The Fog of Cold War.
The superb memoir, From MAD to Madness, penned by Paul Johnstone shortly before his death in 1981, is as relevant today as it was during the period that it chronicles. 1949-1969. That was the initial period of the first Cold War when Paul Johnstone served in the Pentagon and when the world trembled as the Berlin Wall Crisis and the Cuban Missile Crises unfolded. It was during that time that the term Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) was coined to describe the nuclear balance of terror between the US and USSR, a balance that hangs over our heads to this very day. Johnstone headed groups that decided the targets to be struck should that Cold War turn hot and helped design the configuration of the unholy nuclear Triad that would attack. Now that we have entered a period which Russian scholar Stephen F. Cohen calls the New Cold War with Russia, Johnstone’s experience is highly instructive. The book is in fact indispensible for scholars of “nuclear war planning,” an odious phrase, but one which is all too much with us. In fact some of what Johnstone wrote is included in the Pentagon Papers.
But the issues that Johnstone raises are relevant not only for scholars, but for each and every one of us since our very existence hangs by a thread increasingly frayed by the incessant anti-Russia drumbeat in our media. Johnstone’s first hand account of decisions during the Cold War shows how ineptly they were made, due to human limitations for getting at the truth and to the obstacles vested interests place in the way. The limited ability of intelligence agencies to ferret out the truth necessarily gives rise to what we might call a fog of Cold War. One of the best ways to appreciate how perilous this renders our existence is to read Johnstone’s depiction of how conclusions were reached and decisions were made back then.
That relevance is inescapable, because it is laid out with considerable insight in a preface and a postscript by Johnstone’s daughter, Diana. Diana Johnstone, a journalist residing in Paris, a frequent commenter on French and U.S. Politics and formerly a Green representative in the EU Parliament is also the author of The Politics of Euromissiles (1984), Greens in the European Parliament - A New Sense of Purpose for Europe (1994), Fool’s Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (2003), and Queen of Chaos: The Misadventures of Hillary Clinton (2015). Obviously father inspired daughter. In addition, Paul Craig Roberts’s Foreword adds a further dimension to the book since he worked with some of Paul Johnstone’s colleagues of the period and inside the Reagan cabinet when the first Cold War finally came to an end.
Two major contributions of this work stand out. First the danger we face today is even greater than the one we faced in the first Cold War. As Diana Johnstone points out, the collapse of the USSR took us abruptly back to the period between Hiroshima and 1949 when the US had unrivalled power and was often on the brink of using nuclear weapons in an attempt to destroy the USSR and China, a holocaust beyond imagination. Then, when the USSR unexpectedly exploded its first nuclear bomb on August 29, 1949, a balance of nuclear terror replaced the U.S. monopoly on it. When that period of balance came to an end with the collapse of the USSR, the U.S. reverted to the pre-1949 position of sole “superpower” and this led to the doctrine of Paul Wolfowitz and his fellow neoconservatives that the U.S. could and must remain forever in that globally dominant position. And so the idea of using nuclear weapons to preserve the hegemonic status quo gained new currency at that moment. Now the idea floats about again that perhaps the U.S. can assert control of the planet by developing the capacity for a knockout First Strike if only it can invent that lucrative will-o'-the-wisp, an ABM system that actually works. The MAD doctrine that gave rise to the maxim that “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” articulated by Robert McNamara, John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev may now be in peril, Diana Johnstone instructs us. The US is at present suffering from a hangover of the decade of America as sole superpower, the 1990s, even though the world is no longer America’s oyster.
Second, the failure of national “intelligence” and the frail reeds upon which that “intelligence” is based are all too apparent in Paul Johnstone’s work. The conclusions reached by the intelligence community are shaped by beliefs and prejudices to which mere facts are subservient. And in addition all too often relevant facts are unattainable. To this we must add the prejudices that grow out of greed or lust for power or the interests of an “ally.” This is clear when we remember that the “intelligence” agencies told us that there were WMD in Iraq or that Iraq was behind 9/11 or now without a shred of evidence that Putin is determining the outcome of U.S. and European elections and somehow hypnotizing Donald J. Trump into subservience. Simply put, Johnstone’s book shows us in detail why the “intelligence” agencies are not to be believed sans convincing evidence. For even when they do not lie outright, they regularly do not have the capacity to get to the truth. So when making existential decisions we are frequently running on empty. The only way forward is to abandon the notion that we can make such existential decisions in a rational way and to get rid of the WMD that can all too easily take us from MAD to madness and on to Armageddon. And one of the best ways to understand that is to read Johnstone’s account of how such decisions were made during the last Cold War. For, unfortunately, it does not appear that much has changed.
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