Category Archives: Reviews

NSC 68 and the Political Economy of the Early Cold War

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polit-econ-cold-warFrequent readers of this web site will find that this is an unusual posting because it is a combination review and commentary. I took that approach because I disagree with the basic premise of the book that stated simplistically, the Soviets did not present the threat that was advocated by U.S. policy.  My disagreement with the premise of the book does not diminish its importance. There is, in my opinion, immense value in a healthy argument about whether the U.S. rearmament was the primary cause of the Cold War or whether the Soviet Union would have taken full advantage if that policy hadn’t blunted their efforts. I’m thrilled Truman was convinced that FDR’s trust of Stalin was misplaced and that containment of the Soviets was needed.

Back to a stab at a review, the book was written by Curt Cardwell, and he has some serious disagreements with the U.S. policies about the intentions of the Soviet Union before the beginning of the Cold War. Briefly, the National Security Council (NSC) issued a series of documents that gauged the intentions of the Soviet Union in the mid-1940s to early 1950s. Those who advocated that the Truman administration must take a hard line against the Soviet Union were primary authors of the policy statement titled NSC 68. The doctrine in that paper was approved by Truman and resulted in a massive rearmament program by the U.S. beginning in 1950. It was the culmination of several Top Secret documents advocating that the ultimate objective of the U.S.S.R. was world domination and that the U.S. was required to aggressively build military strength to prevent the Soviets from pursing that goal.  Cardwell strongly disagrees. He thinks the real purpose of NSC 68 was to protect free market capitalism. I disagree. I offer that the Soviets had blockaded Berlin, exploded their first atomic bomb in 1949, the Chinese Communists had taken control of China, North Korea had invaded the South, and the Chinese had entered the Korean War before NSC 68 was finally approved. Those events and actions indicate the Soviets were, in my opinion, interested in expanding their area of control.  Continue reading →

The Power and Fun of Mathematical Thinking

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How Not To Be WrongHow Not To Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg is a fun book to read; perhaps surprising since the topic is mathematics. Ellenberg begins by saying the seemingly pointless drills primary school students complain of are akin to practice in sports. This hooked me immediately, since I think too many people believe you somehow “understand” math when you read a textbook and then can “do it”.  Ellenberg says “if you want to play soccer… you’re going to be spending lots of boring weekends on the practice field. There’s no other way.” It’s the same with math. An ability to perform basic operations is important to thinking since, as he observes, it would be hard to write a sonnet if you had to look up the spelling of each word as you worked.

Ellenberg does object to some of the way math is taught. Calculating “is something a computer can do quite effectively. Understanding whether the result makes sense – or deciding whether the method is the right one to use in the first place – requires a guiding human hand… A math course that fails to do so is essentially training the student to be a very slow, buggy version of Microsoft Excel.”

His engaging style is evident throughout the book. I laughed out loud several times, and I urge you to read the footnotes – they’re often funny. For example, when introducing Leonard Jimmy Savage, a pioneer of decision theory and Bayesian statistics, Ellenberg adds this footnote: “Savage… at one point spent six months living only on pemmican in order to prove a point about Arctic exploration. Just thought that was worth mentioning.” Continue reading →

The Manhattan Project: Bioscience and the Atom Bomb

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manhattan-projectThis small book by Jeff Hughes explores how science in the twentieth century changed everything as it spread from universities to the government and to the military. It has good information about the Manhattan Project in “condensed form,” but it spends time and words on the wisdom of “Big Science.”  The Manhattan Project was symbolic of the greatest change of all; “…science’s growth in scale, scope, and cost as it transformed from …small groups or individuals into…”Big Science”—a large-scale enterprise that is carried out by multidisciplinary and multinational groups of researches, cost enormous sums, demanded massive institutions of its own, and often represents a significant fraction of national budgets.” The Project brought together American, British, Canadian, and refugee European scientists to design and build the world’s first atomic bombs. It employed 130,000 people, cost $2 billion, and changed the world forever.

The book gives a brief history of the scientists who began to unlock the mysteries of the atom. Henri Becquerel accidently discovered that uranium had “spontaneous emission” recorded on a photographic plate. Marie Curie suggested the name “radioactivity.” Earnest Rutherford collaborated with Frederick Soddy and many others to work out the theory of radioactive decay by emission of alpha, beta, and gamma. Hans Geiger developed methods for measuring the emissions. Enrico Fermi and co-workers discovered that elements bombarded with neutrons could be turned into isotopes of other elements. Otto Hahn and Fritz Stassman reported they had apparently produced barium by bombarding uranium with neutrons. Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch deducted that “a splitting” had been achieved. Frisch conferred with a biologist who explained that biological cells dividing was called “fission,” and the term stuck. Researchers around the world began replicating the results. Continue reading →

Grounded

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groundedThe sub-title of this book by Robert M. Farley, “The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force,” reveals the premise. I requested it from the library because I read that it discusses the founding of the U.S. Air Force (USAF) in 1947. Military planners had decided many more nuclear weapons were needed for Soviet targets at about that time. That led to the construction of the Rocky Flats Nuclear weapons Plant where the plutonium parts were constructed for all those weapons.  I worked at the Plant for many years beginning with the end of my U.S. Army assignment to NORAD in1969. I was therefore interested in what the military planners were thinking in the late 1940s that led to the beginning of construction at Rocky Flats in 1951. I was disappointed. There is no mention in the book that I found to mention anything about the expansion of Soviet military targets that led to the need for more nuclear weapons. All I could find was that the USAF was assigned most of the nuclear arsenal because of their long-range bombers and the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). I decided to post a review, although I believe the book is flawed, at least for my purposes, by what it does not describe.

The book has several discussions of how the USAF being a separate service creates conflicts in military resource allocation, training, procurement, and strategies that are counterproductive. There is no doubt air power is needed for military missions. However, it is explained the war is an extension of politics and adding the politics of competing military services simply makes the act of engaging in war less than efficient. The author even observes that “…independent air forces make war more likely.” The reasoning is that the independent USAF will argue for policies that “…increase its visibility and access to resources” (which will make the USAF commanders more eager to go to war). The service will vie for political advantage by recommending use of its capabilities, and that certainly could and probably has influenced political policy decisions. Continue reading →

Freakonomics Thinking

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FreakI quickly devoured this short book by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.  Freakonomics “relies on data rather than hunch or ideology to understand how the world works.”  This appeals to me since I try to make decisions based on evidence, and get a kick out of discovering that what I think I know ain’t always so.  Readers should not feel alone in holding mistaken assumptions; Levitt and Dubner note that many of the “experts” we hear from in the media are more noteworthy for confidence than accuracy.

Think Like a Freak offers to teach anyone how to solve problems.  “Solving problems is hard. If a given problem still exists, you can bet that a lot of people have already come along and failed to solve it.” So we need more people who can find root causes of problems.

The book is easy to read, filled with delightful examples of their method, and only occasionally bumps into controversial issues that elicit strong emotions.

They concentrate on problems that are entertaining. For example:

  • Why a kicker in World Cup level play might choose a strategy that leads to fewer goals,
  • How they blew their chance to offer a future British Prime Minister advice,
  • Why medieval trial-by-ordeal often identified the guilty, and
  • Why demanding venues provide M&Ms with the brown candies removed was a practical move on the part of a rock band.

They emphasize that conventional wisdom is often wrong and correlation does not equal causality.  This leads to a controversial issue that they have addressed in greater detail before.  Continue reading →

The Samson Option

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samson-optionThis is a fascinating book by Seymour M. Hersh. As suggested by the subtitle, “Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy,” the book is split between describing how Israel developed nuclear weapons and a succession of American Presidents mostly turning a blind eye toward what Israel was doing. Some of the information is astonishing, and I often wondered whether the information was fact or fiction. There seems to have been a significant amount of research in the form of interviews with Israelis and Americans who could have known the secrets that are discussed. My inclination is to present the book as factual, and that is mostly because that would make the book more interesting!

The story begins with a description of how the U.S. shared high resolution images from a spy satellite called the “KH-11.” It seems a bit odd that the Israelis supposedly promised not to use the images for military purposes but used them to develop targets in the Soviet Union. They also used them to target and destroy the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak twelve miles north of Baghdad in early June 1981. The bombing raid was accomplished with F-16s that had been purchased from the U.S. “for defensive purposes only.” The bombing brought about worldwide protest and was the first Middle East crises for the Reagan administration. President Reagan asked his national security advisor, Richard Allen why the Israelis had bombed the facility and was told “Well. Boys will be boys.” The real answer was that Menachem Begin had said that it was necessary to prevent Iraq from developing a nuclear weapon. He said Iraq having nuclear weapons would result in “another Holocaust.” He then added, “Never again! Never again!” Nine hundred Jewish defenders had committed suicide at Masada in 73 A.D. while Samson had killed himself and his captors by pushing apart the temple pillars where he was chained. “For Israel’s nuclear advocates, the Samson Option became another way of saying ‘Never again!’” Continue reading →