history

“There is nothing to be gained by trying to get away”

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Between the weather and a complete lack of good news in the world, I’ve been in not so much a foul mood lately as a dark mood; I’ve found myself exploring all manner of eschatology and other ridiculousness related to the apocalypse (great resource: Exit Mundi). And rereading my own article hasn’t helped anything. I know this is old news to most, but I was reminded of the BBC’s nuclear war transcript the other day and thought it deserved some reprinting.

If Britain had been attacked with nuclear weapons during the Cold War (I believe the years 1974-79 were when this particular transcript would have been used), then BBC presenters would have read the following chilling passages to the nation:

This is the Wartime Broadcasting Service. This country has been attacked with nuclear weapons. Communications have been severely disrupted, and the number of casualties and the extent of the damage are not yet known. We shall bring you further information as soon as possible. Meanwhile, stay tuned to this wavelength, stay calm and stay in your own homes.

Remember there is nothing to be gained by trying to get away. By leaving your homes you could be exposing yourselves to greater danger….

Make your food stocks last: ration your supply, because it may have to last for 14 days or more. If you have fresh food in the house, use this first to avoid wasting it: food in tins will keep…

Do not, in any circumstances, go outside the house. Radioactive fall-out can kill. You cannot see it or feel it, but it is there. If you go outside, you will bring danger to your family and you may die. Stay in your fall-out room until you are told it is safe to come out or you hear the “all clear” on the sirens.

The actual BBC link above has a clip of Harry Shearer reading the transcript while doing a pretty serviceable impression of Cronkite. But I’d love to hear it from an actual Briton. Is there anything more despair-inducing than “nothing to be gained by trying to get away”?

Play Up! Play Up! And Play the Game!

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“The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton.”

– Arthur Wellesley

There’s a breathless hush in the close to-night
Ten to make and the match to win
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play, and the last man in.
And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat.
Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame,
But his captain’s hand on his shoulder smote
“Play up! Play up! And play the game!”

The sand of the desert is sodden red-
Red with the wreck of the square that broke
The gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed its banks,
And England’s far and Honor a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks-
“Play up! Play up! And play the game!”

This is the word that year by year,
While in her place the school is set,
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with joyful mind
And bear through life Eke a torch in flame,
falling fling to the host behind-
“Play up! Play up! And play the game!”

– Sir Henry Newbolt

Underground Testing

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Recently, France and Britain concluded a defense agreement which, among other things, provides for increased joint nuclear research between the two. In the spirit of that nuclear cooperation – and also in the spirit of getting things done while Congress has their heads up their asses – I have decided to reprint my essay “Underground Testing: Anglo-American Nuclear Cooperation, 1946-58.”

The mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, August 6, 1945.

In 1946, atomic collaboration between Great Britain and the United States screeched to a halt. The fruitful partnership between the ‘Tube Alloys’ team in the United Kingdom and the scientists of the Manhattan Project had grown increasingly one-sided, with the United States’ research contributions far outstripping those of the British by the end of World War II. Two atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945, demonstrating the arrival of nuclear hegemony. The British were merely informed of the decision, to which they acquiesced with “little or no debate.”[1] As the technology gap across the Atlantic Ocean continued to widen in the immediate postwar period, Britain was increasingly thrust into a lesser, subordinate role.

With the passage of Senator Brien McMahon’s Atomic Energy Act in 1946, Anglo-American collaboration in the field of nuclear power and weaponry appeared to be at a congressionally-mandated end. Much of Thatcher-era historiography views that collaboration as entirely dormant until the McMahon Act’s repeal in 1958, and that in the meantime Britain forged on as the jilted partner in the ‘special relationship’.[2] While true on an official level, this ignores the underlying reality of close continuing cooperation on atomic weaponry between 1946 and 1958. Nuclear cooperation did not hit a wall in 1946; it merely endured ‘underground’ for twelve years.

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“It’s Up to You!”

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Staff of "The Campus," Sarah Lawrence College student newspaper, 1950s.

I’ve been reading the Hicks translation of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations (sold as The Emperor’s Handbook), and there’s a phrase that keeps jumping out at me. Of course, it helps that it was specifically called out in the introduction, but nevertheless, “it’s up to you!” resonates beyond its obvious hokeyness.

There are so many permeations and variations on the phrase, and countless adoptions of it, that at times the simple meaning of it can be lost. I went to an all-boys school for five years as a kid, and our motto was “sua sponte” – “in your hands.” It wasn’t until the last few years that I learned that the Army Rangers have the same motto, only translated more formally as “of their own accord.”

Anyways, I guess what I’m trying to say is that one of what seems to be the big problems in modern society is the total lack of agency, and that Aurelius’ writings remind me of that.

Things suck right now, on a deep, fundamental level (much more on that next week). Between economic malaise and my total, total disillusionment with American politics, I don’t know what I even want to do any longer. But it’s not totally out of our control. It’s up to us in all sorts of ways. We have an entrepreneurial spirit unmatched by few in the world.  And if I can’t find a job, or something meaningful to do, then it’s time to literally make something of, and for, myself.

http://armscontrolwonk.com/

Lesser Nobility of the Seas

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Depressing developments out of Britain (new motto: “Good, not Great”), where David Cameron has announced the extent of massive budget cuts.  They’re not only targeted at the much-reviled ‘quangos’ and other sundry domestic spending, but significantly cut down on the size of the Royal Navy.

And I do mean significant. HMS Ark Royal is to be scrapped immediately, and while the two Queen Elizabeth-class carriers will still be built, one will be commissioned pre-mothballed, while neither will be fully operational until 2036 (a rather expensive “jobs program“). One of the two helicopter carriers will be decommissioned. A total of 5,000 personnel cut. And the surface fleet reduced to 19 ships. As many have pointed out, that’s smaller than the task force sent to retake the Falkland Islands.

Obviously, this represents a real threat to British power projection capabilities. But it’s worth asking to what extent they’re still needed. The Guardian, true to form, heralds the cuts as rendering Britain incapable of launching “military operations like Iraq.” Which may be well and good; after all, today’s generals prepare to fight yesterday’s wars, and hopefully there won’t be any more Iraqs or Afghanistans in the near future.

All the same, is this a force capable of defending Britain? Again, the question is what Britain needs defending from. It can’t be the French, with whom the Royal Navy has entered into a sort of timeshare arrangement for the use of aircraft carriers (though hopefully their deployments go better than that of Charles de Gaulle). If anything is to be secure for Britain, though, it must be the sealanes. Britain is an island, and as Patrick Porter reminds us, “for heavy importing island states like Britain, strategy puts food on the table.”

Either way, it’s a huge blow to British prestige both around the world and within NATO. The worst part is that this may be a sign of things to come. As David Betz at Kings of War says:

The thing to grasp is that this is not Year Zero for the UK military, it’s worse than that. It’s more like Year -5 or -10 because that’s what it’s going to take to move all the accumulated bad decisions, and even worse non-decisions, through the system. It will be years before we get to zero and can start to work on building the armed forces we want and need.

Practical considerations aside – and they’re hugely important to consider – it’s almost akin to the death of the battleship, that great “monarch of the sea.” Once the British cuts are complete, the United States will be the only navy in the world operating more than one carrier. Last time the U.S. had to bail out her Anglophone cousin, the Royal Navy had been placed in a similar situation.

By 1939, Britain could not afford the navy that was necessary to ensure security across the globe. While the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty appeared to favor the United States and the United Kingdom, the scattered nature of the British Empire left it without overwhelming strength in any given theater, despite the superiority in absolute tonnage. In the early days of World War II – at least to protect Far East territories and India – the Royal Navy had to rely on the strength of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the South African coastal forces, and the British-controlled Royal Indian Navy.

We all know what happened next: Singapore and Malaya fell, the Japanese preponderance of carrier-based aviation left the entire Eastern Fleet sorely outgunned, and at the Battle of the Java Sea, the entire Allied fleet was wiped out in the largest naval battle since Jutland in 1916. Britain was stretched too thinly.

Obviously, the empire is no more and concerns closer to home are keeping the Ministry of Defence busy, but even so – there is a floor to the minimum amount of required naval force, even for a tiny island like Great Britain. With these cuts, I fear that the UK may have just crashed through it.

“The neutral keep out of the light; good boys are at present safe”

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You’ll have to excuse the delay – it was a week before we had a bed or an internet in the apartment, and since then Comcast has really, really dropped the ball (cutting my neighbors’ physical lines didn’t help any). Also, still no job, which is less than ideal.

But still! The writing must go on. Writing and reprinting.

And so I have a very special treat for you today: the entirety of Brigadier Charles Dunbar’s “The Military Problems of Counter Insurgency.” Dunbar commanded 66 Commando Royal Marine during the Aden Emergency, and had quite an eye for low-intensity operations. Written in late 1967 or 1968, the document is a far-reaching and detailed analysis of the problems faced by the British in Aden, while also making allusions to contemporary insurgencies in Cyprus and Kenya, intrigue in Saudi Arabia, Anna Karenina, and the idiocy of “that well known Scandinavian, Mr. Rudegeld.”

I took the liberty of retyping it – my aging photocopy was worn, scuffed, and overly stamped. I’ve attempted to reproduce the formatting as exactly as possible, and this includes leaving in misspellings and other errors. You can see, for example, that when he’s talking on page 3 about the Eastern Bloc, interrogation, and Vietnam, that his mind is racing too quickly to accurately transfer all his thoughts onto paper. But you’ll know what he means. And it’s definitely worth knowing.

This document is available at the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King’s College London. Box Dunbar 2/5. Enjoy!

Notes From the Archive IV

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When you have several [intelligence] battalions working this system, it is of course most expensive in terms of man hours. But except against the most highly skilled gang, success is only a question of time. What we are after is not the pistol hidden under the car seat, or explosives in the bicycle pump. It is the man with it who can ‘help the police in their enquiries’. Weapons talk, but nothing like its owner.

– Major-General Sir John Willoughby, “Problems of Counter-Insurgency in the Middle East,” The RUSI Journal 113:650 (1968), 108.

Notes from the Archive II

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It merely rhymes:

Mk VII mine buried in a detour around an unfinished culvert on the new road being constructed…

Warning of concerted sabotage attempts at prestige targets and the introduction of timing and anti-handling devices…

Well-timed and expertly executed act of sabotage. The nuisance value was extremely effective considering the small effort and explosives involved…

National opinion is perhaps hardening against us.

– 45 Commando Royal Marine Newsletters, April 1966-June 1967

Perles Before Swine

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Peter Beinart wrote a pretty decent appraisal of Ronald Reagan’s more moderate and dovish tendencies for Foreign Affairs recently. For anyone at all to approach the Gipper with a modicum of even-handedness is impressive these days, and for some of those facts to damn near inspire me; well, I guess that just speaks to Reagan’s better qualities.

Anyways, moral of the story is that of all people, Foreign Affairs somehow ended up with Richard Perle writing a rebuttal. Yes, that Richard Perle, the ‘Prince of Darkness’, who argued for invading Iraq with 40,000 troops. The same Perle who got tired of being credited with planning the Iraq War and passed the buck up to President Bush . The same Perle who called Seymour Hersh a terrorist , proposed a national biometric ID card program, and demanded an invasion of Syria (at this point it should of course be noted that Perle attended the London School of Economics for a time). Perle’s latest gem is called “Against Evil,” with a tagline of “Only liberals like Peter Beinart think that Ronald Reagan was a dove.”

Yes, and only Richard Perles like Richard Perle think that Richard Perle is in any way still relevant or qualified to comment on anything.