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From International Socialism, No.13, Summer 1963, p.36.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Kill and Overkill. The Strategy of Annihilation
Ralph Lapp
Weidenfeld & Nicholson. 16s.
Dr Ralph Lapp has written another insiders’ book for outsiders. In this case, it is the United States Defence Establishment on the inside, and the insider is a member of the liberal wing of its scientific-technical advisory staff, which includes (or included) such other worthies as Hans Bethe, Eugene Rabinowitch, the founder of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and the unfortunate Robert J. Oppenheimer. Dr Lapp is anti-deterrent-minded, and gives a lucid picture of the confusions and failures of the victorious conservative faction (Edward Teller, Lewis Strauss of the Atomic Energy Commission, and a succession of Joint Chiefs of Staff) in its attempts to provide a coherent and plausible defense strategy based on nuclear weapons. Dr Lapp has performed an invaluable service in documenting what is often heard in the peace movement as an assertion, viz. that nuclear war has no sense in terms of the classical goals of war, and is therefore a totally mad undertaking.
There are some interesting insights on various things: the senselessness of atomic secrecy, why Khrushchev broke the test ban moratorium, and the uses of the practiced ghoulishness of RAND Corporation vocabulary (one particularly juicy tidbit deserves a wider audience: ‘bonus kills’ = those due to fallout). He mashes the significance out of the Air Force’s pet theory of ‘counterforce’ or ‘preventive retaliation’ (whereby a massive ‘first strike’ on Russian bases will show their aggressive pants where they get off threatening ‘our’ peaceful boot, which he calls a ‘version of limited nuclear war’ à la Kissinger. But he gets right the confusion which results from the official compromise mixture of counter-force with the more orthodox Army-Navy version of ‘massive retaliation’.) Dr Lapp writes colloquially, with an eye on the mass audience, up to and including the inevitable tiredisms and cutenesses. And that is not such a bad thing; this book comes as if made to draw the liberal-sceptical byline-slander towards CND. Yet in the final analysis, his approach is as stifling and disappointing, because primitive and quietistic, to the average outsider, as that of CND itself. Nor, of course, will any worker, interested in bis own problems, get any inkling of the Bomb as a social or class problem. And Dr Lapp’s own solutions are laughable; in their mixture of liberal naiveté and Kennedy cynicism. Only at one point, and rather vaguely, does he suggest the sort of perspective familiar to readers of this magazine: ‘a change in the basic condition of man’.
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