From the Archives - A Moral Argument for Civil Defense: Advice to America’s Catholic Bishops (1983)

This article appeared exactly 35 years ago today, in the January 1, 1983, issue of Crisis Magazine, a Catholic journal of opinion (previously known as Catholicism in Crisis).

CRISIS MAGAZINE - JANUARY 1, 1983

A Moral Argument for Civil Defense: Advice to America’s Catholic Bishops

RICHARD E. SINCERE, JR.

“Justice demands that those who do not make war not have war made upon them.” This is a central teaching of the Catholic Church that is repeated emphatically in the second draft of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ pastoral letter on peace and war. Just war doctrine demands discrimination in battle and both the United States and the Soviet Union in part meet this moral requirement in their strategic plans, which do not target nuclear weapons against civilian populations as such. However, to meet it fully, both nations must also protect civilian populations from the effects of enemy weapons.

The bishops do not adequately address the question of civil defense in their draft letter, nor is it likely that they will do so in the final version next May. In spite of that oversight, I would like to set forth here the moral principles which compel a government to protect its people from weapons of mass destruction, principles drawn in part from the bishops’ own document.

Moral Foundations: Just War and Vatican II

Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, condemned indiscriminate warfare by saying: “Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation.” This moral judgment has obvious applications to gruesome examples of modern warfare: the obliteration bombings of Coventry and Tokyo, the blitz against London, the firebombings of Dresden and Hamburg, the use of chemical weapons in Afghanistan, Laos, and Kampuchea. By extension we can apply it to the extermination policies of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao — even though these were not acts of war in the conventional sense.

A mistaken interpretation of the Council’s judgment maintains that any use of nuclear weapons would be “indiscriminate” and therefore damnable. Yet the evolution of modern technology made possible pinpoint attacks on purely military targets. Weapons such as the neutron bomb have been designed primarily with the principle of discrimination in mind: enhanced radiation warheads arrest the aggressive movement of tank forces without affecting innocent civilian populations nearby. Their lethal effects are short-lived and narrowly targeted.

However, intercontinental strategic weapons are still so destructive that even pinpoint bombings of missile silos can spread harmful radioactive fallout indiscriminately to civilian areas. Simple measures can be taken to protect against these effects. These must be examined in the light of moral reasoning.

Defense Against Nuclear Weapons

The American bishops write, contrary to the facts, that “the presumption exists that defense against a nuclear attack is not feasible.” They ignore extensive and presumably effective air defenses deployed by the Soviet Union, along with the available technology for ballistic missile defense (BMD) — whether in the form of antiballistic missiles (in place in the Soviet Union, abandoned by the United States), space-based laser — or conventional-BMD, or sophisticated anti-weapon weapons like particle beams. Moreover, the bishops all but overlook the possibility of passive civilian defenses — except in this passage:

“In discussing non-violent means of defense, some attention must be given to existing programs for civil defense against nuclear attack, including blast and fallout shelters and relocation plans. It is unclear in the public mind whether these are intended to offer significant protection against at least some forms of nuclear attack or are being put into place to enhance the credibility of the strategic deterrent forces by demonstrating an ability to survive attack.”

The bishops here unwittingly present two strong reasons to support civil defense: emphatically, significant protection against the effects of nuclear weapons is possible; secondarily, the ability to survive indeed increases the credibility of the deterrent strategy of the United States government. Clearly this is the most peaceful component of nuclear deterrence: it requires no weapons and possesses none of the moral ambiguity of nuclear weapons. If the bishops someday see fit to condemn the mere possession of nuclear weapons, they shall have no justification to condemn the peaceful means to protect innocent civilians against an aggressor.

The bishops recommend that an independent panel of scientists, engineers, and physicians examine the feasibility of civil defense as a means to survive a nuclear war. Yet many such studies have been done over the past thirty years. The consensus is that nuclear war is indeed survivable and, in the words of one of the latest studies, “no insuperable barrier to recovery exists.” It would indeed be horrible, but preparations for the potentially horrible can significantly mitigate its consequences. If targeting civilian populations in your enemy’s territory is morally unjustifiable, acquiescing in the unnecessary death of innocents in your own country is morally repugnant. It deserves unhesitating condemnation.

Civil Defense: A Life or Death Issue

“Questions of war and peace,” write the bishops, “have a profoundly moral dimension which responsible Christians cannot ignore. They are questions of life and death.” War is evil not in itself but because it is the cause of human suffering and death. To alleviate suffering and prevent death is ipso facto a moral good. That is why an increased American commitment to civil defense is a moral imperative. Every reason exists for the bishops to express their support for such a commitment: (1) Above all, civil defense saves lives. Estimates vary, but in the event of nuclear war some civil defense will save more lives than no civil defense. (The Swiss have a slogan: “Better civil defense without nuclear war than nuclear war without civil defense.”) (2) As I argued earlier, civil defense is an integral component of a deterrent strategy, the only component that is objectively peaceful. It is also, many experts argue, the most effective part of a deterrent strategy. Soviet military planners and their leaders in the Kremlin are cautious. If they have no guarantee of victory — that is, if the United States can demonstrate an ability to survive, recover, and challenge Soviet hegemony — they will not be as ready to risk a strategic conflict.

Nuclear war would no doubt be the most tragic disaster ever to befall mankind. There is no need to make it any worse by ignoring its consequences. There are, of course, some problems with civil defense as it exists today: crisis relocation is far from perfect, shelters are not invulnerable, panic and confusion may still occur. Yet to refuse to plan for these contingencies is as sinful as launching a nuclear weapon in the first place.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that “it is the concrete individual who lends meaning to the human race. We do not think that a human being is valuable because he is a member of the race; it is rather the opposite: the human race is valuable because it is composed of human beings.” The responsibility of the nation is to preserve and protect as many human beings as possible. To neglect that responsibility reveals a moral turpitude worse than the Nazi Holocaust, worse than the Stalinist purges, indeed worse than any conceivable use of nuclear weapons. To commit ourselves to civil defense is to reaffirm a choice God made available to us several thousand years ago: “I set before you life or death, a blessing or curse. Choose life then, so that you and your descendants may live in the love of Yahweh your god, obeying his voice, clinging to him; for in this your life consists …” (Deuteronomy 11:26)


Richard E. Sincere, Jr., is research assistant for church and society at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a member of the visiting faculty of the Georgetown University School for Summer and Continuing Education, and president of the Washington, D.C. chapter of the American Civil Defense Association.

From the Archives: 'School Training for Civil Defense' (1981)

Some background may shed light on this 1981 article, retrieved from my paper archives.  Fortunately the story behind it has already been told, in a remembrance of celebrated debate coach James J. Unger, which I posted in April 2008:

The high school debate topic the previous year (1981-82) was "Resolved: That the federal government should establish minimum educational standards for elementary and secondary schools in the United States." I came up with the idea, based upon research I was doing in the real world -- if the world of Washington think tanks can be described as "real" -- that we should write a case about civil defense education in elementary and secondary schools.

The problem with this idea was that there was little, if any, information available about civil defense education. (There was some material from the 1960s, but nothing recent and little that was usable by debaters.) But I was convinced this could be a winning case.

So I asked Professor Unger, "What do you do when something is topical but so obscure that there is nothing written about it that you can use as evidence for inherency?" He replied that there was not much to do in that situation, other than to intensify your research and find the evidence you need.

My solution: since I had already had one article published on the topic of civil defense -- appearing in the Washington Star on October 10, 1980, months after I submitted it and based on research I did during the summer 1980 forensics institute -- and had subsequently become an officer in the American Civil Defense Association, I could just write another one, with a focus on education, that could be used as evidence to support our case.

And that's what I did. I submitted the article to several newspapers, and it was published in the New York Tribune (a sister newspaper to The Washington Times), just days before the institute tournament. We inserted the appropriate quotations into the case (not citing me by name), held others in reserve for second affirmative and rebuttals, and moved forward.

The case was relatively successful, with two of my teams making it into the elimination rounds. After the last round that one of the teams lost, they told me that my qualifications as a source had become an issue in the debate. The judge from that round added: "Your boys defended you valiantly, but they lost on other issues."

This is a long tale meant to be background of something that happened a couple of years later. As it was told to me, late one night while preparing for a tournament, members of the Georgetown debate team had hit a brick wall, unable to find the evidence they needed to complete a brief they were working on. Professor Unger popped up and said, "Well, why don't we just pull a Rick Sincere?" -- meaning, why not write an article and get it published in a reputable newspaper or journal? I don't think they ever followed through on that suggestion, but just the idea that my name became associated with a new debate tactic was enough to warm my ego.

This article was published in The News World, a New York City daily newspaper (later called the New York City Tribune), on July 28, 1981:

Richard Sincere

School Training for Civil Defense

Perhaps no aspect of the strategic competition between the United States and the Soviet Union is ignored more than civil defense and emergency preparedness. Americans waste too much effort in debates which obfuscate strategic issues by statistical manipulation of throw-weights, megatonnages, and MIRV capabilities. Public and policymakers alike are blind to the reality of the strategic balance: Deterrence of nuclear war depends as much on the willingness and ability to survive such a conflict as it does on the technical capacity to fight the battle.

Soviet political and military policies do not reflect a frightened belief in the universal destruction of nuclear war. Instead, they maintain that nuclear weapons are instruments for war-fighting. In many ways, Soviet leaders view nuclear weapons as extensions of conventional war-fighting techniques; Soviet military literature categorizes war by who does the fighting, not by the weapons which they use. Most importantly, Soviet military strategy is fundamentally a survival-oriented strategy.

One result of this thinking has been the establishment of a nationwide civil defense network. The chief of Soviet civil defense is an army general, filling an office equivalent to our own secretary of the Army. The Soviets treat civil defense as a co-equal branch of the military. On the other hand, in the United States responsibility for civil defense lies buried in an obscure bureau of the Department of Commerce called the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Which country takes its self-protection more seriously?

In accord with the principle of protecting their people from the ravages of nuclear war, the Soviets have launched an extensive training program in all public schools from elementary to university levels, and as continuing education industrial plants and communities. Towns and villages celebrate “civil defense days” as holidays, with sports competitions and games geared toward teaching the citizens survival techniques. And if some Soviet citizens scoff at these methods, they will at least have some skills to draw on in an emergency.

A widely-circulated Soviet civil defense manual state: “Civil defense training in the public schools occupies an important place in preparing the people of our country for protection against weapons of mass destruction.” In contrast, the editor of the Journal of Civil Defense told me recently that “civil defense education has been badly neglected in the United States in the past few years. With no initiative from the higher levels, it apparently has fallen off to almost zero.”

This attitude seems unlikely to change. The shame of this neglect is that civil defense survival methods are so easy to teach. Generally, Soviet schools spend no more than 15-20 minutes each week on it, mostly in conjunction with sportsmanlike competition. One civil defense game involves nearly 20 million children each summer. The final match of this game, called “Summer Lightning,” is played in Leningrad as an object of intense national interest.

In the United States, inaccessibility to civil defense literature is the greatest obstacle to survival training. A good beginning for civil defense instruction in America’s public schools would be for the Department of Education to sponsor distribution of survival handbooks (such as Dr. Cresson Kearny’s “Nuclear War Survival Skills,” published in 1979) to all school libraries. Such a minimum requirement would allow individual school districts to expand civil defense education as much as they like, especially if assistance from the Department of Defense and FEMA were available.

Civil defense education will immeasurably increase the maintenance of a peaceful deterrent to nuclear war. As long as no civil defense training is available to United States citizens, our country remains a willing hostage to Soviet weapons with little hope of survival or recovery. Survival plays a major role in Soviet strategy and plays almost no role in our own. To neglect such a vital aspect of the strategic nuclear balance is to assure our own destruction.

Richard Sincere is research assistant for church and society at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. A member of the American Civil Defense Association, he also holds a degree in international affairs from Georgetown University.

Subsequent to this and other newspaper articles on civil defense, I testified on the topic before a subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, discussed it on many television and radio shows, and published a journal article that was reprinted in pamphlet form by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which included a foreword by actor Lorne Greene. It was a central focus of my professional life in the 1980s but faded into the background after I finished my master's degree at the LSE and the Cold War came to an end. Civil defense and nuclear weapons policy took a back seat to Africa policy.

As an added bonus, here is a 1950s-era government training (propaganda?) video about school-based civil defense education.

Despite the jokes about it, civil defense in the schools was much more than "duck and cover."

Sanctions: South Africa, Libya, and the Cuban Embargo

Today's announcement from Presidents Barack Obama and Raul Castro about progress toward normalizing relations between the United States and Cuba and the possible end of the 55-year-old embargo on trade with that island nation reminded me of a time, long ago, when I was testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee subcommittee on Africa.

The topic was sanctions against South Africa, with an aim of ending apartheid there.

I testified that sanctions were a futile gesture and never worked the way they were intended.

The subcommittee chairman, Howard Wolpe (D-Mich.) identifying me as a conservative -- I was testifying alongside Alan Keyes -- tried to trap me by asking whether I also opposed sanctions against Libya or Cuba. I said yes. He was surprised but commended me for my consistency.

Here's a clip from C-SPAN of that hearing on November 5, 1987:

Here's the entire three-and-a-half hour hearing, which includes testimony from Chester A. Crocker, Assistant Secretary, Department of State-African Affairs; Thomas Reilly Donahue, Secretary-Treasurer, AFL-CIO; Nicholas Haysom, Deputy Director, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg-Centre for Applied Legal Studies; Alan Keyes, Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute; James Mndaweni, President, National Council of Trade Unions; Thokoana "James" James Motlatsi, President, South Africa-National Union of Mineworkers; Patrick J. O'Farrell, Executive Director, African-American Labor Center; Richard Sincere, Research Associate, Ethics and Public Policy Center; Damu Smith, Executive Director, Washington Office on Africa; and Peggy Taylor, DirectorAFL-CIO-Legislation.

My Brush with Greatness: Edward Teller (1908-2003)

Today would have been the 106th birthday of nuclear physicist Edward Teller, who has often been called the "father of the hydrogen bomb."  Teller was also an advocate against government secrecy who probably would have relished the opportunity to engage in the debate about the NSA that has resulted from the revelations of Edward Snowden.  He was also a principal advocate for the development of what came to be known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, or "Star Wars."

When Teller died in 2003, I wrote an article for a local Charlottesville newspaper, The Hook, which at the time had been running a series called "My Brush with Greatness."  My piece appeared as a back-of-the-book commentary piece.

For some reason, I have not previously rescued this piece for re-publication in this space, although it has been available on The Hook's archives.  (Sadly, The Hook ceased publication late last year, so how long and how available its archives will be remains an open question. The photo of Teller and me, reproduced below, that accompanied the article is already missing from the paper's web site.)

This article appeared in the print edition of The Hook on September 18, 2003.

Edward Teller: My brush with greatness

While the entertainment world reels from the loss of Warren Zevon, Johnny Cash, and John Ritter, the world stage will long remember the controversial cold warrior bomb-builder Edward Teller, whose September 9 death got lost in the shuffle. One local remembers the man who built the horrifying "super." –editor

RICHARD SINCERE

It would be a lie for me to say that Edward Teller and I were friends. It would even be a stretch to call us acquaintances, although we were colleagues on one side of a vital public debate at the height of the Cold War.

Edward Teller and Rick Sincere, c. 1983

The best I can say is that Edward Teller and I crossed paths on about a dozen occasions in the 1980s, participating in conferences together, and engaging in short but substantive conversations on nuclear weapons policy, U.S.-Soviet relations, and international politics.

Teller, who died on September 9 at his home in California at the age of 95, was known as the "father of the hydrogen bomb." He participated in the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb, and for many years was head of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which pursued fundamental research in nuclear physics and applied sciences.

My most memorable encounter with Teller was not the first one, in 1981. Rather, it was one of the last meetings we had, on November 16, 1988, at the Washington Hilton Hotel in the nation's capital.

On that occasion, Edward Teller, the American "father of the hydrogen bomb," met for the first time Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet "father of the hydrogen bomb." Sakharov, who as a dissident and human rights activist was forced by the Soviet regime to live in internal exile for many years, was in Washington on his first trip to the United States. (This was in the era of glasnost and perestroika-­ openness and reform-­ ushered in by former Communist Party leader Mikhail Gorbachev.)

The meeting between the two famous physicists was arranged by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think-tank for which I worked at the time. On that night, Teller was to receive the Shelby Cullom Davis Award for "integrity and courage in public life" at a dinner attended by some 750 people in government, business, the academy, and journalism. A few days before the dinner, we learned that Sakharov would be in town and that he had a desire to meet Teller.

As the crowd mingled at the cocktail reception several floors below, the president of the Center, Ernest Lefever, and I waited anxiously for Teller and Sakharov to arrive. Teller came first, accompanied by the massive walking stick he always carried with him. The three of us made some small talk when there was a knock at the door: Sakharov, accompanied by a Russian-English interpreter.

Andrei Sakharov and Edward Teller

They greeted each other like old friends, although the two had never met before. They sat together on a sofa and chatted amiably about the issues that motivated them: international stability, human rights, and, above all, nuclear physics. They spoke in soft tones, and we left them alone. What passed between them that night, in private, was known only to Teller and Sakharov.

Teller's career was a storied one, and he earned both scorn and accolades in his long life. Never one to mince words, he criticized government officials regardless of political party or ideology when he thought they were on the wrong path. He led a lonely but articulate crusade against U.S. government secrecy, arguing that it was pointless to classify, for example, reports on nuclear weapons research, because the Soviets were able to obtain these reports by stealth and espionage anyway.

The only people left in the dark were American voters, who were then unable to make sensible, fully informed decisions about public policy.

This approach was consonant with Teller's lifelong trust in democracy. In 1950 he wrote: "It is not the scientist's job to determine whether a hydrogen bomb should be constructed, whether it should be used, or how it should be used. This responsibility rests with the American people and with their chosen representatives."

Teller earned the enmity of "peaceniks," appeasers, nuclear freezers, left-wing ideologues, and Communist fellow travelers. In the 1980s, he was hounded by operatives of Lyndon LaRouche's political cult, who heckled him at public speaking events and tried to embarrass him for his support of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the anti-missile project known derisively as "Star Wars."

It was said that the only human casualty of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979 was Edward Teller: So exhausted by traveling around the country, speaking out calmly against the Chicken Littles who declared Three Mile Island a disaster, Teller suffered a heart attack and was incapacitated for several weeks.

Teller, of course, had his admirers, too-­ not least among them those who felt that a strong defense posture was necessary in the face of Soviet expansionism, and especially those who felt that true defensive strategies (including civil defense programs and anti-missile programs like SDI) were morally, strategically, and politically imperative.

On that November night in 1988, President Ronald Reagan said that Teller was "a sterling example of what scientific knowledge, enlightened by moral sense and a dedication to the principles of freedom and justice, can do to help all mankind." The President added that Teller was "one of the giants of American science, and one of the bulwarks of American freedom."

Richard Sincere is co-editor of Promise or Peril: The Strategic Defense Initiative, and author of Civil Defense: A Moral, Political, and Strategic Approach, both published in 1986 by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, as well as of other books.

It wasn't until I decided to write this blog post that I discovered how Edward Teller shared a birthday with my own father and also with the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Same day, different years in all three cases, however.)

Preparing for the Coming Viral Apocalypse (Please Retweet!)

More than 30 years ago, I was involved in the preparation of an anthology called The Apocalyptic Premise, which was edited by Ernest W. Lefever and E. Stephen Hunt and published by the Ethics and Public Policy Center.  The book gathered 31 essays about the then-current nuclear arms debate.

In an introduction, Lefever and Hunt define what they mean by the anthology's intriguing title, noting that, in public policy debates, "some ideas obscure desirable ends and confuse the means for reaching them."  They go on to say that

One such influential idea is "the apocalyptic premise," which has always flourished in times of trouble and uncertainty.  Both the Old Testament and the New Testament have vivid apocalyptic passages portraying how the world will end for both the righteous and the unrighteous....

But in current secular usage, an apocalyptic event is one that spells doom for a nation,  a civilization, or the human race itself...  In the nuclear era some secular apocalyptic prophets proclaim that the world will be destroyed by fire and brimstone unless their particular prescriptions for avoiding catastrophe are adopted.

In the context of the early 1980s, apocalypticism -- if I might coin a word (or not) -- dealt almost exclusively with fears of an imminently (immanently?) impending nuclear holocaust.  (See, for instance, my commentary on the ABC-TV movie, The Day After, which was broadcast the same year as The Apocalyptic Premise was published.)

End-times hysteria is nothing new.  It spread across Europe like hellfire in the years before the turn of the first millennium (around 1000 A.D.).

More recent years have seen a slew of end-times prophecies that have come and gone.  In 2011, for instance, radio preacher Harold Camping predicted the Rapture would take place on May 21 and then, when it didn't happen, said his calculations were off and the end of the world as we know it would instead take place in October.  Disappointed that the world did not end as he prophesied, Camping withdrew from public life and died a few weeks ago.

On January 9, Gon Ben Ari wrote about some recent apocalyptic predictions for The Jewish Daily Forward:

This may seem odd, but a surprisingly large chunk of the Western World believed we wouldn’t get to see 2013, purely because that’s what the Mayans thought. Most of these people never did anything else that Mayans did — never ate human flesh, for example, or at least never offered to pay for it. So why did they rush to embrace that specific bit of Mayan faith? Eschatology proves to be a human urge, just like hunger, sleep or love. We need to know that there’s at least a hint of a chance that the world is in danger, perhaps because it is too hard to care for anything that isn’t, or because it is easier to believe in a disaster that is inflicted on the planet from above than to admit to the one we cause daily. Secular media is fueled by eschatology — the Y2K bug, meteor scares, terrorist threats — with Hollywood blockbusters competing for the chance to feed it each summer. Who by fire? By water? By zombies?

If there is one thing in common among all the conflicting beliefs in the world, it is the belief that the world will come to an end. Hindus count down to the completion of Kali Yuga; Muslims await the arrival of Mahdi; Christians fear the Day of Wrath. Jewish participation in “hisuvei kitzim” — “end calculations” — is as harshly forbidden as it is widely practiced. Every great rabbi has an end date: The Vilna Gaon, Rashi, Maimonides. In 1927, Rabbi Avraham Yalin published a book in which he claimed that Zionism would be the end of the world and that it would reach its goal in 1948. He died in 1934 and never got to see which part came true. The Gemara itself claims that the world will get to be only 6,000 (Jewish) years old. In Gregorian Calendar time, this means 2,240.

Ben Ari went on to note that a prominent 18th-19th century rabbi prophesied that the end of the world would come in the Hebrew calendar's year 5775, which begins in September 2014.

In other dire warnings, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church last year said that permitting gay people to marry will either (depending on your interpretation of his remarks) be a sign of the apocalypse or will hasten the world's end.

Patriarch Kirill stated in a cathedral sermon:

This is a very dangerous apocalyptic symptom, and we must do everything in our powers to ensure that sin is never sanctioned in Russia by state law, because that would mean that the nation has embarked on a path of self-destruction.”

To take a current example that expresses our contemporary apocalyptic premise in a single word, Lou Dobbs, a popular and sometimes controversial TV host on Fox News, has written a new book published this week and called Upheaval, in which he argues that

the chief threats to the stability of our social order and economic well-being, indeed the very essence of our American way of life, go well beyond leagues of nation-states and ideologues who mean us harm.  The greatest threat of upheaval is a combination of those nation-states, ideological extremists, religious zealots, and the confluence of internal forces that are weakening our notion of who we are, diminishing our confidence in the American dream itself, and leaving many of our citizens and many of our leaders questioning American exceptionalism, our way of life, and our relationship to one another and to the world itself. The very idea of America is under great stress, from within and without.  The prospect of a great upheaval rises with each passing day that we decline to examine the consequences of the choices  we are making as a people and as a nation.  And these forces are allied, not in conspiracy, but in their contemporaneous array against us, our ideals, our values, and our nation's future.

Amidst this climate of dread and apprehension, even a possible shortage of Velveeta processed cheese within weeks of Super Bowl Sunday is being called a "cheesepocalypse," either mocking or reflecting the eschatological mood of the country.

The obsession with the apocalypse and the foreboding end of the world as we know it came to the attention of a Charlottesville financial advisor, David John Marotta, who described in last Sunday's Daily Progress how an off-hand remark on one of his blog posts ended up being distorted in a game of Internet telephone and, because of this distortion, ended up with a link to his post on the Drudge Report, bringing him a cascade of traffic and new visitors to his web site.

Marotta's December 11 blog post about preparing for possible emergencies is what stirred this apocalyptic pot. As he explains it,

Paul Bedard of the Washington Examiner picked up the story first in his Dec. 26 Washington Secrets column titled, "Be prepared: Wall Street advisor recommends guns, ammo for protection in collapse."

Three parts of the headline are misleading.

I am not a Wall Street advisor; I am in Charlottesville. My only connection to Wall Street is having my photo taken at the Bull and eating at the Deli. The article does mildly clarify, describing me as a "Wall Street expert" — true if that means investment advisor. However, future articles referencing Bedard's article were misled by this description.

Furthermore, I did not exactly recommend guns and ammo. I suggested that two-dozen items on the list are more important. This is mentioned in the article when Bedard quotes me as saying, "Firearms are the last item on the list, but they are on the list."

I did not suggest there would be a collapse. I had written in the first of the series, "There is the possibility of a precipitous decline, although a long and drawn out malaise is much more likely."

Bedard was accurate in stating, "Marotta said that many clients fear an end-of-the-world scenario. He doesn't agree with that outcome, but does with much of what has people worried."

The very popular Drudge Report picked up the story next and featured it above its banner: "Wall Street advisor recommend guns, ammo for protection in collapse." The original Washington Examiner article was also copied on multiple sites without comment. Over three days, we had a record 30,946 unique visitors to our two sites.

After suggesting that the viral nature of his otherwise non-descript blog post may reveal something about the changing mood of the country and a reversal of traditional left/right political roles, Marotta said the solution to this apocalyptic thinking may simply be to reduce the size and scope of government. This, he asserts, will have a calming effect on political tempers:

Moving in a more libertarian direction blends the concerns of the right and the left on the abuses of governmental involvement in everything from marriage to spying. A smaller government could focus on what we all agree is its rightful purpose.

Journal of Civil Defense - April 1981

The lesson I take from Marotta's experience isn't that I should emphasize libertarian ideas more. After all, I've been doing that for years, especially since the launch of this blog in December 2004.

Instead, I think I should draw more on my years in the civil defense movement -- years in which I rubbed shoulders with fallout shelter-builders, survivalists, nuclear physicists, and even TV's Ben Cartwright himself, actor Lorne Greene -- and write more about how to prepare for the coming apocalypse.  If I could do it in the 1980s, why not do it today?

Scary headlines that say "Grab your guns and gold and run for the hills!" may stimulate the kind of blog traffic that Marotta experienced, and -- one would hope -- a corresponding increase in advertising revenue (and maybe a few cray-cray comments to enhance our entertainment value).

The end of the world as we know it is more than just a song title. It's a way of life.

So -- grab your gas masks, stock up on Bitcoin, and bunker down in the nearest mountain. Rediscover your inner Boy Scout ("Be prepared!"). The eschaton is imminent and it begs for your enthusiastic participation.

And please don't forget to leave a tip for your blogger and share this article on social media.

Winning through 'winsomeness, equanimity, and a moderate temperament'

(This article appeared originally on Virginia Politics on Demand on August 15, 2013.)

My long-ago colleague and collaborator at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Peter Wehner, has an insightful and instructive article posted at Commentary magazine, headlined "Why Tone in American Politics Matters."

He points out that, as personally satisfying as combativeness in politics may be, it seldom paves the path to electoral victory. (I'd add that it seldom leads to legislative success, either.)

Looking at history and at current conditions, Wehner notes that American voters are non-ideological by their nature, and that is why one's tone matters as much as, if not more than, one's stated positions on policy issues.

"The willingness to fight for a cause is often an admirable thing," he writes,

and many of us were drawn to politics in large part because of a desire to advance a set of convictions. That effort elicits opposition, which in turn leads to clashes. That is the nature of politics in a republic and something that can’t (and shouldn’t) be avoided. Politics ain’t beanbag.

But in choosing to fight, one needs to pick the most favorable terrain possible–and even then (and whenever possible) to wage battles with affability, a touch of grace, and in a manner that projects steadiness and reasonableness. Winsomeness, equanimity, and a moderate temperament (which is different than moderate policies) are what most voters are looking for in candidates–especially from people who have strong philosophical convictions. It’s a mistake to assume that in order to be principled one has to be alienating and agitated.

This is a message worth repeating -- and worth scrutinizing, for that matter -- but above all, it's a message that should be taken to heart by activists and candidates alike.

Launch of a New Weblog: 'Book Reviews by Rick Sincere'

Although the first posts appeared several days ago, I have waited until today to announce the launch of a new blog devoted exclusively to book reviews. Its title is "Book Reviews by Rick Sincere" and its subtitle is "An archive of articles and essays written from 1980 to the present."

It had occurred to me that many of the book reviews I have written over the years have never been available in a digital format (or findable on line). Part of the reason for this is that my heyday as a book reviewer was in the 1980s and early 1990s, although I have periodically reviewed new books since then.

As I explain in my "preface" to the new web site,

While I aim for this blog to deal exclusively in reviews of books, I may from time to time include interviews with authors, either in prose or video formats, or posts about the publishing industry. I hope, however, to remain focused on the printed word on bound pages.

My delay in announcing this new blog launch can be easily explained. I simply wanted there to be a substantial amount of material on the new site for people to read, so that it would not look like a paltry effort or a start-up that will soon be abandoned.

I can guarantee that the latter eventuality is unlikely. I have been digging through my (disorganized) files from the past 30 years and have already found dozens of what will probably turn out to be hundreds of book reviews, not to mention a dizzying array of other articles that I had forgotten about. (Those non-book-related articles will someday find their way to this blog.) Most of the essays and articles relate to foreign policy (with a heavy emphasis on Africa and nuclear weapons policies), although some address issues in education, economics, regulation, and popular culture.

I am quite excited about this new opportunity to recover otherwise lost essays and reviews. I hope that their new availability will be helpful to researchers looking for information about the history of the last fifth of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st.

Here is a sample of my first 20 posts on Book Reviews by Rick Sincere (which can be easily found at http://rickreviewsbooks.blogspot.com/:

'The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium'
'Beyond Queer: Challenging Gay Left Orthodoxy'
'Waging Nuclear Peace: The Technology and Politics of Nuclear Weapons'
'Titanic Legacy: Disaster as Media Event and Myth'
'Hold the Roses,' by Rose Marie

'Breathing Under Water and Other European Essays'
'The Struggle' and 'Dialogue in Williamsburg'
'South Africa’s War Against Capitalism'
'A History of South Africa' by Leonard Thompson
'The Counterfeit Ark: Crisis Relocation for Nuclear War'

'Justice and War in the Nuclear Age'
'In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government'
'Politics and Government in African States, 1960-1985'
'The Spaniards: A Portrait of the New Spain'
'How to Make Nuclear Weapons Obsolete'

'Breakfast in Hell: A Doctor’s Experiences of the Ethiopian Famine'
'Law and the Grenada Mission'

Looking back at the "Introduction" to this blog in December 2004, I find that my original intention was to make it an archive of previously-published materials. That mission has changed over time, and Rick Sincere News and Thoughts is much more eclectic than I thought it would be at the beginning, half a decade ago. I hope that Book Reviews by Rick Sincere will maintain its discipline and focus. If it does not, I invite readers to give me a verbal spanking.

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Remembering Ernest W. Lefever

My habit of waiting until the late hours of the evening to read the early morning newspaper sometimes serves me poorly.

One such occasion was last night (about 3:00 a.m., actually), when I turned to the obituary pages of Thursday's Washington Post to discover that my mentor and first professional employer, Ernest W. Lefever, had passed away.

According to the Post's Adam Bernstein:

Ernest W. Lefever, 89, who founded a conservative public policy organization in Washington and was an embattled nominee for a State Department human rights job under President Ronald Reagan, died July 29 at a Church of the Brethren nursing home in New Oxford, Pa. He had Lewy Body dementia, a progressive brain disorder.

Dr. Lefever, a Chevy Chase resident, was an international affairs specialist with the National Council of Churches, a staff consultant on foreign affairs to then-Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey (D-Minn.) and a senior researcher at the Brookings Institution before starting the Ethics and Public Policy Center in 1976. The center studies the link between Judeo-Christian morality and national and foreign policy.

Bernstein's review of the life of Ernest Lefever focuses, as one might have expected, on one of those episodes that could be categorized as either a high or a low in one's life, depending on your perspective.

That would be Dr. Lefever's nomination by President Ronald Reagan to serve as Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. Dr. Lefever eventually asked the President to withdraw his nomination after it had been entwined in controversy (much of it, in my opinion, manufactured) and political opposition. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Charles Percy (R-Ill.) was unhelpful in pressing the confirmation forward, to say the least.

Although Dr. Lefever's views on foreign policy (and particularly how human rights issues should be treated) were virtually identical to those of Jeane Kirkpatrick, who had been easily confirmed as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, he met a roadblock thrown up by those who differed with those views.

To summarize those views, at the risk of oversimplifying: The United States should treat authoritarian and totalitarian states differently, because authoritarian states -- such as, in those days, Chile and Argentina -- are more likely to be reformed from within and become liberal democracies than totalitarian states (such as the Soviet Union).

Indeed, in the years that followed, Chile and Argentina, as well as South Korea and Taiwan, did reform themselves and became model democracies. Greece, Spain, and Portugal are also examples of reform from within, which were fresh in the minds of Lefever and Kirkpatrick as they were making their arguments in the late 1970s.

It was much more difficult to dislodge totalitarian dictatorships because they controlled civil society (or an ersatz civil society) as well as politics and the economy. In authoritarian states, there were usually autonomous sources of moral and civil authority -- such as the Catholic Church -- that were lacking in totalitarian countries.

In any case, Lefever's views were shaped by decades of experience, not of the ivory tower, but of on-the-ground research around the world.

As the Washington Post article notes, Lefever served in Europe after World War II repatriating prisoners of war and other refugees, working under the auspices of the YMCA. It does not note that he worked in the concentration camps set up by the Roosevelt administration for Japanese-Americans during the war, helping to comfort them in their time of distress.

Lefever often told the story of how his pacifist views changed to more realist views when, somewhere in what later became East Germany, he saw a graffito that showed a swastika and a hammer-and-sickle with an equals sign between them. He realized through his work in Europe that Nazism and Communism were equally oppressive.

Beyond his humanitarian work in war-torn Europe, Dr. Lefever was widely traveled throughout his life. I would guess that he visited nearly every country in sub-Saharan Africa, the major countries of South and Southeast Asia (including Vietnam), and much of East Asia, as well. The results of his travels and research can be seen in the 20+ books and countless articles he wrote for policy journals and academic publications.

The Post notes Lefever's association with Hubert Humphrey. It doesn't specify that Lefever was the principal drafter of the Democratic Party's platform plank on Vietnam during the 1968 Chicago Convention.

During the 1970s, Lefever became associated with a group of disaffected liberal Democrats -- he was one of them -- who became known as "neo-conservatives." Sometimes known as "Scoop Jackson Democrats," many of them came out of a New York-based social democratic tradition that insisted on opposing Stalinism and, later, Soviet expansionism and adventurism. They generally maintained, at least for a while, that the welfare state was generally a good thing, and they supported the Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.

Among the prominent neo-conservatives of those days -- a time, as George F. Will recently put it, "when that designation was more relevant to domestic than foreign policy" -- were Irving Kristol (father of Bill), Midge Decter (mother of John Podhoretz), Jeane Kirkpatrick, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Max Kampelman, and others who ended up either serving in the Reagan administration or supporting its policies in the pages of Commentary, The Public Interest, and similar publications. Ernest W. Lefever was one of these intellectuals.

As an outgrowth of his policy activism, Lefever in 1976 founded the Ethics and Public Policy Center, initially as a part of Georgetown University and later an independent think tank.

It was shortly after the EPPC's founding that I met Dr. Lefever and joined the Center's staff. I was a junior at Georgetown, needing a work-study job and late in finding one.

On a bulletin board in the financial aid office was an index card advertising a part-time position for a research assistant at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which was completely unknown to me. Needing the job and with few other alternatives listed on that bulletin board, I called the number and set up an appointment. (In those days, "bulletin boards" were made of cork and hung on walls.)

Dr. Lefever interviewed me. I was unshaped politically at that time, as likely to follow Richard McSorley and the Berrigan brothers as anyone else. He asked me for writing samples; all I had to offer were press releases I had drafted for my community theatre earlier that summer (1979; the year of Fiddler on the Roof).

He took a chance with me, put me under his wing, and taught me more than I can estimate.

Through his example, he showed me how to write clearly and effectively. He would say, of course, that such teaching would have no impact on someone who did not already think clearly and write plainly, but I must demur. Whether he knew it or not, he drilled me on composition, from word choice to sentence shape to paragraph size. (His influence affected me quickly. Within a few months of my beginning my part-time tenure at EPPC, one of my professors gave me a lower grade on a paper than he otherwise would have, telling me "You write too clearly" -- like a journalist rather than like an academic. I took his criticism as a badge of honor, and shared a chuckle with Dr. Lefever over it.) The Lefever standard for good writing on public policy? "If an interested and motivated person who reads at an eighth-grade level can understand it, you've done your job well."

Two years after I was hired, when my first op-ed was published in the Washington Star, Dr. Lefever congratulated me and said that he could tell from the way I formulated my arguments that I had been a high school debater. Then he chided me -- as he should have -- for identifying myself with the Center when I submitted the article, without clearing it with him first.

Over the seven or eight years that I was employed by EPPC (I took one year off to pursue my master's degree), Dr. Lefever and I worked closely together. My desk was immediately outside his office. He had a secretary, too, but I was his "special assistant to the president for research." I watched closely as he drafted articles; I often typed them for him through numerous iterations.

When, in 1984, a manuscript on investment in South Africa had gone through three different authors and at least four different versions (all rejected), he turned to me and asked me to write a publishable book. I did, and it became my first -- The Politics of Sentiment: Churches and Foreign Investment in South Africa. Much of the shape of the book is actually his. It would have been fair for him to list me as co-author with him, but he generously gave me sole author credit.

Two years later, after we had hosted a conference about the Strategic Defense Initiative, he asked our colleague, Pete Wehner, and me to compile the papers and other articles into an anthology. He suggested that we seek out Zbigniew Brzezinski as a co-editor, so we could have "name" on the cover.

I bet him $5 that Brzezinski would turn down the invitation. I lost. My second book, Promise or Peril: The Strategic Defense Initiative, has four co-editors: myself, Wehner, Brzezinski, and Marin Strmecki (at that time Zbig's research assistant).

After I left the Ethics and Public Policy Center in 1988, I temporarily lost touch with Dr. Lefever. He called me about 10 years ago or so, however, and asked me to help him learn how to use a computer for writing. He had a Macintosh and I spent several hours with him, showing him how to create document files, how to edit them, how to save them. (Throughout his highly productive life, Dr. Lefever typed rapidly with just two fingers, and until the 1990s he used a manual typewriter -- not even an electric one -- for drafting his articles and book manuscripts.)

EWL also liked working with his hands. He was an accomplished cabinet maker. (He learned that trade as a teenager.) I remember spending weekends at the office with him, reinforcing the massive table in our conference room. It was hard work, especially for someone like me who is generally all-thumbs when it comes to carpentry or home maintenance.

Dr. Lefever was not afraid of technology or technological progress. His first published piece of writing, at the age of 13, was a story about a boy who makes a trip to the moon. (This was in about 1931, of course.) He was an early media critic in the sense of finding ways to analyze the way the broadcast networks reported the news so that their bias (if it was there) could be measured. As late as five days before his death, Dr. Lefever's 1974 book about CBS News was cited in an article by Cliff Kincaid.

Forgotten in the Post's coverage is the singular achievement in which Dr. Lefever brought together Edward Teller, the father of the (American) hydrogen bomb and Andrei Sakharov, the father of the (Soviet) hydrogen bomb. The two scientists had never met (largely because Sakharov was forced into internal exile in the Soviet Union as a consequence of his human-rights activism) but, at Dr. Lefever's invitation, Sakharov was an honored guest at the dinner at which Teller received the Shelby Cullom Davis Award for Integrity and Courage in Public Life. (I have to admit that, as one of only three or four people in the room when Teller and Sakharov first shook hands privately, this is an occasion that I shall never forget.)

The Post's obituary also leaves out Dr. Lefever's impish side. His last book, published in 2006, was called Liberating the Limerick: 230 Irresistible Classics. For most of his life, EWL was an inveterate collector -- and composer -- of limericks and other light verse. Here's an example, from the book:

Without being oratorical,
Consider Kant's categorical
Should one treat one's friends
As means or as ends?
Or is the query rhetorical?

Maybe that's not the best. Here's a second, about another noteworthy who recently passed away:

The CBS newsman Cronkite
Claimed ten million viewers each night.
He slanted the news
To fit his own views.
He knew in "his heart he was right."

I last saw Dr. Lefever about two and a half years ago. He asked me to visit him at his Chevy Chase home so that we could discuss possible collaboration on a book that he had in mind. He took me to lunch at a local Chinese restaurant and we had a pleasant conversation. The project never developed, but I was flattered that he would think of me as a collaborator and impressed that, at 87 years of age, that he was still so active and ready to stay in the arena. (Had the book been written, it would have been hotly controversial.)

Since then, we exchanged a few emails, but my last one to him (sent in May) received no reply. Now I know why.

I have quite a few photographs of Ernest W. Lefever from over the years. Here are some of the memorable ones.

Here are the two of us, after one of the Ethics and Public Policy Center's formal dinners.

Ernest W. Lefever, Jack Kemp, and Shelby Cullom Davis

New York Mayor Edward I. Koch and Ernest W. Lefever

EWL leads Jeane J. Kirkpatrick to the podium
(This photo was taken at the same event featured in the video, below.)

EWL opens the luncheon that launched my first book, The Politics of Sentiment

The staff of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in the summer of 1981:
Back row, left to right: Steve (now Stephanie) Mayerhofer, Marion Frayman, Raymond English, Ernest W. Lefever, (unidentified), Rick Sincere, (unidentified), Mary Ellen Pohl (now Bork), Carol Griffith
Front row, left to right: Betty Marshall, Tom Tunney

EWL striking a goofy pose at an office picnic

EWL being playful during an EPPC staff meeting

EWL hosting the annual EPPC staff Christmas party at the Lefever home, early 1980s

Ambassador Margaret Heckler (former HHS Secretary) with Dr. Lefever at a June 2006 book signing for Liberating the Limerick

Margaret and Ernest Lefever in Arlington, Virginia, June 2006

One of the last photographs I took of Dr. Lefever, in June 2006, at a book party for Liberating the Limerick

Finally, you can see Ernest W. Lefever in action, in this promotional video for the Ethics and Public Policy Center that was released in 1985. (Apologies for the fuzzy and staticky conditions in parts of it; it was a copy of a copy before I digitized it.)

In addition to Dr. Lefever, speakers in this video include Jeane Kirkpatrick, Yonas Deressa, Senator Orrin Hatch, Linda Chavez, William Bennett, Ronald Reagan, Chester Finn, Robert Royal, Caspar Weinberger, and myself.

Ernest W. Lefever, rest in peace.

Besides the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times has published an obituary. The current president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Edward Whelan, has a remembrance on NRO's The Corner. EPPC has posted an official obituary here, accompanied by the most familiar formal portrait of EWL. (I have not yet seen a notice about a funeral or memorial service.)

Updates, August 5: The New York Times has an obituary, by Douglas Martin, in yesterday's editions. The EPPC web site announces there will be a memorial service for Dr. Lefever on August 22 in Washington. It also features a remembrance by George Weigel, who was the second president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

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