The Many Dr. Strangeloves

The removal of Dr. Henry Kissinger from constant media attention has not proved as traumatic to Dr. Strangelove addicts like myself as I feared. Even with the help of an entirely new act in Washington to laugh at--and the break-the-news-gently understanding as far back as November 1976 that the good German doctor would have to clean out his desk in the office of Secretary of State--it could have been a real tough slice of cold turkey. After all, with Dr. Kissinger around, I did not need to rely entirely on those terribly infrequent two-in-the-morning television reruns of Stanley Kubrick's cinematic masterpiece. With Kissinger almost always on the tube, I had the real thing.

Now, I find out, I really shouldn't worry. In the academic and foundation worlds, Henry Kissingers, it seems, are a dime a dozen. There are plenty of windup Strangeloves out there, holding their breath in anticipation. The sad truth is that Kissinger was not unique, after all; there are enough reasonable facsimiles lying around to fill up a war room. Most of them come complete with a splendidly mysterious foreign accent and a certificate of naturalization. Kissinger, astonishingly, is not by a long shot the only individual out there who can offer a taste of the Old World charm and menace and a few unreadable books on foreign policy (or on an even more arcane specialty).

There is, indeed, a Strangelove class, but it surfaces cautiously, like a U-boat in hostile waters. Its style, enchantingly secretive and stiff, is to stay submerged, in as murky and deep water as possible. Like their Mafia counterparts, these Herren Doktoren consider it bad for business to pop up every other night on the tube (overexposure might erode the novelty of the act). Remember Joe Colombo? The Mob leader who organized the irritatingly visible Italian-American Civil Rights League and had to be severely dealt with when he would not cool it at the request of organized crime's national commission? Well, Kissinger was actually the Joe Colombo of the Strangelove mob--except his act was so good that even President Carter, it seems, still gets a laugh out of it.

Membership in the Strangelove elite is by mutual recognition. But there are definite requirements. You must be a mad scientist, political or physical, with some serious-minded academic specialty. Nuclear chemistry, particle physics or strategic theory, for instance, will do nicely. And though one highly regarded member of the Strangelove elite lists Bayonne, New Jersey, as his birthplace, it helps to have been born in a foreign country. But a foreign language and accent that, no matter how long you've been in the States, you somehow just can't lose are actually less important than the ability to think in foreign terms, either in the language of some European country or in some arcane intellectual language.

One absolute necessity is to have thought a great deal about war, especially nuclear war, and, if you have not actually helped build a nuclear weapon, to have proposed ways for its use (or for the use of some other monstrous weapon). Surprisingly enough, however, you do not have to be a cardboard hawk to be in. Dr. Strangelove himself, after all, understood that the Doomsday Machine was designed only to usher in an era of eternal peace. This often-forgotten paradox leads to a final, glittering iridescence: Each member of this special breed goes out of his way to put intellectual distance between himself and his Strange-love colleagues. Like theologians arguing about the number of angels that can fit on the head of a pin, our high-class hustlers create mountains out of molehills to blur the forest from the trees. You must always remember that, while separate and distinct entities, these distinguished characters form a class of ambitious intellectual entrepreneurs running the same horse race. The difference in the positions they take often is exaggerated so they do not seem interchangeable; they know all too well the penalty of history for duplication. Taken together, they are living proof that a long name, a foreign accent and some really strange ideas can take you far in this world.

Dr. Technetronic

For the moment, the most eye-catching in the Strangelove elite is Zbigniew Brzezinski, whom President Carter named head of the National Security Council, just as Nixon did Kissinger eight years before. Brzezinski is very much like Kissinger, though not nearly as subtle. The son of a Polish diplomat who fled to Canada in the wake of the Communist take-over of Poland, Zbig, as his friends affectionately refer to him, became one of us in 1958 at the age of 30. In 1968, he violated one of the significant canons in the Strangelove code of ethics: He spoke out on an issue of domestic policy, thereby letting the cat out of the bag. The issue under discussion was the student rebellion at Columbia University, where he was the resident Kremlin expert. In The New Republic, of all places, Zbig implicitly railed against "concessionism" and stated flatly that the leaders of the movement were "historical irrelevants" who would have no role to play in the future. As Arthur P. Mendel, a distinguished professor of Russian history, later wrote, the good Polish doctor's reference to students as historical irrelevants smacked of the kind of thinking used to justify the bloodshed and terror of the Stalinist regime. However, Brzezinski is a member of the NAACP. His peers wonder if this isn't all too transparent.

Zbig's favorite topic is the coming "technetronic society," in which, evidently, there will be no room made for upstarts who disagree with him. Aside from this, no one seems to know exactly what a technetronic society is. Some think it may mean a lot of color TVs, cable movies and stereos. (The Pentagon, naturally, is thinking more along the lines of a computerized battlefield.) Zbig, you should note, has made a big point of disagreeing with Kissinger's détente posture toward the Russians, but there is less here than meets the eye. Zbig's own sense of the coming technetronic society implies that we are all plugged in to the same toaster, anyway.

Dr. Foolproof

Until recently, Dr. Fred Charles Iklé (pronounced ee-clay) was the director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, where his job was to harden the agency's "soft" image. Nevertheless, his appointment by Richard Nixon in 1973 still causes endless mirth among his peers, surprised but amused that a pyromaniac would be made head of a fire department.

Dr. Iklé was born in Samaden, Switzerland, in 1924, and still cultivates a palpable accent. A slender man of average height but unusual, towering visions, Iklé has toiled in the fields of Harvard, MIT and the Rand Corporation and, like Kissinger and Brzezinski, has written a number of semicomprehensible books, of which The Social Impact of Bomb Destruction is the best as far as plot is concerned. Iklé's trick is to assume sanesounding positions on nuclear warfare that on closer inspection turn out to be textbook Strangelove. The current system of nuclear deterrence, he points out, "rests on a form of warfare universally condemned since the Dark Ages--the mass killing of hostages." He wants to replace it with a more "foolproof one." Iklé's solution is to retarget U.S. rockets at Russian military installations, but this is what students of strategic theory otherwise refer to as a first-strike posture. The one hitch in the proposal, therefore, is that once we've emptied our missile silos by hitting the Russians, they will be tempted to lob back not at empty silos but, rather, at our packed cities. So back to the drawing board, Dr. Iklé. (See Dr. Eugene Paul Wigner's solution, below.)

The good Swiss doctor writes that "over 20 years ago, we lost comprehension--in emotive and human terms--of the reality of nuclear weapons." But the next statement illustrates vividly the Strangelovian tendency toward startling leaps into excess, like a paraplegic jump from a wheelchair: "Because the United States is both an open society and also the foremost nuclear nation, we alone can communicate these realities to the world at large." Iklé accordingly reminds us and anyone who might dare disagree with him that the medium is the message: "We have to keep in mind that the usability of nuclear arms is built into them. Indeed, as we all know, nuclear weapons are carefully designed and primed for ready use."

Iklé's positions sometimes seem exaggerated, as if to suggest they are markedly distinguishable from those of other Strangeloves. While this is true in a certain unimportant sense, the exaggeration is more a product of the need for positioning than of any substantive need. In truth, with Iklé, the only thing that is really different is that the accent is Swiss.

Dr. War

Dr. Robert Strausz-Hupé, born in Vienna, came to the New World in 1923 and was naturalized in 1938 (are all these (continued on page 236)Strangeloves(continued from page 176) guys Kremlin spies, planted in the U.S.?). Strausz-Hupé was at the University of Pennsylvania's Foreign Policy Research Institute before landing a string of successive ambassadorships under Nixon-Ford. Strausz-Hupé has staked out a position in the Strangelove spectrum that makes him the Von Clausewitz of his peers. A former lecturer at the U.S. Air Force Air War College, he has contributed articles and essays to such journals of fear and loathing as National Review and to official reports of the House Un-American Activities Committee. With the latter publisher, known to be concerned about matters of social order, Strausz-Hupé has evidenced a keen Brzezinskilike sense of historical irrelevants. But his bag is really war, which he thinks about even while brushing his teeth. "The immense strides in weapons technology," he writes, "alone rule out the possibility that the major powers will forgo, in an armed clash with one another, the use of nuclear weapons and wage strictly 'conventional' war..... The U.S. can ill afford to espouse such a doctrine unilaterally...." Strausz-Hupé may actually believe that war will out: He insists that it is "not an isolated, capricious phenomenon which flouts the 'normal' peaceful processes of history...." Strausz-Hupé is here transparently jockeying for a position vis-à-vis Iklé that seems somewhat more rightward than Kissinger's. Like Kissinger, however, Strausz-Hupé is full of doubts about our chances of winning the world handicap: On the world-war morning line, the West's entry is not even close to being the favorite; he wonders, depressingly, "whether Western civilization is sinking into its final twilight." (This sort of negative, nihilistic thinking makes one wonder whether a latter-day HUAC investigation of Strausz-Hupé might not be in order.)

The Austrian immigrant is clearly not a comer like Brzezinski, but he serves an important over-all function to his peers, and that's why they let him play in their sandbox: By positioning himself as an extreme voice in this chorus line of sycophants and accented quacks, he enhances the impression of altolike moderation among other Strangeloves whose positions unaccompanied by his basso might otherwise seem a collection of random low notes. He is important because he makes others seem on key when and where he seems a bit off.

Dr. Newspeak

Herman Kahn may be the most notorious of the Strangeloves, but he is also the least likely to sit behind the desk of official power. To ordinary Strangeloves, this prospect would be terribly dismaying, but Kahn evidently is unperturbed. He is more the consigliere of the family, preferring the role of oracle, house theoretician and master imponderable. No one knows if he is smarter than everyone else, but almost everyone concedes that, hands down, he is more difficult to understand; remember, in the company he keeps, that is no mean feat. One is reminded of the ancient soothsayer who told his fellow villagers, pressing him for advice, to beware of the stranger who would come into town with or without one shoe. Kahn's futuristic predictions are reminiscent of such sagacity.

Kahn is the godfather of nuclear newspeak. Such Sears catalogs of Strangelove options as On Thermonuclear War, Thinking About the Unthinkable and On Escalation: Metaphors and Scenarios perhaps may have done more to make the idea of nuclear warfare tolerable in previously (and rightly) intolerant circles than Truman's decision to teach the unsuspecting residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a lesson the Japanese would never forget. Like Truman, Kahn is a teacher of such lessons.

Kahn possesses advanced degrees from the California Institute of Technology and early in his career was gainfully employed as a mathematician for Douglas Aircraft, Northrop Aviation and Boeing Aircraft. Out of this early background, and perhaps employing the elegantly illusive concepts of symbolic math, he pieced together a kind of intellectual Esperanto: neither English nor any other language recognized by Berlitz but the ambiguously deft language of Strange-lovian logic (i.e., two plus two equals an arms race). Kahn was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, which in some ways is as foreign to America as is Samaden, but, with his metaphors and scenarios--a contribution that even Kissinger has been unable to emulate--might as well have been born in Greece. With his dazzling, incomprehensible verbal arsenal, Kahn could assume, as the occasion demanded, either a Strausz-Hupé step to the right or a Brzezinski feint to the left with only the most elegant substitution of verbal variables. In the constellations of Strangeloves, he is the Big Dipper.

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It is a mistake to underestimate the subtlety of the Strangelove elite. The club includes not only hawks but doves as well. There is infinite flexibility. Perhaps Brzezinski himself captured the flexibility best when he once described himself as neither hawk nor dove but as a "dawk." (This prestidigitation occurred on the occasion of his defense on national television with McGeorge Bundy of L.B.J.'s escalation in Vietnam.) Such deft formulation by Brzezinski neatly illustrates the complex way in which Strangeloves manage to adopt positions just to make it appear theirs are different from everyone else's. Seeming doves can exist beside seeming hawks in a collegial manner only because of their seeming difference. Take these next three examples.

Dr. Statesman

Dr. George Kistiakowsky, like Kissinger, is a Harvard professor who has spent a lot of time in Washington. Kisty, as his friends call him, was born in Kiev, of a Cossack family; he fought the Bolsheviki in the White Russian army. Kisty got his naturalization papers in 1933 and, in the New World, worked his way to the top of the scientific heap as one of the country's first Presidential science advisors (under Eisenhower in the wake of Sputnik). In this capacity, he became renowned as a "statesman" of science, even after he left Government to return to Harvard.

Kisty, however, comes to us with the sort of baggage from the past that must be opened for inspection. During World War Two, he was very active, indeed, with the military and was placed in charge of the sensitive Division B (explosives) of the National Defense Research Committee. He sparkled in this assignment, coming up with a flourlike explosive that could be baked into bread and cookies. Used by Chinese guerrillas against Japanese occupiers, it was given the enchanting name Aunt Jemima.

Dr. Kistiakowsky also had a strong hand, while an advisor to the Defense Department, in the seminal decision of 1954 to accelerate work on the development of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. This was one of the key decisions in the early history of the nuclear-arms race. But Kisty, though cleverly identified with sane causes such as the popular opposition to the Southeast Asian war, is also identifiable as a good, if quiet, soldier (he is one of the preeminent chemists of his generation) and is extremely well liked by his colleagues, perhaps because he makes them feel better about what they do. Those who have made the otherwise intelligent argument that scientists ought to have nothing to do with the military establishment have felt the lash of his wrath. "We won't reserve for long the generous public support," he counters, getting immediately to the point, "that has been ours without explicit service to the public." But by public service, Kisty means nothing more than Government service. "If we, the scientific community, refuse to be involved," he continues, research will be left to the "industrial corporations that are the servants, if not the stooges, of the Pentagon." In taking the position that the beginning of immorality is scientific disengagement, Kisty has gone a long way toward making Pentagon hucksterism as respectable as Kahn has tried to make nuclear war thinkable. In a fairly recent call to arms, the Harvard professor advocated "far greater social and political involvement of scientists than heretofore." While not making it entirely clear how that could be possible--at least for the already heavily engaged Strange-loves--Kisty's statement sugar-coated all the moral issues in this arrogance of power, succeeding in making what is nothing more than high-class intellectual hustling seem like a nonprofit act of patriotism. In this context, Kistiakowsky's opposition to the Vietnam war, even if deeply felt, somehow seems no more consequential than Brzezinski's membership in the NAACP.

Dr. Civil Defense

Dr. Eugene Paul Wigner is a 1963 Nobel Prize winner and has been a Princeton professor for as long as anyone can remember. Born in Budapest, he got his naturalization papers in 1937. During World War Two, like Kisty, Dr. Wigner distinguished himself in various assignments for the military. On and off between 1952 and 1964, he was on call to the Atomic Energy Commission. Wigner is not as gung ho about war as either Strausz-Hupé or Iklé; almost alone among his Strangelove colleagues, he is obsessed by the need for civil defense, and herein lies the tale.

On the face of it, there is nothing more wrong with a call for civil defense than for cookies or bread, up to the point where the product is examined closely. Remember Iklé's doomsday machine--which would be designed to spare civilians from the role of hostages by retargeting missiles toward enemy military installations? Well, Wigner's civil-defense program is an offspring of that thought in the proposition of an extensive civil-defense program (including, yes, bomb shelters) costing no less than 35 billion dollars (but with cost overruns, etc.). Wigner does not advocate a first-strike (surprise-attack) posture; he does not contest the franchise of either Strausz-Hupé or Iklé. But the program he has in mind, staking out turf somewhere in the vicinity of Iklé--Strausz-Hupé, is exactly the sort of thing that in the Russian mind makes a surprise attack feasible--a damage-reducing strategy. Wigner's seemingly innocent civil-defense proposal, if adopted, is exactly the sort of element that in a crisis situation could click the mind of a trigger-happy enemy into Kahn's thinkable.

"We do not wish to deny, of course," Wigner writes, "that it is even better if no nuclear explosion takes place." But his call for a huge civil-defense program is an important element in the new doomsday machine, making him different from all the other Strangeloves--except, of course, that in Strangelovian logic, the more things appear to be different, the more they are really the same.

Dr. Fail-Safe

Dr. Wolfgang Hermann Panofsky was born in Berlin and was naturalized in 1942. Dr. Panofsky may be the brightest man in the world. He is 5'2" tall, weighs 150 pounds, neither smokes nor drinks and is manifestly, painfully indifferent to clothes. Not that he's a nudist; just that his mind is on higher things.

Panofsky (Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1942) is the developer and director of the world-famous Stanford Linear Accelerator. The accelerator extends in a straight line for a distance of 10,000 feet from the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains toward the Stanford University campus and San Francisco Bay. It is a long vacuum pipe that is housed in a heavy concrete casing sunk 25 feet underground. It has no practical use whatsoever, but this is part of Panofsky's charm and what makes one almost reluctant to single him out in this line-up.

Still, Panofsky is a key figure in the Strangelove business, because, being smarter than the rest, he has helped them all avoid potentially embarrassing, crushing boo-boos. And, as a Government consultant on and off since 1943, he has been inside enough to know where the mistakes are buried. For example, just about all the Strangeloves supported the ABM--even the extensive Nixon antiballistic-missile system that was delimited by SALT I. Nixon-Kissinger sacrificed it at Helsinki-Vienna not only because of hostile public opinion in the U.S. but also because it was too expensive and might not work. Perhaps the first person to demonstrate forcefully that it was an awful price to pay for the tiny protection we were getting was Panofsky.

At a secret strategy meeting that included Pentagon brass, Strangelove consultants and assorted policy types, a graph that purported to show what various levels of ABM investment did by way of enemy-missile protection was Xeroxed and passed around. Everyone except Panofsky was very impressed by the quantification. Being smarter than the rest, Panofsky proceeded to demonstrate at the blackboard that this graph, even though prepared by the Pentagon, proved no such thing; that, on the contrary, it showed for sure why and how ABM was a big nothing for a lot of dough. (Panofsky's demonstration had to do with linear increments of defense per billions of dollars of expenditures.)

Thus, Panofsky, who by the age of eight had beaten his father at chess and probably lost few games after that, was on this day more than a match for the Pentagon. Thereupon, as all in his audience grasped that Wolfgang had done it again, that the ABM was a damned dumb investment and that Panofsky was smarter than the Defense Department, the brass in the room hurriedly confiscated each and every Xerox copy of the graph and, to everyone's horror, stamped them Classified. Ever since then, things have not been the same between Panofsky and the Pentagon; but among fellow Strangeloves, he is fondly remembered as the guy who kept everyone from getting too much egg on his face. In this way, Panofsky is the Strangelove elite's human fail-safe system. Whenever the others are about to go off the deep end, one of them usually stops to wonder what Panofsky thinks. He is their best and brightest.

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This rogues' gallery is necessarily just a sketch. Wohlstetter, Possony, Niemeyer, Teller, to drop a few names, are not here, as they would have to be in any complete Who's Who of the Strangelove elite. Still, we have shown that America is truly a great country; Kubrick's telescopic vision of a one-of-a-kind disaster has become virtually an intellectual and policy trend. From Brzezinski to Aunt Jemima, we are some kind of pluralistic society, and some kind of entertaining one. We see a new casting call in the near future, as the struggle for power and influence in the Carter era continues. The Strangelove players will strut their stuff on the political stage, maybe even exchanging a line or a position, as necessary, in one of the greatest shows on earth.

"Kahn may be the most notorious Strangelove, but he is the least likely to sit behind the desk of official power."