Zahlen, bitte! Nuclear destruction of the USA with up to 360 bombs
RAND calculated the number of nukes needed to destroy the USA, creating plans for satellites and the Internet in the process.
(Image: heise online)
On May 14, 1948, the RAND Corporation, one of the best-known think tanks in the world, was founded in the USA as an independent, non-profit institution. RAND, which stands for Research ANd Development, was primarily intended to provide strategic and scientific advice to the US Air Force, which had grown enormously during the Second World War.
They played "War Games" – the RAND scientists used the German word – and produced various studies. The first major study appeared in November 1951 under the title "The Use of Experts for the Estimation of Bombing Requirements". Seven experts were asked by questionnaire how many atomic bombs the Soviet Union would need to irreparably damage the USA. One expert estimated that 167 bombs would be enough, another came up with 367.
Advisory group for military research
RAND was the brainchild of Harry Arnold, Supreme Commander of the Air Force. He wanted to ensure that the leading scientists who did research for the USA during the war also worked for the troops in peacetime. With "Project RAND", a research institute was to be created in which engineers, physicists, and mathematicians would work on new technologies. Arnold gave the Douglas Aircraft Corporation 10 million dollars to set up such an institute, which was to deal with "peacefare" after "warfare".
The company had earned his trust by building reliable airplanes during the world war. Douglas Aircraft accepted the lucrative contract and entrusted Frank Collbohm with the establishment of the institute and the research. In addition to physicists, many mathematicians who had worked on the Applied Mathematics Panel during the war were initially employed.
The first result was presented in 1946 with the memorandum Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship: The scientists proposed the construction of a satellite that would orbit and observe the earth. "The advantages of a spacecraft would have effects comparable to those of atomic bombs," wrote the scientists, led by Robert M. Salter. The scientists were not entirely wrong. When the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite into space in 1957, this caused a shock in the USA, which led to the founding of the military research agency ARPA.
Difficult cooperation with defense companies
The immediate effect of the memorandum, however, was the realization that Project RAND did not work in a company like Douglas Aircraft. Many of the companies interviewed by the researchers suspected that Douglas was setting up a new form of industrial espionage and complained to the Air Force. The solution was to break away and set up the RAND Corporation as an independent Californian institute, with additional funding from the Ford Foundation. The next RAND study, "The Prediction of Social and Technological Events", published in 1949 by the then employees Abraham Kaplan, Meyer Abraham Girshick and A. L. Skogstad, appeared simultaneously as a secret RAND paper and as an edited publication in the journal Public Opinion Quartely.
(Image: CC BY-SA 4.0, Coolcaeser)
On the basis of this analysis of the quality of expert predictions, the mathematician Olaf Helmer, who had emigrated from Germany, developed the concept of a multi-stage questionnaire survey of experts, which later became known as the Delphi method. Helmer and his assistant Norman Dalkey asked seven experts how many atomic bombs of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki type (20 KT) the Soviet Union could use to destroy the USA.
Four economists, a "physical-vulnerability specialist", a systems analyst and an electronics engineer initially stated anonymously between 50 and 5000 nuclear bombs. In further rounds of questionnaires, the number was finally narrowed down to between 167 and 360 bombs and published in the RAND report "The Use of Experts for the Estimation of Bombing Requirements". The report was top secret for ten years and was only published in an abridged form in 1962 under the title "The Systematic Use of Expert Judgment in Operations Research"[PDF].
Ambivalent reactions to the research report
In the US military, there were two reactions to this RAND report: it was rejected by the US Navy (which had fighters on aircraft carriers), but welcomed by the Air Force (with its long-range bombers), as in their view bombing the Soviet Union was the only possible equivalent response. Albert Wohlstetter, a friend of Olaf Helmer, wrote the influential RAND report "The Delicate Balance of Terror" in 1958 based on the study. His fascination with bombs was parodied by director Stanley Kubrick in the film "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Love the Bomb".
The Ministry of Defense was also concerned with the question of how to secure communications. On May 29, 1961, the New York Times reported that three US Army transmission towers had been blown up in Utah, leaving troops throughout the state to communicate only via the public telephone network. The FBI investigated four perpetrators who belonged to the extremist American Republican Army. On November 3, the Times wrote that the Department of Defense estimated that more serious bombings were expected. RAND was commissioned to carry out a study on the defensive measures.
It was Olaf Helmer who was able to convince the game theorist John D. Williams, head of the mathematics department at RAND, that social scientists needed to be involved in researching the conflicts and possibilities. Although "Project RAND" had already organized a Conference of Social Scientists [PDF] in 1948, the Douglas Corporation had not employed a social scientist. So the German emigrant Hans Speier joined RAND as head of this department, where he attempted to develop a theory of the humane use of atomic bombs in air warfare in the midst of all the bomb planning.
A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates[PDF ], published in 1955, was a significant document for statisticians and research fields that required random numbers. It published 10,000 lines of random numbers. In 2001, a long-awaited new edition of the work was published by numbers enthusiasts, which received amusing reviews on Amazon.
The later Internet described in outline
Even more important was the arrival of computer specialist Paul Baran in 1959. The men, who soon became close friends, considered how the USA could survive the bombing air war and how the military should communicate under these conditions. From these considerations, Baran developed the large-scale RAND report On Distributed Communication in eleven parts. The very first part, Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks, dealt with the question of how information could be rerouted in the event of a node failure in a communications network. This laid the foundation for the military Arpanet and the later Internet, at least in theory.
In his memoirs of his time at RAND (PDF), Olaf Helmer talks about how he and Paul Baran were very dissatisfied with the way the researchers' proposals for the war in Vietnam fell on deaf ears with the political advisors of the US government. From the beginning of the war until 1970, more than 150 studies were written about Vietnam. He suggested to Helmer that every Vietcong who surrendered should be paid a start-up grant of 1000 dollars or that the napalm bombs should be replaced by more humane gas bombs that would only temporarily stun the population.
Helmer and Baran left RAND and in 1968, together with Saturn rocket designer Theodore Jay Gordon, founded the Institute for the Future (IFTF), which still exists today, to improve the quality of Delphi studies and produce future forecasts. Helmer's memoirs also contain a passage stating that he admired the whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg for publishing the Pentagon Papers. In doing so, he had restored the honor of RAND. In this context, we should also remember the RAND employee Anthony Russo, who became a passionate opponent of the war while writing his reports from Vietnam and had to leave RAND.
(dahe)
