1 Why the Wizards of Armageddon Ran Into An Intellectual Dead-end

47 Pages·2014·0.79 MB·English

Why the Wizards of Armageddon Ran Into An Intellectual Dead-end:
And What That Tells Us About the Relevance of Academic Nuclear Strategy Today

Paul C. Avey
Southern Methodist University
and
Michael C. Desch
University of Notre Dame
[Fourth Draft – December 2014]

I. Introduction.

International security has long been among the most policy relevant of sub-fields in field of
academic international relations. 1 This is still the case today, at least as measured by the relative
willingness of authors in top international relations journals to offer explicit policy recommendations.
There is a significant difference in this regard, as Figure 1 shows, between articles since 1980 dealing
with security issues (i.e., weapons of mass destruction, weapons acquisition, terrorism, and military
intervention) and other issue areas in the field.2
But as Figure 2 shows, the willingness of leading international relations scholars to offer such
policy recommendations has declined in absolute terms since 1980 and this drop may have something
to do with the professionalization of the discipline of political science. While the professionalization of a
discipline, and its increasing irrelevance to concrete policy issues, is neither historically nor logically
inevitable, there nonetheless seems to be an elective affinity between these two trends. First, the
increasing emphasis on quantitative research has led to narrower research questions which are often
too abstruse or obscure to be relevant to policy. Second, many proponents of the scientific study of
politics believe that advocacy of particular policies is incompatible with scientific objectivity and so avoid

1 Robert Jervis, “Security Studies: Ideas, Policy, and Politics” and Thomas Schelling, “Academics, Decision Makers,
and Security Policy During the Cold War: A Comment on Jervis” both in Edward D. Mansfield and Richard Sisson,
eds. The Evolution of Political Knowledge (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 101 and 137. Also
see, Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983), 336.
2 The Teaching and Research in International Politics journal coding project is described in Daniel Maliniak, Amy
Oakes, Susan Peterson, and Michael J. Tierney, “International Relations in the Academy,” International Studies
Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 2 (2011)): 437-64. The data from which I generated these figures is available at
http://www3.nd.edu/~carnrank/.
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it. Third, many pressing policy questions are not readily amenable to the preferred methodological
tools of social scientists. Finally, even when the results of these approaches are relevant to policy
questions, they are often not presented in an accessible way for policymakers or the broader public.3
The more “scientific” approaches to international relations scholarship seem to be the least relevant, at
least as measured by their practitioner’s willingness to offer policy recommendations, as Figure 3
indicates. The problem, in our view, is not so much that “scientific” approaches to national security
policy are irrelevant by definition; rather, their current dominance is a symptom of a larger trend among
the social sciences to privilege method over substance, which Figure 3 suggests, with a resulting decline
in policy relevance.

3 For further elaboration, see Michael C. Desch, “Technique Trumps Relevance: The Professionalization of Political
Science and the Marginalization of Security Studies,” Perspectives on Politics Vol. 13, No. 1 (March 2015):
[forthcoming].
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Figure 1: Articles With Policy Prescriptions by Subfield
3
Quantitative Methods and Policy Prescriptions
in Top IR Journals since 1980
60
) 50
%
n ( 40
o
ti 30
or Quantitative
p 20
o
Policy Prescription
Pr 10
0
198019841988199219962000200420082012
Year

Figure 2: The Growth in the Number of Quantitative Articles and Those Providing Policy Prescriptions (1980-2012)
Methodologies and Policy Prescriptions in
Top IR Journals (1980-2012)
90
80
)
% 70
n ( 60
o 50
rti 40
o
p 30
o 20
r
P 10
0
Methodologies

Figure 3 Methodologies That Offer Policy Prescriptions in IR Journals
Since many believe it was nuclear strategy that first opened the door for the Cold War Wizards
of Armageddon to shape nuclear strategy, and remains among the most relevant today, we believe that
this issue area is a good one to explore when and under what conditions academic international
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relations influences policy. “Academic strategists”4 such as Bernard Brodie, Albert Wohlstetter, Herman
Kahn, William Kaufman, and especially Thomas Schelling reputedly exercised such influence that the
period between 1945 and 1961 is regarded as the “Golden Age” of academic national security studies.5
For example, Brodie himself avers that “it is no exaggeration to say that all the distinctively modern
concepts of military strategy, most of which have been embraced by the military services themselves,
have evolved out of [the] ranks [of the ‘scientific strategists’].”6 Former RAND staffer Roman Kolkowicz
claims that “the deterrence paradigm, developed by the defense intellectuals in the 1950s and 1960s,
provided the central concept for the management of nuclear strategy.”7 Even then-Air Force Chief of
Staff General Thomas White, a skeptic of civilian defense intellectuals in general, conceded that some of
them knew more about some nuclear policy issues than he did.8
Many scholars agree. “All the fundamental ideas about nuclear strategy came from civilians,” in
Robert Jervis’ view.9 Retired Army General and former University of Pittsburgh Provost Wesley Posvar
cautions that “the impact of this work [by academic strategists] is so great that any serious new study
which treats of the present military situation in international politics, including the whole fields of
deterrence and arms control, must take account of it.”10 Journalist Fred Kaplan was so impressed with
their influence that he was inspired to use a theological metaphor to describe it: “the ideas of these
thermonuclear Jesuits would have so thoroughly percolated through the corridors of power – and
through their annexes in academia – that, at least among fellow members of the congregation, their
wisdom would be taken almost for granted, their assumptions worshipped as gospel, their insight
elevated to an almost mystical level and accepted as dogma…. [T]his small group of theorists would

4 This is Joseph Kraft’s phrase in “The War Thinkers,” Esquire, Vol. 58, No. ? (1962) 103.
5 Thomas Schelling, “Bernard Brodie (1910-1978),” International Security Vol. 3, No. 3 (Winter 1978-1979): 2.
6 Bernard Brodie, “The American Scientific Strategists,” RAND Paper [P-2979] (Santa Monica, CA: RAND
Corporation, October 1964), 2.
7 Roman Kolkowicz, “The Strange Career of the Defense Intellectuals,” Orbis Vol. 31, No. 2 (Summer 1987): 187.
8 Kraft, “The War Thinkers,” 103.
9 Jervis, “Security Studies: Ideas, Policy, and Politics,” 109.
10 Wesley W. Posvar, “The Impact of Strategy Expertise on the National Security Policy of the United States,” Public
Policy Vol. 13, No. 13 (1964): 51.
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devise and help implement a set of ideas that would change the shape of American defense policy…”11
Even root-and-branch critics of American academic strategists such as P.M.S. Blackett ruefully admitted
that their “writings had a rather big influence.”12
To be sure, not everyone is convinced that there really was such a Golden Age in which social
science actually influenced U.S. national security policy. Pointing to the divergence between U.S. nuclear
declaratory policy (in which defense intellectuals apparently had influence through the theory of Mutual
Assured Destruction [MAD]) and actual operational doctrine and war plans (where in his view they did
not), historian Bruce Kuklick presents the most sustained critique of the conventional wisdom.
According to his account, “the men who actually made decisions were least concerned with scientific
ideas of any sort” and he concludes that the ideas of strategists had “little causal impact,” save perhaps
as ex post facto rationalizations for policymakers’ decisions. In his view, “none of the critical aspects of
decision making had much to do with the prevalent model of American social science – ‘whispering in
the ear of princes’ – the middle-range generalizations supposedly necessary to benign policy and
learned in a Ph.D. course.”13 Deborah Larson agrees that even the dean of civilian nuclear strategists –
Bernard Brodie – actually had little impact on the government or the wider public.14
This debate about the extent of the influence of academic social scientists on nuclear strategy
matters for several reasons. First, if civilian academic strategists had no influence on nuclear thinking
during the early Cold War, there is little reason to expect them to have any today. Second, if there is no
variation in their influence then this case would not be helpful in drawing conclusions about when and

11 Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, 11. Also see 32, where Kaplan points out that this trend began already
during the Second World War.
12 P.M.S. Blackett, “Critique of Some Contemporary Defence Thinking,” Encounter Vol. 16, No. 4 (April 1961):14.
13 Bruce Kuklick, Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2006), 6, 15-16, 143-44, 150, 223-30. Also see, Francis J. Gavin, Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in
America’s Atomic Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 4 and Fred Kaplan, “Strategic Thinkers,” Bulletin
of Atomic Scientists Vol. 38. No. 10 (December 1982): 51-56.
14 Deborah Welch Larson, “Deterrence Theory and the Cold War” Radical History Review Vol. 63 (1995): 88-89.
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under what conditions they might have it.15 Finally, it speaks to the larger question, in the words of a
National Research Council study, whether there is any “relationship between basic [social science]
research … and programmatically useful results.16 Or to quote Aaron Wildavsky, “the real question … is
whether disciplined intuition (meaning theorizing) has something to offer the untutored kind.”17
To answer this question, we will explore the changing relationship between academia and the
national security policy during the so-called “Golden Age” of cooperation between the two realms from
roughly 1945 through 1965, focusing particularly on the issue of nuclear strategy. We aim to establish
the academic strategists’ actual influence (the value of dependent variable) as well as to explain their
changing role in nuclear strategy (identifying the independent variable). Using this history we develop
criteria for when scholarship can influence policy. We further demonstrate the plausibility of this
framework by utilizing it to explain why the first post-Cold War wave of nuclear studies failed to
influence policy.18 We then employ these criteria to determine when and how the current generation of
academics working on nuclear issues might influence policy much as political scientist Robert Gilpin did
for the role of natural scientists in U.S. nuclear weapons policy.19
Briefly, we agree with Jervis that the Golden Age theorists’ “influence may be greater than
Kuklick portrays,”20 but show that it waxed and then waned during the Cold War. It did so even before
the Vietnam War, eventually reaching an intellectual dead-end. By this, we mean that intellectual

15 See Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative
Research. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 129 on the importance of selecting cases with variation
in the dependent variable.
16 Advisory Committee on the Management of Behavioral Science Research in the Department of Defense, Division
of Behavioral Sciences, National Research Council, Behavioral and Social Research in the Department of Defense: A
Framework for Management (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1971), xii.
17 Aaron Wildavsky, “Practical Consequences of the Theoretical Study of Defense Policy,” Public Administration
Review Vol. 25, No. 1 (March 1965): 93. Also see Robert Packenham, “Social Science and Public Policy” in Sidney
Verba, and Lucian W. Pye, eds., The Citizen and Politics: A Comparative Perspective. (Stamford, CT: Greylock
Publishers, 1978), 237-57.
18 In a sense we are ‘testing’ the theory against new data, see King et al., Designing Social Inquiry, 21-23, 30, 46.
19 Robert Gilpin, American Scientists & Nuclear Weapons Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 300.
Also see, 7.
20 Robert Jervis, “Commentary,” H-Diplo Roundtable – Blind Oracles, 9 at http://www.h-
net.org/~diplo/roundtables/PDF/Jervis-KuklickRoundtable.pdf.
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developments within the academy – the privileging of theory and method over substantive relevance –
reduced the relevance of the work of many academic defense intellectuals. What led to that, we
suggest, was their growing embrace of Economic approaches to nuclear strategy. We are not arguing
that sophisticated social scientific methods are necessarily incompatible with policy relevant
scholarship; rather, just that when they are employed without attention to their appropriateness for the
concrete question at hand, and pursued for internal disciplinary reasons such a theoretical elegance or
congruence with our preferred image of what a “science” should be, they are not very helpful to
policymakers. The increasingly abstract character of late Golden Age theories would eventually
disconnect them altogether from real-world policy concerns by pushing nuclear strategy beyond MAD.
The end of the Golden Age is thus a cautionary tale for today’s generation of nuclear scholars, many of
whom in their effort to recreate a “science” of strategy seem once again to be emulating the methods
and approaches of Economics that brought academic nuclear strategy to a dead-end. 21
This paper proceeds in three sections: We begin by tracing and then explaining the waxing and
waning of the Golden Age of academic nuclear strategy to develop criteria for influence. Next we apply
these insights to post-Cold War nuclear theorizing including the optimist-pessimist debate and the
purported “renaissance” in nuclear studies. We conclude with some recommendations for how to
balance rigor with relevance so that the current wave of academic nuclear theorizing can avoid ending
up once again in an intellectual cul-de-sac.
II. The Waxing and Waning of the Golden Age” of Academic Nuclear Strategists
Given that there is some debate about the actual influence of the “Golden Age” civilian nuclear
strategists, our first task is to establish whether they in fact had any. Having established that they did, at
least early on, we need to consider two explanations for the waning of their influence. The conventional

21 This reflects larger disciplinary trend in political science. See, for example, Albert O. Hirshman, Exit, Voice, and
Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 19. Also
see, Gordon Tullock, “Economic Imperialism” in James M. Buchanan, ed., Theory of Public Choice: Political
Applications of Economics (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 325.
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wisdom is that it ended as a result of the political turmoil of the Vietnam War which delegitimized
collaboration with the U.S. Government among academics. While there is some truth in that view, we
suggest that it was the increasing influence of Economic approaches to strategy that further undermined
the relevance of academic strategy by privileging internal disciplinary concerns like theoretical
eloquence and the use of sophisticated methods over addressing concrete policy problems.
The Influence of Academic Nuclear Strategists During The Early Cold War

Ascertaining whether academic nuclear strategists had influence will be challenging for two
reasons: As political scientist John Kingdon warns, the influence of academics upon policy debates is
often “hidden” and the secrecy surrounding national security decision-making makes their role in
nuclear strategy even more opaque. 22 Moreover, such an exercise partakes of the more general
challenge of tracing the influence of ideas – the currency of academics – upon policy outcomes.23 Given
that, our expectations for what sort of influence they could have need to be reasonable. As Bruce
Smith notes, “the end product of most planning and research activities is not an agenda of mechanical
policy moves for every contingency – plainly an impossible task – but rather a more sophisticated map
of reality carried in the minds of the policy makers.”24 Therefore, we need to look more closely at the
history of the Golden Age, which we believe shows that some of these ideas about the effects of nuclear
weapons upon statecraft – particularly the Nuclear Revolution and MAD – did have real impact on
Presidential crisis decision-making at certain junctures even if they did not shape operational plans and
doctrine.

22 John W. Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies [Second ed.] (New York: Longman, 2003), 199.
23 Peter A. Hall, “Introduction” in Hall, ed., The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism Across Nations
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 3-4. Also see Jeffrey W. Legro, “The Transformation of Policy
Ideas,” American Journal of Political Science Vol. 44, No. 3 (July 2000): 419-32; Emanuel Adler and Peter M. Hass,
“Conclusion: Epistemic Communities, World Order, and the Creation of a Reflective Research Program,”
International Organization Vol. 46, No. 1 (Winter 1992): 367-90; and especially Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and
Public Policies, 2-3.
24 Bruce L.R. Smith, The RAND Corporation: Case Study of a Nonprofit Advisory Corporation (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1966), 230.
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Two related events at the end of the Second World War set the stage for the longest peacetime
period of national security policy cooperation between the academy and the U.S. Government. These
were the invention and use of the Atomic Bomb against Japan in the last weeks of the war and then the
outbreak of the Cold War two years later. Not surprisingly given Yale University’s role during the
Second World War, the locus for thinking about the implications of the “nuclear revolution” was at its
Institute for International Studies.25 It was there that political scientist Bernard Brodie first argued that
the development of these weapons would fundamentally change the nature of international relations.26
For much of history, in Brodie’s view, military force had been a viable instrument of statecraft.
But with the advent of nuclear weapons, only the threat of the use of force remained available to
statesmen because the actual use of nuclear weapons would be mutually catastrophic.27 Brodie foresaw
that the development of the H-bomb would tilt the cost/benefit ratio against war permanently:28
“Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief
purpose must be to avert them. It can have no other useful purpose.’”29 It was actually Brodie’s mentor
University of Chicago economist Jacob Viner who drew the logical implication of his student’s argument
that nuclear weapons were only useful for deterrence.30 All these ideas crystalized in a volume of essays
Brodie edited for IIS entitled The Absolute Weapon which established the contributors as the country’s

25 Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 [2nd ed.] (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1996) and Frederick S. Dunn, “The Growth of the Yale Institute of International Studies,”
November 7, 1950 at http://rockefeller100.org/archive/files/ccfe7e7718d3606ab50c8cdd2d88c37b.pdf.
26 Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, 10.
27 See the discussion of Brodie’s influence in Herken, Counsels of War, xi-xii.
28 Barry H. Steiner, Bernard Brodie and the Foundations of American Nuclear Strategy (Lawrence, KS: The University
Press of Kansas, 1991), 134.
29 Frederick S. Dunn, Bernard Brodie, Arnold Wolfers, Percy E. Corbett, and William T.R. Fox, The Absolute
Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1946), 76.
30 The essay was Jacob Viner, “The Implications of the Atomic Bomb for International Relations” in International
Economics (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1946), 300- 9. Also see Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, 27; and
Albert Wohlstetter, Letter to Michael Howard, “On the Genesis of Nuclear Strategy,” 1968, in Robert Zarate
Henry Sokolski, eds., NUCLEAR HEURISTICS: SELECTED WRITINGS OF ALBERT And ROBERTA WOHLSTETTER
(Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College, January 2009), 227 at
http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB893.pdf .
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