by Dan Carlin
It’s hard to really know how much of the navy’s opposition was truly based on morality, or how much might have been an effort to defend the necessity and relevance of its branch of the military services in the face of those looming budget cuts. (Indeed, the moral complaints would be notably muted later when navy submarines began to carry nuclear weapons.)
The admirals’ testimony elucidated a key moral question that the world still wrestles with decades later: Is there an ethical way to fight a nuclear war? Is there a way to bomb cities and civilians with atomic weapons and have it square with American values and the values the Cold War West was trumpeting as a hallmark of its moral superiority over the “godless Communists”? In the view of the time, Stalin was as bad as Hitler had been. He was ruthless, and “the Reds” were on the move globally. But if you kill tens of millions of civilians to thwart the perceived evils of a totalitarian superpower, how much evil do you get splashed onto you in the process?* And to complicate the ethical dilemma ever more, what if the side that purports to occupy the moral high ground strikes first?*
It is crucial to recall that we today have the luxury of knowing how things in that era turned out; that is, that there was no third world war or nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union. Assessing what happened, and the decisions taken in safety, as we do, is one thing, but the folks making those decisions at the time felt anything but safe. We also now know many things today that were hidden then.
The United States and others argued that Soviet ruthlessness* had to be met with a similar level of resolve. By 1948, Truman had already had minor standoffs with the Soviets in several locations around the globe*—and each time the Soviets gave in. But Stalin would further test that resolve in the summer of 1948 when he shut down the rail lines, roads, and canals into West Berlin, denying the United States, France, and Great Britain access to their respective sectors of the divided city.
This is the first crisis that raised truly practical questions about whether or not to use an atomic bomb. Truman had already allegedly played the nuclear bluff game*—a strategy known as “escalation dominance”*—with Stalin. What if he threatened Stalin with atomic bombs over Berlin and Stalin didn’t back down? Would the United States and its allies attack the Soviet Union and precipitate World War III? Was it even possible to launch a nuclear attack? Were there planes in place? How many bombs were available? What would the targets be, and if those targets were bombed and destroyed, would the attack achieve the overarching goal?
How well would such an attack play in the increasingly important court of global public opinion? If the US nuclear arsenal did only half the damage of its own estimates, it would kill untold numbers of men, women, and children.* Western “resolve” might be proved, but at a very high cost. The Soviets hadn’t physically attacked anybody—they had simply closed off supply routes and thereby indicated that the next geopolitical chess move was the West’s.
At this point, Truman brought together various people to have fundamental discussions, the kind they hadn’t had before. And there were broad differences of opinion. The military men (by and large) were under the impression that if the nation went to war, the United States would use the new weapons just as they had used the conventional ones previously. But others, including David Lilienthal, the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, counseled the president not to use nuclear weapons. As Michio Kaku and Daniel Axelrod write in To Win a Nuclear War, the secretary of the army, Kenneth Claiborne Royall, “spoke for the hard-liners when he said, ‘We have been spending 98 percent of all the money for atomic energy for weapons. Now if we aren’t going to use them, that doesn’t make any sense.’”
Some wanted to rely on a strategy that would eventually become known as deterrence.* For deterrence to work, however, the side being deterred must truly believe that these weapons will be used against it. This meant that any nation seeking to lean on deterrence couldn’t ever publicly say anything like, “These weapons are awful, and we’ll never use them.” Yet this is exactly what the United States had said right after the war in 1945. Was the United States ready to blow up Russian cities and slaughter so many of its people if Stalin called its bluff? If he did call the bluff, and the United States backed down, its future ability to use atomic bombs as a threat would be greatly diminished—and thereby the value of its nuclear arsenal, too. This is a conundrum that would outlive most of the officials debating it in 1948.
The fight over Berlin never exploded into a nuclear conflict because both sides managed to walk a delicate tightrope for almost a year. The West began tentatively attempting to fly into the city the supplies it needed to keep citizens from starving or freezing; when Stalin didn’t attack the nonmilitary aircraft, the effort was expanded. The blockade would last until May 1949; the airlift itself would go on for months after that. By the time it ended, the United States and the Western Allies had flown 1.5 million tons of coal, fuel, and other necessary products into the city on nearly 200,000 flights. In geopolitical chess terms, Stalin had made a move fraught with land mines for the other side to trigger, and, by using the airlift, the West had managed to avoid them. In the early history of humankind trying to live with nuclear weapons technology—let’s call it the “toddler years”—each time a crisis was averted without events tipping into disaster, much was learned. That said, if the Third World War had broken out as a result of the Berlin Blockade, only one side was going to have atomic weapons used on it. If you’re a member of the American public sweating out the increasing tensions between the superpowers, you could at least take comfort in knowing you were still safe from atomic weapons because your own government was the only one that had them.
Until it wasn’t.
The Berlin situation calmed down in the spring of 1949, but everything else seemed to ratchet up in intensity that year. In fact, 1949 may have been the most dangerous year of the Cold War.* That was the year that Chinese Communists (the “Red Chinese”) finally gained victory in their long-running civil war over the Nationalists and took over all of mainland China. The Soviet Union—already the largest land power in the world geographically—had now added to its ideological ranks a country roughly the size of the United States, and which contained a full quarter of the world’s population. That year, in order to begin to cobble together a united defense strategy among countries still trying to recover from the damage of the Second World War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed. Tensions only deepened.
Nineteen forty-nine was also the year the Soviets got the bomb.
On August 29, the Soviets conducted their first atomic bomb test in a central Asian desert—about sixteen years sooner than Western scientists had predicted. Suddenly, the whole dynamic changed. The United States now had to worry about having atomic bombs dropped on it. The oceans that had long shielded the North American continent no longer provided safety; in turn, the American nation and its populace had never faced a threat even remotely like it.
Thus ended that brief period at the beginning of the nuclear age when atomic power rested in the hands of a single country. It’s notable, given the evidence of past human history, that with its monopoly, the United States didn’t use that advantage to dominate the world.* Perhaps this means that in an ethical sense there had indeed been human progress—a “growth in human greatness.” But perhaps, too, as Bertrand Russell would point out,* this was a single victory in an endless struggle. The first round went to humankind’s ethical and evolutionary growth because the United States avoided bombing the Soviet Union when it was the only country to have the bomb,* but now two countries had it.
And one of the things that happened right away was that there was a new good argument for starting a preemptive nuclear war as soon as possible.
We’ve been living ever since with the fact that both sides—and others, now—have the nuclear option. Russia’s announcement that it had the bomb signaled the end of the era of the United States having what the secretary of war had called the royal straigh
t flush. Predictably, the question of how to respond ran the gamut; even sober, humanitarian-minded scientists tried to figure out if the balance of rational thought had swung toward the idea of striking the Soviets preemptively. In his book Prisoner’s Dilemma, William Poundstone quotes a letter from William Golden, one of President Truman’s science advisers, who, in trying to come up with rational approaches to this unprecedented civilizational challenge, did his best to imagine how a man from Mars (in other words, somebody who didn’t have any skin in the game) might view the geopolitical situation:
This brings up the matter of immediate use, or threat of use, of our weapons. Let us not delude ourselves, to bring about a true international control agreement with Russia we would have to use them. The consequences would be dreadful indeed, even though I assume that the Russians have so few A-bombs now that they could do little or no damage to the U.S.A. even if they could put them on the target.* In theory we should issue an ultimatum and use the bombs against Russia now: For, from here on, we inevitably lose ground. And this is true no matter at how much greater a rate we produce no matter how much more potent weapons. For once Russia is in a position to put A-bombs on our cities, no matter how inefficient those bombs may be and how few in number, she is in a position to do us unspeakable injury. That we can retaliate a hundredfold, or wipe out every Russian, will not repair the damage. So, a good, though amoral, case can be made by the disinterested man from Mars for our shooting at once.
Golden then goes on to say, however, that the United States and the West wouldn’t carry out a plan like this, regardless of the alternative, because the public would never support it. Whether or not Golden is correct about public support for preventative nuclear war, it’s still interesting to consider what it might mean if he were right. One is tempted to see it as some sort of ethical evolutionary change. After all, would public opinion in an ancient Bronze Age civilization have hesitated for even a minute?*
That said, if it’s possible to argue that we’re adapting the ancient playbook to account for the power of atomic weapons, we nevertheless continue to follow other patterns that have always made logical military sense, but which now greatly increase the chances we will kill ourselves. What’s the proper move if you’re the United States, and you just had your atomic monopoly destroyed? Traditional realpolitik would probably mandate regaining technological superiority or dominance. You keep inventing and improving, and you develop the next system. The last thing you want to do is risk falling behind the other side, which could spell your eventual doom.
But if you haven’t yet figured out how to deal with the power of the weapons you have recently developed, does it make sense to pursue even more powerful ones?
After the Soviets successfully tested their first A-bomb, in October 1949 Truman asked for some help from physicists—including J. Robert Oppenheimer*—on the question of whether to build the next generation of superbombs (what today we call thermonuclear weapons and what then were often referred to as “the Super”). Some of the questions asked were: Should we develop the next level of weaponry above atomic weapons? What are the chances of success if we try?* And if we do succeed, would it actually help solve our problems? The physicists came back with a report telling the administration not to build the new weapon. If built, this “hydrogen bomb” would be thousands of times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.* Humans did not need, and might not be able to handle, such a force, they said.
“We believe a super bomb should never be produced,” the report found. “Mankind would be far better off not to have a demonstration of the feasibility of such a weapon, until the present climate of world opinion changes.” (Is that code for “until we evolve more”?)
This idea that we should not develop stronger weapons rubs against the grain of traditional human behavior, and as such, it signaled an entirely new dilemma confronting our species. Could humanity, if faced with potential extinction, decide to cap weapons research and development?* This would mean avowing to never try to discover anything more powerful and deadly than the weapons of our current capabilities. How does a civilization shut off information like that? And who is qualified to make such a decision?
Oppenheimer and his like-minded associates had essentially assessed how the “growing into greatness” civilizational experiment had been going in the five years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the results did not seem to be encouraging enough to recommend adding exponentially more power into the mix. The world was already akin to a clueless toddler playing with a pistol, and now it was being asked if it favored replacing the pistol with a machine gun.
Elsewhere in the report, the scientists also seemed to suggest that this moment provided a chance to break the patterns of the past to survive. “In determining not to proceed to develop the super bomb,” the report read, “we see a unique opportunity of providing by example some limitations on the totality of war and thus limiting the fear and arousing the hopes of mankind.”
Enrico Fermi and another physicist penned an even more apocalyptic response, arguing that these weapons would be able to create the equivalent of giant natural catastrophes.
A decision on the proposal that an all-out effort be undertaken for the development of the “Super” cannot in our opinion be separated from considerations of broad national policy. A weapon like the “Super” is only an advantage when its energy release is from 100–1000 times greater than that of ordinary atomic bombs. The area of destruction therefore would run from 150 to approximately 1000 square miles or more.
Necessarily such a weapon goes far beyond any military objective and enters the range of very great natural catastrophes. By its very nature it cannot be confined to a military objective but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide. It is clear that the use of such a weapon cannot be justified on any ethical ground which gives a human being a certain individuality and dignity even if he happens to be a resident of an enemy country. It is evident to us that this would be the view of peoples in other countries. Its use would put the United States in a bad moral position relative to the peoples of the world. Any postwar situation resulting from such a weapon would leave unresolvable enmities for generations. A desirable peace cannot come from such an inhuman application of force. The postwar problems would dwarf the problems which confront us at present.
Those who saw such weapons in a more positive light often thought that these scientists lived in a fantasy world. But David Lilienthal from the Atomic Energy Commission—who pushed back against using atomic bombs during the Berlin Airlift—wrote in his diary about the way the government was leaning, and it was not in the direction the physicists wanted. “More and better bombs, where will this lead is difficult to see. We keep saying we have no other course. What we should say is we’re not bright enough to see any other course.”
But Truman, as usual, had many more pressures weighing on him than just the opinion of his scientific advisers. David Lilienthal, again in his diary, records a comment by Senator Brien McMahon, who describes how the American people would likely react if they found out that the Communist superpowers had an H-bomb, but the United States didn’t: “Why, a President who didn’t approve going ahead on the H-bomb all out would be hanged from a lamppost if the Russians should get it and we hadn’t.”
It’s hard not to be struck here by the width of the intellectual chasm between the people who were to create these superweapons and the people who would make the decision whether to use them. But even if elected figures were more competent to make such a choice than the electorate was, the court of public opinion was still strong—and are we comfortable with such decisions being made by the average Joe and Jane?*
In January 1950, after reading the report from Oppenheimer and his fellow scientists telling him not to build the super-superbomb, Truman decided to build it anyway.
The reasons given all revolved around this: the Russians were going to get it, so we had to have it. Even if one b
ought into Oppenheimer’s argument that more powerful weapons weren’t needed (i.e., that a nation can just employ A-bombs against the other side’s H-bombs),* the psychological effect on the American people was unacceptable to a chief executive who depended on keeping power through the ballot box.
To gauge how unusual any other choice would have been, you have to imagine humankind declining to research and develop more powerful weapons systems. No doubt there are überpacifistic groups on the planet that would do so, but when you think of the most powerful nation-states, it’s hard to imagine any of them saying, “Yes, we know our global adversaries and competitors have much bigger and more powerful weapons than we have, but we’re okay with what we currently possess. We don’t need that bigger weapon.”
Growing into greatness isn’t easy.
Humanity had the bad luck to begin this civilizational experiment in extremely tense times. If nuclear weapons had been invented in a more peaceful era, instead of during the worst year of the worst war in human history (followed by a decades-long potentially existential standoff—the Cold War), the evolution of this great high-stakes experiment may have turned out differently. Instead, half a year after Truman decided to proceed with development of the Super, the United States found itself in a ground war in Asia against a Communist country supported by the Soviets. For the first time in history, a nuclear-armed state found itself going to war, and against a country whose friend and benefactor had just successfully conducted its own nuclear test the year before.
In the 1930s, the “isolationist” US republic boasted only a small volunteer army that avoided “foreign entanglements.”* At the dawn of the 1950s, it stood astride the world like a colossus. Several major laws, acts, doctrines, and policy changes had reoriented American foreign and military policy in those years into the very opposite of isolationist.*
