I will assume that electronic surveillance by ship and aircraft off potentially enemy coasts is a necessary security measure. (I note, however, that this is a rather large assumption. We all know how easy it is for some new piece of gadgetry to come to seem necessary. What could be more necessary than that expensive Xerox machine churning out copies by the thousand, though the firm somehow managed to get along well enough all those years without it?) Restarting from the assumption of necessity, it is obvious that in the pre-Pueblo period the military commanders, having said A, had failed to say B. They sent the Pueblos on their missions without regard for what might happen to such missions in such a world as we live in. The Pueblo, though loaded to the gills with secret gear, secret data, secret codes and men whose heads were stuffed full of secrets, had neither speed to run from an enemy nor weapons to fight him nor self-destruct devices to thwart him nor nearby support to call on for protection or retaliation. More astonishing even: the commander of the Pueblo did not have a doctrine covering the kind of incident in which he found himself, nor, by the evidence, did his commanders.
Nothing and Again Nothing
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