This week’s blog post is a guest contribution from my brother, Michael, on the topic of the “nuclear option,” a term from nuclear deterrence theory that has come to be applied, sometimes loosely, in those situations when one decides to “push the button,” to risk, and probably lose, everything for the chance to destroy an opponent. Michael focuses his attention on a work of fiction to show how the theory of mutually assured destruction rests on assumptions of human nature that may be flawed. Fiction can’t be taken as scientific evidence, but when the actions of fictional characters ring true with an audience, they invite us to ponder those questions that science can’t answer either. In this case, such questions as: Will mutually assured destruction someday fail just because one fallible human being with his finger on the button gambles that he could come out victorious after launching a first strike? Or would the losing side in a long war, at the moment before an ignominious defeat, scream après moi, l’apocalypse and set off a nuclear exchange? Human behavior in less high-stakes scenarios suggest we shouldn’t expect our luck will always hold out.
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Nixon’s Madman
Theory and Madison Avenue Mad Men: Why
mutually assured destruction scenarios don’t assure the prevention of mutual destruction
by
Michael Riches (guest contributor, January 30, 2016)
One of the most sublime aspects of the AMC TV series Mad Men, which concluded last year, is
how the show was always about more than what it was about.
On its surface, the program is about the advertising
industry in the 1960s. Watch it patiently and it becomes a depiction of how the
dynamic social classes of the 1960s rubbed against (and rubbed off on) each
other. Pay closer attention and it becomes an almost clinical analysis of one
man’s anxieties about identity and death, and how they play out against the
anxieties and identities of others. Is Mad
Men the story of how modern-day advertising came of age in a turbulent
decade, or is it the story of an orphan raised by Appalachians during the Great
Depression, outrunning his demons with the stolen identity of dead Korean War
lieutenant? In many ways, Mad Men is
more than any of these things. It is the story of how any one of us could be
like Don Draper, abundant with creativity or desperate and mean, or both,
depending on the circumstances of our upbringing and the opportunities
presented to us.
What elevates each of Mad Men’s storylines is how much is revealed by what’s not said within its adeptly scripted
dialogs.
The program had a sharp eye for metaphor –
occasionally clunky, but mostly well disguised within compelling storylines. This
is reflected in how Mad Men dealt
with pivotal events of the 1960s. The first mention of the Cuban Missile
Crisis, for instance, was in the background of the final episode of Season 2
(“Meditations in an Emergency”), “breaking news” that largely went unmentioned
by any character. The social angst caused by the crisis manifested not so much
in open dialog, but in how the characters behaved, as if each were aware that
they might soon perish, yet in too much denial to talk about it – the
secretary’s confession to one of her superiors that she gave birth to his child
then gave it away for adoption; Don’s wife having her first extramarital tryst
in the bathroom of a singles bar after years of deducing (though never verbally
acknowledging) her husband’s infidelities; and the parallel of the hostile
incursion of foreign power, as a British advertising conglomerate lands in New
York to buy out the firm, to which Don is told to stand his ground during
negotiations. Don’s survival (as with the survival of the Americans and Soviets
during Cuba) came down to a risky move that could be seen either as brilliant
or a fluke. All of this could have played out as soap opera, but deft handling
by the writers turned these dramas into authentic moments of catharsis.
It would be too obvious an omission for any fictional
study of the 1960s to ignore the Cold War. The nuclear arms race had a profound
effect on generations raised through the 1950s to the early 1990s, and yet Mad Men made scarce mention of it during
its seven-year run. This, however, was probably a wise and natural choice. As a
child in the 1970s and a high school student in the 1980s, I recall that the
potential of nuclear warfare was an underlying anxiety in our culture,
frequently in our thoughts and constantly in the news, but rarely talked about
outside of political arguments or the occasional topic in Social Studies. I
imagine it would have been the same in the 1960s. In that respect, Mad Men made a wise move in depicting
the Cold War through interpersonal conflict rather than explicit dialog about
the fears of a nuclear attack.
One of the clever ways in which Mad Men touched on the Cold War was in an episode that dealt with
various characters blowing up relationships in a style of “mutually assured
destruction” (season 6, episode 6, “For Immediate Release,” set in the spring
of 1966). In one storyline, the ever insecure account man Pete Campbell locks
eyes with his father-in-law while both are making an exit from a high-end
Manhattan brothel, where Pete’s firm often entertains demanding clients. Unnerved by the encounter, Pete seeks advice
from his more unflappable peer, Ken Cosgrove. Will Pete’s father-in-law, a top executive
with Vicks who handed Pete an ongoing advertising account, pull his business
from the firm?
Ken tells Pete to relax.
Ken: “It’s mutually assured destruction.”
Pete: “So he’s not going to say anything?”
Ken: “He can’t. It’s why I don’t worry about the
bomb.”
In another storyline, Don Draper fires his most
prestigious client, Jaguar, during a dinner in which their insufferable dealer
representative, Herb Rennet, puts forward a business proposal that is a veiled
swipe on Don’s capabilities. Don hands him a card with the name of “the person
who’ll be handling your account from now on.”
Herb: “You never fail to overheat, do ya? You know the
somersaults I’m doing because you’re so touchy?”
Don: “Really? A man your size?”
Two superpowers, one vulgar and fat on life’s
excesses, the other a bully who “overheats” when his pride is wounded, get into
a battle of wills. Herb sees no harm in pushing Don because Don is perceived to
have too much to lose by pushing back. But Don does push back, taking the
“nuclear” option and putting his entire firm in jeopardy (the Jaguar account
was the lifeblood of Don’s agency).
The news infuriates his partners. Pete lividly informs
Don that the loss of Jaguar means killing a public offering that would have
been tremendously lucrative for all involved. As it turned out, another partner
had been talking to Chevy about a bid for their business, meaning the firm
would have had to drop Jaguar regardless.
Don: “You wanna go public? How much better is it when
we have Chevy!”
Pete: “Don’t pretend you had a plan. You’re Tarzan,
swinging from vine to vine.”
(Meanwhile, subtle Cold War reference is made in a
storyline involving the copywriter Peggy and her live-in boyfriend Abe. The two
are residing in the makings of a future ghetto, at the insistence of Abe, a social
activist who is adamant about building a life in a genuine neighborhood free of the
material wants of the Manhattan bourgeoisie. Peggy, in dislike of her living
conditions, moans, “Those kids are living on our stoop, lighting firecrackers
and playing their music.” This can be seen as a reference to Cuba, living on
America’s “stoop,” provoking the USA with Soviet rockets and fiery orations,
not to mention the way Cuba needled the US with their inconvenient example of
Communism working with relative success. A few moments later, while Peggy and
Abe kiss, Latin-American music blasts from outside.)
The subtle lesson in this episode is that when the
“nuclear option” is threatened, a positive outcome can be chalked up more to
luck than to a tactic with a foreseeable result. That much is stressed in a
subsequent scene, when word goes out that Pete’s father-in-law, Tom, has pulled
his business from the agency. Pete visits Tom in his office at Vicks.
Pete: “Tom, what are you doing? I know we’re both
emotional and vulnerable, but I’m not the enemy here.”
Tom: “My daughter is a princess. She could have had
anyone. I knew there was a reason you didn’t want children. You have no
business being a father.”
Pete: “You just pressed the button, Tom! You just blew
everything up!”
Tom: “It makes me sick, thinking about the man I saw
being with my daughter and granddaughter.”
Pete: “Why don’t you go look in the mirror!”
Tom: “You can either walk out of here like a man, or I
can throw you out like the lowlife you are.”
Pete (on his way out the door): “If I have as little
character as you say, why would you push me like this?”
Tom: “You’ll do the right thing.”
Tom: “You’ll do the right thing.”
What is meant by the “right thing” is not stated, but
it’s obvious that Tom believes Pete will keep his mouth shut and forget the
incident. In Tom’s view, he has delivered his revenge, he is “even.” Pete,
though, leaves the room with a different idea of what the “right thing” means,
believing that Tom’s pulling of Vicks’ business was the nuclear option. Pete’s
marriage was already crumbling thanks to one of his affairs – something Tom was
likely not aware of and was not able to consider – which allows Pete some
freedom for a counter-strike when he realizes he is likely going to lose his
wife regardless.
Pete: “Did you know your father pulled his business?”
Trudy: “No. And I don’t care, Peter.”
Pete: “I guess it doesn’t matter that I caught him in
a mid-town whorehouse… It’s true. With a 200-pound negro prostitute. Ask him to
his face.”
Trudy: “You’ll say anything to hurt me, won’t you!”
Pete: “He wanted it this way. He left me no other
choice.”
Trudy: “You had lots of choices, Peter! We’re done.
Get your things.”
That last line perhaps encapsulates the episode’s
argument, that the more heated a conflict becomes, the fewer choices we believe
we have. We may feel that we have been pushed to the brink in any given dispute,
but in fact there is no brink, no precipice; we feel we have only one option, when in fact we have many, including
doing nothing. Pete didn’t have to say anything to his wife, and he didn’t have
to confront Tom in his office. Each decision to escalate the conflict came with
its own consequences. In Don’s case, he gained the upper hand in his
high-stakes gamble out of pure luck, whereas when Pete tried to duplicate Don’s
success, he finished off his marriage after losing a major client. The threat
of mutually assured destruction works sometimes. Other times it doesn’t. Chance
and circumstance are usually the deciding factors.
The title of Mad
Men comes from the moniker that “ad men” applied to themselves in the
1960s. When related to this episode, though, we’re reminded of the “Madman Theory” of US president Richard Nixon
(1969-1974). As recounted by Nixon’s Chief of Staff, H.R. (Bob) Haldeman, in
his 1978 book The Ends of Power,
Nixon said:
“I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North
Vietnamese to believe I've reached the point where I might do anything to stop
the war. We'll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God's sake, you know Nixon
is obsessed about communism. We can't restrain him when he's angry – and he has
his hand on the nuclear button,’ and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in
two days begging for peace.” [1]
Historians generally agree that Nixon came to this strategy on his own, though his tactics can be traced back to Machiavelli and fictional characters such as Hamlet. So Nixon may not have been an original in employing the “madman” approach to international disputes, but he was the first to take such a stance in the nuclear age.
In their article “The Madman Nuclear Alert: Secrecy,
Signaling, and Safety in October 1969” [2] authors Scott
D. Sagan and Jeremi Suri provide detail of how the Madman Theory was put into
practice. The US military had been ordered, in late 1969, to increase readiness
to "respond to possible confrontation by the Soviet Union."
“The Strategic Air Command (SAC) was ordered to …
increase the number of nuclear-armed B-52 bombers on ground alert … Even more
dramatic, on October 27 SAC launched a series of B-52 bombers, armed with
thermonuclear weapons, on a ‘show of force’ airborne alert … Eighteen B-52s
took off from bases in California and Washington State. The bombers crossed
Alaska, were refueled in midair by KC-135 tanker aircraft, and then flew in
oval patterns toward the Soviet Union and back, on eighteen-hour ‘vigils’ over
the northern polar ice cap … Nixon sought to convince Soviet and North
Vietnamese leaders that he might do anything to end the war in Vietnam, in accordance
with his "madman theory" of coercive diplomacy. The nuclear alert
measures were therefore specifically chosen to be loud enough to be picked up
quickly by the Soviet Union's intelligence agencies. The military operation was
also, however, deliberately designed to remain secret from the American public
and U.S. allies.”
Author Michael S. Sherry also reported in In the Shadow of War [3] that American
diplomats, including National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger, directly intimated that the US incursion into Cambodia, in 1970, was
a product of Nixon's mental instability.
The fault in such strategizing is that Nixon might have
ignored the possibility that he was playing a “madman” game with actual madmen
– it was entirely possible that the Communist states he was playing chicken
with might have been willing to sacrifice more than what Nixon himself was
pretending to put at risk. Like Tom in the example above, he lacked information
about his counterpart’s circumstances and psychology. But what this also
demonstrates, as pointed out by Sagan and Suri, is that the American public –
actually, the global public – would have had no clue as to the actual reasons
nuclear warfare had broken out, if it had. In the same way that popular history
has eliminated (or at the very least diminished) the fact that the bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were completely unnecessary to ending Japanese
involvement in World War II, a
“credible” provocation would have likely been manufactured by both sides had a
nuclear conflict resulted from Nixon’s reckless approach to international
relations.
That’s also the subtext of what was demonstrated in
this episode of Mad Men. In each
dispute depicted in the story, every party involved believed that the other had
more to lose than him, and each aspiring “winner” did not know enough about
what was going on behind each scene to be able to guarantee a favorable
outcome. Don believed that his high-stakes strategy – putting his entire firm
at risk in order to purge a client he despised – resulted in victory, when in
fact there was an emerging situation he was not aware of that worked in his favor.
Tom thought he knew how to play his cards with son-in-law Pete, but not without
some unexpected collateral damage to his own family and his own standing as a
father.
In the poetic way that art can argue better
than history, conflict in relationships is often unavoidable and occasionally
necessary. And yet there always remains potential for self-destruction. Mad Men showed that the essential
lessons are in the choices we make when we manage disputes. We can follow our
egos in the pursuit of destroying an adversary, often harming ourselves in the
process, or we can make the difficult choices to resolve the enmity and do
something for the greater good. Whether it’s the mad men of Madison Avenue or those
holding political leadership, history demonstrates that humanity rarely makes
the latter choice. It can be argued that favorable outcomes (not to mention
survival itself) in the nuclear age have largely been matters of luck.
Notes
[1] H.R. Haldeman, The
Ends of Power (Times Books, 1978).
[2] Scott D. Sagan and Jeremi Suri, “The Madman
Nuclear Alert: Secrecy, Signaling, and Safety in October 1969,” International Security, Spring 2003,
Vol. 27, No. 4.
[3] Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War (Yale University Press, 1995).
