If you watched the third and final season of HBO's The Leftovers, you are familiar with the Fisher Protocol.
In the series' penultimate episode, "The Most Powerful Man in the World (and His Identical Twin Brother)," series chief protagonist Kevin Garvey (played by Justin Theroux) "dies" to wake up in an alternative universe where he's Kevin Harvey, an international assassin. (Without going into too much back story, Kevin previously visited this dimension.)
In this episode, Kevin actually toggles between two incarnations of himself--he's both the president of the United States and the president's identical twin brother--who happens to have the nuclear launch codes the president needs to annihilate the planet (which was sort of his twin's campaign promise) implanted in his chest. To blow up the world, President Kevin has to slaughter his brother first.
That was a proposal made in our world by the late Roger Fisher, a Harvard law professor and one of the founders of the Program on Negotiation, a consortium dedicated to developing the theory and practice of negotiation and dispute negotiation. The Fisher Protocol, which was trending on social media last week in the aftermath of dramatic saber-rattling on the part of the current (real world) president of the United States, is a novel approach to nuclear deterrence which Fisher proposed in the March 1981 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Rather than carrying the nuclear launch codes around in what's officially known as the "president's emergency satchel" (and colloquially known as the "nuclear football"), Fisher suggested:
"Put that needed code number in a little capsule, and then implant that capsule right next to the heart of a volunteer. The volunteer would carry with him a big, heavy butcher knife as he accompanied the President. If ever the President wanted to fire nuclear weapons, the only way he could do so would be for him first, with his own hands, to kill one human being. The President says, 'George, I'm sorry but tens of millions must die.' He has to look at someone and realize what death is--what an innocent death is. Blood on the White House carpet. It's reality brought home.
"When I suggested this to friends in the Pentagon they said, 'My God, that's terrible. Having to kill someone would distort the President's judgment. He might never push the button.'"
And it is difficult imaging this or any other American president plunging a knife into the heart of an innocent person, no matter how dire the situation. We prefer to kill at a distance, knowing as little as possible about our victims. That's why martial propaganda invariably seeks to dehumanize the enemy. During World War II we depicted the Japanese as animalistic, dim creatures with yellow skin and buck teeth (and occasionally, with in Jack Campbell's "Tokio Kid" character, part of Douglas Aircraft's wartime campaign against tool breakage and waste).
Would we have dropped an atom bomb on Europeans? It's often been suggested that there was a racist component to Harry Truman's decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan but not Germany, and there's some support for that in the record. As early as 1943 four Japanese cities had been selected as targets, which meant they weren't subject to conventional bombing attacks (as we wanted to register the effects of the A-bomb on a virgin city). One of the reasons cited for this is that the Japanese weren't as far along in their own nuclear program as the Germans were. So they'd be less likely to reverse engineer the bomb if for some reason it didn't explode.
(This is arguable; some believe the Japanese were ahead of the Germans and only a lack of uranium prevented them from making a device. In his 1995 book Japan's Secret War: Japan's Race Against Time to Build Its Own Atomic Bomb, conservative author Robert K. Wilcox argued the Japanese grasped the physics behind it and had the engineering expertise to construct a viable weapon. But then other historians believe physicist Yoshio Nishina, the Japanese scientist in charge of their atomic bomb program, never really believed a nuclear weapon was feasible and took advantage of the military's basic scientific ignorance in order to fund his pet project, the building of a cyclotron. And the Japanese did build the first cyclotron outside the United States, a fact that could be used to argue either position.)
Also, Army Gen. Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, wrote in his memoir Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project, that during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked him if it would be possible to get "one of the gadgets ready" for Berlin. But the Nazis were finished--and Hitler committed suicide--before Fat Man and Little Boy were deployable. By then Japan was the only target.
Still, it's easier to drop a bomb on people we perceive as less human than ourselves. Most Americans can't find North Korea on a map (a recent New York Times study poll found that 36 percent of respondents could, which seems high to me) and all most of us know about the country is that they've got a an erratic, murderous leader who is willing to take extreme measures to stay in power. If he doesn't care about his people, why should we?
Well, because they are people, and regardless of how far away they live or what language they speak, we are more like them than different. While we can invent justifications for any war we want to undertake, we ought to understand the world is flammable, and that while it might be within our capability to reduce a belligerent nation to ashes with the flick of a finger, we probably oughtn't treat the prospect of annihilating millions as a joke.
Whatever else he is, our president is not a good poker player. He bluffs often and recklessly and his won-loss record isn't so great. But for the most part he's been insulated from feeling any pain.
Threatening a pipsqueak dictator provides red meat for his Cult 45 apologists, who see no reason to consider the global ramifications of martial recklessness. While the Fisher Protocol is a thought experiment, it might be a useful practical check on a man who has rarely had to do a hard thing or suffered repercussions.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 08/15/2017