Review: Nightfall Berlin by Jack Grimwood

At the end of the war, Berlin was a mess. Children wandered the streets, people were starving, and anything could be had for a cigarette. Add to the mix thousands of soldiers, all of them bored, and you have a recipe for depredation. "‘The ruins turned us all into rats … The self can be pretty vile if let off the leash.’ All those feral children. All that hunger and starvation. It must have been a feeding frenzy for someone like Blackburn. He wouldn’t have been alone either. Men like that recognized each other, hunted in packs, and protected each other. . . It was like stepping into hell. The problem is, some men like hell."

Some of those predators were officers and they turned a lodge into a true den of iniquity, some of them preying on children. But someone else was writing down the names of the worst, and many of those same men went on to high-level careers in government. Throw in those who want to sabotage the glasnost talks about reducing nuclear weapons and you have a rather incendiary mix.

Major Tom Fox is sent to Berlin to bring back a former defector. It was to be a simple mission. He has none of the above information, but soon it's apparent that someone wants the defector dead and Tom, too. But, most of all they want the memoirs the defector had been supposedly writing as he had the list of names. Fox is caught in a vice but has no idea who's turning the screws. When his children is kidnapped to coerce his cooperation, things get desperate.

This book will suck you into it as it races to the conclusion. I have already ordered Grimwood's other book. Superior spy novel.

Review: Fallout by Garry Disher (Wyatt #6)

Good story, if a bit unusual. Raymond, Wyatt's nephew plays a significant role, and we are left hanging as to Wyatt's relationship with Liz Redding, who was involved with the jewelry heist. Raymond has been making a living (and losing most of it at the casino) by pulling off a series of bank heists. He's been reasonably clever at it, but he's also fallen under the spell of a couple of treasure hunters looking for investors to fund collecting gold from a sunken ship near a reef. Raymond falls for their line, tries to enlist his uncle, and things go downhill for him rapidly.

This is a good series and I have read them somewhat haphazardly, suffering no deleterious effects, so you probably don't have to worry too much about reading in order.

Review: The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War by Fred Kaplan

I read Kaplan's Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War and discovered it to be a very lucid explanation of the technological challenges faced by the security departments around the world. So naturally, I was anxious to check out his most recent book, courtesy Net Galley, for which I am grateful.

It's an immensely enjoyable, if a bit scary, book about the political infighting and territoriality of the armed services and policy development of nuclear weapons. There was a lot of jockeying between the Navy, Army, and Air Force as to who would control "the bomb". and unfortunately much of that in-fighting controlled policy. Curtis LeMay, a brilliant leader in the organization and implementation of the bombing campaigns (read fire-bombing) in Europe and then Japan, as head of the Strategic Air Command was all in favor of a virtual first strike with everything as the SAC bombers were quite vulnerable. (His philosophy was simply to bomb everything.)

The Navy, meanwhile, was eager to get funds for the development of large numbers of ballistic missile equipped Polaris submarines, arguing that if the Russians never knew where you were the deterrent effect was far greater and more valuable. The Army, on the other hand, promoted the use of smaller tactical nukes on the battlefield suggesting that a nuclear counterattack to defend Europe against Russian aggression would lead to a Russian withdrawal and peace discussions. The casual manner in which civilian casualties (not to mention military) were discussed was a bit disheartening.

The man who replaced LeMay at SAC was Thomas Power. Even LeMay thought he was excessive: "There was a cruelty to Power’s zest for bombing cities. Even LeMay privately referred to his protégé as a “sadist.” When Bill Kaufmann briefed him on the Counterforce strategy at SAC headquarters, Power reacted with fury. “Why do you want us to restrain ourselves?” he screamed. “Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards!” After a bit more of this tirade, Power said, “Look. At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win!” Kaufmann snapped back, “You’d better make sure that they’re a man and a woman.” Power stormed out of the room. "

One surprising and note-worthy section was on how Cheney, of all people, was instrumental in reducing the huge number of weapons by half. All of the president's since have failed to reject the no-first-strike policy. Trump, himself, in his on-again, off-again relationship with North Korea didn't hesitate to wave the arsenal and threaten its use.

Kaplan describes the abyss that policy makers then and since have become trapped in. The mere idea of how many times cities (people) need to be nuked in order to assure our victory, even as we ourselves are annihilated, inevitably leads to comparisons with Alice in Wonderland.

That about sums up the insanity faced by all the presidents since Hiroshima. The importance of policy discussions and analysis worries me when I read that our current president disdains not just the briefing books, but the idea of analysis, preferring to rely on his "gut feeling" no doubt the most attuned gut in the history of the world. But then he's such a self-described "stable genius."

A good companion book to McNamara's memoir, "In Retrospect" and Ellsberg's "Secrets." Each is ostensibly more about Vietnam but each reveals much a bout how decisions are made in government. Other titles I will have to read are Kaplan's "Wizards of Armaggedon", Ellsberg's "The Doomsday Machine," and Bruce Kuklick's "Kennan to Kissinger" and I'm sure many others, but we only live so long.

Review: Cops and Robbers by Donald Westlake

Donald Westlake was a national treasure. He wrote more than one hundred novels and I doubt if there is a dud among them. This one is a stand-alone and while not funny, I suspect you'll have a grin on your face at the end, as did I.

A man in a cop's uniform, pulls his gun and holds up a store. Days later he relates what he did to his partner. What follows is how to destroy $12,000,000 in bearer bonds, turning them into confetti, in order to make $2,000,000 in cash.

This was intriguing and suspenseful. Enjoy.

Bork and OCAW v American Cyanamid: Company policy required women to be sterilized to keep their jobs.

While reading a book about the Bork nomination for the Supreme Court**, I ran across an interesting case that was used to build a case against his nomination.

The case involved a multitude of issues: the right of a company to assign workers based on sex, avoidance of hazards in the workplace, pollution, forced sterilization, and the right of workers to make their own decisions.

The facts as best as I can determine from reading articles and court documents is that in 1978 American Cyanamid Company, worried about lead exposure to its female employees who might become pregnant that forbade them working in areas of high exposure unless they had themselves sterilized. The purpose was to assure that no women who could possibly carry a fetus would risk of fetal exposure to toxic workplace chemicals. This policy applied only to women, however "According to OSHA rule making on the lead standard, "hazards to fetuses are not eliminated by keeping fertile and pregnant women out of a lead-exposure workplace;exposure of male employees may also be hazardous. Although the exposure of men to lead toxicity results primarily in decreased sex drive, impotence, and sterility, sperm cells can be affected and in some cases pass on genetic damage to fetuses.*

The company held a series of meetings with female employees explaining they would be terminated unless they could provide a physician's certificate of sterilization. Five women did so to keep their jobs.

In 1979, they were cited by OSHA:

The employer did not furnish employment and a place of employment which were free from recognized hazards that were causing or were likely to cause death or serious physical harm to employees, in that: The employer adopted and implemented a policy which required women employees to be sterilized in order to be eligible to work in the areas of the plant where they would be exposed to certain toxic substances ....'

The company appealed that ruling and won both in the lower courts and the DC Court of Appeals in an opinion written by Judge Bork who "ruled that a policy requiring sterilization is not a "hazard" within the meaning of the general duty clause of the OSH Act." Now that ruling was merely on the narrow aspect of the OSHA ruling, but you can imagine the firestorm that erupted as it looked like Bork was saying it was OK for companies to require that workers be sterilized in order to work if the company required it. That, of course, was, in fact, the result. Richard Lewis, in the Penn Law Review wrote a rather scathing review of Bork's interpretation of the law. My interest was much broader. How can government or industry protect workers from a hazardous environment without requiring such drastic measures? The company's goal was a valid one. They didn't want a host of mutant children running around as a result of mothers having been exposed to lead and other noxious chemicals, but rather than try to clean up the environment, they chose a much more problematic response. (Proposed new OSHA regulation limited the amount of lead in the air were vigorously opposed by the industry.)

That they were treating the men differently than the women might also have been subject to scrutiny. And, in fact, the company was later sued under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for sex discrimination, but was settled in 1984 without a court resolution.

Bork's decision, writing for the court, changed the emphasis of OSHA's responsibility to one of protecting the business rather than the employee's health. "Given the choice between these two rules, the court's decision to limit liability was reasonably consistent with one of the Act's unstated constraints: "Congress does not appear to have intended to protect employees by putting their employers out of business ....The court's interpretation of the Act, however, gave short shrift to the primary purpose of the Act:protection of employee health" Bork reasoned that the sterilization policy lay beyond the Act's scope because the harm suffered by sterilized employees resulted not from the policy but rather from the employees' decision to be sterilized as influenced by "economic and social factors which operate primarily outside the workplace," a bizarre interpretation, indeed.


References:

Lewis, Richard. "OCAW V. American Cyanamid: The Shrinking of the Occupational Safety and Health Act." University of Pennsylvania Law Review 133, no. 5 (1985), 1167. doi:10.2307/3311995.

"OCAW wins settlement against Cyanamid." Chemical & Engineering News 57, no. 8 (1979), 7. doi:10.1021/cen-v057n008.p007.

*See OSHA Preamble to Final Standards, Occupational Exposure to Lead, 43 Fed. Reg. 52,952,52,959-60 (1978)

**Bronner, Ethan. Battle for Justice: How the Bork Nomination Shook America. New York: Sterling Publishing Company, 2007.