perfidy

Most Americans are unaware of how, exactly, their government works. At best, most of our citizenry has a hazy conception of the actual operation of Congress based in large part on vague recollections of schoolhouse rock’s “I’m just a bill.” This is a good and bad thing.

On the one hand, it is bad because liberty in a republic depends on the wise and considered participation of an informed citizenry. Warmed over and fuzzy memories from high school civics layered with factoids from USA Today and CNN do not an informed electorate make.

On the other hand, it is good, because if the good citizens of this nation actually understood, really knew, what goes on in, say, the stygian depths of the House Rules Committee room, they’d invite the British back to finish what they started in 1814. Leaving our fair capital a smoking wasteland would be infinitely preferable to facing the horrifying reality of dysfunction and corruption at the heart of our system.

On a related but tangential track, there’s Sam Cohen. You’ve likely never heard of him, but he’s the dude who invented the atom bomb. The peacemongers and hippies all painted the neutron as an even eviler version of an irredeemably evil weapon. It was the ultimate capitalist bomb – a nefarious device that killed people while leaving their property intact. This is in stark contrast to the actual mindset that led to Cohen to invent the bomb and to declare for decades that it was the most moral weapon ever devised.

Cohen’s logic was that in war, people will use weapons. Weapons are designed to kill. So, it makes sense to design weapons that kill efficiently while doing as little else as possible. If a neutron bomb doesn’t kill you outright, you will live on with out appreciable aftereffects. The infrastructure that you need to survive after the war will be intact – not blasted apart or poisoned with radioactivity. The bomb doesn’t maim, it only kills. Cohen, from his position at RAND, lobbied for years for his concept, only to be rejected by five successive administrations and a military that wanted only bigger bombs, not more efficient ones.

Cohen’s story has some – interesting – accounts of the wrong-headedness of those in charge of our nuclear strategy. But they aren’t as far fetched as they might seem at first. Remember that the depiction of cold war strategic reasoning in Dr. Strangelove is barely exaggerated from the realities of game theory informed strategy used by RAND and the military up until the fall of the Soviet Union. (The takeover of grand strategy by the mathematicians starting with RAND in the late forties is responsible for much of the incredible weirdness of the Cold War, the counterintuitive reasoning, inflexible response postures and bloodthirsty retaliation schemes. Also, the fascination with throw-weight, CEP, megadeaths, and finely-wrought calculations of the effects of nuclear war.) And also that those responsible for setting policy had (with the possible exception of Eisenhower) none of the special aptitude or training one might think necessary for figuring out what to do with city-destroying weaponry.

Knowledge is good, as the Faber college motto tells us. But it doesn’t always make it easier to sleep at night.

[wik] A couple other interesting Cohen bits here and here.