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He could provide for that only in the same way that President Eisenhower had: namely, by allowing lower commanders to exercise their own judgment in those circumstances. In any case, the two admirals found this sub-delegation totally compatible, even obligatory, in terms of naval traditions. But in this situation the logic that applied to the Navy and to CINCPAC applied as well to all the other unified and specified commanders to whom the president had allegedly delegated authority. These were the theater commanders in Europe, Alaska, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Strategic Air Command, as well as NORAD, the air defense command. Unless the president forbade such further delegation explicitly (and perhaps even if he did), the example of his own delegation to CINCPAC and other theater commanders seemed likely to be imitated, not only in the Pacific but also in other theaters around the world. And it was implicit in what these officers told me that the president had not explicitly forbidden these theater commanders to delegate that authority any further in the manner that CINCPAC had sub-delegated to the Seventh Fleet. Nevertheless, I found it hard to believe that the president would have wanted any further delegations, or that he even knew they existed. His own action of delegation—assuming these letters really existed—distributed the authority to just over half a dozen four-star generals and admirals. Further delegations multiplied the number of individuals with authority, under some conditions, to initiate nuclear war, and also drew into that circle officers of progressively lower rank, lesser experience and maturity, and narrower responsibilities and access to information. At some point, as one moved down the chain of command, the advantages of providing further assurance of a retaliatory response would be outweighed—it appeared to me—by the increased risks of a wrong response. Not only were the risks progressively greater as lower units and levels of command became involved, but from the president’s perspective, the need or incentive for subsequent delegations was progressively smaller, involving smaller portions of the overall retaliatory forces. But to a commander at the lower level, whose mission understandably seemed to him to have transcendent importance if it involved any nuclear weapons at all, it wouldn’t look that way. He would want to be sure that “his” weapons took part in the big war—the fight for national survival and victory. If you left the decision whether to delegate further to each successive layer of command, I suspected it would be likely to go down to the bottom.
The Doomsday Machine
Daniel Ellsberg
this practice and the science behind it are neither positive thinking nor another program for manufacturing positive experiences, both of which are usually wasted on the brain. This is about transforming fleeting experiences into lasting improvements in your neural net worth. The inner strengths we need for well-being, coping, and success are built from brain structure—but to help our ancestors survive, the brain evolved a negativity bias that makes it like Velcro for bad experiences but Teflon for good ones.
Hardwiring Happiness
Rick Hanson
The Mongols who inherited Genghis Khan’s empire exercised a determined drive to move products and commodities around and to combine them in ways that produced entirely novel products and unprecedented invention. When their highly skilled engineers from China, Persia, and Europe combined Chinese gunpowder with Muslim flamethrowers and applied European bell-casting technology, they produced the cannon, an entirely new order of technological innovation, from which sprang the vast modern arsenal of weapons from pistols to missiles. While each item had some significance, the larger impact came in the way the Mongols selected and combined technologies to create unusual hybrids. The Mongols displayed a devoutly and persistently internationalist zeal in their political, economic, and intellectual endeavors. They sought not merely to conquer the world but to institute a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all languages.
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
Jack Weatherford
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