From the distance of years, he thinks he can see now her essay’s deeper theme: males building unlivable worlds, then leaving females to live in them. Presumably he sensed a smidgen of this at the time, and it must have had its influence. He doubts it’s coincidental that his ultimate view of the typical RAND scientist was of an intelligent male (needless to say, they were all male) ingeniously building in his head a world he imagined was the real one, populated principally by phenomena that proved his own intelligence.
Ed Paxson and Edward Quade, for example, were very smart men. “Do you know about the Paxson-Quade fighter-bomber study?” Vernon would ask his lunchmates in one of the courtyards. Vernon had seen Ed Paxson at briefings, gleefully shooting down his colleagues’ ideas. He was a systems analyst, so he liked constructing mathematical equations to determine the best way of doing anything, supposedly taking all the relevant factors into account. In 1949, he and Quade devised a mathematical model to evaluate optimum strategies in a fighter-bomber duel. Their math decreed that, in a certain determined best configuration, the fighter ought to be able to shoot down the bomber 60 percent of the time. When they compared that figure with actual data from World War II, they discovered that the real percentage of successful bomber kills in that configuration was 2 percent.
“Real fighter pilots pull away too early,” Vernon would say at the lunch table. “They don’t care about Paxson’s calculations, they care about not dying.”
Paxson was a mathematician. In Vernon’s experience, it’s the engineers who have the healthiest attitude toward numbers. They make the math just good enough to accomplish the task at hand. Physicists are more rigorous, but most of them would agree that beautiful mathematical constructs do not necessarily have manifestations in physical reality. The two sorts of scientists who let numbers make them foolish are soft scientists, like sociologists, who dress their work in spurious equations to convince themselves their science is hard, and mathematicians, who think numbers are the deepest reality, and if the physical world doesn’t live up to their equations, well then, too bad for the physical world. World War II fighter pilots ought to have shot down bombers 60 percent of the time, and that’s what counts.
Thinking about Paxson’s error fed Vernon’s general unease about RAND. Could it be that this imposing modern building, these briefings so ostentatiously featuring “vigorous debate” and “a hard look,” this blizzard of working papers stamped Confidential, the red-eye flights to Washington to brief Air Force chiefs—could it be that the subconscious intent of it all was to blind RAND men to the fact that they were doing nothing useful? The Copernican Principle, as applied to psychology: one should be skeptical of any theory that has the side effect of elevating the importance of the theorist.
Vernon remembered seeing something in a newspaper shortly after the war ended. A delicatessen owner in Manhattan had put photographs of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki moonscapes in his store window, to raise awareness among his customers about the need to avoid nuclear war. As he explained to the reporter, “If somebody starts dropping these bombs, there won’t even be any delicatessens.”
Vernon started saying to his lunchmates, “We have to work all night, because if there’s an all-out nuclear exchange, there won’t even be a RAND.”
• • •
One of the watchwords at RAND was “vulnerability.” Sure, we had enough bombs to destroy every city, midsized town, and lonely crossroad in the Soviet Union—but maybe our bombs were vulnerable to surprise attack, after which we might not retain enough to retaliate. How could we address this problem? Should we disperse our bases, harden our bases, harden our communications, bury our missiles, increase our missiles’ power, increase their accuracy, increase their number?
One of RAND’s gurus of vulnerability was Albert Wohlstetter, a mathematical logician in the Economics division. He came from a wealthy New York family and favored suspenders and patent-leather shoes. His silvering hair was swept back from his forehead as though blown there by the force of his thoughts. Early in his tenure, he had made a name for himself by showing where Ed Paxson’s analyses went wrong. (Make way for the new alpha dog.) He compiled a huge logistical study of overseas US nuclear bomber bases that supposedly showed how easy it would be for the Soviet Union to destroy up to 85 percent of American bombers in a surprise attack. In talks to generals and cabinet secretaries in the early 1950s, he’d argued that this was tantamount to inviting an attack. He was currently working on a RAND paper called “The Delicate Balance of Terror.”
Wohlstetter and his wife, Roberta, lived in Laurel Canyon, in a house designed by a well-known modernist architect. When it was finished, Wohlstetter induced a Los Angeles paper to write an admiring article titled “The House in the Sky,” with photographs of the heavenly abode and its enviable inhabitants. Maybe realizing that too few of his colleagues could be counted on to have seen it, Wohlstetter got