Personal Narrative
I remember the Cuban Missile crisis. I was six. The sky was lowering and grey that week in New Jersey. I had gotten the idea somewhere about what refugees were and the fact that in war you flee. I wondered if we would be able to take the dog with us. When my mother explained about the missiles, I asked her where we would go. She said, “There isn’t anywhere we can go. The missiles can reach everywhere.” Later I woke from nightmares of all the world on fire.
I attended American University in Washington, DC and majored in history. I had internships in Congress and the Office of Management and Budget. My senior paper was on William Short, a friend of Jefferson’s who had an irresistibly romantic and tragic story as a diplomat in France and whose papers are in the Library of Congress.
While I was living in Washington, I read that JFK had found an old challenge of Teddy Roosevelt’s about walking fifty miles in a day and had reissued the challenge: first to the marines, then to his administration. There was a lot of chuckling as JFK's portly press secretary tried to get ready for walking fifty miles in a day. Then one weekend in February 1963 Robert Kennedy talked four of his friends into going with him along the C & O Canal (by the Potomac) walking toward Camp David. I thought, "What a cool thing. What an inspiring thing. You know, I could tell myself that I was going to do that same walk - walk fifty miles in a day - and that would motivate me to get into shape." Like many exercise plans, mine involved a certain amount of self-deception. In my heart of hearts, I didn't really intend to go. But I made a mistake. I invited my friend Rick Cole to go with me.
The moral to this story is you can't always count on your friends. In order for Rick to go on this fifty mile walk he'd have to drop whatever plans he had, find enough cash for a plane ticket to fly all the way across the country from California (this was just after college and we were all still poor) - all this so he could walk fifty miles in the freezing February cold. He would never. Right? Except when I called him he said, “Sounds good. I’m in. Let's go. When do we start?” We walked for 19 and a half hours one cold February day starting at 5:00 am. I watched the moon set across the river on my right in the early morning hours and then looked in awe at the same moon - that had traveled all the way around the world while we walked - rise on my left as we drew near Washington.
We raised money for the Robert Kennedy Memorial Foundation with pledges (we were going to walk the fifty miles anyway, so . . .), and I ended up as a Robert Kennedy Memorial Fellow. I wrote an unbiased guide for high school and college students to the issues surrounding nuclear weapons. I got to meet McGeorge Bundy and Gerard Smith (who negotiated SALT I). The most important part of the Fellowship, though, was not what I wrote or who I met. It was a walk I took with David. (David Hackett was Kennedy’s roommate at Milton, the guy RFK put in charge of juvenile justice issues, and was, when I was there, the head of the RFK Memorial Foundation.) David talks in an elliptical, half-sentence, Boston-accent sort of way. Most of the important stuff is actually unspoken. David took me to the Martin Luther King public library and we sat outside while children played and yelled around us and somehow, without actually saying so, David told me that I could change the world. And I believed him.
I got a book contract with W. H. Freeman to write a book about nuclear weapons and worked on it for a year in New York. I moved to Washington (living in my friends' basement - thank you Bill and Lori) and worked for another year while making money as an office temp. But eventually I had to admit to myself that I was stuck. I couldn’t figure out how to approach nuclear weapons – what the core issues were – and finally I turned to other things.
I got a job in New Jersey as the computer support guy for a market research company. I became a computer consultant. -Got sent to Poland to build a database for the Polish American Enterprise Fund. -Ran an investor presentation for dick clark productions. [Hollywood is an odd place.] -Did work for the CFO of Borland. -Built the website for Wine & Spirits Magazine. I got married. Bought a house. Got divorced.
But nuclear weapons wouldn’t let me go. On weekends, on trains commuting to New York, on trips, at night when I couldn’t sleep - I read. And wrote. I have eight linear feet of notes and drafts and research. My friends and family tired of hearing about nuclear weapons. Relationships suffered (or maybe it was just me). But the problems would not let me go. I read Bernard Brodie (several times) and Schelling and Kahn. I read about Just War theory, and about C3I, about the history of war, and about nuclear winter. I read everything I could get my hands on. And I wrote. And thought. And slowly, slowly, sometimes after years of thought, the breaks started falling my way.
I realized one day in Nashville that the way to frame an intellectual investigation into nuclear weapons was to look at use. How might nuclear weapons be used and what difference would that use make? [This notion fit perfectly, I realized only afterward, with the approach to problems advocated by Ludwig Wittgenstein and William James, two philosophers I've read a lot.] I realized five years later that there was something wrong with the Clausewitzian definition of war. Later I figured out that Richard Nixon threatened the North Vietnamese with a nuclear threat (just like Ike in Korea) but that the threat had failed. I began to understand some of the (often outsized) feelings people have about nuclear weapons. Freeman Dyson showed me a book review he was publishing and something in it about the Falkland war hit me hard. He said the British could have nuked Buenos Aires, but they would still have had to send troops to invade the islands if they wanted them back. It was a fundamental insight.
The big break came when I was reading an obscure book Herman Kahn had written in the early 1960s called On Escalation. Kahn said that nuclear weapons were so new and so different – we had so little experience with them – that everything we write and think about them has to be theoretical and abstract. And I realized that couldn’t be right. Even a new sort of weapon, if it was used against humans, would still have to connect with human experience from the past in some way. And I thought suddenly of Carthage. Wouldn’t it be possible to compare Carthage to a nuclear attack against a city? And couldn’t you study the outcome of Carthage in order to be able to understand what it might be like to use a nuclear weapon against a city?
This was the basic insight that led to the current book. It is essentially Dyson’s point examined through historical examples. Destroying cities doesn’t win wars. And if you search through history you find that fact (and many other interesting points about using extreme measures in war) demonstrated again and again.
I have wanted, for twenty-five years to create arguments that will make it less likely that nuclear weapons will be used. And I find myself, suddenly in the last year, within striking distance of that goal. I have been criss-crossing this pathless landscape - walking and walking: trying to find my way - while the moon and earth have revolved. Now, so long after I started - dirty and tired, my hands swollen - I find unexpectedly that I am nearly there. I look down and am startled to see - below my feet - that it looks as if I am standing on the edge of changing the world.