Fiction and Policy

My WPR column this week references Riddle of the Sands, an Erskine Childers novel about a nefarious German plot to invade Great Britain. For those who haven't read it, the novel really is quite good. Childers is also a pretty interesting guy, dying before a Free State firing squad in 1922.

Journalists, experts, scholars, policymakers and politicians have the same susceptibilities to fictional and artistic portrayals as the mass public. Ronald Reagan is said to have found "The Day After" television mini-series depicting the aftermath of a nuclear war so compelling that he decided to pursue arms control with renewed vigor. The "24" series undoubtedly convinced many within the Bush administration and the CIA of the essential justness of their cause and their methods. Historically, the novels of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne helped set the parameters of what was considered possible in terms of airpower doctrine. The vision of cities destroyed from the air, pioneered by Wells in the novel "War in the Air," helped prime the imaginations of aviators and stoke the fears of civilians and policymakers.

On roughly the same subject, see Erich Simmers' response to my short article on last semester's COIN class. Given that the ability of the Navy to market itself has become a major topic on this blog, I expect to start a series soon on depictions of seapower in fiction. I hope that this will include not only such works as the Patrick O'Brian books and the egregiously awful looking "Battleship," but also portrayals of naval power in games such as the Civilization series.