Life And Times Of The Atomic Bomb: Nuclear Weapons And The Transformation Of Warfare 0765619857, 9780765619853, 9780765619860, 9781315720814, 1317520084, 1315720817, 9781317520085, 1317520092, 9781317520092, 1317520076, 9781317520078

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I | Chain Reactions
1 | The Science and the Scientists 1895–1933
2 | The First Nuclear Arms Race 1933–1942
Part II | Rapid Assembly
3 | “One Grand Final Exam Day…” 1943–1945
4 | “I Am Become Death”
Part III | Two Scorpions in a Bottle
5 | “Wasting Assets” 1945–1950
6 | The Cross of Iron 1950–1962
Part IV | “We All Breathe the Same Air”
7 | “Solution Unsatisfactory”
8 | ANADYR
Part V | The Weapon of the Weak
9 | The Politics of Parity
10 | Sweet Dreams and Suicide Machines
Epilogue
Index

Citation preview

Life and Times of The aTomic BomB

Life and Times of the Atomic Bomb takes up the question of how the world found itself in the age of nuclear weapons – and how it has since tried to find a way out of it. Albert I. Berger charts the story of nuclear weapons from their origins through the Atomic Age and the Cold War up through the present day, arguing that an understanding of the history of nuclear weapons is crucial to modern efforts to manage them. This book examines topics including nuclear strategy debates, weapon system procurement decisions, and arms control conferences through the people and leaders who experienced them. Providing a chronological survey, Life and Times of the Atomic Bomb starts with the major scientific discoveries of the late nineteenth century that laid the groundwork for nuclear development. It then traces the history of nuclear weapons from their inception to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and the reaction to them by key players on both sides. It continues its narrative into the second half of the twentieth century and the role of nuclear weapons throughout the Cold War, engaging in the debate over whether nuclear weapons are an effective deterrent. Finally, the closing chapters consider the atomic bomb’s place in the modern world and the transformation of warfare in an age of advanced technology. This clear and engaging survey will be invaluable reading for students of the Cold War and twentieth-century history. Albert I. Berger is Associate Professor of History and Peace Studies at the University of North Dakota. His previous publications include The Magic That Works: John W. Campbell and the American Response to Technology (1993) and Divided Germany during the Cold War, 1945–1962 (2001).

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Life and Times of The aTomic BomB Nuclear Weapons and the Transformation of Warfare

Albert I. Berger

First published 2016 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Albert I. Berger The right of Albert I. Berger to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Berger, Albert I. (Albert Isaac), 1947– author. Life and times of the atomic bomb / Albert I. Berger. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Atomic bomb–History. I. Title. UG1282.A8B46 2015 623.4’51190973–dc23 ISBN: 978-0-7656-1985-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-7656-1986-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-72081-4 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by HWA Text and Data Management, London

2015027349

For Patricia … I cannot count or describe the many reasons

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conTenTs

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

ParT i

chain reactions

5

1 The Science and the Scientists 1895–1933

7

2 The First Nuclear Arms Race 1933–1942

22

ParT ii

rapid assembly

37

3 “One Grand Final Exam Day…” 1943–1945

39

4 “I Am Become Death”

58

ParT iii

Two scorpions in a Bottle 5 “Wasting Assets” 1945–1950 6 The Cross of Iron 1950–1962

83 85 102

viii

Contents

ParT iV

“We all Breathe the same air”

127

7 “Solution Unsatisfactory”

129

8 ANADYR

150

ParT V

The Weapon of the Weak 9 The Politics of Parity 10 Sweet Dreams and Suicide Machines Epilogue Index

169 171 193 208 214

acknoWLedgemenTs

This book has grown out of a course in the history of nuclear weapons that I have been privileged to teach at the University of North Dakota. I should first thank Bill Schwalm, theoretical physicist and my UND colleague, who recruited me to team-teach the course shortly after I arrived here in 1987. The University and its various components have contributed generously and consistently to support this book and the course upon which it is based, including several instructional development grants and funds for travel to museums and archives. All of us in the UND History Department benefit from the generosity of the Schulte Professional Development Fund, which supported travel for research in once top-secret government documents made available at the National Security Archive, in Washington, DC. The University itself supported this work with a year’s release from teaching responsibilities that allowed me to write most of this book. Bill Burr and the staff at the National Security Archive deserve special thanks for their longstanding efforts to make available to the public the documentary record of United States foreign and defense policy for the last half century and more. Some very good friends gave generously of their time and trouble to read and comment on this manuscript. Two of them, Tom Puckett, a fine and funny writer and my oldest friend, and Ty Reese, our department chair, read the entire project; Joe Fitzharris, Mike Jacobs, Jim Mochoruk, Dave Whalen, and David Wiener all read substantial portions of the manuscript and all of them contributed useful observations and comments of many kinds. Steve Drummond, then of M. E. Sharpe, was the first to see the possibilities of a book like this, and when the project moved (with all of Sharpe’s list) over to Routledge, Genevieve Aoki, Catherine Aitken, and Margo Irvin picked it up with sympathy, competence, and patience. The efforts of all the people who helped me made this a better book, and I thank them for that. They are, of course, innocent of any errors that remain. The responsibility for them is all mine.

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inTroducTion

The book you hold in your hands is a sketch (a bit more than a sketch in some appropriate spots) describing how the world found itself in the age of nuclear weapons—and how it has tried to find a way out of it. It is not a research monograph, but rather an effort at the synthesis (and some reinterpretation) of what some excellent historians have been writing, especially since the end of the Cold War. I have made fair use here of work by Alexandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, David Holloway, Richard Rhodes, Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird, and others. I have sometimes followed the story in different directions and come to different conclusions than they did, but their work, all of it quite accessible to a “general reader,” expands and illuminates what we know about this pivotal part of modern history. The first chapters of the story describe a relatively small group of like-minded men (and three women) and the academic community in which they lived, the things they learned, and the things they did in the first half of the 20th century. These people and the institutions where they worked represented the height of European scientific scholarship at a time when European scholarship was the dominant way of thinking. The discovery of radiation, the new understandings of how atoms work, Einstein’s special theory of relativity, were all part and parcel of 19th-century industrial capitalism—and of the imperialism (there is no other word for it) that carried European capitalism around the world. Yet the scientists of the new century persisted in believing (and acting in the belief) that they were a trans-national fraternity that pursued the truth by studying nature and standing apart from, standing above, politics and national rivalries. The international conflagrations of the new century subjected that belief to literal tests by fire culminating in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The second generation of this history belongs mostly to the men of power in the United States and the Soviet Union who thought that they

2

Introduction

controlled nuclear weapons during their early, dangerous infancy. It was their job, their fate, to protect and advance their countries’ ideals and interests while, simultaneously, acting to keep an unprecedented conflict from destroying them and the rest of the world too. It also became their responsibility to manage a profound conflict in which two of the greatest truisms of military power had been transformed. Military superiority did not guarantee security in an age of nuclear weapons. Neither did secrecy. These men succeeded in their labors, at least for the short period of seventy years that (as of this writing) has followed the first nuclear detonations. But, not twenty years into the “nuclear age,” they came within a hairsbreadth of failing, providing a powerful lesson in the power of events to go out of control, and in the dangerous possibility of mischance in times of great trouble. The most recent chapters of this story belong to us; the political objectives are part of the world in which we live, among the military means that might be used are our friends, neighbors, and relatives. The homes that might face destruction are our own. The capabilities of the digital computer and the arrival of worldwide instantaneous communications are already transforming our relationships with our friends and relatives. We are already doing business very differently “online.” Something once so apparently trivial as “social media” has contributed substantially to changes in the relations between nation-states around the world and the people they seek to govern, and online communications has given non-government organizations (NGOs) the capabilities to direct their operations and to spread propaganda. Generally speaking, nation-states are both powerful and cruel, but claiming legitimate and permanent authority as they do, nation-states of all stripes ordinarily subordinate their policy desires and their official behavior to a collection of restraints, to self-discipline that acts in the interests of stability and everyone’s security. Non-government organizations, like nation-states, are frequently both powerful and cruel, but in the context of this book, their claim to legitimate authority is highly ideological and explicitly revolutionary. Their situation rarely provides incentives for restraint or stability, and often includes explicitly intended endorsements of suicidal behavior in pursuit of a political objective. Necessarily, they challenge the nation-states’ claims to a monopoly on the use of force and violence in public life. Even compared with the parlous world that lived with the dangers of nuclear nations, the world that we live in, the world that must also live with the dangers of nuclear NGOs, is scary. The likelihood of a world in which nuclear NGOs exist seems less than the likelihood of a world in which NGOs arm themselves with other types of weapons, cyber weapons perhaps. Who would give nuclear fuel to al-Qaeda or ISIS? Has the world’s economic turmoil actually become so desperate that corrupt custodians of nuclear weapons could sell them? And, is the iconic power of a nuclear explosion worth the trouble of acquiring the means to make one when the various kinds of cyber warfare might produce as much or more real world damage, more cheaply and at an earlier date, and in a military field in

Introduction

3

which American or Russian technological leads are irrelevant or nonexistent? Is it possible to think of cyber warfare as an “equalizer” between powers of different size, strength, or wealth? These questions should not be taken as the opportunity to disregard a threat. Rather they should suggest that the development of nuclear weapons be seen as part of a transformation of warfare in the age of advanced technology. As well, they should incubate the idea that advances in scientific understanding and progress in technological exploitation have generated a multiplicity of threats available to a broader variety of adversaries than in the past. Niels Bohr’s notion of complementarity does apply. The specter of nuclear destruction does encourage initiatives to prevent it; but those initiatives include new ways of making war as well as creative mechanisms to preserve the peace. And, in the case before us, circumstances provide “positive reinforcement” for avoiding nuclear war. Nuclear weapons are smaller in yield and carried in more precisely aimed launch vehicles than they once were, but they remain the bluntest of blunt instruments that destroy infinitely more than any rational calculation of warfare might require. Cyber warfare has the potential to be more precise and to focus military destruction in accordance with the political objectives for which a war is being fought. Indeed, diplomatic historian John Lewis Gaddis came to believe that nuclear weapons helped preserve the peace during the Cold War. By narrowing the pervasive character of war’s destruction, one might suggest, cyber warfare might even make some transformed kind of “war”—the use of some sort of military means in the service of political objectives—more likely. There are few happy endings in history, and no endings at all in the history of the recent past. We cannot yet know the answers to these questions. Yet perhaps we can learn enough from the short history of our experience of living with nuclear weapons to contribute to the effort to survive them and to add something useful to the management of whatever lies beyond.

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ParT i

chain reactions

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1 The science and The scienTisTs 1895–1933

Like so many births, it began with an accident. In 1896, the French physicist Henri Becquerel was exploring the X-rays that the German Wilhelm Roentgen had discovered the preceding year. At the end of his work one day, he made a mistake while following a perfectly reasonable routine; he put his materials and apparatus away for the night. He placed an unexposed photographic plate, carefully wrapped in thick, black protective paper, in the same drawer with a small crystal. The crystal contained a small amount of uranium, the 92nd and heaviest element catalogued in the Periodic Table of the Elements. When he returned, he demonstrated some of the absent mindedness that was already stereotypical of the scientist; he could not recall whether or not he had actually exposed the plate. The only way to recover any useful information from the plate was to develop it, and Becquerel did that. He soon saw a nice photographic silhouette of the uranium-filled crystal. Through this accidental experiment Becquerel learned that Roentgen’s X-rays were simply one manifestation of a much broader phenomenon, radioactivity. In the next months, Becquerel and his colleagues Pierre and Marie Curie worked their way through the Periodic Table, seeking out other elements that displayed this new phenomenon. In the course of this work, the Curies discovered two new elements, radium and thorium, both of them, like uranium, radioactive. Next, Becquerel decided that radioactivity came in three varieties— he thought they were rays, like X-rays—that he labeled alpha, beta, and gamma after the first three letters of the Greek alphabet. He was assuming that these rays had something to do with X-rays, but he was guessing, and he didn’t know how they tied in with Roentgen’s earlier discovery. He measured the way a magnetic field deflected these rays and concluded that alpha rays carried a positive electrical charge and beta rays a negative charge. The third and most

8

Chain Reactions

powerful stream, gamma rays, carried no electrical charge at all. This was all interesting, of course, but it was also intellectually challenging, for it forced the whole group of physicists to ask some very challenging questions about what they thought they knew. Before too long, it led the scientific community (and eventually humanity) to think differently about the nature of the universe everybody lived in. Physics is an organized and disciplined way of learning that deals with some of the largest and some of the smallest phenomena in the universe: the nature of time and space, the properties of elementary particles of matter, and the ways in which all of these interact. The discipline of physics is empirical and mathematical; physicists observe and try to measure all kinds of natural phenomena. Then they make predictions about what further measurements will reveal and try to check out those predictions with experiments. (An experiment seeks to reproduce natural phenomena in a controlled environment, isolated from the rest of the universe so that nothing will interfere with what the scientists want to observe.) A physicist sometimes discovers phenomena by experiments and then attempts to reconcile them with theories, explanations of how the universe works based on previous mathematical reasoning. A great deal of physics has developed because these theories evolve as scientists observe and explain phenomena in their ongoing efforts to discover what are the underlying laws and principles of nature. Sometimes, in order to make one or two new sets of observations or calculations understandable, scientists discover that they need to discard a great many things they always thought were true about the world. And they have to reorganize and reconstruct how they think about the world; they have to construct what the historian of science Thomas Kuhn called a “new paradigm.”1 Kuhn defined a paradigm as the widest conceptual framework within which a certain set of questions and answers makes sense. For example, the astronomer Ptolemy’s assertion that the Earth is located at the center of the universe, with the Sun, Moon, stars, and planets revolving around it, is a paradigm. For 1500 years, measurements and mathematical predictions based on that paradigm very adequately described the motions of those bodies as people saw them from the Earth. Eventually, however, people could actually see and measure in the heavens motions that Ptolemy’s paradigm couldn’t explain. Over time—a long time spread over the 16th and 17th centuries—Ptolemy’s model of the universe was replaced by the paradigm first understood by Nicolaus Copernicus: the Sun is at the center of the Solar system, with the Earth and other planets revolving around it. So it is worth remembering that physics was a very old science when the 20th century began; but in its modern form it was relatively young. The paradigm called “classical physics” had arrived with such scientists as Copernicus and Galileo, but Isaac Newton’s mathematics, and the three Laws of Motion he identified, established its importance only at the end of the 17th century. The paradigm of classical physics has three components, two of which were products

The Science and the Scientists 1895–1933

9

of the 19th century: Isaac Newton’s (1642–1727) laws of motion describe the behavior of inanimate objects; James Clerk Maxwell’s (1831–1879) equations describe the behavior of electric and magnetic fields and how magnetic fields couple to charged objects (his equations predicted radio waves, for example); finally, the Laws of Thermodynamics apply probability theory to Newton’s laws and Maxwell’s equations in order to predict the behavior of thermal phenomena. However, if modern “classical physics” was young, it was becoming mature by the time Becquerel and the Curies arrived on the scene. One might have argued that classical physics was a complete theory of the operation of the universe. The paradigm contained within it explanations of motion, light, and heat. One could navigate by the motions of the stars as observed from Earth. In a sure sign that their paradigm needed re-thinking (if not replacement) some scientists thought that the process of trying to discover the laws of nature was complete. Physicists would be able to explain all observed phenomena. All they would have to do in the future would be to apply Newton and Maxwell, and stir in the laws of probability. They did not think they had nothing new to learn. Early 20th-century physicists believed that many new and exciting phenomena were yet to be discovered experimentally, but they would learn to understand them by applying the laws and doing some mathematical calculations. Scientists might also predict other new and exciting phenomena by making similar calculations, and those phenomena could then be verified by experiment; but the laws themselves were completely known. Their paradigm insisted that the Universe was knowable, measurable, and stable. Viewed in that light, theoretical physics had been reduced to applied mathematics. It didn’t work out that way. What had happened to Ptolemy’s ideas was about to happen to the ideas of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. None of these scientists had been foolish, superstitious, or backward. None of them had “made mistakes” in the simple sense of an erroneous calculation or an improper application of a theory. When Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton superseded Ptolemy, scientists seeking to explain phenomena they observed applied traditional theories and mathematics and ran into anomalies—facts that the old paradigm couldn’t explain and problems it could not solve. The 20th century’s “new physics” was already moving into what would become a very lusty adolescence, a period of great turmoil in the history of physical theories. The first third of the 20th century was the time when “classical physics” gave way in some formal sense to a completely different paradigm through which physicists understand and interpret the physical universe. This is an important part of humanity’s overall intellectual history, but it is also important in the study of nuclear weapons. It helps explain the excitement and energy with which scientists sought to answer key questions that were vital elements in creating nuclear explosions—even when nuclear explosions were not things they were trying to create. The questions on the table addressed the basic structure and fundamental dynamics of the universe. The discovery of radioactivity by itself challenged one

10 Chain Reactions

of the discipline’s most traditional notions, that the atom was the smallest bit of matter in the universe, the single factor determining the characteristics of an element, a chunk of something so small and unitary it could not be split into smaller units. If radioactivity could exist, none of those assumptions about what an atom (or an element) was could be true. But there was more to come. Becquerel and the Curies worked by observing the properties of elements; they could hold bits of those elements in their hands and observe them with their eyes and their instruments. Other physicists studied properties of the entire universe; but while instruments played some role in their work, the properties of the universe could only be observed with an educated imagination, using advanced mathematics. At this same moment, other physicists had begun to use mathematics to explore Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation, the foundation of scientific reasoning for just over two centuries. In 1905, Albert Einstein published a series of revolutionary papers in the prestigious German journal Annalen der Physik. These all had an enormous impact on the scientific world and everything that spread from it (one of them earned him the Nobel Prize fifteen years later); but our concern here is with only the last one to appear: “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?” In the course of answering that question, Einstein presented his most famous observation, the equation E = mc2. For our purposes here, that means that energy and matter are different forms of the same thing; if one can transform matter entirely into energy, the energy so released would equal the mathematical product of the matter’s mass multiplied by the speed of light, squared. The speed of light is about 299,792,458 meters per second. If the mass of matter involved is but one single gram (about ¼ teaspoon of sugar, or an American dime coin), the amount of energy released is 89,875,517,873,681,764 (89.9 quadrillion) joules. It’s easier to think of that as the equivalent of 25 million kilowatt-hours of electricity, 568,000 US gallons of automotive gasoline, or the explosion of 21.5 thousand tons of TNT.2 The magnitude of the energy release that Einstein’s equation seemed to promise quickly became a tempting element for several authors writing in the new genre of science fiction. An Englishman, H. G. Wells, wrote the most important of these science fiction stories in 1914, a novel called The World Set Free in which all the major cities in the world are destroyed by atomic bombs. However, few physicists thought that it would be possible to actually release energy in accordance with Einstein’s theoretical calculation. Einstein himself wondered “if the dear Lord laughs about it and has led me around by the nose.”3 And although Einstein’s name is always associated with the development of nuclear weapons, many, if not most people are surprised to learn how little he actually had to do with it. So two categories of “what everybody knows” in science were changing at about the same time. In Canada at McGill University, a New Zealand-born physicist named Ernest Rutherford (who eventually became Lord Rutherford, Baron Rutherford of

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Nelson) began studying the phenomenon of radioactivity and the three “rays” that Becquerel had named. Before World War I began, Rutherford had won the Nobel Prize (in Chemistry) for his discoveries that radioactivity involved the disintegration of atoms to the point where one element eventually became another. After he became a Nobel Laureate, he moved from Canada to Great Britain, where he taught at the University of Manchester and eventually became the director of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University. In Britain, Rutherford discovered that what he had been calling “alpha rays” were, in fact, alpha particles, specifically, ionized (electrically charged) atoms of helium gas. The fact that these particles carried an electrical charge made it possible to form them into a stream that Rutherford could then use to bombard atoms larger and heavier than helium in order to observe the effects. So Rutherford, his colleagues, and his students made two discoveries. They sketched a new way to understand the structure and behavior of matter, and they used what they learned to develop a method of exploring further. They began, in 1911, by bombarding targets with streams of alpha particles, only to note that many of those particles passed through the targets as if they were ghosts. A few of them bounced off at wide angles. Rutherford was forced to come to a momentous conclusion, a conclusion that challenged thinking about the structure of matter that went back to the very beginning of physics. Atoms were not the smallest possible pieces of matter. Atoms were not solid and indivisible. Most of the matter in an atom was concentrated in a small central region, the nucleus; and electrons surrounded the nucleus. Rutherford’s methodology would become the standard technique of investigation in nuclear physics all the way into the 1930s. It was the methodology that created the first nuclear fission in the world. These discoveries soon made it possible to learn more about the structure of the atom. At first, the nucleus was believed to consist of protons, minute particles carrying a positive electrical charge and having mass. Electrons carried a negative electrical charge, but they had no mass, and Rutherford believed that they swarmed around the nucleus of an atom. He developed a “model” of what an atom should look like. His model was wrong, but that mattered far less than the fact that the ways in which it was wrong encouraged physicists to find one that was right. In the process of doing that they ended up transforming the theoretical foundations of physics in fundamental and very radical ways, transformations greater than even those required to accommodate Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. By the standards of what people had thought they knew at the beginning of the 19th century, this was all very subtle, very advanced, very sophisticated stuff, in keeping with the European society that produced it. Europe had not been entirely peaceful since the defeat of Napoleon, but the Crimean War—in which Britain and France fought Russia over control of Turkey—was limited in scope. The wars that accompanied Italian and German unification (as nasty as they could get) were not at all comparable to the religious, political, and imperial wars that had characterized the three centuries that ended in 1814. The Industrial

12 Chain Reactions

Revolution had made Europe a turbulent place (and was continuing to do so), but it was also making Europe a very wealthy and powerful place; and modern industry had made the people who ran Europe very wealthy and very powerful indeed. They also became, it seems, smug and self-satisfied. It is hard to blame them; life was better and more comfortable than almost everyone remembered (for some people, anyway), and their world seemed so very stable too. Industry had seemingly overcome all other historical forces. Europeans had invested a very great deal in their factories, their railroads, and their buildings. Europe’s economies were interdependent, and very profitable because of it. For those reasons, warfare of the old sort seemed stupid and highly unlikely. Observers in the 21st century know the illusions under which those Europeans labored, and the acts of violence and injustice around the world that sustained those illusions; but the Europeans of that time did not have our advantages. But try to imagine it the other way round; we do not have the advantages of their perspective either. We remember what they had not yet seen, the long war of 1914–1945 and the catastrophic period of truce that separated what we think of as two world wars. We no longer share their assumption that science is a noble enterprise that transcends such parochial concerns as political rivalries or national conflicts. The community of science in Europe was a fraternity— Marie Curie notwithstanding, it included almost no women—a close-knit group, sharing ideas through a network of specialized publications and arguing over drinks and banquets at annual conferences held across the continent every year. In the matters before us here, we too seldom recall the sense of kinship that united the scientists of that time in pursuit of the truth, which they still defined as an objective and indisputable understanding of how the universe worked. This wonderful ideal fit well into the “real world” in which European scientists lived. As any paradigm should, it provided intellectual and spiritual comfort even as it supported real and practical results. The most idealistic among the scientists disparaged research aimed at “practical results,” inventions; one American physicist compared it to a cook blending a new recipe. However, theoretical research had generated enough “recipes” to encourage industrialists to invest in more such research. The study of thermodynamics had improved the steam engines that powered the world; textile dyes and myriad other industrial chemicals had descended from research. The modern world was only beginning to learn what it might do with electricity. Yet modern European science was also a part of modern European civilization in its unpleasant aspects. It was a part of gigantic factories that consolidated manufacturing and labor in what the poet William Blake called “dark, Satanic mills.” It was a part of steel guns, firing powerful shells at ever-increasing rates of fire, over ever-increasing distances. And it was a part of the growing network of colonies in Africa and Asia: where Europeans searched obsessively for raw materials and markets; and where they fought reflexively with their steel rifles, artillery, and machine guns to keep those materials and markets from Africans, Asians, and each other.

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Finally, the community of science exploded, along with the rest of Europe in 1914, when the five great powers descended into the continental war that none of them really wanted and that many of their subjects had believed impossible. The deadly technological products of 19th-century science (never much noticed in Europe when they were used against Africans and Asians) quickly created a horrifying carnage along a battle line in France that stretched from the North Sea coast all the way to the Swiss border. The great trauma that the fraternity of scientists would suffer began early in the war. Germany’s strategy called for its army to invade northern France at the very start of hostilities: to subdue France very quickly so that the Army could transfer from the western front to the eastern, where it would confront the country’s other enemy, Russia. In order to do all that, German armies would have to pass through Belgium, a country that had tried to stay neutral as the Great Powers constructed their respective blocs throughout the 19th century. The Germans first asked nicely for permission to pass through Belgium on their way to France, and then, when they didn’t get it, they demanded it. Finally, they simply invaded; and they quickly defeated the smaller and unready Belgian army. On their way to France, the Germans passed through the town of Louvain, best known for its medieval university and the university’s magnificent library. Before they left, they burned the town—and the university, and the library. The invasion seemed horrible enough—it brought Britain into a continental war it had been trying to stay out of. But, even as Germany’s enemies began throwing the term atrocity around very freely, Louvain struck many observers as particularly atrocious. Civilians were supposed to be innocent bystanders in warfare. A university was supposed to be an especially innocent place. And only barbarians would destroy a library, especially a library like Louvain’s that had been a repository of learning for centuries, filled with 300,000 books that could never be replaced. In their defense, the Germans argued that the Belgians had taken to sniping and other forms of guerrilla warfare that had killed and wounded many German soldiers. Thus, they forfeited their rights to an army’s forbearance even under the various rules of war to which most European nations adhered. German scientists and other intellectuals further marked themselves as barbaric (from the Allied point of view) when they signed a government-sponsored statement defending what the Army had done. The facts of the matter were open to some dispute, but that did not interest Germany’s enemies. Germany had broken the rules of civilization. German scientists and other intellectuals would later be ostracized from their respective communities because many of them had signed a public proclamation of the Army’s defense of its actions. Allied intellectuals would seek to maintain that ostracism after the war was over, adding to their indictment the charge that German scientists had helped to invent and manufacture poison gas weapons. Of course, German chemists had helped develop poison gas; but no one was completely innocent on that score. Scientists’ involvement in the war effort was not limited to any one side. American and British researchers, for example,

14 Chain Reactions

worked very hard to understand the physics of sound traveling through water; they sought to create equipment to detect submerged submarines, what Americans would come to know as sonar. With armies dependent on industrial production of weapons and munitions as they had never been before, every country conscripted money, factories, and all sorts of work, every kind of worker. The concept of a “home front” in a war dealt a harsh body blow to the scientists’ conceit that their intellectual endeavors and their professional fraternity transcended the mundane and parochial boundaries of nations. But the blow was not immediately fatal. Although many scientists in the Allied nations wanted to continue ostracizing the Germans, many others, seeking to restore the good aspects of the pre-war period and trying to pick up the research that the war had interrupted, did not. And if European industrialists were no longer in a position to finance scientific research, two foundations based on American industrial fortunes were very much able and willing to do so. The Rockefeller Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation were both motivated in part by a desire to rebuild Europe’s war-ravaged scientific enterprise, and in part by a desire to improve the practice and teaching of science in the United States. The Rockefeller Foundation was itself at a significant crossroads. By the end of World War I, the Rockefeller family had subsidized research directly for thirty years, founding first the University of Chicago and then the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City. When it began operating (at about the same time that World War I began in Europe) the Rockefeller Foundation anticipated that it would sponsor research in a similar way. However, for a variety of reasons, the Rockefellers and the trustees of the Foundation concluded by the end of the war that they would have to “become primarily not an operating agency but a fund-dispensing agency.” The work the Foundation proposed to support would have to be done by others. “In no other way could the objectivity of research be established beyond cavil and the projects freed from suspicion of ulterior interest,” the Foundation’s one-time president wrote in 1952. At the same time, the Foundation’s officers concluded that they would have to back away from research into business economics and the social sciences. The family’s wealth was still a divisive object of public attention and the apparent conflict of interest between the business sources of the money and the supposedly disinterested quality of the research was too acute. As they always had, the Rockefellers defaulted to supporting science—especially medical science—in the belief that that would not produce any controversy.4 For a brief, revolutionary period in the 1920s, research and teaching in physics benefited enormously. The foundations aimed their grants at carefully chosen strategic targets. Biology, Chemistry, and Physics, the disciplines that the Rockefeller Foundation was most willing to fund, were ripe for rapid advance. The Rockefeller Institute’s Simon Flexner, for example, anticipated that research in theoretical physics and chemistry would soon produce an entirely new understanding of

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disease (and, therefore, applications to medical therapies). Even before the war ended, Flexner had persuaded George Vincent, the Rockefeller Foundation’s president, to ask leading scientists if they would be interested in a physics and chemistry laboratory modeled on the lines of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. The scientists were interested; but they could not agree on how the new institute should be organized. So the money went to institutions that already existed. The Rockefeller strategy had two steps. Pursuing its first objective, the Foundation would contribute to the reconstruction of European facilities and people. Its first guiding principle was to “make the peaks higher”; that is, to support institutions and people who were already doing the “best science.” They would assist Rutherford at the Cavendish, Niels Bohr at the University of Copenhagen’s Institute for Theoretical Physics, even the Germans at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes and the University of Göttingen. Rockefeller (and Guggenheim) capital paid for buildings that would house laboratories and equipment. It paid salaries to professors and provided fellowships to support graduate students who wanted to work with the top people, at the best institutions, and with the best equipment. This would, of course, rebuild and refurbish what had previously existed. At the same time, since scientific research, wherever it existed, was reaching the stage where an investigator needed relatively expensive equipment to make real progress, these foundation grants would set the stage for something new. The combination of need and intellectual opportunity meant that any investment at all would likely show a good return as the new buildings and equipment, and the new students, began to appear on campuses. If the first objective was to rebuild European science, the second was to upgrade science in the United States. In 1919, the Rockefeller Foundation gave a half million dollars to the National Research Council in the United States, money that the Council would re-grant as postdoctoral fellowships in chemistry and physics. The Foundation supplemented this first grant to the quasi-official National Research Council with a second grant to the private International Education Board (one of its own subsidiaries). American students would use the money to travel to Europe to do their work under the most advanced supervision in the world, to get their degrees by participating in the most advanced research underway at the time. They would then return, continue their research, and teach; in that way, the next generation of American researchers and teachers would be trained and would practice in the United States. As in Europe, grants would “make the peaks higher.” Foundation support for the “best science” would mean increasing prominence for such schools as Columbia, Princeton, Harvard, the University of Chicago, the Massachusetts and California Institutes of Technology (MIT and Caltech), the University of Michigan, and the University of California, Berkeley.5 The program was a great success on both sides of the Atlantic. Physics had reached an intellectual turning point with work done just before and just after World War I. As Rutherford, his colleagues, and his students continued

16 Chain Reactions

to pursue their studies of atomic structure, physicists became aware that their classical paradigm could no longer explain the facts they were observing in their experiments. Physicists had always distinguished between matter and energy, and had always envisioned energy traveling in a way that suggested a radio wave. Modern theorists, pushing beyond Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and led by Max Planck and Niels Bohr, then concluded that energy traveled in the form of little packets called quanta. How could both sets of contradictory observations be true? Sooner or later, someone would have to imagine a radically new way of explaining some of the universe’s fundamental properties. With new, American, capital supporting European scientists, the people and the facilities required to take advantage of this state of the art would have the support that they required. Cambridge continued to be the center for research into atomic structure, while Niels Bohr worked in Copenhagen, and the theoretical physicists, increasingly mathematical in their methods, continued to cluster in Berlin and, especially, Göttingen (where the Physics department worked out of buildings for which the Rockefeller Foundation had paid). Bohr developed a new model of atomic structure and imagined a method of seeing the behavior of light as both a particle and a wave, a way of looking at something that seemed contradictory and seeing instead a way to understand what was happening as “complementarity.” (When Bohr received the Order of the Elephant from the Danish government after World War II, he put the Latin phrase contraria sunt complementa [“opposites are complementary”] on his new coat of arms.) At Göttingen, a generation of mathematicians from all over the world labored to develop an entirely new paradigm of physics based on Bohr’s concepts of quantum mechanics. Werner Heisenberg was still in his twenties when he created powerful new mathematical tools and demonstrated that the universe was not at all so neatly predictable through calculation as Isaac Newton and his intellectual descendants had said it was. Along with Einstein’s theory of relativity, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle laid the paradigm of Newtonian or “classical” physics to rest and established a new paradigm rooted in the idea that some critical phenomena could only be understood within a range of probabilities. (Einstein didn’t like the idea; he refused, he said, to believe that God “plays dice with the universe.”) Like the Theory of Relativity, the Uncertainty Principle is very suggestive in ways that go beyond physics; it has many philosophical implications. However, in our context here, we need keep only a few things in mind: first, like Relativity, Quantum Mechanics is an essential part of understanding the structure and operation of atoms and their nuclei—therefore, it is essential to conceptualizing nuclear weapons; second, it highlights the atmosphere of intellectual revolution that characterized physics during the years between the two world wars; finally, the concentration of the work in only a few places in Europe displays the brief rebirth of the trans-national community of physicists that had existed before World War I. A relatively small group shared a sense of living in the midst of revolution, an awareness of new scientific possibilities, and their knowledge of each other. When the science had advanced just a little bit further, and when world

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politics transformed itself, that shared knowledge would lead some of them to fear what some of the others among them might be able to do. And when they communicated that fear to men in power, they set off a chain of events that led directly to building nuclear weapons. The foundation strategy worked equally well on the western shore of the Atlantic. American students who had studied in Europe did indeed return to teach, do research, and raise standards in American institutions. As always, the strengths of American science were in applications to technology and, one step back from that, in experiment. However, several factors worked to change that situation from a limitation to an advantage and to position the United States as a leader in theoretical scientific research. American industrialists had always known that they might be able to make profits from things discovered through scientific research. As early as the 1850s, for example, Yankee harpoons diminished the supply of whales and caused the price of whale oil for illumination to rise sharply. Yale University chemists received grants from businessmen to determine if kerosene refined from crude petroleum would be a suitable and profitable alternative to whale oil, which was increasingly scarce and expensive. When they concluded that it was, the same interests asked them to find out how that rock oil might be got out of the ground. The machinery that drillers used to get salt would do the job, and the rest was a matter of investment and practice (and, as anyone in the oil business will point out, continued chemical and geophysical research). A little later in the century, in the 1870s and 1880s, banker J. P. Morgan had financed Thomas Edison’s “invention factory” in Menlo Park, New Jersey, the very first American research laboratory.6 It was harder at first to come by money for research that was not connected to some “useful” application; but eventually, theoretical research attracted support from private backers too. The leaders of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research came to believe that they could produce specific cures for disease more efficiently if they cultivated a more theoretical understanding of biology, chemistry, and physics. And theory found a home even in the corporate world. The American Telephone & Telegraph Company owned Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone patents, which made possible the company’s very profitable monopoly on telephone devices. The company’s strategy to maintain that monopoly called for its research subsidiary, Bell Laboratories, to pursue theoretical research energetically and on an industrial scale. Thus, it could pre-empt any outside inventor’s creativity, and therefore control the speed and cost of new technology. But all that was only a beginning. In the age of quantum mechanics, theoretical research became increasingly necessary. New theoretical research was required to make new technology possible and understandable; and new experiments were required to demonstrate and prove the insights of new theories. The strength of American finance and American machine-building came together with advancements in theoretical science at the end of the 1920s, at one of the “peaks” supported by the decade’s characteristic foundation funding—the

18 Chain Reactions

University of California, Berkeley. First to arrive was Ernest O. Lawrence from Yale—one of the rare physicists who had done all of his work in the United States—followed a year later by J. Robert Oppenheimer, soon the best known of the mathematical theorists out of Göttingen. Almost from the beginning, each began to put a distinctive stamp on their work and on Berkeley. Lawrence struck first in 1929, by inventing the cyclotron, a device that used electromagnets to accelerate alpha particles to very high speeds on a spiral path until a stream of them with a lot of energy behind it could be diverted and aimed at a target whose atoms would disintegrate under the impact. Physicists had been doing that sort of thing for a while, since Rutherford, transforming one element into another, but their experiments had been limited in scope because they could not produce the high-energy beams that Lawrence’s cyclotron made possible after 1931. The first cyclotron was very small, about four inches in diameter, and Lawrence spent about $25 to make it. But as the possibilities of the new machine grew more expansive, so too did its size and cost—and its glamour. Lawrence’s cyclotron was an enormously important piece of apparatus. Berkeley instantly became a pre-eminent place to do physics. Within the world of academic science, the machine’s availability filled the needs of quantum research, generating reams of data and providing an electromagnetic environment in which new theories could be tested. However, even before Lawrence got his Nobel Prize in 1939, the cyclotron had become more than just a piece of scientific equipment. As with Einstein and the theory of relativity—and in the midst of the Great Depression—Lawrence and the cyclotron became icons of science and progress. Lawrence and his machines got their splashy nicknames, “atom smashers,” because the high-energy particles they produced disintegrated the atoms of their targets, and that, in turn, led to the discovery of new elements and hundreds of radioactive isotopes of elements already known. Soon enough, Lawrence and his brother John began using radioactive isotopes from the “atom smasher” to treat cancer; and the radioactive isotopes they created could treat the disease at a fraction of the cost of traditional radiation therapies. One could hardly imagine a more dramatic story for journalists to print or donors to read, especially when the two brothers successfully treated their own mother, after doctors familiar with only traditional treatments told her she had just months to live. A machine to cure cancer was useful in a way that people without scientific educations could understand, even if the full explanation of how the gadget worked was not so readily understandable. Lawrence proved to be a very entrepreneurial fundraiser, very effective at convincing private donors and eventually the Rockefeller Foundation to provide the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to build ever-larger machines and keep his research going. But cyclotron builders could attract funding everywhere; Igor Kurchatov and his colleagues were able to build the first cyclotron in Europe, in Leningrad, beginning in 1932. If they didn’t completely understand the cyclotron, most ordinary people did not understand Einstein’s theory of relativity either. They

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did come to believe, however, that both Einstein and the cyclotron stood for something important—and something powerful. While all of this had been going on in the United States, European researchers had been continuing their work with both quantum mechanics and atomic structure. In the same year that Lawrence first operated his cyclotron, James Chadwick discovered the third of the major sub-atomic particles, the neutron. The neutron gets its name from the fact that it carries no electrical charge, unlike the protons in the nucleus with their positive charges and the mass-less electrons surrounding the nucleus with their negative charges. Like the proton, the neutron has mass and the number of neutrons in an element’s nucleus determines many of that element’s characteristics, including radioactivity. Because a neutron has no electrical charge, a stream of neutrons directed against an experimental target can penetrate an atom’s nucleus in a way that Rutherford’s stream of electrically charged alpha particles could not. This advanced the scientific understanding of atomic structure, of course; but the discovery of something new and fundamental had also provided scientists with a new tool that made further investigation more fruitful. A stream of neutrons from a radioactive source could actually “split” the atoms in a target, change one element into another, and release energy. Scientists across Europe were soon bombarding targets made up of every element on the Periodic Table. The most important of these experimenters comprised three teams: Frederic and Irène Joliot Curie (Marie Curie’s daughter and son-in-law) in Paris, Enrico Fermi in Rome, and a team at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin that included chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, and theoretical physicist Lise Meitner. Historian of physics Daniel Kevles once called 1932, the year in which all this began, “miraculous”; but not all miracles are welcome. A great many things were happening almost simultaneously, and it was terribly important that not all of those things were in physics. The Great Depression was in its third year, and economies around the world were swooping down to new lows after many people had thought that the disaster had bottomed out. In Germany, economic turmoil and political unrest were bringing Adolf Hitler and the Nazis into power, and in the United States they were elevating Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the presidency. And the experimental agenda begun with the identification of the neutron was tantalizing some (but not all) scientists with the possibility of releasing usable energy from the atoms being disintegrated in their apparatus. Among those not excited by the possibility was Lord Rutherford, who insisted that the phenomena his colleagues were exploring was, at best, an inefficient way of producing energy; promoting them as a source of power was, he thought “moonshine.”7 But if Rutherford was impatient with this “moonshine,” at least one of Rutherford’s colleagues was very impatient with him. “Pronouncements of experts to the effect that something cannot be done have always irritated me,” Leo Szilard would write forty years later.8 Szilard was a first-rate physicist, and good enough

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at what he did to share several patents with Albert Einstein; but he was not well known. Fleeing from anti-Semitism and fascism developing in Europe, he had originally moved from his home in Hungary to Germany, and then continued from Germany to Britain. He read H. G. Wells’ philosophical speculations, and his science fiction novels, and had even met with Wells in 1929 to buy some publishing rights to his books. Szilard would never really settle anywhere—he was notoriously a “bird of passage,” who lived out of suitcases in a series of hotel rooms—but in the spring and summer of 1933 he had perched in London’s Imperial Hotel, living on income from teaching fees, patent licenses, and some industrial consulting. Mainly, he was seeking out jobs for other refugee scientists, even though he had no job of his own. He had read Wells’ 1914 novel The World Set Free the previous year. Writing only nine years after Einstein had published the Special Theory of Relativity, Wells had imagined a world war fought (in 1956) with atomic bombs that destroyed the world’s major cities. Szilard would later say that he did not think much about Wells’ novel while he was living in London; neither did he recall some conversations about atomic energy that he had had with a friend at the same time—until September 12, 1933. The London Times reported that morning on a talk about the transformation of atoms that Rutherford had given at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the very “moonshine” speech in which Rutherford denounced the hope that the transformation of atoms would lead to practical sources of power. Throwing away his newspaper in a huff, Szilard left the Imperial Hotel to go for a walk. If he was going anywhere specific, he never said so, or didn’t remember. An observer would have seen only a short, rotund figure in clothing cut in the fashion of Central and Eastern Europe— the refugee’s trademark in a London still at peace with the world and with itself. The boulevard separating Szilard’s hotel from Russell Square is called Southampton Row, and as he walked, an observer would not have seen more than an apparently absent-minded professor waiting at a traffic light. When the light changed, Szilard stepped into the crosswalk. Twenty-eight years earlier, Albert Einstein’s mathematics had demonstrated that matter could be converted to energy in accordance with the formula E = mc2; but the best established physicist in the world had just maintained that the thought of actually getting that energy out of matter was “moonshine.” It was September 12, 1933, and when Leo Szilard began to cross Southampton Row, there was still no way to release that energy. By the time he reached the other side, there was.

notes 1 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Second Edition, Enlarged (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, 1962). 2 To get ahead of ourselves just a bit, that explosive yield—21.5 kilotons in the language of nuclear weapons—is a little larger than the atomic bomb dropped on

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5 6 7 8

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Nagasaki in 1945. In fact, even nuclear and thermonuclear explosions don’t release all the energy theoretically contained in their fuel. The explosion itself scatters the fuel before that can happen. Cited by Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), 172. Raymond B. Fosdick, The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952; New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers rpt., 1989) 27–28. Indeed, critics of the Rockefeller Foundation, and all similar corporations, continue to make the same criticisms after more than 100 years, even though the original donor families play almost no role in their governance or policy decisions. Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978). By coincidence, Morgan had graduated from Göttingen in 1857. Quoted in Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 27. Ibid., 28.

2 The firsT nucLear arms race 1933–1942

Leo Szilard later recalled that he thought of two things as he crossed London’s Southampton Row at Russell Square that September morning in 1933. Fuming at Lord Rutherford’s dismissal of nuclear energy as “moonshine,” Szilard remembered reading The World Set Free the preceding year. Wells had had the world’s nations destroying all their cities in a war fought with atomic bombs once they had learned how to use E = mc2. Yet, he had also imagined that this war would give birth to a global government making future wars impossible. At that moment, Szilard added to this visionary fiction his memory of a certain chemical process, a chain reaction. In a chemical chain reaction, a small number of active particles—oxygen atoms, for example—work like leaven in bread when admitted into a chemically unstable system. One center of this chemical reaction produces thousands of product molecules; and one such center occasionally forms not one, but two or more new centers, each capable of producing a new reaction chain. In its turn, the creation of these new chains allows chemical reactions to take place at lower temperatures than they ordinarily might and to proceed faster than they ordinarily would. “As the light changed to green and I crossed the street,” Szilard would remember: “it … suddenly occurred to me that if we could find an element which is split by neutrons and which would emit two neutrons when it absorbs one neutron, such an element, if assembled in sufficiently large mass, could sustain a nuclear chain reaction… . In certain circumstances it might be possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction, liberate energy on an industrial scale, and construct atomic bombs.”1 Szilard did not know of such an element, and he had no idea of how one might find one and create a chain reaction in a piece of it. He was a mathematician, a theoretical scientist. On the other hand, as a theoretician he held part of a patent on a commercial device—a refrigerator. He was a refugee. With his mind

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engaged as thoroughly with issues of society and politics as it was with physics, he understood the real-world implications of his insight perfectly well. Normally, a scientist would publish the sort of thing that Szilard had just realized; but fearful that any publication would give those ideas to the Nazis, Szilard sought to keep his ideas secret. At the same time, though, he wanted credit for his major discovery, and he wanted to protect any commercial rights that might descend from it. So he put his idea into a patent application that would secure both credit and commercial rights. Patents are normally published, so Szilard sought to donate his to the British Army, which would then declare it to be a military secret. The Army wasn’t interested, but the Royal Navy was, and in 1936, Szilard got his British patent for a chain reaction. It was filed, secretly, at the Admiralty. He labored on in obscurity during these years: he had no reputation; his scientific research shared his attention with his efforts to help prospective victims escape the Nazis; and he did not wish to help put an atomic bomb in Hitler’s hands by publicizing his hypothesis. He was, however, an unflagging organizer and fundraiser who cultivated some important friends, most notably the wealthy British scientist Frederick Lindemann and an American banker named Lewis Strauss. Lindemann was a friend of Winston Churchill’s; Strauss had money, deep interests in science, and powerful friends of his own in the United States government. These would all become important in the future; but, for the moment, Szilard was in no position to pursue his historic idea any further. As a matter of physics, however, the issue was to find an element that would, when bombarded by neutrons, emit two neutrons for every one it absorbed. The neutron was the key to the action in nuclear physics during the 1930s. The third of the three most important sub-atomic particles identified, the neutron shared the nucleus with the proton; both were particles that weighed something. The proton carried a positive electrical charge. Electrons carried a negative electrical charge, but they were without mass. Cavendish Laboratory’s James Chadwick had identified neutrons in 1931, and physicists readily imagined ways to apply them to research. A great discovery in the ongoing exploration of the universe, the neutron provided a research methodology as well. “Bombarding” elements, exposing them to radiation (usually exposing them to alpha particles), had become a significant part of experimental physics ever since Rutherford had first done it in 1907. Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie (Marie Curie’s daughter and son-in-law) had, in 1934, induced radioactivity in three elements with alpha particles (and won the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for doing so). After Chadwick had identified the neutron, Szilard and others sought to use what one might think of as a new bullet in an old gun. If one bombarded various elements with the newly discovered particles, they carried no electrical charge to interfere with high-energy trajectories. Physicists anticipated that some trials would induce radioactivity artificially. Szilard was looking for that one element (or more) that would give off more neutrons than it absorbed. He did not have the resources

24 Chain Reactions

to perform the necessary experiments, but Enrico Fermi did, working in Rome quite separately from Szilard or the Joliot-Curies. Building on the JoliotCuries’ work, Fermi began systematically to bombard every element in the Periodic Table, using neutrons obtained from the radioactive decay of radon gas (itself a product of radioactive decay in radium). He had induced radioactivity in twenty elements when his experiments brought him to uranium. In various earlier bombardment experiments, light elements transmuted into lighter elements; however, uranium, the heaviest element found in nature, responded to bombardment differently. Heavy elements apparently got heavier, as the nucleus “captured” the bombarding neutron. Reading his data, Fermi concluded that he had produced a heavier than normal isotope of uranium (U-238) and a “transuranic” element not found in nature, an element with an atomic number of 93 (one higher than uranium’s). He published his results; he became a significant figure in the fraternity of physicists; and he received some popular publicity he didn’t like for discovering a new element. Eventually, he earned the 1938 Nobel Prize for his work. And he was wrong. Few scientific errors have ever had such far-reaching consequences. Fascist Italy was not Nazi Germany and Fermi was not Jewish, but his wife, Laura, was; and both of them detested fascism. By 1938, Mussolini’s anti-Semitic legislation was becoming increasingly restrictive, too. Informed in advance that he was to receive the Nobel Prize, Fermi converted what money he could into watches, objects of value he could carry legally across borders. Thus provided, he and his family traveled to Stockholm, to accept his medal and its accompanying cash prize. Once there, he gave his Nobel lecture and kept on going—to the United States, where he emerged on the faculty of Columbia University in New York. As for his research results, Ida Noddak, a German chemist, had challenged him on them as early as September 1934. He hadn’t looked far enough down the Periodic Table to find the lighter elements that his experiment might have produced, and he hadn’t considered one other possibility: “It is conceivable,” she wrote, “that the nucleus breaks up into several large fragments, which would of course be isotopes of known elements but would not be neighbors of the irradiated element.” She was right; but she was a chemist, not a physicist; she published in a chemistry journal few physicists read; she could offer no theoretical explanation for the result she suggested; and (perhaps not least) she was a woman writing in a field that was almost completely male. Fermi did some re-calculation, but continued to believe he had been right. Not many others paid attention. Nonetheless, Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn, a physicist and a chemist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, remained dissatisfied with Fermi’s results and continued their own experiments. The Joliot-Curies were exploring too. Meitner, however, increasingly noticed that the results everyone was observing required very energetic reactions within the experiments, and no one had any way to explain where the required energy might be coming from. Then, suddenly, it was February 1938 and Nazism intervened.

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Meitner was Jewish only by descent; she had converted to Protestantism thirty years earlier. An Austrian patriot and a war veteran, as a volunteer she had taken the then-new technology of X-rays to her country’s World War I field hospitals. She headed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute’s Physics Department (while living in an apartment in the building). She and Otto Hahn had been research partners ever since World War I had ended. As an Austrian, she was at first immunized from the Nazis’ 1933 anti-Semitic laws. She could and did stay on when the Nazis kicked German Jews out of the civil service (which covered university and research institute faculties). But Anschluss, the German annexation of Austria in February 1938, made her a German subject, and she lost her position, her home, even her physical safety. To make her situation more desperate, the Nazis had finally begun to notice the exodus of scholars and they were moving to stop it. Their new regulations could easily have trapped Meitner in Germany—despised, homeless, without a job or resources. She quickly made arrangements to leave, although she had only an Austrian passport that spoke for a government that no longer existed. She would be able to travel through the Netherlands without documents, friends among the Dutch physicists could see to that; and in July, those same friends and Institute colleagues helped her pack. Otto Hahn gave her a diamond ring that had belonged to his mother, just in case. She got a scare when Nazi border guards seized her useless passport, but they returned it after a tense quarter hour and she was soon safe in Holland. By the end of the year, through Niels Bohr’s influence, she was working in Stockholm. Meanwhile, in December, Hahn and his new partner, Fritz Strassmann, irradiated a sample of uranium with neutrons—a repetition of Fermi’s experiment and the work Hahn and Meitner had been working on together— and got results that they did not understand. Hahn sent them to Meitner and asked what she could make of them. What Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch did next was not obvious or easy, and it required Meitner to admit that she was now challenging some of her own earlier conclusions; but as she and Frisch worked through the mathematical descriptions of the reactions Hahn had induced they came to an inescapable and profound conclusion. The atoms of uranium had split, leaving atoms of the element barium behind, and releasing a great deal of energy, energy accountable only through Einstein’s equation: E = mc2. Frisch borrowed from biology a name for the process, fission. Hahn had spent December 16 arguing with officials—successfully, as it turned out—for permission to send Meitner’s household goods to her new home in Sweden. He ran his experiment the next day, on December 17, 1938. Meitner and Frisch had reached their conclusion on December 24; Meitner replied to Hahn on New Year’s Day. Frisch described what they had seen to Niels Bohr on January 3, as Bohr was about to travel to the United States. Bohr then, on January 6, 1939, drafted for publication a brief note on what the Germans had discovered. It was the same day that the formal Hahn–Strassmann paper appeared in Berlin. American physicists first learned of it on January 16, 1939,

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at an informal Princeton University faculty seminar. Fermi and Szilard, both in New York, had the news by January 25. The news had spread from Berlin to the United States in just over thirty days—and not just to the scientists. The story appeared in the Washington Star, on the Associated Press newswire, and in the New York Times by January 29. By June, in Berlin, Siegfried Flügge, who had worked with Hahn and Meitner, published a technical article suggesting that a “uranium machine” (a nuclear reactor) could produce power. The editor of the American magazine Astounding Science Fiction, who held a bachelor’s degree in physics, talked with friends who were employed in science and engineering, and he read the science sections of his newspapers carefully. He understood by the middle of March that “the discoverer of atomic energy is alive today”; his readers got the news from him in July, after the pulp magazine’s three months required lead time. Flügge published a popular version of his “uranium machine” article in a Berlin newspaper in August, coinciding with the Hitler–Stalin Pact and just weeks before the German invasion of Poland. Things were moving very fast. Every knowledgeable physicist understood the implications, none better than Leo Szilard, of course. “[Eugene] Wigner told me of Hahn’s discovery,” he would later recall; “if enough neutrons are emitted … then it should be, of course, possible to sustain a chain reaction. All the things which H. G. Wells predicted appeared suddenly real to me.” By March 3, he had experimental proof that uranium gave off at least two neutrons per fission, enough to start and sustain a chain reaction. “That night,” he recalled, “there was very little doubt in my mind that the world was headed for grief.” The Joliot-Curies published their report confirming Szilard later that month. A recent Nobel laureate, Fermi used an upper floor office in Columbia University’s Physics building appropriate to his status and prestige. Later that same month, he could invite a visitor to gaze out his window and admire the grand sweep of Manhattan spread out before him. He then put his hands together, making a bowl: “A little bomb like that,” he said, “and it would all disappear.” Even the novices understood. Philip Morrison, a graduate student at the University of California in Berkeley, would later remember what he and his classmates had done: “When fission was discovered, within perhaps a week there was on the blackboard in Robert Oppenheimer’s office a drawing—a very bad, an execrable drawing—of a bomb.” In Berlin, Otto Hahn began to contemplate suicide. Six years and seven months after Hahn’s experiments—to the day—the United States exploded the world’s first atomic bomb.2 And there had never, ever, been a secret to it. The achievement of fission was the high point of the traditional, trans-national community of physicists that had emerged by the end of the 19th century. It was still a small enough group that most of the top people knew all the other top people, or knew others who could fill the gaps in their own connections. And none was naïve enough to ignore the threat of world war that hung over the world. The history of nuclear physics was entangled with the rise of Nazism from the beginning. Szilard, already a political refugee in 1933, had sought to

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keep the concept of a chain reaction from the Nazis; but physicists could and did readily conceive the idea of a chain reaction and its possibilities once they saw fission. And fission had been achieved in Germany, by Germans, and those Germans (along with Lise Meitner, Otto Frisch, and Niels Bohr) had published their achievement for all the world to see. The physicists were cosmopolitan and they prided themselves on the ability of science to transcend international boundaries and rivalries. The spreading news of fission demonstrated that—in some ways, but not all—it had. That was the problem. Many uncertainties lay between fission and a chain reaction, and between a chain reaction and a weapon, and they also spread regardless of borders, which mitigated the problem but also complicated it. Werner Heisenberg—the most eminent of the German physicists who chose to remain in Germany and the scientist nearly everyone outside of Germany expected to lead a German atomic bomb project—visited the United States during the summer of 1939. Why he did is not clear. He may have been saying goodbye; perhaps he imagined that he was laying the groundwork for a renewal of scientific cooperation after the end of what he thought would be a short war. He certainly was not looking for political asylum or a job; either would have been his for the asking—and both were repeatedly offered. He had already made his decision; and he kept his own counsel as to why. He was going to stay in Germany, for reasons that he never made clear enough to suit those of his colleagues who left. German scientists had earlier alerted the German War Office to developments in nuclear physics that might lead to new and powerful explosives. The British and American governments already knew of a scientific meeting on nuclear research the War Office had convened in Berlin on April 30. Heisenberg almost certainly was aware of that, but he believed, he told Fermi, “that atomic developments will be rather slow however hard governments clamor for them; I believe that the war will be over long before the first atom bomb is built.” He might have meant that he thought the coming war would be short. He might have meant that building a weapon would be an extremely long project, longer even than a long war should one develop. If he feared such a weapon in Nazi hands, he did not say so. If he feared for his country’s fate with nuclear weapons in the hands of Germany’s enemies he left behind no evidence to that effect. Above all, in no way did Heisenberg appear to share the profound urgency that gripped Leo Szilard and his own one-time students Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller. By the summer of 1939, Szilard and others had proven that fission in uranium could produce a chain reaction. Whether or not a chain reaction could be built into a useful weapon was still unknown; yet all three Hungarian refugees were afraid that it could, and quite anxious that the research to establish what might be possible get done in the anti-Nazi world—as quickly as possible. Heisenberg, who was still in the United States, and who appeared without concern, had access, but only to the government that they feared. They had concern, but were only refugees, foreigners with neither Heisenberg’s scientific eminence

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nor any other cachet with which to approach power. Of course, Szilard had his connections with Lindemann and Strauss, but he wanted to pitch his warning higher up. He wanted to warn the President of the United States; and for that he needed Albert Einstein. Einstein had concluded, in 1905, that E = mc2, but his later work did not involve nuclear physics. Convinced that God “does not play dice,” he never accepted quantum mechanics and he always argued against the uncertainties and probabilities that Bohr and Heisenberg had brought to the center of physics. Later, when the Manhattan Project was getting underway, his pacifism and socialism became reasons for the various security people to keep him out of it. (Security did not object, however, when he consulted on the development of proximity fuses, miniaturized radar sets that allowed anti-aircraft shells to explode close to an enemy plane, without requiring a direct hit.) But Szilard had been a research partner; they did share patents; and in 1939 he was the celebrity scientist, the iconic genius whose name alone was a key that could turn the most guarded of locks. So Szilard—who had first imagined what a chain reaction might do but who had no car and could not drive—borrowed a car from Wigner and coaxed Teller to drive him from New York City to Einstein’s summer home on Long Island. He carried with him a letter to Franklin Roosevelt that he wanted Einstein to sign. Einstein edited Szilard’s draft and then signed it, something he later regretted. Looking back on it and knowing what eventually came of it, however, the letter conveys profound seriousness, urgency, but not excitement; it strikes the reader as an exercise in restraint, modesty, and understatement, carefully but plainly typed on the kind of paper one would find in a corner store. Perhaps most important, it said that while a chain reaction was “almost certain” to produce power and “new radium-like elements” in the immediate future it was only “conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type” might be made. The letter did not imagine a bomb dropped from an airplane, it “might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air”; but “carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.” The letter recommended that the President appoint a knowledgeable emissary: to maintain contact between the scientists and the administration, so as to keep government departments abreast of research developments; to advise on such actions as the acquisition of uranium supplies; and to speed up research by arranging for funds “through his contacts with private persons who are willing to make contributions for this cause, and perhaps also by obtaining the co-operation of industrial laboratories which have the necessary equipment.” The last paragraph was a warning about German progress, the embargo on uranium sales from Czech mines under Nazi control, and the fact that a high-ranking German official had a son who worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (Carl von Weizsäcker, one of Heisenberg’s closest associates). It was a very professorial letter—its exigency reinforced by its low-key tenor and the way Alexander Sachs, a banker with scientific credentials, hand carried

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it to Roosevelt. Sachs also gave the President a thorough briefing once Einstein’s signature got him past the Oval Office door. Roosevelt’s reply asked only for confirmation: “Alex, what you are after is to see that the Nazis don’t blow us up.” Sachs said yes. FDR called for his military aide, General Edwin “Pa” Watson: “Pa, this requires action.” Replying in a tenor matching Einstein’s own low key, the President described his “Uranium Committee,” whose job would be “to thoroughly investigate the possibilities of your suggestion regarding the element of uranium.” However, even as the tone of the exchange belies Szilard’s heightened anxiety, it makes a decided contrast with the way German scientists presented the situation to their government. The German government had begun meetings (in the Ministry of Education) back in April, only a few weeks after Szilard and the Joliot-Curies had verified the potential for a chain reaction. Some of those present criticized Hahn for publishing what should have been a military secret. On the other hand, when von Weizsäcker learned that fission did produce enough secondary neutrons to initiate a chain reaction, he began to fear that humanity faced only one choice, between the renunciation of war and self-destruction. At that point, von Weizsäcker convinced Siegfried Flügge to publish his paper on a “uranium machine,” a reactor, in June, in part, according to von Weizsäcker, so that that Germany would have no monopoly on such a device. However, British scientists who learned early of the meeting assumed from it that Hitler knew about the possibility of an atomic bomb and was already determined to develop it as a secret weapon. He didn’t, but nevertheless, the German Army moved to weaponize nuclear research more quickly than did its British and American counterparts. The Heereswaffenamt, the ordnance bureau, convened a meeting of a Nuclear Physics Research Group in September, a group Heisenberg joined two weeks later when he got home from the United States. The bureau then commandeered the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics for uranium research by October, with the intention, said its director, Peter Debye, of building “an irresistible offensive weapon.” Debye (Dutch, and himself on his way to a job in the United States) told the Rockefeller Foundation’s Warren Weaver that the Institute staff was “inclined to consider the situation a good joke on the German Army.” Weaver noted that the scientists “consider it altogether improbable that they will be able to accomplish any of the purposes the Army has in mind; but, in the meantime, they will have a splendid opportunity to carry on some fundamental research in nuclear physics.” Like so many others, the scientists were underestimating their masters. The Army had already convened the beginnings of a bomb project, with Heisenberg (who was not a Kaiser Wilhelm physicist) its titular head. At the same time, it seems essential to keep in mind that even if the Germans showed more early interest in what fission could do than their democratic counterparts did, they did not share one of the guiding notions of their enemies: the concept of “the winning weapon.” To those in Britain or the United States whom scientists like Szilard convinced, an atomic bomb would inevitably end

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wars like World War II. They imagined that the destructive power of nuclear explosions would be so great that its use by a belligerent would almost instantly destroy its enemies’ means and will to fight. Confronted by an enemy armed with atomic bombs, and without such bombs of their own, a nation would be forced to surrender, to accept any terms, no matter how harsh or demeaning, as the only alternative to utter destruction. Therefore, if someone developed nuclear weapons during the war then in progress, the power developing them first would win the war. The Germans hardly ignored fission’s staggering possibilities, but what records they left do not suggest the fear of loss and ruin that motivated their western enemies. German physicists had the same mixed feelings about the potential destructive power of the atom as the scientists gathering in Britain and the United States, especially when they considered Germany’s Nazi rulers. But if the émigré, British, and American physicists feared the atomic bomb their German counterparts might produce for Hitler, those German counterparts did not fear them or anything they might build. The questions about fission for military purposes that remained open outnumbered those that scientists had settled. The number and significance of the unknown factors were simply staggering; and no one could honestly say at that moment whether or not an atomic bomb was feasible, much less whether anyone could make it feasible in time to use it in World War II. That lack of certainty lent considerable power to the skepticism of the technically conservative in every country that contemplated building atomic bombs. Even the United States, with the largest resources to spare, appropriated only $6,000 to support the small committee working under the supervision of the stodgy Bureau of Standards. The appropriation appears pitifully small on the scale the whole American bomb project would establish later; yet technical conservatism and limited resources did force some concentration on central questions that did not require massive funding to answer, indeed questions that would have to be answered before massive funding would do any good. What fissionable materials would support a chain reaction? How much would be needed? And how might one lay hands on any industrial-scale quantity of those materials? Research and discovery proceeded in parallel and all sides confronted a staggering issue. Many elements, including uranium, exist in several isotopes. Isotopes of an element are chemically identical; they differ only in the weight of their atoms and in their physical behavior. Uranium has six isotopes, but only two matter in this context, U-238 and U-235. Working in Britain, Otto Frisch and another refugee physicist, Rudolph Peierls, could investigate those differences because their “foreign backgrounds” barred them from working on projects requiring higher security clearances. (For physicists, the most important of those was radar.) If one had a chunk of natural uranium, more than 99 percent of it would be U-238, and one would need an enormous mass of it, tons of it, in order to sustain a fission chain reaction. However, in March 1940, Frisch and Peierls reported that U-235, seven-tenths of one percent (0.7 percent, seven atoms of every thousand) of a natural mass of the metal, fissions much more

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readily, and, therefore, requires much less material to sustain a chain reaction. Frisch and Peierls estimated that a chain reaction in U-235 would require a mass of only about one kilogram. It was an estimate much lower than the mass required by the first actual weapons; nevertheless, Frisch and Peierls made it now seem likely that someone would be able to carry a bomb fueled by the lighter isotope in an airplane. That made it more likely that the effort to build one could pay off—at some point. No one at that time, anywhere, actually knew just how much U-235 would constitute a “critical mass,” the amount required to sustain a chain reaction. But the more immediate unknown was how to separate the two isotopes. Every country that has since tried to create nuclear weapons has had to solve the same problem: how to acquire enough fissionable material to sustain a chain reaction in a package usable as a weapon. In 1940, no one knew how long it would take or how much it would cost, except that both the length of time and the expense promised to be very substantial. Some found comfort in that; Niels Bohr commented that a nation would have to turn itself into a gigantic factory in order to separate the isotopes. In the midst of war, who would do that? After the United States had built and used the first atomic bombs, Americans readily became complacent and self-satisfied about their country’s apparently unique accomplishment. The vast majority easily came to believe that the international appeal of American freedom and prosperity (which attracted refugee scientists), the power of the American economy (which provided unparalleled resources), and the far-sightedness of American leadership, could combine with divine assistance to create the atomic bomb as quickly as it did. “We may be grateful to Providence,” said President Harry Truman, “that the Germans … did not get the atomic bomb at all.” “We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies,” he went on, “and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.” So the Soviet Union’s accomplishment of the same atomic feat a mere four years after Hiroshima came as a severe shock, something that one could only explain as the work of spies and subversives. Espionage certainly was a part of the Soviet atomic bomb program, but that shouldn’t obscure some other, equally relevant facts about the first nuclear arms race. It is important that the American public, at the prompting of American leaders, knew little—and understood less—about the real capabilities of science in the Soviet Union. Most significantly, they did not understand that before World War II Soviet scientists were—despite the more-than-occasional interference of the Stalinist state—part of the same scholarly networks to which their German, British, and American colleagues belonged. They learned about fission at about the same time that their western colleagues did; they understood its destructive potential as Bohr, Szilard, Fermi, Einstein, Hahn, von Weizsäcker, and Heisenberg did; and they learned about the importance of uranium’s two isotopes and the challenges awaiting anyone seeking to separate them at the same time as well. Bohr and Joseph Wheeler had their results on this absolutely

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crucial issue at Princeton early in February; Flerov and Rusinov had theirs early in June. If they were “behind,” it was only by a matter of weeks. The Germans, who had faster and more reliable access to foreign scientific journals than the Soviets did, had learned a great deal from the work done in the United States. Physicists in the USSR were regularly making significant discoveries only to find that credit for what they had done had been pre-empted by Americans who had published first. Stalinist censorship and import controls, not scientific inferiority, hobbled their work. They developed a theory about the operation of nuclear reactors parallel to the work in Britain and the United States. Some work managed actually to appear in Soviet journals before it showed up in the American Physical Review. Espionage had nothing to do with any of this; and even the most expert spies could not steal work that did not yet exist. As it became more and more apparent that separating U-235 would be the key to building anything nuclear, decisions about moving forward became less about physics and more about economics and politics.3 Bohr had identified the obstacle. The variety of methods one could use to separate the two isotopes of uranium had in common that they would be large and expensive enough to require taking resources from other work in order to build them and to make them work. No one knew how long it would take; and a country at war would have to place a gargantuan bet that it could produce a super-weapon before an enemy could defeat it with conventional weapons. In 1940, the United States was the wealthiest of the potential nuclear powers; and of course, the still-neutral United States had the luxury of being a long way from the fighting—no small advantage. The United States could build gigantic plants completely beyond the range of strategic reconnaissance or bombing. As the last major belligerent to enter the war, the United States could face the daunting challenges of uranium separation without the imminent threats of invasion or conventional defeat hanging over it before nuclear weapons would be ready. The Soviet Union too was officially neutral in World War II throughout 1940 and the first half of 1941, but it commanded far fewer resources and its industrial areas were enormously vulnerable to attack. Nuclear physics faced political problems under Marxist rule as well. The discipline had yielded useful technology in the past, always a good thing from the Communist Party’s point of view; yet some in the ruling circles still perceived physics as hopelessly abstract, theoretical, and “idealistic,” not endearing qualities to Marxist ideologues. Moreover, in the crucial eighteen months after Soviet scientists began working in the field, the only enemy for a Soviet atomic bomb was Germany—supposedly an ally under the August 1939 non-aggression pact. A Soviet atomic bomb project before June 1941 might be impolitic and rude at best, and downright provocative at worst. (In the event, foregoing the option did the USSR little good, but it was hardly the only opportunity Comrade Stalin passed up in those crucial months.) Ironically, Soviet nuclear research all but came to a halt when Germany actually did invade the USSR. At first it was too theoretical, then it was too

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provocative. Finally, even as Soviet scientists grew to understand how an atomic bomb might be made, it would require too much time and resources, and too many people, to be of use to the USSR in the fight already going on. The Soviet physicist best known in the West, Peter Kapitsa, warned a Moscow rally in December 1941 that the possibility of atomic bombs promised wars of “huge destructive force”; but he was talking about the next war, not the current, desperate conflict in which German armies were assaulting the defenses of the city where Kapitsa was speaking. Georgii Flerov, re-training as an engineer to work on bombers and addressing a scientific seminar shortly thereafter, shared with his audience a concern that papers on nuclear physics had ceased to appear in western scientific journals. That was a good indication that they were turning research in the field into a military secret, which in turn was an excellent sign that western countries were at work on a nuclear weapons project. Not discouraged by the unfavorable circumstances, Flerov urged Igor Kurchatov to resume his interrupted research on fission, in a thirteen-page, handwritten letter that, among other things, included a design for a uranium-fueled bomb very much resembling the device produced at Los Alamos and exploded over Hiroshima in 1945. Kurchatov did not reply. A few months later, Flerov and his Air Force unit were stationed near the evacuated University of Voronezh, and Flerov stalked the shelves of the abandoned library, seeking out the latest western research on fission. As had been the case in December, he could find nothing, which convinced him that the United States had begun a secret bomb project. At the same time, however, he was more afraid of what Germany might be doing. Like Szilard, he chose to sound an alarm to the highest levels, and when he got no response from the State Defense Committee’s scientific advisers, in April 1942, he wrote directly to Stalin. Flerov’s situation was quite different from Szilard’s and Einstein’s in the United States in 1939. His sense of urgency was neither abstract nor distant. He could not afford professorial restraint. Flerov told the Soviet leader that he was afraid that uranium fission would produce “a real revolution” in military technology, but “it will take place without our participation … because in the scientific world now, as before, inertia flourishes.” Seeking to “break through” a “wall of silence,” he asked Stalin to convene—and attend—a scientific conference to settle the question of whether or not “the uranium problem” could be resolved during the current war. Unlike Roosevelt, Stalin had no positive reply for Flerov; indeed, he gave no reply at all, and Flerov’s proposed meeting never convened. Unlike Szilard and Einstein, Flerov was late to the game, not early. Soviet espionage had, months earlier, learned of British work on atomic bombs and the machinery of the Soviet state was moving, slowly, to get its bomb project underway. The success of Soviet espionage came in September 1941, but its impact on Soviet policy came much later. Beginning in the spring of 1940, after Otto Frisch and Rudolph Peierls had determined that a bomb fueled by U-235 might

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require only a few kilograms to support a chain reaction, the British government convened what became known as the maud Committee in order to ascertain the actual feasibility of an atomic bomb for use in the current war. The committee filed its report in July 1941: We have now reached the conclusion that it will be possible to make an effective uranium bomb which, containing some 25 lb of active material, would be equivalent as regards destructive effect to 1,800 tons of T.N.T… . As regards the time required, [technical consultants] estimate that the material for the first bomb could be ready by the end of 1943… . Even if the war should end before the bombs are ready the effort would not be wasted, except in the unlikely event of complete disarmament, since no nation would care to risk being caught without a weapon of such decisive possibilities. The Committee decided that an atomic bomb was practicable and likely to have decisive results in the current war. On those grounds, the Committee recommended that Britain proceed with its work in the field with a high priority and increasing intensity and expenditure, and it should continue and expand its cooperative efforts in this field with the United States.4 Churchill decided to proceed, and his cabinet’s Scientific Advisory Committee ratified the decision on September 25th. Anatoly Gorskii, the NKVD resident in London, informed the Soviet intelligence aparatus of the decision on the same day. Former MIT President Vannevar Bush briefed Roosevelt on the report on October 9th, and FDR would authorize the all-out American effort, the Manhattan Project, in June 1942. With the Wehrmacht operating in Moscow’s suburbs, the Soviet Union was in no position to spare resources for any kind of long-range research project; but as circumstances changed, so too did opportunities. Lavrenti Beria, the head of the NKVD political police (and also a “go-to” commissar with several portfolios in the Communist Party defense apparatus), recommended in March 1942 that Stalin and the State Defense Committee should create a committee to coordinate research. He wanted to inform key scientists of the work Britain was doing and find out from them what they thought the USSR should be doing. Beria was working from the intelligence reports; he didn’t know much about the Soviets’ own research. So it was British progress that spurred on Britain’s American and Soviet allies. But the spring of Soviet hopes would have to wait for most of 1942, as the fortunes of conventional war still ran against the USSR, even as intelligence discovered evidence that Germany was interested in atomic bombs. Many physicists “in the know” advised against a Soviet bomb project explicitly; the enormous investment could only pay off after the anticipated climax of the current war. Yet some disagreed. It was risky to make the investment (as much as 100 million rubles), but more risky not to, they pointed out. By July, Stalin had decided to re-start the nuclear research abandoned at the time of

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the original invasion. At that time, the project could labor towards two goals, building a Soviet bomb, which was hardly practical, or, realistically, developing a more solid assessment of the danger from a German one. By October, the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ Technical Committee, which reported to the State Defense Committee, selected Igor Kurchatov to run the program; but the Germans now had Stalingrad under siege, bombed to rubble, all but taken. Kurchatov spent the rest of the year traveling to see the research institutes and personnel evacuated eastward ahead of the Germans and to determine who and what he might be able to use. By February 1943, the Soviet counter-offensive had surrounded and captured what was left of the German army at Stalingrad and V. M. Molotov vetted Kurchatov; shortly thereafter, the State Defense Committee formally established the project. Kurchatov was appointed director early in March. So the first nuclear arms race ended, effectively, during the spring and summer of 1942. The British and the Americans, having decided to collaborate, were in the lead by virtue of their enormous advantage in resources and secure location (provided by the United States), by virtue of the head start provided by the refugee scientists’ research, by virtue of the American capacity to mobilize ideas and integrate them with industrial resources and (most important) by a sense of urgency that the Germans never had. The Soviets were in second place on account of a slow start, their exposed location, and their military situation. However, they were in second and not last place because Soviet science was every bit as advanced as its western counterparts, because its physicists were as mindful of danger as the refugees in Britain and the US, and because—even if Soviet resources were limited in desperate circumstances—the Soviet apparatus, especially the Academy of Sciences and the State Defense Committee, were able to mobilize and integrate ideas and resources. Ironically, although everyone was afraid of the Germans, the Germans lost because their best scientists were unable to organize and mobilize their ideas and the German state did not develop mechanisms to integrate them with industrial resources.

notes 1 Cited in Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 28. 2 By comparison, as measured from the Wright Brothers’ first flight, the aeronautical science required to build the B-29s that dropped the first atomic bombs was 41 years, 7 months, and 20 days old the day Hiroshima was struck. 3 This story is very well developed by David Holloway, in Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy 1939–1956 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). Quotations in this chapter are taken from this work. 4 MAUD Report, July 1941. Online access: The Atomic Archive, http://www. atomicarchive.com/Docs/Begin/MAUD.shtml, 28 January 2012.

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3 “one grand finaL exam day…” 1943–1945

The British, the Americans, and their émigré colleagues were afraid of an atomic bomb in Nazi Germany’s hands, which seems a perfectly reasonable fear under the circumstances. At the same time, none of the few Germans who knew about nuclear weapons ever seemed to imagine that the physicists outside of Western Europe could put an atomic bomb into Allied hands—at any time, much less before World War II was over. When the war in Europe did end, Allied intelligence rounded up ten key German atomic scientists and shipped them back to Farm Hall, a country estate near Cambridge. Even under the circumstances, Heisenberg dismissed the possibility that their hosts were listening to their conversations: “I don’t think they know the real Gestapo methods,” he told Kurt Diebner. “They’re a bit old fashioned in that respect,” he said. Underestimating the capabilities of the people he was dealing with seems to have been a habit. The British had indeed bugged Farm Hall’s bedrooms and public living spaces and eventually accumulated six months’ worth of conversations.1 Hahn was the first of the German scientists that their hosts told about the bombing of Hiroshima. He then was escorted into dinner, “with the help of considerable alcoholic stimulant” to make the announcement to his colleagues—who could not believe it. Heisenberg kept insisting that it was someone’s trick. Once or twice Hahn teased Heisenberg that the Americans had accomplished what he could not; but eventually he sided with Heisenberg; “Well, I think we’ll bet on Heisenberg’s suggestion that it is a bluff,” he said. It wasn’t a bluff though, as the German professors realized when they heard the official announcements on British radio. “There’s a great difference between discoveries and inventions,” Heisenberg argued. “With discoveries one can always be skeptical and many surprises can take place. In the case of inventions, surprises can only occur for people who have not had anything to do with it. It’s a bit odd after we have been working on it for five years.” To be sure, they

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had been “working on it,” for almost the full five years. Heisenberg had once told Albert Speer that Germany would need to build an atomic bomb. But they didn’t have a bomb. They weren’t even close. As they ran through what they remembered of the work they and others had done, they did not mention the names of any of their colleagues who had gone to Britain and the United States. Moreover, as a group, the scientists interned at Farm Hall were still das Uranverein, the Uranium Club, no more heavily organized than the Americans’ original Uranium Committee. And the transcripts of their long, somber evening of reflection and recrimination convey clearly that they had only a vague sense of the enormous scale of the AngloAmerican project, no concept of the nuclear industry that the United States Army had created from scratch in less than three years. As the early history of fission developed, Niels Bohr, the mentor all of them shared, had originally thought himself an optimist. If the structure of the universe made nuclear weapons impossible, one could be optimistic about the future. A pessimist believed that they were all too feasible. As research discovered that one could make an airdropped atomic bomb using U-235 as fuel, Bohr remained quietly hopeful that no one would want to make over an entire country into the massive uranium separation plant that would be required. In captivity, Heisenberg touched briefly on a key point, only to allow his skepticism to overwhelm his judgment. “I don’t believe a word,” he said to Hahn and von Weizsäcker. “They must have spent the whole of their 500,000,000 pounds in separating isotopes; and then it is possible.”2 His musing was exaggerated, but only a little, because— quite contrary to Niels Bohr’s expectations—the United States was willing to turn a large part of the country into a factory to make fuel for weapons of mass destruction. After the Cold War was over, the Brookings Institution tabulated the Project’s price tag: bomb fuel factories cost approximately 83 percent of the total $2 billion spent. Three-quarters of that paid for uranium separation plants at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the rest for the plutonium-producing reactors at Hanford, Washington. The Los Alamos laboratory where the bombs were designed cost less than 4 percent of the Project budget.3 But a difference in the scale of the German and American efforts explains the difference between American success and German failure only in part. The Germans abandoned the idea of a uranium-fueled bomb early on it seems, deterred by the cost and the time to completion for uranium isotope separation. A reactor to produce plutonium would be their ticket to an atomic bomb—and they could never build a reactor that worked. The Americans could and did; and they invested in uranium separation as well. The American reactors were built to designs by Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard; and Werner Heisenberg could not have built their counterparts even if he had had unlimited resources. The Germans had made—and never discovered—a technical mistake; and they did not realize that very pure graphite (easily available and easy to handle) could be used to moderate the flow of neutrons in their pilot reactor. They believed they had to use “heavy water” (deuterium, not very available and difficult to

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handle) to control their chain reactions. More significantly, however, they had limited their own vision with European-scale and academic-scale thinking. They remained, as they had begun, the “uranium club.” Admiral Yamamoto, Commander of the Japanese Fleet, opposed war with the United States “because I have seen the oil fields of Texas and the automobile factories of Detroit.”4 Most of the German nuclear physicists should have known better: many of them had received grants from American foundations; some had traveled to and taught in the United States. But they condescended to the Americans. Wartime shortages in Germany, followed by the descent from limited resources to extremely short rations, had only influenced the work later. The lonely and irregular character of the Szilard–Einstein letter to Franklin Roosevelt is by now well enshrined in the mythology of the Manhattan Project. (As of 2013, a photograph of Szilard and Einstein re-enacting their meeting stood fourth in a Google search on the key word “Manhattan Project.”) Individuals took significant but highly irregular steps—the Einstein letter to Roosevelt, Paul Hartek’s to the German War Ministry, Georgii Flerov’s to Stalin—that brought fission to the attention of the governments. However, we should not let the memory of those crucial and sentimentally appealing events obscure the manner in which the three would-be nuclear powers managed scientific research between January 1939 and June 1942. When the time for decisions arrived, individual initiatives were not anywhere near capable of managing the problem. The administration of scientific research was a critical factor accounting for Anglo-American (and Soviet) success and German failure. The British began serious work first. Long before September 1939, British vulnerability to European-launched aerial bombing encouraged broad and innovative investment in research and efforts to use research to provide the most advanced possible defensive armament. A government-sponsored committee system could, and did, funnel significant information up to higher levels. From early 1939 to mid-1942, professors, mostly émigré like Rudolph Peierls and Otto Frisch, working in almost peacetime decentralized ways and funded at very low levels, asked and began answering the serious scientific questions that would determine whether E = mc2 could in actual practice be the basis for a feasible weapon. Frisch and Peierls discovered that to start a chain reaction in naturallyoccurring uranium would require an enormous amount of material; however, a chain reaction in the isotope U-235 would require only a small amount. An atomic bomb might need no more than a few kilograms of U-235. It could be carried in a contemporary airplane and—even with the massive requirements of uranium separation standing in the way—it might well be available for use in World War II. Frisch and Peierls, at the University of Birmingham, gave their results to Professor Marcus Oliphant, who in turn took them to Sir Henry Tizard, Rector of Imperial College and a member of the Committee on the Scientific Survey of Air Defence. Scientific air defense in Britain meant radar. Therefore, Tizard was

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prepared to hear about revolutionary new military technology, and he had leading physicists readily available when he established the so-called maud committee to assess what Frisch and Peierls had discovered: Sir George Thomson (1937 Nobel Laureate in Physics), Sir James Chadwick (discoverer of the neutron, 1935 Nobel Laureate in Physics), and four others: six men, leading figures from every major British university. In addition to evaluating the implications of the Frisch–Peierls memorandum, the maud Committee also commissioned further research on the gaseous diffusion method to separate U-235 from U-238 and made recommendations for further, serious work, some of it to be done in conjunction with the United States, some of it to be done in the United States. Espionage gave all that information to the Soviet government by the end of summer 1941. In the Soviet Union, progress in scientific research, measured by the frequency and size of Conferences and Congresses, and Soviet nuclear research, and coordinated by the Soviet Academy of Sciences, continued from 1940 into 1942, despite the enormous interruption of the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941. Flerov’s 1941 letter to Stalin tried to warn Stalin that atomic weapons research was underway in the United States and Germany, and that it was likely to be productive. The copy of the maud committee report reinforced the scientific weight and policy recommendations coming from Flerov and from the Academy of Sciences. This part of the Soviet project’s history marks the beginning of the argument between the Soviet scientists and the Soviet spies as to which group was more responsible for the first Soviet acquisition of nuclear weapons. But it also highlights simultaneously the importance of one single document, the maud Report, and, to be sure, two individual researchers, Frisch and Peierls, who were in different ways responsible for not one but all three successful World War II bomb programs. And they were needed. Official bureaucracies needed prodding before they began moving. For example, the British copy of the maud report for the American government went to the “Uranium Committee” first kick-started by the Einstein letter and headed up by Lyman Briggs, director of the US Bureau of Standards. Briggs got the report, locked it away for safekeeping, and showed it to no one. Briggs was an appalling non-leader on a critical matter. Nevertheless, the “Uranium Committee”—weak, poorly funded, and painfully slow—had kept things going in the United States. One knowledgeable observer, I. I. Rabi, would later say that Szilard had chosen a poor route to get the government involved in nuclear research. It would have been better, Rabi thought, if Szilard had approached Ernest Lawrence instead of Einstein and the President. Lawrence was a distinguished physicist, the inventor of the cyclotron, already recognized as a builder of highly advanced machines, and also recognized as an accomplished fund-raiser and politician. The President was convinced; he instantly created a project, reached into a figurative pocket to fund it, and moved on to the many other things for which he was responsible. Lawrence might

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have attracted attention at a more appropriate level than the very top that Szilard had reached, from someone who could give it more consistent attention—a foundation, perhaps, or someone in the military services who could connect the scientists to a contractor. Perhaps. However, if the Uranium Committee began as something of an orphan, an adoptive family quickly appeared, the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC). Founded in June 1940, the NDRC sought to join the defense effort, before Pearl Harbor, to mobilize science and engineering research that could produce military equipment of many sorts, and to encourage interservice and interagency cooperation in research and development of advanced weapons. Physicists had produced sonar for the anti-submarine fight in World War I and chemists made their poison gases. Already operational in the field, Radar was a significant emerging technology in World War II. Therefore, the scientists began with some credibility and the Committee was powerfully led by academic administrators. Vannevar Bush, who convinced Roosevelt to appoint the Committee, was an electrical engineer and inventor, founder of the Raytheon Corporation, Dean of Engineering and Vice President at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before and during the war, Bush was President of the Carnegie Institution in Washington. James Bryant Conant was a chemist, a veteran of World War I chemical warfare service, and the President of Harvard University. These two men and the agencies they led, the NDRC and its government successor, the Office of Research and Development (OSRD) were major, usually uncredited, participants in the war effort and in the Manhattan Project. OSRD gradually became the administrative hub of the decentralized work that went on through 1942, with Bush as Director and Conant as Bush’s successor at NDRC. Neither the men nor their agency had German counterparts. The two of them, and other, less prominent educational administrators, provided a regular, organized, interface between the scientists and the corridors of political power. This was something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, someone who understood what concerned the scientists could speak to the President (or more likely, the Secretary of War). On the other hand, the administrators stood between the scientists and the corridors of power. The scientists had no control over the uses to which the government would put their work and they could not speak directly to those officials who did have that control. Finally, Bush, Conant, and their administrator colleagues had a better appreciation of the industrial effort that would be necessary in order to provide their bombs with fuel. By 1942, Bush and Conant were advocates of centralizing research on atomic bombs under the jurisdiction of the Army. When the Army set up the Manhattan Project, both of them were on the Military Policy Committee that oversaw it. The discovery that fission bombs fueled by uranium would require supplies of U-235 that could be produced only slowly and at great cost marked an acute decision point for all the research projects then underway. One set of physical facts determined two things simultaneously. First, one could create

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a fission explosion in a device small enough to carry in a contemporary airplane. Second, acquiring the U-235 was such a massive challenge that its cost might conceivably exceed its military value. Isotope separation might have been the kind of problem that would make it impossible to have a weapon ready before World War II ended. At the same time, a second possibility for bomb fuel developed. Follow-up work on what Fermi and Hahn–Meitner– Strassmann had done indicated that an element existed in theory that did not exist in nature. Eventually named plutonium, it is heavier than uranium and it will support a fission chain reaction just as U-235 will. Most important from a would-be weapons maker’s point of view, even though plutonium does not exist in nature, one can manufacture it in a nuclear reactor fueled with naturally occurring U-238. Building a nuclear reactor to produce plutonium would not be a cheap or quick matter; but building it would be smaller, cheaper, faster, and less detectible than putting together a uranium separation plant. This would be a second road to an atomic bomb and, especially for the Germans, a road more feasible than separating uranium. That was the point at which the overall history of the German bomb project diverged from the arc of the Anglo-American Manhattan Project. In spring 1942, the German physicists met with Hitler’s Armaments Minister, Albert Speer, who asked them if it would be possible to build atomic bombs in time to use them in the current war. Heisenberg replied with the same period the Americans were using, two to three years; but apparently (and this is the source of much controversy) stated that there would be “difficulties” in accomplishing their objective in that period. Heisenberg never claimed that that statement to Speer was intended to steer him away from the German bomb project; his “supporters” and others have done so, however. Speer ruled against anything like a German Manhattan Project because it would require enormous resources that might support other things Germany needed during the war. No one could give a guarantee of success and the expense would be matched by great difficulty and slow speed. By exaggerating the difficulties, some historians argue, the German scientists intentionally persuaded the Nazi government that they could not achieve the wartime use for an atomic bomb that would justify the raw costs and the diversion of scarce resources. The project was continued at a distinctly secondary level and in a decentralized fashion spread out over the German university system and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. Most other historians argue that the scientists’ claims are postwar dreaming to disguise both acquiescence in what the Nazis were doing and their own failure to build fission bombs. In Britain, the United States, and Canada the professors determined that a) one could build a working atomic bomb; b) that bomb could be carried to a target by a contemporary airplane; and c) one could build the fuel plants and the bomb, quite likely in time to use the bomb in the current war. (At least the likelihood was good enough to warrant the diversion of enormous resources.) The professors, using peacetime research methods, working at an academic pace

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in a decentralized network of universities, learned a great deal about how they might create an uncontrolled chain reaction explosion; but once the United States and Britain decided actually to develop these weapons, all of that gentility was too small, too slow, and too insecure. Moreover, real weapons would need real fuel, and someone would have to build the giant factories that would separate the two major isotopes of uranium. One could produce plutonium in a nuclear reactor fueled by natural uranium, if you had a reactor; but in 1942, no one had ever built a nuclear reactor.5 Certainly, building the atomic bomb would require the most advanced theoretical physics of the day; but, obviously, the job would also necessitate a great deal of some very heavy construction. That meant the Army, and certainly two crucial factors in the successful American bomb building for World War II were the Corps of Engineers’ organization of the Manhattan Project, and the bullheaded, egotistical officer the Army put in command, Major General Leslie R. Groves. The son of an Army chaplain, his youth spent on Army posts, Groves had graduated fourth in the West Point class of 1918. Going into the Corps of Engineers was the traditional career path for top-ranking cadets, and Groves took it. His early career was highly regarded, but typical for officers of his age and time. Promotion was glacial and Groves was promoted to major (pay grade O-4, the fourth of ten levels of officer’s rankings) only on 1 July 1940, having been a commissioned officer for twenty-two years.6 Things began happening very fast, though. Groves had always been a successful project officer; his biographer says that his obesity and his rude manner was tolerated because of his success as a project officer. Now, Groves’ first wartime position was Special Assistant (for construction) to the Army’s Quartermaster General and he was again a great success. His job was to break a succession of logjams delaying the construction of camps to house millions of soldiers training. Having solved that set of problems, he supervised the construction of the Pentagon. He wanted, and expected, his next assignment to be in combat: overseas and in command of troops under fire. The Manhattan Project was a stateside job with a mission statement more full of questions than answers. He didn’t want the job, despite the promise that his success would end the war, and despite the promotion to Brigadier General that he received only twenty-seven months after he took off his captain’s bars. Most histories of the Manhattan Project write the scientists’ point of view; most of them didn’t like Groves and Groves had difficulty understanding them, to say the least. He saw them as “the largest collection of crackpots in the world”; they, largely, saw him as the embodiment of every clichéd caricature of an obtuse martinet. He thought that most of them were Communists; they saw him as a right-wing militarist. Up to a point, both had some evidence to back up their views; and the “honors” for a useful or not useful attitude in these matters were about even. Groves was a professional soldier, not the sort of person or life with which university faculty were (or are) familiar. He was not a spit-and-polish officer; but he was a heavy construction boss, a driven man whose job was to

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drive enormous projects to rapid completion. Consider what his deputy, Col. Kenneth Nichols said: First, General Groves is the biggest son of a bitch I have ever worked for… most critical… always a driver, never a praiser… abrasive and sarcastic. He disregards all normal organizational channels… extremely intelligent. He has the guts to make difficult, timely decisions. He is the most egotistical man I know… knows he is right and so sticks by his decision. He abounds with energy and expects everyone to work as hard or even harder than he does… He ruthlessly protected the overall project from other government agency interference… And in summary, if I had to do my part of the atomic bomb project over again and had the privilege of picking my boss I would pick General Groves.7 What Groves had done before the Manhattan Project was substantial, and he deserves his place next to Col. George Goethals, the officer who built the Corps of Engineers’ first great international monument, the Panama Canal. Unlike Goethals, however, Groves held a high-priority wartime command; many of the scientists never really understood the military roots of his concerns about speed and secrecy even as they had their own personal connections to the war. He was also accustomed to steeply hierarchical structures of authority in both the army and construction engineering and he never entirely trusted the scientists’ collegial work style. He certainly distrusted their political judgment; he had absolutely no understanding of what the inside of a social group of left-wing faculty members was like, and he didn’t care. Equally to the point, the scientists saw Germany as the enemy their weapon was to counter; Groves would later say that almost from the beginning of his assignment he considered the Soviet Union as the enemy. On the other hand, however, Groves intended to accomplish his mission, and within some very broad parameters, he accommodated some of the scientists’ concerns in the interest of that mission. If a problem developed, Groves would have an extremely active counter-intelligence section in his command and a working relation with the FBI. He knew how to use them and he was not afraid to use them. If there was a problem. Yet, he still hired and he allowed others to hire people whose pre-war affiliations with “left-wing” organizations and causes might have kept them out of less critical defense projects. The mission was more important. Most significant among those people was physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer of the University of California, designated as the scientific director of the laboratory where the Project would design its weapon. The Manhattan Project’s Counter-Intelligence apparatus could afford to bug every room Robert Oppenheimer occupied, to wiretap every telephone he used. The Army and the FBI had agents follow Oppenheimer anywhere, almost into his former fiancée’s apartment. But (perhaps because they obsessively worried about American political affiliations) this security system failed to catch the

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two Soviet spies who did operate at Los Alamos. Klaus Fuchs was originally a German Communist who fled to Britain and arrived in New Mexico with the British scientists in 1943. His clearance was British and his history as a German Communist was not secret. Ted Hall was eighteen when he graduated from Harvard and nineteen when the Manhattan Project recruited him. Fuchs was not a political activist, and neither he nor Hall had been affiliated with American radicals or left-wing causes. In view of the political storms that later raged about people on the project who did have left-wing affiliations, like Oppenheimer, it is perhaps most significant to point out that none of them ever had anything to do with espionage. Groves was adamantly anti-Communist, “a bastard,” Oppenheimer once said, “but … a straightforward one!” He insisted that his intelligence people issue security clearances for Oppenheimer and several others because their work was essential to the project. And his support for Oppenheimer’s loyalty extended years after the war was over. “I have never felt that it was a mistake to have selected and cleared Oppenheimer for his wartime post,” Groves wrote nearly twenty years after the fact. “I had to consider what I would do if anything happened to him and I had to select a successor,” he went on, “but could arrive at no good solution. There was none that was evident… As to his loyalty, I have repeatedly stated [he wrote in 1962] that I would be greatly surprised if Oppenheimer had ever consciously committed a disloyal act against the United States.” Groves and Oppenheimer in tandem always did strike people as odd; but they worked quite well together. They didn’t look or think alike, but they maintained a highly functional professional relationship that speeded up work and minimized friction in the project. The Project’s scholarly staff distrusted close cooperation with the military, and Oppenheimer was a genuine leader who was also a very effective intermediary between them and the Army. Groves was willing to employ his executive drive to supply facilities and services “outside the box” of a normal Army installation. Each, in their very different ways, was an outsize figure in his own universe; both had the capacity to size people up. They were aware of each other’s vulnerabilities, to some extent. Groves appreciated Oppenheimer’s “overweening” ambition; it might be a handle to keep him in line. He understood that ambition certainly provided Oppenheimer (as it provided him) with a powerful motive to accomplish the mission. Groves also appreciated the clarity and practicality Oppenheimer brought to their earliest conversations about the atomic bomb. Not for nothing did Oppenheimer’s acquaintances maintain that he was the best physics teacher in the United States. Groves was a well-educated, experienced engineer, hardly a technical or mathematical illiterate; but he was not a theoretical scientist. He needed a physics teacher who didn’t patronize him and he needed a theoretician who had enough grasp of the mundane world to understand what the industrial side of the project required. Oppenheimer wanted to impress Groves, wanted to get an important wartime job he might not have gotten from someone else, and he did. Groves was very taken with this man and described him as “a real genius”:

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While Lawrence is very bright, he’s not a genius, just a good hard worker. Why, Oppenheimer knows about … anything you bring up. Well, not exactly. I guess there are a few things he doesn’t know about. He doesn’t know anything about sports.8 Groves’ first acts on his new job were to acquire sites for the uranium separation plants and the plutonium-producing reactors he would build on the banks of the Tennessee and Columbia rivers. Then he moved to acquire all the stores of uranium ore he could lay his hands on. The scale of the construction that the project would eventually necessitate was unknown at the beginning. Oppenheimer had the same problem; he originally thought that the scientific staff at Los Alamos would require a few dozen scientists and their families. No one imagined the final population of 7,500—and no one imagined the oncoming baby boom (whose birth certificates all bore the same address: P. O. Box 1663, Santa Fe). Groves was contracting to build nuclear reactors and uranium separators before those things had even been designed. As for Oppenheimer, Groves might have added construction and administration to sports on the list of things the physicist didn’t know anything about. Oppenheimer “couldn’t run a hamburger stand,” one of his Berkeley colleagues said of him, yet the basic concept of the Los Alamos laboratory was his and his success in running it was spectacular. Groves held some thoroughly traditional ideas about what security required on this kind of a job. The necessary division of labor would create a series of “compartments” in which individual parts of the overall work would be developed; and to the greatest extent possible no one in one compartment could know what was being done in another. Only a small group at the top— those with a “need to know”—would understand what the entire project was about. Oppenheimer understood that such an arrangement would not work and his own distinctive contributions to the Project actually began when he convinced Groves to change his plan of work to include the secret laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Even before nuclear weapons actually became operational, they were beginning to change the practice of war. In this case, Oppenheimer argued, compartmentalization and excessive secrecy would slow the work down and increase the likelihood that Germany would build its atomic bomb before the United States did. Scientific research (even research leading to a decisive weapon) required sharing, discussing, testing, and transmitting information in a context. The stereotype of research in Groves’ world might be a lone experimenter bent over a lab bench, or a distracted genius with chalk at a blackboard. In Oppenheimer’s world, the image was the colloquium, a picture into which Oppenheimer, the teacher and the seminar leader, fit very well. However, Oppenheimer did understand Groves’ concern for security, and proposed that the lab he wanted be located in a remote place, that it become a giant compartment within which discussion would be open, but where communication of any sort between the lab and the rest of the world would be very limited and closely monitored.

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Not all the scientists involved appreciated Oppenheimer’s idea. Some resisted going out into the desert; Szilard maintained that everyone who went to Los Alamos would go crazy. Groves accepted Oppenheimer’s idea and, over some objections, appointed him to run the lab. “A most improbable appointment,” said Oppenheimer’s friend I. I. Rabi: “It was a stroke of genius on the part of General Groves, who was not ordinarily regarded as a genius.” But Rabi underestimated the General. No science fiction writer ever invented a secret laboratory as exciting or as paradoxical as the village Oppenheimer convinced the Army to build across the Rio Grande valley from his small vacation cabin in New Mexico. Despite the enormous destructive power of “the gadget” they were set to build, the overwhelming majority of the technical staff thought of collective life at Los Alamos in a positive way. The sign on the main gate said “Los Alamos Project,” and the Project’s code name for the place was “Site Y.” The residents took to calling it “the Hill”; and for all the inconveniences and outright hardships of living there—and there were many—the design and construction of the first atomic bombs is remembered fondly and well recorded as an extraordinarily rich and notably intense peak experience—intellectually, socially, and collegially—by those who were there and were part of it.9 Otto Frisch pointed out that, viewed from a certain perspective, Los Alamos had a lot going for it: the best people; the highest priority; a magnificent if unexpected leader in Oppenheimer; an awesome and beautiful, if isolated, setting; an immense and terrible sense of purpose. Purpose and esprit seem to have gone together, as have some legends. Handfuls of European scientists, or Americans from more urban environments (some with their families) found themselves in the middle of the desert at Lamy, New Mexico—Santa Fe’s lonely, out-of-town railroad station—waiting to be picked up out of the emptiest landscape most of them had ever seen. At Los Alamos, there was the famous lack of bathtubs, there were the parties with the punch bowls spiked with lab alcohol. There were the horseback caravans into the surrounding mountains. There were many babies. There was Edward Teller, endlessly playing classical piano at midnight. Future Nobel laureate Richard Feynman was from New York City; his instruments were bongo drums. Feynman’s wife was dying in an Albuquerque hospital and, when he could, Feynman would borrow a car from Klaus Fuchs to go and see her. Between trips, Feynman had to make do with his drums, and with his hobby of opening the combination locks of classified safes. He would leave their owners anonymous notes. The obviousness of Nazism’s threat helped to make tolerable their awareness of the destructive power they were preparing to unleash, but so did the sheer excitement of the work, the intensity and profundity of the physics. Recently graduated, Dr Frederick de Hoffman described his work at Los Alamos as “one grand final exam day, with all the senior faculty members of all the US and European physics faculties assembled to give … that final exam.” Feynman, working in the Theoretical Division, the heart of the work, was a future Nobel laureate working

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for another, Hans Bethe. Bethe was, Feynman would say, “a battleship surrounded by an escort of smaller vessels, the younger theorists, moving majestically forward through the ocean of the unknown.” And it was Bethe who would eventually say of Robert Oppenheimer: “He was intellectually superior to us.” When the first wave of European physics professors arrived at their American universities, they wrote back to their colleagues with some wonderment. In the United States, even assistant professors had their own graduate students, they reported. Pyramids of rank in American universities were not only shorter and less intimidating than in Groves’ army, within the university world they were much flatter than in European university departments covering the same disciplines. Oppenheimer was a product of American universities (before and after his European studies). Bethe was a newcomer enjoying his new professional environment. The two of them further transformed the organization of advanced American research with a team approach that was flatter in structure than even the university departments the Europeans found so novel. Inside the protection of Groves’ guards and fences, Oppenheimer instituted a weekly colloquium on their progress, open to anyone with a “white badge,” an ID badge whose color indicated complete access to the lab’s technical area. They gave no consideration to rank. The men were free to speak, to challenge or amend any of the ideas they had put on the table.10 This sometimes worked less than well. Bethe was something of an academic celebrity, the author of a series of review articles surveying the entire field of quantum mechanics that was authoritative enough to have earned the nickname “Bethe’s Bible.” Niels Bohr was … Niels Bohr. The Project’s younger men had last faced senior professors across examination rooms in graduate school. Some of their new colleagues were those very same senior professors, and trying to argue physics with professional heavyweights of Los Alamos’ caliber intimidated too many of them. For their part, Bohr and Bethe were both looking for good fights, challenges sufficient to test their own ideas. If he himself is to be believed, this was a situation that the very capable and permanently irreverent Feynman enjoyed—and exploited. For his part, even years later, Groves thought the colloquia were security risks worth taking only for their benefits to morale rather than any help they brought to the work. Oppenheimer was a leading figure in all of the regular colloquia, even when he was not formally leading the discussion. And it became apparent to the researchers that Oppenheimer could make all manner of scientific conundrums more clear. He could sum up broad-ranging discussions, and work his way through scientific and mathematical disputes in ways that resolved questions and opened mental doors. As the work went on, Oppenheimer became ubiquitous on the project; at once cheerleader and coach, he appeared—sometimes as if out of nowhere—to observe, to share a thought, to offer a new perspective. At the same time, Oppenheimer had to be a traffic cop; he had to organize the extremely rapid flow of ideas and point it towards the project’s objective, a weapon to deliver an atomic explosion derived from a fission chain reaction in U-235.

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And Oppenheimer was an intellectual traffic cop. Edward Teller was an intense and annoyed driver who insisted on driving where the road really should go, instead of where it actually did go. He had been on to something when, as he put it, he entered history as Leo Szilard’s chauffeur on the drive to get Einstein to sign Szilard’s letter to FDR. He was on to something a few years later too. In September 1941, Enrico Fermi suggested, and Teller had confirmed, that just as the breaking up of heavy molecules released energy in accordance with E = mc2, so too did the fusion of light molecules into heavier ones. Furthermore, the temperatures and pressures released by a fission explosion would be sufficient to ignite a fusion explosion. The fusion blast would be infinitely larger than the fission trigger, not the thousands of tons of TNT equivalent expected from fission (kilotons, kt) but millions of tons (megatons, mt). Teller wasn’t the first to understand this; Tokutaro Hagiwara of the University of Kyoto had lectured on it in Japan the previous May, but Teller did not know that and Hagiwara was in no position to make anything real out of his insight. Hagiwara’s lecture had noted that science would have to traverse some intermediate steps to make a fusion bomb feasible; Teller, preferring theory, would move from one subject he thought he understood to a new problem, even before any experiments backed up his ideas. One senses a vast impatience at work, a (perhaps overheated) sense of purpose and patriotism Teller would ever after trace to hearing Franklin Roosevelt call upon researchers to be part of national defense. As Teller conceived the “Super,” the antecedent of the Hydrogen Bomb, it quickly became his ideé fixe, if not his obsession, and he became one of Robert Oppenheimer’s biggest problems. Oppenheimer understood what Teller was trying to say, and he did not disagree with it; but Oppenheimer’s job was to remind Teller that someone had to build a fission bomb before anyone could work realistically on the Hydrogen Bomb. To make matters worse, Teller believed he should be heading up the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos, a job Oppenheimer gave to Hans Bethe. Teller sulked and went off to work on the “Super” by himself. Even in the Nobelrich environment of Los Alamos, Oppenheimer found it difficult to spare Teller from work on the fission weapons whose completion in time for the current war was their primary objective. Teller eventually defeated Oppenheimer on that one. His recalcitrance forced Oppenheimer to create a separate sub-division in the Theoretical Division to accommodate hydrogen bomb research. But Teller had also made his point. The “Super” was feasible enough to become part of the few minutes’ conversation on “future consequences” when the government considered the use of fission weapons in 1945. On the other hand, Teller’s replacement was Klaus Fuchs. A German Communist before the Nazis took power, Fuchs began running from Hitler’s police on the February morning in 1933 when he first heard of the Reichstag fire. He arrived in Britain in September 1933 with a PhD and a DSc from British universities (Bristol and Edinburgh respectively). He liked Britain and his British friends. After a lifetime in Germany’s increasingly lethal

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political climate, he relaxed and enjoyed the intense, passionate, but free climate of argument. He even took in stride his nine months’ “internment” in Canada as an “enemy alien.” When permitted, he returned to Britain, became a naturalized British subject, and took up work on “Tube Alloys,” the British atomic bomb project, working under Rudolph Peierls at the University of Birmingham. Fuchs soon realized that only two members of Churchill’s “Grand Alliance” were sharing what they were learning about nuclear physics and the possibility of nuclear weapons.11 Through a fellow survivor of internment, Fuchs arranged for an introduction to a military attaché at the Soviet Embassy in London and shortly thereafter he began sharing his work with the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence apparatus.12 Fuchs was an especially valuable intelligence “asset.” He did not have to break into the compartment; he was already inside. He was not stealing somebody else’s work, but circulating (to extremely unauthorized people) very important work that was, in part, his own. Now working under Hans Bethe, Fuchs’ field of responsibility was the problem of implosion; and he was a major contributor to the plutonium-fueled bomb. The Project intended to ignite chemical high explosives and aim their blast waves inward, toward the center of a sphere, so as to use heat and pressure to set off an explosive chain reaction in plutonium. (This would be the kind of bomb that dropped on Nagasaki.) Because Edward Teller could not be interested in the chore, Fuchs did calculations needed to develop the mechanism for it. Later still, he continued to work for the British delegation to Los Alamos and for the postwar British bomb project. He made contributions to both the American and the British hydrogen bomb projects; he even filed a patent application (in partnership with mathematician John von Neumann) for a mechanism to ignite a hydrogen explosion. Fuchs was a volunteer, in the specialized vocabulary of intelligence agencies, a “walk-in.” Intelligence handlers don’t always like walk-ins; too often they have their own ideas, even their own agendas, as Fuchs did. Intelligence agencies are critical instruments of national power; and they can’t afford (and frequently won’t tolerate) agendas other than their own. Walk-ins can also develop the awkward idea that what they are doing is noble, done in a righteous cause, something to be proud of. Agencies are more comfortable when they have a handle on one of their “assets” embarrassing sexual or financial information, even sometimes just the fact that the asset is being paid. It helps keep an asset in line. Fuchs must have annoyed his contacts; he would, at first, give them nothing but copies of his own work. And even after he broadened the product he gave his contacts, he resisted offers to pay him for it. Sketches of only three of the men working on the bomb among thousands of others hardly exhausts the kinds of personalities engaged in bomb design, or the attitudes they might bring to their work either as individuals or a group. Yet Oppenheimer, Teller, and Fuchs had much in common: their education, and the shared membership it gave them in what had once thought of itself as a trans-national community of scholars, was only the most prominent. Teller

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and Fuchs had had to flee for their lives, an ordeal spared Oppenheimer; but all three had seen the horrifying political prospects of their time approach all too closely to their own lives. They were all working on weapons, but they were all troubled by what they were doing. At least two first-ranking physicists refused to work on the Manhattan Project: Lise Meitner and Oppenheimer’s friend I. I. Rabi. It was Rabi who said that he did not want the culmination of several hundred years of physics to be a weapon of mass destruction. But, as Richard Rhodes points out, Niels Bohr, who arrived at Los Alamos just as it reached its full pace of work, placed this horrific weapon within the framework described by his concept of “complementarity.” To be sure, atomic bombs and atomic wars carried the prospect of enormous destruction. At the same time, and for the same reason, that same prospect of destruction, atomic bombs, also carried the prospect of human behavior altered sufficiently to hold the prospect of war at bay. Add to that the notion that atomic bombs might be useful in defeating the Nazis and one has good reasons for carrying on in a terrible time. Teller and Fuchs, for example, might have envisioned the “better world” that might exist at the end of the work they were doing in some very different ways, yet Bohr’s hope of a world in which war was transformed was a shared motivator across other significant lines in the Project’s narrow universe. The Project staff and the Bomb they were building had more than an abstract political or psychological objective before them. They were building a machine to kill people and to destroy things, a “gadget” in their own securityconscious vocabulary. This was not an easy thing to do. Not only was the chore very difficult and expensive, the Project also crossed disciplinary lines between sciences and even lines within sub-fields of the same science. The advanced character of the work provided constant temptations to follow-up on the interesting questions raised by the bomb-related research underway, to track down some of the tantalizing possibilities opening up before them. Yet they were charged with preparing a weapon that would be useful in the current war. When Groves first arrived on the project, he feared that many of the scientists would do what Edward Teller did—opt out of Los Alamos’ critical team effort in favor of preoccupations of their own. Teller would be known primarily as a weapons researcher for the rest of his long life (a researcher with very close ties to the military, especially the US Air Force). It is more than a little ironic that he would be the scientist who would behave in a manner so thoroughly subversive of a weapons project. It is equally ironic that the leading academic scientist, Oppenheimer, who could readily be caricatured as the abstract and absentminded professor, emerged as a deft administrator, a charismatic leader, and the leader of the highest-powered seminar in the history of physics. By the end of the war, Oppenheimer’s ability to explain physics to non-scientists had made him a serious figure in Washington. A great deal of that transformation should be credited to Oppenheimer’s character and personality; but as he learned his way around administration and politics, Oppenheimer had good teachers and role models: Vannevar Bush, James Conant, and Leslie Groves.

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Like Groves, and unlike his German counterparts, Oppenheimer understood that he could follow up multiple approaches to a problem because the project had the resources to do so. Resources to overcome difficulties were available. Uranium could be enriched for one kind of bomb (like the one that would be dropped on Hiroshima) and natural un-enriched uranium could fuel a reactor in which controlled chain reactions would transform U-238 to Pu-239. (And two different bomb fuels would eventually mean two different ways of creating a destructive chain reaction.) If no one really knew which of four different ways to separate U-235 from U-238 was most effective, the Army had the money to try out all four. And, whatever tensions pulled Groves and the scientists apart, Bush, Conant, and the OSRD maintained the necessary links between the scientists, the contractors, and the political leadership smoothly and firmly. Like Groves and his own scientific colleagues, and unlike his German counterparts, Oppenheimer presented his political masters with a “can do” attitude when approaching challenges. In that way, if in no other, Robert Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves were a very well matched pair. One other factor helps account for American success and German failure. In general, the Manhattan Project descended from the country’s entire economic history. At the same time, however, it was also, very specifically, the armed offspring of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. The lineage was political and institutional, not visible or personal: Henry Stimson, Vannevar Bush, and Leslie Groves were Republicans. Groves opposed the New Deal and could be noisy about it; some who knew him well thought he was anti-Semitic. However, even before the war’s bounty of government spending, the New Deal’s pre-war economic stimulation had begun to restore some economic health in a general way. Specifically, major public works, like the Hoover, Grand Coulee, and Bonneville Dams, and the dams built as part of the Tennessee Valley Authority had already begun to support industrialization and economic expansion (in previously underdeveloped parts of the country) before the war began.13 Those projects had created considerable very large-scale construction experience that the Project would need. Only the power plants built by the New Deal could provide the vast amounts of electricity that bomb manufacture required. World War II as seen from the perspective of the United States, and the quarter-century following it, saw an extraordinarily successful experimental test of Keynesian economic theory. Even in the post-1929 economic disaster, Congress eventually balked at the government’s spending of enormous sums on economic stimulation, and sought to end it as early as 1937. By doing so, they provoked another post-1929 economic contraction that wiped out some of the New Deal’s 1933–1936 gains. Yet, only a few months later, the same Senators and Representatives appropriated substantially larger sums, billions more dollars of borrowed money, in order to re-arm for a war that now seemed right on the horizon. They kept on doing so for five years, and the country prospered in the midst of conflict. Alone among the belligerent populations in 1945, Americans had more money to spend than they had had before the war.

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Even with wartime rationing, and even with many civilian commodities simply unavailable, American discretionary income was up 12 percent. And if the United States’ national debt stood at 120 percent of Gross Domestic Product, postwar economic growth would largely extinguish that staggering ratio, to a level of 40 percent of GDP only twenty-five very prosperous years later (and to a level of 30 percent of GDP four years after that). The Manhattan Project remains a very good example of how that worked during the war, and it also remains a very good example of how the long creation of the postwar nuclear-armed military contributed substantially to the American prosperity of those twenty-five years. Tens of thousands of Americans would work on the Manhattan Project in some capacity, and thousands more would work in factories that began life in the Project and continue their work as part of the military–industrial complex. The Project created a completely new industry, with its financial footprint the size of the automobile industry’s, between June 1942 and August 1945. However, unlike the automobile industry, the enormous factories labored under emergency conditions, and at great expense, to produce enriched uranium and plutonium measured in grams and, in 1945, useful for only one purpose. With the perspective given us by nearly seventy years, and with the understanding of radioactivity that we now have, the degree of damage the Project could do to the environment without being questioned about it is striking, even for wartime.14 And the environmental compromises are but emblematic of what the United States was prepared to sacrifice to its perceived military requirements. A great deal of what happened was a consequence of the perceived military urgency of the Project. Security was another explanation. For a variety of reasons, the Project became a small fiefdom, detached from the main stem of American government and society, not accountable through the chain of command, the usual Army auditing, or even to wartime congressional investigations. It would take legislation, and considerable postwar controversy, to regularize the nuclear weapons complex in American law and government practice. Contemporary critics still maintain that secrecy is too great and that the military has too much control of the entire nuclear enterprise. And in this too, the Project is emblematic of a great deal in American life during and after the second half of the 20th century. At the same time, in a quieter way whose significance would not be apparent for a generation, the United States had become the leading venue for advanced theoretical physics. The colonial dependency in academic science was easy to see up until World War I; the Americans went to Europe to learn their physics. The Guggenheim and Rockefeller grants sought to develop European-trained American scientists and then to employ them to teach and do research in the best American universities. With considerable help from unforeseen circumstances, they succeeded. The refuge the United States offered those fleeing Hitler was real, if horrifyingly limited to too few people. The romance of the scientific exiles who fled Hitler to build the atomic bomb in the United States appeals to the good opinion Americans have of their political institutions. The horrible

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irony of the Nazis chasing out of Europe so many of the people whose work might have allowed the Nazis to win appeals to a certain cynical sense of humor. However, the scientists in the Manhattan Project are as represented by Oppenheimer and Feynman as by Szilard or Fermi—and this was not just a matter of bragging rights. The fearsome pillars of cloud that marked Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 marked as well another kind of “grand final exam day.” The thirteen North American colonies that won their independence in 1783 had remained in some ways a colonial dependency of Europe even as it became astonishingly rich and powerful. Even as late as World Wars I and II, Europeans had a tendency to see the United States the way Britain saw Canada: distant, different, difficult, but ultimately dependent. That had been changing by increments for some time, but could no longer be missed or mistaken. The United States was banker and paymaster for what Churchill called “The Grand Alliance” (and played the role for the Soviet Union as well as the western European allies). It was also, now, the alliance’s armorer—in a way that could no longer be missed or mistaken— and finally its strategist. The Manhattan Project marks the way in which the United States was also beginning to occupy a focal point in many intellectual disciplines, at once a new incubator for abstract and theoretical thinking and a series of laboratories proficient at integrating new theories and propositions into working technological developments. The difficulty with that had to do with the kind of thinking and integrating that Americans and their imitators would be doing. Despite the ending of the second conflagration of the 20th century, the nations, their peoples, and their fledgling nuclear weapons would face an extended term of mandatory military service.

notes 1 The original transcripts of what was said, in German, no longer exist; the English transcripts that do exist are not wildly inaccurate but not entirely reliable either. 2 Jeremy Bernstein, “The Farm Hall Transcripts: The German Scientists and the Bomb,” The New York Review of Books, 13 August 1992. 3 Atomic Audit, Brookings Institution. 4 American government officials, Project veterans, and economists frequently see the Manhattan Project as an economic complex as large as the automobile industry. 5 Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard held the patent for the first reactor. At that time Americans called a nuclear reactor a “pile” from its basic construction as a pile of graphite blocks holding a three-dimensional checkerboard of uranium slugs. Heisenberg and his colleagues described the same sort of machine as a “uranium engine.” 6 For a comparison, Dwight Eisenhower (West Point 1915) was a temporary Lieutenant Colonel during World War I, only to revert to the permanent rank of Major in which he remained for sixteen years. Promoted to Colonel in March 1941, he reached Major General in twelve months. 7 Kenneth D. Nichols, The Road to Trinity (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1987), 108. 8 Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 186.

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9 Or at least it was so remembered by those who lived there as part of the civilian, scientific staff. The memories of the military garrison and construction crews are sometimes different and in general are much less well recorded. 10 All of them were men. The prominence Marie Curie and Lise Meitner earned simply highlights the degree of gender segregation characteristic of scientific, indeed most scholarly endeavor in the 20th century. The Manhattan Project invited Meitner to join, but she refused to work on nuclear weapons. 11 If he had been further up in the Project, he might have discovered how limited the Americans tried to make the information shared with Great Britain. 12 For bureaucratic reasons that made sense to the Soviets, Fuchs was “handled” by the civilian intelligence agency NKVD, antecedent to the KGB of later Soviet years. 13 The Hoover Dam crosses the Colorado River southeast of Las Vegas, and was known as Boulder Dam through the two decades after completion before it could be named for the (Republican) President who had sponsored its construction. 14 The Soviet record, where construction began after Germany’s defeat, was much worse. See Chapter 5, “Wasting Assets”.

4 “i am Become deaTh”

As the British and American governments began declassifying their Manhattan Project records in the early 1960s, some historians began revising and re-writing how the United States government made the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japanese cities. These “revisionists” argue that the atomic bombings were not necessary to bring World War II to an end. Rather, they write, the United States used its nuclear weapons as part of policies having more to do with the USSR and the upcoming Cold War than with Japan and World War II. No sooner had the revisionists published than adherents of more traditional views began attacking not only their scholarship but also their patriotism. The United States, they maintained, had to drop atomic bombs on Japanese targets in order to end World War II before an invasion of Japan could be launched and result in enormous numbers of casualties. Anyone who said otherwise was foolish, ignorant of the real situation, or responding to an anti-American counterculture more than to the evidence of the event. Some of the emotional temper of the argument seemed to drain away as the 1960s and the Viet Nam War themselves became part of the past. However, it flooded back in 1993. In that year, the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum became the focal point of the renewed controversy when it sought to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the bombings by displaying the Enola Gay for the first time. As an exhibit plan drawn from what was then the most recent scholarship on the bombing began to circulate, a variety of veterans’ organizations, the Air Force Association, and assorted political figures raised a scream of angry protest that eventually claimed the museum director. Despite considerable new evidence, especially from studies of the Japanese and Soviet government records, the arguments of the 1990s were little different from those of the 1960s and 70s. As with the initial controversies, the second round was fueled by “culture wars,” fights over ideas and social practices attached to the electoral politics of an

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increasingly polarized and partisan time. And in this field—as in many others— memory and popular chronicles continued to portray people and events in ways no longer supported by records-based scholarship. At the same time, as the noise level rose and propaganda supporting one political agenda or another continued to swirl, it became hard for an interested public to see how the people who were living and involved at the time had thought and felt. It is worth remembering that charting any national course—for any nation— at the end of World War II was not an academic exercise; no one had any answers at the back of the book. Students and scholars working today have access to information on the state of the world and the state of the war that the belligerents of 1945 did not. (For example, I can show my students the once-top-secret report intended to accompany President Truman’s very first briefing on the Manhattan Project. But they will have worked their way through the history of both the physics and the wartime construction of the first nuclear weapons before they see it. President Truman did not have their advantages.) Almost all of the dynamic forces operating were beyond the experience of any of the participants. Twentieth-century war had become dependent upon technology and on the industry that produced it. Scientists, military leaders, and politicians were increasingly entangled with each other, in sometimes-uncomfortable embraces. Military aviators were testing in combat the theories that underlay the enormous air forces they had built, and getting results different from what they expected, to say the least. American and Soviet leaders were trying to come to grips with the new positions of power their respective nations were occupying. Japanese leaders faced national surrender, something without precedent in their history. Consider the life of Otto Hahn, who first created fission, and who was a good example of a traditional research professor’s sensibilities before World War II. He was a leading scientist, internationally known. He worked and spoke all over Europe and Britain, in Canada and in the United States; his book on radiochemistry was the standard text for the most advanced chemists of his day. He was twice nominated for a Nobel Prize before he created fission in a sample of uranium. (He was awarded his Nobel for that, in Chemistry, in 1944.) He opposed Nazism. He helped Jews keep their jobs as long as possible in Nazi Germany, and he helped Jews escape—Lise Meitner was only the best known of them. Edith Hahn collected food for Jews hiding in wartime Berlin; the Nazis might have executed her (and perhaps Otto too) if they had caught her. He was well known after World War II for his advocacy of peace and his opposition to the development and testing of nuclear weapons. He lived, died, and is remembered as a respected man. Yet fission, his best-known work, impelled him to contemplate suicide at least twice; he was horrified at the possibility of atomic bombs when the army first called the German physicists to weaponize his discovery and shattered when he learned that the Americans had succeeded in the same effort. Lise Meitner, the research partner who had refused an American invitation to join the Manhattan

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Project, would always criticize him because he worked with the German bombmaking effort; but he was harder on himself. He found it difficult to live with the knowledge that his work was at least partially responsible for the deaths of many thousands of human beings. Yet, he was hardly alone, either in his respectability, his courage, or in his responsibility. Neither was the mixed character of his nuclear life novel; he had worked on poison gas weapons in World War I, before fission. The history of the industrial world and the history of the technologies of war are unbreakably bound to each other in many ways; both are awash with the stories of scientists and engineers whose quiet labors in workshops and laboratories led to the deaths of hundreds and then thousands. Warfare—the pursuit of political objectives by military means—is about killing people and destroying things, regardless of objective or justification. Otto Hahn liberated the devastating power of nuclear fission just as the preludes to the most destructive war in human history were giving way to the main event. The carnage of World War I was still fresh in human memory, and the early rounds of World War II—fought in China, Spain, and Ethiopia—had already foreshadowed the horrors to come, even without nuclear weapons. Soldiers, statesmen, and scientists alike were aware of what they were about to cause, although they almost all underestimated the actual extent it would reach before the war was over. The first object of “military means,” after all, is to win. The first theorists of aerial bombardment knew that bombing would ravage civilian lives and property of just the sort the various Hague and Geneva Conventions were supposed to protect. They learned that from the flimsy aircraft and the sardine-can submarines of World War I. Air Power relied on its capacity to wreak just such havoc. Air power generals like Giulio Douhet and William Mitchell responded to the endless grinding violence of “The Great War” as did many others in many fields of public life following the Armistice; they intended to make sure that nothing resembling it ever happened again. Bombing would raise the level of violence in warfare and applying that violence directly to an enemy’s country would be devastating. The terror and destruction from bombing and the lives taken, would make wars perhaps more terrible, but also shorter and cheaper than World War I had been. They argued that—in the end—bombing would reduce war’s horrors, by restricting their scope and by forcing an early end to them. Between the two World Wars, American military aviators gradually developed a doctrine for fighting a war from the air. The plans called for pilots and planes that could cripple an enemy’s ability to fight by destroying a small number of industrial targets chosen for their critical role in the military economy. If the enemy could no longer get key parts (ball bearings, for example), they could no longer build the war machines that depended on those parts (tanks, for example). It certainly would be more efficient to bomb a steel mill than to hunt down and destroy a fleet at sea. One successful bombing raid could have a disproportionately large effect on the war. At the same time, American aviators

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and manufacturers believed that they could develop technology and tactics to enable them to bomb targets very accurately. Their objective was to destroy strategic military targets while inflicting only the minimum possible damage on nearby civilian life and property. In pursuit of those objectives between the two World Wars, the United States invested heavily in long-range bombing aircraft and in advanced guidance systems like the Norden bombsight. The copies of these machines that still exist have been objects of wistful nostalgia for a long time, long enough for even the sentimental to forget the specific work they were built to do and the manner—intended to minimize “collateral damage”— in which they were designed to do it. At the same time, however, bombing theorists understood a second role for their work: creating terror. They believed that bombing civilian population centers would so terrify a people that they would bring unbearable pressure on their leaders to end a war quickly. As they believed that they could quickly destroy an enemy’s means to fight, airpower theorists believed that they could similarly and equally quickly destroy an enemy’s will to fight. The actual experience of aerial bombing in World War II showed that they were wrong, wholly or in part, on both counts. Germany and Britain learned first. The Luftwaffe had been designed to support blitzkrieg troops and tanks on the ground; it was never a strategic bombing force. After RAF Fighter Command successfully defended itself during the opening rounds of the Battle of Britain, the Germans could not concentrate enough force to inflict strategic damage on any one of the cities they had begun to bomb. Flying in the other direction, from 1940 onward, RAF Bomber Command could concentrate more force, with more appropriate equipment (purpose-built heavy bomber aircraft); but it had to contend with three extremely intractable facts. The RAF could not sustain the losses it suffered by bombing in daylight; the RAF could not hit targets at night with anything remotely resembling precision; and, in 1940 and for the near future, Britain could not strike offensive blows against Germany except with its RAF bombers. Like the Luftwaffe over London (but with equipment and training suited to the task), the British would bomb at night, aiming really at the German working class. Their stated objective was still the enemy’s means to fight by “dehousing” workers, burning down hundreds of acres of densely packed urban residential areas, and thereby diminishing Germany’s ability to produce war materiel. At any rate, that was the official explanation. When they first arrived on the scene in 1942 and 1943, the Americans insisted that they could do better than their British colleagues; but they ran into the same problems. Until relatively late in the war, trying to bomb military and industrial targets with the precision articulated in doctrine simply cost too many lives and planes in too short a time to be worth those successes it did achieve. Fighter aircraft in the defensive role could inflict more losses than any bomber force could tolerate when the bombers flew during the day. The only remedy was a long-range escort fighter, part of the offensive to accompany the bombers all

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the way to the target and all the way home. It took a long while for that airplane (North American’s P-51) to appear. In 1943, before the P-51 was available, in what was probably the “purest” application of the doctrines of precision strategic bombing seen in World War II, the US 8th Air Force—heavily armed B-17 “Flying Fortress” bombers—twice flew deep into Germany to attack factories manufacturing ball bearings in the town of Schweinfurt. Ball bearings are antifriction components in machinery, especially, during World War II, in tanks and aircraft. Many other kinds of military machinery also required ball bearings in order to operate. Destroying the capacity to manufacture these essential components would, in theory, cripple a very wide variety of military production lines; thus, a powerful strike at a key point would have a disproportionate impact on the Germans’ means to fight. So, the Americans aimed a concentrated mass of aircraft at the factories that made them, and (if one believes an interview German armaments minister Albert Speer gave a TV crew) they apparently came very close to accomplishing their mission. The bombers caused enormous damage, and—according to Speer—the raids might have had the intended effect if the Air Force could have maintained their size and pace; but it could not do that. The small problems that plague any large and complex enterprise, weather and operational “glitches,” delayed the strikes; when strikes did fly, they suffered enormous losses. Antiaircraft artillery and fighter attacks cost the bombers between 10 percent and 20 percent of their aircraft (and their ten-man crews) on each mission. No force could pay such a price and survive, even if it destroyed its intended targets. And that price would remain very high until fighters could escort bombers all the way to their targets and back, and until the destruction of German fuel supplies suppressed ground-based anti-aircraft defense. Precision strategic bombing in daylight, against traditionally defined military targets, played a part in the eventual allied victory; but it did not produce the quick results and low casualty counts that its advocates had, before the war, so claimed. Among the allies, the United States Army Air Force in particular sought to avoid “area bombardment” that targeted civilian areas for destruction. It could not and did not ignore the facts, however; a large number of airplanes, dropping enormous quantities of white phosphorous and napalm, usually at night, could do an extraordinary amount of damage, and it cost far less (by almost any measure) to do it than bombing in daylight did. In Europe, the Americans worked at precision bombing as best they could, while the RAF did most of the area bombing at night, in what became a “round the clock” bombing offensive. In Asia, the bombing of Japan was entirely in the hands of the US 20th Bomber Command, Maj. Gen. Curtis E. LeMay commanding. Planners laid out the bombing of Japan around the Boeing B-29, an airplane that had a range just short of a global reach and an operational ceiling nearly as high as jet aircraft built two decades later. Its price tag too was in the stratosphere: $3 billion for development and production of nearly 4,000 aircraft. That was 50 percent more than the Manhattan Project itself. The Norden bombsight

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would allow the giant airplane, flying above most fighter planes and anti-aircraft artillery, to drop bombs very accurately on small targets. American commanders expected the B-29 to be an ideal precision bombing platform. They were wrong. Clouds hid targets more frequently in Asia than in Europe. Jet stream winds at 30,000 feet were unknown at lower altitudes, and they presented daunting navigational problems. Bombing from the stratosphere imposed problems of speed and changing wind directions that made precision drops on targets even more problematic than they had been from less advanced aircraft. Opposition, defensive resistance to the bombing, was different too. Japanese fighters had their victories against the B-29s, but Japan lost a great many planes, it lost almost all of its always-short fuel supplies, and the Americans killed great numbers of Japanese pilots. The few who were left, and their less-than-half-trained cadets, could offer only minimal opposition. Even so, in order to demolish Japanese industry as he had been ordered to do, Curtis LeMay began sending his bombers over Japanese cities at night. He filled their giant bomb bays not with the armor-piercing and high-explosive ordnance of precision bombing, but with canisters of incendiaries. To allow his planes to carry bigger incendiary loads, he stripped them of their guns and directed them to bomb from altitudes one-third of their operational ceiling. Pathfinder crews would drop their loads to mark a giant “X” in fire and, for the main body; “X” would mark the spot. LeMay’s first incendiary raid, against Tokyo in March, killed more people and destroyed a larger area than the atomic bomb would at Hiroshima in August. At the tail end of the bomber stream, pilots flying over the Japanese capital could smell human flesh burning two miles below them. Having passed a test at Tokyo, incendiary bombing from B-29s burned out 67 Japanese cities before the end of July. The pace of destruction slackened only when LeMay’s bombers ran out of ammunition. When an Air Force cadet later asked him what he thought of the legality and morality of what he had led, LeMay said that that if Japan had won the war, he might have been tried as a war criminal. Before World War II was over every significant aerial campaign had deliberately bombed civilians, even if air forces avoided labeling it “terror bombing” and maintained stoutly that they were aiming at the enemy’s means rather than the enemy’s will to fight. What before the war a great many people had considered a criminal atrocity of the sort that only “they” committed was, by its end, a commonplace as much a part of our war as it was of theirs. In the end, however, what the bombers intended was less important than what they actually accomplished. Contrary to the expectations of air power theory, the enemy, each enemy, continued to fight. Perhaps the most significant difference between theory and practice was how civilians on the target responded to the attacks. Douhet and Mitchell expected that a people being bombed would be terrified and respond to their terror by provoking an irresistible clamor for peace against which no government could stand. That did not happen in World War II and it has not happened since. It did not happen in London, or in Hamburg,

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or Tokyo (or, more recently, in Cairo, in Hanoi, in Belgrade, in Baghdad, or in New York). People are afraid of being bombed, and they should be; but if Japan before Hiroshima is any indicator, raising the tide of violence—even raising it to truly apocalyptic levels—makes a people resistant and defiant, and then apathetic and despairing, before it makes them cry out for peace. Strategic bombing notwithstanding, the Allies had to invade Germany on the ground before it surrendered. Even more than a half-century later, the issue of whether or not—absent the atomic bomb—Japan would have surrendered before the Allies invaded its home islands remains a matter of enormous controversy. Nearly all of that controversy is based primarily on speculation moving to preconceived conclusions that each speculator always intended to reach. The speculative assertion that even without the atomic bomb, Japan might have quit within days or weeks of when it did is not the least bit foolish. Substantial very well-known evidence exists; but so does considerable wellknown evidence to the contrary. At the same time, the actual record of events shows that, despite everything the United States had done by August 5, Japan had not yet surrendered; and the Germans before them had surrendered only after they had fought their enemies on their own soil. The world was going to see more war in 1945. The only question was how much more? And what kind? Clearly, the airplane had made warfare more terrible, especially for civilians; but war has always been terrible, especially for civilians; and soldiers had not needed airplanes to make it so. Eighty years before Schweinfurt, Gen. William Sherman defended his ruthless march through Georgia in the American Civil War by declaring that “War is cruelty and you can not refine it.” Russell Weigley, a historian of American warfare, speculated in 1973 on what Sherman might have done had he been able to use airplanes. In the context of nuclear weapons, however, Weigley highlights the limits on the degree to which aerial bombing influenced warfare. As enormous as bomb casualties and bomb damage were by 1945, bombing merely increased an existing level of violence, and slapped the hard hand of war across the population of entire nations. It generated only an incremental change in the character of war. Nuclear weapons had the potential do something far more profound; they would create one of Thomas Kuhn’s “paradigm shifts.”1 If developed by any one of the great powers, a war fought with nuclear weapons could lay waste to broad stretches of the world, could destroy the civilization that had produced them—and do it on a global scale. Like Kuhn’s “paradigm shift,” the term “quantum leap” has become a frequently used (or misused) metaphor for radical, discontinuous change; but the term itself derives from the work of two physicists, Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. They were a generation apart, both of them seeking to understand the structure and dynamics of atoms and their nuclei. Their work sought to account for “leaps” in which an electron can abruptly jump from one energy level in an atom to another, without appearing to travel between the

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two. The two men might well be described as the dominant figures in all of physics between the two World Wars; certainly their work defined the agenda in theoretical physics throughout that period. They were more than just scientific colleagues. Heisenberg was Bohr’s protégé, and by 1940 they had been friends for a long time. However, at the same time that their work and their personal affections linked them to each other, the two embodied the opposing poles of moral and political vision between which most physicists found themselves as they confronted the looming reality of nuclear weapons in a world at war. The disintegrating Bohr–Heisenberg friendship provided a moment in the early development of nuclear weapons that was not only iconic and ambiguous, but also of deep significance in the actual history of the first atomic bombs. Bohr seems to have understood that nuclear weapons would work a revolution in warfare at a very early stage. In historical retrospect, he had a counterintuitive, but, nonetheless, a large and very practical advantage in formulating his ideas about nuclear weapons. He was a Dane, a politically suspect citizen in an occupied country. Ironically, that status gave him a peculiar kind of freedom. The Germans might have welcomed his participation in their nuclear weapons research—if they had trusted him; but no one expected him to work on those weapons and the Nazis did not try to coerce his cooperation. He was free to think about the consequences of developing nuclear weapons, a pursuit even the Manhattan Project in the United States discouraged. Heisenberg was a government employee, like all German professors. Whatever his own inclinations, his government expected him to contribute his scientific work to any war effort; and he never denied the legitimacy of that expectation. The character of his government meant that his range of choices in the matter was, at best, extremely narrow and unpleasant. Heisenberg could readily have left Germany. He chose to stay. Having done so, he might have further chosen to become the saboteur of a German bomb project that some of his admirers believe he was. The evidence for that proposition is thin and less than persuasive. Involved in German nuclear weapons research almost from its inception, Heisenberg went to some considerable trouble to visit Bohr in Copenhagen in September 1941. According to his own account, he told Bohr obliquely, that fission bombs were theoretically possible, but that the technical effort would be enormous, and thus one could hope that they would not be ready for use in the current war. He (and his postwar supporters) would claim that Heisenberg sought to tell his mentor that the German physicists were trying to convince the German government that fission bombs could not be built in time for the current war. Bohr never recalled their conversation that way. What he remembered was Heisenberg telling him that it was possible to make fission bombs and, if the current war lasted long enough, they would be used and would be decisive in a German victory. Bohr had originally believed that building an atomic bomb would not be feasible because separating U-235 from U-238 would be too complex and too expensive. Whatever Heisenberg had

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intended his 1941 confession to do, it shocked Bohr into a fear that the Nazis might well make the attempt, succeed, and use nuclear weapons to win the war. Shocked and angry with Heisenberg, Bohr nonetheless remained accustomed to thinking about those aspects of things that appeared to be contradictory, but which were, instead, complementary. It was a habit descended from the work he and Heisenberg had done fifteen years earlier as part of quantum physics. Bohr’s concept of complementarity developed from his conclusion that light could behave like a wave or like a stream of particles, depending upon the conditions of an experiment. Even in a purely scientific context, this first enunciation of complementarity seems preposterous. Like relativity, the claim that two apparently contradictory things are simultaneously true offends “common sense”; but it is still true. Philosophically inclined and living a rich public life, Bohr readily extended the reach of complementarity to politics. Bohr came to believe—to hope—that nuclear explosives might display similarly complementary qualities. Nuclear war might threaten the very existence of human civilization; but the threat of nuclear war’s destruction might allow—or force—human civilization to abandon war. By 1943, when the Royal Air Force smuggled Bohr from Copenhagen to Los Alamos, this had ceased to be a theoretical matter. Shocked by what he took to be Heisenberg’s complicity in the effort to give Hitler an atomic bomb, Bohr continued to have misgivings as the Anglo-American effort briefed him on what it was doing. What he saw of the Manhattan Project between October 1943 and his arrival at Los Alamos at the end of December was, he said, “utterly fantastic”; but if the existence of an American bomb made a German bomb a somewhat less frightening short-term prospect, that existence simply compounded what he regarded as the basic problem. Surprised by the scope of the work to create a bomb in the United States, Bohr feared that if the atomic bomb’s development eventually came as a surprise to the Soviet Union, the first consequence would be a postwar nuclear arms race between the two giants. The prospect of a German bomb had already motivated the United States and Great Britain to start building, pre-emptively, a bomb of their own. Why would the Soviet response to the western allies’ bomb be any different? Bohr believed that the Manhattan Project had already proceeded far enough that it would take some serious work to reassure the Soviets that American fission bombs were not a threat against them. He briefed the Los Alamos staff, including a special talk with Oppenheimer and his leading theoretical physicists, about his talk with Heisenberg; but the first question he asked Oppenheimer was “Is it big enough?” Was the Manhattan Project’s bomb going to be big enough to convince a world at war that mass warfare would be unthinkable in the future? Bohr would later say that his mission in the United States was to convince the Americans to think about the postwar consequences of building nuclear weapons. “They didn’t need my help in making the atomic bomb,” he said.

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Significantly, Bohr’s first messages at Los Alamos were themselves examples of complementarity. The Manhattan Project existed because the Allies feared a hypothetical German bomb project. Bohr’s report of his conversations with Heisenberg suggested that they were right to be afraid; and they in turn brought an even greater sense of urgency to their work. At the same time, however, Bohr’s notion that fission’s destructive potential might turn human society away from war provided an objective for the Project more appealing than incinerating a city full of people in an instant. He had no more necessary and no more sympathetic an audience for these ideas than the scientific director at Los Alamos. As Oppenheimer’s biographers report the way the scientific staff saw their ideas: “Bohr was God and Oppie was his Prophet.”2 The national leaders to whom Bohr spoke next were less receptive. Niels Bohr was a Security officer’s nightmare. Shuttled around the project as “Nicholas Baker,” he was important enough that the British had set up a special operation to smuggle him out of Nazi territory. Within the circle of people who mattered on the Manhattan Project, everyone knew him. He knew everyone. Of equal significance, he had excellent connections outside the academic world; his public life carried weight alongside his scientific eminence. Before the war, if he so wanted, he could simply walk up to the palace and chat with the King of Denmark. He shared a personal friend—Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court Felix Frankfurter—with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Very soon after his arrival in the United States, he was a man who knew almost everything worth knowing about the Project. He had the complete respect of the project scientists. He was a moral, as well as an intellectual figure to many, if not most of them; and he not only shared their frequently antagonistic attitude toward authority, especially military authority, he was a model for it. And, he had an agenda. Over the first months of 1944, Bohr—in characteristic fashion—drafted and redrafted a memorandum maintaining that, for planning purposes, nuclear weapons already existed. He argued that their extraordinary power would change warfare completely and humanity would not be safe from them unless their proliferation could be controlled. The key element in that control would be an end to secrecy, the creation of an “open world.” The absence of a Soviet scientific delegation to a project that was avowedly an allied partnership simply highlighted how (and how easily) a nuclear arms race might begin. In that context, it would be essential at least to inform the Soviet leadership of the Project’s existence before the weapon was used, and to agree on mechanisms for the international control of atomic energy at an early date after the end of the war. Remarkably, Bohr was able to meet with both Roosevelt and Churchill, and he left the White House with the impression that Roosevelt understood the situation and supported his recommendations. FDR was good at giving that impression—to many different people on many different sides of a question. Churchill, on the other hand, disliked and suspected Bohr, and wanted him jailed, or placed under surveillance. At the very least, Churchill thought someone should tell Bohr that what he was doing was “on the verge of mortal crimes.”3

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At the same time, Bohr’s analysis of the situation was flawed in one crucial respect. Bohr was arguing that the Soviet Union would have to be spared an enormous strategic surprise and the US would have to persuade that these new nuclear weapons posed no threat to itself. But they did pose such a threat. They were intended to. The United States was becoming the greatest of great powers and its leaders were paying attention to where it would go, what it should do, and where the limits on its power might be. (The same was true of the Soviet Union, of course.) American Army and Navy staffs all over the world were laying out the component parts of a global military infrastructure. Significant elements of the American leadership expected that after the war ended, suspicion of the Soviet Union would and should resume guiding US foreign policy. Leslie Groves would testify to Congress that he considered the Soviets “the enemy” from the moment he assumed command of the Manhattan Project. Exclusive United States control of this classic “secret weapon” and the very expensive facilities to make it were clear objectives to pursue. Such elements were very well represented on the military side of the Manhattan Project and among the Project’s civilian masters. In their view nuclear weapons represented an enormous (and thus enormously useful) escalation of the mass violence the industrial age had brought to warfare. The United States held a monopoly on the weapon and it seemed natural to exploit the advantages that monopoly was going to provide. From that perspective, Bohr—afraid of a revolutionary upward leap in mass violence, warning against a civilization-destroying nuclear war—was overwrought; his solution to the problem, the “open world,” was superfluous— and dangerous too. People like Churchill, for example, saw Bohr’s appreciation of complexity in human affairs and took it for—at best—hopeless naiveté, dangerous innocence. Less theoretically, and equally importantly, those same leaders looked at the massive facilities they had built, at a cost of $2 billion in top-secret funds. They contemplated the enormous destructive potential on which they were being briefed; and they treated as suspect and rejected any proposition that suggested that the United States could, or would, or should give away those hard-won secrets and magnificent assets. They were needed. And even such indisputably honest figures as Stimson and Groves labored in the shadow of what they feared would be endless congressional investigations if the weapon failed, or was not used when first made ready. By the end of 1944, however, the Manhattan Project and its masters were coming to the realization that none of their enemies possessed nuclear weapons and none had any hope of acquiring them in the immediate future. The initial motivation for the Project was gone, yet the pace of work increased, no effort slackened. The construction side was nearing completion and the beginning of regular operations. As the Battle of the Bulge raged in France and Belgium, the Oak Ridge separators and the Hanford reactors began production runs of U-235 and plutonium. The scientific side was also nearing the completion of its work and the detonations that would mark its success or failure. The military side

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carefully prepared the bombers, their crews, and the plans for the last mission of the war. Enough questions about the gadget had been resolved sufficiently that officialdom could begin to plan using it as a weapon. If the Manhattan Project succeeded, the reasoning went, the atomic bomb would be a war-winner. No nation without an atomic bomb could resist the attack of a nation that had it. No one, anywhere, disputed that proposition! Neither civilian nor military American leaders debated whether to use the new weapon in World War II. Their concern was with how they could best use an atomic bomb when one became available. To be sure, the Soviet Union was acquainting itself with the Anglo-American secrets unilaterally. Espionage was important, but—critically—so too was the USSR’s own fledgling research project. Most significantly, neither Bohr nor the leaders he annoyed had yet grasped that the second nuclear arms race, the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union that Bohr was trying to prevent, was already underway. Bohr was not wrong. In fact, as more of the documentation became available it appears that his analysis of the situation was terribly, terribly on target; but the hour was later than even he could imagine. And the situation was getting worse. Partisan politics intervened as well. In the summer of 1944, Franklin Roosevelt was a far sicker man than most Americans realized. Vice-President Henry A. Wallace, originally of Iowa, stood very likely to become President when Roosevelt died in office sometime in the middle of his fourth term. Wallace opposed “Jim Crow”; and Democratic stalwarts from what had once been the Confederacy would not tolerate the possibility of a President openly committed to ending racial segregation. The bosses of the big city political “machines” went after Wallace because he was a reformer from Iowa who had once been a Progressive Republican. Together, they ambushed Wallace and got him dropped from the 1944 ticket. The very credible segregationist choice for Vice-President was James Byrnes of South Carolina. A loyal New Dealer, although a somewhat conservative one, he had represented South Carolina in the House and Senate before FDR appointed him to the Supreme Court. He had been a justice for just over a year when the President first appointed him to head the Office of Economic Stabilization. In 1943, FDR made him the head of the Office of War Mobilization. In that job, he effectively became the “Assistant President” for domestic policy while the President focused on the war and other foreign policy matters. However, he was from South Carolina, had opposed federal efforts to stop the lynching of African-Americans, and like all the Southern members of Congress, he was unacceptable to the growing number of liberal Democrats who detested Jim Crow. Born into a Catholic family, he had joined the Episcopal Church as an adult, which Northern party officials insisted would offend significant numbers of Catholic voters. Therefore, the nomination went to Harry Truman, a Baptist descendant of Confederates who had prospered in segregated Missouri politics despite his open hostility to the Ku Klux Klan. Eighty-two days after Roosevelt’s fourth inauguration, Truman became President.

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As for the atomic bomb, Truman knew that something was up before FDR died, but that was all. When he had wanted his Senate committee on waste and fraud in the war effort to check out the huge and poorly explained expenses funding the Project, Stimson talked him out of it—citing the demand for secrecy and would Truman please take his word for it? That was enough. Senator Truman laid off, which says a great deal about him, about the times, and about Henry Lewis Stimson. Truman learned little more until after his first cabinet meeting, where Stimson told him what all that money had paid for and asked for a chance for him and Groves to brief the new President. Wallace had overseen the Manhattan Project for the White House; but Roosevelt had not given those same responsibilities to Vice-President Truman. So no one had previously briefed the new President about the Atomic Bomb—or about much else either. At the same time, the Project was outside the previous experience of everyone involved and it had existed, since 1939, in a constitutional limbo. Paid for out of discretionary funds and other pockets buried deep in the swollen wartime budgets, not one dime of $2 billion had been appropriated or even considered by either house of Congress or any of their committees. The Army owned the bomb design lab at Los Alamos; but it had no settled bureaucratic home, the University of California operated it on a contract. In September 1944, Vannevar Bush and James B. Conant suggested to Henry Stimson that with the Project about to succeed, some long-term planning for the future of atomic weapons— and non-military uses of atomic energy—was in order. Stimson passed their recommendation to Truman, who asked the Secretary of War to appoint an “Interim Committee,” which got its name from the expectation that “when the project became more widely known a permanent organization established by Congressional action or by treaty arrangements would be necessary.”4 The Committee’s charter was exceptionally broad: “to study and report on the entire problem of temporary war-time controls and later publicity, and to survey and make recommendations on postwar research, development and control, and on legislation necessary for those purposes.”5 It would also consider questions related to actually using the bomb in conjunction with the reports of a “Targeting Committee” operating at a much lower and much more technical level, meeting in Oppenheimer’s office at Los Alamos and taking guidance from military officers that Groves sent. Stimson’s appointees were powerful and respected, individually and in their official roles. Stimson himself had served as William Howard Taft’s Secretary of War, and Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of State before returning to the War Department in FDR’s cabinet. Ralph Bard was Under-Secretary of the Navy and George Harrison was one of Stimson’s assistants and president of the New York Life Insurance Company. James Byrnes, once a Senator, once “assistant President,” might well have been President himself had the political calculus been different. Here, he was President Truman’s personal representative; and he would be Secretary of State in a matter of weeks. Will Clayton was Assistant Secretary of State. The Committee also included two university presidents,

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Conant of Harvard and Karl Compton of MIT. Vannevar Bush was at once a visionary, an engineer, a businessman, and a politician. He had been VicePresident and Dean of Engineering at MIT, he had founded the Raytheon Company, and he was Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Three of the Committee’s four science advisers were Nobel Laureates, and the fourth was Robert Oppenheimer. The military contingent (whose members were not voting committee members) consisted of Leslie Groves, with two stars, and George Marshall with five. They began their meetings, without the Scientific Advisers, in Stimson’s office on 9 May, the day after Germany surrendered. The Target Committee met in Oppenheimer’s office at Los Alamos the next day, when project scientists and military ordnance specialists made critical decisions about how the United States would use the world’s first atomic bombs. For the most part, they made their recommendations on technical or shortterm operational grounds, and one historian points out that a kind of circular reasoning was at work. “The Gadget,” was a weapon—in both its uraniumand plutonium-fueled incarnations—designed to produce a wide area of blast destruction. Therefore, a sensibly chosen target should present characteristics suitable for a big blast weapon—a city. The altitude at which the bomb exploded would be a key factor determining the area of destruction under it. Weather would be a critical matter for a mission they wanted executed by visual means as opposed to radar. What could the mission crew do to safely land with an undropped bomb aboard? What would happen if the bomb were jettisoned in an emergency? Could the bomb go off in a crash? (The answer, for little boy, was yes.) And which cities would make appropriate targets? Not should we bomb a city? But what city should we bomb? The world is full of angry questions challenging the way the United States used nuclear weapons of mass destruction against Japan. It is fuller still of even angrier denunciations of people who ask those questions or give an answer the questioner takes as politically incorrect. All of that is postwar thinking. To be sure, international law clearly declared that bombing civilian populations from airplanes was illegal; there were treaties that said so. When Franklin Roosevelt called publicly upon all the 1939 belligerents to forego bombing cities and towns, he was appealing to a vaguely defined understanding of “humane” behavior in wartime. Germany had responded by attacking Warsaw in the first month of the war. However, Warsaw was hardly the first town to suffer bombing. No one had noticed when British, Italian and Spanish forces used aerial bombing to secure their colonies in Iraq, Morocco, Libya, Somalia, and Ethiopia. A little later, one might take the international uproar condemning the Luftwaffe’s 1937 bombing of Guernica, in Spain, as some sort of progress; people actually noticed. They were beginning to learn the human costs of 20th-century warfare (at least when those costs were borne by Europeans). But what had been an outrage at Guernica and Shanghai in 1937 had, by 1945, become a commonplace at Dresden and Tokyo. By the time the Target Committee met, its members had already established

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basic criteria: an urban area at least three miles in diameter, “capable of being damaged effectively by a blast,” not yet touched by conventional bombing. Someone had to persuade the Air Force to leave the potential targets unbombed by its conventional incendiaries. To a modern eye nearly seventy years later, the writers of the criteria might be describing a test site as much as a target. One modern scholar points out that the criteria rule out a concentration on specifically military targets—Army barracks and command posts, factories, and the like—within the selected cities. Most of those were dispersed around urban perimeters and built of steel and concrete instead of wood (“hard targets” in military parlance). “It was agreed,” the Target Committee reported, “that for the initial use of the weapon any small and strictly military objective should be located in a much larger area subject to blast damage in order to avoid undue risks of the weapon being lost due to bad placing of the bomb.” To focus on dispersed, hardened targets would cut into the massive blast damage desired.6 Los Alamos sent five specific target recommendations forward. Niigata had an unbombed port, machine tool manufacturing, and oil refineries. Kokura Arsenal was a very large manufacturing center surrounded by civilian industrial structures. Yokohama was a previously untouched but heavily defended industrial center and port. Niigata was the least important of these three, “a B Target.” Yokohama and Kokura were both A targets; but the two preferred targets were the old Japanese capital at Kyoto and Hiroshima, both AA targets. The Target Committee report noted Kyoto’s industry, actually growing as factories moved from more heavily bombed cities; but the Committee cited “the psychological point of view”: “[T]here is the advantage that Kyoto is an intellectual center for Japan and the people there are more apt to appreciate the significance of such a weapon as the gadget.” Officially, Hiroshima was on the list because troops and supplies headed for the defense zone on Kyushu embarked from the harbor, and because Hiroshima Castle housed the Army’s command post for the southern defenses. (Similar criteria would make New York or San Francisco into military targets.) In addition, the city’s geography also made it a good target for the atomic bomb. Hiroshima is built on the banks and islands of the Ota River delta. With the river’s channels flowing through the heart of the city, natural firebreaks made Hiroshima a poor target for conventional incendiaries. At the same time, it was flat and large enough that they could expect the blast to run out within a developed area. Finally, “there are adjacent hills which are likely to produce a focusing effect which would considerably increase the blast damage.” Furthermore, as the Committee elaborated, two “psychological factors” had been significant in the selection of targets. First, the Americans intended to inflict a surrender-inducing shock to Japan; secondly, the Committee sought to make the first use of the bomb “sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognized when publicity on it is released.” So the enemy’s will to fight was the target, more important than the means to fight being reduced with every passing day of conventional warfare. Simultaneously,

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however, Los Alamos was targeting the minds and fears of a broader public than just the Japanese. Niels Bohr was speaking again, but in a context he never publicly entertained. The Target Committee placed Kyoto at the top of its target list, and Hiroshima was next. When Henry Stimson vetoed bombing Kyoto—on the grounds that it was of critical cultural and religious significance to the Japanese—Hiroshima became the primary target and Nagasaki was added to the list. These were the recommendations that would be in front of Stimson and the Interim Committee at its first full meeting on 31 May. As is frequently the case when studying documentary records, the minutes of the Interim Committee’s 31 May – 1 June meetings are as interesting for what they do not say as for what they do. They do not refer, for example, to a series of meetings held by Stimson and George Marshall over the course of the four days that preceded the Interim Committee gathering. In those meetings, the leadership of the State, War, and Navy Departments considered the possibility of softening the American demand that Japan surrender unconditionally. Hoping that surrender might be speeded up by a guarantee that Japan could continue as a constitutional monarchy under its Emperor, and fearing that surrender might be delayed because die-hards took such a guarantee as a sign of weakness, Stimson deliberately put off a discussion of a conditional surrender to a future time. However, as one historian points out, when the time to discuss modifying the surrender demand actually arrived, the hour was deemed not auspicious, in part because the atomic bomb was going to be available to the Americans.7 Neither does the Interim Committee record say much about the emerging Cold War, nor does it reveal how the committee members thought the use of the atomic bomb might influence that struggle. The Committee’s minutes do show, however, that the technical briefing did cover the possibility of Teller’s “Super,” including the prospect that at some point that kind of bomb might yield an explosive blast equivalent to 100 million tons of TNT. The minutes do not record how the members of the Committee responded to that prospect. Once the scientists finished their presentations, they and the Committee spent the rest of their morning session on continuing research after the war, in the United States and elsewhere, and on what they called “problems of control and inspection.” On this issue, “the question of paramount concern was the attitude of Russia.” When the question arose of sharing information with the Soviet Union, as the US was sharing with Great Britain, Army Chief of Staff George Marshall discounted the possibility that— if the Soviets had knowledge of “our project”—they would disclose it to the Japanese. Perhaps, he thought, “it might be desirable to invite two prominent Russian scientists to witness the test.” James Byrnes rejected that, absolutely: “if information were given to the Russians, even in general terms, Stalin would ask to be brought into the partnership.” Vannevar Bush supported Byrnes; the Americans had placed limits on cooperation even with the British. Byrnes in return expressed an opinion

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that, as the note taker wrote, “was generally agreed to by all present, that the most desirable program would be to push ahead as fast as possible in production and research to make certain that we stay ahead and at the same time make every effort to better our political relations with Russia.” The central role of military sponsorship of that kind of research opened up some older, but never settled questions. Arthur Compton pointed out that too much security around a postwar nuclear program might actually hurt the United States by creating “a certain sterility of research and a very real competitive disadvantage to the nation.” He went on to recommend, as a preventative, that the country adopt, for at least ten years, a three-point program: 1 2 3

Freedom of research be developed to the utmost consistent with national security and military necessity. A combination of democratic powers be established for cooperation in this field. A cooperative understanding be reached with Russia.

By that time it was 1:15 and the group adjourned for lunch. The eighth agenda item was the “effect of the bombing on the Japanese and their will to fight,” and the discussion actually began in the dining room. For the rest of the day, two questions dominated the discussion: What is the most effective way to use this weapon? Can we find a way to demonstrate this weapon without setting it off over a densely populated urban area? Here too, beginning at lunch, a group of Committee members tried to concoct some non-lethal demonstration that would still convey their gadget’s power. Others argued that the US should pick a target, and then announce it publicly, to give inhabitants time to flee. Earlier, Edward Teller had proposed exploding the bomb over Tokyo Bay, at so high an altitude that its blast wave would reach the ground very much weakened. Thus it would convey the magnitude of the threat to Japan without killing anyone. Others suggested bombing the giant (and bypassed) naval base at Truk in the Carolines, or even inviting Japanese representatives to the New Mexico test scheduled for July. Still others had a counter to each of these proposals: Warned, the Japanese could reinforce their defenses and break up the attack. On the alert, they might move American prisoners of war into the target area. No one, including most significantly Robert Oppenheimer, could imagine any scenario for a successful non-lethal, or military-target only demonstration. How would its observers travel to the test site? Would they be able to assess at all the power of a bomb dropped on a remote island like Truk that was now thousands of miles behind American lines in the Pacific? Would the Japanese believe any test in an American-controlled place? A “dud” or “fizzle” at the test might actually encourage Japan to fight on.8 The Committee had covered seven agenda items in the meeting’s first three hours and fifteen minutes. The group spent almost all the afternoon session on one, the “effect of the bombing on the Japanese and their will to fight”; the note

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taker—for whatever reason—recorded none of it; he paraphrased Stimson’s summary conclusion instead. The Secretary expressed the conclusion, on which there was general agreement, that we could not give the Japanese any warning; that we could not concentrate on a civilian area; but that we should seek to make a profound psychological impression on as many of the inhabitants as possible. At the suggestion of Dr Conant the Secretary agreed that the most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.9 The paragraph shows how thoroughly the war had eroded moral/legal conceptualization of the protections due civilians during wartime. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were military targets only in the same sense that San Francisco or Detroit might have been. The Committee did not wish to concentrate on civilians, but they did want to shock as many civilians as they could. A working class neighborhood around the factory where its inhabitants labored became a military installation; but (as the Target Committee had said) a strictly military target might not be a good idea because the bomb might fall far enough from the aiming point to diminish its destructive effects. The ways in which the Committee considered these issues raise a number of serious issues, including the very interesting question: at whom were the Americans aiming their bomb? There is by now an extensive literature on the effects of nuclear explosions, including a book full of data, mostly engineering data collected at Hiroshima and Nagasaki that Groves ordered published shortly after the war ended.10 Nevertheless, it seems clear that the first two atomic bombs were area weapons aimed explicitly at the will to fight. And why not? Conventional warfare had systematically, and at great cost, stripped Japan of most of the means with which to fight. Yet Japan fought on, as Germany had fought until invaded. All it had left for the Allies to attack was the will of its people and leaders to continue fighting. There was more to it, however. By Niels Bohr’s reasoning about complementarity, the will to fight had to be stripped from an international public lest the widespread use of nuclear weapons destroy civilization. And the weapon that would do that stripping was nothing other than the atomic bomb itself. “Is it big enough?” Bohr asked when he first saw Los Alamos. That question begs another: By what mechanism would the atomic bomb announce what Niels Bohr thought it should announce? As the Target Committee had said, it wanted the first explosion to be “sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognized when publicity on it is released.” When he decided to begin work on the atomic bomb, FDR exclaimed to the banker who brought Einstein’s letter to him: “What you’re after, is to make sure the Nazis don’t blow us up.” From the first, the scientists who had first brought fission and the United States government together had conceived of an Anglo-

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American atomic bomb as a deterrent weapon. Fearing the use of a German bomb, either as a weapon or a threat, the corps of scientists and engineers who joined the Manhattan Project expressed their doubts and fears very little, if at all, until the end of 1944. Then, the near completion of the fuel creation plants at Oak Ridge and Hanford, the work progressing on bomb design at Los Alamos, and the conventional Allied successes on Europe’s Western Front came together as dynamic forces pulling people’s ideas about the bomb behind them. As the uranium separators in Tennessee and the reactors in Washington began producing actual fuel for bombs, it became impossible to think about the work as an abstraction. At the same time, as the intelligence filtered back from Europe, it became less and less possible to feel any direct threat from a German bomb. Groves had sent special missions to Europe, first to Italy in 1943 and again right after D-Day; code-named alsos, it was commanded by Manhattan security officer Col. Boris Pash and advised by a Dutch-born physicist from the University of Michigan faculty, Samuel Goudsmit. Goudsmit spoke several European languages and had never worked on the Project (and therefore could not give up secrets if captured). Pash and Goudsmit discovered that the Germans had failed; they had done nothing the Allies need fear. The German physicists had a small research reactor that did not yet work, which they took with them as they fled the advancing Allied troops. Eventually, alsos caught them all and sent them to Britain for interrogation. (Goudsmit’s German academic friends were stunned to see him, in combat dress and in an almost-front line combat unit.) Equally to the point, the Germans had a stock of uranium, and before the war in Europe ended, alsos had sent it back to Oak Ridge and, eventually, to Hiroshima. With the feared German effort at such an ignominious end, many on the Project staff began to wonder why the pace of work increased at the very same time. As early as May 1943, the irrepressible and very troubled Leo Szilard had complained to his old friend (and employer) Frederick Lindemann, Lord Cherwell, about the lack of attention to the postwar questions raised by the full development of nuclear weapons. He was, Cherwell later told General Groves, conscientious about security but desperately afraid that the immediate postwar result of the US government’s policy would be a nuclear arms race “with all the disastrous consequences to which this would lead.”11 In those same months at the cusp of 1944 and 1945, the scientists’ political action and public dissent began to appear in the Project facilities, most notably at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago and at Los Alamos. Was it necessary to use a weapon so terrible as “the gadget” promised to be? Was an atomic bombing raid the only way to end this endless war? But also, was it moral to use this weapon at all unless confronted by another copy of it in the hands of an enemy? As the pace of the work on the Project increased in early 1945, so too did the pace of the criticism and the level of its visibility within the circle of the project. Germany’s surrender did nothing to slow either the work or the criticism.

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By June, five chains of discourse were in full operation around the bomb. The first two were technical and operational: the frantic preparations for the first test of the implosion device scheduled for mid-July, and the logistics of moving the strike force, the 509th Composite Group, and the world’s first nuclear weapons 6,500 miles, from the United States to Tinian in the Mariana Islands. The third were the authoritative but rather general discussions that took place in the Target Committee and the Interim Committee. The fourth was Szilard’s small and careful campaign to prevent the actual use of the weapons. Szilard began, as he had in 1939, seeking to lay his case before Franklin Roosevelt. Leo Szilard could not discuss the bomb with Albert Einstein; but he could and did convince Einstein to write a second letter to the President, a letter of introduction vouching for Szilard. FDR’s death in April delayed Szilard, but he nonetheless found contacts who could put him in touch with Harry Truman. He never quite made it to the new President, but he did get an interview with James Byrnes, who told him that an American monopoly on nuclear weapons would make the Soviet Union “more manageable” in postwar bargaining. Byrnes was, of course, a key figure in the fifth chain of discourse, the conferences among the top leaders in the new administration that produced the decision to use “the gadget.” Szilard would later write that he had never been more depressed than when he left Byrnes’ home. Believing that the Project was still a secret, Szilard was afraid that a nuclear arms race would be the inevitable consequence of announcing the bomb’s existence by using it on a live target—a live city— without prior warning. Returning to Chicago, he became the driving spirit instigating two efforts to make recommendations to the government, a petition making an essentially moral argument addressed to the President, and a “Report” from a “Committee on Political and Social Problems” that took the same facts and arranged them into an argument from the national interests of the United States. Both documents circulated at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago and at Los Alamos. Inevitably, some of his colleagues asked Robert Oppenheimer to sign Szilard’s petition, and he refused. In fact, Oppenheimer formally supported the direct combat use of atomic bombs against the Japanese at each opportunity ever given him. However, as his friend and colleague I. I. Rabi later told an interviewer: “He was forgiven the atomic bomb and taken as a man of peace.” How are we to resolve this extraordinary contradiction? Let us return to Niels Bohr’s understanding of the bomb as an example of complementarity. Nuclear weapons were so destructive that in a war they might destroy all of civilization. Nuclear weapons were so destructive that fear of them might well lead humanity to a rejection of war. But this dialectic was meaningless unless nuclear weapons actually existed and unless people (not scientists, soldiers, or politicians) knew what they could do. Edward Teller had driven the car that took Leo Szilard to see Einstein; but now the bomb was almost a reality, and he refused Leo Szilard’s request for a signature on his petition:

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I do not feel that there is any chance to outlaw any one weapon. If we have a slim chance of survival, it lies in the possibility to get rid of wars. The more decisive the weapon is the more surely it will be used in any real conflicts and no agreements will help. Our only hope is in getting the facts of our results before the people. This might help to convince everybody that the next war would be fatal. For this purpose actual combat-use might even be the best thing.12 Teller was already an easy man to dislike, almost as easy to caricature; but the thought he expressed is descended from Niels Bohr, however filtered through Teller’s own distinctive personality. What Teller wrote to Szilard was also in keeping with an idea that Oppenheimer expressed to Robert Wilson and other Los Alamos scientists at a meeting Wilson called to discuss “the impact of the gadget on civilization.” Oppenheimer would have preferred Wilson not hold the meeting, but he made no further move stop it; then he went to the meeting and spoke. As Oppenheimer’s recent biographers put it: The war, he argued, should not end without the world knowing about this primordial new weapon. The worst outcome would be if the gadget remained a military secret. If that happened, then the next war would almost certainly be fought with atomic weapons… It was important that the delegates [to the newly-founded United Nations] begin their deliberations on the postwar world with the knowledge that mankind had invented these weapons of mass destruction.13 Failure and defeat spared Otto Hahn the kind of responsibility that Robert Oppenheimer took upon himself. “It worked,” Frank Oppenheimer heard his brother say when the Project detonated the world’s first nuclear explosion, early in the morning of 16 July. I. I. Rabi, Oppenheimer’s friend and the 1945 Nobel Laureate in Physics, later described him after the test: “his walk was a kind of strut, like High Noon. He had done it.”14 But what had he done? He had directed the design, construction, and testing of a device that was at once the largest scientific experiment in history and also the most destructive weapon human beings had ever built. Put most simply, he had followed Niels Bohr’s reasoning about the complementarity of the atomic bomb ruthlessly to its logical conclusion, and tens of thousands of people were or would soon be dead. Countless others would live with the material and psychic scars for decades. On the other hand, the poignant, horrific stories of the bomb survivors (hibakusha in Japanese) and the photographs and film images of both events may well offer some small-scale experimental proof of the dynamic in Bohr’s hypothesis. However, Oppenheimer’s best-known personal reaction to the accomplishment of his personal wartime mission was the quotation from Chapter 11, verses 31–33 of the Bhagavad Gita he first offered in a television interview in 1965 on the 20th anniversary of the Bomb. Back in 1945,

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Oppenheimer hadn’t recited the passage or said anything his brother Frank or his friend I. I. Rabi could hear; but the short quotation is a powerful line whose relevance to the power of the first atomic bomb is obvious. Oppenheimer read it in the original Sanskrit, but its most familiar rendition in English is: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” It is easy to take an automatic western reading of the line and make it a kind of Oppenheimer sound bite, but nothing about the occasion, or Oppenheimer, or the Bhagavad Gita can be simple. “We knew the world would not be the same,” he said: A few people laughed… A few people cried… Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form, and says, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” “Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty.” What duty? It was to lead an army in battle, into death and destruction. The Prince, Arjuna, asks to see Vishnu in his “real form,” only to be overwhelmed when his wish is granted. “Who are you?” he asks the god, “what is your mission?” The Supreme Lord said: “I am death, the mighty destroyer of the world, out to destroy. Even without your participation all the warriors standing arrayed in the opposing armies shall cease to exist. Therefore, get up and attain glory. Conquer your enemies and enjoy a prosperous kingdom. All these (warriors) have already been destroyed by Me. You are only an instrument, O Arjuna.” This is a peculiarly two-sided call to duty, with its promises of prosperity and glory but also with its fatalism and its shadow of futility over any one human life. But it is a call to duty nonetheless, and this full version of the text Oppenheimer made famous foreshadows the remaining arc of his public life, highlights the complementarity of the Bomb and its makers, and delineates what the achievement of fission had already done to the practice of science and the practice of warfare. If Otto Hahn was an example of the classic European scientist, perhaps Oppenheimer was a principal example of the scientists the nuclear age would produce and of the non-academic public lives (and public controversies) they would endure. This book is written a biblical lifetime (three score years and ten) after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed. Measured against the time scale of human history, that is not a great deal of time; but perhaps it is enough to support some tentative conclusions. Historian John Lewis Gaddis maintains that these years have seen a “long peace” in Europe, an extended absence of continental-scale war approaching in length the ninety-nine years that separate Napoleon’s defeat from the beginning of World War I. Nuclear weapons were

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responsible for that, he argues. A full-scale, direct confrontation would create unthinkable consequences. Even a small-scale conflict could escalate into a nuclear confrontation, so nations sought to avoid them or to resolve them in non-military ways. If the fear of Nazism kept the Allies together in their war against Germany, the threat of nuclear destruction kept the former Allies apart in their Cold War against each other. Their fear of destruction kept them from each other’s throats (most of the time) until the passage of time and the workings of human history resolved their conflict in (almost entirely) peaceful ways. How much longer can we keep this up? Is it realistic to say that deterrence and changes in human political behavior will always engage nuclear destruction successfully? Contemporary historians of the world of post-Cold War nuclear weapons do not necessarily accept Gaddis’ thesis, and they point out the differences between the Cold War years and contemporary international crises. None of this is settled, however. “Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution,” Niels Bohr said, “It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it.” But he also said: “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”

notes 1 See Chapter 1. 2 Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 268–276. 3 The language and the thought are savage enough to warrant the reminder to readers that Niels Bohr was proper and careful in his own handling of classified information and materials. 4 “Notes of the Interim Committee Meeting, Thursday, 31 May 1945, 10:00 A.M. to 1:15 P.M.- 2:15 P.M. to 4:15 P.M.” Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, “The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb.” Online access 13 August 2013 at https://www. trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/bomb/large/index.php 5 Bush was President of the Carnegie Institution and Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Conant, head of the National Defense Research Council and President of Harvard. Quote is from R. Gordon Arneson, “Notes of an Informal Meeting of the Interim Committee Wednesday, 9 May 1945,” Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, “The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb.” Online access 13 August 2013 at https://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_ collections/bomb/large/index.php 6 Major J. A. Derry and Dr. Norman F. Ramsey memo to Maj. Gen. Leslie R. Groves, “Summary of Target Committee Meetings on 10 and 11 May 1945,” 12 May 1945. Harry S. Truman Library & Museum, “The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb,” https://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/bomb/large/index. php, online access 15 August 2013. Sean L. Malloy, “Four Days in May: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, vol. 142-09, 4 April 2009. Online access at http://www.japanfocus.org/-Sean-Malloy/3114, 22 August 2013. 7 Sean Malloy, “Four Days in May,” previously cited. 8 If one looks ahead one year, to the postwar crossroads tests at Bikini, one sees that able, the first shot of the series—detonated at altitude—created a disappointing level of damage. Only the second shot, baker, detonated with the bomb suspended 65 feet below the surface of Bikini Lagoon, created the kind of devastating damage

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people expected from an atomic bomb—and images of an atomic mushroom cloud nearly as iconic as the photographs of the trinity test and Hiroshima. “Notes of the Interim Committee Meeting, Thursday, 31 May 1945, 10:00 A.M. to 1:15 P.M.- 2:15 P.M. to 4:15 P.M,” previously cited. The Manhattan Engineer District, The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, (np: Manhattan Engineer District, 1946). Lord Cherwell (Frederic Lindemann) to Leslie R. Groves (cover letter and memo), 12 July 1945, U.S. National Archives, Record Group 77, Records of the Office of the Chief of Engineers, Manhattan Engineer District, decimal files, “201 (Szilard, Leo).” Online access, 4 September 2013, at “Atomic Bomb: Decision Documents on the Decision to Use Atomic Bombs on the Cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, http://www.dannen.com/decision/lrg-fal.html. Edward Teller to Leo Szilard, 2 July 1945, as cited by Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb, 697. Bird and Sherwin, Oppenheimer, 288–289. See also interview with Robert Wilson [and Mrs. Wilson, who was also there] in The Day After Trinity film. I. I. Rabi, interview with Bill Moyers, Walk Through the 20th Century, CBS (?), production and broadcast data.

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5 “WasTing asseTs” 1945–1950

Sitting in the right-side co-pilot’s seat of B-29 #86292, Captain Robert Lewis flew his mission with mixed feelings. Lewis was 86292’s regular command pilot, but on this mission Group Commander Paul Tibbets claimed the pilot’s left-hand seat. The colonel had also commandeered ground crews to paint his choice for the aircraft’s name on its nose: Enola Gay, for Enola Gay Tibbets, Paul Tibbets’ mother. Lewis knew that, whatever name it carried, B-29 #86292 (radio call sign “Dimples eight two”) was on a special mission to which Lewis— no less than Tibbets—was dedicated. William Laurence, the specially cleared reporter for the New York Times had asked Lewis to keep a log of the mission for later publication. Lewis wrote as opportunities arose during the almost routine 1,500-mile night flight. The log was against regulations, so he penned much of it as a letter home to relatives. His prose fits the popular stereotypes of highspirited airmen, or the casual tone of a soldier writing home. Shortly after eight o’clock in the morning, he wrote: “There’ll be a short intermission while we bomb our target.” When the intermission was over, Lewis looked down on what was left of Hiroshima and picked up his notebook. “Oh my God!” he wrote. “What have we done?” 1 A few days later, Pacific Theatre commander-in-chief Admiral Chester Nimitz, on Guam, called in Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, Groves’ deputy commander and chief of field operations. Nimitz had a problem he thought that Farrell could help him solve. The admiral was vexed that several thousand Japanese soldiers bypassed by combat were still holding out on the island of Rota, sixty miles northeast of Guam and almost directly under the air route connecting Guam with Saipan and Tinian, the northernmost of the Marianas. Out of ammunition, they could still observe a great deal of American activity, and their radios still reported to Tokyo every day. Nimitz asked Farrell if the Project could offer “a small atomic bomb to drop on those fellows.” Farrell

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could not help, he said; the bomb came in only two sizes, “one incredible in its power, the other slightly larger.”2 The two vignettes display both the shock of the atomic bomb’s first public explosion and the absence of any prior planning as to a strategy for its use. Prior planning might have proven superfluous; before the Alamogordo blast, estimates of the Bomb’s explosive yield varied from the equivalent of 2,500 tons of TNT to more than ten times that. However, neither the Project nor the larger government had done any contingency planning for any of the most significant possibilities. No one formally studied what the government might do if the Bomb fizzled. More important, what might be possible (or required) if the Bomb worked at the highest yield predicted in the estimates. (The blast yield at the Alamogordo test was indeed near the top of the estimated scale, the equivalent of approximately 20,000 tons of TNT.) Oppenheimer’s Target Committee did not even define what it thought an appropriate target might be until April 1945. However, Carl von Clausewitz observes that planning is essential in war, even though plans become useless upon first contact with the enemy. Thus, when things began to happen very rapidly after the Trinity test demonstrated just how big the first bombs were going to be, the men who controlled them still conceived of atomic bombs as only the bluntest of blunt instruments. Confusion did not trouble these men. They had expected and they had gotten a weapon of mass destruction: one bomb and one airplane to do (in fractions of a second) what had taken 330 B-29s all night to do in Tokyo back in March.3 There never was much debate over how to use the Bomb; and the parameters of what little debate there was were actually quite narrow. The consensus among Americans who knew about it maintained that the Atomic Bomb was a “winning weapon.” Whoever got it first would win World War II. Whoever had it would win any war in which it became engaged if its adversary did not have it. At the start, the concept encouraged a defensive point of view; “we” had to fear an atomic bomb in “their” hands. Between fission’s German lineage and the Nazis’ fearsome ambition, no one had trouble understanding who “they” were. Soon after Hahn’s publication, one of the most senior German physicists, Carl von Weizsäcker (whose brother was an official in the Reich Foreign Affairs Ministry), encouraged his colleague Siegfried Flügge to publish a popular article describing the prospects for a “uranium machine” (the earliest name for a nuclear reactor) that could produce electric power. In fuel-starved Germany, that was a good idea in itself. At the same time, Weizsäcker hoped that the prospect of a profitable non-military use for fission would attract attention outside of Germany and thus make a German monopoly less likely.4 Any power without an atomic bomb was helpless before a power that had one; it would be able to choose between only two options: surrender or incineration. Only by building their own bomb would Britain and the United States be able to confront such a weapon in Nazi hands. By 1945, however, circumstances were reversed; Americans could now force that choice upon Japan. In the nuclear jargon that was beginning to emerge, the first atomic

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bombs were countervalue weapons: they threatened something Japan valued, its civilian population. (Weapons aimed at traditional military targets useful in warfare—the aircraft carrier task force that had attacked Pearl Harbor, for example—would be deemed counterforce weapons.) The Americans sought to demonstrate their new military power in order to shock the Japanese leadership into an unconditional surrender. Although American leaders were very aware that even ordinary Japanese could fight to the death or commit suicide in preference to surrender, they universally assumed that simple shock following an appropriate strike would be sufficient to induce a surrender. The war would be over after the United States dropped two bombs on Japan, Groves believed. Therefore, no one gave much systematic thought to how one might get from point A, the bombing, to point B, Japanese surrender. By contrast, Pacific commanders, General MacArthur in Manila and Admiral Nimitz on Guam, had planned carefully for all of the alternatives: the invasion, continuing the conventional bombing, and pressing the naval blockade. As the Project and the Interim Committee examined the specific ways in which they could best use their gadget to produce the desired result, President Truman and his closest advisers worked with the knowledge that the Soviet Union had already agreed to join the alliance against Japan and to invade Manchuria ninety days after Germany surrendered. They were also aware that their own tolerance of Soviet behavior had been diminishing substantially as the European War was ending.5 By summer 1945, Truman’s entire diplomatic apparatus worked to back out of the wartime alliance with the Communists and to confront Soviet power in Europe and Communist ideology everywhere. As the war ended, those engagements became a set of political objectives the administration sought to achieve with all the military means at its disposal. At the same time, the administration had another objective, equally compelling: ending the US war with Japan while avoiding any need to share the postwar occupation with the Soviets. (It was an objective the Americans shared with the Emperor of Japan and the peace faction in the Japanese cabinet.) Thus, one small group of powerful people (powerful men)—in the same place, at the same time, and faced with the same problems to solve—integrated their thoughts and actions on both the Bomb and the emerging conflict with the Soviet Union as a matter of course—in a manner nations and their populations expect from leaders of government and their advisers. Many have disputed that, because it raises awkward questions and touches upon some of the most basic (and emotionally charged) disputes in the history of the Cold War. The standard interpretation of the atomic bombing, putting it simply, is that the bombing was about nothing except the American war against Japan, that it was as legitimate an act of war as it was a terrible act, “the least abhorrent alternative,” in Secretary Stimson’s carefully spun words. The “revisionist” interpretation of the atomic bombing, also somewhat oversimplified, grows from British physicist P. M. S. Blackett’s observation that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the last shots of World War II but the first salvoes of the Cold War. This

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interpretation maintains that the bombing was about confronting the Soviets; indeed it was about everything except the American war with Japan, and was thus unnecessary and illegitimate. Furthermore, the argument continues, that illegitimacy of the atomic bombing in its own turn taints its fruit: the Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union itself. In recent writing, a kind of revised standard interpretation has developed, arguing that responsibility for the Cold War is properly shared; American leaders thought of the Bomb primarily in its objective of encouraging the Japanese to surrender unconditionally; and the Truman administration regarded the Bomb’s role in the US–Soviet relations as a very welcome collateral benefit. They would be killing two birds with the one stone. Some of the revisionists have challenged this as well, insisting that the Truman administration bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki primarily for the effect the acts would have on the Soviets. Managing the end of a war is harder than it looks. What Churchill ostentatiously called “the Grand Alliance,” was more a shotgun wedding with Adolf Hitler holding the shotgun; but now Hitler was gone. The United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union destroyed the power of Germany and Japan because they understood it to be necessary. However, official London and (especially) official Washington together feared both Communist ideology and Soviet power. They were concerned about ideology and power individually; but when the American leadership examined them together, they perceived a dangerously aggressive mirror image of the fascist Axis they were defeating. They all sought to establish new structures of international power where the Axis nations and their conquests had once stood, structures of power that served their interests. Churchill, pithy as ever, best stated the problem the aftermath of war posed for the allies in Europe: “What will lie,” he asked, “between the white snows of Russia and the white cliffs of Dover?” Conservatives in Britain and the United States had long feared—and fought—what they saw as the products of Communist ideology. Britain had distrusted Russia since the 19th century, and—increasingly—American leaders of varying stripes feared and fought the power of the Soviet state and the extent of its international ambitions. For their part, the Soviets distrusted their western allies, both of whom had sent troops to fight against the Communist Revolution in 1918–1919. Russia is notoriously open to invasions; Vikings and Mongols alike controlled it for extended periods. Since 1707, with Russia governed by Tsars and Commissars each in their turns, western Europeans had mounted four invasions. The Soviets’ non-negotiable interest was a structure of European order that would preclude a fifth. The Americans and British accepted that fear (at least officially and in public) as a legitimate Soviet security concern. Nevertheless, they were appalled, angry, and very suspicious of the way the Soviets imposed Communist governments on the territories they had taken from the Germans. They suppressed, brutally, all non-Communist administration, expression, and organization, aiming, perhaps at a blitzkrieg of their own to control western as well as Eastern Europe. Certainly a large number of American politicians

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were willing to allege such a threat—for partisan reasons—whether or not they actually believed it. From where the Soviets sat, on the other hand, it seemed clear that the western allies sought to use their enormous economic power to create an anti-USSR, anti-Communist coalition in Europe. The structures of power in Europe were not symmetrical; the Red Army, occupying eastern and much of central Europe, carried an overwhelming weight of conventional military power against the Soviets’ erstwhile anti-Hitler allies. Perhaps more significantly, as the Americans saw it, the Soviet military and Secret Police threw a great weight of political power by suppressing Eastern European parties and even governments in favor of Soviet clients. Other state machinery wielded political and economic power through legitimate, indigenous Communist organizations in almost all of Europe. (And these Communist groups enjoyed relatively high regard for their resistance to the Nazis during the war.) If one sought to deny the USSR the hegemonic role it had seized in Eastern Europe, only a war would likely dislodge it and no sane leaders would make a war at that time for such a purpose. The situation itself protected the Soviet position. Against that, however, was the vast economic power of the United States, wealth and power that the United States would use to rebuild its allies and to dominate the world economy outside of the Soviet bloc for a quarter century. The United States and its allies also possessed the military power that grew from the power of nuclear information that the Soviets did not have.6 The United States, however much the Communists and many other leftists criticized it, also possessed a kind of political power that grew from a support for the Americans among Europeans that was very different from the kind of support the USSR got from its new dependencies. Along the Pacific Rim, the structures of power split along somewhat different lines, oceanic and continental; and the advantages of geography and superior military power all belonged to the United States. At the same time, partisans arguing for the standard interpretations, that the only US objective in the bombing was a shortened war, are almost completely wrong. The United States certainly did have global ambitions and agendas—political objectives—that went beyond simply destroying the German and Japanese war machines. The historiography developed around the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has never been limited to that one set of events; quite properly, a larger context has always been significant. Americans like to believe that their country is a model of international good behavior. The Revisionists were more than suggesting that this article of national faith was not true. Further, the Revisionist argument tended to undermine the United States’ claims of democratic virtue in the Cold War. For their part supporters of the standard interpretation sought not only to buttress a faith in American good behavior and democratic virtue; they also argued that using the Bomb as the US did was a necessary and morally defensible act. Finally, adherents of the standard interpretation assert that their argument in defense of that act was sufficient to discredit the Revisionists’ patriotism and integrity as well as their scholarship. Neither of these classic interpretations has survived the opening of records very well.

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The classic, schoolbook question was: “Was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki necessary?” That formulation, however, begs a further question: “Necessary for what?” If the answer to the second question is “necessary to win World War II in the Pacific,” the answer to the first question is almost certainly “no.” If this were a world where heavy atoms did not fission, where nuclear weapons were not possible, Japan would have been defeated just the same. The further length of the struggle would have changed relatively little. No one can say how much higher the price to each of the warring powers might have been. The price the Americans would have to pay became a central issue in the debate as the original participants defended their actions. As they described what they did and what they thought, their casualty projections kept growing. Former officials reported predictions of a quarter million, a half million, a million American dead if the US attempted an amphibious landing on the Japanese coast. None of the numbers had much foundation, but at the time the literally suicidal defenses of Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa gave promise of much trouble and many, many deaths when Japan itself faced attack. The Army, Navy, and Marines were making their own estimates of casualties. MacArthur’s staff in Manila and Nimitz’ on Guam developed scenarios nothing like those later cited by the civilian decision makers; based on the experience of landing at Normandy, Luzon, and Okinawa. Yet these professional estimates were based on 30- and 60-day combat scenarios. Lengthen the period of combat, allow for any of a number of fudge factors, and the number of casualties—to the Japanese as well as to the Americans—could easily rise, perhaps substantially. Military planners must make lists of the dead and wounded they anticipate; yet there is something indecent about compiling such lists post facto, in order to support competitive analytical arguments. Over time, including victims of radiation-induced illness or frailty, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have killed more than a quarter of a million people, an enormous number. At the same time, thousands of Japanese (and their victims in Asia) died each day the war and the conventional bombing continued. The alternatives to atomic bombing and invasion, the continuation of conventional bombing and a close naval blockade, each carried casualty risks of their own—including the possible costs of a landing in Korea (to support the blockade). And in every category, Japanese and Asian victim casualties would be more numerous than Allied. American assault troops scheduled to be shipped from Europe to Asia— and the Japanese cadets training to greet them on the beach with bamboo spears—alike had cause to echo the American essayist Paul Fussell, at the news from Hiroshima and Nagasaki: “We were going to live. We were going to grow to adulthood after all. The killing was all going to be over, and peace was actually going to be the state of things.”7 None of the available alternatives (including the Bomb) guaranteed the rapid and unconditional surrender of Japan, which was the principal American objective. None of the options except the Bomb gave any hope of extracting surrender from Japan before the Soviet Union attacked Manchuria; and, as it turned out even the actual bombing of Hiroshima was

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not able to accomplish that objective. In addition, as always in war, lives spared when one option was selected over another were taken at another place and at another time. The rest is speculation improved upon by partisanship. The most important events in the recent historiography of the Bomb and how the United States used it in 1945 have been the ever-greater scholarly access to the actual records of actions. Increasing access to American government records in Washington has been of great importance; but the growing ability of international scholars to use Japanese and Soviet government records has created a very new kind of scholarly environment. At this point, the heated arguments of sixty-five years standing have turned out to be irrelevant, although the arguments that have replaced them seem to be every bit as controversial. On the one hand, the argument goes, the Bomb convinced the Japanese leadership to surrender without conditions, under the terms of the Potsdam Convention, less than two weeks after the bombing of Hiroshima. On the other hand, the newer revisionists point out, the principal force was the Soviet invasion of Manchuria because it demonstrated that all hopes for a conditional surrender had passed. It is certain that the Japanese were seeking a conditional surrender, through Soviet good offices, offering terms the United States would not accept. We know because the messages through which Tokyo instructed its Ambassador in Moscow were intercepted and read by the Americans—sometimes faster than the Japanese could read them. But the terms offered were absurd: no occupation, no war crimes trials, and no seizure of assets or colonies. All of those terms might have been inserted to provide bargaining chips Japan could negotiate away in order to preserve the imperial house, but Japan never had the chance to play that hand. And in the final event, while the Japanese surrender had been unconditional, the United States disturbed the imperial status quo only to ground the Emperor’s position in a secular constitution instead in religion. The occupiers did not impose the condition the last wartime Japanese cabinet had so feared; indeed few American leaders wanted to impose it. In charge of the occupation, General Douglas MacArthur preserved the Imperial House and the Emperor, even as he demonstrated that—like all of Japan—Hirohito was subordinate to the United States and to scap (Supreme Commander Allied Powers, MacArthur). The impact of the Soviet attack was an enormous blow; before it fell, even Harry Truman expected it to be a war winner. In the narrowest sense, the Japanese leadership found the Soviet invasion disheartening because it was dismantling the Japanese empire built over the course of nearly a century since Perry had forced the country open to westerners. In addition, the invasion threatened a large Communist political presence in postwar Japan. In a larger but immediate sense, the Soviet invasion ended any Japanese hope of a conditional surrender. Such a surrender required the good offices of the Soviet Union (while the Soviet Union was bound to Japan by a non-aggression pact). That was no longer possible. Stalin, at American urging, had violated the nonaggression agreement and become a belligerent. Clearly too, the timing of the

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three blows—Hiroshima, Manchuria, Nagasaki—coming so closely together reinforced their collective impact on the Japanese. This revision troubles the standard interpretation in part because it highlights the possibility of a diplomatic end to the war at some point in the spring or summer of 1945, in a scenario with Stalin and the Japanese cast in the role of negotiators rather than aggressors. In reality, of course, and for however brief the moment might be, Stalin followed straightforward Soviet interest and chose to cooperate with the Americans. Finally, in the broadest sense, this analysis of the Japanese surrender challenges the entire concept of the atomic bomb as “the winning weapon.” Since Niels Bohr first brought news of the Hahn–Strassman experiment to the United States in 1939, that concept had been a primary motivating factor. If you had the Bomb and your adversary did not, either you won the contest or you destroyed your adversary. For a nation on the defensive, FDR had told Alexander Sachs, “[W]hat you are after is to see that the Nazis don’t blow us up.” Now the Bomb existed; and in actual practice it was the United States, not the Nazis who had the power to blow people up. But had blowing people up ended the war? In the American historiographical/political debates over the end of the war, the elusive object of the exercise was to establish beyond any doubt the necessary resolution of a hypothetical and counterfactual scenario: When would Japan have surrendered if the United States had not used atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Would Japan have resisted an invasion and inflicted the enormous number of casualties cited by various members of the American political leadership? Why, in the real event, did Japan surrender when it did and not at some other time? And it is remarkable how much argument about Japanese history Americans could carry on amidst a striking lack of understanding of Japanese history and a lack of access to Japanese records. Japan faced the most daunting challenges of the Pacific belligerents, a threat not only to a government but also to an entire way of conceiving what the national identity was. Any Japanese path to resolving that issue without an extraordinarily destructive “battle of Japan” would have to run a gantlet that was at once a matter of politics and of intellectual history. What eventually emerged as the peace faction in the Japanese government had to confront three things: traditional ideas, the modern militarist re-working of traditional ideas to support their rule, and militarists in the privileged Army and Navy ministries who had the constitutional power to bring down any civilian cabinet. And all of the Japanese participants were trying to manage unprecedented events. It is worth the effort it takes to remember that Japan’s ruling elites were men of their place and of their time. They were not the caricatures that populated western propaganda and (even when “fanatical”) they were not medieval. When Hiroshima confronted the Japanese Army and Navy ministers, they understood what had happened there; they had been financing an atomic bomb project of their own, after all.8 Some modern historians suggest that the widespread scale of destruction caused by incendiary bombing made it harder for these officers

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to distinguish any differences in kind between the effects of incendiaries and those of a nuclear blast. That may be true; but Japan had not been attacked successfully in the historical memory of the men who ran it in 1945. The traumatic confrontation with Perry and the civil wars that created the modern Japanese state were fought before the wartime leadership generation had been born. Japan’s post-Perry armed forces had been defeated only once before—by the Soviets in 1939. Militarists, Emperor, and Cabinet peace faction alike were conservatives within the framework of Japanese politics; all of them seeking to conserve what they could under the least favorable circumstances imaginable. They were hardly the first leaders, and they would not be the last, to trap themselves and their causes in a web of their own words and ideas. They agreed to surrender when the Emperor ordered them to (and to impose that agreement on their subordinates), and the Emperor gave that order after he was confronted with two developments, both of them, in the words of his rescript of surrender “not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.” They argued too long about it at a time when things were happening very fast until, at last, the time their enemies were willing to give them ran out. What seems most apparent from newer scholarship is that—for several reasons—the Bomb alone did not provide the overpowering war-ending shock that the American leadership expected and wanted it to have. It shared its role in ending the Pacific side of World War II with conventional bombing, the anguished leadership of the Japanese “peace faction,” and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. And it failed utterly to make the Soviet Union “more manageable at the bargaining table,” as Secretary of State James Byrnes had expected it to do. Soviet physicists were part of the European scientific community to begin with and Soviet spies kept the small Soviet bomb project well informed about the Manhattan Project throughout the war. The Soviets knew what an atomic bomb was from the very beginning. When Harry Truman told Stalin (in what he intended to be a veiled and oblique remark) that the United States had developed a new weapon of unusual power, the Soviet leader was not impressed, or shocked, or intimidated. He quietly urged Truman to make good use of it against the Japanese; then he left the room and told his foreign minister that they should notify the leaders of their program to speed up their work. Within weeks, the USSR was investing resources it had not been able to spare during the Great Patriotic War in order to build the actual infrastructure the Soviet Union would need to support a nuclear fuel cycle and build actual weapons. Regardless of intent, if the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had any one single, clear consequence, that consequence was not its role in the surrender of Japan but rather its role in the nuclearization of the rivalry emerging between the US and the USSR. David Holloway, the best-known English-language historian of Soviet nuclear weapons, maintains that Stalin did not understand the strategic importance of nuclear weapons until after the bombing of Hiroshima. After that though, he saw the event and the bomb that set it off as an effort on the part of the US to hamstring the Soviet Union at what should have been its

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moment of triumph. That too was an effect regardless of the American intent in using atomic bombs. But if intimidating the USSR was part of the American intent in that summer of 1945, men like Truman and Byrnes were naïve, or at least uninformed, to expect the Soviets to behave differently than the Americans had when they thought the US might become the victim of a German atomic bomb. In fact, the Soviets did almost precisely what the Americans had done before them. They committed huge amounts of resources to build reactors and uranium separation plants; they built a secret city in a remote and secret location; and (in the midst of a war-ravaged economy in which most goods were still rationed) they created a schedule of perquisites and privileges to entice a large collection of talented scientists and engineers to design weapons. In a sardonic nod towards their American counterparts, those Soviet scientists and engineers transformed the bureaucratic designation for their secret city, Arzamas-16, into the colloquial nickname “Los Arzamas.” It was a good joke and powerful testimony to the extraordinary relationship that the Soviet project had with the American effort. As their American counterparts had, the Soviet atomic scientists developed a strong sense of pride and patriotism on account of the work they were doing. To be sure, the Americans had gotten their bomb first; but in the immediate wake of “the Great Patriotic War,” guarding the borders of the state was more than honorable work, and the physicists understood that their jobs gave testimony to their standing in their fields. David Holloway maintains that even after one discounts for the Soviet Union’s hostility to dissent, Soviet scientists shared little of the doubts that their American counterparts had shown. As the Americans felt threatened by a German bomb, the Soviets felt threatened by an American one, and if the Americans were ahead in the race (as the Americans had believed the Germans to be), the need to catch up and then surpass was a powerful motivating force. The open disdain some American political leaders and some scientists showed for Soviet science and technology put a personal edge on their desire to build a better bomb than their predecessors. At the same time, Arzamas-16 did not conscript its staff any more than Los Alamos, and prospective Soviet volunteers had a much better idea of what they would be producing than their Manhattan Project predecessors had thought. People with doubts or qualms simply needn’t sign up for the job. Or they kept their qualms to themselves; this was Stalin’s USSR and the project chief was Lavrenti Beria, who also led the civilian secret police. But then there was always a major question hovering around the Soviet’s first nuclear explosion: how much of the Soviet bomb was simply a copy of the American one recycled courtesy of the spies? To be sure, Soviet intelligence agencies served their masters well in covering developments in the Anglo-American nuclear projects. The Soviet Union was able to make policy decisions based on British research leading to the maud Report because Soviet intelligence had penetrated the British Foreign and Intelligence Services and procured a copy of the report as early as 1941. Soviet

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intelligence was very lucky indeed to have “walk-in” spies very well placed at Los Alamos; almost too lucky. Klaus Fuchs, the best known of the spies, was a key member of Hans Bethe’s Theoretical Division, doing calculations originally assigned to Edward Teller before he went off to develop his ideas for the “Super,” the hydrogen bomb. Fuchs was working on the design of a plutoniumfueled bomb detonated in an “implosion,” the sort of bomb exploded in the Alamogordo test and at Nagasaki, and he was reporting very complete details of the work, of the methods tested, mistakes made, and so forth. Fuchs’ product was so clear and complete that it was difficult to use; the “analyst” had to be a physicist on his level. In practice, the analyst was Kurchatov. Even on a basic level, Kurchatov and the others “in the know” had to obscure the source of the ideas they were quoting, to protect the operation. More significantly, the Soviets could not simply copy American work. The principles of security required concern for the possibility that it might be deliberate disinformation intended to waste precious Soviet effort and resources. Moreover, intelligence reports, even when a spy as central and knowledgeable as Fuchs wrote them, made for a peculiar form of scholarly communication. The structures and methods of learning demanded interchange; Fuchs’ “customers” could not even ask for clarification of an obscure or difficult point. Most significantly of all, Soviet science was not an intellectual dependency of the Americans and British. For reasons of pride and state security it intended to avoid becoming one. Ironically, the Soviet leadership—including Stalin and Beria—did not trust Soviet science or scientists; and Beria frequently vetoed ideas produced by his own project staff that improved upon what the Americans had done. Kurchatov and his colleagues offered a design for the first Soviet fission bomb that would display substantial improvement over the Americans’ “fat man” implosion weapon— provided Beria and Stalin were willing to wait a short while. The leadership was not willing. The copy “fat man” would be ready first and it would be test fired when available. The world’s balance of power was at stake (Stalin believed) and for the moment faster trumped better. As the 1991 feud between the intelligence veterans and those from the bomb project shows, different groups have a great deal invested in these questions about the responsibility for the first Soviet atomic successes. As a weapon, the Bomb defended against a feared enemy; no surprise that both science/engineering and the organs of state security claimed credit for that. No surprise either that science and security could each claim credit for the national strength and modernity of which nuclear weapons were an iconic symbol. Science could justify its expense and the special benefits and privileges granted its practitioners; security could justify its expense, its enormous intrusions into the lives of Soviet citizens, and the gulag it maintained for … whomever. Different groups of Americans too had their investments in this dispute. On the American side of Winston Churchill’s “iron curtain,” many Americans held tenuous beliefs in their own scientific, technological, and political supremacy; in the peasant character of Russian society; in the backwardness

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of Soviet science and industry; and in the linkage between authoritarian government and inefficient government. In some important ways this was folklore, part of an almost-officially sanctioned national complacency. When Harry Truman asked Robert Oppenheimer how long it would take the USSR to acquire nuclear weapons, Oppenheimer responded with scientists’ very common estimate of three to five years. President Truman brushed that aside. He knew when the Soviets would get the bomb, he said: “and that is never.” He wasn’t alone, and the pervasive, persistent imagery of a medieval peasantry transplanted in time became increasingly important. The acquisition of nuclear weapons by such peasants seemed so unlikely that thieves provided the only explanation for it. This was a considerable support to the allied concepts that the Soviets could now threaten the United States with atomic bombs only because of theft and that theft could only have succeeded because American communists had colluded with the Soviets. According to agitators on the right wing of the American political spectrum, Communists had been infiltrating every aspect of American life ever since the beginning of the 20th century. That same formulation maintained that the Depression and the New Deal, the American recognition of the USSR, and especially the World War II alliance with the Soviets, had made the situation worse. Taken together they provided evidence of economic sabotage, political subversion, and (in a phrase Joe McCarthy would popularize) “twenty years of treason.” Then, Cold War alumni on both sides of the iron curtain became “hard-liners” after the USSR dissolved. Erstwhile enemies on either side found it useful to make common purpose against all of those, on both sides of the iron curtain, who had sought to moderate the global conflict and to restrain those who sought to use security as an excuse for authoritarianism. And it matters that that effort continued, on both sides, even after the Soviet Union dissolved itself. In practice, espionage did matter, but perhaps less than American security people and American politicians feared it would. It played a key role in the Soviet project, but not the role of making the otherwise impossible possible. If it transmitted information the Americans discovered first, it also sent over American mistakes and dead ends. David Holloway estimates that even in the absence of espionage reports, the Soviet Union could easily have possessed atomic bombs (fueled with enriched uranium as the Hiroshima bomb was) as early as 1952. Holloway makes a useful comparison of the three projects that designed and built the first generation of fission bombs: the United States, Britain, and the USSR. All three shared a substantial base of knowledge as they began. By different methods, all three benefited from the scientific work done at Los Alamos between 1943 and 1945. All three could read Henry DeWolf Smyth’s General Account of the Development of Methods of Using Atomic Energy for Military Purposes, the very detailed official history that Leslie Groves commissioned and published right after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Finally, by different methods, all three benefited from Klaus Fuchs’ scientific work. The United States and the Soviet Union each produced an atomic bomb 45 to 48 months after getting

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an order to proceed. After the flow of American nuclear information to Great Britain ended, it took the British bomb project 60 months to accomplish the same. A great deal happened in the world during the 48 months that the Soviets spent building their nuclear fuel complex and their first bombs, including the establishment of the United Nations Organization and the effort there to create international controls of nuclear weapons. Those same months also saw the increasingly rapid disintegration of the wartime alliance and the hardening of the lines dividing Europe once again. In the middle of 1948, the Soviets responded to a western effort to rehabilitate the German economy along capitalist lines by blocking road, rail, and canal access to Berlin. The German capital was partitioned into sectors—American, British, French, Soviet; but the country was also partitioned into occupation zones and the city was located deep inside the Soviet zone. If the Soviets could not be persuaded to re-open the access routes, it appeared that any western efforts to do it by force would lead to war. Truman’s American response was an improvisation in two parts. The Air Force sent a group of B-29 bombers to bases in Great Britain, bases from which an earlier generation of American bombers had operated against enemies on the continent. Only three years after the Nazi surrender, the symbolism was obvious, especially since everyone understood the connection between B-29 airplanes and atomic bombs. But Truman was bluffing. The B-29s were not equipped to carry nuclear weapons and no weapons were ever transferred to Europe; but that did not matter. It was an old trick left over from the days of gunboat diplomacy. The bombers were “showing the flag”; they were a “force in being” that reminded everyone of the US power to threaten the Soviet Union, without having to say much explicit about it and (most importantly) without having to do anything about it. Meanwhile, the US and British air forces mounted an enormous and ultimately successful effort to supply the western sectors of Berlin entirely by air. The Soviets abandoned their blockade a year after they began it, with the city housed, warm, and fed, and with the popularity of the United States in Germany rising. It had been the first European conflict since the arrival of nuclear weapons. It was the first international conflict won entirely by air power; and (not at all coincidentally) it was an international conflict won entirely by unarmed airplanes. The atomic bomb had already changed the rules. The Americans and the British were constrained to make the airlift the center of their defense of Berlin because all the other possibilities involved forcing the Soviet barricades and risking war. And an American–Soviet war likely meant the American use of atomic bombs. However, the United States owned very few weapons, and it had stored most of those in a disassembled condition. The United States’ reputation for atomic weapons was substantially greater than its actual capability to use them in 1948. And even now that the United States had atomic bombs, its military leaders had yet to develop plans for how they might use them in a European war. Even though the United States had a monopoly

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of military atomic power in 1948, this variety of factors deterred President Truman from adopting a strategy based on atomic weapons in this Berlin crisis. “Operations are like … going shopping,” Admiral Raymond Spruance told one historian, “You have to measure what you want against what getting it is likely to cost you.” Dwight Eisenhower and Niels Bohr had been right in 1945; the United States had shocked world opinion by using the atomic bomb and it was now paying a price in the form of restricted maneuvering in a crisis. And in the Berlin Crisis of 1948, the United States still possessed a nuclear monopoly. Berlin was hardly forced to the back pages of the newspapers when that monopoly was broken. The American government had been the first to confront the threat of proliferation, the spread of nuclear knowledge and hardware to countries that had neither in 1945. No sooner had the war ended than the United States, by orders and then by legislation, cut off the sharing of nuclear information with the British. The people who knew what they were talking about agreed that no one could keep the knowledge to create nuclear weapons a military secret for very long. The scientific advisers to the Interim Committee projected the secret’s life at three to five years (36 to 60 months). The principal dissenters from this consensus were elected politicians and some, but not all, of their executive associates. Much of that could be traced to American ideas about race and ethnicity, much of the rest to a complacent reliance on “American knowhow.” Some of the belief in a somewhat extended American nuclear monopoly can be attributed to mistaken intelligence analysis. Aware of the Soviet project, the CIA anticipated success between 1951 and 1953. And it was easy to pursue deceptively simple solutions to the most vexing of problems. Groves, a practiced witness before congressional committees, was the kind of executive American politicians found easy to believe. They were comfortable with his background and education; and he convinced many that he could protect the American nuclear weapons monopoly by creating an American nuclear fuel monopoly. “There is no uranium in Russia,” he maintained; and indeed locating available uranium deposits was one of the most difficult challenges the builders of the Soviet Bomb would have to overcome. Nevertheless, they did overcome those challenges, despite the expense of uranium separation and plutonium-producing nuclear reactors. Just as the United States had, just as every would-be nuclear power had—and for the very same reasons. Very early on the Air Force described its unique nuclear-launch capability and the Strategic Air Command that grew from it as “wasting assets,” units whose value would inevitably diminish over time. Other nations would create their counterparts and new technology would render obsolete what had once been pioneering. In that, the Air Force was realistic about the future for which it had to plan; yet the future arrived before anyone was ready for it. The news that the USSR had developed atomic bombs of its own set off a panic in official Washington, as large numbers of Americans realized that, for the first time since the War of 1812, an overseas enemy possessed the military capability to attack

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them in their homes. American planning was to increasingly rely on atomic bombs if the US were to fight its principal enemy; yet the number of available weapons remained small and strategists and planners had not yet established any doctrinal basis for war planning that included atomic bombs. Henceforth, planning for such a combat would also have to include the enemy’s capacity to retaliate in kind for every usage of the Bomb. But many, if not most Americans perceived the Soviet Union as something more, and more fearsome, than just a geopolitical rival. The USSR was, as President Ronald Reagan would say much later, “an evil empire.” “… we will never use [the atomic bomb] again if we can possibly help it,” Truman told David Lilienthal in 1949. “But I know the Russians would use it on us if they had it.” The same might be said of Germany or Japan. The United States was different, of course. The Soviets and the Americans alike projected themselves to be the aggrieved victims of aggression in the next war, the defenders; yet both intended to seize the initiative with offensive action if it came to war between them. Each moved according to what each thought they had learned during World War II. When advocates of international peace argued that each superpower should pledge that they would not be the first to use nuclear weapons, the American military leadership steadfastly refused (all the way to the end of the Cold War). Increasingly, their war planning descended from classical air power theory and focused on prospective operations known collectively as an air-atomic offensive, based on bomber forces stationed in allied nations. As in the last war, bombers would hurdle enemy lines to attack at home the enemy’s ability and will to resist. Whether atomic bombs would be used against industrial and military assets or against command/control and population centers (that is, in a counterforce or countervalue mode) remained an open question. The answer to that question changed as various plans were adopted, modified, and eventually supplanted. Interestingly, even before the Soviet acquired its own bomb, American planners had begun to think that they were over-estimating the degree to which the atomic bomb alone would be a decisive weapon. Even more interestingly, Soviet military thinkers were coming to some of the same conclusions, especially the conclusion that the best use of the atomic bomb would be to attack major, strategically significant targets in the enemy’s rear areas. The Soviets pledged that they would not be the first to use nuclear weapons, but even before they had any nuclear weapons to use, Soviet military theoreticians, recalling the desperate summer and autumn of 1941, reached the conclusion that the counteroffensive was one variant of the offensive in combat, the offense that made the best defense. Seen from the perspective of the 21st century, this all seems quite odd. In 2013, it is nearly a quarter century since the Soviet Union dissolved itself; and the world has forgotten the Cold War. Ideologically-motivated warfare was a tradition in Europe, from the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) down to the wars of the French Revolution and the USSR’s just concluded Great Patriotic War.

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Americans had even proven themselves willing to fight each other for ideology, in the War for Independence and the Civil War. Money and power were not absent from the formulation; the capitalist democracies in the west and the communist bloc the Soviets were assembling each had their own specific economic and geostrategic interests and objectives. Nevertheless remarkably few traditional casus belli separated them. However, the magnitude of what did separate them was enormous. At issue was both the control of the pre-war centers of empire in Europe, but also the fate of the colonized world in Africa and Asia as the age of European imperialism ended. Few historical moments have ever been so pregnant with non-compatible possibilities; and it was no help that the adherents of two assertive missionary faiths entered into conflict with each other at that moment. Most westerners associate the origins of the Cold War with a struggle to control Europe in the aftermath of the effort to suppress Nazi aggression. However, postwar Asia was equally charged and enormously important. From the 17th century onwards, European colonialism was a tsunami sweeping Africa and Asia. The democratic capitalism of Western Europe and the United States had expanded exponentially. By the 20th century, imperialistic Capitalism had linked African and Asian colonies into a global economy dominated largely by Europe, Britain, and the United States. The Chinese Revolution and the militarization of Japan checked the expansion of colonialism. By destroying the power of Japan and weakening the European colonial powers, World War II began the long recession of the imperial tsunami. Nevertheless, the world after the war would become an even more globalized economy. Who would profit from that growth and global integration? Who would dominate it politically? The American leadership assumed that they would because they had the Bomb (and possessed it exclusively); but that assumption was ill founded. The monopoly ended, ahead of schedule, but in a thoroughly predictable way; and military planners in both the Soviet Union and the United States convinced each other that the atomic bomb as it then existed was not going to be the inevitable “winning weapon” the Americans had first imagined. The Soviet leadership never permitted itself to think of the Bomb in that way, if only because the concept itself highlighted Soviet vulnerability to it. US Air Force commanders understood that their wartime task of breaking the Soviet capability to make war, and the requirement that Air Force bombers penetrate increasingly formidable anti-aircraft defenses in order to do so made it increasingly unlikely that a war with the USSR could be concluded in an afternoon, even with new, postwar aircraft and armaments. A blunt instrument was not going to be enough, and likely would not have been enough even if the American monopoly were to have gone on a little longer. Now, the monopoly was gone. Even before the Soviets acquired nuclear weapons of their own, increasing anti-aircraft defense was set to diminish the effectiveness of any airstrike the United States might send against the Soviets; and no one had forgotten the losses the Americans suffered at Schweinfurt.

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However, air power doctrine maintained that “the bomber will always get through” any conceivable air defense network. Even at Schweinfurt, the vast majority of the bombers fought their way to the target (and back) despite heavy defenses and severe losses. If the bombers were nuclear armed and only one, or a small number, “got through” to launch points against enemy targets, that would be enough. The real problem for American planners under the new circumstances would be the bomber stream the enemy would send against them. It is, for example, disconcerting for Americans to imagine a bomber stream that will “always get through” to Kansas City, less so for them to worry about Magnitogorsk. Before 1949, the last foreign military force to threaten Americans in their own country was defeated downstream from New Orleans by infantry and artillery commanded by Andrew Jackson. After 1949, Americans would not be so invulnerable to military threat even though the Soviet Union at that moment owned neither nuclear weapons nor airplanes that could carry them to the United States. The Soviets could—and would—change that soon enough.

notes 1 Lewis’ original notebook ended up in private hands and is now the property of an anonymous collector. Quotations, some disputed, are usually drawn from one of several secondary sources. It remains the only first-person narrative of the Hiroshima mission. 2 Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, No High Ground (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960; Bantam Books edition, 1961) 107. 3 Curtis LeMay’s very first incendiary raid actually destroyed a broader swath of a thickly populated city and killed more people immediately than did the strikes at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Incendiaries destroyed 16 square miles of Tokyo and killed approximately 120,000 people on the night of 9 March 1945. The atomic bomb destroyed 12 square miles of Hiroshima and killed approximately 80,000 people immediately on the morning of 6 August 1945. 4 Flügge did publish, in both academic and popular form. Von Weizsäcker was one of the German physicists mentioned in Einstein’s letter to FDR, for both his scientific eminence and his family connection to official circles. 5 Truman’s tolerance for the Soviets had never been great. He had suggested in 1941 that the US aid both the USSR and Nazi Germany, whichever was losing, in such a way that they would bleed each other to death. He did add, however, that he didn’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances. Churchill and FDR, by contrast, quickly admitted the Soviet Union into their emerging alliance. 6 Or so the Americans thought. More on that later. 7 Paul Fussell, “Thank God for the Atomic Bomb,” The New Republic, August 1981 http:// www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iakh/HIS1300MET/v12/undervisningsmateriale/ Fussel%20-%20thank%20god%20for%20the%20atom%20bomb.pdf online access, 18 December 2013. 8 An experimental apparatus to separate U235 from U238 by the thermal diffusion process operated on the University of Tokyo campus until it burned to the ground in LeMay’s March firebombings.

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“The atomic bomb is too dangerous to be loose in a lawless world,” Harry Truman told a radio audience on the night that followed the destruction of Nagasaki. For that reason, he went on, “Great Britain, Canada, and the United States, who have the secret of its production, do not intend to reveal that secret until means have been found to control the bomb so as to protect ourselves and the rest of the world from the danger of total destruction.” The American President’s speech was written in the first person plural; “We,” he argued, faced “an awful responsibility,” nevertheless, “We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.”1 In practice, both Congress and the Truman administration would seek to cut even the US’s closest allies as far out of the nuclear loop as they could. Indeed, Congress acted with the same zeal they sought to muster against a Soviet bomb. The age of nuclear war was barely two days old, and—for the first time, but not for the last—a nation that owned nuclear weapons offered the proposition that it was a suitable steward for such terrible power; but all those other nations that did not yet possess them, especially its rivals and enemies, were not. Just over four years later, in the dead of winter and without mentioning nuclear weapons in the text, the Truman White House drafted its first post-test estimate of Soviet intentions and capabilities. It had been a difficult year, as the Communist victory in China’s civil war and revelations about Soviet espionage on the Manhattan Project followed the news of the atomic test. Americans also found themselves confronting an escalating frenzy over government employees whose loyalty to the country many politicians were questioning. Drafted in mid-February 1950—after Senator Joseph McCarthy first made his claim that the Democrats were knowingly harboring subversives—the paper sought to recapture the outrage and political unity once expressed by FDR’s request for a declaration of war after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

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The avowed basic intention of the USSR is to engage in “competition” with the US until the US is destroyed, or forced to capitulate. The Soviet concept of “competition” with the US is—demonstrably—to wage a relentless, unceasing struggle in which any weapon or tactic which promises success is admissible… . While the struggle is limited for the moment in that military weapons are eschewed, it is not limited from the standpoint of finality or all-inclusiveness of the ultimate objective. It consequently cannot be described as merely a “political struggle,” or a “cold war,” or a “limited war.” In the eyes of the Kremlin, it is war in the broadest sense of the term, a war to the death.2 While the debate about how to use the atomic bomb that took place in the first half of 1945 has received endless scholarly and public attention, the arguments and experiments on the same issue that took place after Hiroshima and Nagasaki have received much less. During the early years of the Cold War, public clamor and military classification hid—from public view then and from the consideration of most historians since—what Gregg Herken described as a “dichotomy between political goals and military means,” and a “conflict between the military’s doctrine of deterrence and its actual planning to fight and win a nuclear war.”3 Some of that is necessary and inherent in any deterrent threat. In order to maintain a deterrent’s power to deter one must convince an adversary that one can and will follow through on the threat; that one has the plan, the resources, and the will to fight and win if that adversary refuses to be deterred. And plans, no matter how well designed, lose much of their utility once the shooting starts. Once in action, plans must be revised to fit actual circumstances. Yet planning, the before-action process of exploring, considering, evaluating, and choosing options is essential. However, in this unprecedented case, the plans for an “air-atomic” attack on the Soviet Union that the American military drew up demonstrated a high level of unsettled and incomplete thinking, and that is, perhaps, understandable. Modern military forces establish official doctrine. (There was a right way to do something, a generation of World War II recruits and conscripts had learned, and there was a wrong way; but finally, they were taught, there was the Army way—doctrine.) No doctrine for the use of nuclear weapons emerged from any of the thinking about them done between the bombing of Hiroshima and the first test of the Soviet bomb. Briefly, although Imperial Japan had not yet surrendered by 5 August 1945, atomic bomb or no, it had been defeated. The defeat that Japan had already suffered meant that the actual flights-to-target of the first two bombs were unopposed. Later, both budgetary and military considerations put nuclear weapons in an ever more central role in any projected American–Soviet war. How else to overcome the USSR’s advantages in manpower and geography? Yet the impact of the bomb’s undoubted power at the beginning of a war against an undefeated power—and the ability to deliver it to a target—required considerably more complex thinking about its actual role in war fighting than was needed

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in 1945. As Herken pointed out, Air Force planners in 1949 had not yet come to grips with a whole host of strategic, operational, and logistical problems associated with an “air-atomic” blitz against the USSR, even though that blitz was a common denominator in four years’ worth of changes in specific plans and targeting. Most important, the discussions and planning that did take place generally evaded three principal questions: Did nuclear weapons exist to deter a Soviet attack or to fight the Soviet Union in the wake of an attack? Would the airatomic offensive replace general warfare or simply be the spearhead component of an expanded and globalized conflict still based on the model of World War II? Finally, would American nuclear weapons be aimed at military forces (counterforce targeting) or at civilian populations (countervalue targeting)?4 And that was before the American military had to get used to its adversary’s new ability to fight with its own atomic bombs. In fact, significant members of the Truman administration, including the President himself, did not at first believe that the Soviets achieved a fission explosion in 1949. One cannot blame espionage, or anyone’s naiveté about communism, or even subversion for the surprise that overtook the United States when the USSR set off its first nuclear blast. They had not seen ahead because they chose not to look down the road. President Truman and other leading figures in the American civilian and military leadership had regularly scoffed at Soviet scientific and industrial capabilities, even when people who knew better told them otherwise.5 The Americans’ first response to the Soviet test was to begin building a new set of bombs orders of magnitude more powerful than the bombs that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Whereas “atomic” bombs derive their power from the fission of heavy atoms, “thermonuclear” or “hydrogen” bombs get theirs by fusing the lightest atoms in the Periodic Table, hydrogen, into helium, one element higher. It is the process that fuels the sun, indeed all stars. Not only do fission bombs yield smaller blasts than their fusion cousins, fission bombs confront a theoretical upper limit on the explosions that they generate. As their kinship with the stars suggests, fusion bombs suffer from no such limitations. Several physicists took note of the possibilities fusion opened up soon after the German achievement of fission at the end of 1938, but those opportunities appeared most clearly to Edward Teller. Teller liked to say that he entered the world of nuclear weapons as a chauffeur; in 1939, he had driven Leo Szilard to Long Island to convince Einstein to write to FDR about fission. He had spent most of World War II at Los Alamos, offended that Robert Oppenheimer had appointed Hans Bethe to lead the bomb lab’s Theoretical Division, and increasingly obsessed with his work on the fusion bomb everyone called “the Super.” Teller complained endlessly about the slow pace of postwar nuclear weapons research and the American vulnerabilities to Soviet attack resulting from it. At the same time, no one, least of all Teller, knew if the Super could ever be made into a practical weapon.6 I. I. Rabi pointed out that “Teller made

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one proposal after another, and these were all shot down, some of them by Teller himself, some by other people.”7 By 7 October 1949, the shock of the Soviet bomb test was sufficient that Teller and Ernest Lawrence (Oppenheimer called them “two experienced promoters”) convinced Atomic Energy Commissioner Lewis Strauss to urge his administration colleagues to initiate a “crash program” to build the Super. Strauss signed on; if the American decision on the hydrogen bomb were “unilateral renunciation,” the most likely result, he argued, would be “its unilateral possession by the Soviet government.”8 The case was not at all so clear, even among military professionals who recommended building the Super on a crash program. Gen. Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, maintained that the US had “no choice but to build the Super.” It would be “intolerable” for the Soviet Union to have it and the United States not to have it. At the same time, however, Bradley saw no military use for a hydrogen bomb. A fusion bomb’s advantage over a fission bomb would be “only psychological,” he said.9 Bradley came from Missouri, as the President had. The President liked that. He respected Bradley for his professional reputation, and he took his advice. The proposal for a Super “crash program” quickly drew a great deal of political support; and many critics responded by trying to get off the railroad tracks before the train hit them. The Super, in Oppenheimer’s words, “the miserable thing,” might not work, one might have to get it to a target “by oxcart,” but, he noted, “[it] appears to have caught the imagination both of the Congressional and of military people, as the answer to the problem posed by the Russian advance.” At the White House meeting to approve the Super crash program, President Truman had asked only one question: “Can the Russians do it?” Told that they could, Truman said that the US had no choice. “We’ll go ahead,” as he signed off on the recommendations after a meeting that lasted all of seven minutes. “It would be folly to oppose the exploration of this weapon,” Oppenheimer would say. “We have already known it had to be done; and it does have to be done. But that we become committed to it as the way to save the country and the peace appears to me full of dangers.” Why would opposition be folly? As Gen. Bradley had pointed out, it would be intolerable for the United States to allow the Soviet Union unilateral possession of the Super for psychological reasons, not for military reasons, but effectively for domestic political reasons. Working to build a Super bomb, even if that bomb were to be useless, might not, indeed did not insulate the administration from charges that its opposition to the Soviets was “soft.” To suggest renouncing a “big stick” that would have impressed even Theodore Roosevelt would simply not fly in that corrosive year as McCarthyite attacks on the administration’s patriotism sucked up its political capital. Building up a more numerous stockpile of lower yield, physically smaller, and easier to deliver fission bombs might well have been more useful in some traditional military sense. Bethe, Oppenheimer, and the Atomic Energy Commission’s General Advisory Committee thought

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so; but, in practice, the public and the opinion makers who agitated it believed simply that size mattered. The Super would confront a nuclear adversary with a more intimidating deterrent threat regardless of the possible apocalyptic consequences. Nothing less than the biggest stick of all would satisfy. Four years later, Oppenheimer’s political critics also criticized the General Advisory Committee, essentially for agreeing with Oppenheimer. Yet the committee had always agreed that research towards a fusion bomb was necessary: “We have already known it had to be done; and it does have to be done,” Oppenheimer had told Conant, but a crash program would be wasteful, nonproductive, and perhaps even counterproductive. Teller’s theoretical concept and the tenacity with which he promoted its utility as a weapon need not conceal that Teller’s original concept of a thermonuclear device could not be made to work even months after Truman issued the crash program order. Only further down the road did Stanislaw Ulam and Teller come up with a mechanism in which a fission explosion actually would trigger a fusion explosion in a device that might fit inside an airplane. Only at that point did the technical arguments point towards, rather than away from, rapid development; and at that point the technical arguments became compelling, even for those who opposed the creation of fusion weapons. As Oppenheimer put it: “It is my judgment in these things that when you see something that is technically sweet you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success.” Had igniting a fusion explosion seemed as possible in 1949 as it did two years later, the Advisory Committee might have said something different about the crash program; but the project had not been so feasible back when its adoption first became a matter of political urgency. Teller, at the 1954 Loyalty Review Board hearings, charged that Oppenheimer’s distaste for the fusion bomb and his malign influence over others delayed achievement of the fusion bomb. Hans Bethe wrote a 25-page classified memorandum that disposed of that charge in encyclopedic detail and with a very closely written time line.10 Bethe’s memo remained classified for a quarter of a century, however; and the facts were not important, hardly relevant to the hostility to Oppenheimer that was growing in the government, and even less relevant to the forces shaping the character of the Cold War. The bi-polar ideological conflict between the US and the USSR was arguably the lesser of the two great tidal events in late 20th-century world history. The tsunami of European colonialism had engulfed Africa and Asia before 1900, reaching its fullest extent in the islands and continental territories surrounding the Sea of Japan. In northeast Asia, the American-led victory of 1945 could set aside the consequences of Japanese victories in 1941–1942 only for a short time. As they typically did, and do, Americans believed themselves to be the best behaved and most anti-colonial of those Europeans in the colonial world. As the tsunami receded and the colonial character of that world crumbled, Americans were surprised to discover and unwilling to admit that Africans and Asians did not necessarily share their own high opinion of themselves or their country’s

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behavior. As far as Americans knew, China in 1945 had been full of hundreds of millions of friends of the United States. Now it was in the hands of the Communist enemy, and American political conservatives and church groups affiliated with missionaries working in China wanted someone to be blamed for that calamity. (And Nationalist China’s American political supporters made sure that none of that blame was going to fall on Jiang Jeshi’s ramshackle Republic of China government.) Americans had lived free of the fear of foreign invasion or bombardment since James Madison was President. If, for the first time in 130 years, they were now vulnerable to attack, someone had to be held responsible for making that attack possible. Soviet physicists and engineers, even the Soviet intelligence apparatus could not be principally responsible. Members of peace groups, supporters of left-wing political groups (not at all limited to the Communist Party), unorthodox or openly dissident journalists would do, whether jointly or severally. Ironically, both supporters and opponents of an expanded arsenal justified their positions with powerful fear-driven mythologies—even before the Soviets’ August 1949 test. If Americans feared destruction at the hands of other people, they might address those fears in one of two ways. On the one hand, broad but small groups of Americans—many of them scientists in one of the nuclear weapons-related fields—argued for political reconstruction: for a “one world” world government; for arms-control agreements among the great powers; for international, United Nations control of the materials required to manufacture atomic bombs. Other people rested their hopes on a nuclear-armed American military. That was the nexus of the problem as it passed from nightmare theory to the day’s work. The Soviet Union would accept no controls on nuclear weapons until its military had the same nuclear capacity as the United States forces. The United States would accept no controls on nuclear weapons that might limit its ability to improve the yields of its technological monopoly or the size of its arsenal. Neither would it allow itself to be intimidated by nuclear weapons in the hands of the other. Both intended to face down any nucleararmed adversary if necessary (and, implicitly, by any means necessary). Thus, the Soviet test created an instant crisis, because from that moment the Soviets had a growing capability to launch a devastating air strike against the US in retaliation for anything the US might do. They might choose to strike first, at least on paper. There were those on the western side of the iron curtain who advocated that the US and its allies strike first, while the Americans still possessed an overwhelming advantage in both weapons and bombers to carry and launch them. The Truman administration gave the task of making some policy sense out of this to the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, where Paul Nitze had just replaced its founding director George F. Kennan. Both men recommended what might be described accurately as the “containment” of an aggressive and expansionist power; however, Kennan’s containment and Nitze’s containment were two different policies stemming from two different concepts of the nature

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of the Soviet Union. Kennan well understood the authoritarian character of the Soviet Union. He also understood how historical forces worked within that authoritarian character to shape Soviet conduct in a way demonstrating continuity with traditional Russian behavior. To Nitze, the Revolution and Stalin’s ascension to power marked an enormous discontinuity in Russian history, indeed in world history. Together, Lenin and Stalin had opened a gate into a thoroughly Manichaean political universe in which the USSR could and would attack and overrun the United States and its allies at any moment that seemed to offer it an advantage. Kennan spent the rest of his very long life decrying the manner in which Harry Truman and Dean Acheson militarized his containment policy. Kennan had envisioned a strategy for a policy in divided Europe; in his thinking, containment was dependent upon diplomacy, and it sought to preserve as much freedom for the US to maneuver as possible. But the White House’s February definition of the threat and Nitze’s version of containment had a political appeal that diplomats did not. For example, Joe McCarthy’s rude description of diplomats as “striped pants cookie-pushers” worked as political propaganda addressed to a mass-market electorate. It conveyed a world of contempt for men whose work—fashioned from negotiation, concession, and compromise, and supported by a language of conciliation—was easily caricatured as effeminate and therefore weak. In their public rhetoric, McCarthy and men like him scorned diplomacy and international politics as instruments of national power. The men who practiced diplomacy were reviled; the functions of diplomacy re-defined as equivalent to appeasement. Nitze’s containment became a global shibboleth founded on military power. Ironically, however, it was precisely those diplomats, foremost among them Secretary of State Acheson (McCarthy’s so-called “Red Dean”), who transformed containment into a global military strategy. Clearly, if the United States sought to control any sort of balance of power in the face of a Soviet nuclear arsenal, it would have to commit itself to massive military buildups, of nuclear forces to be sure, but also of conventional forces. This was going to be a very, very expensive proposition. NSC-68 was the Americans’ second response to the Soviet bomb. Nitze’s paper reveals clearly the panic that gripped Washington in that grim winter of 1949–1950. It was not the most over-reactive paper making the rounds; dissident Democrat Stuart Symington—a vocal promoter of the Air Force whose first secretary he had been—would sponsor an even more panic-stricken and bellicose set of recommendations (NSC-100) a few months later.11 Both proposals called for enormous expansion of both nuclear and conventional military forces and the government spending required to support it. The February estimate of Soviet intentions and capabilities had already declared that a US–Soviet war was already underway; NSC-68 now pushed for a World War II-sized military supported by budgets assuming wartime spending and tax levels. The State Department’s Policy Planning Staff recommended that the government increase spending on the Cold War military and related items from 22 percent of

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gross national product to as much as 50 percent.12 The paper could be sanguine about the staggering expenditure only because its authors used World War II experience to support an argument rooted in the work of British economist John Maynard Keynes. Nitze and his staff believed that the US could afford their policy recommendations because the enormous growth in government spending would stimulate the economy, produce more government revenue, and make the country more prosperous as well as stronger. This completely Keynesian proposition—as much or more than any other recommendation in NSC-68—has shaped the history of the United States up to almost the present moment: From the point of view of the economy as a whole, the program might not result in a real decrease in the standard of living, for the economic effects of the program might be to increase the gross national product by more than the amount being absorbed for additional military and foreign assistance purposes. One of the most significant lessons of our World War II experience was that the American economy, when it operates at a level approaching full efficiency, can provide enormous resources for purposes other than civilian consumption while simultaneously providing a high standard of living. After allowing for price changes, personal consumption expenditures rose by about one-fifth between 1939 and 1944, even though the economy had in the meantime increased the amount of resources going into Government use by $60–$65 billion (in 1939 prices).13 Guns would not displace butter; in fact, one could have more butter by making more guns. As events of the next half-century would demonstrate, military Keynesianism would support enormous prosperity in the United States. Since the objects of military spending were increasingly capital-intensive, forms of Keynesian spending subsidizing people—paying construction workers or teachers for example—actually stimulates the economy more efficiently; but borrowing huge sums of money to pay for “defense” is not so politically daunting as borrowing lesser sums for anything else. Nevertheless, the idea was sufficiently unorthodox that Congress refused to fund implementation of the recommendations until after the North Korean invasion of South Korea at the end of June 1950. The magnitude of the build-up attributable to the policy and the size of Korean War expenditures obscured each other thereafter, until the stalemate in Korea became that war’s most distinctive feature. At the time, American political commentators interpreted the Korean War according to themes and examples carried over from Hitlerian aggression in Europe fifteen years past. Stalin’s North Korean puppets charged across the recognized border at the 38th parallel of latitude and attempted to seize the antiCommunist Republic of Korea (South Korea) by force. Truman’s entries in his diaries contain his fears that a third world war was beginning. The United States spearheaded a United Nations army to defeat the forces of aggression and that

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effort succeeded until China’s new Communist government intervened with a huge army of “volunteers.” The reality was significantly more complex, having as much to do with European and Japanese colonialism in Asia as it did with Communism. Korea had been Japan’s mainland colony since the beginning of the 20th century. Some Korean independence groups drew on Communist inspiration; others were western-oriented. During World War II, the Americans and the Soviets had each backed their own Korean, anti-Japanese groups; however, neither the US nor the Soviet Union acknowledged any significant national interests on the Korean peninsula. By agreement with the United States, the Soviet Union accepted Japanese surrenders and disarmed Japanese troops north of an almost arbitrary, American-selected dividing line at the 38th parallel of latitude. The Americans would do the same south of the parallel. The US and the USSR agreed to set up elections in their zones to provide an electoral foundation for the establishment of an independent, unified Korea. However, neither objected too loudly when those nationwide elections failed. After that the full partition of the peninsula into two nations became inevitable. There would be no unified Korea. The United States was reluctant to arm the new Republic of Korea, fearing that a fully armed South Korea would commit an act of aggression against North Korea. Neither the USSR, China, nor the US sought a war in Korea; in fact, Stalin gave his approval for the invasion of South Korea rather reluctantly and only after North Korea’s Kim Il-sung persuaded him that the Americans were not likely to intervene. The Chinese, with a brand new government, presiding over a country convulsed by invasion and civil war for twenty years, and fearing a foreign army on their borders, were even more reluctant. Nevertheless, both they and the United States allowed themselves to be pulled into a war that was relatively small but extremely unpleasant and very costly for both of them. When it was over, while the Americans (and the United Nations) had demonstrated that they would not allow Communists to unify Korea by force, they learned that they could not afford to unify Korea by force themselves. The Chinese had demonstrated that they would not tolerate a hostile army on their borders; but learned that they could not, with impunity, eject the Americans or their antiCommunist rivals in Asia. The Americans also learned that the atomic bomb was not necessarily a war-winning weapon, even if their adversary had no nuclear weapons of their own. No one spoke publicly about using nuclear weapons in Korea during the first five months of the war; fighting the North Koreans with American troops, leadership, and conventional tactics seemed to be doing the job until China sent in its own enormous army in November. Now the UN was struggling against an enormous disadvantage in numbers. In Europe, imagining an analogous situation made nato and the American nuclear war plans aimed at the USSR seem rational. The same arguments for atomic bombs might apply in Asia, but in Asia, two additional factors argued against the use of nuclear weapons. Operating from the premise that atomic bombs were in short supply, the Joint Chiefs of

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Staff argued that there were no targets in Korea worthy of the limited American arsenal. Strategists in the USSR and the US were coming to the conclusion that large strategic complexes (factories, military bases, command posts and population centers) in the enemy’s rear were the appropriate targets for atomic bombs. In the Korean theatre, those complexes were found in China—a part of China very close to the Soviet Union. Bombing them with any sort of weapons might be dangerously provocative. Further, using the weapons on inappropriate targets might produce a very unfortunate result; people around the world might be less afraid of them if they did not live up to their billing as winning weapons. Moreover, the Americans were deterred from using nuclear weapons in the Korean War as a consequence of the way they did use them in World War II. When Eisenhower first discussed the atomic bomb with Secretary of War Stimson, he made a two-pronged argument against using it in Japan. The first—Japan was already defeated and the weapon was, therefore, unnecessary— we might trace to two sources in Eisenhower’s thinking. It was a textbook expression of a military principle, the “economy of force,” that also drew upon the late 19th-century code of military ethics that underlies the various Hague and Geneva Conventions. The code acknowledges that soldiers will use all the force necessary to achieve their objectives, but holds them to use no more force than necessary. Furthermore, soldiers are duty-bound to minimize the impact of war on non-combatants, and to protect (to the extent possible) even enemy civilians from military violence. Those codes were supposed to govern the fighting of World War I and World War II, and Eisenhower had been trained in them from his days at West Point onward. The second argument— the US “should avoid shocking world opinion” by using a gruesome weapon unjustified by the need to save American lives—shows significant development in Eisenhower’s conceptualization of American national power. Eisenhower understood that other people’s good opinion of you matters even in the greatest of great international games. Events demonstrated this only five short years after the end of World War II. A significant fraction of world opinion was already critical of what the US had done to Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and it lay in wait for a second American use of an atomic bomb, especially a second use of an American atomic bomb against Asians. If the United States used its atomic military power, it stood to lose so much diplomatic and political support around the world that the bombing itself would prove to be counterproductive. Having using the Bomb once, the United States found that using it a second time was more difficult; the nation was bound in constraints woven by its own behavior several moves back in the game. With or without nuclear weapons, the Truman administration had to decide on its political objectives in this “whole new war.” Douglas MacArthur, Truman’s theater commander as well as United Nations forces Commander-inChief, recommended a continued campaign to expel China from the peninsula and unite Korea by force. This would require a general war against China. The destruction of the People’s Republic would necessarily be an objective, and

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MacArthur recommended as well that the Republic of China forces on Taiwan be enlisted as allies. Famously, this would be, according to Omar Bradley, “the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.”14 (A possible war with the Soviet Union, in Europe, after the US had had some time to build up its forces, was a higher priority.) The administration decided that the United States would have to settle for a truce with the North Koreans and the Chinese, an agreement reached by belligerents who were still fighting desperate battles almost within earshot of the negotiations. Truman relieved MacArthur of his command on 11 April 1951. By the middle of the year, the battlefront was stabilized close to the original dividing line at the 38th parallel; the talking-while-fighting went on for the next two years. Harry Truman’s standing in the polls was dismal in his last year in office. The 1950s in the US is remembered as a prosperous time in a prosperous place, but that prosperity was yet to materialize fully. It was wartime, and the impact of Keynesian economic policies, military and otherwise, was then visible primarily as inflation. The fighting and the peace talks in Korea, both stalemated, seemed endless. The size of the American armed forces, and the budgets to pay for them, were growing, rapidly. That American voters would seek new and different leadership is no surprise; the leadership they got remains astonishing. The military historian John Keegan called attention to what he called a leader’s “mask of command,” a near-theatrical persona intended simultaneously to highlight and conceal, to shape other people’s perceptions of one’s human characteristics in pursuit of an objective. Dwight Eisenhower’s chosen façade drew on his wide, sunny smile to present himself as an amiable, easy-going Kansas farm boy, an image very much at odds with the reality of his substantial military education, his long service as a high-level Army staff officer, and of course with his tour as World War II Supreme Commander. Throughout his career, he followed the then-typical Army officer’s practice of disavowing any political affiliations. He only identified himself as a Republican on the eve of his campaign for the presidential nomination and maintained his reputation for being above politics for two presidential terms. But he was no political naïf. He had lived in Washington for most of the years between the two World Wars. He had been Douglas MacArthur’s aide when MacArthur was Army Chief of Staff (and again when MacArthur led the Philippines’ army) and he had become the Army’s chief lobbyist with Congress. He was an excellent, unemotional calculator of probability and risk. Like Richard Nixon, his later Vice-president, Eisenhower was an exceptionally good poker player; junior officer Eisenhower had felt compelled to stop playing for money when he realized he was beating colleagues who could not afford to lose. In part, these games were mental exercise, part of the same self-disciplined routine as his frequent (and frequently mocked) rounds of golf. But observers as diverse as Nixon and Eisenhower’s own son John were well aware of the character revealed by the ruthlessness with which he played poker and bridge. Eventually, John Eisenhower simply refused to play with his father. Overall, President Eisenhower understood and

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enjoyed what he was doing; famously warning before a press conference to avoid discussing one touchy subject, he told his press secretary that if it did come up he would “just confuse ‘em.”15 In affairs of substance, Eisenhower was a more genuinely conservative figure than any of his successors. In connection with our issues here, he was no Keynesian, and three months after he replaced Truman in the White House, he bluntly rejected the economic assumptions that made NSC-68 feasible in its authors’ minds. The new President would not accept that any administration could or should count on economic stimulus to pay for defense. It wasn’t practical, Eisenhower maintained; it wasn’t ethical; and it wasn’t going to work. Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people… . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.16 There was a catch, of course: In the world of [the Soviet Union’s] design, security was to be found, not in mutual trust and mutual aid but in force: huge armies, subversion, rule of neighbor nations. The goal was power superiority at all cost. Security was to be sought by denying it to all others… . The amassing of Soviet power alerted free nations to a new danger of aggression. It compelled them in self-defense to spend unprecedented money and energy for armaments. It forced them to develop weapons of war now capable of inflicting instant and terrible punishment upon any aggressor. It instilled in the free nations—and let none doubt this—the unshakable conviction that, as long as there persists a threat to freedom, they must, at any cost, remain armed, strong, and ready for the risk of war. It inspired them— and let none doubt this—to attain a unity of purpose and will beyond the power of propaganda or pressure to break, now or ever.17 The first of the above-cited paragraphs is one of the most cherry-picked of Eisenhower’s public remarks. Perhaps only his farewell address, with its warnings about the “military industrial complex” is more frequently quoted. Still, Eisenhower’s speech—still remarkable after more than sixty years—was a

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put up or shut up challenge to the post-Stalin Soviet leadership on a variety of issues that Ike maintained were simultaneously necessary stations on the road to peace and negotiable. In the context of his whole speech, Eisenhower’s cost comparisons engaged two issues. First, he was openly appealing to any desires the new Communist leaders might have had to raise the Soviet standard of living. Second, he pointed out that the United States faced “more than merely a military threat.” For all of the speech’s nominal audience in the Soviet Union, the President linked a sound economy and national security as very significant concerns for the United States. The Soviets, he charged in May, had “coldly calculated” that they could “force upon America and the free world an unbearable security burden leading to economic disaster.”18 “[O]ur military strength and our economic strength are truly one,” he insisted a month later, “neither can sensibly be purchased at the price of destroying the other.” Even as he listed the many millions of dollars his administration intended to spend, largely on air power, Eisenhower went on to point out that this was about more than economics: reasonable defense posture is not won by juggling magic numbers—even with an air of great authority. There is no wonderfully sure number of planes or ships or divisions, or billions of dollars, that can automatically guarantee security… there is no such thing as maximum military security short of total mobilization. Now, this total mobilization would mean regimentation of the worker, the farmer, the businessman—allocation of materials—control of wages and prices—drafting of every able-bodied citizen. It would mean, in short, all the grim paraphernalia of the garrison state.19 Not bad for a conservative Republican who had spent an adult lifetime in the Army before getting elected President in wartime and in the heyday of Joe McCarthy! Not bad either, for a superpower leader warning his adversaries, his colleagues, and his own people about the threats they should fear and the opportunities they should seize. But Eisenhower’s insightful understanding of the complex dilemma of defense and the challenges of national finance without the help of Keynesian multipliers did leave him with some very basic problems to solve. For all of the ferocious rhetoric of the 1952 Republican party campaign and the bellicosity associated with Secretary of State Dulles, Eisenhower’s national security policies were not substantially different from Truman’s, although they were focused more clearly and backstopped by more settled strategies.20 The new President began with a formal planning exercise to determine what objectives US defense policy should pursue. Dubbed solarium (for the White House room where it had been launched), even the very existence of the exercise was kept secret for years. Three teams of civilian and military national security veterans would advocate for three separate objectives: one would aim

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at continuing containment with only a few tweaks; a second would support a significantly more assertive, more militarized containment; the third would call for implementing the Republicans’ campaign call to “roll back” the Communist presence in central and Eastern Europe. The personnel were serious; eleven of twenty-one were senior military officers from all three services, two of them were future chairs of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a third, Andrew Goodpaster, would soon serve as one of President Eisenhower’s closest aides. (Goodpaster and the two future chiefs were all on Team C—rollback.) The chair of the team advocating containment was George Kennan, only recently banished from the State Department by both Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles.21 Like so many historians since 1960, Kennan discovered the new President to be far more open-minded and much better educated than he had expected him to be. When he described Eisenhower as the most intelligent man in the room, one skeptic asked if Kennan included himself in the count. Kennan said yes, he did. Even more surprisingly, Eisenhower was actually willing to take Kennan’s advice; he would retain “containment” as the foundation of foreign policy instead of implementing the Republicans’ trumpeted “rollback” of Communist expansion.22 The next item would be an operational strategy to implement the policy the administration chose. Ironically, founding that strategy on “the capability of inflicting massive retaliatory damage” derived from a surprising source. J. Robert Oppenheimer’s “Atomic Weapons and American Policy,” which appeared in the July 1953 issue of Foreign Affairs, is an unexpected essay. It is Oppenheimer at his best, but it is also an exposition of candid policy quite at odds with the saintly impression of persecuted Oppenheimer one frequently gathers. Moreover, his thoughts remained rooted in Niels Bohr’s use of “complementarity” to assess the Bomb’s historical role. Atomic bombs were not just another set of weapons in a nation’s arsenals; they were “almost the only military measure that anyone has in mind to prevent … a great battle in Europe from being a continuing, agonizing, large-scale Korea.” He said: We may anticipate a state of affairs in which two Great Powers will each be in a position to put an end to the civilization and life of the other, though not without risking its own. We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.23 The essay was broad ranging, but he was giving attention to and making recommendations on some specific defense-related issues. He didn’t believe that any defensive measures could become “a permanent solution,” but “that is no reason for not doing a little better than we are now doing.” He was not specific, not in public; but he was suggesting that the limited measures would mean, “some delay in the imminence of the threat. They will mean a disincentive—a defensive deterrent—to the Soviet Union … the time when the Soviet Union

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can be confident of destroying the productive power of America will be further off.” The alternative was grim: “There will not be many great atomic wars for us, nor for our institutions. It is important that there not be one.” The administration held the Project solarium meetings in the second week of June, within days of Foreign Affairs’ publication of “Atomic Weapons and American Policy.” By October 30, NSC-162 was official US policy: “a strong military posture, with emphasis on the capability of inflicting massive retaliatory damage by offensive striking power.” When both the USSR and the United States reach a stage of atomic plenty and ample means of delivery, each will have the probable capacity to inflict critical damage on the other, but is not likely to be able to prevent major atomic retaliations. This could create a stalemate, with both sides reluctant to initiate general warfare, although if the Soviets believed that initial surprise held the prospect of destroying the capacity for retaliation, they might be tempted into attacking.24 By the end of the year, the Atomic Energy Commission revoked Oppenheimer’s security clearance, a response to a variety of charges that he had been a Communist before and during World War II. Oppenheimer challenged the revocation before an AEC security board and lost, but only after President Eisenhower ordered that a solid wall be erected between Oppenheimer and any classified information. Eisenhower did allow the McCarthyite wing of his party (and his administration) to cast Oppenheimer out of the corridors of power; he had always known when to relieve himself of embarrassing subordinates. But he took his advice, just as he had allowed Dulles to exile George Kennan only to bring him back and appropriate his ideas about containment. Oppenheimer might have been persona non grata, but the Chairman of Eisenhower’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Arthur Radford, put an assessment strikingly similar to Oppenheimer’s into more politically correct language in a 1954 War College address: Where there exist two huge world combinations, two tremendous adversaries, and only one of them is ready for peace, there exists a danger of war. At the same time, where there exist two such combinations, both of whom are ready for war, there does exist an opportunity for peace, or at the very least, a deferment of war. Albeit the lesser of two evils, it is better to live in a state of tension than to exhaust ourselves physically and economically in war. 25 In turn-of-the-century Abilene, Kansas, the town’s confident, energetic, unrestrained young men learned that it was best not to push any of the Eisenhower boys around. Six of them survived infancy—Ike was third—and messing with one of them always meant dealing with all of them: a permanently

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learned lesson in collective security that his professional military education reinforced. In that more formal environment, his mentor, Fox Connor— Operations Officer on John Pershing’s World War I staff—was an apostle of alliance warfare, and he articulated three rules to guide a democracy in battle: “never fight unless you have to; never fight alone; never fight for long.”26 A reporter once asked Eisenhower whether he, as a military man, preferred the views of warfare associated with Napoleon or those associated with Carl von Clausewitz. He replied that he was a firm adherent of Clausewitz, an understanding of whom begins with his concept of objectives—the linkage of policy ends, and military means. Eisenhower faced a new and unique problem; in addition to protecting American allies around the world his administration had to provide some protection to Americans now vulnerable to a foreign bombardment for the first time since the Battle of New Orleans. Now that the USSR had the Bomb, preventing the atomic bombing of American cities sat plainly atop the “to do list” for national security; and doing it was not going to be easy. A functioning atomic bomb would explode after it was dropped and there was no way to protect the life and property beneath it from that explosion. A realistic defense required the destruction of the incoming attack vehicles before they reached their launch points. And air power doctrine, the experience of World War II, and the findings of postwar research all maintained that defensive forces would not be adequate to the task. A RAND Corporation study published just before the explosion of the first fusion device in 1952 concluded that an “effective active air defense” was “well within our means,” but pointed out the inevitable limitations on such a system that would preclude “full reliance” on it.27 More pessimistic studies of the same vintage estimated that air defense might bring down only between 10 and 30 percent of an attack force.28 “The bomber will always get through,” ran the refrain. “[N]o system will be capable of effecting prohibitive losses against a well-coordinated, determined offensive force that has prepared itself for the penetration,” Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay reminded his colleagues in 1956.29 Even if only one bomber struggled through to its target, if that bomber carried nuclear weapons, the result would be unacceptable devastation. The only way to defend against an aerial bombing attack with 100 percent certainty was to keep it from being launched in the first place. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said that their policy was the intention “to retaliate instantly against open aggression by Red Armies, so that, if it occurred anywhere, we could and would strike back where it hurts, by means of our own choosing.” The threat of massive retaliation was a strategy to contain Soviet expansion, to keep Soviet (and American) bombers and missiles on the ground, to defer war.30 Hence “the New Look,” a strategic formulation named for (of all things) a Paris fashion show. The primary strike force would be the Air Force, especially LeMay’s Strategic Air Command, standing ready at bases around the world to make “a smoking ruin” out of the Soviet Union if ever it should attack the United States. The nation’s other military forces, the army in particular, complained

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that the country under Eisenhower lacked the means to fight a war too small to warrant a global thermonuclear confrontation. And one of Eisenhower’s recent biographers suggests that that was the President’s intention: knowingly, deliberately denying the generals those means.31 It was part of the plan. If the New Look’s budget spared the country a ruinous burden of spending, it also acted as a brake on any tendency to get into small wars. A small war can grow into a large “general war” rapidly; and Eisenhower genuinely believed that any “general war” with the USSR would be nuclear. By guaranteeing that it would be nuclear, Eisenhower sought to ensure that it would never take place. Regardless of the President’s intention, he had not won, and perhaps had not even sought support from his generals. The Navy and (especially) the Army were famously critical of the New Look, because it would put them in the back seat and at the bottom of the funding stream. Eisenhower was not sympathetic to his former comrades and classmates and the New Look is properly known for its emphasis on (and funding of) a nuclear-armed Air Force. Nevertheless, the Air Force leadership hated both the retaliatory character of the policy and the manner in which Eisenhower had adopted it. A planning staff memo to the Chief of Staff put it bluntly: “When all logic will support the view that to ‘accept the first blow’ in atomic and thermo-nuclear warfare is to accept national suicide, we have been tolerating the pseudo-moralist who insists that we must accept this catastrophe.” For all of Eisenhower’s military gravitas, for all of the administration’s Republican party conservatism, the Air Force argued that accepting a strategy of retaliation was caving in to Soviet propaganda—and it criticized a “bandwagon” effect that had, the memo said, influenced even the military itself. Any retaliation-based defense, the planners argued, would be “the greatest crime against humanity.”32 From the Air Force planners’ point of view, Eisenhower’s policy heralded a “national crisis.”33 They proclaimed loudly that allowing the budget to shape the kind and number of weapons to become available would soon leave the uniformed services with an “unmanageable” security situation. They wanted the Air Force Chief of Staff (and ultimately the Joint Chiefs of Staff) to go on the record advising that Eisenhower’s 1955 fiscal year budget would leave the United States facing defeat in a projected conflict with the Soviet Union. They wanted a JCS recommendation for “the maintenance of military strength adequate to provide effective support to a strong cold war policy,” and a 1955 budget formulated “on the basis of military requirements, rather than fiscal policy.”34 Even stripped of their ideological biases, Air Force leaders did know whereof they spoke regarding the limitations on a strategy of retaliation. Indeed, at the planning level, one could not separate deterrence and war fighting. If the policy was deterrence, duty required the Air Force to conceptualize nuclear war fighting as it mapped the operations that would implement the policy. Indeed, the necessity of retaliation gave the Air Force a claim on resources and a clear mission it didn’t have before 1949. “[I]f war cannot be prevented,” SAC

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commander Gen. Curtis LeMay told his colleagues in 1956, “the Air Force must insure that we win no matter how hollow the victory might be.”35 As LeMay saw it, an “Air Power Battle” with the Soviet Union was already underway, in what he called its deterrent phase, “the day to day appraisal both sides must make to determine relative military strengths.” The combat phase of the battle would begin if deterrence failed (and LeMay really meant when deterrence failed): “There can be no doubt,” he said, “at such time as Russian forces have the ascendancy over our forces, and it is to her advantage to attack us, she will attack.”36 Aircraft still dominated the military environment. The idea of a war begun, fought, won, and lost in an afternoon still belonged to the world of prediction, hyperbole, science fiction, and Air Force public relations. The professionals still had to talk about logistics, and these were complex. A multitude of complex and very variable factors shaped and limited SAC’s ability to mount the kind of strikes its leadership and war plans proposed. Planners had to manage range limits and refueling requirements. The global character of the projected war would require deployment to dispersed launch points (many of them on allied rather than American soil). This would require diplomacy and crisis management in advance and, later, at the worst possible moment. The amount of time it would take to load and unload airplanes on overcrowded fields, even the availability of bunk space and shelter for deployed crews were logistic challenges to be overcome if these missions were to be viable even on paper. Despite the higher performance characteristics of its new jet bombers, the Strategic Air Command would take hours to reach its Soviet targets under the best of circumstances. Air traffic control was a factor, as strikes on perimeter targets would create navigational obstacles for those aiming for the enemy heartland. Similarly, high-speed strike forces would have to avoid radar and surface-to-air missile sites and the “atomic clouds” and electromagnetic turbulence from attacks on those sites meant to clear their way. Sorties would have to be steered away from each other; both on the way in and (for whoever survived) on the way home, to families that might have been incinerated, to bases that might be inoperable, or to whatever unfamiliar fields might still be operational. Then there were the issues of spare parts—repair, refit, and rearmament in the event additional strikes might be required. Inspired by the urgency of its task and by LeMay’s forceful and uncompromising leadership, SAC tried.37 The New Look was supposed to minimize the cost of the Cold War; yet the perceived linkage between deterrence and war fighting meant that the Air Force could still generate enormous force requirements and budget requests. Indeed, the bulk of LeMay’s remarks to the January 1956 Commander’s Conference just quoted was a screed against projected cuts in the bomber force, even when ballistic missiles were slated to replace them as nuclear launchers.38 He was, he said, “just as anxious as anybody to get a missile into the inventory that will improve or increase our capability.” But he could not really get with the program:

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Even if these missiles meet their specifications and time schedules, they could not be depended upon to any acceptable degree in winning the air battle. Furthermore, they could play only a minor role in achieving destruction to the target system as a whole… . We are not “augmenting” the manned bomber force with the missile, we are “replacing” the bomber with a weapon of questionable capability.39 Curtis LeMay is properly perceived as the ultimate bomber commander, and is easily caricatured as such. However, his grievance with Eisenhower’s defense policy was more profound than just that. An intercontinental offensive capability was the key to winning an air war, and the force levels programmed for 1955–1965 would, he maintained, force the United States into a defensive posture and grant the USSR a margin of superiority that would allow it to attack and, after 1959, win.40 Staying on the offensive, maintaining the initiative, was of the essence. Recognizing that dedication to the principles of initiative and the offensive is necessary if one is to understand LeMay; but that same dedication meant that LeMay’s formulation of the Air Power Battle with the Soviet Union always contained an almost completely unspoken subtext. The point of the exercise was the fact that the Soviet Union had an indeterminate number of nuclear weapons and a never accurately estimated bomber force to launch them against the United States and its allies. In such a contest, the traditional principle that the side that fired the first effective shot would retain the advantage throughout the battle was more important than ever. LeMay’s unsurpassed and successful World War II experience allowed him to turn Air Power Doctrine into an article of faith: “No system will be capable of effecting prohibitive losses against a well-coordinated, determined offensive force that has prepared itself for the penetration,” he reminded his colleagues.41 He meant that as a warranty for his own command’s performance against the USSR of course; but (and equally of course) as a description of what was possible, it applied to anything the Soviets might try against the United States. Defense against airborne attack would be important, but ultimately insufficient. A RAND Corporation study published just before the explosion of the first fusion device in 1952 concluded that an “effective active air defense” would be “well within our means,” but pointed out the inevitable limitations on such a system that would preclude “full reliance” on it.42 More pessimistic studies of the same vintage estimated that air defense might bring down only between 10 and 30 percent of an attack force.43 LeMay’s answer to this doctrinal conundrum was the use of bomber doctrine to make a claim on resources for an SAC offensive capability with a priority ahead of the Air Defense Command. Offensive capability was the best defense; and deterrence, the Air Force always maintained publicly, relied on SAC’s ability to launch its bombers before any attackers reached their bases.44 Whether or not the Soviets ever believed the claim that SAC bombers could launch in a matter of minutes, careful American observers, including LeMay

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(at least in private) did not. Early in April 1957, Mose Harvey, a member of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, wrote to his White House colleague Robert Bowie, expressing his unsettling “uncertainty” as to “the most essential of all our military capabilities, that of SAC to withstand a surprise nuclear attack and still have the wherewithal (in an effective sense) to strike back in kind.”45 He had gotten the impression, Harvey said, that virtually every aspect of SAC’s vaunted airborne alert procedures was “a myth.” The heavily touted alert flights were training missions that would have to land and reload before launching on the real thing; reliable dispersal field and overseas basing arrangements did not really exist; and communications with the President (or a successor authority) would not be established within the narrow time frames needed to launch a retaliatory strike. “Leave it to LeMay,” did not constitute facing up to the problem, he concluded. At the same time though, Harvey had learned something else from the general. “While too much significance should probably not be attached to it,” he said: General LeMay in the fall of 1956 in answer to a direct question as to his capability to strike back after a surprise attack suggested real uncertainty and then added something like this, “if we are fools enough to let ourselves get hit by a surprise attack, we will deserve what we get.”46 Harvey had underestimated LeMay. A few weeks later, two leaders of the Gaither Commission—appointed by Eisenhower to evaluate the survivability of the nuclear deterrent and the civil population it existed to protect—judged that by SAC’s own exhibits it would not be able to launch in time to avoid destruction on the ground. They could and they did broach the question with the General directly. “I will know from my own intelligence whether or not the Russians are massing their planes … against the United States,” Le May told them; “and if I come to that conclusion, I’m going to knock the shit out of them before they get off the ground.”47 The remark is, by now, oft-quoted and (once again) easily caricatured; nonetheless, it was very traditional air power doctrine: “We all know that the best way to destroy an enemy air offensive force is to attack it in its most vulnerable situation—on the ground before it is launched,” LeMay had reminded his listeners at the 1956 Commanders’ Conference.48 (The application of this doctrine would become even more acute as ballistic missiles replaced aircraft.) At the same time, though, a pre-emptive first strike was not national policy—at least not public national policy. Reminded of that, LeMay responded (according to one of the Gaither Commission’s interlocutors) that he didn’t care: “it’s not national policy, but it’s my policy.” The other visitor recalled LeMay’s expressing more constitutional views: although what he intended was not the President’s policy, the general said, it was his job to allow the President to change the policy.49 LeMay’s comments would remain secret for decades, as would Harvey’s letter to Bowie. The Gaither Commission did not criticize the way in which

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the general had interpreted “massive retaliation” into a license to prepare for preventive war or a pre-emptive first strike. Rather, it responded to SAC’s 1957 vulnerability by seeking to eliminate or minimize that exposure. In the end, the Gaither Report (officially “Deterrence & Survival in the Nuclear Age”) bore a striking resemblance to NSC-68, not least because Paul Nitze was among its authors. The panel advised Eisenhower to begin crash development programs, upgrade nuclear strike forces, resume funding for conventional military forces, and to build a huge network of bomb shelters for civilians. The price tag called for spending, over five years, an additional sum 116 percent larger than the entire defense budget for fiscal year 1956. As had been the case with NSC-68, the expense would be affordable because it would stimulate the economy.50 As had been the case seven years earlier, the American shock at an unexpected technological accomplishment—in this case launching the first artificial satellite into Earth orbit—generated a public and to some degree an official panic. The greatest difference was at the White House, where Eisenhower maintained his composure far better than Truman had.51 The wheel had spun full circle since 1950, propelled, as it had been under Truman, by the inconvenient fact of a nuclear-armed Soviet Union and now also by the undeniable complexities of mounting a bomber offensive that would girdle the globe. By the spring of 1958, John Foster Dulles himself was arguing, “the strength of the deterrent derived from that strategy [massive retaliation] will rapidly deteriorate as the consequences of putting the doctrine into action become so appalling.”52 The consequences were recommendations for new ways to protect the deterrent force (underground missile silos and ballistic missile-launching submarines LeMay liked to ignore), a renewed search for ways actually to fight a nuclear war, and for ways to limit smaller or regional conflicts so that they would not escalate into “general war.”53 Still, when Dwight Eisenhower’s successor, publicly committed to a strategy dubbed “flexible response,” sought to manage a direct confrontation with the Soviet Union, the first salvoes of a nuclear exchange hung only an eyeball’s blink away from both adversaries. Neither adversary could imagine any way to stop an escalation to general war once a smaller war had begun. In Cuba in 1962, the fear of that consequence drove both sides to (in Nikita Khrushchev’s vivid phrase) “untie that knot.”54 So “massive retaliation,” the strategy, produced a situation in which two enemies feared the perceived consequences of nuclear attacks, “Mutual Assured Destruction.” The strategy did deter nuclear attacks, as was intended. And it continued to deter general war until the Cold War itself passed into history. “Massive Retaliation,” was a strategy, described by Dulles as the intention “to retaliate instantly against open aggression by Red Armies, so that, if it occurred anywhere, we could and would strike back where it hurts, by means of our own choosing.”55 The threat, and the projected range of American responses were never quite as simple as critics still, occasionally, point out. The means available to support the strategy would be limited to a degree that angered the Air Force

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assigned to implement it; and the strategy necessarily implied a primary effort to deter a war with the USSR, not to fight one. The point at issue between Dwight Eisenhower and Curtis LeMay was what to do if deterrence failed. It was LeMay’s job to prepare for a fight if that happened. It could not be otherwise; and LeMay did that job with a legendary forcefulness rooted in the profound experience of his work in World War II. Eisenhower was a bigger (if less colorful) man than LeMay. His World War II experience, like his presidency, included political responsibilities beyond LeMay’s and they incubated a political vision broader and infinitely more acute. Eisenhower understood that nuclear weapons had made LeMay’s thinking obsolete. LeMay’s quest for a victory, “no matter how hollow that victory might be,” had no realistic meaning. “There is no victory except through our imaginations,” Eisenhower once told his Joint Chiefs of Staff.56 The President could be every bit as blunt as his tough-talking bomber commander. The world simply could not fight a nuclear war, Eisenhower told the Gaither panelists. “There just aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.”57

notes 1 Harry Truman, “Radio Report to the American People on the Potsdam Conference,” 9 August 1945, Public Papers of the Presidents, online access 18 February 2014. 2 “Soviet Intentions and Capabilities,” 20 February 1950. PSF, Truman Papers. Online access , 13 February 2014, 1. 3 Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, 1945–1950 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981: Vintage Books rpt., 1982), 280. 4 Ibid., 193–343. For two examples, see Curtis LeMay (C-in-C, SAC) to Lauris Norstad (Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations), 15 December 1948, NSArch NH00183, and RADM W. F. Boone, USN, “The Tenets of Naval War Planning,” Address at the Air War University, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, 18 April 1949, NSArch NH00184. “NSArch” indicates a citation to a document at the National Security Archive, headquartered at George Washington University in Washington, DC and available in digital form. The NH prefix to the accession number indicates the nuclear history collection. 5 Herken, Winning Weapon, 6–7, 30, 32, 36–39, 97–150, 338–342, 391 (n51); John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 62; Peter L. Kuznick, “A Tragic Life: Oppenheimer and the Bomb,” Arms Control Today, (Arms Control Association), July/August 2005, (online access, , August 24, 2011). 6 Hans A. Bethe, “Observations on the Development of the H-Bomb,” in Herbert F. York, The Advisors, Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Superbomb (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976), 1989 edition with a historical essay by Hans A. Bethe. Online access: Federation of American Scientists—United States Nuclear Weapons, Sources and Resources 21 February 2014. 7 I. I. Rabi conversation with John Newhouse, 11/12/1986, cited in John Newhouse, War and Peace in the Nuclear Age (New York: Knopf, 1989), 47–49. 8 Ibid., 79.

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9 Ibid., 75–79. 10 Hans A. Bethe, “Observations on the Development of the H-Bomb.” Bethe wrote plain, readable narrative English prose and non-scientists will find his essay accessible and his argument convincing. However, Bethe wrote in 1954 and “Observations” remained classified for a quarter of a century, until 1980. 11 NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, (April 14, 1950), Naval War College Review, vol. XXVII (May–June, 1975), 51–108. (online access, Vincent Ferrarro, “Resources for the Study of International Relations and Foreign Policy,” , 13 June 2011); NSC 100, Recommended Policies and Actions in Light of the Grave World Situation, 11 January 1951, Department of State, Department of State Publication 8975, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1951. Volume I, National Security Affairs; Foreign Economic Policy (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1979), 7–18 (online access, Vincent Ferrarro, “Resources for the Study of International Relations and Foreign Policy,” , 13 June 2011>). 12 NSC-68, Ibid. IX/D/2. 13 Ibid. 14 Gen. Omar Bradley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff testimony to Congress April 1951. 15 Paul A. Carter, Another Part of the Fifties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). 16 Dwight Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace” (also known as the “Cross of Iron”) address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, 16 April 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library and Museum (access, http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/ all_about_ike/Speeches/, 17 June 2011). 17 Ibid. 18 Eisenhower, Radio Address on the National Security and Its Costs, 19 May 1953, Public Papers of the Presidents, (access John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project [online]. Santa Barbara, CA., http://www.presidency.ucsb. edu/ws/?pid=9854, 17 June 2011). 19 Eisenhower, Address at the Annual Convention of the National Junior Chamber of Commerce, Minneapolis, MN, 10 June 1953, Public Papers of the Presidents, (access John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project [online]. Santa Barbara, CA, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=9871, 17 June 2011). 20 Eisenhower’s policies were, to a degree, protected by his reputation as a military leader and by the greater freedom from “McCarthyite” political attacks he enjoyed as a Republican. Moreover, while the magnitude of change in the Cold War on Eisenhower’s watch was significant, it was, arguably, considerably less than it had been on Truman’s. 21 Kennan’s team included a Navy Captain and an Admiral, two Army Colonels, a State Department European specialist from what is now the Agency for International Development, and a Soviet/Eastern European expert from the CIA. 22 William B. Pickett, ed., George F. Kennan and the Origins of Eisenhower’s New Look: An Oral History of Project Solarium (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies Monograph Series Number 1, Princeton University, 2004: access http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~pickett/Solarium.pdf, 17 June 2011). 23 J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Atomic Weapons and American Policy,” Foreign Affairs, July 1953, p. 529. 24 “Statement of Policy by the National Security Council on Basic National Security Policy (NSC-162) 30 October 1953, Pentagon Papers Gravel Edition, vol. 1, document 18, 412–429 (access Vincent Ferrarro, http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/ intrel/pentagon/doc18.htm, 21 June 2011), paragraph 6(b). The same document,

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25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39

40 41 42 43 44

45 46 47 48 49

125

paragraph 43 alludes to a second aspect of the “New Look,” the use of covert action; but that subject is for another day. Admiral Arthur Radford (Chairman, JCS), “Military Strategy and Defense Planning,” address to students and faculties at the National War College and Industrial College of the Armed Forces, 25 January 1954, NSArch 00084. Mark Perry, Partners in Command: George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in War and Peace (New York: Penguin Press, 2007), 44–47. “Implications of Large Yield Nuclear Weapons,” RAND Corporation, 10 July 1952, 12, NSArchNH00047. L. Douglas Keeney, 15 Minutes: General Curtis LeMay and the Countdown to Nuclear Annihilation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011), 90–91, citing studies by Lt. Col. Harry Pike (USAF Command and Staff College) and Dr. George Valley (MIT). Gen. Curtis LeMay, Remarks at Commanders’ Conference, Wright Patterson Air Force Base, [23–25] January 1956, 2, 8, NSArch NH00086. John Foster Dulles, “A Policy of Boldness,” Life magazine, 19 May 1952, 151 (access, http//books.google.com/books, 27 June 2011). Evan Thomas, Ike’s Bluff: President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World (New York: Little, Brown & Co, 2012), 201–206. Robert M. Lee, Memorandum for the Chief of Staff, United States Air Force, 21 August 1958, NSArch NH00187. Citations like this refer to the National Security Archive, Nuclear History catalogue number. Ibid. Ibid. Gen. Curtis LeMay, Remarks at Commanders’ Conference, Wright Patterson Air Force Base, [23–25] January 1956, 2, NSArch NH00086. Ibid., 3. Joint Chiefs of Staff directive to various military commands, 18 February 1956, NSArch NH00192; L. Douglas Keeney, 15 Minutes: General Curtis LeMay and the Countdown to Nuclear Annihilation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011), 3, 29, 32, 44–45, 51–59, 65–68, 78–79, 96–98, 100, 154–155, 160, 173–174, 177, 186, 219–223, 237–238, 252–256, 279; Herken, Winning Weapon, 294–299, notes 389–391. LeMay, “Remarks,” previously cited, 8–11. Ibid., 9–10. LeMay’s comparisons of US and Soviet force levels noted only liquidfueled ballistic missiles and an early generation of long-distance cruise missiles like Snark. He did not count the Minuteman ICBM or (especially) the submarinelaunched Polaris IRBM. Ibid., 12. How aware was LeMay that the Soviet force levels he cited were vastly over-estimated? That is the subject for another paper. Gen. Curtis LeMay, “Remarks,” previously cited, 8. “Implications of Large Yield Nuclear Weapons,” RAND Corporation, 10 July 1952, 12, NSArchNH00047. Keeney, 15 Minutes, 90–91, citing studies by Lt. Col. Harry Pike (USAF Command and Staff College) and Dr. George Valley (MIT). Ibid.; Col. Kenneth R. Kreps, USAF (Asst. Chief, War Plans Division), “SAC and USAF Briefings for Steering Committee, Security Resources Panel, ODM, Executive Office of the President,” Memorandum for record, 24 September 1957 (included with file dated 29 October 1957), NSArchNH00093, X. Mose Harvey to Robert Bowie, 3 April 1957, NSArchNH00194. Ibid. John Newhouse, War and Peace in the Nuclear Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 280. Gen. Curtis LeMay, “Remarks,” previously cited, 3. Newhouse, War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, previously cited, 280; Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995),

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50

51

52

53 54

55 56 57

568. The interlocutors were Robert Sprague, a defense contractor, and Jerome Wiesner of MIT, a science adviser to Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. Security Resources Panel of the Scientific Advisory Committee, Office of Defense Mobilization in the Executive Office of the President, “Deterrence & Survival in the Nuclear Age,” 7 November 1957 (NSArch, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/ NSAEBB/NSAEBB139/nitze02.pdf, access 12 July 2011). Perhaps some of the resemblance to NSC 68 is due to Paul Nitze’s hand in writing both documents, although his role in writing “Deterrence & Survival” was not as prominent as it had been in the earlier paper. David L. Snead, “Eisenhower and the Gaither Report: The Influence of a Committee of Experts on National Security Policy in the Late 1950s,” PhD dissertation, Department of History, University of Virginia, 1997 (access online, http://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/, 13 July 2011), 205–209. Memorandum of Conversation, Secretary of State Dulles, Secretary of Defense McElroy, assistant secretaries of State and Defense, Secretaries of the three services, members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and White House staffers Generals Cutler and Goodpaster, 7 April 1958, NSArch NH00099, 4. That search, which began with Dulles and his arms control deputy, Gerard Smith, is the subject for another day. Nikita Khrushchev to John F. Kennedy, 26 October 1962, Document 66, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, vol. VI, Kennedy–Khrushchev Exchanges, Department of State Publication 10338 (online access 27 June 2011). John Foster Dulles, “A Policy of Boldness,” Life magazine, 19 May 1952, 151 (access, http//books.google.com/books, 27 June 2011). Newhouse, War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, 106. Gregg Herken, Counsels of War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 116; Newhouse, War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, 120. It is always useful to recall that Dwight Eisenhower was the theater commander who relieved George Patton of his command—twice.

ParT iV

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7 “soLuTion unsaTisfacTory”

According to Harry Truman, an act of Providence had made the United States the first country to develop the atomic bomb. Science fiction editor John W. Campbell didn’t see it that way. “Nature is a blabbermouth,” he was fond of observing. There was no such thing as a scientific secret; nature would provide information to anyone who asked the right questions and the spread of information would lead, inevitably, to the spread of weapons. The President and the Editor believed in common, however, that the atomic bomb was an equalizer. Even a small principality could face down a great empire, if the principality had nuclear weapons. The European Great Powers’ ability to restrain and mediate the poisonous rivalries between the various smaller states would disappear. “I hope to God Russia takes over all of Europe,” Campbell told one of his writers in 1945, “particularly Czechoslovakia and Belgium”: I’m not afraid of Russia with an atomic bomb; Russia wants only one thing—peace and time to develop. I am scared to blazes that Czechoslovakia, where they have everything necessary to make one, will get one. Boy, do those Czechs hate the Poles, Magyars, Germans, Yugos, Italians, Swiss, French, English, Russians, Greeks, Bulgars, Romanians, Slavs and including the Scandinavian [sic]. The Belgians, on the other hand, have all the needed facilities, and hate only the Germans, French, Dutch, and English, with a mild dislike of Russians, Danes, and Poles… And just try scaring a Belgian by telling him his city might be devastated in an atomic war! Like trying to scare an Egyptian peasant with a threat that the land might be flooded.1 “Imagine the chances for world peace if each of the Balkan nations is equipped with Atomic bombs!” he editorialized in January 1946.2 He had published one

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version of that scenario as fiction, as far back as May 1941. That was “Solution Unsatisfactory,” by Robert A. Heinlein. Having first invented nuclear weapons and used them to end World War II in Europe (then in progress), the United States establishes a worldwide dictatorship based on its nuclear monopoly. It does this, it is required to do this because nuclear weapons are too easily made by other nations and these pose a threat first to the United States and then to all of human civilization. An airborne patrol armed with the monopoly’s weapons stands ready over every country in the world, in position to destroy preemptively any one of them building a challenging arsenal. Eventually, a patrol coup d’état defeats the surviving vestiges of American constitutional government, leaving the world living under military dictatorship. It was, author and editor averred, an unsatisfactory solution to the problem.3 The great difficulty with the nuclear equalizer is that it did, in fact, equalize. Even without the ideological and geopolitical conflicts of the “real world” Cold War, Heinlein’s science fiction story maintained that no state with its own nuclear weapons would want to be “equalized” by any newcomer. In that “real world,” the problem of too many countries with too many atomic bombs was both simpler and more complex than Heinlein had it. Nature might be a blabbermouth, but even knowing the “right answers” did not, in 1946, automatically put functioning nuclear weapons in everyone’s hand. Campbell, for one, published his expression of relief in 1948, when, for the very first time, he was able to visit a real nuclear reactor (at what is now Brookhaven National Laboratory, on Long Island). The size, complexity, and obvious expense of the facilities reassured him that nuclear power—and nuclear explosives—would be the province of only the largest—and in Campbell’s opinion, the most responsible—of nations.4 Quite conservative in conventional political terms, Campbell never did develop much understanding (by anyone’s standards) of the Cold War. Like Heinlein, he focused on how he believed mass psychology functioned in politics, not on the history of how statecraft and economics had actually dealt with the first of the 20th century’s great arms races, the naval races before and after World War I. At the beginning of the century, Britain and Germany each sought to guarantee their own control of the North Sea if (or when) war broke out between them. For that purpose each constructed, at immense expense, vast fleets of massive battleships. Parliamentary debates over the policies and the budgets were less than thoughtful; resolute patriotism seasoned with fear of an implacable enemy usually trumped any focus on the merits. Winston Churchill (not yet Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty) put it simply after one naval budget fight: “The militarists proposed building six battleships. The economists proposed building only four; and we compromised and built eight.”5 When the war finally arrived, two great navies and thousands of sailors fought several minor engagements and one epic duel on the high seas—and had no effect on the war. When the war was over, however, the once supreme Royal Navy, the rapidly expanding United

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States Navy, and Japan’s Imperial Navy found themselves facing yet another battleship-building race; a race to control global waters that the United States would inevitably win, but only at a ruinous cost to all three rivals. On the other hand, negotiated disarmament would allow all three powers to avoid spectacular expenses in pursuit of military machines that events had already proven nearly useless. At a well-attended conference in Washington in 1921, American Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes rolled out his dictated disarmament agreement, down to a list of the specific ships he expected navies to destroy. The Washington Disarmament Treaty stopped building on some classes of ships and it dictated capability limits for others. Ironically, the treaty guaranteed major modernization to every fleet on the ocean, as the navies sacrificed their least capable units to the treaty first. The principal instrument of Hughes’ power in the matter was the immense American economy; he could make a credible threat to create an American fleet of 48 battleships. Forty-eight was an arbitrary number with no more foundation than that it would provide one capital ship for each of the states, and a number Britain or Japan could not hope to match. Hughes’ secondary instrument was the code-breaking unit that the War and State Departments based in New York. The staff there was able to read instructions to Japan’s delegation sent by their Cabinet in Tokyo. Aware of Japan’s fallback position, Hughes pushed hard and eventually secured a very grudging Japanese agreement to limit the Imperial battleship navy to only 60 percent the size of its British and American rivals. Hughes aggrieved the British as well; he had persuaded and/or coerced them to abandon their traditional insistence on the Royal Navy’s supremacy. Rehearsing this pre-nuclear history demonstrates some useful aspects of the control of modern armaments. Within its limits, Hughes’ Treaty succeeded; no one built battleships in violation of its construction holiday. Until Japan repudiated the Treaty, none of the three major signatories exceeded its capability limits. Although the Treaty negotiations gave the Army and Navy an appetite for signals intelligence, Hughes’ successor, Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of State, Henry Stimson, felt the peace sufficiently preserved that he could suspend State Department funding for the code-breaking operation that had read Japan’s treaty instructions so profitably.6 His justification for that decision, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,” has become an icon of official cluelessness that completely belies the actual nature of Stimson’s career; but the phrase does indicate what Stimson thought he was working with: the degree to which the modernized world was maintaining the peace, and the benefits of its doing so.7 Hughes’ version of arms control was not derailed by technology but by politics. Events eventually transformed the political character of the contracting parties who had joined the treaty when it was written—and the character of Germany, which was bound by other agreements. However, if arms races, disarmament, and arms control were familiar elements of the international environment as nuclear weapons entered the world, arms-

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control agreements, including most specifically the Washington Treaty and its successors, were read into the mythology surrounding appeasement that emerged during World War II. The fact that the world was unable to preserve the treaties as political circumstances changed became part of a larger political argument that blamed even the desire for arms-control agreement for the inadequate capability to confront and defeat aggression. Thus, even as the world confronted public shock at the destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both sides in the Cold War were able to escape pleas for nuclear arms control that neither of them wanted to implement. The first nuclear arms-control plan was American; Henry Stimson shoved it onto a not-very-interested Truman administration’s agenda as his last act in public office, at a ceremonial meeting of the Cabinet President Truman had called to celebrate his 80th birthday. Lack of interest did not mean lack of talent applied to the problem, however. Secretary of State Byrnes (an opponent of allowing any limits on American development of its post-Hiroshima nuclear monopoly) gave responsibility for developing a plan to take to the United Nations Organization to his deputy (and ultimately, successor) Dean Acheson. Acheson brought in James Conant, Vannevar Bush, Leslie Groves, and John McCloy, a Wall Street lawyer who had served as Stimson’s Assistant Secretary during the war. For scientific advice, Acheson turned to a committee headed by David Lilienthal, formerly general manager of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and Robert Oppenheimer. To them, he added Charles A. Thomas of Monsanto (which operated the uranium-separation plant at Oak Ridge), Chester I. Barnard of New Jersey Bell Telephone, and Harry Winne, VP for Engineering of General Electric. The two committees focused on the manufacture of nuclear fuel—highly enriched uranium or plutonium, materials that can sustain a chain reaction while maintaining mass small and light enough to fit into a launch vehicle. This was the beginning of a pattern that continues even as this is written. Oppenheimer’s idea for what became known as the Acheson–Lilienthal Plan had three objectives: to stop the spread of nuclear weapons to nations that did not (as of 1946) yet possess them; to guarantee that nuclear arms-control agreements did not leave nations that did have nuclear weapons less secure than they were before the agreements; and to insure that the benefits of “the peaceful uses of atomic energy in non-weapon contexts (electric generating stations, for example) become available to nations that did not possess them at the beginning of this process.” His mechanism was control of the nuclear fuel cycle. Nuclear chain reactions are dual-use tools, with peaceful and non-peaceful applications. So too are the various apparatus used to create and control them. This poses very large problems for arms controllers because one cannot automatically assume that even possession of a stockpile of fissile material or of the machinery to make it is a sign of impending nuclear aggression. Oppenheimer’s solution was to create an International Atomic Energy Agency (iaea) under the United Nations. The iaea would control “the dangerous aspects” of nuclear

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power, the fuel cycle; nations needing fuel for peaceful purposes would get it from the iaea. Accounting procedures and periodic inspections would keep track of the fuel disbursed, to whom, and for what purpose. This might not prevent proliferation, Oppenheimer said, but it would give warning if some nation sought to build a nuclear arsenal after the initial agreement. In the 21st century, some of the details have changed; some of the apparatus is different. The possible scenarios and the casts of characters are certainly transformed. However, the control of the nuclear fuel cycle remains central to any control of the spread of nuclear weapons to new owners. And controlling the fuel cycle to block weapons manufacture remains problematic because the fuel cycle is dual-use technology.8 However, if Acheson, Lilienthal, Oppenheimer and their compatriots gave American diplomats a useful analysis of the problem and a workable proposal to resolve it, they had not increased anyone’s real interest in either the problem or the proposed resolution. Truman and Byrnes did not send any of their committee members or their scientific consultants to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission that was going to consider nuclear arms control in 1946. They named Bernard Baruch as the United States representative. A self-made stock speculator who administered war production in World War I and advised Woodrow Wilson and FDR on economic matters, Baruch was an instant disaster as an arms-control diplomat. Ignorant, and vain, according to David Lilienthal, Baruch presented to the UN his own plan rather than the work Oppenheimer and Lilienthal had put together. A successful capitalist as a matter of principle, Baruch was also an investor in companies that owned uranium mines and he would be directly affected by any program to make uranium the sole province of an international public agency. He refused to believe that the USSR could acquire nuclear weapons in fewer than twenty years, and thus did not believe that the situation as it stood in 1946 required urgent attention, immediate resolution, or the abandoning of the American monopoly of nuclear weapons. He re-wrote the original proposal to include a provision allowing the United States to retain all of its nuclear weapons, as a deterrent and as an element of “condign punishment” against any nations that sought to violate the pact and build its own weapons. Finally, the Baruch Plan sought to eliminate the Soviet veto from the iaea, although it had become the standard in the UN’s agencies. Whatever the Soviets might have done with the original Acheson–Lilienthal plan, there was never any chance that the Soviet Union would accept the Baruch Plan, even as the basis for negotiation. Some, including Oppenheimer, thought that the plan might have been created for the Soviets to reject; Soviet unwillingness to go along might put the blame on them and fuel American popular support for “that growing number who want to put the country on a war footing.” The United States also ran its first postwar nuclear tests, Operation crossroads, at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, while the discussion at the UN was still underway. Testing weapons in the middle of arms-control talks is not unheard of, but hardly “diplomatic.” On this occasion, the United States

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was saying that, whatever the treaty controls, the United States had no intention to limit development of its principal strategic advantage. As for its Soviet rivals, the USSR had no intention to allow inspection for treaty compliance to reveal how weak they were. And they would accept no limits on nuclear weapons until they possessed a Soviet arsenal to match the American one. Years earlier, when Niels Bohr first reached Los Alamos during the war, he asked Oppenheimer and the others a simple question. “Is it big enough?” Would the gadget be big enough to confront humanity thoroughly with the possibility of self-destruction, to the point at which the behavior of nations would change? When he first asked it, Bohr’s question had no answer. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki made Bohr’s hypothesis, complementarity, the subject of a cruel real-world experiment. Could the destructive power of nuclear weapons actually initiate changes in the way peoples and nations sought to settle their differences? Surveying the world at the end of World War II, a later generation’s answers to Bohr’s questions would have to be both no and yes. The first fission bombs were used in the most shocking manner imaginable, and, despite censorship efforts on the part of the United States government, the horrible devastation those bombs wrought on the human victims at the target became clearly known relatively quickly. The widespread shock was visible, audible, palpable. In the popular culture and in the worlds of dissident politics the costs of nuclear war became an item of concern and a cause for action very quickly, within a generation.9 Yet in the world of states and their leaders, the nuclear arms races proceeded essentially undiminished in any quarter from 1939 through 1962. As Paul Boyer noted, during the period of American monopoly, Americans afraid of atomic war could make some choices about where they would invest their hopes to avoid one. Some of them offered the hope of a unified world government, “one world or none.” Opposition to the Cold War and support for closer and less confrontational relations with the Soviet Union were distinctly minority positions, but candidates supporting those positions were on ballots. Or Americans could invest their hopes, their votes, and their tax dollars in a nuclear-armed military, which they did. What enemy would strike the US while facing an atomic-armed American retaliation? However, the end of the monopoly foreclosed all of those as avenues of hope. The end product of a nuclear-armed military now would be an exchange, nuclear destruction at home as well as “over there.” The iconic response to the appearance of nuclear weapons on both sides of the Cold War divide was the Hydrogen Bomb, the larger yielding fusion weapon. At that point, a global confrontation with an expanded concept of nuclear destruction did generate an upsurge of popular activity aimed at doing something to prevent it. This provides an instance of experimental support for Bohr’s application of his complementarity hypothesis to the questions of nuclear arms control. Thus, the answer to Bohr’s 1944 question, “Is it big enough?” may be that the first fission bombs alone were not big enough to drive Bohr’s revolution in international

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affairs. However the larger fusion weapons were “big enough” to do so. From that point of view, the most influential of nuclear explosions in that era was the second “shot” in the test series named Castle, or, in the military services’ phonetic alphabet, Castle bravo. bravo was the first test of a fusion bomb that could be weaponized, made small enough and reliable enough to put in an airplane. It also became the largest device the United States ever fired. bravo became historically important when it exploded with more than twice the blast yield its makers expected it to have; estimated to yield the blast equivalent of 6 million tons of TNT, the gadget yielded about 15 million tons equivalent when it was ignited on Bikini Atoll at the end of February 1954. Test commanders had declared a restricted area of 50,000 square miles around Bikini and it wasn’t big enough. The blast was so much larger than anticipated that it damaged facilities and observation ships placed where scientists calculated that they would be out of danger. Ralph Lapp, a Manhattan Project veteran and Head of the Nuclear Physics Division of the Office of Naval Research, estimated that bravo deposited “fallout”—radioactive dust and debris produced and thrown into the atmosphere by the explosion— over an elliptical area 50 miles wide and 200 miles long, somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000 square miles. If bravo had been dropped on Washington, DC, its radioactive plume would have enveloped all of Maryland in fatal radiation and killed more people than the original detonation would have. Most important of all, bravo had independent witnesses. For the very first time, people who understood what was happening and who were free to speak publicly about it were exposed to the aftermath of a nuclear explosion. At the moment bravo went off, Daigo Fukuryu Maru (No. 5 Lucky Dragon), a Japanese tuna fishing boat, was sailing 85 miles east of Bikini. The crew knew what a pika-don was before they saw the sun rising to the west of their position. Their small ship was where it was supposed to be; they understood that they were well outside the Americans’ declared restricted area. They did, nonetheless, experience a small “snowstorm” of radioactive dust and ash after the blast, and by the time Lucky Dragon returned home, several of her crew were displaying symptoms of radiation sickness. American officials tried to minimize the importance of the exposure to radiation, but the evidence and the victims were now in Japan, being examined and treated by a group of physicians familiar with radiation-induced disease, and among a population still divided in what they thought of Americans. Anti-Americanism was clearly part of the story as a political or ideological matter. So too was American anti-Communism; Secretary of State John Foster Dulles suggested that Fukuryu Maru was “a Red spy outfit,” sent out to fabricate something that would embarrass the United States or the then-new US–Japan security agreements. Yet undeniable facts were indisputably present and their implications were beyond doubt. The Eisenhower administration first had to explain a blast more than twice as large as was expected. That effort went badly. No one knew the real reasons why the blast had been so large, and all the good reasons seemed to cause more

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public relations difficulties than they resolved.10 Some government leaders’ efforts at reassurance backfired. For example, as President Eisenhower told a press conference: “It is quite clear that this time something must have happened that we have never experienced before, and must have surprised and astonished the scientists.” His off-the-cuff remark left the very ominous implication that bravo had gotten seriously out of control. Releasing what he intended to be a reassuring statement about radiation from fallout, AEC Chair Lewis Strauss got into a disturbing Q&A with reporter Richard Wilson of the Cowles magazine chain: strauss:

Well, the nature of an H-bomb, Mr Wilson, is that, in effect, it can be made to be as large as you wish, as large as the military requirement demands, that is to say, an H-bomb can be made—large enough to take out a city. (A chorus of “What?”) To take out a city, to destroy a city. wilson: How big a city? strauss: Any city. wilson: Any city, New York? strauss: The metropolitan area, yes.11 Announcing an exchange like that, about a story like that, even the stodgy New York Times could allow itself a melodramatic headline: “H-bomb can wipe out any city.” Strauss had sought to quiet fears of radioactive fallout and had instead raised the specter of a nuclear holocaust. One consequence of that was an increase in the number of critics of the tests and of nuclear weapons. A swelling chorus began—first in Western Europe and Britain, then in Asia and, finally, in the United States—calling for an end to nuclear weapons and, somewhat separately, for an end to the testing of nuclear weapons. As early as April 1954, less than two months after bravo, the White House was receiving 100 cards and letters a day calling for an end to testing and a ban on the possession of Hydrogen bombs. Some of that stream was orchestrated, arriving on pre-printed postcards. Those went to the FBI, who set off to see if it had been part of some Communist plot. The chorus grew louder after photos and films taken of the very first H-bomb test, the Ivy mike shot in November 1952, were published that same month. The National Security Council tried to manage the public impact, by allowing the export from the United States of the motion picture film shot in black-and-white but trying to block export of the four-color still photographs that ran in Life magazine. Presidential Press Secretary Jim Hagerty admitted in his diary, “All hell broke loose last night and this AM over H-bomb release.” All of this made life very difficult for the Eisenhower administration. The “New Look,” indeed the whole “massive retaliation” strategy that guided defense policy, was dependent on nuclear weapons. The American military services

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could—and did—make their case that they had to test in order to maintain the effectiveness of the nuclear forces. Their affiliated scientists and engineers made the same case, led now by Edward Teller, then becoming very visible as an Air Force consultant. At the same time, just as unquestioning support for continuing to make and test all sorts of weapons was beginning to erode, the opportunities and the requirements of new technological weapons required testing. All the trends in the nuclear weapons business were following the progress and anticipating the arrival of the ballistic missile. Missile payloads had to be very much smaller and lighter than the gravity bombs that flew in a B-52’s cavernous bomb bays. Even the Army, the most “conventional” of the services, sought to fight equipped with nuclear-fueled artillery shells. The services needed to test weapons for a variety of battlefields: fully air-droppable Hydrogen gravity bombs, ballistic missile warheads, shells for the atomic artillery, depth charges and torpedo warheads, and so forth. American weapons’ advantages over their Soviet counterparts were the fruit of advances in miniaturization technologies and these too had to be tested. The post-Soviet records re-opened the controversy between those who believe that the nuclear powers might have foregone the development of fusion weapons through policy and/or diplomacy and those who believe, with Lewis Strauss, that unilateral renunciation of fusion weapons by the US would have led only to unilateral Soviet possession of them. In view of the imminent mating of nuclear explosives and ballistic missiles, an international arms race was almost a certainty. The Arms Race materialized, but the elimination of the American lead in numbers of available nuclear weapons would take a while. At the same time, from the American point of view strange things were beginning to show up. For example, the weapons and the testing of them, were becoming unpopular. Perhaps that was to be expected when the unpopularity was overseas. But in the United States? Criticism of American government policies and actions was not yet fashionable (as it would be in the 1960s), but it was becoming more socially and politically acceptable. It would be a long time before American leaders or the American public understood why. The American shorthand memory recalls the decade between the invasion of South Korea and the shooting-down of Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 by borrowing the title of a television situation comedy: Happy Days. It is not an accurate identifier; the 1950s were very troubled days in both nuclear powers; and the opening of the H-bomb phase of the Cold War coincided with some turbulent and divisive events descended from the rest of the world’s history. Both the Soviet Union and the United States were passing through very significant changes in their respective ruling groups at the same moments that those groups had to lay out defense plans of the greatest possible significance for their societies. Some were nuclear-related, like the AEC hearings that eventually stripped Robert Oppenheimer of his security clearance, but not all. The day of the bravo test, five Puerto Rican nationalists fired pistols from the Spectators’ Gallery onto the floor of the House of Representatives and wounded five members

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of Congress. In the Senate, the Army–McCarthy Hearings played out, on live television, at the same time as the bravo controversy. In the same spring, in what most Americans still knew as French Indochina, troops of the Vietnamese Independence League—the Viet Minh—trapped a French paratroop division in the remote valley of Dien Bien Phu and the defeat of France’s Southeast Asian colonies was at hand. At home, the Supreme Court struck down state laws segregating public schools by race. A few months later, Ms Rosa Parks’ arrest for violating Montgomery, Alabama’s bus segregation laws set off a year-long bus boycott that lasted until the Supreme Court declared that segregating the buses was unconstitutional. The completeness of these legal victories over this most enduring aspect of American life would be matched only by the power and short-term success of the Gandhian methodology that helped achieve them and the violence and political resistance to them that would characterize the balance of the 20th century. The Soviets were hardly in calmer circumstances. The post-1953 Soviet leadership might denounce Stalin’s legacy, but its members could hardly forget Stalin’s dying curse upon them: without him, he said, the capitalists would wring their necks like so many chickens. Post-Soviet histories, based on Soviet documents, note that Khrushchev and his colleagues in the Presidium—the collective leadership of the Soviet Communist party—were grimly aware that they had not fulfilled Communist promises—promises they wanted to keep—of material plenty for the working class. In 1953, they passed through a year of bitter and bloody rebellion in East Germany, rebellion that they bloodily repressed. Two years later, they would face—and face down—an even greater challenge in Hungary. At the same time, while the public focus was on the largest nuclear weapons, like bravo, the smallest, the “tactical” weapons intended to backstop nato’s ground forces were just then beginning to arrive at their forward bases in Britain and Western Europe. By the end of the happy days, Western Europe was on its way to full economic recovery from World War II, but it lay completely exposed to Soviet medium- and intermediate-range missiles and their nuclear warheads. In return, the westernmost portions of the USSR, the most devastated part of the country in World War II, were similarly covered by the American intermediate-range tHor and jupiter missiles stationed in three nato countries: Britain, Italy, and Turkey. But global geography still protected the United States from the Cold War’s European cockpit; the Soviet Union had no equivalent of the United States’ nato “forward bases.” It would be a while before Soviet intercontinental-range ballistic missiles could threaten the US from Soviet soil. Europe, despite its division and despite the two blocs to which each sector nominally belonged, was thus in a position analogous to Poland’s between the two World Wars. Located between two adversaries, Europeans had to worry about more than what each of their neighbors wanted of them and might be willing to take by force. They also worried about what either of their neighbors might do with them if and when one of them crashed through their backyards to get at each other. In East Germany in 1953 and in Hungary in 1956, the Soviet

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Union brutally suppressed European revolution against its rule. Led by the United States, nato was armed with nuclear weapons deployed in an implicit and never-admitted policy of “first use” against a feared Soviet attack. Both powers clearly demonstrated their willingness to use Europe as a battlefield and Europeans as pawns in conflicts that might be solely between themselves. The gigantic bi-polar conflict, was, in fact, far more complex than it appeared to the American public, and it grew more complex as Europe rebuilt from war’s destruction and as colonialism passed more thoroughly from the scene. Perhaps the one certainty in the speculative projections for World War III was that when it was over most of Europe would be in ruins once again, assuming that any Europeans remained to appreciate that outcome. The situation was not symmetrical, of course; few Western European governments felt comfortable being so thoroughly led by the United States. Western European leaders were free enough to question many aspects of their situation and to challenge the direction of American leadership in many ways. They could also wonder how safe they could be as they relied upon the United States’ willingness to risk nuclear retaliation in order to defend Europe against the USSR. For that reason, Western Europe developed two indigenous nuclear military forces at least partially independent of American military control. And for that same reason, Western Europe was the point of origin for a global popular political movement aimed at banning the testing and eventually even the possession and use of nuclear weapons. The partnership between the Soviet Union and China, which the Soviets insisted that they would lead, quickly developed cracks that became ravines running along very similar lines. Western Europe and China alike had their own interpretations of ideology and interest that were very different from each other, but which were also different from those of the nominal senior partners on either side of the Cold War. Like Britain and France, China found it useful to build its own very small nuclear arsenal, free of Soviet controls. Unwilling to tolerate anything like the anti-nuclear protests that were developing in Europe and Britain, the Chinese involved themselves in the international “non-aligned movement,” a group of governments, mostly of newly independent African and Asian states that sought development assistance free of political strings to either Cold War camp.12 The non-aligned group could criticize nuclear policy in the first and second worlds (the nato bloc and rich capitalists, the Warsaw Pact and the Communists) while agitating for development assistance to the third world (politically neutral and just beginning to modernize). At the same time, of course, the Chinese went on designing their own nuclear weapons and constructing the industrial infrastructure needed to build more of them. Dissident leaders in the nato orbit could voice their complaints more freely than their Warsaw Pact counterparts could; but there were dissidents in the Soviet bloc, some of them in power locally (or temporarily). Tito in Yugoslavia, Mao Zedong in China, Imre Nagy in Hungary, Alexander Dubçek in Czechoslovakia were the best known in the nato world; but there were others all over the world,

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some of them well known, others who would become known (especially Andrei Sakharov and the Soviet counterparts to scientists like Rudolph Peierls, Robert Wilson, and Oppenheimer). The dissident leaders would be counted after the factionalization and personal struggles in the Soviet leadership were brought into the calculations; the dissident scientists and other citizens would have to wait longer. Africa and Asia had endured long and unpleasant experiences as Western Europe’s subordinate colonies; yet much of the colonial world refused to look to Moscow for geo-political leadership, advice, or support. Much of the world that did soon changed its opinion. Yet the problem of nuclear weapons remained, for Cold War neutrals as well as for belligerents. bravo offered dramatic proof that nuclear blasts could be large enough to render all modern concepts of neutrality meaningless. As much as anyone, Europe’s turn-of-the-20th-century warriors had sought to erect barriers between the horrors of war and the lives and property of noncombatant civilians. Military and Naval officers had been full participants in the series of international conferences that produced the various Hague and Geneva Conventions. Moreover, recent scholarship emphasizes the degree to which the modern laws of warfare descend from codes of conduct proclaimed by Abraham Lincoln to Union troops during the American Civil War. Nevertheless, beginning in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, armies learned how to apply what William Sherman called the hard hand of war directly to the populations of enemy nations. Indeed, a large part of the story of war in the 20th century tells of how technology increasingly and more easily renders those barriers— physical, legal, and ethical—irrelevant. As an airplane leapfrogs a line of troops or fortifications, new 20th- and 21st-century technology frequently aims to leapfrog the standards of earlier military formulations. Armies from Germany, France, and Britain pioneered the use of machine guns against tribal adversaries who did not segregate their military forces from their people. Long-range artillery, submarine-launched torpedoes, and the world’s first major aerial bombing campaigns had all marked World War I. Poison gas and biological weaponry were staples of military research from World War I onwards. Radioactive poisons cast high into the atmosphere, to be borne hundreds of miles on the wind, will cross borders and will do damage to people whose political connections to the conflict are little more than zero. bravo also offered dramatic illustration that, although a nuclear war would be infinitely more destructive than the spreading of radioactive fallout through the aftermath of tests, the preparations for nuclear war were themselves dangerous to people and their surroundings. Especially in the Anglo-American–European world such realizations ignited popular fears that were both old and new. People were afraid, with reason, that their governments would not listen to them, would not take heed of their fears. Governments in kind were somewhat afraid of their people, with equal reason. Western European governments were also afraid that as the world’s nations were swept into hostile alliances they would all be governed in the interests of the two senior partners, the US and the USSR, and might not

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necessarily be protected by those partners’ nuclear deterrent forces. In practice, this meant that the emergent anti-nuclear weapons movement would attract people and political groups usually identified as left of the political center, even before the Soviets mobilized their international Communist parties to spice up the movement’s critique of American arsenals and policies. Also in practice, the looming shadow of nuclear war pushed a larger, broader constituency into the anti-nuclear movement for fear that political forces beyond European control would destroy what Europeans were laboriously rebuilding, for reasons that had little to do with Europe. Finally, as afraid of losing their seats “at the top table” as they were of anything, British leaders authorized the creation of a British fission bomb, eventually of a fusion device as well, and the design of British ships and aircraft to take them to enemy targets. Charles DeGaulle and France, and then China too, would soon follow suit. In the United States, at least effectively, people became more afraid of nuclear war, less afraid of being charged with a lack of patriotism. Successive waves of civil defense debates and public shelter drills seemed to generate more criticism of military policy and of civil defense than they did readiness for a crisis. Nevertheless, a hostile political process remained athwart efforts to do anything with nuclear weapons except make them bigger in yield, more numerous, and easier to launch. The surge of radiation research done after bravo produced some decidedly mixed scientific and political results. Radiation was dangerous and nuclear tests could spread it all over the globe; disclaimers from the Defense Department or the Atomic Energy Commission in the United States persistently denied what the records plainly showed. After bravo, and after the Soviet Union indicated for the first time that it would discuss an international arms-control agency with real powers to inspect arsenals, President Eisenhower appointed Harold Stassen his special assistant on disarmament (“Secretary of Peace” according to the press). Stassen had seen modern war in World War II; a pre-war Governor of Minnesota with a naval reserve commission, he had become Admiral William Halsey’s Flag Secretary in the South Pacific. He returned to be part of the San Francisco Conference delegation that established the United Nations. Soon after taking the new job with Eisenhower, he came to a most significant conclusion; it was no longer feasible, he thought, to eliminate all nuclear weapons. Instead of disarmament, Stassen would pursue arms control, regulating the arms race through a variety of measures and inspection protocols would provide control and insure against the most dangerous and destructive event, a surprise nuclear attack against the United States. The experience of the pre-World War II naval disarmament conferences provided examples of how such arms-control agreements might work—and about how they might go wrong. Stassen and his new staff didn’t want to be drawn into the spreading debate over the danger or lack of danger in radioactive fallout; however, a test ban suddenly became something “do-able,” at a time when things that could be done to cope with the rushing progress of nuclear weapons were in short

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supply. The proposal was feasible because the seismograph could detect large explosions at great distances, and, therefore, monitor compliance with armscontrol agreements without sovereignty-violating on-site inspections. The AEC-funded physicist David Inglis had, in effect, invented the first version of what later generations would call “national means of verification.” A test ban would not be disarmament, but Inglis said, “It would slow down the rate of development of new techniques of offense and allow the techniques of defense to come closer to catching up.” This was akin to Admiral Radford’s thoughts about the “deferment” of war under a “massive retaliation” regime. Inglis also noted that an agreement on banning easily detected tests would make a good first step, something easy to do that would create trust to support taking a second step, something more difficult to accomplish. It would provide a way to break the existing stalemate between the two nuclear powers and help create a new environment conducive to additional agreements. Finally, he said, it would also make nuclear proliferation (the possession of nuclear weapons by nations other than the US, USSR, and UK) impossible. No one would dare put thermonuclear weapons into their arsenals without testing them first. However, President Eisenhower didn’t share Inglis’ opinion of the test ban’s virtues without a comprehensive disarmament agreement and the Soviets did not accept the fallback mutual aerial inspection proposition (“Open Skies”) that Stassen had developed along with Eisenhower’s national security adviser, Nelson Rockefeller. There (along with the U-2) matters stood until the Presidential Election, when former Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson ran against Dwight Eisenhower for a second time. The Democrats had their talking points, but Eisenhower remained popular. The country was at peace and people trusted Eisenhower as their defender. General of the Army Eisenhower’s weight and standing on foreign relations and national security matters was great enough that he could get away with policies for which more liberal politicians would be pilloried. Even I. F. Stone, a well-known and (eventually) well-regarded left-wing journalist, endorsed Eisenhower for a second term, on the grounds that he was better able to keep the peace than Stevenson was. Then, in August 1956, two years after bravo and after two years of supporting a test ban, the Soviet Union ended a long informal moratorium that both powers had observed and began a new series of nuclear tests. Eisenhower’s official response was to lambaste both the secrecy with which the Soviets had conducted the test and the hypocrisy that allowed them to test after all their rhetoric about a test ban. The Soviets replied with propagandistic disclaimers, but also with proposals for a test ban agreement as a first step towards a more comprehensive agreement. Soviet Premier Bulganin also said that enforcement could be undertaken without on-site inspections because long-range detection would identify any tests. The Atomic Energy Commission and the Defense Department opposed any discussions; but Harold Stassen had a brief to consider it, and John Foster Dulles would have to deal with the international backlash if the US simply refused to discuss a

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Soviet proposal that seemed plausible (even if only superficially so). Briefly, the administration was doing what it would need to do if it was to reverse its position on a test ban treaty. Then, in a campaign appearance, Stevenson called for a test ban treaty. Stevenson, addressing the annual convention of the American Legion in Los Angeles, tried to challenge Eisenhower on the President’s strongest issue by proposing two great changes: he wanted to end the Cold War draft and “halt further testing of large nuclear devices, conditional upon adherence by the other atomic powers to a similar policy.” The proposal to end the draft got most of the attention, and in the furor that followed, some newspapers ignored his test ban proposals entirely. Eisenhower joined the Republican Party line that a test ban would be, in effect, unilateral (because the Soviets would cheat), a threat to the current US lead in nuclear matters, and a cause of “confusion at home and misunderstanding abroad.” Finally, Eisenhower didn’t want nuclear arms control debated in a partisan forum and he resented Stevenson’s making a test ban the subject of that kind of debate. The President cited the distortion of information that occurred in such a context without mentioning that most of the identifiable distortions had originated in his own administration and in the Republican caucuses in Congress.13 Rumors published in the press suggested that both parties were acting as they were in order to pre-empt what the other was saying. Stevenson’s language in the proposal was specific: this was to be a multi-lateral agreement. Other countries (but he did not specify which) had signaled their readiness to join it. Nevertheless, the day after Stevenson spoke, Vice-President Nixon addressed the same American Legion audience. He charged that to do what Stevenson advocated would be “like telling police officials that they should discard their weapons provided the lawbreakers would offer to throw away their machineguns.” Thomas Dewey, the Republican presidential candidate in 1944 and 1948 described Stevenson as impulsive and ill-informed, someone who could plunge the world into a third world war through “one act of weakness, one act based on misinformation.” The Republicans sent a so-called “truth squad” around the country highlighting how the Communist newspaper The Daily Worker had endorsed Stevenson’s proposal. Attorney General Brownell, the author of the administration’s 1957 Civil Rights Act, declared that the test ban would “bring joy to the hearts of those who expect to wipe out the free nations one by one.”14 McCarthyism in the United States was not gone even though McCarthy himself, just shy of fifty years of age, would be dead within a year. As the argument went on, it became an increasingly prominent point in the national campaigns, which of course included races for the US House of Representatives as well as the US Senate. And in which Eisenhower retained his seat in the White House, while the Republicans lost control of both houses of Congress. Robert Divine has given some thought to the political impact the test ban debate had on the 1956 elections. On the one hand, Stevenson’s proposal seemed vague and ill defined, uncertain whether its objective was to hold back the dogs

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of war or to protect the atmosphere from radioactive fallout. Therefore, in some ways, Stevenson’s support of arms control enhanced Eisenhower’s already good chances for re-election. On the other hand, after a few weeks of his low-key advocacy followed by the ferocious and deceptive attacks from the Republicans, Stevenson doubled down on his test ban proposals to increasingly favorable public responses on a west coast campaign swing. People were afraid of nuclear war and nuclear tests. The response was encouraging, earning Stevenson the largest campaign demonstration of the year after a speech in Oakland.15 The critics tried to sneer away the whole concept of a self-enforcing test ban—as if one could hide even a small atomic explosion. The Republicans (except for Eisenhower) kept arguing that a test ban would be an act of unilateral disarmament on the part of the US. Finally, a letter from Soviet Premier Bulganin essentially accepting Stevenson’s proposals and noting that one would not need troublesome onsite inspections to verify observance of the agreement. Eisenhower’s response was scathing, including calling Bulganin’s reference to Stevenson’s position as interference in the domestic affairs of the United States. Stevenson’s reply was equally hostile to Bulganin and his offer but, as the weekly magazine Newsweek reported, Bulganin had administered a “kiss of death with an electorate hugely mistrustful of Russia’s intentions.”16 Divine observes that it should surprise no one that Stevenson’s challenge to Eisenhower on a national security issue failed. Rather, the real surprise of the incident was the degree to which it came close to succeeding before Bulganin’s letter quashed the whole debate. Divine concludes by giving credit to Stevenson’s “remarkable feat of public education.”17 One does wonder, however, what lay behind the Soviet proposition. Whatever the party line in Moscow, the Soviet military at that time owned the world’s second largest nuclear arsenal and it had no intention of blocking its own path to first with inconvenient treaties. Were they thinking: why not reap the benefits of their propaganda line and torpedo an inconvenient initiative based on it at the same time? The documents the Russian government has made available to scholars do not yet answer that question. However, the post-bravo test ban debate demonstrated that powerful people opposed to any limitations on the procurement of nuclear weapons existed within both Cold War adversaries. In 1958, for example, as the Soviet Union proposed monitoring a ban on nuclear tests with a chain of seismographs spaced at roughly 1,000-kilometer (620 miles) intervals, official US government sources maintained that American instruments failed to detect the American rainier test (the first underground explosion) at ranges greater than 250 miles. To demonstrate the falsehood of the US government release on the shot, left-wing reporter I. F. Stone (blacklisted and barred from the usual Washington news venues) famously visited the Coast and Geodetic Survey, where “they hadn’t seen a reporter since Noah hit Mount Ararat.” At the government’s own professional (and very non-political) seismographic laboratory he learned that several recent American explosions had been detected by American instruments at the College, Alaska station, 2,300 miles from rainier, distances great enough to

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accommodate the Soviet proposal. The theme of “unworkability” had come from Edward Teller, his associates at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, and their clients in the Air Force.18 Teller would later suggest that the Soviets would test their nuclear explosives on the far side of the moon if necessary, to conceal their inevitable cheating on a test ban treaty. He left unanswered the question of why the USSR would cheat on a nuclear test ban with a moon shot, perhaps the one human enterprise necessarily as noticeable as a nuclear explosion. As the 1950s became the 1960s, the efforts to freeze, or reverse, or re-direct the nuclear arms race were increasingly pushed from outside the nato governments. The British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and its counterparts—like the American Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (sane)—emerged during the coldest years of the Cold War. In Britain, the political environment was bounded by the many traumas and problems generated by the end of Britain’s empire. These included a straitened budget and the postwar introduction of socialist institutions. The failed effort to preserve imperial power by seizing the Suez Canal in 1956 simply highlighted Britain’s new normal. It was tethered to the United States without any real guarantee that the United States would support Britain in a pinch, or would consider British interests when leading the UK (and the rest of Europe) where it wanted to go. Developing its own nuclear forces amidst political controversy, Britain was also producing a popular movement that gestated outside the channels of established national party politics, but which then doubled back to seize power through victories in local political establishments. In the United States, Joe McCarthy’s censure by the US Senate was one factor making the appearance of a new peace movement possible, though bravo and its controversial aftermath had a great deal to do with it as well. But if bravo played its large role in the creation of a worldwide counterculture and political moment, the resiliency of the day’s establishments—and the establishments’ attitudes—were great enough to keep public fear in place against the demand to control the spread of nuclear weapons that was then beginning. Even before 1949, most Americans had shared their government’s official suspicion of Soviet behavior in nuclear matters. They blamed the failure of the Baruch Plan for nuclear arms control on the USSR and—with a little help from well-placed political figures and the news columnists and radio commentators affiliated with them—came to associate any discussions of arms control or mutual disarmament with weakness or softness on Communism. Today’s students and historians can parse the exhaustive debates about Soviet nuclear espionage; Americans of that day recalled only headlines about “atom spies,” the straightforward confession of Klaus Fuchs, and the proposition that they and everyone in the “free world” lived in great danger because of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and their “comrades.” The British Bomb and the eventual basing of American nuclear launchers in Britain provided the occasions for the emergence of the first of the anti-nuclear protest movements. Between November 1957 and February 1958 a group of

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politically minded artists, intellectuals, writers, and religious leaders organized the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Their objectives were to support Britain’s unilateral nuclear disarmament; to oppose the construction of British nuclear weapons and launch vehicles; to stop construction of nuclear bases (for both British and American forces); and to oppose the further development of nuclear power. By Easter, CND had joined a coalition organizing a mass march from London to a nuclear research facility some fifty miles away in Aldermaston. The Aldermaston march succeeded, not least because the new mass march harkened back to the pre-World War II peace movement and to political sentiments about war and peace that had for nearly two decades been quietly parked in deference to Hitler and the Nazis. It was a large march, populated with a significant number of visible and recognizable celebrities. With the imagery of the Aldermaston march drawing strength from the historical tradition it evoked, and with that traditional imagery alongside modern issues and modern personalities, the entire message could be distributed very widely and quickly by television. CND also received a great gift from that first march, a simple logo from designer Gerald Holtom. Derived from flag semaphore signals for the letters “N” and “D”, the now iconic sigil inside a circle (☮) rapidly came to symbolize far more than a single political organization. It soon became a sign of the entire anti-nuclear movement, and then was quickly identified with a broader peace movement. Eventually it came to recall a worldwide set of attitudes and aspirations associated with the political and cultural turmoil of the 1960s and ‘70s. The political methods the sign identified, the linking of the mass march to the mass media and thereby to the mass audience, became a defining tool for challenging establishments just as the inclination to make such challenges was becoming widespread. Its more recent descent into a de-politicized fashion statement is instructive as well as to the capacity of modern mass society to absorb and co-opt all sorts of logos, icons, and the causes they represent. But by 1965, peace had become a “brand.” The role that nuclear testing played in the 1956 US presidential elections seems instructive; especially since the open political debate over a nuclear test ban treaty in the 1956 presidential election was a rare intrusion of an election into nuclear matters. Much about it suggests that it was representative. Americans (and others) were properly afraid of the possibility of nuclear war, as they were afraid of fallout from testing the weapons that would fight it. Yet that fear did not defeat Adlai Stevenson. Neither did Nixon’s McCarthyite charges. Dwight Eisenhower defeated Stevenson, with the perceived ability to protect the country and to keep the peace that was his greatest campaign asset. Yet the success of Eisenhower’s Cold War policies was not yet complete or even assured. Eisenhower confronted real limits on even his ability to control events. And even an enthusiast like Dulles recognized that the extremity of the retaliatory threat, matched by an anticipated response, made the whole strategy less than fully credible. After all, an American second strike on the USSR would be as suicidal an act as a first strike might be. Western Europe wondered

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if the US would risk destruction for them. The Soviets might have asked the same questions from a different point of view. John Kennedy complained that Ike left him no options “between doing nothing and blowing up the world,” but the options he did leave, mostly varieties of covert action, had their own heavy prices. Those bills had not yet come due, but when they did, they would be enormous. Some historic changes were still in progress—the new use of overhead surveillance, for example, but also the arrival of the intercontinental missile—in its stationary land-based mode and in its stealthy, mobile submarinelaunched mode. Events were overtaking even Dwight Eisenhower. The Soviet achievement of space flight was received with considerable shock in the United States, and with some self-satisfaction in the Soviet Union. Not only had the Soviets demonstrated the modernity of their science and engineering, they had done it while the parallel effort in the United States appeared to be failing. “We had always envied Americans,” Soviet scholar and analyst Genrikh (Henry) Trofimenko told an American television interviewer in the late 1980s. “Now we, we are the Americans.”19 Americans in Washington swiftly panicked over the new “lead” the Soviets had opened up in science and technology. American Democrats in Washington—equally swiftly—charged that Eisenhower defense policies had left the country vulnerable. Thanks to Eisenhower, they charged, the United States faced a “missile gap,” in which the Soviet Union owned greater numbers of superior performance ballistic missiles than did the United States. That was not the case, as Eisenhower knew from the U-2 photographs; but, until the President was willing to admit to the airplane’s existence and publish its photographs, he could not make this basic argument. He admitted to the U-2 only when caught and he never admitted to what he learned from it. Neither would he ever admit to the real reason—the budget— why the Soviets “beat us into space.” Eisenhower had experienced Germany’s V-2 rocket barrages of World War II; he was not at all in a hurry to build ballistic missiles of any sort. Khrushchev wanted to build them faster so as to leapfrog the large numbers of bombers in the US Air Force. If one lays aside the obvious military implications of Sputnik’s giant, clumsy, slow-to-fuel rocket launcher, the Soviet Union’s artificial satellite had its greatest influence in various realms of ideas and culture, especially in the United States. One culprit quickly identified in the apparent disaster was American education, which took hits from many different directions. A consensus gathered around the notion (an enduring one, as it turned out, still potent now, more than onehalf a century after Sputnik) that the “Russians are ahead,” because American schools taught students to value sports and social skills more than scholarship. The consensus could produce legislation to redress the problem by subsidizing college students; yet there were, and always would be, arguments about which scholarship Americans should be teaching their children. History, literature, and most of the social sciences were usually off the list. However, the scholarship programs begun under the National Defense Education Act of 1958 soon supported more than just the science, engineering, and math fields in the

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original focus, and they were the forerunners of extensive federal aid enabling a broader and more diverse group of students to go to college. This aid, and the students it supported, first showed up on American college and university campuses with the so-called “baby boom” generation. Measured against the total universe of Americans born between 1944 and 1960, the college-bound fraction of the population represented a larger proportionate slice of a pie than ever in the past, or anywhere else in the world. The pie had itself grown larger. In the short run, the high-speed expansion of colleges, universities, and faculties, had an enormous impact as well. New subsidies for students moved entry thresholds further down the socio-economic ladder. Wide-open job markets and widespread prosperity beckoned and promised, at first only for those who conformed to certain norms; but conformity—indeed, the norms themselves— were diminishing in value as time went on. The conventional wisdom of the day and the traditional historians’ view of the 1950s is that it was a very conservative time in which social dynamics pushed almost everyone to appear and behave conventionally—in private as well as in public view. However, the happy days incubated virtually every intellectual, cultural, or political phenomenon usually associated with “the Sixties,” from the proverbial sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll to the civil rights movement and to public meetings and demonstrations highly critical of American government foreign policies. By the time Dwight Eisenhower left the White House, publicly disappointed with the progress towards peace he had been able to make while in office, a peace movement existed outside the government and an arms-control faction existed inside government. Everyone seems to expect that John Kennedy would have won his seat in the White House for eight years had he not been murdered in 1963. By what would have been the end of Kennedy’s second term in 1969, a peace movement was one of the United States’ defining political characteristics. Yet in 1960 both nuclear powers had yet to restore a necessary balance to either of their military stances. Both were making a great many new launchers operational. Then, of course, came the two weeks in 1962 when both of them came close to using all that hardware.

notes 1 Albert I. Berger, The Magic That Works: John W. Campbell and the American Response to Technology (San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 1993), 77. Campbell was writing to L. Ron Hubbard, before the creation of Dianetics and Scientology, when Hubbard was a frequent contributor to Astounding Science Fiction (now Analog), Campbell’s magazine. 2 Ibid. 3 Anson McDonald (pseud. Robert A. Heinlein), “Solution Unsatisfactory,” Astounding Science Fiction, May 1941. 4 Berger, The Magic That Works, 78. 5 Robert K. Massie, Castles of Steel: Britain Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004), 122, 129.

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6 The National Security Agency, specifically responsible for it, defines signals intelligence (siGint) as follows: “siGint involves collecting foreign intelligence from communications and information systems and providing it to customers across the U.S. government, such as senior civilian and military officials.” National Security Agency website, frequently asked questions page. Online access, 9 July 2014. 7 Stimson explained himself carefully in his post-World War II memoir On Active Service in Peace and War, written with the help of McGeorge Bundy. Bundy, son of Stimson aide Harvey Bundy, later served John F. Kennedy as National Security Advisor. 8 Chester I. Barnard et al. “Prepared for the secretary of state’s committee on atomic energy: a report on the international control of atomic energy,” The Acheson– Lilienthal Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy, Washington, DC, March 16, 1946. Available online at http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/ document_conversions/50/Report_on_the_International_Control_of_Atomic_ Energy_16_Mar_1946.pdf, 1 May 2015. 9 See Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). Critics have long called attention to the extended efforts the US Government made to minimize the audience for photographic and cinematic records from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as they should. Nevertheless, the comparisons to be made between postwar German and Japanese coverage of atrocities in their jurisdictions and the popular and enduring success—in the United States—of John Hersey’s Hiroshima are very instructive. 10 The “real reason” was a matter of physics; one of the materials in the device was expected to be inert, expected not to contribute energy to the reaction. Instead, the material acted as a substantial additional jolt of fuel. 11 Robert A. Divine, Blowing on the Wind: The Nuclear Test Ban Debate, 1954–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), ch.1, especially p. 13. 12 Few Americans took China’s Communist government seriously as a “non-aligned nation”; it was Communist China, Red China, the Chicoms. But China was more non-aligned than it was pro-Soviet when it wanted to be. Indeed one American Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, would boast that the Nixon administration had closer ties with each Communist government than either could maintain with the other. 13 Divine, Blowing on the Wind, 91–93. 14 Ibid., 85–87. 15 Oakland’s support for the idea was not automatic or even predictable. William Knowland was California’s junior senator and a Joe McCarthy ally. Its newspaper, the Tribune, belonged to his father and he would publish and edit it after he was defeated for re-election in 1958. 16 Divine, Blowing on the Wind. 100. 17 Ibid., 110–112. 18 Ibid., 188. Also Andrew Patner, “I.F. Stone: How I Got That Story,” Boston Review, April 1988. Excerpted from Patner, I. F. Stone, A Portrait (Boston: Pantheon Books, 1988). Online Access at , 21 May 2014. 19 John Newhouse, War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, WGBH Boston Television series, episode 3, “A Bigger Bang for the Buck,” January 1989.

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The view from the cockpit of a U-2 reconnaissance plane is spectacular, but the jet-powered glider is notoriously difficult to fly and harder to land. Its cruising speed is hardly greater than its stall speed; not for nothing do the U-2 crews know the plane as “the Dragon Lady.”1 On the morning of 14 October 1962, Major Richard Heyser had been flying his U-2 at 70,000 feet for hours when he crossed the coast of western Cuba heading roughly north and east, his cameras and electronic intelligence gear running. He had taken off from Edwards Air Force Base in California and he would land at McCoy Air Force Base in Florida. The next day, Heyser and Major Rudolph Anderson, Jr. each spent five hours flying, out of McCoy, then up and down the 780-mile length of Cuba. When they landed, the cameras from the three sorties were rushed to Washington, full of photos showing launch sites for Soviet nuclear-tipped missiles under construction and crates full of nuclear-capable bombers on a Cuban airfield.2 National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy brought some of the pictures they had taken to President John F. Kennedy before noon the next day, 16 October. While historians differ in their interpretations of the origins and characteristics of the Cold War, the American public, their political leaders, and their opinion makers in general still, in the 21st century, subscribe to a memory of the Cold War as a consequence of Soviet aggression. In 1962, parts of that memory conveyed strong lessons that guided political behavior. As they had done in 1950, on the occasion of the invasion of South Korea, Americans remembered the seizure of Czechoslovakia in 1938 as foreshadowing the larger grabs to come and the larger war to resist them. The so-called “Munich analogy” dominated American thinking about containment. Advocating—let alone acting—aimed at anything less than stonewalled resistance could be and was derided as appeasement. Appetites would only grow, tactics would only grow more ruthless, argued many Americans; to maintain the peace, aggression had to be met firmly and

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early. The United States had to lead the “free world” in resisting that aggression, lest the USSR get the impression that it could continue and expand aggression to the point where only another World War could end it. Especially during the Kennedy administration, and especially during the crises over Berlin and Cuba, American leaders took every Soviet action as “a test of our resolve.” However, as more of the original documentary record—especially the Soviet and Soviet client record—becomes available, one finds a very different narrative and must come to grips with very different questions. What the Soviet leadership was thinking was quite different from what the American leadership believed it was thinking. The Soviet leadership and public were equally clueless about what the Americans were really up to. Neither public really knew or completely understood what its own government was doing. A larger portion of the United States government record has been public for some time; yet the ongoing de-classification and release of that record continues to yield useful new information and insight.3 (Cuban records remain closed.) It goes without saying that citizens of the United States, what used to be the Soviet Union, and Cuba alike have very different perceptions of their own governments than their parents and grandparents had. In addition, the passage of a little time has been generous with useful perspective. For example, the Cold War is frequently remembered and described as an ideological conflict. Two national empires confronted each other, each adhering to mutually antagonistic proselytizing faiths, each representing all that was good and decent in a contest against an enemy embodying the greatest of evil. And ideology was an important motivator; but some of the most critical factors governing the Cold War were also among the least noticed. American economic dominance was likely the single most significant material factor for a quarter century after World War II. American tastes and styles and the way they appealed to young people around the world were outcomes of that economic dominance and had significance in the Cold War that historians have not yet studied in depth. (Modern commentators call this phenomenon “soft power” and the United States had, and still has, a lot of it.) American technological and geo-strategic advantages, and (at least through the Khrushchev years) efforts by the Soviets to deliver on the promises of a better material life made by the Communist Party and never kept, all had considerable influence on the evolution of the Cold War. At the same time, the tsunami of European colonialism continued to recede across Africa and Asia, and wherever the end of colonialism intersected the currents of the Cold War a maelstrom appeared, threatening and trapping anything carried into its reach. The names of those maelstroms became familiar to two generations around the world: Iran, Guatemala, Suez, Iraq, Congo, Korea, Viet Nam—and Cuba. On the short end of the Cold War inventory of resources, by virtually all measurements, the USSR had to maximize its resources, even as it starved the civilian economy. No “bomber gap” ever existed. Unable to overcome the Americans’ enormous lead in the number of bombers, the Soviets had to

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concede a bomber arms race to them. Instead, the USSR sought to leapfrog over the American advantage by moving early to produce ballistic missiles to carry nuclear warheads. Here too, resources and geography limited what the Soviets could do to the United States. No “missile gap” ever existed. Faced with enormous costs (and carried by no significant Russian or Soviet naval tradition), the Soviet Navy had few surface warships, no aircraft carriers. Instead, the Soviets deployed an enormous fleet of submarines. All of these measures of weakness would be specific factors in the decision to establish the Cuban base— and in the decision to abandon it too. The Americans’ great economic power, their advanced technology, their initial leads in nuclear weapons and launch vehicles, and their geographic advantages sat in the forefront of Soviet thinking throughout the 1950s. The understanding of their strategic weakness on the part of the Soviet leadership went almost completely unnoticed by most of their American counterparts. President Eisenhower did notice. Few presidents have involved themselves so personally in the strategic planning aspects of their role as commander-in-chief as Dwight Eisenhower did; and of course none—not even Ulysses Grant—have been so qualified by education and experience to do so. Eisenhower’s “Open Skies” proposal, made at the 1954 Summit meeting in Geneva, had proposed mutual overflights as an arms-control measure allowing the US and the USSR to verify that their respective adversary was not preparing for war. Khrushchev rejected “Open Skies” out of hand; it would lay bare the Soviet Union’s most important secret, its military weaknesses and its lack of readiness for war. Eisenhower then took a step into the future; he implemented “Open Skies” unilaterally, a step towards peace despite the enormous breach he blew into the traditional laws and conventions of war in order to do it. In the everyday practice of the time, nations respected the boundaries of other nations’ territory; it was worthwhile to be reciprocal about it, to make it part of an infrastructure of social, legal, and political behaviors that we call peace. However, airplanes can overfly boundaries as they can cross lines of battle. Overflying a nation in a military reconnaissance airplane was a considerable provocation, justifiable only by the magnitude of the threat and tolerable as policy only because it promised to be transient. In 1955, the earth-orbiting reconnaissance satellite was not yet in anyone’s inventory, but it was already on everyone’s horizon. No one expected that national boundaries or “air space” could be extended beyond the atmosphere. Simply by travelling outside the atmosphere the artificial satellite would evade the traditional bans on peacetime aerial reconnaissance.4 Pending the deployment of the satellites, the President ordered the CIA to develop the U-2, a long-range, high-altitude airplane. Light and fragile, the U-2 flew—slowly—at altitudes beyond the reach of Soviet air defenses, deriving its range and altitude capability from a pair of long, graceful wings stretching 103 feet from tip to tip. As U-2 overflights of the Soviet Union began in 1957, President Eisenhower read the photos with a professional eye and understood the weakness they revealed. He

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knew that the Soviets were afraid of American military strength and what the United States might do with it. After the Soviets’ success in launching the first artificial earth satellites Eisenhower’s critics charged him with negligence, even sloth, which had resulted in a fearful “missile gap,” a period in which the Soviet Union was supposed to have the advantage in nuclear standoff. Eisenhower had seen the hard evidence with his own professionally trained eyes, and he knew that the advantage was all with the United States; he was able to know that because of his initiative and willingness to take a calculated risk. The U-2 became public when the Soviet Union shot one of them down, but what the plane did while it was still a closely held secret (run by the CIA, not the Air Force) was of historic importance.5 Legally, a U-2 flight over Soviet territory was an act of war. On the other hand (a very critical other hand), the early U-2 flights over Soviet territory helped keep the peace by telling Eisenhower that his adversaries did not yet have any means of launching a nuclear attack against the United States from their soil: by telling Eisenhower what he need not fear. The “Open Skies” proposal, without its authors quite realizing it, was both an extraordinary recognition of what nuclear weapons had already done to the rules of war and a farsighted way to minimize the chances for nuclear catastrophe. Traditionally, secrecy—the ciphered message, the secret weapon, the hidden fortress—was a guarantor of security in a world of conflict, accompanied by what Winston Churchill had called (during World War II) “a bodyguard of lies.” Soviet armies and their Russian successors give a high priority to exercising the deception and disinformation tactics they call maskirovka. However, in a nuclear world, secrecy breeds fear, the kind of fear that foreshadows the most lethal kind of miscalculation or mistake. Anything can take place behind a veil of secrecy. In front of one, imaginations can run riot. Transparency, the absence of secrets, reinforces a sense of safety and even national security. It makes for international calm, what arms controllers call stability. That was (and remains) the rationale for Open Skies, for its unilateral counterpart, the U-2, and for the earth-orbiting satellites that replaced them both. The downside of the U-2 was its violations of traditional norms of international behavior, but that was less important, even in the 1950s, than it had been before. The problem fell victim to new technology. Even as the Lockheed Company was teasing the U-2 out of one of its existing fighter-interceptor designs and hanging it from a sailplane wingspan, policymakers and engineers understood that the airplane would be a transitional machine. In a matter of years information-gathering satellites of every description would overfly the entire planet regularly. The extension of national boundaries into the air was one thing; the proposition that one could extend them into space was ludicrous. The opportunities to verify arms-control agreements on a global basis were arriving; the desire required to reach those agreements did not yet exist—in the Soviet bloc or among the western allies. Sputnik I, the very first artificial earth satellite, overflew the US and the nato countries regularly in its orbit; and work on the first generation of purpose-built

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“spy” satellites was underway as the U-2 was being test flown. The satellite, orbiting very high over national boundaries, made obsolete the norm that the U-2 violated. One simple observation concerning that aircraft’s peculiar history seems instructive. The plane and its mission were so secret that tests flights were flown from the epitome of a “hidden fortress” in the age of jet flight, a remote facility on Groom Lake, a dry salt flat in Nevada, well away from the main test center at Edwards Air Force Base. For reasons that remain vague, the place became known as Area 51, and around it accumulated an enormous amount of folklore. Only in 1992, after the USSR dissolved, did posters showing satellite photos of the airfield appear for sale in shops and other American markets. A Soviet satellite had taken the pictures. To know what is happening in a nation is not to know why it is happening. One of the controversies surrounding recent scholarship in the Soviet archives concerns the relative roles of ideology and of pragmatic political calculation in determining the policies and behavior of the Soviet government. Certainly a great deal of what happened took place because of the way the Cold War and the turmoil of de-colonization became simultaneous and intertwined events. Perhaps the basic axiom of Soviet policymaking assumed that, capitalists being capitalists, the Communists could and should expect unremitting attacks on any government representing the revolution. At the same time, the USSR had subsidiary interests and policy objectives about which calculations and compromises might be made. Significantly, the same could be said of the United States. Americans just knew that whenever the Soviet Union believed that they had an advantage over the United States, they would attack. They would seize any opportunity to assault, to challenge, or to subvert. Yet, opportunities to improve relations, to minimize the possibility of war, would come along and could be taken. In those same years, the Soviet Union had a priceless political asset few Americans appreciated—even though the United States had once possessed the same asset. In such theatres as Viet Nam, the United States had set aside its anticolonial tradition in order to fight Communism. Khrushchev understood that the Soviet Union could improve its position by taking on allies in the developing world, where many nations were just emerging from a century of colonial rule by America’s European allies. The “free world” was the political descendant of the European powers that had dominated Africa and Asia and were, in the 1960s, still fighting to preserve that control. The Soviet Union claimed descent from the likes of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, who had attacked European colonialism as it was being set up and whose works had been part of the education of most intellectuals in the colonized world.6 Khrushchev understood that the Soviet Union could improve its position by taking on allies in that world. The difficulty of the match-up for Khrushchev lay in the Soviet Union’s economic and strategic weaknesses. He had relatively little to work with and his ideological tendencies as well as his pragmatism impelled him to seek an inevitably expensive fulfillment of Communist promises of a better material

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life. He needed something to provide him with an advantage over the United States. His solution to the problem was his own version of maskirovka, fraught with danger. In his memoirs, Khrushchev describes being unable to sleep for days after his first briefings on the Soviet arsenal and plans for its use. He was properly respectful of the destructive power of thermonuclear explosions, and he wrote that only after he realized that such weapons could never actually be used could he sleep again. Having come to that conclusion, however, Khrushchev used that insight to embark on what appeared to be a most provocative course. The Soviets did not have the enormous and advanced arsenal that the Americans feared they had, but the USSR had no objection to playing along with (and exploiting) the myth of Soviet strength the Americans were spreading. So Khrushchev seized his opportunities. There was a reality underneath the propaganda. Consider the impact of the Sputnik satellites and the missiles that launched them. In reality, getting into space ahead of the Americans owed a great deal to some very mundane factors: budgetary constraints in both Washington and Moscow; the critical Soviet military goal of leapfrogging the enormous American lead in bombers; and the US Air Force’s sometimes lukewarm reception of war machines that flew but did not need pilots. However, there was little to gain by focusing on such factors, and few public voices addressed them—in contemporary policy debate or in historical analysis. No one accepted those successes as evidence of the superiority of Soviet educational systems more thoroughly than did conservative, anti-Communist American politicians. In the end, Khrushchev could not let the facts spoil good stories about international rivalries, a space race, and about the ways in which Soviet students learned math and science while American high schoolers received more rewards for sports and sociability than for scholarship. The Communists were telling those peoples emerging from colonialism that the Soviet Union embodied three things that the developing world wanted: modernization of the underdeveloped; enrichment of the poor; and empowerment of the powerless. They had not fulfilled such promises at home, and Khrushchev knew that; but the rosy maskirovka did play well when cast against the backdrop of the old colonial reality. Khrushchev’s objective was a change in the overall terms of the Cold War, to force the western allies to accept that the Soviet Union was an international equal and that it deserved respect as an equal. Towards that objective, he sought to intimidate the United States, relying on the idea that the Americans could not actually use their nuclear advantages to protect a position like Berlin in Europe. Faced with a position they could secure only by starting a nuclear war, the Americans would be rational and accept Soviet demands, which, he believed, were and always had been perfectly reasonable in themselves. Bluster and bluff on Khrushchev’s part substituted for advantages the USSR didn’t have and a global military reach he was unwilling to pay for. American panic helped sell the story. Khrushchev was able to keep the Berlin Crisis running for five years.

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Meanwhile, the recession of colonialism proceeded. No political principle could be more thoroughly “American” than opposition to colonialism. During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt’s anti-colonialism had impressed even Ho Chi Minh while, at the same time, it infuriated Winston Churchill. The United States had never been a full colonial power in Cuba of the sort that Britain was in Africa and India, France was in Viet Nam or of the sort that the US itself was in the Philippines. The various military occupations can’t be ignored, but they do not constitute a quest for or the exercise of direct political and administrative power. However, since the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, the United States had regarded Latin America as its own sacrosanct sphere of influence. Americans had discussed taking the island over since Thomas Jefferson had been president. Americans seized Cuba in 1898, and used their five-year occupation to create what they viewed as a modern, sanitary, healthful society. They also created an economy that served American interests and markets, and a government that would allow the United States to rule the island under certain circumstances, regardless of the desires of Cuba’s elected government. In the eyes of the United States, those circumstances arose five times between 1904 and 1933. Finally, in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt, responding to Cuba’s nullification of the section of their Constitution that conceded to the US the right to make occupations, sent ships and troops to occupy the island. The American ships and troops left government in the hands of a series of administrations supported by the Cuban military and dictator Fulgencio Batista. Batista’s Cuba was very closely aligned with the United States. The country’s most important product, sugar, was almost entirely American-owned and it was produced largely for one market, the United States. Moreover, the regime, and Batista himself cooperated with criminal groups in the United States that controlled the gambling, drug trafficking, and prostitution for which Havana had become known.7 Interestingly enough, Josef Stalin, nominally a revolutionary, shared with the nominal conservative Winston Churchill the practice of a very traditional kind of Great Power diplomacy. Stalin had respected the imperialist concept of spheres of influence (as long as the imperialists respected Soviet spheres of influence). Khrushchev could not afford to do that; he needed allies in the developing world if he was to improve the USSR’s international position among the capitalists; he needed allies in the developing world if he was to manage the USSR’s conflict with the People’s Republic of China. As well, influence in the rising once-colonized world was a useful prize in its own right. The Soviets did not create Castro’s revolution, indeed they were more than a little suspicious of Fidel Castro; but they were nonetheless willing to embrace his July 26th Movement revolution. For its part, as it always had, the United States invoked the Monroe Doctrine (with a self-righteousness that obscured the fact that the Doctrine is a very long-standing policy statement, not binding international law). Thereupon, the Eisenhower administration began the country’s long campaign to destroy the Cuban regime and its leader. The United

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States refused to tolerate what it was describing as (at least) a quasi-Socialist regime, a Soviet client state, in the western hemisphere. However, the United States had become hostile to the Castro government well before Cuba became a Soviet client. The hostility spread in reaction to the Castro expropriation of American-owned land in Cuba.8 The increasingly hostile attitude and pressure pushed Castro towards the Soviet Union. The Party in Moscow, historians Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali tell us, was aware that Raul Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara were members of Cuba’s Communist Party, but Fidel Castro himself was seen as unreliable. If the Americans were pushing Castro, the Soviets were pulling and winning. Before 1962, two American administrations (of two political parties) had unleashed diplomats, economic sanctions, spies, propagandists, assassins, agents, and even a small army to get rid of the Castro regime. And they had failed. John Kennedy recorded discussion in his top-level meetings during the 1962 Missile Crisis. On the tape, one can hear the President remind his advisers that the European allies already thought them all obsessive about Cuba. In retrospect, and with access to considerable documentation, “obsessive” does seem quite descriptive of the Castro–Kennedy confrontation. One can also hear Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara offer the opinion that the Soviet missiles in Cuba were not a military problem; they were a domestic political problem. And so they were. Joe McCarthy had still been alive when Castro’s July 26th Movement first began and the vestiges of the political atmosphere named for him still lingered. It is also important to remember that most of the Kennedy foreign policy leadership remembered what McCarthy and McCarthyism had been like— and some of those memories were up close and personal. The quality of the memories was mixed. McCarthyism was a powerful partisan force that had burned the Democratic party. From a more personal perspective, McCarthy was even more problematic. Everyone in Kennedy’s circle was anti-Communist, of course; but there was more to it than that. The Senator from Wisconsin had dated two of the Kennedy sisters, with the manifest approval of their father, Joseph Kennedy Sr. Being Joe McCarthy’s brother-in-law might not sit well with liberal Democrats whose votes John Kennedy would need to become President. Senator John Kennedy’s younger brother Robert had been minority counsel of McCarthy’s Government Operations Committee. Lyndon Johnson had become Senate Minority Leader at the height of McCarthy’s influence and he led the Democrats through the effort to censure McCarthy. Dean Rusk was the only political survivor from the State Department’s China desk. The specter of another bout of “red-baiting” haunted almost everything the Kennedy foreign policy people were trying to do. They feared more hectoring about who “lost” some piece of strategically valuable real estate and dreaded the political retribution they had received in 1952. That the Kennedy team feared more McCarthyism did not suggest (as McCarthy himself might have) that the Kennedy people were insufficiently anti-Communist. John Kennedy’s own public regrets that he allowed himself

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to approve an American-sponsored invasion of Cuba in 1961 were quite genuine; but he did approve it. When it failed, one of the President’s aides recalled that it was probably the first time Kennedy had actually lost anything. That alone seems a plausible trigger for obsessive thinking and ill-considered action. In any event, the invasion’s failure encouraged the Kennedys to attack Castro again, to get rid of him by any means necessary, including the use of overt military force if it came to that. What it came to was “the Cuban Project,” Operation monGoose, a campaign of hit-and-run commando raids on a variety of civilian and military targets all over the island. The director of the operation was Brigadier General Edward Lansdale, a legendary covert operator in the Philippines and Viet Nam during the Eisenhower years. Lansdale answered to a White House committee, the “Special Group Augmented,” whose leader and driving force was the President’s brother, Robert. The American role would not be limited to harassing actions. Lansdale, who had as much experience with this sort of operation as anyone, had a clear picture of what he wanted monGoose to accomplish: “[T]he operation is to bring about the revolt of the Cuban people,” Lansdale wrote. “The revolt will overthrow the Communist regime and institute a new government with which the United States can live in peace.” Lansdale also had a clear picture of how he expected to accomplish his mission. The revolt requires a strongly motivated political action movement established within Cuba, to generate the revolt, to give it direction towards the object, and to capitalize on the climactic moment. The political actions will be assisted by economic warfare to induce failure of the Communist regime to supply Cuba’s economic needs, psychological operations to turn the peoples’ resentment increasingly against the regime, and military-type groups to give the popular movement an action arm for sabotage and armed resistance in support of political objectives.9 A list of thirty-two tasks Lansdale wanted completed before March 1962 has a very hard time not looking like the outline of a plan for another invasion.10 During the 1960 presidential campaign Kennedy had attacked the Eisenhower administration for its unsatisfactory record while dealing with Castro and Cuba. Now Kennedy wanted to make sure that Khrushchev and the American electorate both understood that he was a tough and resolute leader of the United States’ side of the Cold War. At that time neither the Cubans nor the Soviets learned about or understood all aspects of the planning for Kennedy’s continuing campaign against Castro; but in the context of what they feared and what their ideology taught them to expect, they knew enough to fear massive military action. In early 1962, when Khrushchev made his decision to send missiles to Cuba, monGoose was not yet a prelude to a full-scale landing in mid-1962; but it might have been. American naval exercises for such a landing (a staple of routine US Navy training) clearly signaled what might be on the horizon. Getting wrong the difference between American capabilities—even

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American contingency planning—and actual American intent represented a Soviet intelligence failure. It was, however, a failure easy to understand, and Cuban and Soviet intelligence erred on what they thought was the side of prudence. Cuba needed defending. At the same time (and from their point of view, more significantly), the Soviet leadership had to confront its substantially weaker position in the strategic nuclear confrontation with the Americans. Their shorter-range rockets could devastate Western Europe but they had a ballistic missile strike force capable of striking the United States only one-tenth the size of the force with which the United States could strike them. Meanwhile, Khrushchev could sit on the beach beside his villa on the Black Sea and visualize across the water the Jupiter missiles the Americans had emplaced, through nato, in Turkey. These were rockets that could strike the Soviet Union in ten minutes. Khrushchev and his colleagues might quite literally never know what hit them. That bothered Dwight Eisenhower. As early as 1959, he had compared such a nato base to then-hypothetical Soviet missiles in Mexico or Cuba. Such bases might warrant anything on the part of the United States, President Eisenhower said, ranging from serious concern to direct military action. President Kennedy was highly skeptical of the value or even the common sense of installing the Jupiters in Turkey; but he approved installing them. By early 1962 those missiles, fifteen of them, were operational. So were others in Britain and Italy. Khrushchev’s proposed response to all this was a bold and imaginative stroke—code named anadyr, after a river in Siberia—but it was not at all prudent. Some of Khrushchev’s colleagues and advisers tried to tell him so; but he held to his original course and got his way. He moved, in the spring of 1962, to kill two, or even three or four, birds with one stone. He had two clear objectives: to improve the strategic position of the Soviet Union by establishing what the US and nato call a “forward base” when it is one of theirs. Cuba was to be something analogous to the network of installations the US got with its network of geographic alliances. Cuban bases for intermediate-range missiles would compensate for the lack of Soviet intercontinental launch vehicles and bring the United States within range of Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces for the first time. The Americans would eventually discover launch sites for about forty medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles with one-megaton warheads, along with a squadron or so of obsolete, but nuclearcapable bombers, surface-to-air missiles to protect them, and a contingent of Soviet technicians to operate the complex. What Khrushchev actually sent was a powerful, integrated military force of 50,000 (about half the size of the American command in South Korea at the same time) that could maintain and launch the land-based ballistic missiles, support patrols in American waters by Soviet missile-launching submarines, and defend Cuba from an American invasion. In addition to the strategic rockets, bombers, and anti-aircraft equipment, the Soviet weapons included motorized infantry regiments, tanks, and short-range cruise missiles tipped with tactical nuclear weapons. Most of

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these last warheads were small; the largest were only about the size of the bomb that had destroyed Hiroshima. In this way, Khrushchev could also protect the Soviet Union’s client from American attack through nuclear deterrence (or failing that, through various mixtures of military force). Cuba as a forward base differed from the western alliance’s European bases in one significant respect. In Europe, the bases were part of our allies’ home territory, protected by a “defense in depth” on the western side of Churchill’s “iron curtain.” Cuba was something else. Since the 19th century, Americans had been describing Cuba as “a ripe pear” ready to drop into American laps. Soviet submarines might make the Atlantic perilous in the event of a conflict, but American dominance of the Atlantic was almost complete. In wartime, predatory Soviet submarines might offer serious challenges to nato lines of supply; however, depending on stealth for their military effectiveness, they were not able to apply Soviet sea power in a short-of-war situation that required revealing their locations. Cuba could be readily isolated, surrounded by a theater of conflict controlled by the most dominant branch in the American forces and traversed only with difficulty by the USSR’s weakest military service. anadyr’s success required that the ballistic missiles remain undetected until they became operational. Once operational, the Americans could do nothing to remove them; they would have to fear the possibility that an attempt to remove them could lead to their launch. Khrushchev expected the United States to grumble, but eventually to admit the new strategic situation, to accept living under the shadow of missile-launched nuclear weapons—as Western Europe had, as the Soviet Union had. He did not expect to get caught. That was a mistake. He did get caught. Khrushchev’s military advisers had warned him that the Americans would most likely discover the installations before they were ready to fire, while they as yet had no power to deter, and while they were still vulnerable. Other Kremlin leaders had warned Khrushchev of the general risks he was running. When the United States gave Soviet ambassador Dobrynin the advance text of the President’s October 22 TV address to the nation, it became clear that Kennedy was calling Khrushchev’s bluff. The administration in Washington had dealt with one dilemma for a week: having discovered the missiles, what was the US going to do about it. Once Kennedy had made that decision, Khrushchev and the Presidium had to decide what to do in response to American demands that were far more rigorous than Khrushchev had anticipated. The Monroe Doctrine was a policy statement, not a law; but Americans have always expected it to be treated as a law by other nations. And, disciplined by the demands of McCarthyite politics, the Kennedys were obsessive about Cuba. Khrushchev faced some of the same problems. If Kennedy had to think and act with his senses cocked to what McCarthy’s political successors were up to, Khrushchev certainly had to be aware of factions within the Kremlin and to Mao Zedong and the People’s Republic of China. Neither government wanted to back down. Some (although certainly not all) on each side realized (at least to a degree) that both of them had to back down. Both sets of leaders were

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painfully aware that one wrong move (whether deliberate, miscalculated, or simply accidental) could begin a global thermonuclear war. Having gathered his senior advisers (collectively named the “Executive Committee of the National Security Council” or “ExComm”), President Kennedy initially intended to send an air strike to destroy the missiles where they lay. However, the solution that first appeared simple, and simply obvious, lost its sheen of simplicity and obviousness as the discussions wore on. Gradually, the American leadership realized that bombing alone could not guarantee the destruction of the entire missile complex. Infantry would have to follow the bombers, a full-scale invasion of Cuba that planners projected to cost over 18,000 casualties. (The actual costs would likely have been far higher than that; intelligence had substantially underestimated the forces—tactical nuclear weapons and relatively large conventional ground forces—that would have opposed an American landing.) However, even the underestimated resistance gave ExComm pause. Kennedy feared that opening with a diplomatic move would make him look weak, and diplomacy was never a first option. However, in that first week, ExComm did discuss diplomatic solutions, including proposals to remove the American missiles in Turkey in trade for the Soviet missiles in Cuba. For several reasons, Kennedy did not like the idea of “trading” the missiles in Turkey for those in Cuba. Only as Kennedy and his aides realized that a direct assault (bombing followed immediately by an invasion) was unworkable did they allow themselves to accept the less immediately violent course of a naval blockade. The “quarantine” provided a show of military force sufficient to impress both the Soviets and American Cold War politics, while providing some room to think between drawing the guns and firing them. Historian Sheldon Stern, chief archivist at the JFK Library and the researcher most familiar with the actual audiotape recordings of ExComm meetings, maintains that the consensus for the immediate or very-near-future use of warfare—bombing of Cuba, invasion, or both—was extensive during the 13-day crisis. The consensus was denied its desires, Stern maintains, only because President Kennedy refused to begin courses of action that, the way he read the situation, could only end in nuclear war. The Soviets first realized on October 22nd that the Americans had found them out. It was the morning before Kennedy announced the discovery of the missiles and the blockade intended to force the USSR to remove them. Although some of their nuclear weapons in Cuba were already operational, they had, surprisingly, made no plans for how to use them if the United States actually attacked the island. Led by Khrushchev, the Presidium debated as heatedly as ExComm had for the previous week, and then backed down. The longest-range missiles and some of the warheads were still at sea—on an American-controlled ocean. Defying Kennedy’s blockade might or might not start a war, but if it did not, some of the USSR’s most advanced military technology was still crossing the Atlantic, ripe for capture by the American Navy’s cruisers and destroyers. Khrushchev’s all-submarine fleet could threaten the American ships; but the

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submarines—most of them diesel-electric, with tight operating limits—were poor choices as convoy escorts. They were vulnerable if the blockaders caught up with them first and they had little with which to fight except ship-killing torpedoes, some of them nuclear and all of them provocative if used. The Soviets continued to deny Kennedy’s charges in public, but the Americans had the military and geographic advantage. And they had photographic proof to present to a live, televised session of the United Nations Security Council. To defend Cuba against an American attack, the Soviets and the Cubans could have made do with what they already had there: the strategic rockets—with their one-megaton warheads—250,000 Cuban troops, 40,000 Soviet troops and their nuclear backups, and the anti-aircraft installations, but they didn’t. Kennedy’s flat-out refusal to tolerate the missiles in Cuba had had exactly, and immediately, the impact he wanted, although, perilously, he did not yet realize it. anadyr had failed because it was discovered before it was ready to operate. Khrushchev’s plan for a Soviet strategic base was dead. Khrushchev would better have followed the instincts that told him that no one could actually use nuclear weapons. The Americans had not been willing to use them to defend their position in Berlin and (to Fidel Castro’s infuriated dismay) Khrushchev was not willing to use them to defend Cuba. Khrushchev’s problems were now twofold. First, how could he descend from the limb he had climbed out on, without his country losing too much face? Secondly, what could he and Kennedy do to keep the crisis from spinning out of control and igniting a war no one wanted? It is ironic, and frightening, that the most dangerous moment of the crisis came after the Soviets had agreed to the United States’ principal demand, but before the United States realized it, and before the deal had actually been closed. The situation was so tense in Washington on the evening of Saturday, October 27th, that the American Secretary of Defense wondered if he had seen his last sunset. The confusion began on Friday, October 26th, after Khrushchev had written to Kennedy offering to remove the ballistic missiles in return for a simple pledge that the US would not invade Cuba. Before Kennedy had a chance to respond, however, Khrushchev sent a second letter received on the morning of October 27th adding to his price a demand to trade the Soviet missiles in Cuba for the American missiles in Turkey. While ExComm and the President wondered if the Soviets were double-crossing them, or if hard-liners had deposed Khrushchev, a Soviet anti-aircraft commander, without authorization, shot down a U-2 with a surface-to-air missile. With the possibility of a peaceful solution apparently receding, the American military began to implement more of their contingency plans for an invasion of Cuba. Soviet forces were preparing to repel them, although without authority to use their nuclear weapons. It was all the result of confusion, but then so was the eventual resolution of the crisis. After he had sent his first letter, Khrushchev interpreted an article by the American columnist Walter Lippmann proposing a Turkey–Cuba missile swap as Kennedy’s signal that he was willing to make such a trade. Historian Sheldon Stern notes that the tapes of ExComm meetings reveal that

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actually making the trade was in fact opposed by all of the ExComm members except President Kennedy himself. Upset and angry, and unaware of all the circumstances, Kennedy then chose to accept in public Khrushchev’s first, lower-priced offer. Shaken by the unauthorized missile firing, Khrushchev chose to accept Kennedy’s deal before things got completely out of hand. At virtually the same moment, however, Kennedy—equally disturbed—refused to risk a nuclear war for the sake of fifteen obsolete missiles. Over the almost unanimous objections of his advisers, including his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the President sent the attorney general to meet with Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin to accept the missile swap—provided that the agreement to do so was kept secret. Khrushchev, understanding that he had at last gotten lucky, broadcast his acceptance on Radio Moscow at mid-morning 28 October (Washington time). The two countries had to clean up some details over the next month (some of them serious); but it was over and not a moment too soon. Khrushchev’s strategy depended on his insight that no rational person would actually use nuclear weapons; Kennedy’s depended on his insight that nothing at stake in the crisis was worth global nuclear destruction. But rational persons might not always be in control and the very continuation of the crisis guaranteed that the least rational of the hardline militarists (in either the US or the USSR) would have more and more to say about how their governments behaved. Of the governments involved, we now know least about Havana, where the relevant records remain sealed. But we do know that Castro felt abandoned by Khrushchev’s decision to back away from a nuclear showdown with the United States. Without Soviet assistance, Cuba faced another American invasion, and Castro suggested even the unthinkable to defend his revolution: “… if they actually carry out the brutal act of invading Cuba in violation of international law and morality, that would be the moment to eliminate such danger forever through an act of clear legitimate defense, however harsh and terrible the solution would be, for there is no other.”11 Confronting irrationality in a matter of control during a crisis is one question. Castro could be irrational, or excessive in this matter; but whatever he would have liked to do with nuclear weapons, he had no control over any. More dangerous was confronting the prospect of no control at all. The actual US– Soviet confrontations were spread out over only one week. On the sixth day, an American aircraft wandered off course into Soviet airspace and a Soviet anti-aircraft missile shot down Maj. Rudolph Anderson’s U-2 as it overflew and photographed Cuba. Neither provocation was deliberate, but either might have derailed the agreement then being cobbled together. After all, each side had an adversary it considered dangerous enough to betray an agreement, unscrupulous enough to bait a trap with the hope of an agreement. Seen by most Americans as an act of Soviet aggression in their own backyard, anadyr was Khrushchev’s attempt to alter the balance of the Cold War by doing two things: he sought to redress the endemic weaknesses of Soviet military

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power while, secondarily, to defend the Castro regime. It seems to me that, from a military standpoint Kennedy’s pledge was a more effective shield for the Castro regime than an isolated outpost, even a large and nuclear-armed outpost, might have been. (Compare Cuba’s position, if you will, to the situation of the American-occupied Philippines in the five months after Pearl Harbor. They were cut off and partially occupied, with their American and Filipino defenders forced to surrender as their food, medicine, and ammunition ran out.) Khrushchev had given the United States a “taste of its own medicine” and he had eliminated the Turkish missiles that he considered humiliating as well as threatening. In that sense he could and did argue that he had won. But the strategic base in the western hemisphere was more important and he had lost it, as he had lost considerable face in the Kremlin. Eventually, he lost his job. The trouble was that catch-up turned out to be the most dangerous game of all in the nuclear age. As the Americans and the British had when nuclear fission was a tabletop experiment, the Soviets concluded that they could not tolerate nuclear superiority in the hands of another power. Nuclear power in the hands of another is so threatening, this line of reasoning goes, that it justifies absorbing great costs and taking great risks while redressing the balance. The Soviets had taken enormous risks to create what they saw as a long overdue capability to strike the United States with nuclear weapons; and the magnitude of those risks sobered all the leaders on both sides who survived it. Influential factions within the American and Soviet leadership came to realize that (like nuclear tests) competition for nuclear advantage might become more dangerous than even their most threatening enemies. Even when all parties wanted to keep a crisis from escalating (and that fairly describes the situation in the 1962 Cuban Crisis), miscalculation, mischance, or communications failure would always threaten to send it spiraling out of control. The US and the USSR had approached such a disaster closely enough that both sides came to appreciate that the crisis itself was too dangerous ever to repeat. Just as military secrecy was no longer any guarantee of military safety, military superiority was no longer a protection against anything. The world after anadyr would not again come so close to nuclear war. The global brush with death brought no respite to the Cold War (in fact, some arms build-ups grew faster); but it did mark a turning point in the superpower conflict. Thereafter, the United States and the Soviet Union could sign some agreements that had never before been in reach, and negotiations to place controls on nuclear weapons began and became institutionalized— although consummation would take nearly a decade. In the United States, John Kennedy’s apparent victory, without war, earned him a reputation for Cold War management that—despite critics who said he was either too reckless or too meek—eventually overshadowed the failures of his early months in power and the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Since the missile swap was kept secret, and implemented months later, no one ever successfully accused Kennedy of appeasement. Since he had cleared up the strategic threat, he looked good because he “stood up to the Russians” successfully, especially on Cuba. Since he had cleared up the

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strategic threat without war, he looked good to other Americans because he had stood up to the “hard liners,” who had argued for immediate and risky military action. (We do not yet know much about the counterparts debating in the Kremlin.) Kennedy had given himself the Cold War credibility that allowed him to argue for peaceful relations between his country and the USSR in a commencement address at Washington’s American University in June 1963. The resolution to the confrontation contributed to the success of Kennedy’s abbreviated third year in office; and it remains a central element of his historical reputation. The crisis’ drama made it one of the most studied aspects of Kennedy’s presidency. The initial public record (from only one side) made it, literally, a textbook case study in American public decision-making and crisis management. However, it was a one-sided case study based on mythology and the impossibility of admitting, in either Washington or Moscow, that the peaceful resolution depended very largely on two somewhat reckless men who, in extremis, abandoned ideology in favor of their shared preference for life over death. It was, as well, a case study extolling the cool, precise, and measured crisis management of Kennedy’s ExComm, a performance better than one might have feared but hardly reflective of the actual scenes recorded in the documents and tape recordings. Also lost in the shuffle: calm, clear weather in the Caribbean during hurricane season and great good fortune. In Moscow, Khrushchev’s retreat from the confrontation was a principal reason the Presidium unseated him as its leader. His colleagues regarded him as too reckless and too clever in seeking to bluff the United States. His successors would replace his foreign policy of assertive, blustery bluffs masking weakness with long-term, expensive plans to eliminate the weakness in reality. Recognizing, as Khrushchev had, that the USSR held a weaker hand than the Americans, his successors proceeded to abandon bluff for a new deck of cards, ships, and aircraft, and more missiles in quantities that, within a decade of the crisis, created “parity” with the United States. And this may be why the peace was preserved. October 1962 highlighted the fact that a nuclear arms race creates situations defying what many still see as “common sense.” Neither military secrecy nor military superiority guarantees a nation’s safety any longer. The threat from nuclear weapons is so great that one country’s superiority only makes it imperative for that country’s adversaries to overcome it, by any means possible. The effort alone can lead to the possibility of destruction. Secrecy, if successful, can conceal—anything. Since the adversary firing first would have the advantage in a nuclear exchange, ignorance and fear can together create the temptation to “pre-empt” an adversary’s first strike with one’s own. Under the circumstances that prevailed during the Cold War, national survival relied on a “balance of terror.” Peace depended on two things: a situation in which both adversaries possessed roughly equivalent arsenals, so that if either one of them started a fight they would face “mutually assured destruction”; and an international regime that—through diplomacy or technology—allowed even the most bitter enemies to see what each other was doing all the time. Since

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these insights are counterintuitive, and since they run counter to traditional military thinking, they became and remained controversial elements over American political debates about nuclear arms control and nuclear preparedness until the Cold War was over and even more recently. This new narrative of the Missile Crisis differs markedly from both the standard and revisionist interpretations offered by various American historians. Yet its role as an emblematic microcosm remains. Most notably, the story suggests that partisans of both the Soviet and western side of the Cold War are wrong in their Manichean explanations of it. It would be a mistake to discount the role of ideology, as Vladislav Zubok emphasizes in his histories of Soviet foreign policy. It would also be a mistake to attribute an ideological motivation to only one side. Both superpowers believed in their own missionary faiths. Both sides believed in their respective manifest destinies. And, of course, both sides believed in the traditionally defined national interests that also motivated them, as those interests appeared modified by the marriage of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Neither really won and neither really lost, which is a good thing. But, perhaps the most important lesson to take away is that—politicians then and now (there and here) notwithstanding—neither side was truly innocent.

notes 1 James May, “Ride on a U-2,” Top Gear, BBC Worldwide, online access at YouTube. com. See , uploaded 28 June 2010. 2 Robert Kipp, Lynn Peake, and Herman Wolk, Strategic Air Command Operations in the Cuban Crisis of 1962 (Strategic Air Command, Historical Study no. 90, vol. I, nd), 8–11. 3 I owe much of what follows to the following authors and works: Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy 1958– 1964 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997); Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006); William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and his Era (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003). 4 The concepts of “territorial waters,” “territorial limits,” and the “three-mile limit” all derive from the concept that a nation can make a legal claim to them, if they could defend them with the weapons of early modern Europe—a cannon shot with a range of approximately three miles. 5 It is worth noting that the U-2 is an extraordinary piece of machinery. As this is written in 2014, the airplane is still in service, more than fifty years after it first entered the US inventory, with the copies currently in service built nearly between twenty and thirty years ago. Its scheduled retirement, and its planned replacement by remotely piloted aircraft (drones) is a matter of controversy. 6 The fact that the realities of Soviet relations with the decolonizing world were rather different than a familiarity with Marx and Lenin—or with Soviet propaganda— might suggest they would have considerable influence down the road. 7 The character of Batista’s Cuba had even entered modern popular culture: see the 1954 musical comedy Guys and Dolls. 8 The largest landowner was the United Fruit Company, whose corporate counsel was Sullivan and Cromwell, the law firm once managed by Eisenhower’s Secretary

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of State John Foster Dulles; CIA director Allen Dulles was also among the Sullivan and Cromwell partners. Henry Cabot Lodge, Eisenhower’s ambassador to the UN, was a major United Fruit stockholder and Ed Whitman, United Fruits’ PR chief, was married to Ann Whitman, Dwight Eisenhower’s personal secretary. 9 Brig. Gen. Edward Lansdale, Program Review by the Chief of Operations, Operation monGoose, 18 January 1962 U.S., Department of State, Central Files, 737.00/1-2062. Top Secret; Sensitive. Foreign Relations of the United States 1961–1963, Volume X Cuba, 1961–1962. Online access: Vincent Ferrarro, ed., “Documents Relating to American Foreign Policy: Cuban Missile Crisis,” 5 April 2014, . 10 Ibid. 11 Fidel Castro letter to Nikita Khrushchev, 26 October 1962, online access .

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ParT V

The Weapon of the Weak

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9 The PoLiTics of PariTy

Even before the dissolution of the Soviet Union made it possible to examine the Soviet side of the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis had, with ample reason, become one of the most studied of the 20th century’s great events. It had been a very close scrape with a possible disaster so large that it boggled even the most hardened of imaginations. Moreover, John Kennedy, whose literary tastes were historical, came into the Crisis on the heels of his reading of Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, her magisterial account of how the European nations entered into the terrible destruction of World War I even though none of them wanted a war. Tuchman reported that even some of the most important actors in the 1914 drama could not identify why they had gone to war. Under the circumstances, Tuchman’s book should certainly be reckoned one of the most influential histories ever written. Even before it was safely over, the Caribbean Crisis demonstrated that holding off a nuclear war depended in great measure upon managing the impersonal, reflexive dynamics of the confrontation as well as one’s own conscious choices or those of an adversary. What did one want? And was it worth the price of a war that getting it would cost? At the same time, however, the Crisis left the powerful memory of the confrontation’s last day, when impersonal and unintentional actions had nearly brought the world to grief just as its leaders were getting ready to fix the problem. One of the first and most important “lessons learned” from the October Crisis was that the crisis was an integral part of the problem, not just the background environment or even the consequences of pre-crisis actions. Therefore, coming to grips with the crisis’ aftermath necessarily meant grappling with the origins of the critical events at issue. The Soviet side of that story is not entirely settled. Khrushchev himself preferred to remember his fears for the independence of Cuba (under a Communist government). Two contemporary historians, Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, the first scholars to examine the records

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of the Presidium, seemed to ratify that interpretation when they published their first account of Operation anadyr, One Hell of a Gamble, in 1997. However, when they published their second version, 2004’s Khrushchev’s Cold War, they had changed their opinions. They had come to believe that Khrushchev’s effort to achieve a better international strategic position was the primary motivator, the desire to protect the Castro government secondary. Catch-up was the most dangerous of Cold War games. The Cold War generations of US government leaders certainly understood the reasoning behind nuclear catch-up that they themselves had constructed; a non-nuclear power, or a nuclear power demonstrably out-gunned by a larger one, had only the bleak choice of surrender or destruction. Fearing a bomb in German hands, émigré scientists had encouraged Franklin Roosevelt to build nuclear weapons in the first place. The Soviets had built their weapons in an identical frame of mind. However, the weapons alone did not resolve the disadvantages that decorated Soviet nuclear endeavors. Sputnik notwithstanding, the Soviet capability to produce and to launch heavy intercontinental missiles was not significantly greater than the American capability, and the arsenal of such weapons was minuscule. The Soviet Union could devastate Western Europe, but the Americans had the drop on the USSR from forward bases available to them through nato.1 Europe was home to bomber bases to support the attacks LeMay and the Strategic Air Command were planning. Those bombers could fly to targets identified and photographed by high-flying U-2 airplanes that the Soviets could not yet shoot down. By 1962, Europe supported missile bases for small numbers of intermediate-range ballistic missiles that could carry nuclear weapons into the Soviet Union itself. At the same time, the United States (historically a naval power in a way that neither Russia nor the USSR ever was) was pioneering the use of submarines powered by nuclear reactors. In 1958, it planned to build (in addition to several dozen traditional ship-hunting “attack” boats) forty-one Fleet Ballistic Missile Submarines, each armed with sixteen Polaris missiles that could fire a one-megaton warhead over an initial range of 1,200 miles. And the United States Navy was quick to demonstrate just what such submarines could do. Early in August of that year, USS Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear-powered “attack” submarine, surfaced without advance notice between Greenland and Iceland in the North Atlantic—having sailed from San Diego, Seattle, and Pearl Harbor in the Pacific. It had transited the Arctic Ocean, submerged, across the North Pole; it was navigating briskly, “in excess of twenty knots”; and it was just far enough beyond Polaris range of Moscow and Leningrad to be diplomatic. Like Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union could protect its own territory against a war’s devastation in only one of two ways. They could choose only not to fight or to fight elsewhere. The Soviets developed their nuclear weapons later than their American counterparts did and from 1950 to 1962 always labored to overcome the early American leads in weaponry and in launch vehicles. Khrushchev took the very substantial risks that went with the effort to build a

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major base in Cuba, over the objections of his generals, because (to him) the risk was preferable to the short end of the strategic stick. This was the pattern of international behavior with nuclear weapons during the Cold War. The records of “Open Skies,” the U-2, and reconnaissance satellites illustrate the obsolescence of secrecy in a nuclear world; the Caribbean Crisis provided an emphatic lesson in the obsolescence of military superiority. The destructive power of nuclear weapons is so great that one cannot tolerate “not knowing” what a potential adversary is up to. Similarly, that destructive power prohibits tolerating an adversary’s possessing any significant measure of nuclear superiority. The enormity of the stakes on the table in 1962, and the nearness the two adversaries came to “the final failure” should highlight that the primary Soviet objective—an objective for which the world was held hostage—was, in effect, a better battlefield position; and the battlefield was already sufficiently lethal that neither adversary was likely to survive the confrontation. If anadyr was Khrushchev’s effort to improve the USSR’s strategic position then the imbalance itself was the root of the crisis. That, in its turn should establish that any imbalance in a nuclear arms race is extremely dangerous, since redressing it seems so urgent; and attempting redress (as in the case of Cuba) could so readily lead to a nuclear showdown in which events beyond the control of leaders would increasingly control the fate of the world. Any project of sufficient size would have the effect of poking a bear (or an eagle) in its den. The American government had begun talking about a test ban in 1957, only to succumb to a kind of panic after Sputnik and, eventually the disintegration of the May 1960 Summit Meeting. Disagreements and obfuscation among some of the scientists had blurred the technical, the political, and the moral arguments considerably, even before one could take into account the residual, reflexive red-baiting that awaited virtually any arms-control proposal. The insights emerging from the October Crisis contributed to enough change in the political environment that the three nuclear powers (including Britain) could begin to discuss banning the testing of nuclear weapons. Coming right behind the test ban were proposals for a broader international arms-control environment that would limit the number of nations that possessed them. It was important that the political environment was beginning to change, for the arguments themselves were significantly less malleable; officials, military leaders, and some of the scientists in the nuclear field continued to insist that testing nuclear weapons was necessary to preserve and advance national security. According to advocates of testing, not testing for the US would give a non-recoverable advantage in an international conflict to the Soviet Union. Environmental hazards from radioactivity released by bomb tests had been overstated; in fact, banning testing would prevent research to create a bomb that did not release such radioactive hazards—a “clean bomb.” The advocates of testing, or their allied partisans, questioned the patriotism of Americans arguing for a test ban. Nevertheless, disclaimers and denials notwithstanding, the health of millions of children over many generations was at risk from the radioactive

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materials nuclear testing was putting into the atmosphere. The arms race itself was creating national security problems and making nuclear war more likely. Even John Foster Dulles—who was at the end of his life, dying from cancer—was beginning to question whether the suicidal implications of massive retaliation stripped credibility from a deterrent force based on retaliation. He became an advocate of a test ban for another reason as well; his State Department was pointing out that rigorous US opposition to a test ban was reason for substantial anti-Americanism in the nations emerging from colonialism.2 The change in the political environment had a great deal to do with events, of course. Even by Cold War standards, 1955–1965 was a crowded decade, climaxed by crises in Europe and the Caribbean that threatened escalation into “general war,” nuclear war. But not all the historical forces at work were impersonal. The quality of individual leadership at the top was critical. When he first took office, the public did not regard John Kennedy so highly as a steward of the national security as Dwight Eisenhower. Not all, but much of what Kennedy did with that stewardship during the first nineteen months of his term was clumsy to say the least. However, after October 1962, the American people developed a sense that Kennedy had faced Khrushchev down, without giving anything away (the dismantling of the Turkish Jupiters remained a secret); and it soon became apparent that Kennedy had faced down hardliners in the military, in Congress, and in his own administration as well.3 Much of what the 21st century thinks it knows about President Kennedy is illuminated—and shadowed—by those thirteen days. In that sense, John Kennedy was an individual winner in the Cuban crisis; his policies prevailed without war and in a manner politically acceptable to his constituents. In that same sense, Nikita Khrushchev was an individual loser; but his losses carried far more historical weight than Kennedy’s win. In the short term, though, Khrushchev held on to power long enough to be part of both the Limited Test Ban Treaty and the Non-Proliferation Treaty (signed after the Central Committee overthrew Khrushchev’s leadership). Khrushchev and the USSR took more away from the Caribbean Crisis than most people realize. The pledged word of the United States better protects Cuba than could even a powerful military command stuck out on a limb stretching across the Atlantic.4 The American missiles in Turkey were gone. (More numerous and more capable submarine-launched missiles would replace them, but the insult of the Turkish launch sites would be gone.) The crisis itself was something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the Soviet base had been publicly withdrawn without resistance and American command of the Atlantic had been publicly illustrated. A Soviet observer might characterize the withdrawal as humiliating. On the other hand, the magnitude and the emotional tenor of the American response proclaimed the importance (and the success) of allowing the US “a taste of its own medicine,” one of Khrushchev’s original objectives for the operation. However, Khrushchev’s colleagues on the Soviet Presidium didn’t see it that way, and they deposed him (likely in large measure for Cuba, but not exclusively for that).

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Khrushchev had used bluff and bluster as he sought to command the US and its European allies to respect the USSR as an equal. He preferred to use state revenue in his perennially failing efforts to increase food production than to pay for the most modern weapons other than rockets. His successors moved in different ways, especially in military matters. For example, Khrushchev had created a Soviet Navy centered on submarines—a descendant, really, of Karl Dönitz’ U-boat packs—to cut allied transatlantic supply lines in the event of another war along the lines of World War II. However, when called upon during the Missile Crisis, those submarines could not provide an escort for ships on the Soviets’ own supply lines to Cuba without triggering an upward escalation that might culminate in the use of nuclear weapons. US Navy anti-submarine units forced all of the boats attached to anadyr to surface next to their American hunters; it was as profound a tactical and strategic victory as one might find in any naval battle in which no one actually fired their weapons. The Soviets also could not help but observe the classic—and overwhelming—mid-century sea power the Americans’ Navy could exercise on the surface, without being required to shoot. The Central Committee that Leonid Brezhnev headed up abandoned the kind of blustery, boisterous bluffing that Khrushchev preferred, instead putting enormous new appropriations into a real Soviet surface navy. Soviet defense spending soared. Following on, American appropriations rose at an equivalent rate, a year or two after each Soviet increment. The United States built most of its three-legged nuclear strike force, notably the underground Minuteman missile silos on the northern Great Plains, and the “boomers” (fleet ballistic missile submarines), at the time of and immediately after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet those same years are remembered as a time of “thaw” in the Cold War, the months when reflection on the near-death experience of the crisis generated public support in the United States for a Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and a broader Non-Proliferation Treaty with some very far-reaching implications. How could this be? By the time the 1960s ended, the nuclear forces of the United States and the Soviet Union had come to exist in a state of “rough parity,” a state derided by critics of arms control, but also a state that made conflict less likely and lasting arms control more possible. The term is “parity” not “equality” because while the two forces were similar in some ways, they were equivalents based on the damage they could inflict, but not symmetrical mirror images of each other. Each side controlled a “triad,” a nuclear force operating three sets of launchers: bomber aircraft, ballistic missiles from underground silos, and ballistic missiles from submarines; but Soviet forces relied more heavily on ground-launched intercontinental missiles than did the Americans. The Americans had a large bomber fleet that the Soviets didn’t. The Americans had two nuclear allies— Britain and France—that the Soviets didn’t. When and if the evil day ever arrived their forces would most likely to be ranged with the US and against the USSR; but they were forces that could not be bound by a Soviet–American treaty without the participation of their parent governments. Issues of comparative

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quality were always matters of charged debate. It was of crucial importance that, although both arsenals were very large, neither was actually superior to the other. In the world of calculated risk, extracting oneself from a position of strategic inferiority might justify taking terrible risks; but the same kind of reasoning says that one cannot justify those kinds of risks in order to move from a state of parity to one of strategic advantage. As Eisenhower had foreseen, the certainty of mutual destruction if either side actually began firing at the other was an effective element deferring if not deterring war. Experience was seemingly ratifying Winston Churchill’s 1955 observation; “it may be that we shall by a process of sublime irony have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror and survival the twin brother of annihilation.”5 Each side was free to charge forward in pursuit of further advantage, but both sides could see the interest everyone had in moderating some of the speed of that pursuit, in preserving parity. And although the third and fourth nuclear powers, Britain and France, did not scare the Americans or the Soviets, the fifth, China, did. So did the as-yet-unknown sixth, seventh, and eighth nuclear powers. And John Kennedy was hardly alone in forecasting as many as fifteen or twenty nuclear powers in the world within the span of a generation. Making a deal on a limited nuclear test ban treaty came first; the talks that followed the October Crisis could build on the nearly four-year-old negotiations that were originally to culminate in a treaty signed at the May 1960 Paris Summit meeting. That first attempt at a treaty had been collateral damage when the Summit fell apart following the shoot-down of Francis Powers’ U-2. By 1963, popular and government support for the treaty was a direct response to the international fear of radioactive fallout and the experience of the October Crisis. Khrushchev proposed a halt to all nuclear tests two months after the end of the Cuban Crisis. Like President Kennedy, the Chairman of the Central Committee understood the world audience to which both his country and the US were playing, but he also believed that the situation illustrated and supported a central point in the architecture of his policy towards the US and the Cold War. In his view, the Soviet Union was a legitimate national sovereignty deserving of stature, respected rights, and legal powers, equal to the United States’. Moreover, Soviet power was equal to American might, courtesy of the same nuclear arsenals that made them exceptional among nations (even as Britain, France, China, and Israel owned their own small stockpiles). Only the two of them could make a nuclear war in 1963, therefore, only they could rein in the increasingly rapid growth of the world’s nuclear arsenals. Kennedy responded slowly but positively. He was genuinely afraid of a world with ten or fifteen nuclear-armed nations in it; and he was intent on discouraging newly nuclear China and the non-nuclear states from developing their nuclear arsenals any further than they already had. He was aware that a limited test ban would stop both the radioactive fallout that atmospheric testing kicked up and the political chaff that the fallout kicked up all around the world. (Indeed, some of his aides viewed the test ban treaty as

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merely a cynical gesture to appease the growing numbers of people worried and angry about strontium-90 in the air and in the food chain.) He was also mindful that he would enjoy some political profit in the United States, particularly since it would be very difficult now, after Cuba, to characterize him as weak or soft. Kennedy also sent signals with a major speech, the 1963 commencement address at American University in Washington, DC. It was a very personal statement for the President of the United States to make. Even more than Eisenhower’s “Cross of Iron,” it was a purely presidential statement; no bureaucracy parsed the text. Theodore Sorenson— Kennedy’s principal speechwriter, counselor, and friend—wrote the speech, and the two of them edited it on a plane ride between campaign stops. They protected its desired impact by letting only a few top staff members see the draft, so as to minimize advance sniping—especially from the military services. “[F]rom the viewpoint of orderly administration, this was a bad way to prepare a major statement on foreign policy,” historian and presidential aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. confided to his diary. “But the State Department could never in a thousand years have produced this speech.” On this small question, Schlesinger was right, but he misunderstood; the address was Kennedy’s assessment of historical position: a statement of faith of the sort whose weight could never come from a bureaucracy, only from a powerfully placed author and the electorate behind him. Eisenhower’s “Cross of Iron” speech was, formally “The Chance for Peace.” The formal title of Kennedy’s was “A Strategy of Peace,” a road map of a sort toward establishing, “the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, and the kind that enables men and nations to grow, and to hope, and build a better life for their children.” In language that says an enormous amount about John Kennedy, the President was asking listeners to re-examine their notions of peace and the possibility of achieving it, to reconsider their ideas about the Soviet Union (and also about themselves). And he crossed one of the most significant taboo lines of the Cold War to remind a President’s global audience that the Soviet peoples had achieved a great deal and they had borne the horribly violent burden of World War II more heavily than anyone else. And in sharp contrast to most other pairings of great powers, the United States and Russia, the United States and the Soviet Union had never gone to war against each other. War need not be inevitable, or peace only a dream, he insisted: “Our problems are manmade; therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.” Peace, he said, was “the necessary, rational end of rational men… . For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.” Nikita Khrushchev thought it the best speech by an American president since Franklin Roosevelt, and, for the first time, he allowed the broadcast of an American presidential speech to reach Soviet listeners unjammed. Kennedy returned the compliment by calling for the next round of talks about a test ban to

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be held at a very high level, and in Moscow. Then he sent W. Averell Harriman as his negotiator. Harriman, 72, was serving as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. No one except Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, or Secretary of State Dean Rusk carried more heft in diplomatic protocol; and none of them would have Harriman’s prestige in Moscow. A generation earlier Averell Harriman had been Franklin Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease coordinator and ambassador to the Soviet Union during World War II. The son of one of the United States’ legendary capitalist aristocrats (and an early advocate of tough US policies towards the USSR at the end of World War II), Harriman had shared many months of that terrible war with Muscovites. No other appointment could so clearly recall a time when the United States and the USSR had been on the same side. Yet it was not so simple. To be sure, it seemed as if critics of the Soviets and the Americans, including many of the emerging post-colonial governments, had gotten from the nuclear states precisely what they had asked for—or at least a part of it. Fallout-producing nuclear tests were going to stop. What the non-nuclear states had not gotten was disarmament, a potential product of a test ban that the Americans in particular disavowed. And although the ban on atmospheric, oceanic, and outer space tests put limits on radioactive fallout, the continued legality of underground testing meant that the world could expect research towards more destructive weapons to continue. In effect, the treaty was as good a list of what it permitted as it was of what it would ban. And the testing the treaty would permit would remain part of the threat that the non-nuclear states believed they had to meet. By that time, the world divided along not one, but two nuclear fault lines, Churchill’s “iron curtain,” the great power standoff between the US and the USSR, and the line that still separates the nuclear “haves” from the nuclear “have nots.” Indeed, both US and Soviet policy sought to manage the nuclear ambitions of the “have not” nations, while blunting any effort to constrain their own, a concurrence of interest that helped to drive this US–Soviet rapprochement even so closely following October 1962. The Limited Test Ban Treaty had been negotiated by only three parties—US, USSR, UK—who thereupon invited other nations to accede to it, to join the agreement; but the three nuclear states had defined the problem and the treaty’s solution to it. Taking a next step would be a bit more complicated, for the proliferation of nuclear weapons looked different from the non-nuclear states than when seen from New York or Leningrad. The non-nuclear states, including many emerging from colonialism (the so-called “third world”), were familiar with the ways more powerful European nations had used superior weaponry to coerce them in earlier years. “We shall not fear the Hottentot,” Hilaire Belloc had written, “because we have the Maxim gun and he has not.” At the same time, those same third world leaders could certainly imagine being coerced by their own neighbors using nuclear weapons in their own neighborhoods, even if not on the global scale that marked the Cold War. From their perspective the nuclear states could hardly ignore the possibility that as more and more nations joined the nuclear club it became increasingly likely

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that some conflict (perhaps a very minor or parochial one from their point of view) would lead to a global nuclear exchange. From their point of view, the non-nuclear states wanted three things from the nuclear states: assistance in developing non-military uses for nuclear power, guarantees of assistance against nations that attacked with nuclear weapons, and disarmament of the nuclear states. Whatever ideological conflicts or political rivalries divided the three nuclear states, they united in their continued assertion that they were fit stewards of nuclear power and others were not and could not be. The boldness of such an attitude bespeaks the awkward fact that they get away with it, even among the non-nuclear states and “the third world.” The nuclear states (those nations that had detonated nuclear explosions before 1964) negotiated the Non-Proliferation Treaty among themselves, between 1963 and 1965, and then presented it for other nations to join, just as they had done with the Test Ban Treaty. Many observers have noted that NPT is a rigid discriminatory arrangement that places many restrictions and obligations on the non-nuclear states that the nuclear states refuse to apply to themselves. However, the non-nuclear states very much wanted some bar to the spread of nuclear weapons. They wanted it badly enough that, while they properly groaned and moaned (and still do) about the slowness of disarmament in the nuclear states, they tolerated it (and still do). They did that and continue to do that for two reasons. The nuclear states always reiterate their promises (no matter how empty); and the small numbers of heavyweight nuclear states like the US or the Russian Federation are preferable in their view to larger numbers of such less reliable or less stable nuclear neighbors as South Africa, Israel, Iran, Pakistan, or India, whose horizons and ambitions are lower. The more industrialized of the non-nuclear states, Germany and Japan, Brazil and Argentina, for example, accede to the treaty because (among other things) they wish to protect their commercial interests in peaceful nuclear power installations. They too settle for empty promises about disarmament from the nuclear states, but they get back an international business in dangerous materials and installations that is at once profitable, a focus for risky acts and accidents, and increasingly necessary to fill needs for electrical power that cannot be filled without nuclear reactors. In his short history of the negotiations that produced the 1968 NonProliferation Treaty, Bernard Goldschmidt, once Chairman of the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, emphasized that the NPT is a discriminatory treaty that grants only second-class international citizenship to the nations that had not detonated a nuclear explosion before 1967.6 Those nations had to renounce an entire class of weapons for all time to join the treaty, and submit to outsiders with indefinite rights to examine and control even (nominally) non-military nuclear facilities to determine if they are in use to develop prohibited weaponry. After submitting to that, membership in the treaty is supposed to provide non-nuclear states with support from the original nuclear states against any nation attacking with nuclear weapons. The nuclear states, on the other hand, can retain any nuclear weapons they already

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possessed, can make new ones they like when they choose, and can transfer information from one of their own facilities to another without restriction. To be sure, they promised to take steps towards nuclear disarmament; but when the nuclear “haves” choose to and agree with each other, they can police the agreement and enforce the behavior guaranteed by the “have nots” promises. At the same time, no one can enforce the so far hollow promises of nuclear disarmament the original three powers have made. Goldschmidt argues that in its discriminatory and unenforceable form, the NPT represents a great diplomatic success shared by the three original nuclear states. They were faced with great pressure to shield the world from the destructive power of their weapons, and they resolved it with a treaty regime that restricts their own behavior least of all and creates at least an “on paper” power they can use to coerce most of all the nations that most wanted the treaty. However, the treaty did rearrange some alignments, from the Cold War scheme to the have/have not scheme. Goldschmidt says that the treaty was a necessary precursor to the 1970s’ détente between the US and USSR.7 It was, however, a success that imposed a system of unequal rights and opportunities on a very large number of states, and a success that required certain states to accept, permanently, meaningful constraints on their industrial power. And that is an acceptance few nations have ever been willing to make; and few of those acceptances have ever had anything like a permanent staying power. So if the NPT has been successful to date, despite its discriminatory character, Goldschmidt recalls how important it is that the NPT does remain discriminatory, despite its success. The years after the October Crisis saw the United States and the Soviet Union reach a series of agreements that at least appeared to impose actual limits on nuclear weapons. As this is written, world leaders communicate readily with each other by cell phone, e-mail, and other methods so ubiquitous that they escape notice—except on the part of those who can remember the years before the missile crisis when direct communication was virtually nonexistent. Establishing a dedicated teletype line between the White House and the Kremlin was big news in 1963. So too was the long distance telephone installed soon thereafter. The Kennedys had had “back channel” communication with the Soviet government during the crisis, as well as good official channels through the Soviet ambassador in Washington; but direct personal communication between leaders was a “lessons learned” product of the Cuban crisis.8 The post-Cuban environment also allowed the two adversaries to forego nuclear testing in hitherto untouched environments, the ocean floor, outer space, and the Moon. Their ability to reach, much less exploit such environments was very small at the time and very expensive, which made it easier to reach agreement about them. In those areas where the technological ability to exploit environments was greater, or reaching maturity sooner, leaders, especially military leaders, might take agreements of virtually any sort to be a poor idea. An agreement might create or ratify advantages for one side or another, or be fatally vulnerable to undetectable cheating. Yet

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such agreements were increasingly necessary. anadyr had demonstrated that successful deterrence would not be a passive matter. Waiting to be attacked and responding, if and when, would not be enough. October 1962 had demonstrated that even a crisis that had been resolved in principle could run off the rails and create unimaginable destruction. Technological power and political rivalry together made it possible for Americans and Soviets to destroy each other; at the same time, they gave both nations a most formidable concurrent interest in the pursuit of mutual survival. Pursuing the American side of that interest was not always easy in the United States of the 1960s, despite perceptions that the decade was coterminous with raucous agitation for “peace.” Popular memories of Munich and appeasement were still blended by political rhetoric with Joe McCarthy’s accusations that the New Deal had fostered “twenty years of treason.” Many Americans anticipated with perfect certainty that the Soviet Union would sign an agreement only to dupe the United States; that the Soviets would cheat on any agreement, regardless of its terms and safeguards and regardless of any calculation of interest or objective. And if one could safely expect the Soviets to cheat on a test ban treaty, one could certainly expect them to cheat on any agreement to disarm or to limit the possession of nuclear weapons. Timing played a critical role in minimizing the right wing’s influence on the arms-control processes after the Cuban crisis. Kennedy’s appearance of strength in Cuba came days before mid-term elections. The Democrats and the pollsters agreed that although the Democrats lost seats in Congress in 1962 (as the majority party tends to do in mid-term elections) their losses were minimized by what was perceived as successful standing up to the USSR. Kennedy’s assassination put Lyndon Johnson in the presidency and he had very few fingerprints on Cuban affairs, indeed on any foreign policy matters. Moreover, the Democrats’ choice to campaign on the memory of the martyred President made too negative a Republican campaign seem churlish and unpleasant. Finally, the extreme right wing of the Republican Party succeeded in securing the party’s presidential nomination for Barry Goldwater, who was not only the most right wing candidate for the nomination, but also a candidate who was running as much against centrist Republicans as he was running against Democrats. Opposed to the New Deal, Social Security, and federal assistance to poor families, Goldwater also opposed federal civil rights legislation and wanted the country to prosecute the War in Viet Nam more intensely. Before the campaign began, he had urged the use of nuclear weapons in Viet Nam, and shortly after receiving the Republican nomination joked about “tossing one into the gent’s room at the Kremlin.” The Democrats responded with a campaign emphasizing Goldwater’s extremism, especially as the Senator tried to avoid the polarizing positions and statements that had gotten him the nomination but might torpedo his chances in the general election. Most famously, the Democrats produced two one-minute-long television ads taking aim at Goldwater’s opposition to the Limited Test Ban Treaty. The more famous

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of the two aired only once as a campaign document: the audience sees and hears a little girl counting as she pulls petals from a daisy. As she goes on, a brassy loudspeaker overpowers her voice as its counts down to zero, at which point the film shows a nuclear explosion. The audience sees the fireball and the mushroom cloud while listening to Lyndon Johnson’s voice: “These are the stakes! To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.” The second ad, much less well known, shows another little girl eating an ice cream cone while a woman’s voiceover recites (as if reading an unbelievable fairy tale) both the dangers of nuclear fallout in food and water and Goldwater’s opposition to the Test Ban Treaty.9 Goldwater’s landslide presidential defeat took some of the McCarthyist curse off anti-nuclear, anti-war political campaigns.10 Indeed, circumstances provided a rare moment in American history; centrist executive and legislative branch leaders who supported some increased racial equality, who believed in some measure of economic justice, and who sought a peaceful set of relations with other countries, controlled the national political agenda. And on the spectrum’s left flank a significant minority existed large enough to influence and even to pass—although not to command—public debate and legislation. Goldwater’s defeat and Johnson’s victory had “coattails” too; enough Johnson supporters voted for Democrats in Congress to give the party a commanding majority in each house of Congress for the 1965– 1967 sessions. And the Democrats were not alone in pursuing a more or less progressive agenda; especially in the areas of Civil Rights and nuclear arms control, Democrats would have to enlist significant numbers of Republicans in order to prevail—and they did. However, conservatives still retained a lot of power in American politics, and they continued to support the war in Asia on anti-Communist grounds; to challenge the Americanism of all the social critics; and to voice their alarm at the Soviets’ achievement of strategic nuclear parity. Through the 1960s, while millions of people around the world watched on television, American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts flew into earth orbit; then the Americans went on to lunar orbit, and then onto the moon itself. Banishing all memory of the 1960 campaign’s “missile gap,” the success of NASA’s manned rockets displayed the United States’ growing mastery of ballistic missile technology. However, military missile technology was advancing more rapidly than civilian. The US and the Soviet Union had made very large investments in fortifications that might allow an ICBM to survive a nearby nuclear blast before launching against a target in a retaliatory strike. Both sides were making large investments in missile-launching submarines, and in other submarines to hunt and kill them. Both sides were, simultaneously, developing the accuracy of the aim on their missiles and rapidly creating ballistic missile defense technology to further “harden” their fortifications. Both sides were learning how to mount multiple warheads atop each missile, and how to steer those separate warheads to separate targets. And all of this was in pursuit of a policy objective called mutual assured destruction.

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The acronym for that objective was convenient, too convenient; for mutual assured destruction—lunatic at first glance—was, in fact, a rational and successful strategy followed by two distrustful antagonists to avoid a conflict neither wanted. Therefore this was an episode in the real-world testing of Niels Bohr’s complementarity thesis. Nevertheless, in official doctrine and in much popular thinking, the Americans and the Soviets each entertained the assumption that being attacked by the other was inevitable, and that was an equally powerful factor in the test. It meant that even when the Soviet nuclear forces reached parity with the American forces, parity would not be static or even a stable quality. As had happened before World War I, the constant push for military supremacy and the concomitant fear of being left behind stood to generate needlessly large force requirements; and as those requirements were filled, they would stimulate the adversary to its own response in return, ad infinitum. Two new technologies were going to become operational in the 1970s: ABM (anti-ballistic missile) and MIRV (Multiple, Independently-targeted, Re-entry Vehicle). Together they created a crisis in massive retaliation that trumped the pressures for an all-out arms race. A successful ABM system might create the impression that one adversary was trying to protect the arsenal and the population because it was considering an attack. To an especially suspicious mind, an ABM system might be preparation for an attack because the system might be far more effective deflecting a retaliatory second strike than it might be in its advertised role, defending against, parrying a first strike. The easiest way (and the cheapest) to counter an ABM system in the hands of one’s adversary is simply to saturate it with more warheads than it can handle. That, of course, provides an incentive to build both more multiple-warhead missiles and more ABM systems. And catch-up remains the most dangerous of games; it provides eternal incentives to build new forces and to forego the advantages of parity; and at the same time it affords unending opportunities for war to begin because of fear, temptation, miscalculation or chance. Orbiting satellite photography and other surveillance methods were available to both sides; the USSR and the US each could spot any activity “visible” to those methods without intrusive on-site inspections. So, if ABM and MIRV technology made some form of strategic (that is to say, nuclear) arms limitations necessary, other technologies, collectively dubbed “national technical means of verification,” made those limitations possible. (Technical means of verification also have their own limitations. One can only regulate something that those means can “see” or “hear.”) Two kinds of political change as well became factors making limitations possible; government leadership changed dramatically in both the US and the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Missile Crisis, and both the US and the Soviet Union confronted significant turmoil stemming from their respective “imperial” behaviors beyond their borders. Indeed, the spring of 1968 saw the height of a challenge to both orthodoxies that was political but also cultural—counter-cultural—in Prague, in Paris, and (remarkably quickly) in Philadelphia and Phoenix. One aspect of those challenges to orthodoxy, the

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push for “Communism with a human face” in Czechoslovakia and the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of Czechoslovakia to defeat it, led the United States to suspend its participation in nuclear arms-control talks and delay the development of the ABM treaty and the preliminary Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I). They would not go further until after the elections of 1968 put Richard Nixon in the White House with Henry Kissinger as his principal associate for foreign policy questions. Kissinger was the most successful example of a new breed of scholarly professional, men who may have sprouted in academia, but who were rooted in no one institution. Instead, they played a sort of professional hopscotch, moving from the university to the “think tank” (the purposeful, applied research institution, affiliated with a sponsoring agency, frequently the military), the consulting firm, and the political campaign. Kissinger himself was a refugee from Nazism who had become a veteran of the American military occupation of Germany before he went to college. His first published writing dealt with nations seeking to re-structure relations with each other following traumatic conflict. He had also written Nuclear Weapons and American Foreign Policy, a provocative essay theorizing that the US and the USSR could fight a “limited” nuclear war, a war that did not destroy civilizations wholesale. Richard Nixon was a phoenix rising from the ashes of his spectacularly successful (and then blasted) early career. Thirty-four when he was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1946, Nixon became a stalwart of the right wing, a national figure in his very first term for his pursuit of former New Dealer Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy. He jumped to the Senate after his second term and he was only forty when he became Vice-President. Except when Eisenhower was sick, Nixon as the number two faded into the background. When Ike was sick and Nixon stood constitutionally close to the presidency, Nixon’s many enemies delighted in public hand wringing about the danger in which the republic stood. Then he ran for President and lost by a hairsbreadth. More difficult for his reputation, he ran for Governor of California in 1962 and lost. Losing did him less harm than the petulant spirit in which he seemed to take it, telling a press conference: “you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” But by 1968, Dwight Eisenhower no longer overshadowed him. John F. Kennedy outshone him no more. Between them, Nixon and Kissinger constructed a plan for their own version of a Cold War restructuring. Recognizing that the Sino-Soviet split visible for a decade was real and significant, the new White House foreign policy proposed to turn a bi-polar structure of power and conflict into a triangular “new structure of peace.” The United States was to be friendlier with each of the Communist giants than they were with each other, and it was to be in a position to play each of the adversaries off against each other. At the same time, the US could solicit from both help in quieting the Communist war in Southeast Asia. None of this was outrageous; much of it was a clever and successful application of American economic and diplomatic power. And it made good use of Nixon’s

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own reputation as a committed and hardline anti-communist. It would be hard to attack him as soft or naïve about anything Communist; within limits, he could do things for which someone else (Hubert Humphrey, his 1968 presidential opponent, for example) might be hung out to dry. Nevertheless, even Richard Nixon had to overcome deeply dug-in resistance to arms control or to the improvement in US–Soviet relations of which arms control was to be a part. The arguments were well worn. The Soviets would attack whenever they sensed weakness or unreadiness on the American part. They would cheat successfully on any conceivable agreement. More important was the way nuclear weapons transform the twin concepts of military secrecy and military superiority. Neither side was convinced of the virtues of parity; the constant push for advantage and superiority was the source of the problem, after all. The ways in which military secrecy and superiority become invitations to attack are not obscure; but they are counterintuitive, and traditional appeals to military strength make good political theatre. The political parties owned neither side of the issue. Some of the most ardent opponents of arms limitation agreements with the Soviet Union were a group of conservatives on defense and foreign policy issues who clustered around Sen. Henry Jackson, a Democrat from Washington. Jackson acted from conviction, but he certainly maintained a careful eye on the state of Washington’s largest employer; he was “the senator from Boeing” in critical portraits and news columns. These conservative Democrats, nicknamed neo-conservatives or “neocons” were, in 1972, busy walking away from their party, which had made room for the anti-war movement that had played such a spectacular role in the 1968 Democratic Convention. 1972 was at once the high and the low point of Nixon’s presidency as the man sought to cap his first term with accomplishment, win re-election, and lay the foundation for a fresh round of accomplishment in his second term. His triangular diplomacy matured that year. He traveled to China in February and began formally the normalization of relations the United States had terminated back in 1949. He went to Moscow in May, and amidst great ceremony signed two nuclear arms treaties. One limited anti-ballistic missile defense weapons; the second restricted the number of strategic nuclear weapons launchers (bombers, land-based and submarine-based ballistic missiles) that each side would retain. Then, early in the morning of June 17, four operatives from the Nixon campaign were caught burglarizing the offices of the Democratic National Committee in Washington’s Watergate complex. The June 17 burglary, Nixon’s effort to cover it up, and the long, grinding haul of the investigative and legal processes had an enormous impact on virtually every aspect of the administration’s work, but its impact on nuclear matters (and especially the embryonic arms limitation process) was especially important. Even with Nixon supporting it, SALT was a difficult sell; it consumed political capital. As the public investigations of Nixon’s conduct developed, he had to expend more capital on his defense and consequently had fewer and smaller presidential resources (simple time, for example, as well as capital) for the job.

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Moreover, the gradual revelations of White House misconduct made it easier to criticize policy and the White House was less and less able to construct and focus attention on policy. Finally, the rhythm of events continued relentlessly and even sped up; the Senate began televised hearings into the break-in and the aftermath in April 1973, international oil prices began to rise that summer, and Egypt and Syria (then allied with the Soviet Union) attacked Israel in October. In those same months, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) had been moving to raise the world price of crude oil. OPEC was not entirely an Arab organization, it did not maintain an international monopoly on oil; but it took advantage of the so-called Yom Kippur War to embargo oil for shipment to the US, Western Europe, and Japan—and effectively doubled the price of oil in just a few months.11 By October, the congressional hearings had revealed that President Nixon had had key parts of the White House “bugged,” and hidden microphones connected to tape recorders had preserved conversations dealing with “Watergate.” When Archibald Cox, the appointed Special Prosecutor, subpoenaed the tapes, Nixon’s responded on October 20, 1973, with actions quickly nicknamed “the Saturday Night Massacre.” First, he ordered Attorney General Eliot Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson had been appointed because his predecessor, Nixon’s former law partner John Mitchell, was directly involved in the scandal, and he resigned rather than obey Nixon’s order. Then, Nixon fired Richardson’s number two, William Ruckelshaus, when he also refused to fire the Prosecutor. Finally, Solicitor General Robert Bork did the President’s chore. Nixon had done himself mortal harm, but the world proceeded heedlessly. The Yom Kippur War continued, with Israel recovering from its early losses, inflicting considerable damage on its enemies, and consuming an enormous supply of equipment and ammunition. The United States proposed to re-supply Israel, a proposal to which the Soviet Union took grave exception. Egypt sought Soviet and American troops to police a cease fire jointly; a proposal to which the United States took very grave exception. By the night of October 24–25, the United States and the Soviet Union were in another nuclear showdown. The showdown itself was literally an overnight affair, a confrontation over which superpower would give what assistance to Egypt or Israel. The Soviets sent a politely worded threat of military intervention; the United States responded with a just-short-of-war nuclear alert. Then, amidst charges in the American press and in political circles that the alert was simply an effort to divert attention from Watergate, it was over. Egypt switched its call from a US–Soviet force to a more diverse international peacekeeping force, closing the door to Soviet intervention that the Americans feared when it was open. The juxtaposition of Nixon’s personal struggle for his political survival and a nuclear crisis is telling. Nixon’s aides that night—Kissinger, Chief of Staff Gen. Alexander Haig, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger—were as close to him as any of his associates other than those who were implicated with him.

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And they did not believe that he was in any shape to manage this crisis. So they managed it for him, and—from a certain point of view—rather successfully too. They said little and put American forces on a just-short-of-war footing. They wrote a statement for the President to send back to the Politburo. But what they did disregarded statutes and policies established to preserve the President as the sole authority to launch nuclear weapons. To say the least, they explored the very broadest limits of their authority to inform, advise, and assist the President. And that is the problem. Of course, staffs, advisers, and subordinates almost always prepare their principles’ statements and actions in advance. Kissinger, Schlesinger, and Haig would have been a part of this decision in any event; but Nixon had the authority, granted by an election. His very capable aides had only the authority granted by the President’s power of appointment and in a constitutional republic, the way they used that authority is a very troubling matter in itself. Yet the question of how fast a proper constitutional process can respond to a fast-developing situation is still open and is not trivial. The affair also illustrates the “ailments” to which nuclear safeguards and controls are heir. In the short term, however, the Saturday Night Massacre and its various consequences first took from Richard Nixon any ability to advance his triangular Cold War scheme and then forced him from office. And, as Nixon’s sponsorship of SALT and détente had helped those policies win approval at first, the discrediting of Nixon meant also the discrediting of his policies in the end. The memory of Nixon’s old persona as the quintessential anticommunist had buffered and deflected the heat of the by-then traditional hostility to communism and the Soviet Union. With that buffer removed, and in view of some Soviet successes in once-colonized Africa, the notion of détente withered in the American political establishment and in the public mind of the American people. Gerald Ford, Nixon’s successor as President, had considerable support in his role as a constitutional caretaker. Nevertheless, he was in no position to take initiatives, especially challenging ones, and the times could hardly have been worse—regardless of who was serving as President. In short, Americans were learning the hard way about serious historical change. 1970 marked the passage of twenty-five years following the end of World War II and Americans were surprised to discover that much they had thought permanent in their lives and in the life of their country was at best only transient. Some of the country’s new challenges were the consequences of United States policy right after World War II. The Marshall Plan and its Asian counterparts succeeded in rebuilding modern industrial Europe and Japan, which provided the United States with serious economic competition in its own markets for the very first time. The 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement had put American capital and American currency at the dominant center of the world economy. In 1971, in order to manage the economic consequences of the deficit financing of the War in Viet Nam, Nixon abandoned that structure—and the international economic dominance it created.

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Other troubles were of more recent provenance. As the Chinese and, later, the Cubans had discovered, the Soviet presence in its client states outside of Europe could be “imperial” in its own right. Nevertheless, hostile propaganda, along with American actions outside of Europe—capped by the War in Viet Nam— had deposited a legacy of anti-Americanism all over the globe. Justified or not, that legacy was a factor in international political power; it had an impact and it needed consideration. In the 1970s, that anti-Americanism was an irritating “background noise” to many Americans’ lives, a noise made sharp and intrusive by the impact of OPEC’s oil embargo. In the right circles, it was easy to conflate that hostility from the outside with the critiques leveled at American political life by the rather amorphous, homegrown “anti-war movement” of the day. However, while that was taking place, many of the social and cultural changes that had been part of the insurgencies in the 1960s were becoming establishmentarian in the 1970s; and that contributed to marked senses of unease all over the spectrum of American life. In the states once part of the Confederacy, part of the “Solid South” when the name meant solidly Democratic, the increasingly conservative Republican Party was becoming dominant. Lyndon Johnson had predicted that development when the Democrats under his leadership had become the party of civil rights. Most to the point were two key economic indicators. In the United States, once the world’s leading producer of crude oil, 1970 marked the peak of domestic production. At the same time, 1970 saw the average real wages paid to American workers reach their peak value and begin a historic decline in the purchasing power of the American paycheck. Dramatic political and social upheavals have grown from much less. As a nuclear matter, all of this became relevant only when Nixon left office, for he had signed the original agreements and shepherded them through Congress. Nixon could sponsor major policies quite contrary to the traditional prosecution of an armed Cold War standoff and get away with it. Nixon’s successors, Ford and Jimmy Carter, did not have the same kind of support. And both Ford and Carter faced real and political pressure to go in a very different nuclear direction. The political pressures were much as before (although louder), but the real pressures were compelling enough. The military services, especially the Army, had paid heavily for the war in Viet Nam, in blood, in equipment, and in public trust and acceptance. The Navy was doing its jobs with vessels built for the end of World War II and for Korea; most were at or nearing the end of service lives anticipated being thirty years. In the Air Force’s manned strategic force, pilots were beginning to fly B-52 bombers that were older than they were. The SALT agreements tightly regulated ABM defenses but permitted a variety of “offensive” technologies to operate, as long as they were visible to national means of verification. This supervision of the critical systems that made arms control so necessary encouraged the development of multiple-warhead missiles— to allow a fixed number of launchers to attack a growing number of targets. That increased the risk to hardened missile silos and therefore threatened the ability to implement a strategy of retaliation. Finally, the situation called for the

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rapid development of new launch systems, the Trident and MX ballistic missile systems, larger, longer range, and significantly more capable of launching MIRV weapons. Coming too were cruise missiles, jet-powered, computer-guided robot airplanes. With ranges of 1,000 miles or more, these descendants of the German V-1 “buzz bomb” of World War II, were less than twenty feet long and two feet in diameter. They weighed less than 3,500 pounds, which made them easily transportable, and readily concealable. Accurate enough at the target to be useful with a chemical explosive warhead, cruise missiles further confounded an arms-control regime with key characteristics that were invisible to technical means of verification. The Carter administration is remembered for weakness and defeat because of its commitment to arms limitation and to cutting funding for the military, yet President Carter, himself a veteran of the Naval Academy and trained for service in nuclear submarines, actually shut down only one strategic launcher project, the B-1 bomber. His object, also contrary to folklore, was not to reduce the number of bomber aircraft, but to save money to be used towards more advanced “stealth” aircraft, the F-117 and the B-2, both of them now well into long service lives as this is written. Programs to build a new generation of aircraft carriers, and to deploy a new class of huge ballistic missile submarines proceeded smoothly through the turbulence of the day. Carter also proposed that should the Soviet Union choose to attack in Europe, nato would confront the Soviet Union there with a weapon called “the neutron bomb.” Offered as a way to fight a Soviet attack without destroying Europe in the process, a neutron bomb was designed to have very small yields of blast and heat. It would do its killing with radiation; it would spare the property and infrastructure of Europeans while defeating an aggressor army fielding larger numbers of people. In theory. And Carter’s administration supported the construction of the MX (missile, experimental), a large ICBM capable of launching ten warheads.12 The MX, carrying ten re-entry vehicles was, in fact, too big. Its punch would be sufficiently devastating that an adversary might think it would be worthwhile to begin a first strike with an attack on it. To protect it, the administration proposed to create an enormous transport system underneath the western United States. The missiles were to be hauled around the system on railcars, invisible to satellite observers. Since the hatches over the launch points were visible to spy satellites (as the first generation Minuteman silos and their Soviet counterparts were), there would be a very large number of such hatches, more than could be used at any one time. As in a street-corner shell game, an adversary would have to guess: an enemy would be aiming an irreplaceable warhead at a hatch; if the launch point under the hatch was empty, the weapon was wasted and ten target areas in the USSR would be destroyed. It was a clever idea, if one disregarded the lunatic scale on which the system would have to be built, and the price tag, which was very large. The rhetoric of the 1976 campaign notwithstanding, President Ford and President Carter sought to continue Nixon’s policy of détente and to move

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the SALT process along a track supposedly leading to greater trust and more complete and effective limits on nuclear weapons. Conservatives in both political parties resisted that, especially the prospect of replacing SALT I (The Interim Agreement) with SALT II (“The Treaty … on the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms). As before, most of the opposition rhetoric was little changed: The Soviets have cheated on the existing agreements. The Soviets will cheat, intend to cheat, on future agreements. The Soviet objective is to maneuver the West into a position in which the Soviets have an advantage and can attack. The energy of the argument was changed some—a consequence of an American inability to maintain an international image of a white hat cowboy/liberator in the wake of Viet Nam. However, as arms limitation kept moving from abstraction to order of business, the changing nature of arsenals as a consequence of arms limitations became a larger factor in nuclear strategy and other related decisions. Jeffrey Marsh, writing in Commentary (once an anti-Stalinist left-wing journal, then moving to become a neo-conservative one) observed: While defensive systems are strictly regulated in the final accords, offensive systems are allowed to grow even more advanced and destructive, so long as the number of launchers is not increased. This is meant to make the consequences of a nuclear war so awful that deterrence cannot break down. What it does, in fact, is to guarantee that if deterrence does break down, the consequences will be as awful as possible.13 This foreshadowed a confluence of several traditional streams of Americans thinking. First came a repetition of some old American propositions: If something is very wrong, a technical “fix” would set it right. American military power earns its place because it is for defense not aggression. Here one sees a widespread yearning for some way to live with a global nuclear threat other than getting through each day as an eternal hostage to global devastation, a public opinion that might lead in many directions. Diplomacy and other uses of political power was an alternative but even amidst war weariness in the United States, SALT I did not come across as an encouraging example. Neither did the United Nations. As had been the case in the first years after Hiroshima, when a variety of political options seemed available to Americans in order to confront the prospect of nuclear attack, public support would go to military power, a nuclear-armed military. Ultimately it illustrates where the support for President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative came from. Reagan’s effort to upgrade ABM defenses tapped into the parallel American longing for security from attack right alongside the American belief that somewhere existed a technology that could provide it. The first great surprise of the Reagan administration, however, was how ABM defense transformed into the grandiloquent Strategic Defense Initiative. “Star Wars,” a name first applied by the system’s opponents, reinforced those

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traditional American thought patterns, especially since only two months separated the President’s March 1983 speech announcing SDI and the May release of the third film in the original “Star Wars” trilogy. Perhaps Reagan’s critics intended to imply that SDI was nothing other than a flight of juvenile science fiction imagination; what they seemed to have done was to associate marvelous new gadgets with the good-v-evil arc of the film’s story. Moreover, even if a fantasy, President Reagan’s SDI promised a kind of security that avoidance of mutual destruction could not. After all, Reagan had called them, publicly, “the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.”14 As the Cold War had developed, the strategic environment had changed a great deal, much more than anyone realized at the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s administration in the United States. Like it or not, the USSR had achieved rough parity with the United States in a nuclear arms race that was rooted in the early Cold War. Two other factors were equally important. The conditions that had led President Truman to proclaim the Truman Doctrine in 1947 pertained rather differently than they had in the beginning, especially in Europe. And the tsunami of European colonialism was now receding from Africa and Asia at full speed. The conceit that all revolution was pro-Communist and directed from Moscow was less defensible than ever.

notes 1 To a lesser degree, the bases also existed in the other regional treaty organizations John Foster Dulles constructed. For example, Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 began its last flight at Incirlik, Turkey and flew to Peshawar, Pakistan before penetrating Soviet airspace. 2 All of these, pro and con, are truly enduring issues, as the records of the 1992 US Senate debate on the comprehensive test ban treaty, the first treaty rejected by the Senate since the treaty of Versailles in 1920 show. 3 Sheldon Stern points out, it would be almost a half century before the public learned of the breadth of support an invasion of Cuba had, or of the solitary character of Kennedy’s refusal to use force against the Cuban missiles. 4 Let us reiterate the example of the Philippines in 1941–42. The Cuban Revolution’s protection in the form of the pledged word of the United States (albeit an oath extracted from a grumpily reluctant United States) remains as it was, now fifty years after the original pledge. Viewed in another way, the pledge did not stop American covert operations aimed at overthrowing the Castro government. These continued for some time after October 1962. 5 Churchill had been First Lord of the British Admiralty during the Anglo-German battleship-building race that preceded World War I and was thus a survivor from the corridors of power in both of the 20th century’s arms races. 6 Those are the United States, Soviet Union, United Kingdom, China, and France. 7 B. Goldschmidt, “The Negotiation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)” IAEA Bulletin, vol. 22, no. 3/4. 8 Kennedy and Khrushchev established an official, but private and direct communication through letters, the so-called “pen pal correspondence” that eventually became part of the official record of US diplomatic correspondence. They also employed private emissaries, including KGB agents like Georgi Bolshakov and Alexandr Feklisov.

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9 Lyndon Johnson Campaign Ad: Peace Little Girl (Daisy Spot), YouTube, online access: 30 July 2014; Lyndon Johnson Campaign Ad: Girl with an ice cream cone, YouTube, online access: , 30 July 2014. 10 Goldwater was a far more serious and influential Senator after he lost the presidency, and the Reagan-era restructuring of the military services Goldwater led through Congress is a monument of direct interest in our current field here. 11 For example, the United States remained one of the world’s great oil producers in 1973, 10 million barrels a day, although its rate of production was beginning a long slide. 12 The most modern model in the then-current US ICBM arsenal, the Minuteman III, could launch three re-entry vehicles. 13 Jeffrey Marsh, review of Cold Dawn: The Story of SALT, by John Newhouse, Commentary, 1 August 1973. Online access, 19 August 2014, . 14 Brainyquote.com, online access: , 20 August 2014.

10 sWeeT dreams and suicide machines

It was August 1984, seventy years after the beginning of World War I, forty-five after Hitler’s invasion of Poland. “My fellow Americans,” the President began. “I am pleased to tell you I just signed legislation which outlaws Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”1 Ronald Reagan should have been more careful. He certainly knew what he was doing behind a radio microphone; he had begun his career as an announcer and sportscaster in the 1930s; but on that day he suffered every live broadcaster’s constant nightmare accident. He made casual jokes through an equipment check while he was getting ready for his weekly radio speech; the microphone was open and what was supposed to be off the cuff and private went out to the whole world. In the immediate sense, the remark seemed to be Ronald Reagan at his laid-back, careless, and callous worst, and the whole affair had echoes of Barry Goldwater’s offhand remarks about “tossing one into the gent’s room at the Kremlin” during the 1964 campaign. The locker room cruelty of both remarks is worth remembering, as are what they suggest for an understanding of American Conservatism. At the same time, now that we have at least some of the answers at the back of this particular book, we understand that some of what people thought they knew about Ronald Reagan and his administration was wrong— and wrong in interesting and provocative ways. To begin with, what Ronald Reagan actually did with nuclear weapons resembled what Jimmy Carter did more than supporters of either would like to admit. Carter was a submariner by training, the only American President with training and field-level experience in any part of any nuclear delivery system. But unlike his Cold War predecessors or his own contemporary critics, Carter supported some level of nuclear disarmament and tried to limit spending on weapons systems that he thought unnecessary. At the same time, he was in no way the soft touch described in maliciously exaggerated partisan caricature.

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Reagan won political points by trash talking the SALT arms-control agreements, especially after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But once President Carter abandoned the effort to ratify the SALT II agreement in the Senate, his administration—and Reagan’s too, in its turn—followed its protocols as if it had been ratified. Although American charges that the Soviets cheated were always in the air, the Soviet Union did the same. And the Reagan administration, like Carter’s, pursued interests the Americans and Soviets held in common in the effort to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons beyond the control of the five nations that already owned them. Papers opened at the Reagan presidential library in the past decade allowed historian Paul Lettow to make a credible case that Reagan found nuclear weapons repellent and made abolishing them the great objective of his life and his presidency.2 What makes Lettow’s argument credible is the documentary evidence of Reagan’s private writings before his presidency and the clear congruence of witnesses, close colleagues who gave multiple interviews. What detracts from the argument is more than a little stretching of logic in service to partisan enthusiasm for Ronald Reagan. Yet his thesis, supported by research in the documents applauded by scholarly reviewers, explains much that is otherwise not understandable or visible. Ronald Reagan was elected as a hard-liner willing to completely overthrow détente and to pursue the Cold War, energetically, to the extreme. How and why did he then transform into a very successful supporter of nuclear arms reductions? Most importantly (and little discussed in this interpretation), Reagan did little to alter his positions. Put simply, he did not view the resumption of an offensive against the Soviet Union and the abolition of nuclear weapons to be contradictory objectives. He did not aim at containment and an ongoing conflict. Reagan’s papers led Lettow to conclude that the level of destruction caused by the earliest uses of nuclear weapons in World War II disgusted the President; in consequence, Reagan sought to abolish nuclear weapons even before his public life progressed beyond the Screen Actors Guild. Reagan and his supporters would later maintain that his experiences dealing with Hollywood Communists during the House Committee on Un-American Activities investigations and the McCarthy period fueled Reagan’s dislike for both the containment policy and the various retaliatory strategies associated with it. His view maintained that Containment was an error because it accepted the continued existence of the USSR’s “evil system.” The various retaliatory scenarios were in error because they accepted too much damage to the United States before the United States began shooting. Moving from those launch points, Reagan’s thinking resembles that of Curtis LeMay and the Air Force (as much as it resembles anyone’s), but Reagan also accepts some of the assumptions of Truman-era war planning as outlined in NSC-68. That should not be a surprise; Reagan was, after all, a former New Dealer and a union president. Like Truman’s planners, Reagan would pay for his expanded arsenals with Keynesian economics, “supply-side” Keynesian economics. Using a strategy borrowed from John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson,

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the Reagan tax cuts would keep more money in the pockets of business and the wealthiest individuals; they would invest it, the argument ran, and that would (in company with direct military spending) stimulate the economy, which would in its turn generate additional government revenue. Contemporary observers took note of the political home Reagan’s administration offered Cold War, anticommunist Democrats, neo-conservatives in the emerging political taxonomy; it is worth noting now the degree to which a famously Republican governor and President was himself a political heir to this political tendency working its way across the aisle. Reagan’s political journey also allowed him to bypass the isolationism that was part of the Republican legacy until the Cold War and the establishment of nato. Finally, Reagan apparently shared with some in military circles a specific ethical view of the Cold War nuclear stalemate. This formulation begins with the basic and indisputable fact of nuclear deterrence; the foundation of Massive Retaliation and Mutual Assured Destruction is the vulnerability of civilian population centers, cities, what the professionals had come to call countervalue targets. This necessarily requires treating millions of innocent civilians as hostages, in fact if not in name. In this argument, implementing a retaliatory strategy would be, by some very traditional military codes, illegal, immoral, and genocidal. In practice, to be sure, nations have honored those codes as much or more in the breach than in the observance; nonetheless, they exist as the forces in being of diplomatic and political power. Nations even observe them, sometimes. In the face of the horrific possible slaughter, a military ethicist can suggest that it would be more ethical to aim at military targets, in professional language counterforce targets. These would be targets made harder to hit; targets defended by other weapons; targets built harder to damage even with nuclear weapons; targets containing ever-larger portions of an enemy’s striking power and (one hoped) smaller portions of an enemy’s civilian population. This substantial evolution of LeMay’s strategic thinking is honorably descended from the US Air Force’s classical thinking on precision bombardment. But it also generates enormous force requirements, makes it tempting to strike first, and it creates pressure to begin a nuclear war so as to pre-empt an enemy’s more destructive attack on oneself. And the strategy’s ethical claims themselves beg some practically minded questioning. The possibility that a nuclear exchange might be limited to counterforce targets—and resolved with a relatively smaller human cost than would be the case if cities were the primary targets—is impossible to assess. In the historical experience of bombing since World War II onwards, however, the masters of aerial bombing have not been able to limit their damage in that way. Lettow describes pre-presidential Reagan’s rhetorical designs to use American economic and military power in tandem to pressure the Soviet Union to modify its official behavior (internally and on the world stage). From a very early point in his public life, Ronald Reagan was calling for the de-nuclearization of the Cold War with an eye towards the energetic pursuit of American advantage in it.

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That was the platform on which he would run and be elected President in 1980. Indeed, Reagan’s criticisms of Carter suggest that the energetic, muscular, even military pursuit of American advantage in international conflict (even if only for its own sake) had become an expected and desirable model for the behavior of nuclear-age political leaders, even when conditions and interest called for using other instruments of power. In 1942, perceiving that it had no other choice, the United States made an enormous investment in the Manhattan Project to hold off the damage that a German bomb might cause. However, poorer than the United States to begin with, and hobbled by its Communist dogma, the Soviet Union was vulnerable because its economy could not keep up with the demands of such a program. Reagan partisans overreach in crediting him with an early understanding of how the Soviet Union would lose the Cold War. Lettow sketches Reagan’s original objective as something less than “winning” the Cold War and destroying the Soviet Union; he no more foresaw the end of either the conflict or the adversary than did any other observer. Lettow describes the end of what process Reagan envisioned as inducing the USSR to adopt internal reforms which he believed would lead to a Soviet willingness to consider real cuts in nuclear weapons. He conceived of the end game only vaguely, but it was a time when only a very few people imagined an end game at all—even after that end had begun. Reagan was also fascinated with the possibilities of high-technology weapons as part of his anti-Communist designs; a fascination consistent with what had become a traditional American belief in technological fixes. It was also a nice fit with economic interests in the defense sector. What Lettow calls Reagan’s “wildly unconventional” thinking on nuclear weapons had no trouble sharing the arena of political propaganda with far more orthodox calls for more assertive antiSoviet policies and weapons. Indeed, the combination made excellent politics. Nuclear matters scared Americans in the seasons preceding Ronald Reagan’s election and they pondered two possible responses. Anti-nuclear activists proposed a “Nuclear Freeze” to replace SALT, a bi-lateral agreement between the US and the USSR to halt in place all nuclear weapons development. A pastoral letter from the conference of American Roman Catholic bishops made similar calls in the early months of 1983. “The Freeze” became a large and widespread movement, larger, more pervasive, and more closely connected to mainstream politics than earlier “peace” and anti-nuclear movements. Earlier in the Cold War, Americans had found it easier to relieve their fears of nuclear destruction by investing their hopes and their tax dollars in a nuclear-armed military.3 In his first term, President Reagan successfully urged them to do it again. He announced the ABM Strategic Defense Initiative on March 23, 1983, and over the next few weeks obliquely denounced the Freeze proposal as Soviet propaganda. A few weeks after that, the House of Representatives defeated a version of the Freeze resolution. The situation in the “real world” was beginning to bear some resemblance to some of the scenarios in Reagan’s files: the Soviet economy had been stagnant

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for a decade; so too had been the motivational power of the Soviet leadership. Things were now changing. The closet of relics who had been running the show in Moscow was giving way to a new generation of leaders, ironically, the first actually born after the Revolution, the first to come of age after the end of the Great Patriotic War. However, the Soviet desire for arms control pre-dated the arrival of Gorbachev and his reformers, and as Lettow points out, Reagan’s original scenarios did not include the United States “winning” the Cold War by causing the Soviet Union to collapse. The obstacle to formal agreement was SDI. The Soviets didn’t want to tolerate it—even when Reagan offered to share the technology after the US perfected it. A counterforce nuclear arsenal aimed at the Soviet military and backstopped by the space-based ABM network to disrupt a retaliatory “second strike” looked, from where they sat, much too like an offensive, aggressive formation. The Soviets disliked SDI enough that some US officials saw it as a valuable bargaining chip, something the Soviets would give a great deal to sweep away; and for that reason too, the United States didn’t want to give it up—and would under no circumstances give it up cheaply. Reagan and his party reaped another benefit as well. A good many Americans refused to believe that any transformation was underway in the character of the Soviet Union or in the character of the Cold War. Glasnost and perestroika were in this view nothing more than maskirovka. Therefore, SDI would retain a domestic political value as a symbol of hard-line defense policies even after Reagan left office and even after the USSR ceased to exist. However, Reagan himself apparently thought that the existence of SDI, especially if shared between the US and the USSR, would be an essential part of making the new military order work; he did not appreciate those of his advisers who wanted to treat it as a mere bargaining chip. Reagan needed coaxing before he was willing to work with Gorbachev on nuclear issues, some of it reportedly from British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. On the other hand, Reagan gave Gorbachev credit for the diplomacy that was thawing the Cold War even before his White House term ended. Jack F. Matlock, Jr., a former Reagan adviser on Soviet affairs and later US ambassador to the USSR, sees a pattern of involvement more typical of an American presidency that had just entered its second term when Gorbachev came to power. Matlock sees President Reagan as a seizer of opportunities, a pragmatist who sought to encourage Soviet initiatives to reform the Soviet system without threatening to demolish and replace it; as, in Strobe Talbott’s words, an “operational optimist” who came to believe that Gorbachev’s success was in the interest of the United States.4 As it was, at least in the short term. In this view of momentous times, the United States did not aim at and did not expect the collapse of the Soviet Union. Indeed, in 1985 diplomatic historian John Lewis Gaddis suggested at a Washington foreign policy “think tank” seminar that some of the draft recommendations the group was preparing consider the possibility that the Cold War might end. What might the US do to bring it about? What relationships might then replace it? After what Gaddis describes

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as “an embarrassed silence,” a “highly-respected senior diplomat” replied, “it hadn’t occurred to any of us that it ever would end.”5 The conflict that might have ushered in an apocalypse had been reduced to part of the scenery, albeit an important part. Military and diplomatic leaders had become used to thinking within a box defined by the Cold War and its nuclear arsenals. The American and Soviet presidents met privately during their Reykjavik summit in 1986, with translators but without advisers, and considered the possibility that they might abolish all nuclear weapons. SDI was the deal-breaking obstacle at that time, but two sets of “advisers” and handlers recoiled, their dismay growing into horror as they realized how far their principals were willing to go without them. Still, it was a time of unexpected developments. China broke up prodemocracy demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in June 1989; but the Soviet bloc in Central and Eastern Europe had crumbled during Gorbachev’s administration. The following November, two revolutions were televised around the world; citizens of two German republics cooperated in the spectacular destruction of the Berlin Wall, and, within weeks, the Republic of South Africa released Nelson Mandela from two decades in prison. Neither the Soviet nor the South African transformation has been entirely peaceful or pristine; but before the process took place no one would have predicted that either of them would succeed at all, much less as peacefully as they have so far. The nearly simultaneous birth of the atomic bomb and the Cold War made it seem that they were inextricably tied to each other. The end of the Cold War in the ninth decade of the 20th century and the end of the USSR in 1991 destroyed that illusion. The Soviet Union and the United States were each animated by great secular faiths and guided in their behavior by the powerful missionary impulses within each of those faiths. Did the apocalyptic destructive power of the atomic bomb seem a match for the magnitude of the conflict and the size of the stakes? Or, alternatively, were the magnitude of the conflict and the size of the stakes responses to the apocalyptic destructive power of the atomic bomb? Richard Rhodes has begun consideration of such questions, drawing attention in the process to South Africa’s small but completely unknown nuclear arsenal, accumulated and then renounced in the 1970s.6 This transformation in the nature of the world’s nuclear questions was the consequence of political changes in both primary nuclear powers. Gorbachev, born in 1931, was the first Soviet leader for whom the Great Patriotic War was only a childhood memory. For him, even more than for Nikita Khrushchev, fulfillment of the promise of the Revolution was the task before the Soviet state and that required the state to get out from under its military budget. Unlike Khrushchev, Gorbachev would not use force to preserve either the Soviet state or his own rule of it. The world saw that as political and economic circumstances having changed, and the atomic bomb seeming (if only momentarily) to become more manageable. It was even a quiet matter for Russia to consolidate the parts of the Soviet arsenal once based in the about-to-be independent republics such as Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Russia accepted responsibility for Soviet obligations

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under several arms-control agreements, including some that had been recently concluded. And when the Russians’ reconnaissance satellites and warning networks began to degrade, the Americans worked (and paid) to maintain them in orbit and in working order. It was clearly and indisputably in the American interest for the Russians to see that the United States was living up to the terms of the arms-control agreements, and that there was no activity in the United States they had to fear. Perhaps in that sense, Niels Bohr was proven right. “Complementarity” did operate in the real world. At the same time, and by any standard of measure, the age of nuclear weapons is not yet very old; so most conclusions about it must remain preliminary and tentative. One may tease yet another point of view by noting that nuclear physics and exploration in the upper reaches of the Periodic Table have discovered elementary particles and even elements whose life spans are also extremely short. Lord Rutherford once derided the proposition that one could actually unleash the potential energy described in E = mc2. Moonshine, he had called it. Lise Meitner, Otto Hahn, and Fritz Strassman demonstrated, with a small amount of material and equipment assembled atop a laboratory table, that it was not moonshine. Perhaps as much as nuclear weapons prove anything else, they demonstrate that phenomena at first very small and very short-lived can have an enormous impact on life as it is lived at the scale of human life and society. If the proof-of-principle applies to destructive consequences, why would it not also apply to the complementary non-destructive consequences? That question can be answered only through history not yet experienced, through work not yet done. But if the closing of the Cold War briefly minimized the likelihood of a global apocalypse, the tide of European colonialism was continuing to recede. This “other” great historical phenomenon of the 20th century has contributed and continues to contribute to the possibility of local or regional apocalypse. And it also always threatens to draw the US and Russia—with their much larger nuclear arsenals—into their regional conflicts. Finally, this new stage in the life of the atomic bomb demonstrates that just as nuclear weapons have transformed the value of military superiority and military secrecy, they have also transformed the values and instruments of peace. Niels Bohr and his concept of complementarity provide a critical spirit that animates Richard Rhodes’ magisterial four-volume history of nuclear weapons. The Bomb’s destructive potential threatens civilization with extinction, but that same destructive potential also encourages changes in international public behavior that make war less likely. In Rhodes’ implicit scenario, a world more open to peaceful international discourse and exchange is simultaneously a requirement for and a consequence of coming to grips with the threat of nuclear destruction. Yet just that openness is a big part of the problem of nuclear proliferation, as is the possibility that “the peaceful uses of atomic power” will provide enormous amounts of energy to the improvement of the human condition.

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After the US first acquired nuclear weapons, the first “proliferators” were two former allies, the Soviet Union and Great Britain. The Soviet Union was responding to an American Bomb in much the same way that the United States had responded to the possibility of a German Bomb; Britain’s motives were more complex. The British played a critical role in achieving fission for military purposes, but the Americans had precipitously cut off their information supply. To be sure, British leaders expected to be at the United States’ side under just about any imaginable circumstances; but good leaders like to keep their options open. Even the new Socialist government in London believed in maintaining whatever bastions of British world power still remained, including a seat “at the top table” in the generally bi-polar Cold War. On both sides of the Cold War, the two original nuclear states were, very quietly, aiding their allies—at least it was on both sides until the summer of 1960 when the Soviet Union ended all its assistance to the Chinese program. Skeptics in China, just as in Britain and France, questioned whether the United States or the Soviet Union would risk their own survival to extend a deterrent umbrella over their allies. In actual practice, however, the pursuit of “the peaceful uses of atomic power” has provided the best opportunities for non-nuclear states seeking to “join the club,” generally much better than direct military assistance. In fact, policing the fuel for “the peaceful atom” constitutes at once the front line of defense against nuclear proliferation and the greatest difficulty in that effort. Dwight Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program created the largest portal through which nuclear proliferators may pass. “The New Look” was one side of Eisenhower’s coin; “Atoms for Peace” was the other, a program to share information, technology, even nuclear fuel in pursuit of four objectives. The administration wanted to spread the benefits of the peaceful uses of atomic power and to encourage nations to align themselves with the United States in order to receive those benefits. It would keep a measure of American control over nuclear activities among allied or even merely friendly nations. Above all, access to benefits of the “peaceful atom” would, they hoped, deter searches for the benefits of the “military atom.” In some important ways, notably the spread of nuclear-generated electricity and the willingness of most “have not” nations to limit their own nuclear programs, Atoms for Peace was a success. Before his death, John Kennedy could imagine a world with fifteen or twenty nucleararmed nations. There has never been anything like that number, and so one can—and should—credit Atoms for Peace, along with other anti-proliferation efforts, with that success. Yet, with nuclear weapons involved, the logic of the bomber stream is the same as the logic of arms-control efforts. “The bomber will always get through,” and nuclear weapons are so destructive that even one weapon will be more than enough to create a cataclysm. Similarly, even amidst a successful anti-proliferation regime, some outlier nation—acting out of fear or greed, aggression or paranoia—will maintain a nuclear arsenal and/or the equipment to create one upon demand. One such nation would be enough. And by the logic of arms races, such a nation would become two (and then

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more) contending nations before very long. As Richard Rhodes and others have pointed out, the most common response to the presence of nuclear weapons is more nuclear weapons. At this early stage in the age of nuclear weapons, some of the proliferations already on record seem more important than others. Britain built its own fission and fusion bombs so as to retain its “seat at the top table.” France resisted a subordinate role in a Western European confederacy led by the United States. China was laying a claim to scientific modernity and creating an arsenal based on the principle of minimal deterrence. All now seem less threatening to the world of their time than arsenals built in the Middle East and South Asia seem to ours. Perhaps they were less threatening; none of those projects existed outside the framework of the US–Soviet Cold War, none challenged the Cold War’s status as the world’s primary conflict. In the 21st century, however, observers discuss seven other nations who might, or might not possess nuclear weapons (now or in the past) or be working to acquire them: Israel, India, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, South Africa, and North Korea. For the sake of argument, assume that all of them are or were at one time engaged in building nuclear weapons. Their leaders, all of them, justified the increase in destructive power and the expense of creating it, by referring to some conflict descended from colonialism and its mid-20th-century retreat. Israel was first. Most of the discussion of a nuclear Israel has taken place within the framework of “the Arab–Israeli conflict,” regardless of the discussants’ pointof-view on that struggle. However, one recent treatment, Feroz Khan’s Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb, places the Israeli choice in a broader historical perspective and indeed uses Israel’s history as part of a theoretical model that justifies Pakistan’s nuclear behavior.7 Khan, a veteran of a decade in the Pakistani nuclear program and a former director in Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Division, joined the faculty of the United States’ Naval Postgraduate School in 2003. His work was independent, at least nominally; but he supports what Pakistan did, what he was part of doing, and Pakistan’s government exercised significant control over what he could see and to whom he could talk. However, if limited by all of that—and by his partisanship—Khan does make some useful generalizations about nuclear proliferation in the developing world. And his partisanship actually becomes a useful element in understanding nuclear proliferation outside of the Cold War context. In the theoretically-based, model-building mode of political science, he argues that nations, especially developing nations, choose to build nuclear weapons as a response to insecurity that is affordable within limited resources. In that frame of reference, nuclear weapons are no longer a distinguishing mark of a wealthy, powerful, and modern nation. Instead, they appear to be a weapon of choice for poor nations (or even of non-state actors like terrorist organizations). Khan maintains that Pakistan, like Israel, was an “orphan state” trying to protect itself while lying outside the protection of the American nuclear

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umbrella. On the one hand, both nations could in theory have chosen to “bandwagon,” to rely upon the stronger, threatening state for protection. Or they could “balance,” work to acquire additional military power or a reliable ally. In such circumstances, he says, states prefer to “balance,” to resist. Having made that first choice, nations have a second choice to make, how to resist. Exercising that, they prefer to balance with greater military capability instead of an alliance. That provides them with greater freedom of action, more control. And it does away with any dependence upon or need to convince a perhaps reluctant partner. Khan also introduces the concept of strategic culture and its importance as a contributing factor in a choice to “go nuclear.” Drawing upon his sources, Khan defines strategic culture as: a collectivity of the beliefs, norms, values, and historical experiences of the dominant elite in a polity that influences their understanding and interpretation of security issues and environment, and shapes their responses to these.8 In other words, public opinion among a group of leaders, a shared mythology, what people have been through, what people at the top think they know—true or not. Khan’s “strategic culture” descends, he says, through what he calls a “nuclear weapons acquisition narrative,” a narrative fueled at its origins by national humiliation: the Soviet Union in 1945, for example, remembering foreign intervention in the Revolution, recovering from the Nazi invasion, and refusing to accept a threatening American nuclear monopoly. Britain and France remembering their now lost international power. They had required massive help in order to survive World War II and (however stoically) resented American leadership and their continued dependence on American wealth and power. China had to come to grips with a legacy of foreign control in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Japanese occupation had followed these, as had an early round of American nuclear threats. India recalled colonial subjugation, partition, its defeat by China, and its fear of a nuclear China after 1964; Pakistan remembered its birth in partition, its defeat at India’s hands in 1971 and then its dismemberment. Israel is nominally descended from early 20th-century Zionist activism and a World War I British pledge to support the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. His Majesty’s government was seeking support from the world’s Jewish community in its duel with Germany. However, Israel, from that time onward, occupied territory that Britain had also promised—at about the same time—as an Arab homeland in return for Arab support against Germany’s ally, the Ottoman empire. Finally, regardless of any promises they had made to anybody, the British and the French intended to divide the region between them, to reap their colonial advantages and the profits of the flowing oil trade. Violent conflict flared quickly. At first, largely Arab violence attacked British rule and Israeli

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settlement. As time went on, Israeli settlers began to attack British rule and then they commenced campaigns of retaliatory violence—to deter or repay their Arab neighbors. In all the years since, not even the UN’s partition of Palestine and the more than a half-century of warfare that followed have been able to put an end to it. Confronting what its leaders saw as an implacable cadre of enemies surrounding it, Israel apparently sought nuclear protection from its earliest days as an independent nation. Haunted by the Nazi Holocaust, Israelis and their Zionist supporters around the world recalled even more vividly the closed borders that had trapped multitudes as they tried to flee ahead of it. No one had had room for Europe’s Jews. Israel was to be one place, perhaps the only place, where Jews would fear neither exclusion nor expulsion. Whether intended to deter an Arab attack, or to threaten a nuclear conflict wide enough to force outsiders to protect its existence, Israel apparently used French help to create an arsenal several hundred warheads large. The Israelis won’t say exactly how large an arsenal. In fact, they won’t admit to having any arsenal at all, much less discuss how they propose to use it. According to Khan, isolation follows humiliation as a factor in nuclearization. Capitalist Europe demonized and sought to isolate the Soviet Union throughout the years before World War I. China was isolated from both its capitalist adversaries and its nominal Soviet ally. Britain and France were never certain that the US would risk itself and its population to protect Europe against a Soviet attack. Neither was Israel. In the 1960s, India faced the threat they feared—a nuclear-armed China—without help. Neither the Americans nor the Soviet bloc would guarantee India’s safety against attack from China. Pakistan got no help from either China or the United States when it confronted India in 1971. Khan points out that as it got its nuclear program underway and became the target of western criticism, Pakistan’s population and leadership also developed a conviction that they were the victims of anti-Muslim prejudice, a conviction that mixed well with resentments over the conflict with India. Finally, there is the matter of national identity. Khan also points out that overcoming the various challenges that are part of building a nuclear arsenal elicits pride, a remedy for humiliation and an instrument against isolation. The talents and assets required become part of a national population’s self-image. The nuclear weapons states do constitute the most elite club in international relations and nuclear weapons provided clear and instant testimony to the modernity and power of their owners. And Pakistan’s national identity has been a matter for lethal quarrels, both at home and abroad, throughout its relatively short history. The ethnic-religious conflict between Hindus and Muslims in South Asia started long before the British arrived. Indeed, the British colonizers manipulated those divisions in order to take control of both groups. In the first half of the 20th century, the anti-colonial movement in India tried but failed to secure independence for all of “British India” under one government. The eventual

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independence settlement subdivided the vast colony. Regions where a majority of the population was Muslim would become part of Pakistan. Hindu regions would become part of India, although the freedoms and equality of both groups in both countries was supposed to be guaranteed. According to Khan, the violent failure of that partition created a sense of victimization and an awareness of diplomatic isolation in Pakistan. As the process continued, India successfully claimed possession of the border province of Kashmir, where most of the people were Muslim but the princely family that had ruled (with British permission) was Hindu. That Indian success entrenched a Pakistani “legend” of humiliation in a classic, traditional, perpetually live border dispute. Partition and the legacy of colonialism also imposed some astonishing political geography on Pakistan. Between the two parts of the country (East Pakistan and West Pakistan) lay a subcontinent: 2,000 miles between Peshawar on the Northwest Frontier and Rangoon on the Southeast. Whatever the merits of the Bengali dispute with the West Pakistanis who ran the country, Pakistan lost the 1971 war with India that it triggered. The Indians, from a larger country with a larger military, won enough on the battlefield to keep Kashmir and dictate a Pakistani evacuation of what is now Bangladesh. Having begun nuclear development to generate electrical power, Pakistan then began the long process that would allow it to build nuclear weapons. Khan demonstrates his point; even the possibility of a nuclear-armed adversary conjures up the terror of a ruthless, implacable, and otherwise unstoppable enemy and fear of that alone is sufficient to justify in some minds enormous effort to build nuclear weapons. He is hardly without interest in the question, of course, and (even when discussing India’s nuclear arsenal) treads only lightly on the more aggressive thinking that might motivate a country to acquire nuclear weapons. Indeed, once the prospective uses and users of nuclear weapons expanded beyond the limits of the original Cold War antagonists, the number and complexity of situations that one might think worthy of nuclear resolution also multiplied. Similarly, the paths one might take actually to acquire nuclear weapons became more numerous. It was at just this point in nuclear history that Pakistan’s route to a nuclear arsenal illustrated the new dimensions of the nuclear proliferation problem. As Feroz Khan has it, Pakistan is following along a path previously trodden by its principal enemy, indeed by all nuclear states. In the 21st century, the physics and engineering of explosive nuclear devices—atomic and hydrogen bombs—is no longer the world’s deepest, darkest set of secrets. However, even in the days when it had been, bomb designers needed nuclear fuel, uranium and plutonium. To satisfy that need the United States had built (in wartime) a substantial industrial infrastructure. Pakistan bore the same burden, with fewer resources and with a terribly small pool of trained people. The intersection of the Cold War with the recession of colonialism produced a solution to those problems, although at the price of making the proliferation of nuclear weapons easier. The “peaceful” atom and its military twin are united by the fuel cycle. A reactor and a bomb use the same fuel. The uranium isotope U-235 will support

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a chain reaction, but it constitutes 0.7 percent (seven-tenths of one percent) of naturally occurring uranium. A reactor’s uranium fuel must be “enriched” with enough additional U-235 to support a chain reaction; “weapons grade” nuclear fuel must be “enriched” to a much higher level. The processes of enrichment are identical for both. In 1946, the “Acheson–Lilienthal Plan” for arms control (written by an advisory committee that included Robert Oppenheimer) made control of the nuclear fuel cycle the foundation of formal arms control. The plan placed the fuel cycle under the jurisdiction of a United Nations Atomic Energy Agency. The notion of creating an intergovernmental public agency to control and operate the fuel cycle worldwide did not survive; but the concept of privately- or state-owned companies regulated, monitored, and inspected by an international agency came to characterize the global industry founded upon that fuel cycle. That concept seems plausible, but evasion of it would hardly be unique to nuclear power. Industries and regulators have sought to profit at the other’s expense, as long as there have been marketplaces. That so much industrial nuclear hardware is “dual use”—necessary to produce and use both the peaceful and the military atom—simply makes the problem more difficult and more urgent. One enormously significant feature of underdevelopment in the oncecolonized world remains a lack of electrical power, a need that can be met by nuclear reactors (as well as by other technologies). During the Cold War both the United States and the Soviet Union became interested in filling that need for nuclear reactors, at the price of political affiliation and with the concession of fuel cycle control by the great power. Training of technicians to operate the equipment was frequently provided by the supplier—company or nation— through programs like “Atoms for Peace.” Around the world, the methodology worked as intended almost all the time. Almost. Feroz Khan highlights the complex waltz Pakistan’s nuclear program danced with first informal international norms and then with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). His partisanship weighs the merits of India’s and Pakistan’s respective efforts to evade the NPT on different, pro-Pakistani, scales, but Khan does not conceal them either. Nuclear reactors are the ultimate dual-use technology. Uranium enrichment plants make the fuel the reactors need and, by extending the process, they can increase the enrichment level to bomb-grade. Reactors can also produce bombgrade uranium, and plutonium as well as electrical power. After 1971, Pakistan sought to make its own nuclear fuel, free of NPT supervision through the International Atomic Energy Agency. As Feroz Khan would have us believe, this action simultaneously addressed a legitimate development issue and the need to keep prying eyes off the long, slow effort to assemble a nuclear fuel industry in the country. And as the decision to attach a weapons program to the existing electric power initiative became more tangible, Pakistan’s methods revolutionized the nuclear weapons business and created a new set of challenges to hopes that nuclear arms can be controlled. The principal (although not the

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only) agent of this revolution was a European-trained Pakistani metallurgist, Abdul Qadeer Khan. Khan was born in Bhopal, now part of India, and grew up in Karachi after his family’s migration across the partition line in 1953. He moved to Europe to earn advanced degrees, including a doctorate. European credentials led to a European job, to a European wife, indeed to a European life—until Pakistan was defeated and humiliated in the 1971 war with India. By that time, Khan was a successful scientist and engineer who worked for a European conglomerate that did a large business in reactor uranium reprocessing. As the smoke was lifting, Khan contacted Pakistan’s new government and offered his services toward the acquisition of a Pakistani atomic bomb. Abdul Qadeer Khan’s position seems almost completely distinctive. Of course, few people ever could get in on the ground floor of a historic enterprise such as the American or Pakistani quests for nuclear weapons, but A. Q. Khan’s vantage point was different and these were two different ground floors. In the American and Soviet projects, bomb designers accumulated leadership and pride of place. Pakistan’s project seems emblematic of all the post-NTP proliferations. They depended, and they still depend on the logistics of acquiring and maintaining their access to fissile material, highly enriched bomb fuel that can, even in a very small package, support a chain reaction. Because the enrichment process is the same for reactor and bomb fuel, however, facilities to make them are very justifiable as innocent development even as they can act as cover for weapons making. From another point of view, like Klaus Fuchs, A. Q. Khan was a believer—a product of the violent partition of India and Pakistan and the colonial past that preceded it—who subscribed to Pakistan’s grievances and who cheerfully volunteered in a determined effort to redress them. Again like Klaus Fuchs, Khan was creating at least some of the information he was transmitting illicitly. (Fuchs did some of the theoretical calculations needed to develop the implosion method of detonating a nuclear blast; Khan is a major figure in the creation of high-speed centrifuges to enrich uranium.) Yet historical circumstances had changed. Information and information flows had become much more open, but the opportunities to use them also became, if not transparent, then always suspect. Fuchs labored deep within the apparat; Khan seized leadership and exercised an entrepreneurial opportunity that Fuchs would never have, and he rose to heights of wealth and power that would never come Fuchs’ way. Their chosen work sent both to prison, of course (house arrest in Khan’s case), but—for better or worse—imprisonment neither deterred nor undid the nuclear proliferation they made possible. Pakistan’s quasi-covert nuclear project had hunted for suppliers carefully, seeking out vendors and shippers who could, and would work to maintain a very low profile for these sales. Khan did not create the widespread network of contacts attributed to him, but he expanded and refined it, in a manner perhaps analogous to the capitalist industrial consolidators of the late 19th century. And he consolidated power, the power of his agency and his personal power,

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within the framework of Pakistani politics. The sources and the degree of the permission he had to do any of what he did next remains open to considerable question, apparently. What he actually did was complex, but nonetheless readily understandable. Whether they were a set of rogue private interests or simply an assertive part of Pakistan’s national enterprise, Khan’s research labs and his international network of suppliers and brokers could be enormous and unique assets if and when made available to the right customers. Khan and Pakistan made them available, to Iran, and Iraq, to North Korea, and to Libya. Now many less-than-fully-developed nations might arm themselves with nuclear weapons. South Africa’s short-lived and stealthy arsenal proved the theoretical point, but Pakistan’s situation was more typical of situations around the world. Khan and his colleagues altered the industrial scale once required to build nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons and nuclear strategies were now factors in regional as well as global conflict. And security in a world of post-colonial nuclear states rested in part on governments neither democratic nor stable, as the case of Pakistan has demonstrated and on governments not necessarily aligned with any great outside power, as Iran insists on demonstrating. Finally, the glorification of the suicide bomber and a new acceptance of terrorism as a weapon represents a powerful challenge to an international structure of nuclear security based on retaliation and mutually assured destruction. That is to say it is now a completely new nuclear arms race.

notes 1 Ronald Reagan, transcription of radio broadcast, 11 August 1984, YouTube, , online access, 6 April 2015. 2 Paul Lettow, Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (New York: Random House, 2005). 3 Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985). 4 Jack F. Matlock, Jr., Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended (New York: Random House, 2004). See also Strobe Talbott’s review, “Reagan and Gorbachev: Shutting the Cold War Down,” New York Times, 1 August 2004; online access, 29 September 2014, . 5 John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), vii. 6 Richard Rhodes, Twilight of the Bombs (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 156–172. 7 Feroz Khan, Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb, Stanford Security Studies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). 8 Ibid., introduction.

ePiLogue

Bob Dylan’s anthem “The Times They Are a-Changin’” caught the spirit of its time very well but it did not anticipate the magnitude and the direction of social and cultural changes over the following decades, and that should be a warning to students of the late 20th century.1 Worth noting as well is that from the vantage point of the early 21st century, it seems that few, if any, scholarly students of the past that was recent when Dylan began writing did any better than he did. The atomic bomb remains what it has always been, a blunt instrument of no military use beyond deterrence and completely unable to win for its owners any benefits proportionate to the enormous costs and risks of using it. And it also continues to occupy a place in historical geography—that place where historical forces flowing from the Communist Revolution and its aftermath swirl together with those forces flowing from the recession of European colonialism out of Asia and Africa. The forces controlling and maintaining those weapons have changed, however, with consequences not yet fully experienced and certainly not yet fully understood. All the five original nuclear-armed states have concluded that they themselves are safe, reliable custodians for the destructive power they command, and that they are entitled to that custody. They will not be shaken from that conviction, nor from the ancillary conviction that more recently arrived nuclear states are not safe and, therefore, not reliable. For those reasons, the argument runs, these new nuclear states are not entitled to the custody of nuclear weapons. This is a contention that the new states, or the potential new states, reject completely and adamantly. However, previously, the United States and the Soviet Union could make decisions with global impact during the Cold War— bilaterally if they could, unilaterally if they had to. They could constrain the actions of their allied and client states, although that control was sometimes achieved only with difficulty, as the Soviets discovered dealing with China

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and as the Americans discovered with Britain, France, and Israel at Suez. They can’t do that anymore. What is new, what has emerged since the Cuban Missile Crisis is a group of new nuclear-armed (or potentially nuclear-armed) states that might well develop the capabilities to inject their own arsenals and their own interests into a situation that might once have been managed by one or more “Great Powers.” Fidel Castro famously objected to Khrushchev’s decision to accept Kennedy’s no-invasion pledge to end the Missile Crisis, asking for a Soviet nuclear response in the event of an American invasion. Castro’s complaint had no influence on Khrushchev; however, under current circumstances one cannot know if Castro’s latter-day counterpart might have had some nuclear strength of his own—or some unknown ally or admirer. The end of the Cold War took a great deal of the superpowers’ capabilities with it. The Americans had had to tolerate the Israeli bombing of Iraq’s osirak reactor in 1981. They have had to tolerate the Russian seizure of the Crimea and other parts of Ukraine as the Russians have had to cope with significant economic sanctions. The Soviets could not keep Saddam Hussein, their one-time client in Iraq, from invading Kuwait in 1990. Nor could they keep nato and the United States, their long-term adversaries, from sending substantial military forces to their own security zone to defeat Saddam Hussein. Russia and Iran have acted together on occasion, but they are hardly allies and no larger power has or seeks the power to act as Iran’s sponsor on the world stage. As it was when the 20th century first arrived, the world is governed by a handful of great powers and maintaining a precarious international balance between the two largest is no longer a help, or a threat, to widespread peace. Even before worldwide communications and transactions were but a mouse click away, global perspectives competed for attention, or for power, with parochial ones. And even without nuclear weapons, a parochial conflict might be only a small event or two away from a world war. During the early years of our modern European history, the Seven Years’ War was one such a conflict. It began as a fight to control the Ohio River Valley, a 1754 battle on the site of Pittsburgh between British and French colonial scouting parties. The “British” were Virginia Provincial troops, under the British flag and commanded by Col. George Washington, and they lost. When the war was over, the British ended up winning control of what would become Canada and the United States, not to mention literally imperial power for themselves in sub-continental India. Given how difficult bringing to bear the technology and organization of violence was in the 18th century, especially the slow speed of communication, the Seven Years’ War had generated a much-extended radius of destruction in a very short period of time. Today, in the 21st century, what might yet emerge from a fight for control of a river valley in Kashmir? On the other hand, we may ask if the post-Cold War world has been mimicking the Cold War. What regional or ethnic conflicts are ready to break out except that nations fear the nuclear destruction they would set loose upon the world?

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One reason why it might be difficult to see the next Cuban Missile Crisis in its early stages is that the character of relations between very large nations and their citizens was changing, even in the democracies. During the Cold War, few in the United States thought seriously to question the objectives and methods of the nato nations, facing a totalitarian state, even fewer in the Soviet Union had the inclination, the opportunity, or the courage. Nevertheless, when the Cold War was over, one of the two great nuclear states disappeared, along with the proselytizing ideology that supported it. The other great nuclear power suffered (simultaneously) defeat in war, angry conflict over very basic questions of citizenship and citizens’ rights, and revelations that its government had used criminal methods in order to preserve itself. For better or worse, more nonEuropean peoples had governments of their own; but many features of the postcolonial world suggest that many peoples’ governments are not “their own” in any traditional democratic sense. Developments in the post-colonial years, a global economy whose market values supplant traditional values in every sphere of human activity, have created enormous social and cultural strains—and new fault lines—between the traditional and the modern. The epicenter of these fault lines is the Persian Gulf and adjacent South Asia. During the Cold War, few thought to question the stability of the governments that owned nuclear weapons or their capability to lock those weapons up against thieves. Not planners, but screenwriters imagined scenarios that might play out if something terrible happened. Something could be done, invariably successful: something reliant upon a character Sean Connery or George Clooney might play. Pakistan, seated atop the intersection of the fault lines, not surprisingly has had frequently transient regimes, both civil and military; and Pakistan became the first politically unstable nuclear state. And as colonialism receded, the South Asian fault lines once concealed by the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein, and the other authoritarian figures of the region became visible, and groups increasingly known as “non-state actors” or “nongovernment organizations” developed considerable power along those fault lines. Some of these NGOs have themselves become trans-national players. And some of these groups have developed innovative examples of what one may call, for the sake of argument, launch vehicles. Once again, the world’s fault lines appear to separate the “haves” from the “have nots,” with more of the “have nots” attempting to develop their own access to nuclear weapons. And on the other side of the fault, people scare each other; suppose they got the Bomb. The rhetoric is heavily dependent upon negative stereotyping and readily provides emotional fodder for the escalation of some minor fault or incident into an apocalypse waiting to happen. Yet it would be a mistake to see the future as simply an extrapolation of the recent past with the number of players and plays increased, for even nuclear weapons exist in historical and intellectual contexts. And the nature of warfare is changing. European warfare is an insatiable consumer of everything needed for modern, comfortable life. At first Europeans thought that the sheer destructive

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expense of war among the Great Powers would prevent one from taking place. When that hope was denied, Europeans turned their attentions to, one way or another, prevent something like World War I from ever happening again. One overriding characteristic of the effort, and therefore of war in the 20th century, was the desire to leap over traditional lines of confrontation, the better to fight an enemy’s means to fight while they were being fabricated, the more effectively to attack an enemy’s will to fight by making him fight at home. Blitzkrieg and strategic bombing are examples of that. Non-nuclear warfare is becoming increasingly a matter of militias, robot machines, and special operations commandos. The architects of conflict seek to minimize war’s destruction because of its enormous modern expense in any currency one would like to count including blood and reconstruction. Increasingly, any victory, in any war, is likely to be Pyrrhic. Finally, nuclear physics is not the only scientific discipline to have reached a kind of maturity in the last century; and cyber warfare has already played a significant role in one of the major nuclear stories of the past few years. At some time before 2009, a party or parties unknown (at least officially) introduced a computer “worm” named stuxnet into the highly secured computer system operating huge arrays of gas centrifuges at Natanz, Iran. These centrifuges separate U-235 from U-238, “enriching” naturally occurring uranium with enough U-235 to support chain reactions. Modest enrichment makes fuel for reactors, including the reactors used to generate electricity for civilian use. Substantial enrichment makes fuel for nuclear weapons. Officially, Natanz enriched uranium fuel for a nuclear power program that the Iranians insist is civilian in character. stuxnet took Natanz to be part of a bomb-making effort, and instructed those centrifuges to operate at speeds that would shake them apart. The worm was, based on news accounts, only partially successful, but even so, it struck a powerful blow against a significant weapons factory, put it out of business for an extended period of time. Many of Curtis LeMay’s bombing raids could not have claimed so much impact on a target. Yet much of the involved public did not realize that there was a war on at all. From the start, Niels Bohr’s concept of complementarity applied to nuclear weapons anticipated that the advent of the atomic bomb might lead to the destruction of civilization, or it might lead to a transformation in the character of war as peoples acted to prevent such nuclear destruction. In the atomic bomb’s youth and adolescence, complementarity was indeed operating. However, the two primary alternatives that today complement the destructive potential of nuclear weapons are a mixed bag. The first of these—as Bohr and his contemporaries anticipated—are initiatives to settle disputes without general war, and agreements to limit the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The second of these has been the development of new information management technologies. In recent years, American thinking about a nation’s power in the world has focused on four elements or instruments of power. Sometimes organized into

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the acronym dime, these four instruments are diplomacy, information, military strength, and economic power. Historically, information in this environment meant intelligence. But as warfare became industrialized, new ways of generating and managing information became significant tactical factors in the other instruments; wireless communications created requirements for encipherment, which in its turn created requirements for deciphering, both of them heavily dependent on a capability to perform and manage thousands of mathematical operations every second. These were requirements that among others gave birth to the electronic computer. From the end of the 19th century onwards, electromechanical analog computers became increasingly important tools used to increase the effectiveness of long-range artillery, naval gunnery and torpedoes, and anti-aircraft fire. The increased speed and power of the digital computer simply enhanced all of that as the century came to an end. In that light, the stuxnet raid was something of a transitional battle. Information handling had previously been an integrated part of advanced industrialized weapons systems. stuxnet was malicious software, “malware,” a purely information weapon aimed at the information handling components of an enemy weapon system. In the future, one might attack an enemy’s infrastructure by infecting other forms of systems with malware. One might overload an electric power grid, for example, or derange an air traffic control network. In that sort of warfare, one would seek to un-coordinate any strategically or socially critical activity in which the necessary coordinating was done by computer control. And computerization has become a pervasive a part of modern life; if one followed the logic of modern strategic warfare and leapfrogged the lines of conflict and attacked one’s adversary “at home,” it would mean “at home” literally, for millions of individuals. What would the derangement of private banking records, the utter destruction of private wealth, do to the means and will to fight of a nation at war? What as yet unknown forms of organized assault will the development of new cyber weapons make possible? In what kind of a conflict will William Sherman’s cyber war counterpart push forward the unrefined cruelty of war, and to what new lines of conflict will she or he push it? Such possibilities too are the fruits of Bohr’s “complementarity.” Nuclear weapons are too destructive, still too much the blunt instrument. Using them, even in a regional conflict, might well be suicidal in the face of retaliation from those only indirectly threatened as well as from those involved in a specific conflict. A terrorist wielding an atomic bomb gleaned from who knows where seems more a nightmare fantasy than a real threat for similar reasons. “Return addresses” for attacks have proven difficult to erase. In the face of almost certain reprisal, who would donate such a weapon to another’s cause? However, the same dynamics that call up efforts to create institutions of peace as complementary responses to the possibility of nuclear war can, and so call up new ways of making war, even ways of making war that leave the victor with a world that can bear a victor’s exploitation. And the same uneasy globalization that has created so much of the current generation’s political turmoil has created

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a world in which the distribution of computer capability is much broader than the distribution of nuclear capability. People once spoke of the atomic bomb as an equalizer among nations, a capability its owners were glad to have but a serious threat nonetheless. Cyber warfare is not something one can do from a department store laptop, yet it is cheaper and more secure than a nuclear complex with its fuel cycle. And the most advanced cyber technology is more widely available than nuclear technology. “Victory smiles,” Giulio Douhet wrote, while arguing for military aviation, “upon those who anticipate the changes in the character of war, not upon those who wait to adapt themselves after the changes occur.” We can first acknowledge that any nation that avoids involvement in a nuclear war is already something of a victor, but we are left with two ways in which Niels Bohr’s concept of complementarity may respond to the nuclear threats of the 21st century. Which will nations and peoples choose? Bohr himself perhaps provided the only answer: “Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution,” he said. “It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it.” But he also said: “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”

note 1 Bob Dylan, “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” Copyright © 1963, 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991, 1992 by Special Rider Music.

index

ABMs 183, 188, 197; and MIRV technology 183; transformed into the “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative 190, 196; Treaty 184 Academy of Sciences 35, 42 Acheson–Lilienthal Plan 132–3, 205 Acts and Regulations: Civil Rights Act 1957 143; National Defense Education Act 1958 147 advanced guidance systems 61; see also Norden gunsight advanced theoretical physics 9, 14–15, 45, 55, 65 advisers 87, 157, 198; of John Kennedy 161, 163, 187; of Khrushchev 159; of Ronald Reagan 197; scientific 33, 71, 98 aerial bombardment: aims at creating terror 61; cripples an enemy’s ability to fight by destroying a small number of industrial targets 60–1; and the deliberate bombing of civilians 63, 140, 195; and the doctrine for fighting a war from the air 60; and the use of Boeing B-29s in the bombing of Japan 62–3; and the use of canisters of incendiaries 63; and the use of heavily armed B-17 “Flying Fortress” bombers 62 Africa: and colonialism 12–13, 100, 106, 140, 151, 156, 191, 208; dominated by the European powers 154; and some Soviet successes in once-colonized 187

air power 60, 97, 114; doctrine of 101, 103, 117, 120–1; theory 63, 99 aircraft: B-1 bombers 189; B-17 “Flying Fortress” bombers 62; B-29 bombers 97; B-52 bombers 137, 188; crews 62–3, 69, 71, 85, 119, 135; F-117s 189; jet 62, 154; military reconnaissance 152; stealth 189; U-2s 137, 147, 150, 152–3, 163, 172, 176 Alamogordo test 86, 95 Aldermaston march 146 allies 62, 64, 67, 75–6, 80, 154, 156, 200; anti-Hitler 89; Britain’s American and Soviet 34, 203; European 56, 157, 175; nuclear 175; western 66, 88–9, 153, 155 alpha particles 11, 18–19, 23; see also alpha rays alpha rays 7, 11 alsos (code-name of special mission to Europe) 76 American and Soviet leadership 59, 164 American Civil War 64, 140 The American Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy see sane American economy 31, 109, 131, 151 American governments 42, 55, 98, 137, 148, 173 American Legion 143 American military: leadership 31, 68, 88, 91, 93, 99–100, 151, 161; nucleararmed 107; occupation of Germany 184; services 136; strength 153

Index

American missiles in Turkey 161–2, 174 American monopoly of nuclear weapons 77, 98, 100, 104, 133–4 American physicists 12, 25, 30 American planners 99, 101 American politicians 88, 96, 98, 142, 155 “American–Soviet war” 97, 103 anadyr 150–66, 172–3, 175, 181 Anglo-American Manhattan Project see Manhattan Project Annalen der Physik 10 anti-Americanism 135, 174, 188 anti-ballistic missiles see ABMs anti-Semitism 20, 54 apocalypse 64, 198–9, 210 Arab–Israeli conflict 201 arms control 123, 131, 141, 185, 188, 197, 205; agreements 107, 132, 141–2, 153, 199; and calls for stability 153; critics of 175; factions 148; formal 205; nuclear 132–4, 143, 145, 166, 182, 184; and support by Adlai Stevenson 144 arms race 130–1, 141, 174, 183, 200; international 137; nuclear 22–35, 66–7, 69, 76–7, 134, 145, 165, 173 army 13–14, 29, 45–7, 49–50, 110, 112–14, 117–18, 140; see also British Army; German Army; US Army; US Army Air Force; Belgian Army Army–McCarthy Hearings 138 Arzamas-16 (Soviet scientists’ secret city) 94 atomic bomb 29–30, 33–4, 39–41, 43–8, 75–8, 99–100, 102–4, 110–11; aimed to break the will to fight 75; as a countervalue weapon 86–7; and the debate about how to use the 103; development of 98; first 26, 31, 49, 65, 71, 79; “as legitimate an act of war as it was a terrible act” 87; possessed by the Soviets 96; Revisionist interpretations of 58, 87–9, 166; Revisionist interpretations of its use 58; small 85; as a “winning weapon” 86 The Atomic Energy Commission 105, 116, 141–2 atomic power 98, 143, 199–200 atomic wars 53, 116, 129, 134 Atomic Weapons and American Policy (Oppenheimer) 115–16 atoms 10, 16, 18–19, 25, 30, 64, 200; bombarding 11; heavy 90, 104; lightest 104; oxygen 22; transformation of 20 “Atoms for Peace” program (Eisenhower) 200

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B-1 bombers 189 B-17 “Flying Fortress” bombers 62 B-29 bombers 63, 85–6, 97 B-52 bombers 137, 188 Baker, Nicholas (code-name for Niels Bohr) 67 ball bearings 60, 62 ballistic missiles 119, 121, 137–8, 147, 159–60, 162, 172, 175 Baruch Plan 133, 145 bases 41, 96–7, 117–20, 133, 173; bomber 111, 172; Cuba 152, 159; doctrinal (for war planning) 99; European 160; forward 138, 159–60, 172; missile 172; naval 74; nuclear 146 Batista, Fulgencio 156 Battle of Britain 61 Bay of Pigs 164 Becquerel, Henri 7, 9–11 Belgian army 13 Belgium 68, 129 Bell Laboratories 17 Beria 34, 95 Berlin 16, 25–7, 59, 151, 162 Berlin Crisis 97–8, 155 Berlin Wall 198 Bethe, Hans 50–2, 95, 105–6 Bhagavad Gita 78–9 Bikini Atoll 133, 135 biological weaponry 140 Blackett, P. M. S. 87–8 blitzkrieg 61, 88, 211 Bohr, Niels 25, 27–8, 31–2, 50, 53, 64–6, 69, 75; afraid of an upward leap in mass violence 68; and the concept of quantum mechanics 16; disliked and suspected by Winston Churchill 67; and his concept of complementarity applied to nuclear weapons 77, 134, 211, 213; and the Manhattan Project 67; smuggled by RAF from Copenhagen to Los Alamos 66; told by Heisenberg of the possibility of making fission bombs which would be decisive for a German victory 65; understood that nuclear weapons would be a revolution in warfare 65; visited by Heisenberg in Copenhagen 65 bomb fuel 40, 44, 54, 206 bomb projects 29, 33, 95 bombers 61–3, 97, 99, 101, 117, 119–20, 159, 161; B-1 189; B-17 “Flying Fortress” 62; B-29s 63, 85–6, 97; B-52s 137, 188; new jet 119; nuclear-capable 150, 159

216 Index

bombing 60, 62–3, 74, 89, 93, 111, 193, 195; aerial 61, 64, 71, 195; casualties 58, 64, 90, 92, 161; conventional 72, 87, 90, 93; of Hiroshima 31, 33, 39, 63–4, 72–3, 88, 90–3, 103; incendiary 63, 92; of Nagasaki 87, 89–90, 93, 134; precision 62–3; strategic 61–2, 64; terror 63; theorists 61; see also atomic bombing bombs 30, 58–9, 61–3, 86–7, 96–9, 110–11, 134, 136–7; design lab 70, 104; fission 25–7, 29–31, 43–4, 50–1, 59–60, 65–7, 104–6, 134–5; gravity 137; hydrogen 51–2, 95, 104–5, 134, 136–7, 204; incendiary 63, 72, 93; neutron 189; plutonium-fueled 52, 95; uranium-fueled 33, 40 Bradley, Omar 105, 112 bravo 135–8, 140–2, 145 Bretton Woods Agreement 187 Brezhnev, Leonid 175 Briggs, Lyman 42 Britain 34–5, 51–2, 61, 88, 130, 138–40, 145, 201–2; Otto Frisch and Rudolph Peierls investigate how many elements, including uranium, exist in several isotopes 30; Rutherford discovers that “alpha rays” are “alpha particles” 11; Rutherford’s methodology becomes the standard technique of investigation in nuclear physics into the 1930s 11; scientists argue an atomic bomb would inevitably end wars 29–30, 47; scientists interned at Farm Hall 40 British Army 23 British Association for the Advancement of Science 20 British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament 145 British hydrogen bomb project 52 Bulganin (Soviet Premier) 142, 144 Bush, Vannevar 34, 43, 53–4, 70–1, 73, 132 Byrnes, James 69–70, 73, 77, 94, 133 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament see CND Campbell, John W. 129–30 capitalism 100 Carter, Jimmy 188–9, 193–4, 196 Castle bravo test series see bravo Castro, Fidel 156–8, 162–3, 209 Castro, Raul 157 Castro–Kennedy confrontation 157

casualties 58, 64, 90, 92, 161 Cavendish Laboratory 11, 23 Chadwick, Sir James 19, 23, 42 China 60, 102, 110–11, 141, 185, 198, 200–1, 208; forces 112; government of 107; nuclear-armed 176, 202–3; and Western Europe 139 Churchill, Winston 23, 34, 52, 56, 153, 160, 176, 178; authorizes research on the atomic bomb 34; dislikes and suspects Niels Bohr 67; and the “Grand Alliance” 56, 67, 88; and his prediction of an “iron curtain” 95 CIA 98, 152–3 Civil Rights Act 1957 143 civilians 13, 63–4, 75, 111, 122, 140, 195 “classical physics” 8–10, 16 CND 146 code-breaking units 131 Cold War 87–9, 130, 139–40, 150–1, 163–6, 173–8, 193–9, 208–10; bi-polar 200; emerging 73; generations of US government leaders 172; policies 146; and the Soviets 161, 201; status of 201; and support for closer and less confrontational relations with the Soviet Union 134 Communist Party 32, 34, 107, 151 Communist Revolution 88, 208 Communists 45, 87, 89, 96, 110, 115–16, 139, 154–5; ideology and Soviet power 88 complementarity 3, 16, 53, 67, 75, 77–9, 115, 199; concept of 77, 134, 211, 213; first enunciation of 66; and nuclear arms control 134 Conant, James B. 43, 53–4, 70–1, 75, 106, 132 conditional surrender 73, 91 containment 107, 116, 150; militarized 115; policy of 108, 194; transformed 108 controversy 14, 44, 58, 64, 137, 154; commemorating the 50th anniversary of the bombings 58; political 145; public 79 CPUSSR Central Committee’s Presidium 172 crews 62–3, 69, 71, 85, 119, 135 crisis 98, 141, 151, 162–3, 165, 173, 183, 187; Berlin 97–8, 155; international 80; management of 119, 165; nuclear 186; October Cuban missile 164, 171, 173–6, 180–1, 209–10 “Cross of Iron” speech 177

Index

cruise missiles 189 Cuba 122, 150–1, 156, 158–63, 173, 177; Communist Party 157; invasion of 162–3; missile crisis 164, 171, 174–6, 180–1, 209–10; photographed 163; seized by the US in 1898 156; and Soviet intelligence 159 Curie, Marie 7, 12, 19, 23 cyclotrons 18–19, 42 Czechoslovakia 129, 139, 150, 184 Daigo Fukuryu Maru 135 The Daily Worker 143 de Hoffman, Frederick 49 Debye, Peter 29 DeGaulle, Charles 141 democratic capitalism 100 Democrats 102, 142, 147, 181–2, 188; anti-communist 195; conservative 185; liberal 69, 157 Deterrence & Survival in the Nuclear Age (Gaither Report) 122 Dewey, Thomas 143 DeWolf Smyth, Henry 96 Diebner, Kurt 39 disarmament 131, 141–2, 178–9; complete 34; mutual 145; negotiated 131; unilateral 144 Divine, Robert A. 144 doctrine 60–2, 122, 156; air power 101, 103, 117, 120–1; official 183 Dönitz, Karl 175 Douhet, Giulio 60, 63, 213 Dubçek, Alexander 139 Dulles, John Foster 114–17, 122, 135, 142, 146, 174 Dutch physicists 25 East Germany 138 Eastern Europe 20, 88–9, 115, 198 Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb 201 Edwards Air Force Base 150, 154 Einstein, Albert 18–20, 31, 33, 42, 51, 77, 104; equation on energy and matter 10, 25; letter to Roosevelt 41–2, 75; name associated with the development of nuclear weapons 10; summer home on Long Island 28; and the Theory of Relativity 11, 16, 18 Eisenhower, Dwight 113, 115–17, 121–3, 141, 143, 146–7, 152–3, 176–7; administration 135–6, 156, 158; appeals to the Communist leaders to raise the Soviet standard

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of living 114; argues that a sound economy and national security as very significant concerns for the United States 114; conceptualization of American national power 111; defense policy 118, 120; displays insightful understanding of the complex dilemma of defense and the challenges of national finance 114; displays insightful understanding of the dilemma of defense 114; endorsed for a second term 142, 144; excels at poker 112; trusted by the US people 142 Eisenhower, John (son of Dwight Eisenhower) 112 Enola Gay (named after Enola Gay Tibbets) 58, 85 espionage 31, 33, 42, 102, 145 European allies 56, 157, 175 Europeans 12, 19, 50, 56, 71, 89, 138–9, 141; economies of 12; scientific community 12, 16, 49, 93; western 88 experiments 8–9, 17, 19, 24–5, 51, 66, 103; Albert Einstein 10, 16, 18–20, 28, 31, 33, 42, 77; Enrico Fermi 19, 24–7, 31, 40, 51, 56; Ernest Rutherford 10–11, 15, 18–20, 22–3, 199; Frédéric Joliot-Curie 7, 9–10, 23–4, 26, 29; Fritz Strassmann 19, 199; Hahn– Strassmann 25–6, 92; Henri Becquerel 7; Irène Joliot-Curie 7, 9–10, 19, 23–4, 26, 29; Leo Szilard 19–20, 22–4, 26–9, 31, 33, 40–3, 49, 77–8; Lise Meitner 19, 24–7, 53, 59, 199; Otto Hahn 19, 24–6, 29, 31, 39–40, 59–60, 78–9, 86 F-117s 189 factories 12, 14, 40, 55, 62, 72, 75, 111; automobile 41; weapons 211 fallout 144, 146, 176, 178; nuclear 178, 182; radioactive 135–6, 140–1, 144, 146, 176, 178, 182 Farm Hall 41; and the bugging of the scientist’s rooms 39; German scientists accepted the truth of the public announcement of the bombing of Hiroshima 39; scientists amazed at the enormous scale of the AngloAmerican project 40; ten German atomic scientists rounded up and shipped them back to 39; ten German scientists rounded up and shipped back to 39 Farrell, Thomas 85

218 Index

FBI 46, 136 fears 73, 110, 172; of the German effort at producing an atomic bomb 76; by Harry Truman that a third world war was beginning 109; of losing military strength 183; of a Soviet attack 139; that uranium fission would produce “a real revolution” in military technology 33 Fermi, Enrico 19, 24–7, 31, 40, 51, 56 Feynman, Richard 49–50, 56 fission bombs 25–7, 29–31, 43–4, 50–1, 59–60, 65–7, 104–6, 134–5; British 141; early history of 40 Flerov, Georgii 32; fears that uranium fission would produce “a real revolution” in military technology 33; and his letter to Stalin 42 Flexner, Simon 14–15 “Flying Fortress” bombers 62 Ford, Gerald 187–9 Foreign Affairs 115 foreign policy 68, 115, 148, 157, 165–6, 177, 184, 197 France 13, 68, 140–1, 156, 176, 201, 209 French Indochina 138 Frisch, Otto 25, 27, 30–1, 33, 41–2, 49 Frisch–Peierls Memorandum 42 Fuchs, Klaus 47, 49, 51–3, 95–6, 145, 206 fuel 40, 43, 54, 104, 133, 200, 204; creation of plants at Oak Ridge and Hanford 44, 76; enriched uranium 205, 211; production for bombs 76 fuel cycle 133, 204–5, 213; control 205; nuclear 93, 132–3, 205 Fursenko, Aleksandr 157, 171 fusion device 51, 104, 117, 120, 141 fusion weapons 106, 134–5, 137; see also fusion bombs Gaddis, John Lewis 3, 79–80, 197–8 “The Gadget” 49, 71, 76–7 Gaither Report 122 General Account of the Development of Methods of Using Atomic Energy for Military Purposes 96 German Army 13, 29, 33, 35 German atomic bomb project 67; led by Werner Heisenberg 27; and a “Manhattan” program ruled out because of high costs 44; motivates the United States and Great Britain to start building a bomb of their own. 66; research 65

German atomic scientists 13, 27, 29–30, 39, 41, 59, 65, 76; atomic project continues at German universities and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute 44; meet with Albert Speer to discuss the building of an atomic bomb 44; persuade the Nazi government that the wartime availability for an atomic bomb would not be possible 44 German chemists 13, 24 German fuel supplies 62, 86 Germany 19–20, 25, 27, 32–4, 61–2, 71, 86–8, 130–1; strategy for the invasion of France 13; surrender of 76, 97; V-2 rocket 147; wartime shortages in 41 gliders, jet-powered 150; see also U-2 aircraft Goethals, George 46 Goldschmidt, Bernard 179–80 Goldwater, Barry 181–2, 193 Goodpaster, Andrew 115 Gorbachev 197–8 Gorskii, Anatoly 34 Goudsmit, Samuel 76 “The Grand Alliance” 52, 56, 88 gravity bombs 137 Great Depression 18–19 Great Patriotic War (USSR) 93, 99, 197–8 Groves, Leslie 49–50, 53, 68, 70–1, 75–6, 85, 87, 96; convinced by Oppenheimer to change his plan of work at Los Alamos 48; describes the Manhattan Project scientists as “ the largest collection of crackpots in the world” 45–6; distrusts the scientists’ collegial work style 46; enjoys a positive working relationship with Oppenheimer 47; experiences tensions between scientists and contractors 54; and the Manhattan Project’s Counter-Intelligence apparatus 46 Guam 85, 90 Guggenheim Foundation 14–15, 55 guidance systems 61; see also Norden bombsight The Guns of August 171 H-bomb 136–7; see also hydrogen bomb Hahn, Otto 19, 24–5, 29, 31, 39–40, 78–9, 86, 199; acknowledged after World War II for his advocacy of peace 59; contemplates suicide 59–60; criticized for working with

Index

the German bomb-making effort 60; discovers that a “uranium machine” could produce power 26, 59; works on poison gas weapons in World War I 60 Hahn–Strassmann Paper 25–6, 92 Haig, Alexander 186–7 Hall, Ted 47 Halsey, William 141 Hanford reactors 68 Harriman, Averell 178 Hartek, Paul 41 Harvey, Mose 121 “heavy water” 40 Heinlein, Robert A. 130 Heisenberg, Werner 29, 31, 39–40, 44, 64, 67; complicity in the effort to give Hitler an atomic bomb 66; and the disintegrating friendship with Niels Bohr 65; his pacifism and socialism became reasons to keep him out of the Manhattan Project 28; joins the Nuclear Physics Research Group 29; and the “uncertainty principle” 16; visits the USA in 1939 27 Herken, Gregg 103–4 Hindus 203–4 Hiroshima 31, 33, 54, 63–4, 72–3, 76, 85, 103; atomic bombings of 39, 88, 90–1, 93, 103; bombing “not the last shot of World War II but the first salvo of the Cold War” 87–8; destruction of 160; incinerated 104; and Nagasaki 75, 79, 87, 89–90, 92, 96, 132, 134 Hiss, Alger 184 Hitler 23, 29–30, 66, 88, 109, 146 Hitler–Stalin Pact 26 Ho Chi Minh 156 Holloway, David 93–4, 96 Hoover, Herbert 54, 70, 131 Hughes, Charles Evans 131 Hughes’ Treaty 131 Humphrey, Hubert 185 Hungary 20, 138 Hussein, Saddam 209–10 hydrogen bomb 51–2, 95, 104–5, 134, 136–7, 204 iaea 132–3, 179, 205 imperialistic capitalism 100 incendiary bombs 63, 72, 93 India 156, 179, 201–6 Industrial Revolution 11–12 Inglis, David 142 International Atomic Energy Agency, see iaea

219

Iran 151, 179, 201, 207, 209, 211 Iraq 71, 151, 201, 207, 209 isotopes 18, 24, 30–1, 40, 44; see also U-235 and U-238 Israel 176, 179, 186, 202; bombing of Iraq’s osirak reactor 209; conflict with the Arab states 201; history of 201; settlers 203 Ivy mike (first H-bomb test) 136 Jackson, Andrew 101, 185 Jackson, Henry 185 Japan 64, 71–5, 86–8, 90, 92–3, 99–100, 111, 131; bombing of cities 58, 62–3; postwar 91; and World War II 58 Japanese 74–5, 77–8, 88; Army and Navy ministers 92; and Asian victim casualties 90; cadets training 90; Emperor 87; Imperial Navy 131; leadership 87, 91; pilots 63; politics 93; and Soviet government records 58, 91; surrender 72–3, 87, 90–3, 110; targets 58; treaty instructions 131 Jefferson, Thomas 156 Jewish community 24–5, 202 Jews 25, 59, 203 Johnson, Lyndon 157, 178, 181–2, 188, 194 Joliot-Curie, Frédéric 7, 9–10, 23–4, 26, 29 Joliot-Curie, Irène 7, 9–10, 19, 23–4, 26, 29 Kaiser Wilhelm Institute 19, 24–5, 29, 44 Kapitsa, Peter 33 Kennan, George 107–8, 115 Kennedy, John 147–8, 150, 157, 159–61, 163, 165, 174, 176; administration 151; appearance of strength in Cuba 181; assassination of 181; assessment of historical position 177; attacks the Eisenhower administration for its unsatisfactory record with Castro and Cuba 158; and Operation Mongoose 158; reputation for Cold War management 164 Kennedy, Joseph Sr. 157 Kennedy, Robert 163 Kevles, Daniel 19 Keynes, John Maynard 109 Keynesian economic theory 54, 112–13 Khan, Abdul Qadeer 206–7 Khan, Feroz 201–5 Khrushchev, Nikita 147, 151–2, 154–6, 158–9, 161, 164–5, 175–7,

220 Index

198; attempts to achieve a better international strategic position 172–3; backs away from the nuclear showdown 163, 209; bluff called by Kennedy 160; involved in both the Limited Test Ban Treaty and the Non-Proliferation Treaty 174; plans for a Soviet strategic base on Cuba 162; retreats from the confrontation 165; strategizes that no rational person would use nuclear weapons 163; suggests a trade between the Soviet missiles in Cuba and the American missiles in Turkey 162; warned by military advisers that the US would discover the Cuban installations 160 Khrushchev’s Cold War 172 Kissinger, Henry 184, 186–7 Korean War 109, 111 Kremlin 103, 160, 164–5, 180–1, 193 Kuhn, Thomas 8, 64 Kurchatov, Igor 18, 33, 35, 95 Kyoto 72–3 laboratories 46, 50, 56, 60; chemistry 15; first American research 17; industrial 28; secret 48–9; seismographic 144 Lamy, New Mexico 49 Lansdale, Edward 158 Lapp, Ralph 135 Laurence, William 85 Lawrence, Ernest O. 18–19, 42, 48, 105 LeMay, Curtis 62–3, 117, 121, 123, 194–5, 211; and the ballistic missile-launching submarines 122; displays forceful and uncompromising leadership 119; plans attacks on the Soviets 172; and the Strategic Air Command 119; turns Air Power Doctrine into an article of faith 120 letters 7, 28, 77, 136, 146; Bulganin to Eisenhower 144; Flerov to Kurchatov 33; Flerov to Stalin 42; Harvey to Bowie 121; Szilard–Einstein to Roosevelt 41–2, 75 Lettow, Paul 194–6 Lewis, Robert 85 Life magazine 136 Limited Test Ban Treaty 174, 178, 181 Lincoln, Abraham 140 Lindemann, Frederick 23, 28, 76 Lippmann, Walter 162 Los Alamos Project (code name “Site Y”) 33, 40, 47–51, 53, 66–7, 70–3, 75–8, 94–6

“Los Arzamas” (nickname for Soviet scientists’ and engineers’ secret city, Arzamas -16) 94 Louvain 13 Luftwaffe 61, 71 MacArthur, Douglas 87, 90; and Harry Truman 111–12; preserves the Imperial House and the Emperor 91; recommends a continued campaign to expel China from the Korean peninsula 111; recommends that the Republic of China forces on Taiwan be enlisted as allies 112 Madison, James 107 Manchuria 90; Hiroshima, and Nagasaki bombings reinforce the collective impact on Japan 91–2; Soviet invasion ends any Japanese hope of a conditional surrender 91, 93; and the Soviet Union invades ninety days after Germany surrendered 87 Manhattan Project 40–1, 43–5, 47, 53–6, 59–60, 65–6, 68–70, 93–4; and Bohr Niels 67; counter-intelligence apparatus 46; declassifying of records 58; see also Anglo-American Manhattan Project Mariana Islands 77 Marsh, Jeffrey 190 Marshall, George 71, 73 Marshall Islands 133 Marshall Plan 187 Matlock, Jack F. 197 maud Report 34, 42, 94 McCarthy, Joseph 96, 102, 108, 114, 145, 181 McCarthyism 105, 116, 143, 146, 157, 160, 182, 194 McCloy, John 132 McCoy Air Force Base, Florida 150 Meitner, Lise 19, 24–7, 53, 59, 199 military planners 90, 100 military power 2, 108, 190, 195, 202; conventional 89; new 87; superior 89 military secrecy 164–5, 185, 199; see also secrecy military targets 62, 72, 74–5, 87, 158, 195; see also targets Minuteman missile silos 122, 175, 178 MIRV 183 missile crisis 157, 159, 166, 175, 180, 183, 209 missiles 117, 119–20, 155, 158–60, 165, 182, 189; American in Turkey 161–2,

Index

174; cruise 189; ground-launched intercontinental 175; intercontinental 147, 172; multiple-warhead 183, 188; nuclear-tipped 150; obsolete 163; Polaris 172; Soviet’s installation in Cuba 157, 161–2; surface-to-air 159, 162 Mitchell, William 60, 63 money 14–15, 17, 23–4, 54, 109, 112, 189, 195; borrowed 54; conscripted 14; unprecedented spend on armaments 113 monGoose 158 Monroe Doctrine 156, 160 Morrison, Philip 26 Moscow 91, 144, 155, 157, 185, 191, 197; geo-political leadership offers spurned by the colonial world 140; Harriman’s prestige in 178; Khrushchev’s retreat from the confrontation led to the Presidium unseated him 165; rally in December warned about by Peter Kapitsa 33 Multiple, Independently-Targeted, Reentry Vehicle see MIRV MX (missile, experimental) 189 Naftali, Timothy 157, 171 Nagasaki 52, 56, 92–3, 95, 102, 104; added to the list of atomic bomb targets 73; bombing “not the last shot of World War II but the first salvo of the Cold War” 87–8; and the debate about the necessity of bombing 90 NASA rockets 182 National Air and Space Museum 58 National Defense Education Act 1958 147 National Defense Research Committee see NDRC National Research Council 15 national security 74, 117, 153, 173; policies 114; problems 174; veterans 114 National Security Council 136, 161 nato countries 138–9, 145, 153, 210 Nazis and Nazi Germany 23, 25, 27, 29, 51, 65–6, 86, 92 Nazism 24, 26, 49, 59, 80, 184 NDRC 43 neutron bombs 189 neutrons 19, 22–6, 29, 40, 42 New Deal (Roosevelt) 54, 96, 181 “New Look” 117–19, 136, 200 New Mexico 47–9 New Mexico test 74

221

New York Times 26, 85, 136 newspapers: The Daily Worker 143; Foreign Affairs 115; New York Times 26, 85, 136; Newsweek 144; The Times (London) 20; Washington Star 26 Newton, Isaac 8–9, 16 NGOs 2, 210 Nichols, Kenneth 46 Nimitz, Chester 85, 87, 90 Nitze, Paul 107–9, 122 Nixon, Richard 112, 143, 184–9; sponsorship of SALT 187 Nobel Prize 10–11, 18, 24, 59 Noddak, Ida 24 Non-Government Organizations see NGOs non-nuclear states 176, 178–9, 200 Non-Proliferation Treaty, see NPT Norden bombsight 61 NPT 179–80, 205 NSC-68 108–9, 113, 122, 194 nuclear arms-control plan 132 nuclear arsenals 108, 133, 139, 144, 176, 197–200, 204 nuclear disarmament 145, 180, 193; see also disarmament nuclear fuel cycle 133 nuclear physics 11, 23, 26–9, 32–3, 52, 199, 211; see also physics nuclear powers 130, 137, 142, 146, 148, 172–3, 176, 179 nuclear reactors 26, 32, 44–5, 48, 86, 172, 179, 205 nuclear states 178–80, 200, 204, 207–8, 210 nuclear war 102–3, 122–3, 140–1, 144, 146, 163–4, 174, 212–13 nuclear weapons 64–8, 101–4, 129–32, 139–42, 162–6, 178–81, 193–6, 206–12; acquired 100, 200; acquisition of 202; American monopoly of 77, 98, 100, 104, 133–4; developed 2, 30; of mass destruction 71; missile-launched 160; tactical 159, 161; testing 133, 173 Nuclear Weapons and American Foreign Policy 184 Oak Ridge separators 40, 68, 76, 132 October Crisis 171, 173, 176, 180 Office of Naval Research 135 Office of Research and Development see OSRD Okinawa 90 Oliphant, Marcus 41 One Hell of a Gamble 172

222 Index

OPEC 188 “Open Skies” 142, 152–3, 173 Operation crossroads 133 Operation monGoose 158 Oppenheimer, Frank (brother of Robert Oppenheimer) 47, 51, 78, 116 Oppenheimer, Robert 46–8, 50, 54, 77, 79, 104–5, 116, 132–4; ability to explain physics to non-scientists 53; associate of I. I. Rabi 49, 53, 78; convinces the Army to build a secret laboratory 49; distaste for the fusion bomb 106; forced by Edward Teller to create a separate sub-division in the Theoretical Division to accommodate hydrogen bomb research 51; and his publication Atomic Weapons and American Policy 115; office at Los Alamos 70; and Richard Feynman 56 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries see OPEC 186 osirak reactor (Iraq) 209 OSRD 43, 54, 71 Pakistan 179, 202–5, 207, 210; atomic bomb 201, 206; government of 201; grievances 206; politics 207; population 203; quasi-covert nuclear project 206–7 peace 63–4, 116, 131, 141–2, 146, 152–3, 177, 199–200; advocacy of 59; faction in Japanese cabinet 87, 92–3; international 99; new structure of 184 peace movement 145–6, 148 peacekeeping 186 Pearl Harbor 43, 87, 102, 164, 172 Peierls, Rudolph 30–1, 33, 41–2, 52, 140 People’s Republic of China 107, 112, 156, 160 photography 183 physicists 8–10, 18, 23–4, 27, 34–5, 42–3, 64–5, 94–5; American 12, 25, 30; Dutch 25; German 30; refugee 30; Soviet 33, 93, 107; theoretical 16, 66; trans-national community of 16, 26 physics 8, 11, 14–19, 23, 28–9, 42, 49–50, 53; “classical” 8–10, 16; experimental 23; quantum 66; theoretical 9, 14–15, 45, 55, 65 Planck, Max 16 plutonium 40, 44–5, 52, 55, 68, 71, 132, 204–5 poison gas 13, 43, 60, 140 Potsdam Convention 91 Powers, Francis Gary 137, 176

Project solarium 116 projects 27–30, 32–5, 40–50, 52–6, 58–60, 65–71, 76–8, 92–9; American and Soviet 206; defense 46; price tag of 40; research 34, 43; scientists 7–9, 11–15, 19, 26–30, 43–6, 53–4, 59–60, 75–7; see also Manhattan Project Ptolemy’s paradigm 8 Pu-239 54 publications: Annalen der Physik 10; Atomic Weapons and American Policy 115–16; Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb 201; General Account of the Development of Methods of Using Atomic Energy for Military Purposes 96; The Guns of August 171; Khrushchev’s Cold War 172; maud Report 42, 94; Nuclear Weapons and American Foreign Policy 184; One Hell of a Gamble 172; Solution Unsatisfactory 130; Special Theory of Relativity 20; The World Set Free 10, 20, 22 quantum mechanics 16–17, 19, 28, 50 Rabi, I. I. 42, 49, 53, 77–9, 104 Radford, Arthur 116, 142 radiation 23, 136, 189; fatal 135; research 141; sickness 90, 135 radioactivity 7, 9–11, 19, 23–4, 55, 173 RAF: Bomber Command 61; Fighter Command 61; smuggles Bohr from Copenhagen to Los Alamos 66; unable to sustain the losses suffered by bombing in daylight 61 rainier test (first underground explosion) 144 RAND Corporation study 117, 120 reactors 29, 45, 54, 94, 204–6, 211; nuclear 26, 32, 44–5, 48, 86, 172, 179, 205; pilot 40; plutonium-producing 40, 48; small research 76 Reagan, Ronald 99, 195–6; administration 190; critics of SDI considered it a flight of juvenile science fiction imagination 191; encourages by Margaret Thatcher to work with Gorbachev on nuclear issues197; finds nuclear weapons repellent and makes their abolition the main objective of his life and presidency 194; surprised how ABM defense transformed into the Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) 190; “we begin bombing in 5 minutes” (speech) 193–4

Index

reconnaissance satellites 173 Red Army 89, 117, 122 refugee scientists 20, 31, 35 relativity 11, 16, 18, 20, 66 reports 34–5, 67, 70, 72, 77, 85, 95–6, 144; Deterrence & Survival in the Nuclear Age (Gaither Report) 122; Joliot-Curie 26; maud Report 34, 42, 94 Republicans 54, 112, 115, 143–4, 182; centrist 181; conservative 114 research 12, 14, 16, 30, 35, 40–1, 73–4, 173; advanced American 15, 50; bombrelated 53; geophysical 17; hydrogen bomb 51; methodology 23; nuclear 27, 29, 32, 34, 42; partners 25, 28, 59; postwar 70, 117; projects 34, 43; quantum 18; subsidized 14; theoretical 12, 17; see also scientific research resources 23, 25, 32–3, 44, 54, 93–5, 109, 151–2; industrial 35; limited 30, 41, 201; presidential 185; scarce 44; unlimited 40 Revisionist interpretations of the atomic bombing 58, 87–9, 166 Rhodes, Richard 53, 198–9, 201 Rockefeller, Nelson 14–15, 142 Rockefeller Foundation 14–16, 18, 29 Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research 14–15, 17 rocket launchers 147 rockets 113, 159, 175; NASA 182; shorter-range 159; strategic 159, 162; V-22 147 Roentgen, Wilhelm 7 Roosevelt, Franklin 28–9, 33, 41, 67, 69–71, 77, 156, 177–8; calls upon researchers to be part of national defense 51; encouraged to build nuclear weapons 172 Rosenberg, Ethel 145 Rosenberg, Julius 145 Rota Island 85 Royal Air Force see RAF Ruckelshaus, William 186 Rusk, Dean 157 Russia 11, 13, 73–4, 88, 129, 172, 198, 209; government of 144; history of 108; see also USSR Russian, scientists 73 Rutherford, Ernest 10–11, 15, 18–20, 22–3, 199 SAC 98, 117–22, 172 Sachs, Alexander 28–9, 92 Sakharov, Andrei 140

223

SALT I 184–5, 188, 196 SALT II 190, 194 San Francisco Conference 141 sane 145 satellite photography 183 satellites 154–5; earth-orbiting reconnaissance 152–3, 173, 199; information-gathering 153; spy 189 Schweinfurt 62, 64, 100–1 science 7–20, 23, 26–7, 42, 51, 53, 95, 147–8; community of 12–13; fiction 10, 20, 49, 119; medical 14; social 14, 147; theoretical 17 scientific research 14–15, 23, 48, 71; British vulnerability to Europeanlaunched aerial bombing 41; carried out by the British using a governmentsponsored committee system sending significant information up to higher levels 41; establishes the United States as a leader in theoretical 17, 41; and the establishment of the maud committee 42; led by Rudolph Peieris and Otto Frisch using a governmentsponsored committee system 41 scientists 7–9, 11–15, 19, 26–8, 43–6, 53– 4, 59–60, 75–7; British 29, 47; project 67, 71; refugee 20, 31, 35; Russian 73 SDI 191, 197–8 secrecy 46, 48, 55, 67, 70, 153, 165, 173 secret laboratories 48–9 Sherman, William 64, 140, 212 “Site Y,” code name for the Los Alamos Project 33, 40, 47–51, 53, 66–7, 70–3, 75–8, 94–6 Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum 58 Solution Unsatisfactory 130 sonar, discovery of 14, 43 Sorenson, Theodore 177 South Africa 179, 198, 201, 207 South Korea 90, 109–12, 137, 150–1, 188 Soviet Academy of Sciences 35, 42 Soviet atomic bomb project 31–2, 34–5, 93–5, 98, 102–3, 105, 108 Soviet intelligence agencies 34, 94, 107, 159 Soviet leadership 67, 95, 100, 140, 151–2, 159, 197–8; post-1953 138; post-Stalin 114 Soviet military 144, 163, 197; intelligence apparatus 52; and Secret Police 89; theoreticians 99; thinkers 99 Soviet missiles in Cuba 157, 161–2 Soviet physicists 33, 93, 107

224 Index

Soviet propaganda 118, 196 Soviet science 35, 94–5 Soviet scientists 32–3, 42, 94 Soviet spies 42, 47, 93, 184 Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces 159 Soviet targets 119 Soviet Union 68–9, 93–4, 110–15, 117–20, 151–5, 171–3, 175–8, 194–200; accomplishments 31; and China 139; and the collapse of the 197–8; and Great Britain 200 Soviet–American Treaty 175 Special Theory of Relativity 20 Speer, Albert 40, 44, 62 spies 31–2, 94–5, 145, 154, 157; see also Soviet spies Spruance, Raymond 98 Sputnik 147, 153, 155, 172–3 Stalin, Josef 33–4, 41–2, 73, 91–3, 110, 138, 156; and Beria 95; censorship and import controls 32; legacy denounced after 1953 138; and Lenin 108; and North Korea 109 Stalingrad 35 Stassen, Harold 141–2 State Defense Committee 33–5 Stern, Sheldon 161–2 Stevenson, Adlai 142–4, 146 Stimson, Henry Lewis 54, 68, 70–1, 73, 87, 111, 131–2 Strassmann, Fritz 19, 25, 199 Strategic Air Command see SAC Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) 184 Strauss, Lewis 23, 28, 105, 136–7 strength development inventory see SDI strontium-90 177 stuxnet 211 surrender 30, 59, 86, 88, 164, 172; conditional 73, 91; of Germany 76, 97; of Japanese 72–3, 87, 90–3, 110; unconditional 73, 87, 90 Szilard, Leo 19, 24, 26–9, 31, 33, 40–3, 49, 77–8; establishes the possibility of getting energy out of matter 20; fumes at Lord Rutherford’s dismissal of nuclear energy as “moonshine” 22; obtains British patent for a “chain reaction” 23; troubled about the inattention to the postwar questions about the development of nuclear weapons 76 Talbott, Strobe 197 Target Committee 70–3, 75, 77, 86

targets 19, 62, 72, 77; counterforce 195; industrial 60–1; lists 73; perimeter 119; Soviet 119; strategic 14 Teller, Edward 27–8, 49, 51–3, 73–4, 77–8, 104–6, 137, 145 test 50, 63, 73, 78, 95, 137, 140, 145; Alamogordo test 86, 95; detected 142; experimental 54; Ivy mike 136; New Mexico 74; nuclear 133, 141–2, 144, 164, 176, 178; sites 72, 74; Trinity 86 test ban 141, 144, 173–4, 177–8; agreement 142; debate 143; nuclear 145; self-enforcing 144 testing 48, 59, 136–7, 139, 142–3, 146, 173, 178 theoretical physics 9, 14–15, 45, 55, 65 Theory of Relativity 11, 16, 18 Thomas, Charles 132 Tibbets, Paul 85 The Times (London) 20 TNT 10, 51, 73, 86, 135 Tokyo 63–4, 71, 85–6, 91, 131 treaty 71, 132, 176, 178, 190; arrangements 70; compliance 134; negotiations 131; regime 180; test ban 143, 145–6, 175–6, 179, 181–2 Treaty on the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (SALT II) 190, 194 Trinity test 86 Trofimenko, Genrikh 147 Truman, Harry 59, 69–70, 87, 93–4, 96–7, 105–6, 122, 132–3; administration 88, 102, 104, 107, 111; diary entries contain fears that a third world war was beginning 109; dismal standing in the polls during his last year in office 112; war planning 194 Truman Doctrine 191 Tuchman, Barbara 171 Turkey 11, 138, 159; American missiles in 161–2, 174; and the missile swap with Cuba 162 U-2 aircraft 137, 147, 150, 152–3, 163, 172, 176 U-235 (isotope) 30–1, 33, 40–4, 50, 54, 65, 68, 211 U-238 (isotope) 24, 30, 42, 44, 54, 65, 211 UN 78, 133, 190; creates an International Atomic Energy Agency (iaea) 132; established at the San Francisco Conference 97, 141; and issues regarding the Korean peninsula 109– 10; and Operation crossroads 133; partition of Palestine 203; receives Plan

Index

from arms-control diplomat Baruch 133; seeks control of the materials required to manufacture atomic bombs 107 The Uncertainty Principle 16 underground Minuteman missile silos 122, 175, 178 United Nations Atomic Energy Agency 205 United Nations Atomic Energy Commission 133 United Nations Organization see UN United Nations Security Council 162 United States 23–35, 64–9, 86–9, 98–102, 108–12, 133–7, 151–65, 174–8; and Britain 45, 66; and the collapse of the Soviet Union 197–8; forces 107; and Germany 42, 97; and NATO 138; Navy 172; policy following World War II 187; and Russia 177 University of Birmingham 41, 52 University of California 15, 18, 26, 46, 70 University of Chicago 14–15 University of Copenhagen’s Institute for Theoretical Physics 15 University of Göttingen 15 University of Kyoto 51 University of Manchester 11 University of Michigan 15, 76 University of Voronez 33 uranium 7, 24–7, 29–31, 43, 54, 76, 133, 211; bomb-grade 205; deposits 98; enrichment plants 55, 96, 132, 205–6; fission 33; isotope U-235 204; isotopes of 32, 45; mines 133; natural un-enriched 30, 41, 45, 54; ore 48; research 29; separation plants 32, 40–1, 44, 48, 76, 94, 98, 132 “Uranium Committee” 29, 40–3 US 8th Air Force 62 US Air Force 53, 100, 147, 155, 195; bombs using incendiaries over Japanese cities 63; deploys B-29 bombers to bases in Great Britain 97; leadership 118; and the limitations of a strategy of retaliation 118; nuclear-armed 118; seeks to avoid bombing civilian areas 62 US Air Force Association 58 US Army 40 US Army Air Force 62 USS Nautilus 172 USSR 32–4, 96, 98–100, 110–11, 151–2, 154–6, 172–5, 196–8

225

Viet Nam War 151, 154, 156, 158, 181, 187–8, 190 von Clausewitz, Carl 86, 117 von Weizsäcker, Carl 28 Wallace, Henry 69–70 war, current 33–4, 44, 51, 53, 65 warfare 60, 64–5, 68, 71, 79, 116–17, 203, 210; conventional 72, 75; cyber 2–3, 211, 213; economic 158; guerrilla 13; modern strategic 212; thermo-nuclear 118; transformation of 3 Warsaw Pact 139 Washington 88, 98, 108 Washington, Pres. George 209 The Washington Disarmament Treaty 131–2 Washington Disarmament Treaty 131 Washington Star 26 Weigley, Russell 64 Wells, H.G. 10, 20, 22, 26 Western Europe 39, 100, 138, 140, 147, 160, 186, 201; and Britain 136; and China 139; and the possibilities of devastation 159, 172 Wheeler, Joseph 31, 86 White House 67, 70, 102, 113–14, 121–2, 148, 184, 186 Wilson, Woodrow 78, 133 Wilson, Richard (reporter) 136 Wilson, Robert 78, 140 Winne, Harry 132 The World Set Free 10, 20, 22 World War I 11–12, 14–16, 25–6, 43, 55–6, 60–1, 111–12, 202–3 World War II 58–63, 86–7, 99–100, 104, 110–11, 138, 177–8, 187–9; and the administration of scientific research 41, 43–4; alliance with the Soviets 96; bomb programs 42; in Europe 130; experience of 109, 117, 120, 123; and the German atomic scientists at Farm Hall 39; recruits 103; and the US as the last major belligerent to enter the war 32; and the use of fission for military purposes 30 World War II, American bomb building for 45 “World War III” 139 X-rays 7, 25 Yamamoto, Adml 41 Yom Kippur War 186