Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara

Robert McNamara:
I'd rather be damned-if-I-don't.

Robert McNamara:
If we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merits of our cause, we'd better reexamine our reasoning.

Robert McNamara:
In the end, it was luck. We were *this* close to nuclear war, and luck prevented it.

Robert McNamara:
I think the human race needs to think about killing. How much evil must we do in order to do good.

Robert McNamara:
Lesson #2: The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of nations.

Robert McNamara:
Any military commander who is honest with himself, or with those he is speaking to, will admit that he has made mistakes in the application of military power. He's killed people - unnecessarily. His own troops or other troops. Through mistakes, through errors of judgement. A hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand, maybe even a hundred thousand. But he hasn't destroyed nations.

Robert McNamara:
And the conventional wisdom is: don't make the same mistake twice. Learn from your mistakes. And we all do. Maybe we make the mistake three times, but hopefully not four or five.

Robert McNamara:
They'll be no learning period with nuclear weapons. Make one mistake and you're going to destroy nations.

Robert McNamara:
I was on the island of Guam in his

Robert McNamara:
command in March 1945. In that single night, we burned to death one hundred thousand Japanese civilians in Tokyo. Men, women and children.

Interviewer:
Were you aware this was going to happen?

Robert McNamara:
Well, I was part of a mechanism that, in a sense, recommended it.

Robert McNamara:
LeMay said, "If we lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals". And I think he's right.

Robert McNamara:
He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals.

Robert McNamara:
LeMay recognised that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose, and not immoral if you win?