The past few weeks have brought some wonderfully stimulating email exchanges regarding Albert Wohlstetter, which reminded me of an article from the June 5 issue of The American Prospect that I’d been meaning to blog.

Anthony David asks the question “how do you make sense of a man [I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby] getting drawn to the Dark Side without being dark himself?” His answer: Albert Wohlstetter. David concludes that Libby’s path to perjury and a federal courtroom began “with discoveries made by an obscure mathematician.”

David’s narrative traces Libby’s corruption to Wohlstetter by way of Paul Wolfowitz, who taught Libby in at least one class at Yale and whose dissertation adviser at the University of Chicago was Wohlstetter. From this scaffolding of fact, David creates an edifice that bears only the most tenuous relationship to Wohlstetter’s actual body of work.

David offers this summary of “The Delicate Balance of Terror:”

“The Delicate Balance of Terror,” which he published with the RAND Corporation in 1958, was a groundbreaking tract that took on the heavyweights of American foreign policy. In it, Henry Kissinger, George Kennan, Dean Acheson, and others appear as hapless characters intellectually marooned in a pre-nuclear age.

Wohlstetter singled out the doctrine of “mutual assured destruction” (MAD) as proof of the national-security elite’s dangerous anachronism. The “realists” believed that nuclear weapons had made war obsolete. Only an “insane adventurer” would launch an attack, and professional diplomats assumed that the totalitarian beast in Moscow would probably behave rationally. But, argued Wohlstetter, the Soviet Union was not necessarily a rational actor: The Russians had lost 20 million people during World War II; there was no reason to assume they wouldn’t risk losing many more to become the premier global power.

Wohlstetter did critique the conventional wisdom, but not because it was out of date. In “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” he focused his criticisms very specifically on a set of unexamined assumptions about the robustness of America’s nuclear deterrent. Kennan and Acheson (along with Richard Rovere, Sir Winston Churchill, P. M. S. Blackett, Sir John Slessor, Admiral Buzzard, Raymond Aron, General Gallois, General Gazin and Henry Kissinger) were cited because their assumptions about nuclear war were mistaken, not because they were pre-nuclear or out-dated. The flawed assumptions held that deterrence automatically flowed from possession of nuclear weapons and an effective deterrent could be maintained with little effort. Wohlstetter countered that the “requirements for deterrence are stringent.”

Wohlstetter brought up the issue of Russian losses during WWII, for example, to illustrate the difficulty of defining what degree of threat would deter the Soviet regime. He was not arguing that the Russians might be irrational; he was pointing out situations within which it could be rational to risk the death of 20 million people. The key question was always ‘compared to what?’ If the Soviet Union, for example, feared losing a key satellite with revolt spreading or feared an American attack, attacking first and accepting 20 million casualties could be the sensible choice for them. In Wohlstetter’s own words,

Would not a general thermonuclear war mean “extinction” for the aggressor as well as the defender? “Extinction” is a state that badly needs analysis. Russian fatalities in World War II were more than 20,000,000. Yet Russia recovered extremely well from this catastrophe. There are several quite plausible circumstances in the future when the Russians might be confident of being able to limit damage to considerably less than this number — if they make sensible strategic choices and we do not. On the other hand, the risks of not striking might at some juncture appear very great to the Soviets, involving, for example, disastrous defeat in peripheral war, loss of key satellites with danger of revolt spreading — possibly to Russia itself — or fear of an attack by ourselves. Then, striking first, by surprise, would be the sensible choice for them, and from their point of view the smaller risk.

Note that Wohlstetter never claims that “the Soviet Union was not necessarily a rational actor.” Rather, he cites Russian history to illustrate the difficulty of determining an adequate deterrent.

One needs to remember that “The Delicate Balance of Terror” represented the unclassified culmination of seven years of analysis on the dynamics of basing, employing and defending the Strategic Air Command’s bomber fleet. Wohlstetter’s conclusions, such as the superiority of a deep defensive warning net over hardened shelters for protecting bombers, were based on extensive study of relative vulnerabilities and capabilities. Ignoring this foundation of research and misrepresenting its results turns David’s article into a caricature of Wohlstetter’s actual historical significance.