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Destroying the Village: Eisenhower and Thermonuclear War
Campbell Craig
1998
2. General War Becomes Thermonuclear War, 1948–1952
The only question left to resolve regarding atomic weapons and American security policy, now that Truman had signed on to NSC&-;30, seemed to be the bitter, but in the larger picture unimportant, question of who exactly in the U.S. military would be in charge of waging atomic war. Truman’s unexpected and dramatic victory in the November election had encouraged him during budget negotiations in early 1949 to stick to his policy of low defense spending. Everyone in Washington knew that with Truman’s $14 billion defense allocation the United States armed forces would not be able to do much in a general war other than launch the atomic arsenal, so the branch given primary responsibility for that job would have unquestionably triumphed in the interservice wars and could rightly be seen to dominate the American military. While American and British pilots continued to fly back and forth across eastern Germany in late 1948 and early 1949, Army, Navy, and Air Force representatives in Washington went after one another’s throats in their struggle for money and strategic sway. 1
A weapon in this latter war was the Harmon report, a study on the likely outcome of an atomic war completed by Lt. General Hubert Harmon of the Air Force in May 1949. This report was remarkably pessimistic. Harmon and his committee concluded that a general war against the Soviet Union, despite the American atomic monopoly, would be difficult for the United States to win. Lessons from the previous war suggested that a unilateral atomic attack upon Russian cities could well stiffen, not break, the resistance of the Russian people, and by escalating the war into this new realm the United States risked making the Soviet government desperate and its fighting forces vengeful, something against which memories of the previous war also cautioned. It would be very bad for America to lose a war into which it had introduced atomic weapons. Despite these fundamental problems, however, there was no alternative in the end but to maintain the current strategy of relying upon the atomic monopoly. The Soviet standing army was too big, and the American defense budget too small, to do otherwise. 2
In retrospect the Harmon report remains a fascinating document, not least for its description of atomic war as something much less than the total, species-destroying cataclysm that a war between the United States and the Soviet Union would later connote. Moreover, the report turned out to be the first of a series of speculative studies on atomic and thermonuclear war to be written over the next decade that would come to have a decisive impact upon policymakers’ considerations of general war. As far as its immediate influence upon Truman administration security policy was concerned, however, the Harmon report was of little significance. Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, an ally of the Air Force in the interservice wars, thought the report insufficiently supportive of atomic strategy and kept it away from Truman’s desk. The president therefore did not learn of the report’s main points until well after it was completed, and nothing in the report found its way into approved NSC policy.
Reacting to the Soviet Bomb
But even had Truman read it and immediately set about conforming national security policy to its conclusions, the Harmon report would likely have had little lasting effect. In early September the AEC reported that its sensors had detected a significant release of radioactivity from somewhere in Soviet Asia. Immediately AEC scientists began to analyze the data, concluding by the third week of September that the level of radioactivity had to have been produced by the detonation of some sort of atomic device. The American monopoly was over. 3
The initial American reaction to this news was, in many cases, one of denial. Secretary Johnson, and evidently President Truman as well, initially subscribed to the theory that the radioactivity detected by the AEC came not from the successful test of an atomic bomb but from some sort of accident—that the American monopoly had not ended at all. Hinting at this, Truman in his public statement of September 23 ambiguously called the test a "nuclear explosion." 4 Gradually this theory lost credence in the White House, however, and on October 10 Truman approved an NSC plan, which had been conceived by the Defense Department back in September, to assume that the Soviet Union had indeed built a bomb, and make the American response one of escalating atomic-bomb production. The American decision to rely upon atomic bombardment in a general war—the basis of NSC–30—did not necessarily require an atomic monopoly, but it certainly required atomic predominance. There was simply no way to win a war to stay in Berlin, for example, if the Soviets had an atomic arsenal comparable to the American one. Truman approved the NSC plan quickly and the AEC began work building more bombs. 5
But this initiative, like the Berlin airlift, would provide only temporary reprieve. The West could regain a numerical advantage, to be sure, but however many atomic bombs the United States built, the Soviets would in all probability eventually attain enough themselves to offset them in any likely theater. That stalemate would then make the Soviet advantage in conventional forces decisive. Almost immediately many of Truman’s advisers and others in Washington began to consider another way of responding to the Soviet achievement.
Upon learning of the Soviet test two of the most influential atomic policymakers in Washington—Senator Brien McMahon, chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, and Lewis Strauss, one of the AEC’s five commissioners—began to urge Truman to move ahead quickly on a project to build a thermonuclear bomb. 6 Manhattan Project scientists had theorized during the war that an atomic fission explosion could generate enough heat to implode two nuclei, creating a thermonuclear explosion that would dwarf its atomic counterpart. After the Soviet test many of these scientists, including Ernest Lawrence, Luis Alvarez, and Edward Teller began to promote this theory more vigorously; Senator McMahon concurred, and had his principal adviser, William Borden, draft a policy statement, which the senator entered into the record on September 29. This proposal argued simply for an immediate crash program to develop the superbomb and a nuclear-powered airplane to deliver it to Soviet targets.
On September 30 Strauss sent Truman a memorandum suggesting that by building the superbomb the United States could regain its qualitative advantage in the Cold War. Thermonuclear weaponry represented a "quantum jump" in military hardware, and with it America could once again confront the Soviets with confidence and aggressiveness. Truman met with Strauss to discuss this memorandum, and, according to Hewlett and Duncan, urged its author to "force the issue up to the White House and do it quickly." 7
Truman’s order set the decisionmaking process in motion. By early October, the various bureaucracies in Washington concerned with nuclear weapons had turned their attention exclusively to the question of whether or not to build the superbomb. The AEC directed its General Advisory Committee (GAC), a group made up mostly of prominent atomic scientists, to advise on the feasibility and merit of developing thermonuclear weaponry. The Joint Chiefs and other military planners began to consider how the new bomb might fit into military planning. Secretary of State Acheson asked George Kennan to evaluate the effect of thermonuclear bombs upon the long-term interests of American foreign policy.
The GAC was led by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the "father" of the atomic bomb, and consisted largely of scientists and other civilian experts on atomic issues. Working quickly, the committee completed its final report by October 30. Its main recommendation was to urge Truman to refrain from building the superbomb. Though the GAC’s formal mission was to evaluate the decision scientifically, the basis of this recommendation was not. The moral opprobrium associated with building such a weapon, together with the possibilities of international control and the poor state of Soviet thermonuclear research, the committee argued, outweighed any political or strategic use the superbomb might provide. 8 In an addendum to their report the authors (probably the main author was Oppenheimer) explained their thinking. "We base our recommendation," they stated,
on our belief that the extreme dangers to mankind inherent in the proposal wholly outweigh any military advantage that could come from this development. Let it be clearly realized that this is a superweapon; it is in a totally different category from an atomic bomb.. . . We believe a superbomb should never be produced. 9
The authors of the GAC were not blind to the likely objections that would be placed against their report. In particular, they contended that the United States could continue to wage the Cold War successfully against the Soviet Union even if the Soviets, as a result of the American decision to eschew the superbomb, attained a thermonuclear monopoly. Atomic weapons were destructive enough to serve as a deterrent to war. A Soviet thermonuclear attack, they argued, could be met effectively with atomic reprisal. 10
Seeing the GAC report as a possible obstacle to Truman’s immediate approval of the H–Bomb project—particularly given the GAC’s elite reputation and Truman’s frequent public expressions of support for the idea of international control—NSC officials and the Joint Chiefs turned their full attention to defeating the GAC recommendation. These supporters of the bomb sent urgent memoranda to the White House in November and December. One clear message emerged from their sharp testimony. The political risk inherent in allowing the Soviet Union to acquire the bomb before the United States outweighed the "extreme dangers to mankind" of which the GAC warned. This risk could not be described in traditional terms of relative military power, as the GAC had tried to argue; it was more profound than that, striking at the very core of American national survival.
Everyone clamoring for Truman’s ear in late 1949 iterated this basic point. 11 The Joint Chiefs argued simply that "[P]ossession of a thermonuclear weapon by the USSR without such possession by the United States would be intolerable." 12 Paul Nitze, speaking for the State Department, wrote that "it is essential that the U.S. not find itself in a position of technological inferiority in this field;" Strauss noted understatedly that "The danger in the weapon does not reside in its physical nature but in human behavior. Its unilateral renunciation by the United States could very easily result in its unilateral possession by the Soviet government. I am unable to see any satisfaction in that prospect."
"[O]ur arsenal," Strauss concluded, "must not be less well equipped than with the most potent weapons that our technology can devise." 13 Defense members of a NSC working group elaborated further:
The situation today is strikingly parallel to that of a few years ago when this nation was engaged in a desperate race to develop a fission bomb before Germany. From the Soviet point of view sole possession of the thermonuclear weapon would place in their hands an offensive weapon of the greatest known power possibilities.. . . In time of war sole possession of the thermonuclear weapon coupled with tremendous superiority of conventional military forces would provide the Soviets with the necessary balance. . . to risk hostilities for the rapid achievement of their objectives.. . . The inevitable jeopardy to our position as a world power and to our democratic way of life would be intolerable. 14
Attacks on the GAC report also came from Congress. Senator McMahon led the way. In a November 21 letter to Truman he argued that the "specific decision that you must make regarding the superbomb is one of the gravest ever to confront an American president.. . . If we let Russia get the super first," McMahon added, "catastrophe becomes all but certain—whereas, if we get it first, there exists a chance of saving ourselves." 15
Having allowed the debate to percolate, Truman prepared to make a final decision in January. Back in November the president had created a special committee of the NSC, to be made up of Acheson, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, and AEC Chairman David E. Lilienthal, whose job would be to consider the various arguments and make a formal recommendation to the president on the superbomb. The special committee’s mission was perfunctory, given Truman’s own view that the bomb should be built, together with the adamant concurrence of the Joint Chiefs, his main advisers, and the dominant congressional authority on atomic weaponry. Moreover, all three of the special committee’s members had already made their opinions known. 16 Nevertheless the three men submitted their final report to Truman on January 31, 1950. They recommended, with Lilienthal dissenting, that the United States proceed with a program to build the superbomb. 17 Truman did not need to be persuaded. The president asked: "Can the Russians do it?" All three members of the subcommittee, including Lilienthal, assented. "In that case," Truman concluded, "we have no choice. We’ll go ahead." 18
The GAC made a poor case against the bomb, for in their recommendation there can be found no effective refutation of the thesis put forth by Nitze, Strauss, the Joint Chiefs, et al. However true it was that the superbomb could kill civilians by the millions, that the Soviet Union could not possibly attain the bomb for several years, that international control was feasible, that atomic bombs could deter a thermonuclear attack—none of these arguments spoke to the simple fact that the only sure way for American national security to be put in fundamental danger in 1950 was for the Soviet Union to acquire a monopoly over thermonuclear weaponry, and the only sure way to prevent that from happening was for the United States to build a bomb first. 19 It was this simple formula that prompted the chorus of support for the superbomb in late 1949; it was this distinction that prompted McMahon to remark that the GAC report "made me sick." 20
Kennan’s Demurral
By contending that America atomic arsenal could serve as an effective deterrent to a Soviet thermonuclear attack, the GAC failed to recognize, or chose to overlook, the advantage that military predominance can provide apart from actual warfare. It was particularly surprising that they missed this since it was precisely this advantage that the United States had utilized during its atomic monopoly. The decision to build the hydrogen bomb was not a last-ditch effort to prevent an otherwise imminent Soviet attack; rather, it was to make sure that the balance of Cold War power did not tilt irretrievably toward the Soviet side. 21 To object to this line of reasoning on its own terms one would have had to advance the proposition that the "extreme dangers to mankind" inherent in thermonuclear technology should have been of greater concern to Americans than their national survival. The GAC critics of the H–Bomb decision were not willing to make that argument.
One who was willing to make that argument, or at least grope toward it, was George Kennan. Secretary of State Dean Acheson had asked Kennan, who was about to leave the State Department, to assess the superbomb decision in the light of larger American foreign policy objectives. Kennan spent his last days in Washington dedicating himself to this task, completing by January a memorandum so elaborate in form and unusual in content that Truman never came close to seeing it. Yet Kennan hit upon something that the GAC and other critics of the super had not.
The outgoing Policy Planning Staff director had been thinking about the thermonuclear bomb since 1949. Senator Edwin Johnson of Colorado had let slip in a television interview in November of that year that the United States was considering its development, and this prompted Kennan to send an anguished letter to Acheson. The following questions, Kennan insisted, "would have to be answered" if the United States were to "arrive at a rational decision" regarding the bomb. "Would our possession of the weapon as a means of creating terror," Kennan asked, "serve the interests of the United States either as a preventive of war or as a means of winning it? What would be the moral effect in the United States and throughout the world of our developing this weapon of mass destruction the ingredients of which have no peaceful applications whatever?" Kennan added that the "ultimate decision whether to develop the super-bomb will be made from the point of view of national security in its broadest sense—self-preservation or actual survival." 22 Asked for his professional opinion about whether it would be in the American interest to build the superbomb, like the GAC Kennan instead listed his moral objections to it.
In January, before Truman made his final decision, Kennan completed his last memorandum, a remarkably long essay called "International Control of Atomic Energy." 23 In this paper Kennan suggested that surrender to the Soviet Union might well be preferable to a thermonuclear war. Warfare, he argued,
should be a means to an end other than warfare, an end connected with the beliefs and the feelings and the attitudes of people, an end marked by submission to a new political will and perhaps to a new regime of life, but an end which at least did not negate the principle of life itself.
The weapons of mass destruction do not have this quality.. . . they cannot really be reconciled with a political purpose directed to shaping, rather than destroying, the lives of the adversary. 24
Kennan acknowledged that nuclear weapons could serve the United States temporarily as tools of deterrence. But this was to be an expedient until steps were taken to establish international control over the bomb. "In the military sphere," Kennan added in February, "we should act at once to get rid of our dependence, in our war plans, on the atomic weapon." 25
One can discern the difference, subtle and undeveloped as it was, between Kennan’s opposition to the superbomb and that of the GAC. Both sides saw in the hydrogen bomb a revolutionary military invention so potentially destructive that to use it posed dangers to humanity as a whole. Thermonuclear weapons were different from atomic ones. But the GAC tempered its objection by insisting that the United States, even after having allowed the Soviets to obtain a thermonuclear monopoly, could still win a war and preserve its security, by responding to a Soviet attack with atomic weapons. Even in the thermonuclear age, according to this view, the United States could maintain its political survival by prevailing in a world war.
Kennan disagreed. He admitted that the hydrogen bomb could deter the Soviet Union from embarking upon aggression, but he was more interested in trying to force American policymakers to think about what the new weapon could actually do for them. The more important question looked to the future: once both sides had attained thermonuclear arsenals, could the United States, or any nation, "win" a general war in the traditional sense? Could Americans really defend their national existence by fighting a war with hydrogen bombs? If not, then what other solutions were there, other than creating an airtight system of international control, or developing a new policy which in the end admitted that "submission to a new political will" was better than unleashing a general war?
Truman did not take such reasoning into consideration. Acting upon basic national security logic, he wanted quickly and unconditionally to go ahead with the superbomb, and objections to this decision by some scientists and a State Department official on his way out of Washington were hardly going to change his mind. On January 31, 1950, he made the decision to build the hydrogen bomb.
NSC–68
The same day that he approved of the decision to go ahead with the hydrogen bomb, President Truman also issued this order:
I hereby direct the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense to undertake a reexamination of our objectives in peace and war and of the effect of these objectives on our strategic plans, in the light of the probable fission bomb capability and possible thermonuclear bomb capability of the Soviet Union. 26
The task of officially complying with Truman’s January 31 directive fell to Paul Nitze, the State Department expert who would soon take over Kennan’s job as head of the Policy Planning Staff. Nitze completed NSC–68 on April 14, 1950. 27 In it he argued that the primary threat to American security over the coming years would be a stronger and more confident Soviet Union, emboldened particularly by its new weaponry. Always a fanatical regime bent on world domination, the Kremlin had avoided confrontation in the Cold War’s early years because of the American atomic monopoly. 28 Once Stalin obtained nuclear parity, Nitze warned, he would use it to cancel out the American arsenal, move his vast, almost omnipotent conventional forces into the "Eurasian land mass" and dare the Americans to risk World War III by stopping him. If the West were to retain its moral resolve to resist totalitarianism over the long haul, it would have to prevent the Soviets from gaining this upper hand. 29
Breaking finally from Kennan’s policy, Nitze argued in NSC–68 that the best way to keep the Soviets at bay would be to embark upon a vast buildup of American armed forces. Political and economic means of containment were fine, he acknowledged, but in the crucial coming years the Kremlin would be deterred in the end only by substantial military might. Until the Soviets demonstrated a willingness to participate "normally" in international politics, United States officials needed to concentrate upon the military component of American security policy.
Nitze’s basic recommendation, therefore, was straightforward. Potential Soviet attainment of nuclear arsenals meant that the United States must intensify its strategy of containment. This new approach had to emphasize military power over other means of containment. Policymakers needed to forget notions of fiscal restraint and engage in Keynesian deficit spending, so as to provide larger sums for defense without stifling the domestic economy. Americans also needed to shed any illusions about Soviet intentions: the Kremlin’s aim was world domination, and only the United States stood in its way.
Conspicuous in its absence from this basic national security policy was any substantial discussion of the thermonuclear weapons that prompted its writing in the first place. Nitze’s argument was that the United States needed to beef up its military power so as to counteract an increasing Soviet threat. Consequently he supported significant expansion of American conventional and atomic capabilities. But as for deployment of the weapons that Truman had just decided to build, weapons that Nitze himself had urged Truman to build, on this matter Nitze was ambiguous. In fact, his recommendation regarding thermonuclear weapons was so equivocal, contrasting strongly with the assertive tone of the rest of the document, that one must wonder what was going on. 30
"In the event of a general war with the U.S.S.R.," Nitze stated, "it must be anticipated that atomic weapons will be used by each side in the manner it deems best suited to accomplish its objectives." 31 In other words, one could not base one’s policy upon the assumption that either side would refrain from using these weapons in an all-out war. This was a position consistent with that taken by Nitze and many others when demanding that Truman go ahead with the super. Yet Nitze went on to write that it
appears to follow from the above that we should produce and stockpile thermonuclear weapons in the event they prove feasible and would add significantly to our net capability. Not enough is yet known of their potentialities to warrant a judgment at this time regarding their use in war to attain our objectives. 32
Thermonuclear weapons, as Nitze knew, would be able to destroy the enemy hundreds of times more quickly and completely than atomic bombs, a fact he alluded to in his recommendation that Truman go ahead with the bomb. So it is hard to see how Nitze could wonder whether such weapons would "add significantly to our net capability." Further along in NSC–68 Nitze elaborated on this point, but he continued to be vague. It was "mandatory," he argued, "that we enlarge upon our technical superiority by an accelerated exploitation of the scientific potential of the United States and our allies." 33 He concluded: "It is necessary to have the military power to deter, if possible, Soviet expansion, and to defeat, if necessary, aggressive Soviet or Soviet-directed actions of a limited or total character." 34
If the United States was to exploit the West’s scientific potential in order to create military forces capable of both deterring Soviet expansion and defeating the Soviet Union in any kind of war, then one has to ask what kind of military forces Nitze could possibly have had in mind other than the weapons that the United States was at that moment rushing to build. 35 Yet again Nitze left the issue unclear, not stating here or anywhere else in NSC–68 that the threat of thermonuclear war would have to become the ultima ratio of basic American military policy.
The Truman administration’s implementation of NSC–68 had enormous consequences. Sitting on Truman’s desk the day North Korean forces crossed over into South Korea, NSC–68 provided Truman and his main security advisers with both a ready-made explanation of this invasion, and a broad strategy to deal with it. It suggested that the events in Korea were not the opening salvo of a civil war in a remote part of the world but of a systematic Soviet Cold War offensive. Nitze’s Keynesian argument that the United States could treble or quadruple defense spending without stifling the domestic economy provided the president with a rationale to spend far more to repel the Soviet threat than he had previously been willing to. Finally, NSC–68 replaced Kennan’s emphasis upon political and economic means of resisting Soviet expansion with a new and thoroughgoing emphasis upon military power. Truman’s approval of NSC–68, then, foretold his rejection of more moderate Cold War policies in favor of the all-out military crusade upon which the United States embarked after January 1950. This is a story that has been authoritatively told. 36
The one area of national security policy which did not fit into the NSC–68 blueprint was the Truman administration’s attitude toward thermonuclear weaponry. If American policy on thermonuclear war had conformed to the recommendations of NSC–68 as closely as non-nuclear policy had, then one might have expected to see in the years 1950–53 a patient attempt to build the superbomb, and at the same time an effort among American military planners to construct a general war strategy that excluded, or at least sought to avert, all-out thermonuclear attack. What actually occurred was quite the opposite, revealing a large gap between Truman administration policy and practice on the question of thermonuclear war.
All-out for the Superbomb
The arrest of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on charges of passing nuclear secrets to the Russians in August 1950, coming in the wake of the British announcement that Klaus Fuchs, an emigré who had worked on the Manhattan project, had been caught committing a similar crime, intensified the desires of many American officials to spare no expense in building the superbomb. The logic that led Truman to make the initial decision in January had not gone away: it was by no means impossible that Fuchs or the Rosenbergs had transferred to the Russians decisive information on the development of thermonuclear weaponry, and this meant that the Soviets could still get the bomb before the Americans. 37 Added to this was the "loss" of China in late 1949, the outbreak of the Korean war, an event that seemed to conform with NSC–68’s resonating depiction of the USSR as a messianic regime bent on world domination, and the shocking entrance of the Chinese communists into that war in late 1950. It was in this climate that Senator Joseph McCarthy was able to prosper, that the Congress and the president acquiesced in the quadrupling of the American defense budget, that General Douglas MacArthur publicly defied the orders of his president to popular acclaim, and that American military planners and scientists, urged on by the frenzied Senator Brien McMahon, worked to develop a thermonuclear bomb and a strategy to deploy it against the Russians.
In the late summer of 1950, as the Korean war raged, Truman moved to expedite the superbomb program. On August 2 McMahon argued in front of his joint committee that the United States needed to begin a crash program of constructing new nuclear reactors and the industrial plants needed to manufacture the Uranium 235 and heavy water necessary for successful nuclear fusion. Truman agreed, and soon AEC operatives were at work at new or rehabilitated facilities in Washington, Idaho, South Carolina, and Tennessee, and in laboratories at Los Alamos, Berkeley, and Chicago. 38 At the same time operatives overseas secured American control over raw materials in South Africa, the Belgian Congo, and Norway, and Edward Teller, now a chief scientist at Los Alamos, received funding for new laboratories and the hiring of many new scientists. Basic, theoretical research, Teller argued, was necessary if there were to be a chance of building a bomb quickly. On December 1 Truman asked Congress for an additional $16.8 billion in defense spending—a figure higher than the total he had wanted back in 1949 to spend for all of fiscal 1951—and $1 billion for the AEC, a sum to be dedicated entirely to thermonuclear research and production. In May of 1951 officials conducted early tests, code-named Greenhouse, in the Nevada desert, which demonstrated that it would be possible to create the heat necessary to instigate fusion with atomic explosions. 39
On the military front, General Curtis LeMay of the U.S. Air Force transformed the Strategic Air Command (SAC), theretofore a minor Air Force agency, into the force that would be responsible for delivering thermonuclear bombs to Russian targets. LeMay’s mission was to attain the capability to launch a large nuclear attack against the Soviet Union before the Soviets could respond in kind. He therefore acquired new intercontinental bombers, some with the ability to reach Russian targets and return to base without refueling. SAC commissioned new pilots and base commanders. And LeMay brought together many colleagues who had served under him in the campaign to bombard German and Japanese cities during World War II. In 1951 and 1952 this new staff developed a systematic targeting doctrine, taking from their previous campaign the idea (one rejected, among other places, in the Harmon report) that comprehensive bombardment of a nation’s industrial and economic centers and its strategic forces still on the ground could lead to a quick and decisive victory. LeMay believed that intensive nuclear bombardment could win a world war pretty much by itself. His force therefore had to predominate in any military planning for World War III. SAC would not be providing support for ground troops. 40
The effort to build the bomb only intensified after the Greenhouse tests. McMahon, believing like LeMay that a substantial arsenal of hydrogen bombs could all by itself give the United States decisive Cold War superiority, called for building "thousands and thousands" of them in the summer of 1951. 41 Following a second Soviet atomic test in late September, something that magnified fears in Washington of an imminent Soviet monopoly, Truman acceded to the demands of McMahon and other hard-line congressmen that the United States go even further to get the bomb as soon as possible. In February 1952 Congress allocated an astonishing $4.9 billion for construction of new manufacturing facilities and a state-of-the-art laboratory near the Berkeley campus at Livermore. 42
By the summer of 1952 AEC officials were informing Truman that a thermonuclear device, code named for the moment "Alarm Clock," would probably be ready by the fall. 43 This posed a political dilemma, for it would appear strange for an outgoing president to authorize a thermonuclear test before the general election in early November. Truman apparently tried to get the test date moved back to late November or December, but clear days at the test site, the Eniwetok atoll in the South Pacific, were rare toward the end of the year. 44 As it happened AEC forecasters predicted clear weather on November 1—October 31, Halloween, in the United States—and, with Truman’s go-ahead, early in the morning on that date AEC and military officials ignited "Mike," a sixty-ton apparatus designed to fuse a nucleus and thus create a thermonuclear reaction.
The ensuing explosion was measured at ten megatons, i.e., the equivalent of ten million tons of dynamite blowing up in a single instant. 45 The firepower unleashed by Mike easily exceeded the aggregate blast and heat produced by every bomb America dropped in World War II, including the two atomic ones. Mike was detonated over the island of Elugelab in the Eniwetok atoll. After November 1, 1952, Elugelab was no more; it was vaporized out of existence. 46
Though Mike was a prototype, at sixty tons hardly available for use as a weapon of war, the successful test at Eniwetok signified the beginning of the thermonuclear age. Mike showed that fusion could create an explosion that made fission bombs seem impotent in comparison; from November 1 onward the problem was simply a mechanical one of designing a lighter bomb, a task no one believed to be insurmountable. It did not require great vision to see that a war fought with bombs as powerful as the one that put an end to Elugelab could destroy nations whole and kill hundreds of millions or more in a matter of days or even hours. Nor did it require a particularly pessimistic opinion of international politics to see that in 1952 such a war might well occur. The United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in a hostile, worldwide struggle. The Truman administration had developed a military policy which dictated that the United States would wage general war, which meant nuclear war, over stakes it deemed vital to American national security. To be sure, many areas so deemed were quite unlikely to be attacked by the Soviet Union in any foreseeable future; the Cold War had become stable, with each superpower tacitly staying away from the other’s vital interests and preferring to push matters to a conflict only in more peripheral places like Korea. An exception to this rule, however, was the continuing Western presence in Berlin.
Endnotes
Note 1: On the interservice struggles see Williamson and Rearden, The Origins of U.S. Nuclear Strategy, pp. 92–96; Leffler, Preponderance of Power, chapter 7; Herken, The Winning Weapon, chapter 14. Back.
Note 2: Some of the Harmon Report is reprinted in Thomas Etzold and John Lewis Gaddis, eds., Containment: Documents on American Policy and Strategy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), pp. 360–64. Also see Williamson and Rearden, The Origins of U.S. Nuclear Strategy, pp. 104–5; Herken, The Winning Weapon, pp. 293–98; and David Alan Rosenberg, "American Atomic Strategy and the Hydrogen Bomb Decision," Journal of American History 66 (June, 1979): 77–78. Back.
Note 3: On the Soviet test and American reaction to it, see Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), chapter 19. Back.
Note 4: See Richard Hewlett and Francis Duncan, Atomic Shield: A History of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission vol. 2, 1947–1952 (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1969), p. 369; Herken, The Winning Weapon, p. 303; and Lewis Strauss, Men and Decisions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962), pp. 205–6. Apparently Truman was apprehensive about acknowledging the Soviet test also because of the effect this news could have had on the world financial markets, which were at that moment undergoing a major crisis. Back.
Note 5: See Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, p. 327; Herken, The Winning Weapon, pp. 304–5; and Hewlett and Duncan, Atomic Shield, pp. 370–71. Back.
Note 6: Herbert York, The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Superbomb (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976), pp. 44–45; Williamson and Rearden, The Origins of U.S. Nuclear Strategy, p. 114. Back.
Note 7: Hewlett and Duncan, Atomic Shield, p. 374. Also see Williamson and Rearden, The Origins of U.S. Nuclear Strategy, pp. 123–24. Back.
Note 8: See The Lilienthal Journals, pp. 580–83. Two members of the GAC, Enrico Fermi and I.I. Rabi, dissented from the main conclusion, arguing that American renunciation of the superbomb had to be contingent on some kind of Soviet conciliation. Back.
Note 9: FRUS 1 (1949): "National Security Affairs; Foreign Economic Policy," Statement Appended to the Report of the General Advisory Committee, p. 571. Also see York, The Advisors, pp. 52–53. Back.
Note 10: York, The Advisors, p. 53. Back.
Note 11: The following citations are a few examples only. The one exception was Dean Acheson, Truman’s new Secretary of State, who—though he ultimately did not oppose the decision in January to go ahead with the bomb—wrote a long memorandum on atomic weaponry on December 20 in which he never expressed an opinion as to whether the United States should build it or not. Memorandum by the Secretary of State, FRUS 1 (1949): 612–17. Leffler, in A Preponderance of Power (p. 330) calls Acheson’s memorandum "the most significant memorandum dealing with the hydrogen bomb"—a conclusion that I cannot see how Professor Leffler reached. On this matter also see Bundy, Danger and Survival, pp. 212–13. Back.
Note 12: Memorandum by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Secretary of Defense, FRUS 1 (1949): 595. Back.
Note 13: December 19, 1949 Nitze memorandum, ibid., p. 611; November 25, 1949 letter from Strauss to Truman, ibid., pp. 597–98. Back.
Note 14: Undated memorandum circulated by the Defense Members of the Working Group of the Special Committee of the National Security Council, ibid., p. 606. According to Rearden and Williamson the meeting that produced this memorandum took place on December 16. See The Origins of U.S. Nuclear Strategy, p. 119. Back.
Note 15: November 21, 1949 letter from McMahon to Truman, FRUS 1 (1949): 588. Back.
Note 16: Indeed, the entire controversy surrounding the GAC report had an air of unreality about it, as the main makers of national security policy in the Truman administration, including the president himself, acted as if the GAC recommendation might somehow become American policy against all of their wishes. Stanislaw Ulam, a mathematician working on the superbomb, described this as "the weird and unnatural things going on in Washington." Quoted in Hewlett and Duncan, Atomic Shield, p. 392. Back.
Note 17: Lilienthal’s efforts to persuade Truman to wait on the superbomb are related in his Journals, pp. 587–634. In the interest of secrecy Lilienthal referred to the hydrogen bomb as "Campbell" ("super" = soup). Passages like "I asked him if the Commission should try to elicit the views on ‘Campbell’ of State and Defense. . . " or "Have just come from handing our memo on ‘Campbell’ to the President. . . " were rather disconcerting to this author. Back.
Note 18: Truman quoted by R. Gordon Arneson, "The H–Bomb Decision," Foreign Service Journal 46 (May 1969): 27. Back.
Note 19: On this point also see Rhodes, Dark Sun, pp. 401–2. Back.
Note 20: McMahon is quoted in Edward Teller with Allen Brown, After Hiroshima (Garden City, NY : Doubleday, 1962), p. 44. In his letter to Truman on November 21 McMahon iterates this point. "Here is a fundamental inconsistency," he stated, referring to the GAC objections. " If the super would accomplish no more than weapons already in our arsenal, why single it out for special objection? If, on the other hand, the super represents a wholly new order of destructive magnitude—as I think it obviously does—than its military role would seem to be decisive." Memorandum from McMahon to Truman, cited in note 15, pp. 588–89. Back.
Note 21: On this point also see Herken, The Winning Weapon, pp. 316–17; Williamson and Rearden, The Origins of U.S. Nuclear Strategy, pp. 111, 116; and Leffler, Preponderance of Power, p. 332, who writes that "it is essential to emphasize that U.S. officials were not worried about purposeful Soviet military aggression. They were worried about the diplomatic shadows cast by strategic power." Back.
Note 22: November 18, 1949 draft memorandum from Kennan to Acheson, FRUS 1 (1949): 586. Back.
Note 23: An excerpt from this paper is printed in FRUS 1 (1950): 22–44. Kennan noted in an attached memorandum that "since Paul [Nitze] and the others were not entirely in agreement with the substance and since I was afraid that this report might be an embarrassing one to have on record as a formal staff report, I have re-done this as a personal paper." (p. 22n) Kennan discusses this paper in his Memoirs, pp. 471–76. On Kennan’s valedictory also see Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, pp. 79–83. Back.
Note 24: FRUS 1 (1950) p. 39. Back.
Note 25: February 17, 1950 draft memorandum from Kennan to Acheson, ibid., p. 164 Back.
Note 26: January 31, 1950 message from Truman to Acheson, FRUS 1 (1950): 141–42. This directive was adapted from a recommendation given to Truman by the Acheson/Lilienthal/Johnson special committee. Back.
Note 27: A standard argument regarding NSC–68 (Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, pp. 91–109) holds that Nitze expanded containment qualitatively beyond the basic realist formula provided by Kennan in 1946 and 1947. Other historians—for example, Walter Hixson, George F. Kennan: Cold War Iconoclast (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 303; and Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, pp. 355–56—contend that NSC–68 followed logically from Kennan’s realism. A new way to address this debate might be to see how each of them approached nuclear policy with that realist formula in the 1950s. Back.
Note 28: April 7, 1950 Report to the President Pursuant to the President’s Directive of January 31, 1950 (NSC–68), FRUS 1 (1950): 245. Back.
Note 29: Ibid., pp. 238–39. Back.
Note 30: Williamson and Rearden, in The Origins of U.S. Nuclear Strategy, pp. 131–38, also do not mention this omission, doubly odd given the topic of their book. Also see Bundy, Danger and Survival, p. 229. Back.
Note 31: NSC–68, FRUS 1 (1950): 267–68. Back.
Note 33: Ibid., pp. 264, 283. Back.
Note 35: Also clearly implied in this passage is an endorsement of pre-emptive thermonuclear war: Nitze argues in this carefully worded sentence that the United States must defeat not only Soviet, but also "Soviet-directed" aggression of "a limited or total character." In 1961 Nitze reintroduced this idea during the second Berlin crisis. Back.
Note 36: Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, chapter 4. Back.
Note 37: See Hewlett and Duncan, Atomic Shield, p. 472. Back.
Note 39: Ibid., pp. 541–46. Back.
Note 40: See Rosenberg, "American Atomic Strategy," pp. 20–26; and Williamson and Rearden, The Origins of U.S. Nuclear Strategy, chapter seven. Back.
Note 41: Hewlett and Duncan, Atomic Shield, p. 557. Back.
Note 43: See July 3, 1952 letter from LeBaron to Dean, DDC 1996, number 511. Back.
Note 44: Truman’s anxiety about detonating a thermonuclear device in early November is related in a October 9, 1952 memorandum by R. Gordon Arneson, FRUS 2 (1952–54), part 2, pp. 1032–33. Back.
Note 45: Richard Rhodes offers a wonderful, microsecond-by-microsecond account of Mike’s explosion in Dark Sun, pp. 505–10. Back.
Note 46: The official announcement of the successful detonation came on November 16: it explained that the test program at Eniwetok "included experiments contributing to thermonuclear weapons research.. . . Scientific executives have expressed satisfaction with the results." November 16, 1952 press release, FRUS 2 (1952–54), part 2, pp. 1042. Back.
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