Report from Iron Mountain  

ON THE POSSIBILITY AND DESIRABILITY
OF PEACE

With introductory material by Leonard C. Lewin

The Dial Press, Inc. 1967, New York

Library of Congress Catalog card Number 67-27553 Printed in the U.S.



FOREWORD

"John Doe," as I will call him in this book for reasons that will be made clear, is
a professor at a large university in the Middle West. His field is one of the
social sciences, but I will not identify him beyond this. He telephoned me one
evening last winter, quite unexpectedly; we had not been in touch for several
years. He was in New York for a few days, he said, and there was something
important he wanted to discuss with me. He wouldn't say what it was. We met
for lunch the next day at a midtown restaurant.

He was obviously disturbed. He made small talk for half an hour, which was
quite out of character, and I didn't press him. Then, apropos of nothing, he
mentioned a dispute between a writer and a prominent political family that had
been in the headlines. What, he wanted to know, were my views on "freedom of
information"? How would I qualify them? And so on. My answers were not
memorable, but they seemed to satisfy him. Then, quite abruptly, he began to
tell me the following story:

Early in August of 1963, he said, he found a message on his desk that a "Mrs.
Potts" had called him from Washington. When he returned the call, a MAN
answered immediately, and told Doe, among other things, that he had been
selected to serve on a commission "of the highest importance." Its objective was
to determine, accurately and realistically, the nature of the problems that would
confront the United States if and when a condition of "permanent peace" should
arrive, and to draft a program for dealing with this contingency. The man
described the unique procedures that were to govern the commission's work and
that were expected to extend its scope far beyond that of any previous
examination of these problems.

Considering that the caller did not precisely identify either himself or his
agency, his persuasiveness must have been a truly remarkable order. Doe
entertained no serious doubts of the bona fides of the project, however, chiefly
because of his previous experience with the excessive secrecy that often
surrounds quasi-governmental activities. In addition, the man at the other end of
the line demonstrated an impressively complete and surprisingly detailed
knowledge of Doe's work and personal life. He also mentioned the names of
others who were to serve with the group; most of them were known to Doe by
reputation. Doe agreed to take the assignment --- he felt he had no real choice in
the matter --- and to appear the second Saturday following at Iron Mountain,
New York. An airline ticket arrived in his mail the next morning.

The cloak-and-dagger tone of this convocation was further enhanced by the
meeting place itself. Iron Mountain, located near the town of Hudson, is like
something out of Ian Fleming or E. Phillips Oppenheim. It is an underground
nuclear hideout for hundreds of large American corporations. Most of them use
it as an emergency storage vault for important documents. But a number of
them maintain substitute corporate headquarters as well, where essential
personnel could presumably survive and continue to work after an attack. This
latter group includes such firms as Standard Oil of New Jersey, Manufacturers
Hanover Trust, and Shell.

I will leave most of the story of the operations of the Special Study Group, as
the commission was formally called, for Doe to tell in his own words
("Background Information"). At this point it is necessary to say only that it met
and worked regularly for over two and a half years, after which it produced a
Report. It was this document, and what to do about it, that Doe wanted to talk to
me about.

The Report, he said, had been suppressed --- both by the Special Study Group
itself and by the government INTERAGENCY committee to which it had been
submitted. After months of agonizing, Doe had decided that he would no longer
be party to keeping it secret. What he wanted from me was advice and
assistance in having it published. He gave me his copy to read, with the express
understanding that if for any reason I were unwilling to become involved, I
would say nothing about it to anyone else.

I read the Report that same night. I will pass over my own reactions to it, except
to say that the unwillingness of Doe's associates to publicize their findings
became readily understandable. What had happened was that they had been so
tenacious in their determination to deal comprehensively with the many
problems of transition to peace that the original questions asked of them were
never quite answered. Instead, this is what they concluded:

Lasting peace, while no theoretically impossible, is probably unattainable; even
if it could be achieved it would almost certainly not be in the best interests of a
stable society to achieve it.

That is the gist of what they say. Behind their qualified academic language runs
this general argument: War fills certain functions essential to the stability of our
society; until other ways of filling them are developed, the war system must be
maintained -- and improved in effectiveness.

It is not surprising that the Group, in its Letter of Transmittal, did not choose to
justify its work to "the lay reader, unexposed to the exigencies of higher
political or military responsibility." Its Report was addressed, deliberately, to
unnamed government administrators of high rank; it assumed - considerable
political sophistication from this select audience. To the general reader,
therefore, the substance of the document may be even more unsettling than its
conclusions. He may not be prepared for some of its assumptions -- for instance,
that most medical advances are viewed more as problems than as progress; or
that poverty is necessary and desirable, public postures by politicians to the
contrary notwithstanding; or that standing armies are, among other things
social-welfare institutions in exactly the same sense as are old-people's homes
and mental hospitals. It may strike him as odd to find the probably explanation
of "flying saucer" incidents disposed of en passant in less than a sentence. He
may be less surprised to find that the space program and the "controversial
antimissile missile and fallout shelter programs are understood to have the
spending of vast sums of money, not the advancement of science or national
defense, as their principal goals, and to learn that "military" draft policies are
only remotely concerned with defense.

He may be offended to find the organized repression of minority groups, and
even the reestablishment of slavery, seriously (and on the whole favorably
discussed as possible aspects of a world at peace. He is not likely to take kindly
to the notion of the deliberate intensification of air and water pollution (as part
of a program leading to peace), even when the reason for considering it is made
clear. That a world without war will have to turn sooner rather than later to
universal test-tube procreation will be less disturbing, if no more appealing. But
few readers will not be taken aback, at least, by a few lines in the Report's
conclusions, repeated in its formal recommendations, that suggest that the long-
range planning--and "budgeting" -- of the "optimum" number of lives to be
destroyed annually in overt warfare is high on the Group's list of priorities for
government action.

I cite these few examples primarily to warn the general reader what he can
expect. The statesmen and strategists for whose eyes the Report was intended
obviously need no such protective admonition.

This book, of course, is evidence of my response to Doe's request. After
carefully considering the problems that might confront the publisher of the
Report, we took it to The Dial Press. There, its significance was immediately
recognized, and, more important, we were given firm assurances that no outside
pressures of any sort would be permitted to interfere with its publication.

It should be made clear that Doe does not disagree with the substance of the
Report, which represents as genuine consensus in all important respects. He
constituted a minority of one -- but only on the issue of disclosing it to the
general public. A look at how the Group dealt with this question will be
illuminating

The debate took place at the Group's last full meeting before the Report was
written, late in March, 1966, and again at Iron Mountain. Two facts must be
kept in mind, by way of background. The first is that the Special Study Group
had never been explicitly charged with or sworn to secrecy, either when it was
convened or at any time thereafter. The second is that the Group had
nevertheless operated as if it had been. This was assumed from the
circumstances of its inception and from the tone of its instructions. (The Group's
acknowledgment of help from "the many persons....who contributed so greatly
to our work" is somewhat equivocal; these persons were not told the nature of
the project for which their special resources of information were solicited.)

Those who argued the case for keeping the Report secret were admittedly
motivated by fear of the explosive political effects that could be expected from
publicity. For evidence, they pointed to the suppression of the far less
controversial report of then-Senator Hubert Humphrey's subcommittee on
disarmament in 1962. (Subcommittee members had reportedly feared that it
might be used by Communist propagandists, as Senator Stuart Symington put it,
to "back up the Marxian theory that was production was the reason for the
success of capitalism.") Similar political precautions had been taken with the
better-known Gaither Report in 1957, and even with the so-called Moynihan
Report in 1965.

Furthermore, they insisted, a distinction must be made between serious studies,
which are normally classified unless and until policy makers decide to release
them, and conventional "showcase" projects, organized to demonstrate a
political leadership's concerns about an issue and to deflect the energy of those
pressing for action on it. (The example used, because some of the Group had
participated in it, was a "While House Conference" on intended cooperation,
disarmament, etc., which had been staged late in 1965 to offset complaints
about escalation of Vietnam War.)

Doe acknowledges this distinction, as well as the strong possibility of public
misunderstanding. But he feels that if the sponsoring agency had wanted to
mandate secrecy it could have done so at the outset. It could also have assigned
the project to one of the government's established "think tanks," which normally
work on a classified basis. He scoffed at fear of public reaction, which could
have no lasting effect on long-range measures that might be taken to implement
the Group's proposals, and derided the Group's abdication of responsibility for
its opinions and conclusions. So far as he was concerned, there was such a thing
as a public right to know what was being done on its behalf; the burden of proof
was on those who would abridge it.

If my account seems to give Doe the better of the argument, despite his failure
to convince his colleagues, so be it. My participation in this book testifies that I
am not neutral. In my opinion, the decision of the Special Study Group to
censor its own findings was not merely timid but presumptuous. But the refusal,
as of this writing, of the agencies for which the Report was prepared to release
it themselves raises broader questions of public policy. Such questions center on
the continuing use of self-serve definitions of "security" to avoid possible
political embarrassment. It is ironic how often this practice backfires.

I should state, for the record, that I do not share the attitudes toward war and
peace, life and death, and survival of the species manifested in the Report. Few
readers will. In human terms, it is an outrageous document. But it does
represent a serious and challenging effort to define an enormous problem. And
it explains, or certainly appears to explain, aspects of American policy
otherwise incomprehensible by the ordinary standards of common sense. What
we may think of these explanations is something else, but it seems to me that
we are entitled to know not only what they are but whose they are.

By "whose" I don't mean merely the names of the authors of the Report. Much
more important, we have a right to know to what extent their assumptions of
social necessity are shared by the decision-makers in our government. Which do
they accept and which do they reject? However disturbing the answers, only full
and frank discussion offers any conceivable hope of solving the problems raised
by the Special Study Group in their Report from Iron Mountain.

L.C.L. New York June 1967

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

[The following account of the workings of the Special Study Group is taken
verbatim from a series of tape recorded interviews I had with "John Doe." The
transcript has been edited to minimize the intrusion of my questions and
comments, as well as for length, and the sequence has been revised in the
interest of continuity. L.C.L.]

HOW WAS THE GROUP FORMED?

...The general idea for it, for this kind of study dates back at least to 1961. It
started with some of the new people who came in with the Kennedy
administration, mostly, I think, with McNamara, Bundy, and Rusk. They were
impatient about many things....One of them was that no really serious work had
been done about planning for peace---a long-range peace, that is, with long-
rang planning.

Everything that had been written on the subject [before 1961] was superficial.
There was insufficient appreciation of the scope of the problem. The main
reason for this, of course, was that the idea of a real peace in the world, general
disarmament and so on, was looked on as utopian. Or even crack- pot. This is
still true, and it's easy enough to understand when you look at what's going on
in the world today....It was reflected in the studies that had been made up to that
time. They were not realistic...

The idea of the Special Study, the exact form it would take, was worked out
early in '63...The settlement of the Cuban missile affair had something to do
with it, but what helped most to get it moving were the big changes in military
spending that were being planned.....Plants being closed, relocations, and so
forth. Most of it wasn't made public until much later....

[I understand] it took a long time to select the people for the Group. The calls
didn't go out until the summer......

WHO MADE THE SELECTION?

That's something I can't tell you. I wasn't involved with the preliminary
planning. The first I knew of it was when I was called myself. But three of the
people had been in on it, and what the rest of us know we learned from them,
about what went on earlier. I do know that it started very informally. I don't
know what particular government agency approved the project.

WOULD YOU CARE TO MAKE A GUESS?

All right---I think it was an ad hoc committee, at the cabinet level, or near it. It
had to be. I suppose they gave the organizational job--making arrangements,
paying the bills, and so on---to somebody from the State or Defense of the
National Security Council. Only one of us was in touch with Washington, and I
wasn't the one. But I can tell you that very, very few people knew about
us....For instance, there was the Ackley Committee. It was set up after we were.
If you read their report---the same old tune---economic reconversion, turning
sword plants into plowshare factories...I think you'll wonder if even the
President knew about our Group. The Ackley Committee certainly didn't.

IS THAT POSSIBLE, REALLY? I MEAN THAT NOT EVEN THE
PRESIDENT KNEW OF YOUR COMMISSION?

Well, I don't think there's anything odd about the government attacking a
problem at two different levels. Or even about two or three [government]
agencies working at cross-purposes. It happens all the time. Perhaps the
President did know. And I don't mean to denigrate the Ackley Committee, but it
was exactly that narrowness of approach that we were supposed to get away
from.......

You have to remember -- you've read the Report---that what they wanted from
us was a different kind of thinking. It was a matter of approach. Herman Kahn
calls is "Byzantine"--no agonizing over cultural and religious values. No moral
posturing. It's the kind of thinking that Rand and the Hudson Institute and
I.D.A. (Institute for Defense Analysis.) brought into war planning...What they
asked up to do, and I think we did it, was to give the same kind of treatment to
the hypothetical nuclear war...We may have gone further than they expected,
but once you establish your premises and your logic you can't turn back....

Kahn's books, for example, are misunderstood, at least by laymen. They shock
people. But you see, what's important about them is not his conclusions, or his
opinions. It's the method. He has done more than anyone else I can think of to
get the general public accustomed to the style of modern military
thinking.....Today it's possible for a columnist to write about "counterforce
strategy" and "minimum deterrence" and "credible first strike capability" with-
out having to explain every other word. He can write about war and strategy
without getting bogged down in questions or morality.......


The other big difference about or work is breadth. The Report speaks for itself. I
can't say that we took every relevant aspect of life and society into account, but
I don't think we missed anything essential...

WHY WAS THE PROJECT GIVEN TO AN OUTSIDE COMMISSION?
WHY COULDN'T IT HAVE BEEN HANDLED BY AN APPROPRIATE
GOVERNMENT AGENCY?

I think that's obvious, or should be. The kind of thinking wanted from our
Group just isn't to be had in a formal government operation. Too many
constraints. Too many inhibitions. This isn't a new problem. Why else would
outfits like Rand and Hudson stay in business? Any assignment that's at all
sophisticated is almost always given to an outside group. This is true even in the
State Department, in the "gray" operations, those that are supposed to be
unofficial, but are really as official as can be. Also with the C.I.A....

For our study, even the private research centers were too institutional... A lot of
thought went into making sure that our thinking would be unrestricted. All
kinds of little things. The way we were called into the Group, the places we
met, all kinds of subtle devices to remind us. For instance, even our name, the
Special Study Group. You know government names. Wouldn't you think we'd
have been called "Operation Olive Branch," or "Project Pacifica," or something
like that? Nothing like that for us---too allusive, too suggestive. And no minutes
of our meetings---too inhibiting.... About who might be reading them. Of
course, we took notes for our own use. And among ourselves, we usually called
ourselves "The Iron Mountain Boys," or "Our Thing," or whatever came to
mind........

WHAT CAN YOU TELL ME ABOUT THE MEMBERS OF THE
GROUP?

I'll have to stick to generalities....There were fifteen of us. The important thing
was that we represented a very wide range of disciplines. And not all academic.
People from the natural sciences, the social sciences, even the humanities. We
had a lawyer and a businessman. Also, a professional war planner. Also, you
should know that everyone in the Group had done work of distinction in at least
two different fields. The interdisciplinary element was built in.....

It's true that there were no women in the Group, but I don't think that was
significant.....We were all American citizens, of course. And all, I can say, in
very good health, at least when we began.... You see, the first order of business,
at the first meeting, was the reading of dossiers. They were very detailed, and

not just professional, but also personal. They included medical histories. I
remember one very curious thing, for whatever it's worth. Most of us, and that
includes me, had a record of abnormally high uric acid concentrations in the
blood...... None of us had ever had this experience, of a public inspection of
credentials, or medical reports. It was very disturbing...

But it was deliberate. The reason for it was to emphasize that we were supposed
to make ALL our own decisions on procedure, without outside rules. This
included judging each other's qualifications and making allowances for possible
bias. I don't think it affected our work directly, but it made the point it was
supposed to make...... That we should ignore absolutely nothing that might
conceivably affect our objectivity.


[At this point I persuaded Doe that a brief occupational description of the
individual members of the Group would serve a useful purpose for readers of
the Report. The list which follows was worked out on paper. (It might be more
accurate to say it was negotiated)/. The problem was to give as much relevant
information as possible without violating Doe's commitment to protect his
colleagues' anonymity. It turned out to be very difficult, especially in the cases
of those members who are very well known. For this reason, secondary areas of
achievement or reputations are usually not shown.

The simple alphabetical "names" were assigned by Doe for convenient
reference; they bear no intended relation to actual names. "Able" was the
Group's Washington contact. It was he who brought and read the dossiers, and
who most often acted as chairman. He, "Baker," and "Cox" were the three who
had been involved in the preliminary planning. There is no other significance to
the order of listing.

"Arthur Able" is an historian and political theorist, who has served in
government.

"Bernard Baker: is a professor of international law and a consultant on
government operations.

"Charles Cox" is an economist, social critic, and biographer.

"John Doe."

"Edward Ellis" is a sociologist often involved in public affairs.

"Frank Fox" is a cultural anthropologist.

"George Green" is a psychologist, educator, and developer of personnel testing
systems.

"Harold Hill" is a psychiatrist, who has conducted extensive studies of the
relationship between individual and group behavior.

"John Jones" is a scholar and literary critic.

"Martin Miller" is a physical chemist, whose work has received inter- national
recognition at the highest level.

"Paul Peters" is a biochemist, who has made important discoveries bearing on
reproductive processes.

"Richard Roe" is a mathematician affiliated with an independent West Coast
research institution.

"Samuel Smith" is an astronomer, physicist, and communications theorist.

"Thomas Taylor" is a systems analyst and war planner, who has written
extensively on war, peace, and international relations.

"William White" is an industrialist, who has undertaken many special
government assignments.]

HOW DID THE GROUP OPERATE? I MEAN, WHERE AND WHEN
DID YOU MEET, AND SO FORTH?

We met on the average of once a month. Usually it was on weekends, and
usually for two days. We had a few longer sessions, and one that lasted only
four hours. .... We met all over the country, always at a different place, except
for the first and last times, which were at Iron Mountain. It was like a traveling
seminar....Sometimes at hotels, sometimes at universities. Twice we met at
summer camps, and once at a private estate, in Virginia. We used a business
place in Pittsburgh, and another in Poughkeepsie, [New York]....We never met
in Washington, or on government property anywhere....Able would announce
the times and places two meetings ahead. They were never changed.....

We didn't divide into subcommittees, or anything else that formal. But we all
took individual assignments between meetings. A lot of it involved getting
information from other people.... Among the fifteen of us, I don't thing there
was anybody in the academic or professional world we couldn't call on if we
wanted to, and we took advantage of it..... We were paid a very modest per
diem. All of it was called "expenses" on the vouchers. We were told not to
report it on our tax returns.... The checks were drawn on a special account of
Able's at a New York bank. He signed them....I don't know what the study cost.
So far as our time and travel were concerned, it couldn't have come to more
than the low six-figure range. But the big item must have been computer time,
and I have no idea how high this ran......

YOU SAY THAT YOU DON'T THINK YOUR WORK WAS AFFECTED
BY PROFESSIONAL BIAS. WHAT ABOUT POLITICAL AND
PHILOSOPHICAL BIAS? IS IT POSSIBLE TO DEAL WITH
QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE WITHOUT REFLECTING
PERSONAL VALUES?

Yes, it is. I can understand your skepticism. But if you had been at any of our
meetings you'd have had a very hard time figuring out who were the liberals and
who were the conservatives, or who were hawks and who were doves. There IS
such a thing as objectivity, and I think we had it... I don't say no one had any
emotional reaction to what we were doing. We all did, to some extent. As a
matter of fact, two members had heart attacks after we were finished, and I'll be
the first to admit it probably wasn't a coincidence.

YOU SAID YOU MADE UP YOUR OWN GROUND RULES. WHAT
WERE THESE GROUND RULES?

The most important were informality and unanimity . By informality I mean
that our discussions were open-ended. We went as far afield as any one of us
thought we had to. For instance, we spent a lot of time on the relationship
between military recruitment policies and industrial employment. Before we
were finished with it, we'd gone through the history of western penal codes and
any number of comparative psychiatric studies [of draftees and volunteers]. We
looked over the organization of the Inca empire. We determined the effects of
automation on underdeveloped societies....It was all relevant....

By unanimity, I don't mean that we kept taking votes, like a jury. I mean that we
stayed with every issue until we had what the Quakers call a "sense of the
meeting." It was time-consuming. But in the long run it saved time. Eventually
we all got on the same wavelength, so to speak.....

Of course we had differences, and big ones, especially in the beginning... For
instance, in Section I you might think we were merely clarifying our
instructions. Not so; it took a long time before we all agreed to a strict
interpretation.... Roe and Taylor deserve most of the credit for this... There are
many things in the Report that look obvious now, but didn't seem so obvious
then. For instance, on the relationship of war to social systems. The original
premise was conventional, from Clausewitz. .... That war was an "instrument"
of broader political values. Able was the only one who challenged this, at first.
Fox called his position "perverse." Yet it was Fox who furnished most of the
data that led us all to agree with Able eventually. I mention this be- cause I
think it's a good example of the way we worked. A triumph of method over
cliché...... I certainly don't intend to go into details about who took what side
about what, and when. But I will say, to give credit where due, that only Roe,
Able, Hill and Taylor were able to see, at the beginning, where our method was
taking us.

BUT YOU ALWAYS REACHED AGREEMENT, EVENTUALLY?

Yes. It's a unanimous report... I don't mean that our sessions were always
harmonious. Some of them were rough. The last six months there was a lot of
quibbling about small points... We'd been under pressure for a long time, we'd
been working together too long. It was natural.....that we got on each other's
nerves. For a while Able and Taylor weren't speaking to each other. Miller
threatened to quit. But this all passed. There were no important differences...

HOW WAS THE REPORT ACTUALLY WRITTEN? WHO DID THE
WRITING?

We all had a hand in the first draft. Jones and Able put it together, and then
mailed it around for review before working out a final version... The only
problems were the form it should take and whom we were writing it for. And, of
course, the question of disclosure.... [Doe's comments on this point are
summarized in the introduction.]

YOU MENTIONED A "PEACE GAMES" MANUAL. WHAT ARE
PEACE GAMES?

I wanted to say something about that. The Report barely mentions it. "Peace
games" is a method we developed during the course of the study. It's a
forecasting technique, an information system. I'm very excited about it. Even if
nothing is done about our recommendations--which is conceivable--this is
something that can't be ignored. It will revolutionize the study of social
problems. It's a by-product of the study. We needed a fast, dependable
procedure to approximate the effects of disparate social phenomena on other
social phenomena. We got it. It's in a primitive phase, but it works.

HOW ARE PEACE GAMES PLAYED? ARE THEY LIKE RAND'S WAR
GAMES?

You don't "play" peace games, like chess or Monopoly, any more than you play
war games with toy soldiers. You use computers. It's a programming system. A
computer "language," like Fortran, or Algol, or Jovial.... Its advantage is its
superior capacity to interrelate data with no apparent common points of
reference.... A simple analogy is likely to be misleading. But I can give you
some examples. For instance, supposing I asked you to figure out what effect a
moon landing by U.S. astronauts would have on an election in, say, Sweden. Or
what effect a change in the draft law--a specific change--would have on the
value of real estate in downtown Manhattan? Or a certain change in college
entrance requirements in the United States on the British shipping industry?

You would probably say, first, that there would be no effect to speak of, and
second, that there would be no way of telling. But you'd be wrong on both
counts. In each case there would be an effect, and the peace games method
could tell you what it would be, quantitatively. I didn't take these examples out
of the air. We used them in working out the method....Essentially, it's an
elaborate high-speed trial-and-error system for determining working algorithms.
Like most sophisticated types of computer problem-solving...

A lot of the "games" of this kind you read about are just glorified and
conversational exercises. They really are games, and nothing more. I just saw
one reported in the Canadian Computer Society Bulletin, called a "Vietnam
Peace Game." They use simulation techniques, but the programming hypotheses
are speculative....

The idea of a problem-solving system like this is not original with us. ARPA
(the Advanced Research Projects Agency, of the Department of Defense DoD.)
has been working on something like it. So has General Electric, in California.
There are others..... We were successful not because we know more than they
do about programming, which we don't, but because we leaned how to
formulate the problems accurately. It goes back to the old saw. You can always
find the answer if you know the right question.....

Continua >>