Preparing for the 'Second' Great War? Military Planning and Technology in the Interregnum Era; Central Europe entry (2 of 2)

preliminary note

the second post of the Central Europe military update, best read after the one immediately preceding it!

Preparing for the ‘Second’ Great War? Military Planning and Technology in the Interregnum Era

Central Europe: Political Culture as Military Policy (2 of 2)
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The Third Track: The Special Programs

The Third Track belongs in a category of its own; at the time, the “special programs” would not have been recognized as distinctively military projects at all, and in fact, their institutions were not located in the same space as the conventional military apparatus but instead in the civilian planning bureaucracy. They were presented as civilian projects, approved publicly as such, and only acquired their military dimensions in secrecy, when their immense and troubling consequences became clear.

There were a range of different special projects, but the two which consumed the greatest share of the budget and which ultimately had the most consequential impact on the shape of world-history were the nuclear and rocketry programs, Projekt Prometheus and Projekt Dädalus. Before we examine them directly and concretely, we should say a word about the conditions which enabled Germany to embark upon these projects in the first place, while being mindful that this is an explanation of what made the projects possible, not of the particular form they took.

Contrary to the crude, racial caricatures of German “technical genius” which have proliferated in the Atlantic Union and amongst certain German national-chauvinists, the accumulation of scientific knowledge within Germany was a consequence of its structural position within the IntRevMar system. Germany’s heavy-industrial capabilities rendered it the wealthiest nation within the socialist bloc, and its coalition governments leveraged this wealth early on to invest in education, with the Revolutionary Social Democrats displaying a particular zeal for the reform and expansion of the university system. The socialists inherited a superb suite of scientific institutes and technical high schools from Imperial Germany, and made the conscious decision to repurpose and transform them into public, state-run institutions rather than abolish them outright. The generous funds allocated to scientific research was itself the consequence of the RSD’s relentless efforts, motivated by their ideologically-inflected belief that scientific progress was the necessary condition for the communist future.

This scientific expansion would also not have been possible, however, without the economic pressures which were placed on Germany by Soviet industrial expansion and the overcapacity worries this elicited. The planning apparatus, fearing that Germany’s own favorable export position was being undermined, chose to double down on the strengths Germany possessed which could not be as easily replicated: its edge in technical science, in advanced metallurgy, in chemical techniques and electrical engineering. Quite unsurprisingly, this made Germany a hub for scientists across the entire socialist world, and in fact, many of the scientists who contributed most profusely to the special projects were not of German ethnicity at all. In short, it was the functional specialization of the German economy (itself set within a larger socialist world-system) in the domains of education, basic research and technical innovation which enabled the Germans to embark upon the (in)famous “special projects”.

Projekt Prometheus: Liberating the Neutron from its Prison-House

In late 1940, Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch, writing on a series of recent experiments at the Berlin Institute of Chemical Studies, offered proof that the team led by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann had unwittingly and unknowingly split the atom. By bombarding uranium with neutrons, Meitner and Frisch argued, Hahn’s team had induced a fission event: the uranium nucleus had divided, producing barium, an element scarcely more than half its mass, and releasing some 200 megaelectronvolts with each atom split. Hahn and Strassmann, chemists by training, had been baffled to find so light an element issuing from the reaction; it was Frisch and Meitner who supplied the elegant and faultless explanation of what occurred. The paper appeared in a domestic German journal, but it was publicly available, and word of the discovery of nuclear fission soon reached scientific communities across the world, several of which replicated the result. In Europe, Enrico Fermi, initially skeptical, came around, while Niels Bohr offered further refinements.

The potential of nuclear fission as a source of energy was appreciated at once by Germans and Italians alike. The latter had long depended on German coal, and Germany itself had for some years been straining against the limits of its own coal production, steadily growing more reliant on Baku and Romanian oil, both in Soviet hands. The planning apparatus, moreover, was well suited to explore and build out a novel technology across a long horizon, and nuclear energy found an important early champion in the RSD, who were junior partners in the coalition government and the natural party of scientists and technicians.

Projekt Prometheus was authorized by the executive council and ratified by the All-Union Congress of Soviets in 1942. Cheap and perhaps limitless energy had its appeal to the civilian workers, even at the cost of a long wait. The program’s stated goal - and, at the time, its sole and actual one - was to develop the science of fission and investigate its use as a source of power. Hans Bethe, a prominent physicist at Heidelberg, left his professorship to head the new team, while Meitner and Frisch, who with Hahn had made the original discovery, joined the research laboratories established in one of the vacated bourgeois palaces of Charlottenburg in western Berlin, no longer the repose of idle wealth, but now a site of “scientific labor”.

Albert Einstein, perhaps the most celebrated physicist in Germany, pointedly declined to join. He warned of the potential for weaponization, though many of his colleagues, Bethe among them, doubted that a bomb was possible at all. Others, such as Fermi, allowed that it might one day prove physically feasible while questioning whether the engineering of the present could achieve it. The Einstein–Bethe dispute would later be remembered as a vindication of the brilliant author of general relativity, and yet there is little reason to think Bethe was insincere when he professed no intention of turning the program to military ends, and, in any case, no real belief that a bomb could be built.

Over the following two years the project advanced slowly but steadily, recruiting Fermi from Italy and constructing the world’s first primitive nuclear reactor at Potsdam. During this period Meitner met privately with Einstein, and came to share his conviction that the danger of weaponization was real; she met as well with Fermi, who had run his own calculations on the figures required to reach a so-called “critical mass” and had arrived at much the same conclusions. A debate now smoldered within the small circle of senior scientists over whether the German and Italian governments ought to be consulted. It was the news that Heisenberg, who had defected to the United States years before, was engaged in nuclear work there that at last moved Meitner, radicalized by the Bolivian Crisis, to approach the German Commissar of the Army, Wilhelm Pieck. There followed a series of closed-door consultations between Bethe, the foremost theoretical minds of his team, and the inner circle of the German executive committee, some fifteen individuals in all. Weaponization would be difficult, protracted, and might demand advances in engineering not yet in hand, but it would be possible in the near enough future. To let such a weapon fall to the capitalists alone, it scarcely needed saying, would be a security catastrophe.

This presented the German government with an unprecedented difficulty. It could not openly announce that weaponization had been found possible without surrendering the secret in the same breath. Nor could it proceed through the ordinary All-Union Congress, whose thousands of members would render any pretense of confidentiality absurd. The solution finally adopted was an imperfect one: the science and technology committee of the All-Union Congress was converted into a permanent standing body, sworn to secrecy, charged with the monitoring and oversight of the nuclear program. Its members would continue to be popularly elected by an All-Union Congress that remained mostly unaware of the committee’s true function. A little under half were to be drawn from the executive committee, ensuring that elements more closely aligned with the established state bureaucracy held a voice on the body without commanding it.

Under the aegis of the science and technology committee, Projekt Prometheus was quietly enlarged and turned toward military ends. Bethe remained at the head of the civilian section, but this became, by degrees, a shell for the weaponization effort. Real authority came to rest in the so-called “pure science” division under Fermi, who drew Meitner, Frisch, and Hahn onto his side of the program, with Bohr as a part-time consultant; the civilian section made do with a cadre of younger and less established physicists, the most prominent of whom was Victor Weisskopf.

The scientists reached first for the obvious design: a gun-type weapon built around the uranium-235 isotope, the simplest path in principle, requiring no more than the slamming together of two subcritical masses. The difficulty was the fuel. To enrich uranium to weapons grade demanded isotope-separation plants on a scale that, even with the most advanced gaseous diffusion then available, would consume a portion of the bloc’s entire industrial capacity. Ignoring the warnings of Frisch and Bethe, Fermi pressed the committee for a gargantuan diffusion works, and was politely informed that his plan was politically and fiscally impossible. His scientists would have to find a more economical road to the bomb. Splitting the atom was a potent image, but it did not seize the imagination of the masses as the dream of spaceflight and the dread of American terror bombing did.

The rejection proved salutary in an unforeseen way, since it turned the program toward the Soviets. They had set their own program in motion not long after the Germans, and while they possessed significantly less scientific expertise, they retained vast resources that might prove necessary should Fermi’s group fail to find some far more economical route to the bomb. Precisely how this collaboration would unfold lies beyond the remit of the present essay, but its course would display, in equal measure, the achievements and the limits of socialist internationalism.

Projekt Dädalus: Storming the Gates of Heaven

While Projekt Prometheus attracted the most top-flight scientific talent within Central Europe, it was Projekt Dädalus which received a greater share of public attention, and for a time, significantly more funding. Unlike Projekt Prometheus, which emerged from German strength in theoretical physics, Projekt Dädalus arose out of German weakness and the humiliation which weakness provoked.

Over the 1930s, the Verein für Raumschiffahrt(Society for Space Travel) - headed up by Klaus Riedel and assisted by a number of significant scientific figures - had staged a number of well-attended rocket launches, but failed to secure state funding. In its absence, the society resorted to a subscription model, which rose astronomically from just under 1,000 members in 1930 to over 40,000 in 1938. The general enthusiasm for rocketry was propelled by the diffusion of Russian Cosmist thought into Germany, by the growing genre of speculative science fiction, and by the entire mythos of space-flight, which could offer either an escape from humanity’s woes into the stars or the fulfillment of socialist construction through the transcendence of earthly limitations. Spaceflight was connected to a vision of post-scarcity, but also to a fantasy of the otherworldly: it could thus speak to both socialist partisans and those who remained in Germany but never found themselves fully committed to its politics.

Initially, the Congress of Soviets looked upon the rocketry program as a fantastical, impractical, and therefore exorbitant proposal. The Verein für Raumschiffahrt petitioned for funds at nearly every meeting, and they were told that the proletarian republic did not have the resources to waste on an improbable journey to the stars. All the while, the Soviet Union had been generously subsidizing its own rocketry program, and Germany’s own rocket enthusiasts responded with both acclamation and anger: praise for the achievements of their socialist brothers, and ire directed at the narrow-minded and philistine All-Union Congress, which was now regularly accused of practicing a “penny-pinching socialism of the miser.” In the late 30s, several new feature-length films were shot by Fritz Lang in collaboration with the Verein für Raumschiffahrt; reels were shown of the spectacular Russian rocket launches, which naturally, could not be matched by the unsubsidized volunteer German spaceflight societies. This is what finally brought the matter of spaceflight from the press and into the councils. In 1938, Riedel himself, along with the popular Russian rocket engineer Sergie Korolev, was allowed to formally testify before the All-Union Congress, who were forthrightly shamed for their small-minded neglect of the technology. “The men who made 1919”, it was said, “would be saddened at such utter lack of imagination, at the limited sense of what is possible in our socialist society.” This was not exactly pleasant to hear for the All-Union Congress, since more than a few of its members were quite active participants in 1919; growing older, had they now become too accustomed to the present order, thereby losing that vision of the utopian future which socialism promised? Whether to soothe their consciences or to protect themselves from the feared instrument of recall, a rocket program was duly approved.

…A rocketry program was thus commenced, much like the nuclear one as a civilian project housed in the planning apparatus. The first task, of course, was to catch up with the Soviets. The Germans, well-behind, leaned heavily on older Soviet schematics which were often a generation or two old (and therefore publicly available). By 1943, they had managed to develop rocketry which was only a year or two behind the Soviet state-of-the-art, but over the same period, enthusiasm had diminished somewhat. The planning apparatus, quite predictably, had demanded a time-frame for manned spaceflight, and Riedel, aware of how primitive the technology really was, had prevaricated and shown himself generally incapable of ably navigating the bureaucracy. The consequence was a series of scandals which made growing numbers doubt the fiscal prudence of the program without, however, meaningfully impacting the enthusiasm of its true zealots. Why, many of them wanted to know, had so many of Germany’s most capable and able scientists gone to the nuclear program, while spaceflight had been neglected? These were not questions the All-Union Congress wanted being asked, and, in a bid to both preserve the rocketry program’s successes and ensure it would not became a massive fiscal sink, it was decided to fold it into the larger and more well-resourced Soviet program on the condition that each nation would maintain the means to manufacture and develop its own rockets. To soothe German sensibilities, the Soviet’s decided to adopt their name - Projekt Dadalus - for the joint program, thus making it appear that it was in some sense a German project, when in reality the Germans would be junior partners.

The Soviet rocket program was never of a wholly civilian character, and already in 1944, they had begun leveraging their advanced rocket technologies to produce new forms of rocket-based artillery. The Germans, and Riedel in particular, were interested in rockets as a form of anti-aircraft weapon, but the technology proved to be far too imprecise for this. It was Kurt Lindemann, a military liaison to the nuclear weapons program, who came to a strategic breakthrough, and discovered that the rocket would be the ideal weapon to deliver the bomb. Lindemann himself was involved in the spaceflight societies of the 1930s, and had closely tracked the progress of the rocket program despite his formal non-involvement in it. The rockets might not be able to hit an airfield, but the eventual yield of a bomb would render such imprecision forgivable. Lacking a fighter program that could establish air supremacy over the British isles, a supersonic rocket would be the ideal delivery mechanism. Quietly, Lindemann reached out to the Science and Technology committee, and made clear that one day in the not-too-distant future there would need to be a meeting of minds between the rocket scientists and the nuclear ones.

Conclusion: The Three Track Trap?

It remains to draw together what these three tracks, taken together as a system, actually amounted to. The conclusion is less flattering to the architects of Central European defense than any single track examined in isolation would suggest. The most striking feature of the whole apparatus is that each part of it, without exception, was imagined as an instrument of the Hot War. The militia was built for the mass strike into France and lost its central importance the moment that strike failed to bring a decision. It was envisioned as a force for the continental plain, incapable of projecting power into the dispersed and distant theaters where a Quasi-War would be waged. The platform projects were tuned to the opening campaign of the same continental war: the interceptor to shield the Rhine-Ruhr, the bomber to support the drive into France, the submarine to harry the Atlantic lifelines for the first few months before the world-fleet ground it down. Even the special projects, for all their futurity, were thought of as Hot War instruments: the bomb existed to deter it from beginning in the first place, and the rocket program ultimately aimed to produce either a conventional military weapon or a vehicle for delivering the bomb and thus making the deterrent credible. The three tracks were less hedges against an uncertain future than they were three expressions of a conviction - and perhaps even a hope - about what the next war would be.

The natural objection is that this was simply a forecasting error, the sort of thing any general staff might commit, and that the Central Europeans bet on the wrong scenario. But this lets the architects off too lightly, and it mistakes a structural failure for a contingent one. Far from being unseeable, the prospect of a global Quasi-war was older than the Hot War fixation, dating to the First Revolutionary Era rather than the 1930s; the Americans and the Soviets had both grasped it, and its proponents within Central Europe never tired of pointing to it. The failure was not that the Quasi-War could not be imagined, but that it could not be squared with the doctrine, and the reason it could not be squared with the doctrine is the reason the whole pattern rises to the level of pathology rather than mere miscalculation. The instruments the Quasi-War demanded were precisely the instruments the political culture of the Rousseauian republics were constituted to forbid.

Consider what fighting the Quasi-War would actually have required. It would have demanded a standing professional force capable of sustained deployment far from home, the very Bonapartist establishment that the militia tradition existed to prevent. It would have required the capacity for deniable action abroad, the covert mission and the unacknowledged volunteer, which the council oversight of military affairs was specifically designed to render impossible. One need only recall the extraordinary contrivance by which the nuclear program achieved its secrecy, the conversion of an ordinary committee into a permanent and secret body that bypassed the Congress, to see how violently the demands of confidentiality cut against the whole constitutional grain. And it would have required the steady funding of offensive expeditionary capability that could not be presented as the defense of the homeland, the one thing the council appropriations process, with its systematic preference for butter, would be loathe to willingly underwrite. Central Europe could find no way of acquiring these instruments without ceasing to be what it was, without surrendering the council sovereignty, the militia ideal, and the antimilitarism that were part of the very substance of what the revolution had achieved.

The Hot War for which Central Europe so thoroughly prepared was, by the logic we examined at the outset, the war least likely to occur, deterred into improbability by numbers and distance and the world-fleet and the simple reluctance of all parties to repeat the catastrophe of the last great conflict. The Quasi-War, which Central Europe could neither prepare for nor bring itself to contemplate, was the war that would actually arrive. The bloc had poured its genius and its treasure into deterring a war that would not come, and had done so in a form that left it at least partially disarmed for the war that would, all under a political settlement that forbade it to correct the error. The world’s finest interceptor, the trans-European bomber, the mined and bristling coasts, the bomb assembled in secret beneath the planning bureaucracy: the whole magnificent edifice was a wager on a conflict which would never occur.

And yet it would be a profound mistake to read this as a mere chronicle of failure. Unwittingly, the Rousseauian Republics generated the conditions for some of the greatest technological advances in the history of humanity. The militia system, for its part, may not have produced divisions capable of waging the Quasi-war, but it did create some of its finest weapons. The whole apparatus may not have been designed for the Quasi-war, but neither were its most powerful instruments entirely useless for it.

Each decision, taken on its own terms, was also entirely rational, especially when one forsakes the stifling and narrow abode of instrumental rationality for the more capacious air of value rationality. It was rational for a society scarred by a decade-long trauma to deter the hot war, whose consequences, however improbable, would have been catastrophic. So too, was it rational to honor the antimilitarist settlement, which was the revolution’s whole point and the source of its legitimacy. It was rational to fund what the councils would fund and to forgo what they would not. The tragedy was structural and not personal, a property of the system rather than a deficiency of the people who operated it. To call it a pathology is to imply a sickness that some healthier constitution might have avoided, and this is not quite right, for the features that disabled Central Europe’s ability to prepare directly for the Quasi-War were the same features that made it the thing it was and wished to remain. It is better called a trap: the Central Europeans had built, with great care and considerable brilliance, the perfect apparatus for a war which history had decided not to offer them, and they had built it in such a way that they could not dismantle it, and could not, for the time being, repurpose it.