Maverick Genius

by Phillip F. Schewe

  Dyson centered his interest around a basic question: what are nuclear weapons for? His meditation on this query crystallized as a book called Weapons and Hope. The book’s inscription comes from the pastoral letter prepared by those bishops:

  Hope is the capacity to live with danger without being overwhelmed by it; hope is the will to struggle against obstacles even when they appear insuperable.2

  BOMBS AND POETRY

  The Cold War lasted long enough to have evolved through several phases. We saw a bit of the mid-1950s McCarthyite phase in Chapter 6, when Dyson, as a young professor, was pretty much a bystander. The Sputnik phase played out in Chapter 8 when, armed with a high security clearance and the desire to minimize the radioactive effusions from his nuclear-propelled spaceship, Dyson worked with Edward Teller briefly on an unsuccessful effort to design a neutron bomb. During the Cuban Missile Crisis phase of the Cold War (Chapter 10) Dyson had hindered and then helped the passage of a limited nuclear test ban treaty. He wrote a Jason report about the prospective use of tactical nuclear devices in Vietnam (Chapter 11). Indeed, because of his annual Jason summer study group meetings, Dyson’s intimate connection to the technology of nuclear weapons grew but was largely out of sight, within the cloistered councils of Jason.

  For decades the spiral of nuclear arms seemed overwhelming. Through heroic efforts the open-air testing of nuclear bombs was at last halted, but the bombs themselves were still around. In 1945 the inventory could be counted on one hand: the one tested in New Mexico in July, the two used on the Japanese cities in August, and one or two more on the way. By 1950 the inventory had risen above 100. The Russians did their best to keep pace. Eventually the combined stockpile would number in the tens of thousands. Quantitatively, the U.S. nuclear portfolio peaked in the 1960s. Thereafter a different race began, a qualitative race to produce more accurate and reliable warheads and missiles. The freeze movement sought an end to both the qualitative and quantitative races.3

  Ostensibly the Western attitude was the same in the 1980s as it had been in 1950s: if our adversary had nuclear bombs then we would need to have them too. The bombs were evil—millions would die—but a necessary evil. In a dangerous world, where Communist advances threatened Western democracy, the United States and its allies needed the deterrent of a nuclear cudgel.

  In order to examine the logic of these arguments Dyson compared the necessary evil of modern nuclear weaponry with the chattel slavery of previous centuries, which was also viewed by many as a necessary evil. Dyson was impressed with the role of the Quakers in ending slavery in British colonies. The Quakers had brought several important qualities to bear: moral conviction (slavery was evil, so they opposed it); patience (keep up the struggle, for decades if necessary); objectivity (employ accurate facts); and a willingness to compromise (the Quakers sought first the end of the trade in slaves and later of slavery itself).4

  Dyson now applied these principles to the crusade against nuclear weapons. He did not become a Quaker, but in 1980 he did join the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament, a group of concerned citizens in Princeton, and served on its research committee. Almost immediately the need for compromise arose. Within the coalition, some like Dyson wanted to promote a policy of no-first-use, meaning that the United States should pledge that it would never be the first to use nuclear weapons in the case of armed hostilities. Another faction felt that a more practical approach to arms reduction was to seek a freeze in nuclear weapons, meaning a treaty that would keep the number of weapons from going up. The rationale here was that the public could at least grasp the idea of a freeze, a ceiling in the number of nukes, whereas the no-first-use concept was nebulous. The freeze proposal was adopted.*

  While Dyson recognized the important symbolism of the 1982 referendum, he felt that a nuclear freeze was only a short-term tactic. What he really wanted was a clearer concept, a more thorough enunciation of what the weapons were for. This, combined with a better understanding of the Soviet position, would be the starting point for true arms reductions, he felt. History would be his guide.

  For example, the controlling concept governing Britain’s foreign policy for centuries was the need to dominate the coastal waters between itself and continental Europe. Against a succession of adversaries—Spain, Holland, France, Germany, and then Russia—the sea lanes had to be, and were, controlled by the Royal Navy.5

  Dyson’s friend, diplomat and historian George Kennan, has mentioned analogous strategic concepts shaping nineteenth-century America, principally the Monroe Doctrine (checking European influence in the Western Hemisphere) and Manifest Destiny (the idea that the United States would fill out the space between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans). But at the end of the nineteenth century, Kennan suggested, a pretentious element crept into American foreign policy. This moralizing tendency, which said in effect that America knew better than other nations what was right, was thereafter going to be an element in U.S. actions around the world.6

  When it came time for Kennan to apply his sense of pragmatism to the actual formulation of policy, as a senior planner in the State Department in 1947, his chosen concept for America’s role in the post-world-war world—the equivalent of Britain’s safeguard of coastal waters—was a doctrine that sought to guarantee absolutely the freedom and economic power of three important nations—West Germany, Britain, and Japan—against Soviet aggression.

  The concept that actually emerged, “containment,” although using some of Kennan’s ideas, would be broadly interpreted to mean that the United States should combat Communist expansion wherever it appeared, including Cuba, Korea, and Vietnam, regardless of whether or not vital U.S. interests were at stake in these places.

  Using Kennan’s concept as a model, Dyson now tried to settle upon a central concept of his own for the basing and use of American nuclear weapons. The prevailing nuclear reality was usually called “assured destruction,” a phrase coming from the Vietnam War pronouncements of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who solemnly said that America’s chief strategic requirement was that the United States should always have the capability of destroying an adversary (sometimes he specifically named the Soviet Union) with nuclear warheads even if the United States itself had sustained a first strike.7 This was America’s nuclear Monroe Doctrine. A secondary doctrine held that under some circumstances the United States might wage a limited nuclear war.

  You’d expect that the Soviets would hold symmetric views, but Dyson argued that the Soviets rejected both of the U.S. nuclear doctrines of assured destruction and limited war. Dyson, who could read Russian and who was a student of Russian military publications, felt that the central Russian military ethos came out of War and Peace. In the Napoleonic campaigns so colorfully depicted by Tolstoy, the Russian forces won by grinding down and outlasting the French forces. Their attitude was this: we will beat you in the end; we will lose battles but win the war; we will live to see your funeral; we will bury you with our economic might. If necessary, we will outlast you in war. This was in fact Nikita Khrushchev’s blunt assertion hurled at the United States in 1962. If they had to, the Soviets would “bury” the Americans, meaning, in the Russian vernacular, that they would live long enough to outlast their adversary. Their strategy, formulated into a doctrine called counterforce was enunciated clearly in 1971 by the Soviet defense minister, Marshal Andrei Grechko. Its official aim was not to target American cities and citizens per se. Rather it would be to attack America’s weapons and soldiers if war began.8

  The U.S. policy was officially also to strike at military targets. Even if in practice the rival concepts would likely result in the same thing, namely the deaths of millions, the outlook of the two positions is very different. America says to Russia: if you try anything we will destroy you. And Russia says to America: if you try anything we will outlive you. In Dyson’s assessment, the U.S. assured destruction approach works better if the nuclear war is short and predictable; the Russian counterforce approach works better if the war is leng
thy and subject to many unpredictable events.9

  As for a limited war, one supposedly involving the exchange of a few small nuclear blasts, the Russians assured the Americans that the introduction of any explosion could, and probably would, rapidly escalate to a full-scale broadside of H-bombs. The American limited war doctrine necessarily enfolds a first-use policy. That is, the United States reserves the right to be the first to attack an opponent with nuclear weapons. Dyson found this unsound for three reasons: it was aggressive and provocative, making effective negotiations impossible; it was basically immoral, since the unloosing of even small nukes meant high civilian casualties; and it was suicidal, since it would trigger an automatic Russian counterstrike.10

  Dyson maintained that some American analysts of Soviet behavior developed a distorted impression because they insisted on assessing Soviet psychology from a Western historical perspective. It was irresponsible to view the Soviets, or any adversary, as if they were Martians. Dyson’s experience had taught him that when it comes to history and warfare, the Russians saw themselves as victims. Vikings, Mongols, Teutons, Napoléon, and the Nazis had, in a grim roll of centuries, invaded Russia and later been ejected.11 How the Russians dealt with Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1943, Dyson said, influenced how they viewed potential invaders at the present time:

  The American strategy of deterrence, sufficiency, and retaliation is a purely nuclear strategy having nothing to do with war as it has been waged in the past. The Soviet strategy of victory, superiority, and offensive action is a continuation of the historical process by which Russia over the centuries repelled invaders from her territory. Both strategies have advantages and disadvantages. Neither is aggressive in intention. Both are to me equally frightening, because both make the survival of civilization depend on people behaving reasonably.12

  For Dyson, thinking through important issues, delivering public lectures, and formulating polished written essays are all part of a continuum. In this case the issue was the quest for a concept of nuclear weapons. His most prominent effort to answer the question of what these weapons are for was the Tanner Lectures, delivered at Oxford University in May of 1982. The written version, appearing in 1983, was called “Bombs and Poetry.” The “poetry” part referred to Dyson’s penchant for quoting from world literature, that “great storehouse where meanings distilled by all kinds of people out of all kinds of experience are presented.” The book included meaningful excerpts from a spectrum of poetical writing—W. H. Auden, C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, The Bhagavad Gita, Shakespeare, Wilfred Owen, T. E. Lawrence, George Herbert, Bertolt Brecht, and multiple entries from William Blake.13 These lectures, which form Dyson’s nuclear manifesto, appeared later as chapters in Weapons and Hope.

  LIVE AND LET LIVE

  In the years after World War II, the central national security concern of the United States and the Soviet Union was amassing nuclear weapons and contemplating their use. Historian Garry Wills draws attention to the consequences of this nuclear buildup. The network of off-limits labs, sophisticated surveillance and espionage, and the creation of special agencies and protocols for guarding secrets, Wills argues, constituted a new entity, a national security state. The “care and feeding” of the bomb (airports, security, radars, satellites, fuel procurement and enrichment) became a mini-government of its own. The U.S. president, being on permanent alert, was granted wide new powers. “He became, mainly, the Commander in Chief, since he could loose the whole military force of the nation in an instant.”14

  Dyson saw this historic changeover as it unfolded. He continued to search for a coherent plan for what to do with nuclear weapons. Now, it’s not as though the White House or the State Department was asking for his opinion. Except for his involvement with Jason, he wasn’t part of the government. Yet, he felt compelled to formulate some kind of alternative to both the U.S. and USSR doctrines. He adapted an outlook set forth by his friend the military expert Donald Brennan. Brennan suggested a military version of the Golden Rule—that for any plausibly feasible Soviet attack, we should be able to do at least as badly unto the Soviets as they had done unto us. To this Brennan added something hopeful:

  The second principle is that we should prefer live Americans to dead Russians, whenever a choice between the two presents itself. The Soviets may be expected to prefer live Russians to dead Americans, and therein resides the basis for an important common interest; we may both prefer live Americans and live Russians.15

  This concept, which Dyson embraced as his preferred nuclear philosophy, he called live and let live. It incorporated several practical attitudes: no, we don’t have to trust the Russians; no, we don’t have to doubt their territorial ambitions; and yes, we’ve avoided nuclear war so far, but some episodes, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, have come close to triggering catastrophe. Dyson’s more streamlined approach to negotiations, looking forward to a day when the Cold War would be over, was to regard nuclear weapons as bargaining chips rather than desirable military assets.16

  The goal of a live-and-let-live concept was to move away from nuclear slavery. Dyson wanted the United States to persuade by example, not by force. On the technology side, for example, the U.S. stopped building larger warheads, and so did the Soviets. The U.S. stopped deploying extensive missile defense systems (in the 1960s and 1970s), and so did the Soviets. Soviet leaders do not always wish to listen to our diplomacy, Dyson argued, but they do listen to our technology.17

  The harder part of nuclear abolitionism, Dyson believed, was to convince people that movement is possible, that we are not irremediably doomed, that our lives have a meaning and a purpose, and that we can still choose to be masters our own fates.18 The embrace of nuclear weapons wasn’t irrevocable. We needn’t commit to a perpetual doctrine of nuclear belligerence.

  In mid-nineteenth-century America most citizens would have thought slavery was irremediably a fact of life. It was woven into society, at least in the Southern states, and wasn’t going to change. The end of slavery will never arrive, most would have thought. A majority of Americans, even those in the North, even those who disliked slavery, were against abolitionism. The existence of slavery, bad though it might be, was enshrined in the Constitution. To be an abolitionist was regarded by some to be a kind of anarchist. To insist on the abolition of slavery would tear apart the union of American states. Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing in his journal in the 1840s and 1850s, expressed both his loathing for slavery and his reluctance to endure the consuming task of ending it.19

  A consequence of Dyson’s live-and-let-live concept was his embrace of the no-first-use principle. And here Dyson parted from some of his friends, such as Stanford physicist Sidney Drell. Dyson credits Drell (who for many years was the deputy director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) with giving him an excellent education in the technology and politics of military hardware over many years of Jason work together.20

  The no-first-use idea sounds good, but would it work under duress? Drell has worked to reduce the threat of nuclear war but views a no-first-use pledge as an unfortunate reduction in the options of political and military strategists when war breaks out. Back in the days when Europe was divided by the Iron Curtain, the nightmare of military planners was a hypothetical Russian armored thrust from East Germany into West Germany. The only way to counter the large Soviet superiority in tanks and combat troops, short of building up Western conventional forces, would be (the argument went) to hurl small nuclear explosives at the invaders, while hoping to keep collateral damage to civilians and buildings to a minimum. To which Dyson said: first, there will be plenty of collateral damage; and second, by using nuclear weapons of any kind we might well initiate a larger exchange of nuclear salvos. If we wish to present a credible deterrent we just have to build up a conventionally armed defensive force.

  Weapons and Hope, Dyson’s book enunciating his nuclear and defense ideas, made it to the New York Times bestseller list. In 1985 it won the National Book Critics Circle Award for
general nonfiction. The book was generally well received by critics. Dyson’s friend Frank von Hippel, also a physicist and an expert on nuclear matters, praised the book’s technical competency, its moral stance, and its wide historical perspective. But he questioned the efficacy of Dyson’s advocacy of a nonnuclear defense in the face of a nuclear threat.21

  Dyson’s antinuclear crusade was part of a more comprehensive David-vs.-Goliath philosophy, according to which (he asserts) ethical behavior and a strong defense are compatible; defense is good and offense bad; moral arguments can certainly be made against nukes (since nukes have genocidal repercussions) but military arguments—to the effect that the weapons are dangerous even to their owners—are more practical; and having imperfectly verifiable treaties is generally better than having no treaties.22

  Dyson’s liking for defensive weaponry extended even to the idea of the Strategic Defense Initiative, the space- and land-based missile interception system proposed by President Reagan in 1983. Disliked by most physicists, SDI was, in Dyson’s opinion, a technically flawed but possibly workable venture. In 1984, he and his friend Edward Teller visited the head of SDI, General James Abrahamson, to urge him to lift the shroud of secrecy over the program. In that way technical progress could benefit from the criticism and fresh ideas needed for highly complex engineering projects. The general promised that the secrecy would indeed be lifted. The secrecy, however, remained, and the program foundered over technological failure.23

  ILIAD AND ODYSSEY

  Freeman Dyson was well placed to act as a middleman in the great debate between those actively working to reduce nuclear stockpiles and those who insisted that the stockpiles were a necessary deterrent against aggression by hostile powers. He attended antinuke church meetings and wrote critical essays in prominent publications. At the same time however, he was owing to his Jason affiliation, advising the generals who maintained the stockpiles. He was, in effect, still a part of Bomber Command, and always would be.