Soothing Assumptions

by George F. Will
The Washington Post, June 27, 1996

A tendentious prediction is the Clinton
administration’s latest justification for its dilatory
approach to defending the nation against the sort of
ballistic missile attack that could be launched by a
rogue nation. The administration says that such a threat
is at least 15 years distant. The historical record of
such predictions is not reassuring. Neither is the method
by which this one was produced.

In 1906, three years after the flight at Kitty Hawk,
Simon Newcomb, an eminent scientist, declared it was
demonstrable — “as complete as is possible for the
demonstration of any physical fact to be” — that
“no possible combination of known substances, known
forms of machine, and known forms of force can be united
in a practicable machine by which men shall fly long
distances through the air.” In 1922 a former
assistant secretary of the Navy, Franklin Roosevelt,
said, “It is highly unlikely that an airplane, or
fleet of them, could ever successfully sink a fleet of
naval vessels under battle conditions.” In 1939 an
admiral said, “As far as sinking a ship with a bomb
is concerned, you just can’t do it.”

Albert Wohlstetter, a noted strategic thinker, writes
that when in 1937 a congressional committee published an
ambitious attempt to forecast technological developments
of the next 10 to 25 years, it missed, among other
things, nuclear energy, antibiotics, radar and jet
propulsion. In 1945 MIT’s Vannevar Bush, director of the
Office of Scientific Research and Development, reported
to the Senate concerning the possibility of developing an
intercontinental (3,000 miles range) missile capable of
delivering an atomic bomb precisely enough to hit a
particular city: “I feel confident that it will not
be done for a very long period of time. . . . I think we
can leave that out of our thinking.”

Many experts were wrong about how swiftly the Soviet
Union would acquire atomic and then hydrogen bombs. U.S.
intelligence underestimated the progress of Iraq’s
nuclear program.

Now the Clinton administration suggests wagering the
nation’s safety on a sanguine prediction that seems to
have been produced by a premise designed to induce
complacency. The premise is that at least 15 years will
elapse before a ballistic missile threat to the 48
contiguous states can be developed indigenously by a
rogue state such as Iraq or North Korea.

Now, leave aside the oddity of leaving out, as
second-class entities, Alaska and Hawaii. And leave aside
the imprudence of ignoring the potential of threats from
China and Russia, where the regimes could be changed on
short notice.

However, note the intelligence estimate’s emphasis on
indigenous development of ballistic missiles by lesser
powers. That scants the possibility that a nation capable
of producing a device for mass destruction might be able
to purchase on the international market a means of
delivering that device to the continental United States.

Fifteen years ago Roberta Wohls tetter, author of a
brilliant study of why we were surprised at Pearl Harbor,
wrote an essay titled “Slow Pearl Harbors and the
Pleasures of Self-Deception.” Her subject was the
role a victim’s cherished beliefs and comforting
assumptions often play in deceiving him.

Beginning in 1919 the British, flinching from the
thought of another war and eager to minimize military
spending, adopted what came to be called “The Ten
Year Rule.” They predicted there would be no major
war in the next 10 years. And then they began making the
same “prediction” — actually, a thought
generated by a wish — annually. Not surprisingly,
beginning in 1933, British estimates of the numbers of
first-line German aircraft consistently erred on the low
side.

Roberta Wohlstetter also cites “the even slower
and more reluctant recognition by American intelligence
that the Russians were not interested merely in having a
minimum deterrent force of 200 ICBMs, nor even satisfied
with the same numbers as our own,” but instead
wanted much more. Far from being reluctant participants
in the arms race, they continued to “run along quite
smartly long after we had stopped.” Not
surprisingly, long-term U.S. projections of Soviet ICBM
silos were too low from 1962 to the end of the 1960s, and
then became even more erroneous. The 1962 prediction was
85 percent of the number that materialized, and in 1969
we predicted less than 20 percent of the number the
Soviet Union actually built.

Soothing assumptions about the good faith and shared
interests of antagonists are natural to democracies, as
is the desire to spend money on things other than
defense. Getting a democracy to do what does not come
naturally requires leadership. To get that for the
defense of this democracy, a different commander in chief
is required.