Katherine Howard, Herman Kahn, Condoleezza Rice and Hilary Clinton

     Speaking in Sacramento on October 13, 1953, Mrs. Katherine Howard, a Deputy Director of the Federal Civil Defense Administration, offered this estimate. “Properly distributed, 100 A-bombs would result in 11 million casualties, and an assault of that size is admittedly within the attack capabilities of the Soviet Union, today.”

    Mrs. Howard agreed that 11 million dead equaled a “paralyzing” blow against “enemy target number one, civilians”; but, since the U.S. had 160 million citizens, she valiantly tried to arouse the patriotism of those who attended the Women’s Conference on Civil Defense. “Multiply that casualty list an inconceivable five times, in your mind if you will, and it would still be safer to be an American than a Russian, for two-thirds of this nation would be left to vent its wrath on the Kremlin –if the people of the Kremlin were still there.”

    Mrs. Howard and her civil defense colleagues had an impossible job: They “stared into hell” and, given what they saw, they deliberately tried to frighten the American people into some sort of defensive action. Documents at the Eisenhower library show a serious sense of frustration on the part of Civil Defense officials. Nobody wanted to listen so Civil Defense rallied the nation with a series of mid-fifties evacuation sessions labeled, “Operation Alert”. Unfortunately, instead of producing action, the prospect of fifty or one hundred million deaths acted like a forty-eight state injection of Novocain; the ceaseless predictions numbed minds, moving millions of people to focus on life rather than the prospect of death in a bomb shelter.

    Meanwhile, at think tanks like RAND, civilian strategists developed what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice approvingly calls the “classical statement of deterrence”. The only way to keep catastrophe at bay was for each side to frighten the living bejesus out of the other. Long before the hideous attacks of the Tamil Tigers or Al Qaeda, you mentally terrorized your enemy, knowing all the while that the effectiveness of the “balance of terror” always required delicate and continual adjustments. If one side built better bomb shelters, the other might need bigger bombs; if one installed an army of powerful land based missiles, the other used additional submarines to assure a devastating second strike capability.

    The ultimate deterrent was to threaten the death of everyone on earth. Thus, in Congressional hearings and in On Thermonuclear War, Herman Kahn discussed the “Doomsday Machine, the Doomsday-in-a-Hurry Machine and the Homicide Pact Machine”. He seriously “assumed that for, say $10 billion we could build a device whose only function is to destroy all human life…the computer would be programmed so that if, say five nuclear bombs exploded over the United States, the device would be triggered and the earth destroyed.” Kahn doubted that either side would actually build such a machine but, since the balance of terror was already a homicide pact, he did offer a way to end our apprehensions by ending the world and everything in it.

       It’s an astonishing commentary.You could threaten to extinguish all human life and still be, at least in U.S. foreign policy circles, a respected representative of the world’s most civilized nation.

     America still boasts leaders who are almost as threatening as Herman Kahn. In 2000, Condoleezza Rice discussed the foreign policy of then Presidential candidate George Bush. In a section of her presentation titled “Coping with Rogue Regimes”, Ms. Rice notes (about Iraq and North Korea) “these regimes are living on borrowed time, so there need be no sense of panic about them. Rather, the first line of defense should be a clear and classical statement of deterrence-if they do acquire WMD, these weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration.” (http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20000101faessay5/condoleezza-rice/campaign-2000-promoting-the-national-interest.html)

    Since the population of Iraq then totaled 25 million people, with close to 40% 14 years old or younger, Ms. Rice had just threatened to obliterate ten million children.

   Eight years after Ms. Rice’s threats, Senator Hilary Clinton made one of her own. In April of 2008, she discussed the nuclear weapons program of Iran, noting that if “they foolishly considered launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them. That’s a terrible thing to say, but those people who run Iran need to understand that, because perhaps that will deter them from doing something that would be reckless, foolish and tragic.”

   Tragic indeed! Iran’s population is 70 million, with 34% under the age of 14. Thus, Senator Clinton had just threatened to obliterate almost 24 million children.

      As with Herman Kahn and the Doomsday Machine, Ms. Rice and Senator Clinton are treated as though they were sane. And I think that David Rothkopf helps us understand why. In Superclass, Rothkopf notes that “most international issues fail to resonate with voters.” Very small groups of people determine U.S. foreign and nuclear policy; and, while some are Republicans, and others are Democrats in truth “there is only one group, with its individual members moving from one set of jobs to another.” Thus, former Secretary of State Madeline Albright may disagree with present Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice but, since Albright’s father taught Rice about international affairs at Harvard, we can assume that they all learned and support –to varying degrees- the classical statement of deterrence. That is, terrorize your enemy with threats of obliteration and rest assured that, as with Mrs. Howard in 1953, the rest of the population will never listen to what you are saying.

   We all need to listen; and we all need to put our Presidential candidates on a national hot seat. So, during the town meetings that take place this summer, I would ask that both Senator’s McCain and Obama each please answer these two questions.

    Are American leaders who threaten to obliterate ten million children civilized or barbaric?

    And is an American leader who threatens to obliterate 70 million people sane or insane?