imagine himself sitting in the dock at Nuremberg at the end of World War III and preparing his defense. Would his defense be any more convincing to the judges than the defense of Alfred Jodl? Jodl was, according to his own opinion and the opinion of his friends, an honorable man and a good soldier. Our strategic commanders and theorists are, so far as I know them, honorable men and good soldiers too. Jodl was condemned because his cult of obedience led to the death of millions. If our strategic commanders’ cult of destruction should also lead to the death of millions, are they less deserving of condemnation?4

  1. Jenseits des Endes: Leben u. Sterben des Generaloberst Alfred Jodl (Beyond the End: Life and Death of Colonel-General Alfred Jodl) (Vienna: Molden, 1976). There is no English edition; the translations here are my own.

  2. Hermann Balck’s reminiscences are in an interview with Pierre Sprey, published in two reports by Battelle Columbus Laboratories, Tactical Technology Center, Columbus, Ohio, January and April, 1979.

  3. R.L. Stevenson, “The English Admirals,” in Virginibus Puerisque (London: Chatto and Windus, 1897).

  4. In this and the following two chapters, which were originally published in my book Weapons and Hope (Harper and Row) in 1984, I have omitted some passages which have been made obsolete by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

  9

  RUSSIANS

  IOSIP SHKLOVSKY WAS a Russian astronomer of unusual brilliance, with several major discoveries to his credit. He was known to the Russian public as a writer of books and magazine articles describing the astronomical universe in a lively popular style. At scientific meetings he spiced his technical arguments with jokes and paradoxes. He had wide interests outside astronomy and could talk amusingly on almost any subject. He enjoyed unorthodox ideas, and he took a leading part in encouraging international efforts to listen for radio signals which might reveal the existence of intelligence in remote parts of the universe. In his professional life he projected an image of a happy, active, and successful man of the world. In private, like many Russian intellectuals, he was melancholic. He told me once that he had lived with a feeling of inner loneliness since he discovered, at the end of World War II, that he was the only one of his high school graduating class to have survived. He was the scientist in the class, and the authorities kept him out of the army to work on technical projects. The others went to the front and died. Russian citizens of Shklovsky’s generation still bear the scars of war. Those who are younger grew up hearing tales of war told by their parents and grandparents. All alike carry deep in their consciousness a collective memory of suffering and irreparable loss. This is the central fact conditioning the Russian view of war. Russians, when they think of war, think of themselves not as warriors but as victims.

  Another vignette of Russian life illustrates the same theme. It was a cold Sunday in late November, and I had the day free after a week of astronomical meetings in Moscow. The radio astronomer Nikolai Kardashev took me on a sightseeing trip to the ancient cities of Vladimir and Suzdal, halfway between Moscow and Gorky. We started before dawn and drove two hundred kilometers in darkness in order to arrive before the crowds. As we approached Suzdal we saw old monasteries shining golden in the light of the rising sun. Vladimir and Suzdal were places of refuge for monks and artists during the bitter centuries when Mongols and Tartars ruled in Russia. Both cities were taken and destroyed by the Mongols in 1238. They lay directly in the path of the army of Subutai, which swept across half of Europe in a merciless campaign of conquest. The inhabitants later rebuilt the cities, raised churches, and filled them with religious paintings. Vladimir and Suzdal lie far enough to the northeast so that they escaped the invasions which ravaged Kiev and Moscow in later centuries. Andrei Rublyov, the greatest painter of old Russia, worked at Vladimir in the fifteenth century. Buildings and paintings survive from the thirteenth century onward. Kardashev and I spent the day wandering from church to church among busloads of schoolchildren from Moscow and Gorky. The last stop on our tour was the city museum of Vladimir. Here we found the densest concentration of schoolchildren. The museum is in a tower over one of the ancient gates of the city. Its emphasis is historical rather than artistic. The main exhibit is an enormous diorama of the city as it was at the moment of its destruction in 1238, with every detail faithfully modeled in wood and clay. Across the plains come riding endless lines of Mongol horsemen slashing arms, legs, and heads off defenseless Russians whom they meet outside the city walls. The armed defenders of the city are on top of the walls, but the flaming arrows of the Mongols have set fire to the buildings behind them. Already a party of horsemen has broken into the city through a side gate and is beginning a general slaughter of the inhabitants. Blood is running in the streets and flames are rising from the churches. On the wall above this scene of horror there is a large notice for schoolchildren and other visitors to read. It says: “The heroic people of Vladimir chose to die rather than submit to the invader. By their self-sacrifice they saved Western Europe from suffering the same fate, and saved European civilization from extinction.”

  The diorama of Vladimir gives visible form to the dreams and fears which have molded the Russian people’s perception of themselves and their p
lace in history. Central to their dreams is the Mongol horde slicing through their country, swift and implacable. It is difficult for English-speaking people to share such dreams. The Russian experience of the Mongol invasions is so foreign to us that we gave the word “horde” a new and inappropriate meaning when we borrowed it into our language. English-speaking people came to Asia as traders and conquerors protected by a superior technology. Our view of Asia is mirrored in the image which the word “horde” conveys to an English-speaking mind. A horde in our language is a sprawling, undisciplined mob. In Russian and in the original Turkish, a horde is a camp or a tribe organized for war. The organization of the Mongol horde in the thirteenth century was technically far in advance of any other military system in the world. The Mongols could travel and maintain communications over vast distances; they could maneuver their armies with a speed and precision which no other power could match. It took the Russians 150 years to learn to fight them on equal terms, and three hundred years to defeat them decisively. The horde in the folk memory of Russia means an alien presence moving through the homeland, ravaging and consuming the substance of the people, subverting the loyalty of their leaders with blackmail and bribes. This is the image of Asia which three centuries of suffering implanted in the Russian mind. It is easy for us in the strategically inviolate West to dismiss Russian fears of China as “paranoid.” If we had lived for three centuries at the mercy of the alien horsemen, we would be paranoid too.