T. K. Jones, Pentagon official who argued U.S. could survive an all-out nuclear war, dies

Jones continued: “You can make very good sheltering by taking the doors off your house, digging a trench, stacking the doors about two deep over that, covering it with plastic so that rainwater or something doesn’t screw up the glue in the door, then pile dirt over it.” He added: “It’s the dirt that does it.”

He figured that digging would take about ten hours, followed by installation of a ventilation pump and dealing with sanitation and supplies. People who lived in apartment buildings were no problem, he said; they could be moved to rural areas.

“The second problem of the ’50s was we fell into that argument of: If you’ve got a shelter and your neighbor’s got a gun, how’s this going to be handled?” he continued. “Turns out with the Russian approach, if there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it” (for more on the Los Angeles Times interview, and, more generally, on the Reagan and Bush administrations’ nuclear weapons policies, see Robert Scheer, With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush, and Nuclear War [Random House, 1982]).

Congressional Democrats, and more than a few Republicans, were outraged by Jones’s comments, and wanted him to testify before a congressional panel to explain his views on nuclear war. The administration initially refused to let him testify, but eventually relented, and he appeared, accompanied by assistant secretary Richard N. Perle, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 31 March 1982.

On 19 March 1982, a New York Times editorial, titled “The Dirt on T. K. Jones,” asked: “Who is the Thomas K. Jones who is saying those funny things about civil defense? Is he only a character in ‘Doonesbury’? Did he once write lyrics for Tom Lehrer’s darker political ballads? Or is T. K., as he is known to friends, the peace movement’s mole inside the Reagan Administration?”

Jones may have been a bit colorful in the way he expressed himself on the issue, but in the higher echelons of the Pentagon during the early years of the Reagan administration he was not alone in arguing that an all-out nuclear war could be fought and could be survived – and that there would be a meaningful difference between winning and losing such a war. Thus, in a speech early in his tenure, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger said that the nuclear strategy of the Reagan administration was to make sure that the United States “prevailed” over the Soviet Union in an all-out nuclear war.

The lawyerly Weinberger then spent the next twelve months writing letters to newspapers and magazines which described him as believing that it would be possible to win an all-out nuclear war. He insisted that it was not accurate to say that he believed it would be possible to “win” a nuclear war: rather, he believed it would be possible to “prevail” in one. These letters-to-the-editors then engaged in erudite and involved philological discussions of the differences between “winning” a war and “prevailing” in one.

Within two or three years these heated debates over whether or not it would be possible to survive a nuclear war, and whether or not the Soviet Union had opened a civil defense gap, became irrelevant. In March 1983 Reagan announced his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), aka Star Wars, aiming to make nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” As Bruce Blair, a research scholar at the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, told the New York Times, “by the mid-1980s and the rise of Gorbachev, Reagan switched gears and renounced the idea of fighting and winning a nuclear war, and he actually sought the total elimination of nuclear weapons.”

T. K. Jones, a native of Tacoma, Washington, died in Bellevue, Washington, on 15 May. He was 82.