Category: Essays

Poetic Nods to an Atomic Indochina

~ Michael A. Innes

Bernard Fall… nuclear strategist? One of the pieces of archival treasure I discovered among Fall’s personal papers is a document that reveals his awareness of and engagement with nuclear issues.

In a general sense, that’s a claim that could be made of just about anyone at the time. At the height of the Cold War, social and political anxieties over the prospect of nuclear war were real and pervasive. This was c. 1960-1961, right around the same time Fall was seeing Street Without Joy: Indochina at War, 1946-1954 – that quintessential artefact of Vietnam-era counterinsurgency – fully realized and published. Apparently he wasn’t busy enough, because meanwhile he was, according to what I found in his papers, also contributing expert input and analysis to a U.S Air Force Command and Staff College exercise.

It was a 24-hour affair a year in the planning, and focused on a hypothetical deployment of forces to Laos, then of much more immediate concern to U.S. policymakers than was Vietnam. In typical Fall style, he submitted a memoranda to exercise planners in which he tore apart the scenario they had developed for being completely “unrealistic” (underlined in the original memo). It was, he wrote, “so divorced from the military, political, terrain and even meteorological realities of war in Laos as to make any attempted solution along its lines unlikely to ever be applicable to Laos or to a similar situation.” He went on to detail exactly why this was the case, one paragraph per faulty scenario reality.

This is pretty standard Fall: when someone got their details wrong, he would basically eat them alive. But this wasn’t even the fun part. In addition to pointing out the flaws in the exercise design, he also offered a few observations about parts of it that could work, and it’s here that his engagement with nuclear practicalities comes through. Exercise participants were meant to include in their planning any and all possible options. The use of nuclear weapons was tabled, and one move that participants suggested was to disrupt cross-border logistics by nuking the mountain passes between Laos and North Vietnam.

Fall thought that while it might work on the ground units and bases in the area, Soviet airlift would limit its effectiveness. Use of battlefield nuclear weapons, on the other hand, could work in another way. “One new favorable factor is the creation by the Communists of a large supply center based on the three airfields of the Xien-Kouang Plateau (XK, Plaine des Jarres, and Phong-Savan). This does offer a valuable target inside Laos which no doubt can be taken out by small nuclear weapons.” It’s a striking comment, not least because it’s so far removed from the kind of subject matter for which Fall is remember these days.

Fall had made the occasional poetic allusion to nuclear anxieties in his military histories, but they were rare and fleeting and not the point of his published writing. The brutally unsympathetic nods to atomic Indochina contained in this exercise paperwork puts a different spin on things. And yes, this is a bit of shameless self-promotion: if you want the details and the source references, you’ll have to buy the book (or at least wait until it comes out, and then use Amazon to look inside and pilfer whatever details you need).

In Praise of Paper

~ Michael A. Innes

Amid all the preoccupation with Big Data over the last few years, one might be forgiven for missing the telltale signs of a  low-key aesthetic return to (fixation with?) paper. It was there metaphorically, through apps that attempted to digitally capture the sensory aspects of paper-based media. But paper itself maintains its hold on the imagination, in part because of the kinds of communication and practices that it represents.

The Clinton Presidential library, for example, recently released tens of thousands of pages of previously withheld documents. A boon to historians, it recalls an era, according to former Clinton speechwriter Jeff Shesol, in which officials working in litigious Washington were dissuaded from keeping records, schedules, diaries and the like, lest those records become forensic grist.

That concern – not producing the petards of one’s own (or one’s colleague’s) potential future hoisting  – still exists. But “in their wonky way,” Shesol writes, the Clinton papers “demonstrate the basic human compulsion to write things down—to work out and test ideas on paper, to engage in debates and occasional snits, to record and transcribe and (in my own case) doodle, and, to a surprising degree, to let down one’s guard.”

There are worlds of fact and flavor contained in such materials. Their survival represents a form of historical transparency and accountability that is inherently valuable, not least because it seizes and preserves the essence of, in Shisol’s terms, “government at work”.

I think it’s fair to say that insofar as “paper” and “writing it down” can be understood euphemistically, they evoke an aesthetic and practical compunction that is fundamentally archival. They refer to the accumulation of historically valuable  document collections and preserving them for a variety of purposes.

In this case, “paper” and “writing” might equally be understood through a variety of framing lenses: as metaphor  – one thing understood in terms of another; or as metanym – the whole understood through reference to its parts.

It almost goes without saying that not all records are on paper, and that a good number of datum generated these days begin and end their lives as electrons. But it is interesting that with Big Data comes a sort of Paper Blindness – that if it is not available electronically, then it either doesn’t exist at all or isn’t worth the bother of finding.

That a significant volume of paper-based information never gets seen by ordinary human beings isn’t remarkable. There is simply too much for any one person to consume, or tranches of it are too contentious to touch, or are tainted by their provenance,  or are classified, and so on.

If there’s a concern in this, it’s that enhanced or amplified accessibility in some areas also closes down the space for it in others. One day our expectations of  vast troves of historically relevant material may be confronted with…. a void.

Some of that is accepted and acceptable practice. Some of it isn’t.

Physical documents are regularly winnowed from archival collections, lost to water, fire and termites, abandoned in mouldering heaps, forgotten in attics, set aflame in wartime, or – in the lived vernacular of government at work – too secret, sensitive, or scandalous to ever see the light of day.

This has always been true, and it is as true in places like Quetta or Kandahar as it has been in Washington and Whitehall.