The Warning Of Pearl Harbour

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31327, 25 March 1967, Page 4

The Warning Of Pearl Harbour

Pearl Harbour: Warning and Decision. By Roberta Wohlstetter. Stanford University Press. 412 pp. Bibliography and Index. The reissue as • paperback of this minute analysis of the American intelligence structure and preparedness on the eve of the Japanese attack 25 years ago should make its highly important findings available to a much wider audience. The author’s thesis is that Pearl Harbour was not a colossal and extraordinary blunder. “It was a supremely ordinary blunder. ... It was just a dramatic failure of * remarkably well-

informed Government to call the next enemy move in a cold-war crisis.” As such this analysis has great relevance today when, in spite of improved methods of intelligence collection and assessment, the capacity for strategic surprise has increased even more. Likewise, the benefits of achieving surprise and the penalties for losing initiative in an all-out war have also increased. The author writes that in conditions of great uncertainty people tend to predict that the events they want to happen actually will happen. While warnings of a major attack appear crystal clear after the event, before it they tend to be submerged in a

mass of background information and “noise” which suggests other more likely outcomes. There is a tendency to pay attention to signals which support current expectations about enemy behaviour. “If noone is listening for signals of an attack against a highly improbable target, then it is very difficult for the signals to be heard.” Thus the critical factors in this surprise attack, as in most others, were not the collection of intelligence but its evaluation, co-ordination and transmission into a command structure able to act with speed and efficiency. In conditions of nuclear stalemate and "balance of terror" there is much here to ponder.