Category Archives: Reviews

America’s Plans for War Against the Soviet Union, 1945-1950, Vol. 14, Long Range Planning, Dropshot

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A review was posted last week of Vol. 13 in the series of books edited by Steven T. Ross and David Alan Rosenberg. That book evaluated the military plan called “OFFTACKLE,” which called for being prepared to engage in war with the Soviet Union in the late 1940s to early 1950s with 220 atomic bombs dropped on Soviet targets followed by conventional bombing. Volume 14 carries the plan into the future with the Soviet attack into Europe expected to occur in 1957. The extra time allowed the planners to produce the war plan with the code name “DROPSHOT,” which expanded the scale of the attacks. DROPSHOT was being prepared when NSC-68 was written, which was a planning document calling for an extensive U.S. rearmament plan. The Korean War and the fall of China to the Communists reinforced belief that World War III with the Soviets was inevitable. This volume1 contains the declassified (from top secret) facsimiles of the Joint Chiefs of Staff document JCS 1950/5 prepared in three sections. The basic assumption is that “…war against the USSR has been forced upon the United States by an act of aggression of the USSR and/or her satellites.”

It was believed that the massive Soviet conventional forces would sweep into and through Europe when the Soviet leaders decided that war would be to their advantage. Their armies were expected to be in control of Western Europe in twenty days. The report indicates that there was more confidence in intelligence about Soviet capabilities that in previous war plans. For example, “The committee is now informed that the Joint Intelligence Committee has available a revised estimate of the 1957 Soviet atomic bomb stock pile.” One aspect of planning that didn’t change was that it was considered strategically important to hold the oil producing areas of the Near and Middle East. Continue reading →

America’s Plans for War Against the Soviet Union, 1945-1950, Vol. 13, Evaluating the Air Offensive

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This book 1, edited by Stephen R. Ross and David Alan Rosenberg, is an unusual book to be reviewed this web site. The book is listed as unavailable and out of print on Amazon. I obtained a copy on interlibrary loan from the “Center for Naval Analysis” in Arlington, VA. For those who might wonder why I would be interested in such an obscure book, I worked at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in Colorado, and have been researching why the nation believed we needed such a facility to be built in the early 1950s. I had motivation to obtain the book, but I’ll warn others that the book is very large. It has in excess of 400 8 ½ X 11 pages, even though it only contains the declassified information from the original top secret report. A quick summary is that the report describes an evaluation of “War Plan OFFTACKLE,” which called for a strike with atomic bombs on 220 Soviet industrial site followed by massive conventional bombing.

I’ve read much about the negative effects on military planning created by the competition between the military services in the late 1940s. There was also a lack of cooperation between the civilian Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the military planners. The AEC felt they were prevented by the Atomic Energy Act from revealing physical characteristics of the atomic bombs (which was crucial to determining how the weapons could be carried and delivered) or even the number of weapons in the stockpile. This report discusses the stark fact that the military didn’t have the capability to carry out the full war plan and also clearly emphasizes the even more depressing reality of the nearly complete lack of effective intelligence about the Soviet Union, its military capabilities, and its intentions. The only thing that seemed a certainty to the planners was that a World War with the Soviet Union was inevitable.   Continue reading →

The Road to Trinity

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road-to-trinityThis book, which had the subtitle, “A Personal Account of How America’s Nuclear Policies Were Made, was written by Major General Kenneth D. Nichols, (Retired). Nichols was a Lieutenant Colonel when he began an assignment as deputy district engineer of the Manhattan Engineer District. He was deputy to Leslie Groves. There have been many books written on the subject, but I would recommend this and the Groves account “Now it Can be Told,” as the best two to read if you are just beginning to want to understand what happened in the Manhattan Project and beyond. I was shocked that there hasn’t been a single review of the Nichols book on Amazon. You can buy a used copy of the book for about a dollar plus shipping. It would be worth your investment, although interlibrary loan was even less expensive.

The book begins in November 1952 when Nichols is directed to write his “…personal views on the political and military implications of the hydrogen bomb and given three hours to write it.” He wrote that the hydrogen bomb “…has equal or greater political than strictly military implications.” He warned that to achieve deterrence the U.S. must convince the Soviet Union we will utilize nuclear weapons ruthlessly. He believed we should have used tactical nuclear weapons in Korea “…proving to the world we really mean to use every potential weapon available to us to preserve peace and thereby deter war. He recognized that might or probably would  have precipitated a major war “…at a time when we have the greatest potential for winning it with minimum damage to the U.S.A.”

People who are “anti-nuclear” and favor disarmament will gasp at some of the things Nichols writes. I was comfortable with his advice and opinions, and judge that he had, because of the roles he filled, an informed understanding of the real world situation that should be carefully and respectfully considered despite which side of the argument you might stand on. Continue reading →

“Let’s Kill All the Psychiatrists!”

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anatomy-of-an-epidemicL. Ron Hubbard was one of the most prolific writers in history, authoring more than 1100 books. He was also the founder of the Church of Scientology, arguably one of history’s most controversial quasi-religious organizations. Many of the tenets upon which Hubbard based his church are inarguably crackpot, but after reading Robert Whitaker’s latest offering one could easily conclude that at least one of Hubbard’s paranoid beliefs, that psychiatric drugs and the doctors who prescribe them are the tools of the Devil, may contain a grain of truth.

Whitaker’s book, Anatomy of an Epidemic:  Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, examines two related issues.  The first is the astronomical increase over the last 60 years in the number of Americans who have been diagnosed with anxiety, depression and bipolar disorders, and schizophrenia.  These conditions, now being diagnosed in as many as 850 adults and 250 children per day, often are so debilitating that sufferers are unable to hold a job and so become dependent on Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) to survive.  The exploding number of mentally disabled being granted SSDI is threatening to bust the agency’s budget as early as 2016.

In 1955, around the time that the first psychotropic drugs like Thorazine were discovered, there were 355,000 people in the US under diagnosis for psychiatric conditions.  Almost all were housed in state or county hospitals as was then standard practice.  This number represented one in 468 Americans.  By 1987, with the closing of most mental hospitals and the treatment of affective disorders well into the age of Lithium and Prozac, one in 186 Americans was on the mental patient rolls. Since then, in spite of the promises made by the psychiatric profession and Big Pharma that Selective Serotonen Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) drugs were the cure for America’s mental ills, the numbers are still going up.  Continue reading →

Dead Wake

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dead-wakeMy wife recommended this excellent book by Erik Larson, and I’m glad I read it. The Lusitania was a luxury ocean liner, and considered to be a “greyhound,” the fastest liner in service. It sailed out of New York harbor carrying a record number of children and infants despite a German warning that the seas around Britain were a war zone. (My wife wondered why there were so many families travelling to Britain in a time of war.)  Captain William Turner was said to have placed faith in “…the gentlemanly strictures of warfare that had for a century kept civilian ships safe from attack.” Germany and Walther Schwieger, the captain of the Unterseeboot-20 was determined to change the rules of the game. The book presents meticulous details of the hunted and the hunter to the point of their historical connection. Detailed descriptions are given of numerous Lusitania passengers, and I found it eerie wondering whether the people being described in very human terms survived or died. I actually found myself hoping that some of the many accidents of history that brought U-20 within torpedo range of the Lusitania would somehow magically change and cause the torpedo to not be fired or miss. I knew I was hopelessly wrong thinking such thoughts, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself from wanting history to change. Larsen in a note to readers preceding the book must have had some of the same thoughts. He wrote that in his research, “What I learned both charmed and horrified me…”

Most, or at least many, of the passengers on the Lusitania had read notices placed by the German Embassy in Washington on the shipping pages of New York newspapers that “…vessels flying the flag of Great Britain, or any of her allies, are liable to destruction and that passengers sailing on such ships ‘do so at their own risk’.” Captain Turner had told passengers that he had received warning of fresh submarine activity off the Irish coast, but “…assured the audience there was no need for alarm.” The Cunard Company that owned the ship issued an official response to the German warning. “The truth is that the Lusitania is the safest boat on the sea. She is too fast for any submarine. No German war vessel can get her or near her.” One Greek carpet merchant apparently wasn’t reassured. He put on a life jacket and spent the night in a lifeboat. Another passenger took comfort from the revolver he always carried. Continue reading →

Working Poor in America

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hand to mouthIn 2013, Linda Tirado saw a forum question online: Why do poor people do things that seem so self-destructive? Tirado is a poor person and wrote a lengthy reply. Her essay was picked up by huffingtonpost.com and has become the introduction to her book, Hand to Mouth – Living in Bootstrap America.

Though Tirado makes some wider comments about the working poor, this is a memoir, written about her personal experience. Memoirs are not the genre we typically review for this blog. But public assistance may be debated in the upcoming election cycle and the book offers insight you’ll get nowhere else.

I don’t know if the publisher tried to verify Tirado’s story, but her tales of a chaotic work history ring true for me. I spent my working career at Rocky Flats, where employers invested a lot of time and expense in recruiting and training employees, and therefore invested patience and expense in retaining them. Since I’ve retired I’ve met people whose work seems disposable. Supporting what Tirado writes, their employers invest little in them and fire them for (what seem to me) minor offenses. They invest little in their jobs and quit over (what seem to me to be) minor conflicts with bosses or coworkers.

If you’ve ever asked the question that led to this book – Why do poor people do things that seem so self-destructive? – or the many related questions of why – here are answers in poignant, personal terms.

Tirado notes that this is her story. After her essay went viral she received comments from poor people saying they had different experiences. “That’s fair and true. Keep it in mind,” Tirado writes. “What is neither fair nor true was the criticism I received inferring that I was the wrong sort of poor… that I was not born into poverty… [But that’s not] the only way someone might find herself unable to make rent.”

I’ve read complaints that public assistance goes to people who are undeserving. In contrast, Tirado is surely the deserving poor. She is married to the father of her two children. Her husband is a military veteran. They often work two or more jobs each, have tried to better their educations, and do not use illegal drugs.

Anyone who has been led to believe all poor people live in publicly-funded leisure, or should be ashamed of the help they receive, or that healthcare can be had for free at emergency rooms, owes it to themselves to read Tirado’s book.

I’m struck by the futility of her life: Continue reading →