As to the first of these doubts, as I shall show, we have clearly demonstrated the relevance of history to current policy issues. For the second, we believe that the dangers of the concept of “every man his own historian” are becoming apparent to many Government officials. The historical background of Government specialists, even in their own area of specialty, is not only spotty, but their recollection of historical experience is limited mostly to those examples which tend to support their own pre-conceived ideas. Furthermore, their own Governmental documentation is often inadequate in most areas other than in classified documents. More and more people are beginning to recognize the ability of the trained historian to bring out _all_ of the pertinent facts, and to weigh their relative value far more objectively than is possible for the average person without historical training.
Thus, HERO is convinced of the utility of our primary mission of mining the rich natural resource which we think history is, and also of refining the ore so as to permit history to serve mankind, as philosophers have always said it should. This has never been done before, either here or in any other country, to the best of my knowledge—though, as a historian, I am aware of the danger of using such absolute terms as “never,” or “the first ever.”
Rather than going into any generalized explanation of how we go about mining and refining this resource, I think I can demonstrate how we do it—and at the same time give concrete examples of some uses of history—by talking about some of HERO’s past and current work.
The first study which HERO completed was done for the Sandia Corporation—a special contracting agency for the Atomic Energy Commission. The purpose of this study—which we dubbed “Pre-Alert”—was to ascertain the extent to which historical example and experience could be useful in the area of military command and control. The Sandia Corporation had the responsibility for developing the so-called “black box” to provide foolproof, automatic controls which will prevent accidental or unauthorized employment of nuclear weapons systems. Our study was unclassified, so we didn’t get into the classified details of these foolproof, automatic controls. Our task was to assess the likelihood that such controls might be so complicated, or might be so inhibiting to individual initiative, as to preclude adequate military response in the event of unforeseen emergency conditions or circumstances.