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Destroying the Village: Eisenhower and Thermonuclear War
Campbell Craig
1998
1. Casus Belli in Berlin, 1948
As of March 1948 Harry Truman and his foreign policy advisers had given little thought to the continuing presence of western occupation forces in Berlin. There were more urgent matters to deal with: the Marshall Plan, the imminent Jewish victory in Palestine, communist successes in Italy and Greece, the communist putsch in Czechoslovakia, and, especially in the president’s case, gearing up for the fall campaign. In this climate the minor question of unresolved occupation policy easily slipped toward the bottom of Truman’s Cold War list. And even if some prescient staffer had managed to foresee trouble in the Prussian capital, the NSC was not yet in the habit of developing contingency plans and topical strategy papers. The intense turmoil of 1948 international politics, together with the improvisational manner with which Washington approached global crises, made the United States seriously unprepared for a confrontation in Berlin.
The western position there was objectively tenuous. In the last months of the war in Europe General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander of the European theater of operations, decided to send his armies toward Bavaria rather than race to Berlin ahead of the Russians. 1 Upon the German surrender American, British, and free French forces occupied southern and western Germany, while the Soviet army controlled the northeastern part of the country. But the allies also established a four-power formal occupation of Berlin, as victorious armies tend to do in a vanquished capital. The problem was that instead of conveniently straddling eastern and western Germany, Berlin lay 110 miles east of the western border, well into the Soviet sector.
As the United States and the Soviet Union turned against one another in 1946 and 1947, relations among the occupying forces in Berlin predictably worsened. Metropolitan politics there turned into a forum for superpower competition, as Soviet-bankrolled parties competed for local power against American-bankrolled parties. To transport supplies to their sectors the western powers obviously had to cross Soviet-controlled territory, an awkward task that increasingly aggrieved the Soviets and their East German clients. The proximity of Soviet and western armies in Berlin led to numerous skirmishes and street confrontations, as did the tendency of both sides’ top officials to travel gratuitously into the other’s sector. Berlin became a microcosm of the emerging Cold War. 1
Making matters worse were the desperate economic conditions prevailing throughout Germany. The allied policy of exercising complete control over German society, together with the Soviet Union’s systematic looting of its sector (something few in the West wanted to criticize, given the Nazis’ depredation of Russia during the war), stifled economic activity in the defeated nation. The economy, as Political Adviser for Germany Robert Murphy stated, was getting "steadily worse." 3 In fact the allied victors were obligated to keep the population alive, doling out 1,500-calorie food rations—more to coal miners, less to the elderly—and addressing endless power outages and housing shortages. This task, not at all attractive to nations trying themselves to recover from the war, was even less appealing to the military governors assigned to rule Germany. The heady days of shaking hands and sharing vodka in the Nazi rubble were gone.
In February 1948 delegates from the three western occupying powers convened in London, in order to arrange some sort of common political and economic reform in western Germany. 4 Despite the agreement at the Potsdam conference in July 1945 to maintain joint four-power occupation over all Germany until a final peace treaty was signed, the Soviet Union was not invited to this conference. On March 6 the London delegates issued a communique announcing their intention to reconstruct western Germany along capitalist, Marshall-Plan lines. 5 Meanwhile, American planners began to set up "Operation Bird Dog," a secret scheme to introduce a new currency throughout western Germany. Bird Dog would connect that part of Germany with the economy of western Europe, making it ready for Marshall plan aid; in so doing it would separate it cleanly from the eastern Soviet sector, just as the Plan had demarcated eastern and western Europe. 6
The Soviet military governor in Germany, Marshal Vassily Danilovich Sokolovsky, protested that these initiatives revealed a western intention to renege on the Potsdam agreement and divide Germany along Cold War lines. 7 As a reaction, on March 30 his forces began to interfere with western rail and road traffic within and around Berlin. More of a harassment than a confrontation, the Soviet action consisted of closer inspection of western vehicles, derailment of railroad cars, and a more obstinate attitude at Allied Control Council (ACC) meetings. It was now up to the western powers, and especially the United States, to decide whether to remain in Berlin, which meant putting up with Soviet harassment and antagonizing the Russians further, or to abandon the city, turning over its sectors there to Soviet control, and concentrating efforts upon western Germany. For almost three years the occupation of Berlin had persisted ad hoc. Now, the United States needed to come up with a policy.
To be sure, the West still had a legal right to remain in Berlin, and some American statesmen, notably Secretary of State George Marshall, initially believed that this was the best line to take. 8 No peace treaty had been signed with the Germans: whatever informal arrangements the western delegates were devising in London, the four powers still enjoyed the venerable victors’ rights of occupation and control. Indeed, according to this literal perspective, as to the governing of Germany the Soviet Union and the United States were still allies. But recent events had put the lie to such legalism. President Truman’s March 17 speech made the notion of Soviet-American alliance obviously specious; the March 6 London communique underscored this antagonism as far as Germany was concerned. The relations between the United States and the Soviet Union had no longer anything to do with international law. If the West was going to stay in Berlin, it needed a better justification. 9
"Legalistic argument no longer has meaning," stated General Lucius Dubignon Clay, the American military governor in Germany, in a March 31 teleconference on the Soviet harassment. "We are now faced with a realistic and not a legalistic problem. Our reply will not be misunderstood by 42 million Germans and perhaps 200 million Western Europeans." 10 Clay had long believed that Berlin symbolized American commitment to Europe. Once the Soviets began their harassment of western commerce and travel, Clay, along with Political Adviser Robert Murphy, sought to persuade Washington that a departure under Soviet duress would demoralize Germans and lead to American defeat on the continent. Over the next several weeks Truman and his advisers gradually endorsed this position. Indeed, Clay and Murphy ended up fulfilling their own prophecy: as Clay in particular well understood, in the absence of other information, relentless description of something as a crucial stake can make it just that.
In early April Clay and Murphy argued emotionally in communications across the Atlantic for American resoluteness. Evacuation, in the immediate wake of anti-communist elections in Italy and the growing success of the Marshall Plan, was to Clay "almost unthinkable." Murphy predicted that an American withdrawal "would have severe psychological reparations which would, at this critical stage in European situation, extend far beyond boundaries of Berlin and even Germany." 11 With the Soviets backing off their border harassment, Clay expounded his views in an April 10 teleconference with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Omar Bradley:
Why are we in Europe? We have lost Czechoslovakia. We have lost Finland. Norway is threatened. We retreat from Berlin.. . . If we mean that we are to hold Europe against communism, we must not budge. We can take humiliation and pressure short of war in Berlin without losing face. If we move, our position in Europe is threatened. If America does not know this, does not believe the issue is cast now, then it never will and communism will run rampant. 12
Initially, diplomats in Washington were less sure. The veteran policymaker Robert Lovett, for example, was not convinced that Berlin was an important Cold War stake, and he also worried that pugnacity there, especially given recent American successes in Europe, might make the Russians desperate. On April 22 Lovett sent a personal telegram to Clay, Murphy, and the American ambassador to Great Britain, Lewis Douglas, warning that intransigence could provoke a "drastic Sov reaction" and recommending instead that the three powers send a joint note to the Soviets explaining their position. 13 Following up on this, in early May Marshall and Truman ordered the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, Walter Bedell Smith, to hand the Kremlin a conciliatory note calling for mutual efforts to resolve the Berlin question. Also, Marshall and Bradley rejected Clay’s plan to send an armed convoy through eastern Germany toward Berlin; Bradley curtly reminded Clay that he was not to escalate. 14
One wonders then why Washington left the one real means with which Clay could intensify the crisis entirely in his hands. On June 7, the delegates at London announced their decision to go ahead with currency reform in western Germany. As the American governor (the United States was providing the currency for Operation Bird Dog) Clay was given complete discretion as to the actual implementation of this reform. Given his clear opinions about western presence in Berlin it should have come as no surprise that Clay decided to initiate Bird Dog immediately, and to distribute the new currency not only in western Germany but also the western sectors of Berlin. On June 18 Clay informed Sokolovsky of his intentions; the Russian Marshal protested, proposing instead that a special currency be distributed throughout Berlin only. Clay had no problem rejecting this offer, and on June 23 American authorities began to introduce the western Deutschmark, stamped with a "B," to the three western sectors. Clay went ahead with all of this before getting approval from Washington. 15
On June 24 Sokolovsky formally described Clay’s action as a violation of the Potsdam treaty, and offered a final proposal which would evacuate all occupying forces from Germany. With no positive response from Washington, the Soviet Union on the evening of the 24th imposed around the western sectors of Berlin a complete land and water blockade, closing off as well electricity and food supplies which came from the eastern sector. With this move Stalin was clearly raising the stakes, for the West would now have to get out of Berlin once supplies ran out or confront the blockade physically. Now the United States had to decide whether to risk war to maintain a western presence in Berlin. 16
Again, while Washington tried to come up with a coherent policy Clay pushed matters toward a confrontation. His subordinate, Colonel Frank Howley, stated publicly that his forces were not going anywhere, while Clay told his superiors in Washington that "we have to sweat it out, come what may.. . . To retreat now is to imply we are prepared to retreat further." 17 On June 26, once again without approval from his superiors, Clay initiated a small airlift to bring needed supplies from western Germany into Berlin. As Avi Shlaim writes, the political significance of this move was "paramount," because the United States was engaging in military action to signify a determination to stay in Berlin and to stand up to the Soviet challenge. 18
Would Washington back up Clay’s action? Murphy sent his opinion in a midnight telegram. The "presence in Berlin of Western occupants became a symbol of resistance to eastern expansionism," Murphy wrote.
It is unquestionably an index of our prestige in central and eastern Europe. As far as Germany is concerned, it is a test of US ability in Europe. If we docilely withdraw now, Germans and other Europeans would conclude that our retreat from western Germany is just a question of time. US position in Europe would be gravely weakened, and like a cat on a sloping tin roof. 19
On June 28 Truman met with his main advisers to reach a formal decision. The president was asked: What was the long-term American policy regarding Berlin? There was to be "no discussion on that point," he answered: "we were going to stay period." As Truman put it in hindsight:
What was at stake in Berlin was not a contest over legal rights, although our position was entirely sound in international law, but a struggle over Germany and, in a larger sense, over Europe.. . . the Kremlin tried to mislead the people of Europe into believing that our interest and support would not extend beyond economic matters and that we would back away from any military risks. 20
That evening Marshall sent a telegram to Douglas, who had earlier reported that the British were unsure about how serious the American commitment to the Prussian capital actually was. Marshall’s order reflected Truman’s unambiguity: "We stay in Berlin," he wired to London. 21 On the 30th Marshall, with Truman’s concurrence, announced publicly that the United States and its two allies intended to stay in Berlin indefinitely. Marshall hinted that airlift capability could be increased significantly so as to supply Berlin for the indefinite future (a suggestion that became reality with the opening of a new airstrip that fall). On July 6 the western powers delivered a formal note protesting the blockade, 22 but this was after Clay, together with Air Force Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg, had already begun to put in place a full-time airlift that could keep West Berlin alive. Using C-47 and C-54 transport planes the U.S. and British air forces began to ferry food, coal, and medical supplies to airstrips in western Berlin, eventually bringing 2.3 million tons of material to the beleaguered city.
The United States decided to stay in Berlin, even at the risk of war, because Clay and Murphy had persuaded Washington that the "bandwagon" model that the Truman administration had applied to the rest of Western Europe applied to Berlin as well. American policymakers agreed with Kennan that the struggle with the Soviet Union for Western Europe was as much psychological as it was economic or military: the United States had to prevent the fall of Berlin not for its inherent geopolitical value, but because an American departure under Soviet duress would cause Western Europeans to doubt the commitment of the United States. Ambassador to Great Britain Douglas, in a passage that (were it more eloquent) Kennan might have written, laid out his opinion to Lovett in July: Warning that to abandon Berlin would be "a calamity of the first order," he stressed that "Western European confidence in us, in the light of our repeated statements that we intend to remain in Berlin, would be so shattered that we would, with reasonable expectancy [sic], progressively lose Western Germany, if not Western Europe." 23
But few in the Truman administration had even thought about the importance of Berlin before the spring of 1948. The German capital was hardly at the center of the American sphere; indeed, it was the last place on the continent that the West could plausibly claim as its own whose political affiliation had yet to be firmly decided. This was why the actions of Clay and Murphy were so decisive: these two agitators saw to it that their "repeated statements" transformed Berlin, in the minds of busy Washington officials, into a Cold War stake more like France than Finland. As Richard Betts has put it: "[p]sychological symbolism became strategic determinism." 24
NSC-30
Once the United States committed fully to supplying West Berlin with resources (Truman made the formal decision to maintain the airlift indefinitely on July 22) the crisis there stabilized. The Russians, aware of the American bomb, did not want to escalate the confrontation into war. Truman was equally cautious: in his July 22 order he expressly ruled out a hawkish plan to break down the Soviet blockade. Most important, the Soviet expectation that the airlift would falter during the winter proved to be incorrect. The American and British air forces got into high gear by the fall of 1948, transporting thousands of tons of basic supplies to Berlin every day. Providentially the winter of 1948-49 turned out to be remarkably mild, allowing the airlift crews to maintain sortie rates unheard of for winter flying. At the same time the West Berliners, by defiantly enduring the blockade’s privations, frustrated Soviet hopes that the winter’s misery would destroy their morale.
In the late summer and fall of 1948, therefore, the crisis evolved from a volatile confrontation into another Cold War dispute that neither side was going to go to war over. Through the second half of 1948 delegates from all four nations met to argue about the Berlin blockade at Council of Foreign Ministers’ meetings in Paris and during United Nations Security Council meetings; by the end of the year the western powers were concerning themselves more with the development of a West German "Basic Law" and federal political system, and with the inauguration of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. As a consequence the Russians responded positively to subtle American overtures to begin negotiations on ending the blockade, and in the spring of 1949 the American diplomat Philip Jessup met secretly with a Soviet counterpart, Yakov Malik. 25 On May 3 the two negotiators formally signed an agreement to raise the blockade, and at midnight on May 12 the East Berlin authorities began to permit traffic to cross over into the western sector. With this the Berlin blockade was over, a plain victory for the West.
But this victory was simply a tactical one of rebuffing the Soviet blockade. Berlin still lay in the Soviet sector, the East German authorities still controlled all access points around the city, there was no independent economy there, nor any Western military forces to speak of. At the Council of Foreign Ministers’ meetings in early June, moreover, the four sides reached no agreement whatsoever concerning the longer-term political status of Berlin. In other words, there was nothing to prevent the Soviet Union from reviving its harassment and obstruction of commerce and movement any time it wanted to, nor anything to prevent the Russians from taking West Berlin by force once they believed that they had sufficient military power to deter American escalation. The action taken by the United States in 1948 and 1949 to maintain a Western presence in Berlin succeeded on its own terms but solved nothing. 26
The Berlin blockade prompted the West to make several major changes in its Cold War policy. One conclusion that American decisionmakers, especially Secretary Forrestal and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reached was that the United States military needed much more money. This led to an intense budget battle in 1948 and 1949 between the military and President Truman, a battle resolved for the time being in the form of NSC document 20/4. The blockade also contributed to the formation of NATO. It showed that the Russians were willing, despite the American atomic monopoly, to move against vulnerable western positions. European politicians wanted formal assurance that the United States would come to their aid should the Soviet Union try its luck elsewhere. Both of these stories have been expertly treated by other historians. 27
A third consequence of the Berlin blockade was less immediate, but equally important. Berlin gave Forrestal and the chiefs the opportunity to demand that Truman decide whether the United States would be willing to wage general war to defend that city. Ever since the early confrontations they naturally saw in the airlift a possible prelude to a wider European war. Alarmed by the weak Western military position in Berlin and in Germany generally, they had argued that the American policy on Berlin could lead to disaster. If the airlift escalated into actual warfare the immense Soviet army could overwhelm the local forces and move rapidly westward. Western European nations—in particular, France—were in no condition to fight in the first place and especially not in a war triggered by a dispute over occupation rights in the faraway Prussian city and erstwhile Nazi capital. Like all major crises, Berlin forced policymakers to make difficult decisions previously avoidable. 28
Indeed, early planning on Berlin had indicated the administration’s desire to avoid the subject. If the United States were to go to war with the Soviet Union, argued Secretary Royall on May 19, the United States needed to decide whether it would use atomic weapons. 29 On the 21st Truman asked the Joint Chiefs to prepare a plan "envisaging that we will not use atomic weapons." The NSC debated this proposal, and for the moment "deferred action on this subject." 30
In the summer of 1948 Truman’s military advisers insisted that it was a poor idea to continue deferring this subject, and an even poorer one to envisage a war with the Soviet Union in which the United States would not use its atomic weapons. In early July Forrestal met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to discuss a rumor that the Soviets would launch balloons to frustrate the nascent airlift. At this meeting the Joint Chiefs agreed that if a war broke out in Berlin this would escalate into a war for Europe. As deployments currently stood the United States would have to use atomic weapons in this war if it were to have any hope of winning it. The chiefs all agreed that the NSC needed to develop an atomic policy that specified under what political circumstances the United States would initiate atomic war. 31
Truman hinted at an answer to this question two weeks later, when he set into motion a plan to deploy several B-29 bombers to Britain. B-29s could carry atomic bombs, and the Russians were quite aware of this. 32 Quietly but not indetectably, several of these aircraft were deployed to Britain in mid-July.
But the B-29 deployment was a bluff; there were no atomic bombs aboard the planes, nor were they even fitted for them, something of which we now know Stalin was probably aware. 33 Moreover, control of atomic weapons still was formally held in the Atomic Energy Commission’s (AEC) civilian hands. Forrestal and the JCS wanted to know what the United States would actually do if the Soviets initiated war in Berlin. 34 On July 22 and 23 the NSC met to discuss this problem. Truman stated his position: the defense of Berlin was a matter of utmost national security, and it would not do to modify that objective because the Pentagon thought that military forces in Europe were inadequate. "If we move out of Berlin," he asserted, "we have lost everything we have been fighting for." Truman found an ally in General Clay, who described the good morale among West Berliners and downplayed the likelihood of a Soviet escalation of the crisis. 35 The point was to defend western rights in Berlin first and worry about the unlikely chances of a war breaking out second. Truman, worrying about the difficult election battle that fall, wanted the Berlin airlift to go smoothly while avoiding new defense spending.
Forrestal and the Joint Chiefs could not accept this. On July 26 and 28 they articulated their opposition to Truman’s stance on Berlin. Forrestal stated in a letter to Marshall that should the Soviets move against the airlift, neither he nor the JCS could recommend an expansion of the war, due "to the risk of war involved and the inadequacy of United States preparation for global conflict." 36 If defending Berlin were really a matter of defending "everything we have fought for," why did the AEC still control atomic bombs? Why had the administration developed no atomic strategy? From the military perspective atomic bombs would be necessary to win a war over Berlin. 37
Truman wanted to satisfy the demands of Forrestal and the JCS. In September he signed on to NSC-30, the first formal expression of American atomic policy. 38 NSC-30 was a brief against the proposition that the United States should refrain from waging atomic war for moral reasons. It was "futile to hope or to suggest that the imposition of limitations on the use of certain military weapons can prevent their use in war." The novel nature of atomic war nevertheless made it advisable to refrain from openly declaring an American atomic strategy, because that would alarm the American public, triggering a moral debate that would lend comfort to the Russians. The Soviets, according to the new document, "should in fact never be given the slightest reason to believe that the U.S. would even consider not to use atomic weapons against them if necessary." 39
NSC-30 did not contain a specific atomic strategy, at least in the sense that "strategy" came to have in the more meticulous 1950s and 1960s. It contained no targeting doctrines, deterrence theories, battlefield tactics, or sociological studies. 40 Indeed, insofar as the authors of NSC-30 worried about the actual conduct of an atomic war, it was to bring up the point that the destructiveness of such a war might make its political objectives harder to attain. It was necessary therefore to ensure that an atomic attack indeed "advances the fundamental and lasting aims of US policy." One of the reasons, of course, for this lack of specificity was that the Soviet Union had not yet gotten its own bomb, making concerns over deterrence or counterforce targeting premature. But more important than this was the overriding purpose of NSC-30, which was not to decide how to wage an atomic war but whether to do so in the first place. Hiroshima had bothered American decision-makers, not least President Truman himself, despite his public pose of gruff pragmatism. 41 For three years the United States government had avoided squarely deciding whether it would wage atomic war to avoid defeat at the hands of the Soviet Union. NSC-30 was, above all, a policy meant to answer this question.
Soon after the NSC meeting at which NSC-30 was unveiled the president made a point of assuring his military advisers that he was determined to adhere to this new policy. Truman "prayed that he would never have to make such a decision," Forrestal recalled the president saying, "but that if it became necessary no one need have a misgiving but what we would do so." 42
With this endorsement basic American security policy formally evolved. 43 Before 1948 the United States had no direct policy regarding general atomic warfare: there was no statement indicating over exactly which stakes the United States would wage general war, nor was there a strategy that specified under what circumstances the United States would use atomic weapons. There were several reasons for this imprecision, but probably the most important of them was Truman’s preference to avoid the question. Berlin made him confront it. With his plain endorsement of NSC-30 he had concluded that the United States must wage general war to maintain a western presence in Berlin, and by general war he meant atomic war.
Endnotes
Note 1: On Eisenhower’s momentous decision not to advance toward Berlin see Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower and Berlin, 1945: The Decision to Halt at the Elbe (New York: Norton, 1967). Also see Russell Weigley, Eisenhower’s Lieutenants: The Campaign of France and Germany 1944-1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), pp. 684-87; and Richard Betts, Soldiers, Statesmen and Cold War Crises (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 77-78. Back.
Note 2: For a summary of Berlin politics before the blockade, see Ann and John Tusa, The Berlin Airlift (New York: Atheneum, 1988), chapters 1-4; W. Phillips Davison, The Berlin Blockade: A Study in Cold War Politics (New York: Arno Press, 1980), chapter 2; and Avi Shlaim, The United States and the Berlin Blockade, 1948-1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), chapter 2. The first work concentrates on activities in Berlin itself, while the latter two deal primarily with United States and Allied decisionmaking. Back.
Note 3: February 1, 1948 telegram from Murphy to Marshall, FRUS 2 (1948): 2, "Germany and Austria," p. 873. Back.
Note 4: This chapter will not deal with the politics of this conference at any length; briefly, France wanted to avoid antagonizing the Soviet Union by splitting Germany so obviously, while Britain and the United States favored the harder line. A record of the conference’s proceedings can be found in FRUS 2 (1948): 1-374. Later, the British would come to take a softer line on Germany, while France would become much more hawkish. Back.
Note 5: This communique can be found in ibid., pp. 141-43. Back.
Note 6: On Operation Bird Dog, see Robert Murphy, Diplomat Among Warriors (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964), p. 349; and Jean Edward Smith, Lucius D. Clay (New York: Holt, 1990), pp. 483-93. Also see Ann and John Tusa, The Berlin Airlift, p. 132. Back.
Note 7: Murphy related Sokolovsky’s protest in a March 20, 1948 telegram to Marshall, FRUS 2 (1948): 883-84. Back.
Note 8: Marshall listed his legal reasonings in a formal letter to the Soviet Ambassador in July. See July 6, 1948 letter from Marshall to Panyushkin, ibid., pp. 950-53. Back.
Note 9: The task of justifying a Western presence in Berlin would continue to perplex American policymakers, most notably President Kennedy during the 1961 Vienna Summit. See chapter 8. Back.
Note 10: March 31, 1948 teleconference among Generals Lucius D. Clay and Omar Bradley, and Lieutenant General Albert Wedemeyer, from Jean Edward Smith, ed., The Papers of General Lucius D. Clay volume 2 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974), p. 605. Back.
Note 11: April 2, 1948 teleconference with Bradley and Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall, ibid., p. 614; April 1, 1948 telegram from Murphy to Marshall, FRUS 2 (1948): 886. Back.
Note 12: April 10, 1948 teleconference with Bradley, Papers of General Lucius D. Clay, p. 623. Back.
Note 13: April 22, 1948 telegram from Lovett to U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain Lewis Douglas, FRUS 2 (1948): 896-97. Back.
Note 14: On Marshall and Truman’s order, see Kennan, Memoirs 1925-1950, p. 246, and Walter Millis, ed., The Forrestal Diaries (New York: Viking Press, 1951), p. 424. On Bradley’s order, see Shlaim, The United States and the Berlin Blockade, p. 138. Back.
Note 15: Editorial Note, in FRUS 2 (1948): 909-10; Shlaim, The United States and the Berlin Blockade, pp. 150-59. Back.
Note 16: On the events of June 24 and 25 see U.S. Department of State, Germany 1947-49, The Story in Documents (Washington, 1950), pp. 203-4. Back.
Note 17: Shlaim, The United States and the Berlin Blockade, p. 196; June 25, 1948 teleconference with Royall and General J. Lawton Collins, Papers of General Lucius D. Clay, p. 703. Back.
Note 18: Shlaim, The United States and the Berlin Blockade, p. 206. Back.
Note 19: June 26, 1948 telegram from Murphy to Marshall, FRUS 2 (1948): 919-20. Back.
Note 20: Harry S Truman, Memoirs of Harry S. Truman: Volume 2, Years of Trial and Hope (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956), p. 123. Back.
Note 21: June 28, 1948 Marshall telegram to Clay, FRUS 2 (1948): 930; also see Forrestal Diaries, p. 454. Back.
Note 22: This is the July 6, 1948 Marshall letter to Panyushkin, mentioned above in note 8. Back.
Note 23: July 14, 1948 telegram from Douglass to Lovett, FRUS 2 (1948): 968. Back.
Note 24: Richard Betts, Soldiers, Statesmen and Cold War Crises (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 93. On Clay’s regular use of the fait accompli to force Washington’s hand, also see Shlaim, The United States and the Berlin Blockade, p. 206. Back.
Note 25: A record of the Malik-Jessup talks can be found in FRUS 3 (1949): "Council of Foreign Ministers; Germany and Austria," pp. 694-750. Back.
Note 26: This is the conclusion of Robert Murphy, who believed that the United States ought to have challenged the blockade directly and with military force. Murphy writes in his Diplomat Among Warriors (p. 354) that he "should have resigned in protest against Washington’s policy." Back.
Note 27: For recent examples, see Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, chapter 6; and Samuel R. Williamson Jr., and Steven L. Rearden, The Origins of U.S. Nuclear Strategy, 1945-1953 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), pp. 93-95. Back.
Note 28: Richard Betts argues that the Truman administration paid "astonishingly little attention" to the atomic bomb before the Berlin crisis. Betts, Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance (Washington: Brookings Institute, 1987). Back.
Note 29: May 19, 1948 memorandum from Royall to the NSC, FRUS 1 (1948): 572-73. On the direct relationship between the Berlin blockade and the demand by the American military to specify American atomic policy, also see Scott Sagan, Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 15-16. Back.
Note 30: Memorandum of May 21, 1948 NSC discussion, Declassified Document Collection, 1996 series, document number 3474 (hereafter in this form: DDC 1996, number 3474), p. 7. Back.
Note 31: Williamson and Rearden, The Origins of U.S. Nuclear Strategy, pp. 87-88. Back.
Note 32: "You have no idea," Kennan said in a 1946 National War College lecture, "how much it contributes to the general politeness and pleasantness of diplomacy when you have a little quiet armed force in the background." (Quoted in Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, p. 39.) Back.
Note 33: Though evidence from the Soviet side is not yet clear, some historians argue that the B-29 deployment did in fact intimidate the Soviets and contribute to their decision to accept the Western presence in Berlin and eventually back off from their blockade in 1949. See Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, 1945-1950 (New York: Knopf, 1981), p. 260; and Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 109-10. Back.
Note 34: See Shlaim, The United States and the Berlin Blockade, p. 245, and Herken, The Winning Weapon, p. 287. Back.
Note 35: To prove this latter point Clay characteristically offered to sit on the Berlin airfields throughout the crisis. His bravado, admirable here, would have different effects in the 1961 crisis. The only source for this crucial meeting that I have been able to find is Truman’s memoirs. See Years of Trial and Hope, pp. 131-33. Back.
Note 36: July 28, 1948 letter from Forrestal to Marshall, FRUS 2 (1948): 994. Back.
Note 37: Truman, Years of Trial and Hope, pp. 125-26; Forrestal Diaries, pp. 460-62; Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, p. 225. Back.
Note 38: NSC-30 is reprinted in FRUS 1 (1948): "General: The United Nations," part 1, pp. 624-28. Back.
Note 40: On this point also see David Alan Rosenberg, "The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945-60," International Security 7 (Spring 1983): 13. Back.
Note 41: On this point see The Journals of David E. Lilienthal: The Atomic Energy Years, 1945-1950 (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), p. 474. Hamby, Man of the People, p. 552; and McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988), pp. 199-200. Back.
Note 42: Truman quoted in Forrestal Diaries, p. 487. Back.
Note 43: Also making this point are Williamson and Rearden, The Origins of U.S. Nuclear Strategy, p. 78. Back.
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