Bomb Power (w/ Erik Baker)
Added 2023-12-19 22:55:17 +0000 UTCFor our final main episode of 2023, we're dipping back into the Wills well to discuss Garry's under-appreciated 2010 book, Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State. Joining us is our great friend Erik Baker, lecturer in the History of Science Department at Harvard University and an editor at The Drift magazine.
In Bomb Power, Garry Wills elegantly demonstrates how the imperatives of secretly conceiving, building, and deploying the nuclear bomb fundamentally changed American democracy — massively empowering the presidency, disempowering Congress, and setting the nation on a permanent war footing. At the same time, secrecy and deception metastasized through the American system, enabling the rise of extra-judicial assassinations, coup plotting, domestic surveillance, torture, and clandestine war. "Secrecy emanated from the Manhattan Project like a giant radiation emission..." writes Wills, "Because the government was the keeper of the great secret, it began specializing in secret keeping.”
Also discussed: Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer (2023), Henry Kissinger (RIP), Bush and Obama, Snowden, Ellsberg, and the ways in which Bomb Power is a profoundly Catholic book. Enjoy!
Sources:
Garry Wills, Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State (2010)
Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear Planner (2017)
Barton Gellman, Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State (2021)
Archbishop John Wester, "Living in the Light of Christ's Peace: A Conversation Toward Nuclear Disarmament," Jan 11, 2022
Erik Baker, "Daniel in the Lion's Den: On the Moral Courage of Daniel Ellsberg," The Baffler, June 17, 2023
John Schwenkler and Mark Souva, "False Choices: The Unjustifiable Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki," Commonweal, Oct 14, 2020
Comments
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2024/05/30/garry-wills-at-90-the-influential-historian-has-become-his-own-iconoclast/?share=nitccoobsifiiehn2slg
Matt Messbarger
2024-05-30 19:49:50 +0000 UTCI welcome @Mark K's quotes from Richard Rhodes, a book I read long ago and now plan to reread, and I would also recommend "American Prometheus," upon which the movie "Oppenheimer" was based. I love your pod, Matt and Sam, but I have to say I found this episode superficial and simplistic, a one-note song. I haven't read Wills' book, but to me his/your main thesis only goes so far. For one thing, secrecy and extensive illegal wiretapping and spying on U.S. citizens by our own government long predated the Manhattan Project, mostly courtesy of good ol' J. Edgar Hoover. Had you done more homework by reading "American Prometheus" at least (it's obvious you hadn't) and perhaps "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" as well (both massive undertakings, I admit) you would have had a better understanding of the philosophical and moral implications of the bomb and how intelligent people of good will -- many were scientists and many were not -- wrestled deeply with those implications at the time. Moreover, you would appreciate the bomb's inevitability. There is no way it would not have been developed by one country or another, especially given the incredibly weird timing of the discovery of nuclear fission, right in the middle of a terrifying world war in which our most powerful "ally" was none other than Joseph Stalin. The curse of nuclear weapons was bound to happen, it happened at a difficult time, and yes, it changed the way our government and other governments work. Truman especially made some dreadful mistakes. So did Eisenhower. But it's hard to know how things would have gone had they acted more wisely. At least, as Rhodes points out, "no world wars have engulfed us since 1945" and there is "at least a distant prospect of felicity." It is more the whole notion of the nation-state that is called into question by the existence of the bomb than it is our particular form of government, and hand-wringing about our particular guilt in the matter -- didn't Sam even refer to the bomb as our Original Sin? -- is an easy out. ... Speaking of Original Sin, bringing religion into a discussion of so complex and momentous a topic -- especially a Christian religion like Catholicism -- only serves to cloud the matter.
Mark Bowen
2024-02-03 18:02:21 +0000 UTCI encourage everyone to read the epilogue of Richard Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" that, after just describing what the atom bomb did to Hiroshima in the previous chapter, suggests the nation-state is the true evil that "bomb power" has created. He then posits international, democratically-controlled science as the only force that can counter it. Here are a few quotes: "Though it dominates the world, the nation-state owns no long history of legitimacy. It developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, its nationalism 'a doctrine invented in Europe,' writes the political scientist Elie Kedourie, that 'pretends to supply a criterion for the determination of the unit of population proper to enjoy a government exclusively its own . . . . Briefly, the doctrine holds that humanity is naturally divided into nations, that nations are known by certain characteristics which can be ascertained, and that the only legitimate type of government is national self-government.'" "What now seems natural [the existence of the nation-state] once was unfamiliar, needing argument, persuasion, evidences of many kinds; what seems simple and transparent is really obscure and contrived, the outcome of circumstances now forgotten and preoccupations now academic, the residue of metaphysical systems sometimes incompatible and even contradictory." "But the nation-state was not the only new political system invented in early modern times. Through the two centuries of the nation-state's evolution the republic of science had been evolving in parallel. Founded on openness, international in scope, science survived in the nation-state's midst by limiting its sovereignty to a part of the world which interested the larger system hardly at all: observable natural phenomena... In 1945 science became the first living organic structure strong enough to challenge the nation-state itself." "Science in conflict with the nation-state demonstrates how an open world could function without chartered violence. The effectiveness of such profound civility is obscured at present because it necessarily operates from within the nation-state itself. Turning around and looking back across the half-century since 1945 demonstrates its power: it forced an end to world war, in itself an enormous deliverance." "When politicians, in tones of grave wonder, characterize our age as one of vast effort in saving human life, and enormous vigor in destroying it, they seem to feel they are indicating some mysterious paradox of the human spirit. There is no paradox and no mystery. The difference is that one area of public death has been tackled and secured by the forces of reason; the other has not. The pioneers of public health did not change nature, or men, but adjusted the active relationship of men to certain aspects of nature so that the relationship became one of watchful and healthy respect. In doing so they had to contend with and struggle against the suspicious opposition of those who believed that to interfere with nature was sinful, and even that disease and plague were the result of something sinful in the nature of man himself." "Man-made death is evidently more intractable than biological death. Whether the unarmed republic of science, dedicated to human felicity rather than to the accumulation of power, can force nation-states armed to the teeth to change before they destroy themselves remains to be seen. That no world wars have engulfed us since 1945 is our interim guarantee that the opening up of the world is well begun, though at any time accident or miscalculation could close it forever. That nuclear weapons proliferate and the superpowers exhaust their economies attempting to outmaneuver each other to unattainable dominance demonstrates how irrationally tenacious is our hold on traditional forms of control." "The preeminent transnational community in our culture is science. With the release of nuclear energy in the first half of the twentieth century that model commonwealth decisively challenged the power of the nation-state. The confrontation is ongoing and inextricably embedded in mortal risk, but it offers at least a distant prospect of felicity."
Mark K
2024-01-18 23:40:09 +0000 UTCthis convo was great. i work in local govt in a big city and am very interested how some of these characterizations of the executive have trickled down to practices of secrecy, military tactics in policing, and the role of the executive, especially in some larger cities. does anyone have any thoughts?
colin delargy
2024-01-11 00:42:30 +0000 UTCI feel like you’re really bringing me along on being Wills-pilled. To be honest I had never heard of him prior to you guys bringing him up. I have always struggled to reconcile my own left-leaning policy positions and sympathies with my more conservative instincts as to how government should be structured. I want a lot of the same stuff that a lot of liberal/progressive/socialist thinkers profess to want, but I’m also very nervous about concentration of government power. I don’t ascribe to the perversity thesis as an ironclad rule, but I think it’s a constant risk that needs to be considered in public policy. Maybe I’m projecting , but when you describe Wills, something about his worldview feels so familiar to me. I have read a number of books because they were discussed here, and I think this will be my next.
Thomas Peake
2023-12-27 15:22:42 +0000 UTCIncredible episode, one of your best, again. So many goodies in here. I loved the discussion about the decline of this Willsian mode of Catholicism in the United States, the deep scars of the atomic era and its interaction with our modern circumstances, and am now really excited to read the book. So much to recommend, a great Christmas listen. Happy holidays to the KYE crew!
Joshua Smith
2023-12-25 18:50:06 +0000 UTCI'll add to the chorus of approval on this episode. Thank you for it. As a side note, the conversation around Wills' book reminded me of Edward Shils' 'The Torment of Secrecy'. Shils was, I think, more interested in how secrecy breeds conspiracy theory in American culture than he was about the imperial presidency, etc., but the two books, I gather, nonetheless dovetail. I was also reminded of Alex Wellerstein's 'Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States' (also a really great blog!) and Joseph Masco's 'The Theatre of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror'
Xtinction Agenda
2023-12-25 18:19:06 +0000 UTCSam Waterston. Apparently available on Prime or BBC streaming.
Amy Lepak
2023-12-23 14:24:36 +0000 UTCTry the 1980 Oppenheimer series starring zz
Amy Lepak
2023-12-23 14:23:45 +0000 UTCWills’s emphasis on the problems with secrecy points to another — albeit more obscure — connection to St. Augustine. Augustine was the preeminent anti-esotericist. He wrote tracts upon tracts about the problem with secret doctrine.
William B Penley
2023-12-23 02:16:21 +0000 UTCI just want to note the tremendous “Yes!” from Matt at 15:11, one of the best yet. I loved the episode, need to move this book toward the top of the To Read pile.
Chris Maisano
2023-12-23 01:32:48 +0000 UTCI love when you guys talk Garry Wills! I haven’t read a word of his and I’m a convert (or fan, let’s say). This ep also made me want to rewatch Oppenheimer—which I admittedly found tedious and sonically oppressive the first time around.
Justin Kehoe
2023-12-21 15:03:34 +0000 UTCOutstanding episode!
Benjamin Pletcher
2023-12-21 08:32:32 +0000 UTCThis episode was so good I ordered “Bomb Power” BEFORE listening to it! Much excellent discussion, but I was particularly (perhaps as a one-time military child) grabbed by the discussion of the inflation of the term “commander in chief.” It used to be widely used in the military, until SecDef Rumsfeld decided it should be exclusive to “the” commander in chief, the POTUS. Of course, things reached their nadir in the 2008 campaign, when Hillary Clinton declared herself “ready on day one to be commander in chief of the economy.”
Andrew Rogers
2023-12-21 01:47:03 +0000 UTCPowerful episode. You guys always make me think, but this one really challenged some blind spots. Thanks and happy sparkle days
Gavin Dluehosh
2023-12-21 00:12:51 +0000 UTCGreat episode! Currently reading a book I think connects this episode well with the previous one: SM Amadae's Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: the Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism. Good account of how cold war liberals manage to square national security state planning with free market economics, and the invention of the "rational actor."
Henry Snow
2023-12-20 21:28:05 +0000 UTCA phenomenal episode that's been more thoughtful about the strange place of the American presidency than my entire semester-long graduate Presidency seminar! Merry Festivus!
barthe234
2023-12-20 20:50:36 +0000 UTCSam's extended monologue on how secrecy destroys democratic governance. WOW
Lou Guberti Ng
2023-12-20 11:20:34 +0000 UTCThis absolutely slays
Where there’s a Wills there’s a Way
2023-12-20 06:17:42 +0000 UTCThis was an exceptionally good episode, even by the standards of this consistently excellent podcast. It reminded me of a personal anecdote about my father's religious upbringing that feels relevant to this conversation, so I hope you'll forgive me if this story takes a bit to get to the point. My father was raised Episcopalian, but the formative pastor in his young life, Reverend John Fowler, was a devoted proponent of the Anglo-Catholic tradition. I won't claim that Father Fowler was Wills' equal as a writer or a thinker and he was certainly more straightforwardly of the left than Wills, but based on my father's recollections I think it's safe to say that the two shared many of the same qualities-- a thoughtfulness about how ancient religion can (and cannot) co-exist with the modern world, an astonishing love for humanity that stops short of blinding a person to our many inadequacies, and a willingness to suffer ostracization and condemnation for following one's convictions. I was mostly raised irreligious and in any case I think pastors like Father Fowler are pretty rare, but I think my father still tried to pass on these formative experiences from his own childhood by explaining the moral education he received from Fowler. As a child, I often heard stories about how Father Fowler demonstrated it was important to use power to fight injustice even when doing so might lead to personal setbacks by appointing African American families to prominent positions within the parish and enduring the financial hit from racist whites departing. I heard stories about how he encouraged service and taught young people to think beyond their own surroundings by taking church youth past the border to hand out water and food to striking workers during Cesar Chavez's Grape Strike. Finally, and perhaps most frequently, I heard stories about how Father Fowler demonstrated the way a person should be forthright and unafraid in stating their convictions with the large sign outside St. Michael's that read "It is a Sin to Build a Nuclear Weapon." This excellent conversation has given me some insight into the underlying ideas that Father Fowler might have been gesturing towards with this short, almost tweet-like provocation, and for that I thank you.
Will Hubbert
2023-12-20 01:53:44 +0000 UTCI didn't even think to look for interviews about this book, though it can be nice to approach it "fresh," without the author's commentary. And it makes sense you interviewed him about this, sorry we couldn't give more attention to Ellsberg in this ep! (Matt)
Know Your Enemy
2023-12-20 00:26:14 +0000 UTCOn VP Truman not knowing about the bomb: very similar to LBJ not knowing about JFK's secret deal to remove nuclear missiles from Turkey to end the Cuban Missile Crisis. He thought JFK's big swinging dick did it--an interpretation RFK encouraged. So he would swing that Big Dick in Vietnam, because that's what JFK would have done...
Rick Perlstein
2023-12-19 23:59:48 +0000 UTCMisheard “this was a PEACE based on a weapon” as “This was a PIECE [ie a set piece] based on a weapon” and thought this was heading to a point about Chekov’s gun
Benjamón Bellota
2023-12-19 23:56:02 +0000 UTCGood stuff. I got to interview the maestro when it came out! https://www.bookforum.com/print/1605/garry-wills-pins-down-the-origins-of-the-imperial-presidency-in-the-dark-recesses-of-the-manhattan-project-and-explains-it-all-to-rick-perlstein-5000
Rick Perlstein
2023-12-19 23:55:51 +0000 UTCIf modernity and increased secularism murdered god, the bomb was an act of divine cannibalism. Fabulous episode- if y'all do another episode on the military industrial complex, it would be great to hear about the birth of modern think tanks, and how even progressive/liberal think tanks are functionally anti-democratic pools of money and power.
Leonardo Restrepo
2023-12-19 23:46:34 +0000 UTCIf you did nothing but Wills for the next ten episodes, you’d only have scratched the surface. Hurrah!
Russell Arben Fox
2023-12-19 23:31:29 +0000 UTCThanks for continuing to dip into the Wills reservoir. Excited for this one.
Joshua Smith
2023-12-19 23:14:56 +0000 UTCi will ride the wills wagon ANYWHERE it should take me
Where there’s a Wills there’s a Way
2023-12-19 22:59:39 +0000 UTC
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