Ian Morris - War! What Is It Good For?: Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots

WAR

WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

IAN MORRIS is Willard Professor of Classics and a fellow of the Archaeology Centre at Stanford University. He has appeared on a number of television networks, including the History Network and PBS and has directed excavations in Greece and Italy. His first trade book Why the West Rules For Now was published to critical acclaim and won a number of prizes including a PEN USA Literary Award. Morriss second book The Measure of Civilisation, a companion volume to his first, was praised as a treasure trove of information about social development.

ALSO BY IAN MORRIS

Why the West Rulesfor Now

WAR

WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

THE ROLE OF CONFLICT

IN CIVILISATION, FROM

PRIMATES TO ROBOTS

IAN MORRIS

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

PROFILE BOOKS LTD

3A Exmouth House

Pine Street

London ECIR 0JH

www.profilebooks.com

First published in the United States of America in 2014 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Copyright Ian Morris, 2014

Maps copyright 2014 by Michele Angel

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Hal Leonard Corporation for permission to reprint lyrics from War, written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, 1969, first recorded by Edwin Starr, 1970, released as a single by Gordy Records (Gordy 7101). Publisher: Stone Agate Music (from BMI Repertoire).

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN 978 1 84765 454 0

ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION: FRIEND TO THE UNDERTAKER

I was twenty-three when I almost died in battle.

It was September 26, 1983, around 9:30 in the evening. I was hunched over a manual typewriter in a rented room in Cambridge, England, pounding out the first chapter of my PhD thesis in archaeology. I had just come back from four months of fieldwork in the Greek islands. My work was going well. I was in love. Life was good.

I had no idea that two thousand miles away, Stanislav Petrov was deciding whether to kill me.

Petrov was the deputy chief for combat algorithms at Serpukhov-15, the nerve center of the Soviet Unions early-warning system. He was a methodical man, an engineer, a writer of computer codeand not, fortunately for me, a man given to panic. But when the siren went off a little after midnight (Moscow time), even Petrov leaped out of his chair. A red bulb blinked into life on the giant map of the Northern Hemisphere that filled one wall of the control room. It signaled that a missile had been launched from Montana.

Above the map, red letters came to life, spelling out the worst word Petrov knew: LAUNCH.

Computers checked and double-checked their data. Again the red lights flashed, this time with more certainty: LAUNCHHIGH RELIABILITY.

In a way, Petrov had been expecting this day to come. Six months earlier, Ronald Reagan had denounced Mother Russia as an evil empire. He had threatened that the Americans would build a space-based antimissile shield, ending the mutual balance of terror that had kept the peace for nearly forty years. And then he had announced that he would speed up the deployment of new missiles, able to hit Moscow with just a five-minute flight. Next, as if to mock the Soviet Unions vulnerability, a South Korean airliner had strayed over Siberia, apparently lost. It took the Soviet air force several hours to find it, and then, as the plane was finally making its way back to neutral airspace, a fighter shot it down. Everyone on board diedincluding a U.S. congressman. Now, the screen was saying, the imperialists had taken the final step.

And yet Petrov knew that this was not what World War III should look like. An American first strike ought to involve a thousand Minute-man missiles roaring over the North Pole. It should mean an incoming inferno of fire and radiation, a frenzied, all-out effort to destroy the Soviet missiles as they sat in their silos, leaving Moscow with no way to respond. Launching a single missile was insane.

Petrovs job was to follow the rules, to run all the mandated tests for malfunctions, but there was no time for any of that. He had to decide whether the world was about to end.

He picked up the phone. I am reporting to you, he said to the duty officer on the other end. He tried to sound matter-of-fact. This is a false alarm.

The duty officer asked no questions, betrayed no anxiety. Got it.

A moment later, the siren was turned off. Petrovs staff began to relax. The technicians turned to their prescribed routines, systematically searching the circuits for errors. But then

LAUNCH.

The red word was back. A second light appeared on the map; another missile was on its way.

And then another bulb lit up. And another, and another, until the entire map seemed to be burning red. The algorithms that Petrov had helped to write now took over. For a moment, the panel above the map went dark. Then it flashed back into life with a new warning. It was announcing the apocalypse.

MISSILE ATTACK.

The Soviet Unions biggest supercomputer automatically sent this message up the chain of command. Every second now counted. The aging, ailing Yuri Andropov, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was about to be asked to make the most important decision of all time. You may not be very interested in war, Trotsky is supposed to have said, but war is very interested in you. Cambridge wasand still isa sleepy university town, far from the seats of power. In 1983, though, it was ringed by air force bases, high on Moscows list of targets. If the Soviet General Staff had believed Petrovs algorithms, I would have been dead within fifteen minutes, vaporized in a fireball hotter than the surface of the sun. Kings College and its choir, the cows grazing as punts drifted by, the scholars in their gowns passing the port at High Tableall would have been blasted into radioactive dust.

If the Soviets had launched only the missiles that they were pointing at military targets (what strategists called a counterforce attack), and if the United States had responded in kind, I would have been one of roughly a hundred million people blown apart, burned up, and poisoned on the first day of the war. But that is probably not what would have happened. Just three months before Petrovs moment of truth, the U.S. Strategic Concepts Development Center had run a war game to see how the opening stages of a nuclear exchange might go. They found that no player managed to draw the line at counterforce attacks. In every case, they escalated to countervalue attacks, firing on cities as well as silos. And when that happened, the first few days death toll rose to around half a billion, with fallout, starvation, and further fighting killing another half billion in the weeks and months that followed.

Back in the real world, however, Petrov did draw a line. He later admitted to having been so scared that his legs gave way under him, but he still trusted his instincts over his algorithms. Going with his gut, he told the duty officer that this too was a false alarm. The missile attack message was stopped before it worked its way up the chain of command. Twelve thousand Soviet warheads stayed in their silos; a billion of us lived to fight another day.