DEFCON, Neocon, Katechon

The 1983 movie WarGames introduced many Americans to the concept of MAD, or “mutual assured destruction.” A young Matthew Broderick plays a teenage hacker who accidentally discovers a U.S. government supercomputer simulating exchanges of nuclear warheads in preparation for a real war with the Soviet Union. By the end of the film, Broderick and another noble techie teach the supercomputer that, in any nuclear conflict, the destruction of all players is guaranteed. Mutually assured, you might say. The computer learns the lesson, and war, cinematically at least, is averted.

I saw the movie as a boy and was frightened. Other movies at the time — Red Dawn (1984), about teenagers using guerrilla warfare against Soviet invaders in Colorado, and Rocky IV (1985), in which the all-American boxer fights the almost robotically evil Russian Ivan Drago — left little room for doubt. The Soviets were not to be trusted. They were plotting something, somewhere, and had to be restrained.

Restraint was the motif of WarGames. Restraint of the Russians, yes, but that was only a subplot. The Americans were restraining the Soviet communists, but the system the Americans had set up to do so also needed restraining. Alas, that system had a mind of its own, as evidenced by another U.S. government neologism WarGames taught us: DEFCON. It stands for “defense readiness condition” and, like MAD, is a byproduct of looming nuclear Armageddon. Beginning in the late 1950s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other military brass and civilian overseers developed DEFCON as a way to ratchet up or down the readiness of American armed forces. DEFCON 1, the highest rung on the readiness ladder, indicates that nuclear war is imminent.

This was hardly bluff or posture. Beginning in the summer of 1946, not even one year after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. government detonated atomic, then thermonuclear, weapons of increasing megaton yields. Film of mushroom clouds rising over the Bikini Atoll following the 1954 Castle Bravo tests is famous. But there were many others. By 1992, the year the tests ostensibly ended, Washington had conducted over a thousand. Though the tests are gone, the threat remains. Today, the U.S. government deploys some 1,770 nuclear warheads and has a stockpile of more than 5,100, though this is but a sixth or so of the maximum of more than 31,000 the government had in 1967. Washington was not just playing around with acronyms and numbers when it set up the DEFCON parameter. It was serious — and so were the Russians — about unleashing the Apocalypse to keep a geopolitical adversary at bay. The calculus of MAD may have been just that — madness — but it was cold, hard logic, too. The whole world will be blown to smithereens, the thinking went, before we see it fall into the hands of the enemy.