Daddis applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Faith and Fear: America’s Relationship with War since 1945, and reported the following:
What are the implications when you write a “moral tract on mass murder”? This was the question one reviewer pondered as he evaluated Herman Kahn’s 1960 book On Thermonuclear War. Kahn, director of the Hudson Institute think tank in New York, had set out to challenge his readers, to force them to think about “the unthinkable” because, he surmised, nuclear war was not just possible, but statistically probable. In many ways, he succeeded. Well before the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, many Americans fearfully considered the prospect of nuclear Armageddon.Learn more about Faith and Fear at the Oxford University Press website.
Kahn’s treatise took aim at more than just deterrence theory, the popular notion that nuclear weapons could serve as a global “stabilizing force” because the superpowers feared “retaliation in kind.” Rather, the physicist-turned-strategist was critiquing US policymakers’ deeper faith in war keeping their nation safe in an uncertain yet dangerous world.
As page 99 of Faith and Fear reveals, however, that faith in war sat in uneasy and constant tension with a fear of war and its consequences. Throughout the early Cold War years of the late 1940s and 1950s, a pattern emerged in how Americans conceived of their relationship with war. They held faith that they could adeptly manage military force to promote an ever-expanding foreign policy agenda while keeping guard against communist enemies seemingly hell-bent on world domination. Yet they also feared that war might bring chaos and destruction and, in the atomic era, the possible extinction of mankind itself.
Page 99 illustrates well the dysfunctionality of this relationship between faith and fear. Cold War “policymakers may have exuded confidence from their possession of nuclear weapons, yet their eagerness to pursue hydrogen bombs and a triad of delivery systems—intercontinental bombers, ballistic missiles, and submarines—intimated deeper fears about what the future might hold.”
These tensions between faith and fear matter because they endure. Americans continue to place faith in massive defense budgets keeping them safe from threats both real and imagined. And they fear, acutely so, that those same threats may lead to the end of the nation as they know it.
Back in 1960, Herman Kahn wanted his fellow citizens to think more seriously about their relationship with war. Sixty-five years later, his inclinations to challenge our martial assumptions about war and its value are as relevant as ever.
The Page 99 Test:Westmoreland's War.
The Page 99 Test: Withdrawal.
The Page 99 Test: Pulp Vietnam.
--Marshal Zeringue
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