The End Is Always Near
Page 14
This is where the fork-in-the-road question we’ve been looking at again comes into play. Either things will happen again as they always have, or they won’t—meaning either there will be another great war (or wars) in human history, or there never will be again. You’re free to choose either scenario.
Realizing that they had delivered the most powerful weapon ever created into the hands of a rather violent species, some of those who helped create the superbomb tried to look at the potential positives. Maybe humanity would finally be frightened enough and motivated enough to renounce war, something that had been with us since the dawn of history. Oppenheimer himself said, “It did not take atomic weapons to make man want peace, but the atomic bomb was the turn of the screw. The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable.” Idealism had become realism (or else).
The physicist Arthur Holly Compton* wrote, “If with such destructive weapons men are to survive, they must grow rapidly in human greatness. A new level of human understanding is needed. The reward for using the atom’s power towards man’s welfare is great and sure. The punishment for its misuse would seem to be death and the destruction of the civilization that has been growing for a thousand years.”
“Must grow rapidly in human greatness” is a wonderful phrase. As is “destruction of the civilization that has been growing for a thousand years.” It seems like a nice way of saying that we as a species must become more enlightened or die.
Einstein seemed to be a bit more pessimistic about the adapt-or-die question: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything, save our modes of thinking and thus, we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” He later clarified what he meant:
Many persons have inquired concerning a recent message of mine that “a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move to higher levels.”
Often in evolutionary processes a species must adapt to new conditions in order to survive. Today the atomic bomb has altered profoundly the nature of the world as we know it, and the human race consequently finds itself in a new habitat to which it must adapt its thinking.
In light of new knowledge . . . an eventual world state is not just desirable in the name of brotherhood; it is necessary for survival. . . . Today we must abandon competition and secure cooperation. This must be the central fact in all our considerations of international affairs; otherwise we face certain disaster. Past thinking and methods did not prevent world wars. Future thinking must prevent wars.*
This is one fork in the intellectual road. It is the one that says humanity must change profoundly or be destroyed by its own creations. Even the proponents of this viewpoint acknowledge how difficult it will be for humankind to stop acting as it always has,* but they also maintain that we don’t have a choice. In essence, this view of the world represents a true test of our vaunted adaptability as a species. We either succeed or face nuclear Armageddon at some point in our collective future.
The other intellectual fork in the road says that humankind will likely act as it always has, and that ancient habits are too ingrained to substantially change. Some people who hold this view argue that the odds are too highly stacked against sufficient adaptation or evolution by our species and believe it’s better to try to find strategies to minimize bad outcomes. Still others don’t buy into the general premise that these new weapons are inherently bad things; to these adherents of the bomb, it’s more about who uses them and how that determines whether they’re good or bad.
Once the Second World War was over and emotions had cooled somewhat, questions arose about what to do with this weapons technology. How can it be controlled? What if other countries get the new weapons, too?* Many debates took place within the United States in 1945 and 1946 concerning topics such as who should be in charge of the weapons. The military seemed like the logical choice—it was the one who was going to use them, after all. But President Truman wasn’t having it,* and eventually, it was decided that going forward the US president would have the exclusive power to authorize and order the use of the superweapons.
But this was a level of personal power the constitutional framers of the United States had never foreseen. And that, historian Garry Wills wrote, was one of the side effects of the bomb—it changed the American constitutional system. “Lodging ‘the fate of the world’ on one man,” Wills argues, “with no constitutional check on his actions, caused a violent break in our whole governmental system.” But it was a development that “was accepted under the impression that technology imposed it as a harsh necessity.” How, for example, would a president have time to consult with other leaders or branches of government if the enemy’s missiles were already in the air?
The nature of the presidency, says Wills, was irrevocably altered by this grant of unprecedented power.
While new weapons were changing how the American government did things on a national level, the question of how they might change things on a human level was also being debated. There developed an active attempt to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle, to eliminate atomic weapons from the face of the earth, almost as if they had never been discovered at all.*
Indeed, in October 1945, just one month after Japan’s surrender, President Truman, in a speech to Congress, said the hope of civilization rested on international agreements to renunciate the use and development of atomic weapons. In November that same year, he began to work with the leaders of Canada and the United Kingdom to formulate a policy to effect limits. It was, according to the nuclear expert Joseph Cirincione, essentially the first nuclear nonproliferation agreement.
The financier Bernard Baruch was tasked with presenting the plan at the first session of the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission on June 14, 1946. He framed the stakes in biblical terms. “We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead,” Baruch said in his speech. “That is our business. If we fail, then we’ve damned every man to be the slave of fear.” His proposal included collecting all the uranium and thorium* in the world, as well as all the explosives and other components that go into the making of bombs, and putting all of it in a central location under the control of what he called an international atomic development authority, “to which should be entrusted all phases of the development and use of atomic energy.”
The Soviet Union, quickly morphing into the “other side” in the Cold War* during this era, objected to this plan, in no small part because while the United States was offering to give up its monopoly on atomic weapons, it was asking every other country to renounce them first. The deal would allow the United States to keep its nuclear arsenal for several years before dismantling it, thereby allowing it to extend its advantage. Instead, the Soviets suggested the Americans get rid of their nukes immediately, and then the rest of the world could figure out how to keep from developing any more.
The military historian Gwynne Dyer doesn’t find the fact that the two superpowers soured toward each other surprising at all. He likens it to earlier geopolitical rivalries and argues that the democracy-versus-communism Cold War dynamic was a lot like the role religion played in the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. “Each side has an ideologically watertight explanation for why the adversary behaves with such persistent wickedness and aggression,” Dyer writes. “None of the post-1945 developments would seem surprising to a 17th century Spanish or Ottoman diplomat. Neither communism nor liberal democracy would mean anything to him, other than as a useful label for the players, but he would have no trouble understanding why the victorious alliance so quickly fell apart. They almost always do after victory, because the winners are the biggest players left on the board, hence they automatically become the greatest threats to each other’s power.”
In the immediate postwar period, both sides had ample reason to fear the capabilities of the other. These were, after all, the armies that had recently won the war. But now they might be turned against each other, and they were frankly scary. The Soviets had what was probably the stronges
t land force that had yet existed in global history—the Red Army, even after partially demobilizing in 1945, remained large, powerful, and threatening.* Where the Western Allies had used a wide array of tools to achieve battlefield superiority (airpower was a crucial component, for example), the Soviets put most of their emphasis on lots of very heavy armor, masses of artillery, and lots of men. This was not a finesse force; it was an army built to steamroll opponents, as it had the German Wehrmacht, which had been considered the best army in the world up to its defeat.* And they were perched along the farthest limit of the territory they had taken over in wartime, occupying unwilling populations in places like Poland, Romania, Hungary, and the Baltic states.
The West, however, had fantastic air forces and complete naval supremacy. On the ground their land armies had many electronic, signals, logistics, and communication advantages over the somewhat technologically simpler Red Army. And they had the atomic bomb.
Over the ensuing decades, it became an article of faith among many that war with the Soviet Union wasn’t just a possibility, but an inevitability. For the United States, such pessimism colored its decision making. If the premise that war was inevitably going to happen was accepted, more than five thousand years of political and military history said it would be best if such a war happened at a time and place of one’s choosing, and when one’s strengths were maximized. Since the end of the Second World War, no greater disparity in weapons technology has ever existed than when the United States had a monopoly on nuclear weapons right after it. How many leaders in world history would have taken advantage of such circumstances?
Some of the more aggressive voices at the time argued for doing just that, acting before the advantage narrowed. General George Patton famously suggested before demobilization began that, since the Western Allies already had mobilized forces over in Europe, ready to fight, they ought to confront the Soviets right away. No one knew how long that window of opportunity was going to last.* Only a fool, some thought, would squander such a chance.
There were differing opinions about what to do with the United States’ atomic monopoly. President Truman’s secretary of war, Henry Stimson, described the advantage of the monopoly in poker terms: The bomb was the equivalent, he said, of a royal straight flush. How do you resist playing with a hand like that? What would Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great—or Hitler, for that matter—have done with a monopoly on nuclear weapons? Not use them? If you gave the great Carthaginian general Hannibal nuclear weapons in his life-or-death struggle with the Roman Republic, handed him the button, and said, “If you push this, all of Rome will be devastated,” does he push it, or does he say, “Maybe I should think about this”?*
Conversely, what might a very enlightened people do with such force? Could they turn it into a tool for righteousness? The fact that the West saw itself in a Manichaean good-versus-evil face-off with the USSR also colored how the weapons were seen. They were often viewed as the counterbalancing force offsetting the conventional power of the Red Army, and thus as the most powerful weapon protecting the free world from Soviet tyranny.
Even concerned scientists and pacifists were worried enough about the Soviet threat to consider the potential value of a preventative nuclear war. The British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell, who was such a proponent of peaceful approaches to conflict that he was jailed for opposing the First World War, wrote just after the Second, “There is one thing and only one thing which could save the world, and that is a thing which I should not dream of advocating. It is that America should make war on Russia during the next two years and establish a world empire by means of the atomic bomb.”* Russell went on, in a speech to the House of Lords, to theorize that after the next war—which he deemed imminent—civilization would have to be rebuilt anew. (He believed this effort would take five hundred years.)*
It is relevant that Russell and others spoke such thoughts at a time when everyone was still traumatized by the war. Today, humanity still faces its share of potential calamities,* but the tension level is different now than in those immediate postwar years.
People understood that war could break out with little or no warning, too—the leading nations on both sides of the Cold War had entered the Second World War as a result of being on the receiving end of devastating surprise attacks: Operation Barbarossa, the massive German surprise invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 (in violation of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939); and Pearl Harbor, the Japanese surprise bombing raid on the US territory of Hawaii in December of the same year.*
Between 1946 and 1952, the bomb would fundamentally transform the US government into an entity that would in many ways be unrecognizable from the one that was attacked at Pearl Harbor in 1941. Not only did the fate of the world rest in the hands of a single individual, as the author Garry Wills has described, but in just a few years a series of new policies and laws such as the Truman Doctrine,* the National Security Act of 1947, and the Marshall Plan* created a new national security state at home and reoriented US foreign policy abroad, making the containment of communism its top concern. This was also the era when the CIA, the NSA, and the National Security Council were born, all part of a massive redesign of the US government, one intended to protect secrets, spy on our enemies, and run an increasingly globally focused military command.
While these may have been understandable changes, given the state of the world at the time, they do seem to run counter to what many scientists had been arguing about preventing a third world war through bringing about a new level of human understanding. It certainly was a very different approach from what some physicists had suggested should be done in late 1945 and 1946—sharing atomic secrets with the Soviet Union and thereby easing tensions. This idea was seen by its adherents as a trust-building move, a demonstration of good faith that could usher in a new postatomic spirit of cooperation in order to ward off catastrophe. To our modern mind-set, it seems more like the equivalent of giving military secrets to terrorists. It sounded just as crazy to the military class after the war.
For President Truman in the immediate postwar years, practical questions went along with the philosophical questions. For one thing, although the United States didn’t let on, it actually had very few of these bombs in its arsenal. In addition, it had no particularly good way to deliver them to their targets.
So, over the next couple of years, the United States focused on developing a system to deliver Armageddon on command, if that was deemed necessary. The official name of this intricate weapons-delivery system was the Strategic Air Command (SAC). SAC was part of a brand-new branch of the US military known as the air force.* SAC’s job, if called on to do it, was to destroy the Soviet Union’s major population centers, infrastructure, and industries with atomic weapons, making it the most destructive weapons system that had ever existed so far—if used, it would have killed at least tens of millions of people. Here we can see that in the space of less than two years we had gone from discussions about crafting legislation to rid the world of the scourge of atomic weaponry to the president being asked to approve air force plans for a strategy commonly referred to as the “atomic blitzkrieg.”
One might think that in a situation as important to humanity’s future as potential global nuclear war, the modern equivalent of philosopher-kings would meet, together with the most intelligent physicists and ethicists and others, in some sort of unprecedented global forum, where they could quietly and wisely (one hopes) discuss how to meet this potentially existential challenge. Instead, the reality of normal life and pedestrian concerns intervened. Politics was an obvious element that affected decision making, but matters like budgetary concerns and interservice rivalries within the military also influenced the outcomes. Indeed, there is a pretty good argument to be made—and many have made it—that one of the primary reasons for adopting the atomic blitz strategy in the first place was budgetary—it was a cost-saving move. If you have an air force with lots of atomic bombs, maybe yo
u don’t need to keep buying all the other expensive military equipment like tanks or cannons.
This was a theoretical question at the time, since there were no data or metrics on the subject of cost savings. One thing President Truman did know was that after the war ended, the United States couldn’t long keep funding the military as it had at its astronomical wartime levels; he was faced with cutting funding by 70 percent, while still maintaining the capability to fight a third world war should it come (and, again, many people thought it surely would).
Adopting and embracing a military strategy that put tens (if not hundreds) of millions of civilians in the crosshairs of the US armed forces understandably didn’t sit well with a lot of people. Some of them happened to be those who would be called on to do the killing—that is, members of the military itself.
In October 1949, at congressional hearings about the air force’s atomic blitz plan, the “Revolt of the Admirals” revealed the strong feelings held by those faced with doing the dirty work. As Eric Schlosser writes in Command and Control, “One high-ranking admiral after another condemned the atomic blitz, arguing that the bombing of Soviet cities would be not only futile but immoral.” Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey—a commander of the South Pacific during the war, and a man whose battle group got Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle’s planes close enough to Japan for them to bomb Tokyo in 1942—testified thus: “I don’t believe in mass killings of noncombatants.” Admiral Arthur W. Radford—commander of the northern carrier group and eventual vice chief of naval operations during the war—said, “A war of annihilation might bring a pyrrhic military victory, but it would be politically and economically senseless.” And Rear Admiral Ralph A. Ofstie, who had toured the burned-out cities of Japan after the war, described the atomic blitz as the “random mass slaughter of men, women, and children.” The whole idea, he said, was “ruthless and barbaric and contrary to American values.”