The United States, which developed the atomic bomb, is the only nation that has used it in war. During the cold war, the U.S. initiated each round of escalation in its nuclear competition with the Soviet Union, and several times brought the world to the brink of Armageddon.
In House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power, James Carroll traces the development of U.S. military strategy in the nuclear age. The emphasis is on the presidents, secretaries of defense, and other key leaders who built the U.S. into the world’s undisputed superpower, but many of whom who also had second thoughts about what they were doing. Its drama is the internal struggle within these leaders between nuclear weapons as instruments of strategy but also as morally unacceptable destroyers of civilian life.
Carroll is the son of an Air Force general and founding director of the Defense Intelligence Agency who broke with his father over the Vietnam war, became a Catholic priest, and then left the priesthood to write. As a child of the 1950s nuclear terror, his method is to use his personal roots in a Catholic, Air Force family to humanize and shed light on his historical analysis.
Curtis LeMay is the villain of the story because he has no doubts. After launching the incendiary bombing of German and Japanese cities, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, in the last years of World War II even before the invention of the nuclear bomb, he repeatedly returns in later decades to threaten nuclear war in the Berlin crisis, Korea, and Vietnam.
Henry Stimson, secretary of war from 1940-1945, proposes after the war to turn nuclear weapons over to an international body. James Forrestal defeats the proposal, replaces him as the first secretary of defense, and leads preparations for war with the Soviets during the early years of the cold war, only to crack under the pressure and commit suicide.
John F. Kennedy, the tragic hero, is Carroll’s emotional reference point. After blundering in the Bay of Pigs and nearly exploding the planet in the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy articulates the danger and calls for an end to the arms race in his speech at American University in June, 1963, considered by Carroll to be the turning point of the cold war. The speech leads to ratification of the Partial Test Ban Treaty, but progress ends after Kennedy’s assassination in November.
Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, changes the Air Force’s strategy from massive retaliation to flexible retaliation, but then approves a new generation of missiles. After guiding the Vietnam war for several years, he testifies to Congress in 1967 that the bombing of North Vietnam is futile. Two months later he is out of office.
Richard Nixon, days from removal in the Watergate scandal, threatens to launch an unprovoked nuclear strike while in an alcoholic haze.
Jimmy Carter proposes to the Joint Chiefs that the U.S. reduce the number of nuclear weapons to a few hundred, but his plan is stopped by the “generals’ revolt” and by Paul Nitze, “Cassandra of the nuclear age”, who exaggerates the Soviet threat. Carter, the would-be disarmer, ends his term by approving the MX missile and the Carter Doctrine, in which the U.S. asserts that it will defend access to Persian Gulf oil “by any means necessary, including military force”. Carroll draws the lesson that “good intentions are not enough. Ideals are not enough…. Those of us who bathe in the soothing water of virtuous intentions, eschewing the gritty challenges of political struggle and bureaucratic infighting, imagining that the call to peace is enough to bring it, must acknowledge Carter as our character ideal. His [lack of] achievements stand as our rebuke.”
Clinton is equally ineffective at bringing the generals to heel. Losing credibility with the “don’t ask, don’t tell” fiasco, he cannot control the Pentagon.
To explain the force behind the U.S. military buildup, Carroll speaks of a “Niagara current” pushing the U.S. towards war. But what is the source of this current? The quest for military contracts, rivalry between the U.S. armed services for preeminence, and virulent anti-Communism, are mentioned as reasons, but Carroll offers no study of these factors or how they may be turned around -- and of course, he misses the biggest factor underlying the U.S. military establishment.
Compared to Joseph Gerson’s Empire and the Bomb, another peace activist's history of U.S. nuclear might, Carroll’s political analysis is almost nonexistent. He does not mention empire, does not explain that the Pentagon serves the U.S. drive to global domination, does not see that it serves the interests of a ruling class against those of the great majority.
In fact, Carroll does not agree that there is an “us” and a “them”. When the 1967 March on the Pentagon chants “Out, demons! Out!”, Carroll replies, “whatever the men in the Pentagon were to me by then, they were not demons.” Instead of following the vision of Catholic liberation theology which seeks to mobilize the victims to change unjust institutions, Carroll’s focus is on individual choices and morality, on acceptable use of force in national policy. “Every notion of a ‘just war’ presumed ‘proportionality’, the idea of consonance between ends and means… But nuclear weapons would never be ‘proportional’, which is, at bottom, why the American embrace of them was wrong…. “ “New choices can rechannel the current in another direction.”
Nuclear weapons are immoral; James Carroll's is a powerful moral voice against them, and he appears to be developing a critique of U.S. domination. While his account of the roots of nuclear policy and of the way to end the nuclear arms race is vague and untargeted, Carroll is an eloquent critic of the insanity of global domination through nuclear weapons.
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