The Untold History of the United States

by Oliver Stone

  Less than one week later, scientists meeting in Lindau, Germany, released the Mainau Declaration, signed by eighteen Nobel laureates. Reaching out once again to “all men everywhere,” the declaration warned that “in an all-out war the earth can be made so radioactive that whole nations will be destroyed.” Nations would either have to “renounce force” or “they will cease to exist.”24

  Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles begged to differ, defying the opinion of most of humanity and insisting that recklessly brandishing nuclear threats was not only defensible, it worked. An early–January 1956 interview in Life magazine quoted Dulles as saying that the Eisenhower administration had “walked to the brink” of nuclear war on three recent occasions and forced the Communists to back down. U.S. resolve, he argued, had thwarted Communist aggression in Korea, Indochina, and the Formosa Strait.25

  Dulles’s penchant for playing nuclear “chicken” produced a firestorm of controversy. Democratic Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn deplored Dulles’s “pitiful performance.”26 Adlai Stevenson accused Dulles of playing “Russian roulette with the life of our Nation.”27 India’s Hindustan Standard newspaper charged that Dulles’s brinksmanship “condemns millions of men to live in a state of perpetual fear and misery.”28 Twelve leading Protestant clergymen and editors of important religious journals wrote to Eisenhower, complaining that they were “deeply shocked” by Dulles’s “reckless and irresponsible policies.” “It remained for Mr. Dulles to tell a world aghast that the United States government three times came near the ‘brink’ of annihilating the human race in an atomic Armageddon.”29

  As historian Richard Immerman has shown, Dulles’s private views were more complicated. He understood the dangers posed by the increasing destructiveness of nuclear weapons, the challenges of Soviet nuclear parity, the growing international outcry against a policy that threatened human annihilation, and, as he told Eisenhower in April 1958, reliance on a strategy of massive retaliation that “invoked massive nuclear attack in the event of any clash anywhere of U.S. with Soviet forces.”30 But that did not stop the administration from again threatening China with nuclear attack in the second conflict over the disputed islands Quemoy and Matsu in 1958, as it had in the 1955 conflict, or from threatening the Soviet Union with nuclear retaliation during the Suez Crisis in 1956, when Israel, Britain, and France invaded Egypt following Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. Vice President Richard Nixon drew dangerous lessons from the success of that strategy against the Soviets over Suez: “In 1956 we considered using the Bomb in Suez, and we did use it diplomatically. . . . Eisenhower . . . got Al Gruenther, the NATO commander, to hold a press conference, and Gruenther said that if Khrushchev carried out his threat to use rockets against the British Isles, Moscow would be destroyed ‘as surely as day follows night.’ From that time on, the U.S. has played the dominant role in the Mideast.”31 Nixon tried to repeat that performance during the 1970 Jordanian civil war, in which U.S.-allied King Hussein drove the Palestinian Liberation Organization out of Jordan.

  Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson emphasized the growing nuclear threat in his 1956 presidential campaign, insisting that he could not “accept the apparent Administration position that we are powerless to do anything to stop this headlong race for extinction” and calling Eisenhower’s nuclear buildup “madness.”32 He pledged to push for an agreement to stop testing as his “first order of business if elected.”33 British, U.S., and Soviet tests in spring 1957 aroused international ire. Indian Prime Minister Nehru demanded an end to all nuclear tests, fearing that they “might put an end to human life as we see it.”34 The New York Times reported a “world-wide concern that the continuation of tests poses a threat to the future existence of all living things on earth.”35

  In November 1957, following a new round of tests, the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy placed an ad, written largely by Norman Cousins, in the New York Times. Signed by forty-eight prominent citizens, it called for an end to nuclear testing as the first step toward arms control. The unexpected public response to the ad sparked the formation of a major national antinuclear organization, popularly known as SANE.36

  SANE was only one of several initiatives launched in 1957. The first Pugwash Conference was held in Nova Scotia in July. Participating scientists from all over the world, including five from the United States and three from the USSR, called for abolishing war, ending the arms race, and halting nuclear testing.37

  Reacting to the public outcry, Eisenhower began a campaign at home and abroad to promote what he called “the peaceful atom,” building on the momentum generated by his December 1953 UN address. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) marketed nuclear power not only as a protector against godless communism but as a magic elixir that would power transportation vehicles, feed the hungry, light the cities, heal the sick, and excavate the planet. The U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp celebrating “Atoms for Peace: To Find the Way by Which the Inventiveness of Man Shall Be Consecrated to New Life.”

  In late April 1955, Eisenhower unveiled plans for an atomic-powered merchant ship that would visit ports all over the world to show the United States’ commitment to a “just and lasting peace.” In July, the United States generated its first commercial nuclear power. In October 1956, Eisenhower announced that Atoms for Peace was succeeding. The United States had agreements with Japan and thirty-six other nations to build atomic reactors and was negotiating with fourteen more. Meanwhile, the United States was proceeding with the development of an atomic plane, but a proposed $60 million atomic-powered Coast Guard icebreaker proved too costly and Eisenhower vetoed it.

  By 1958, the United States was becoming almost giddy with the prospect of something even more ambitious, grandiose, and absurd: planetary excavation under the AEC’s Project Plowshare. In September 1957, the AEC detonated a 2-kiloton bomb inside a mountain in Nevada. Willard Libby, who had replaced the independent-minded Henry Smyth as the only scientist on the AEC in 1954, reported in December that radioactive fallout from the Rainier test had been entirely contained within the mountain, making possible a broad range of peaceful uses for atomic explosions. Libby exulted, “I’ve not seen anything in years so exciting.”38 AEC chairman Lewis Strauss understood the real purpose of the program. In February, he admitted that Plowshare had been intended to “highlight the peaceful applications of nuclear explosive devices and thereby create a climate of world opinion that is more favorable to weapons development and tests.”39

  The New York Times reported on its front page on March 14 that “atomic explosions up to ten times the power of the World War II Hiroshima bomb may be within a couple years an every-day occurrence almost anywhere in the country under a program being pressed by scientists of the Atomic Energy Commission.”40 In June, the AEC announced Project Chariot, a plan to create a three-hundred-foot harbor in Alaska north of the Arctic Circle with four hydrogen bombs. Officials anticipated that the bombs would be used to free inaccessible oil deposits trapped in both tar sand and shale formations. Similar explosions could also create huge underground reservoirs, produce steam, desalinize water, crack copper and other impenetrable ores, and produce radioactive isotopes for use in medicine, biology, agriculture, and industry.

  Experts wanted to blast a new, bigger, and better Panama Canal. Some wanted to alter weather patterns. Jack Reed of the Sandia Laboratory in Albuquerque proposed exploding a 20-megaton bomb alongside the eye of a hurricane to reverse its course. He was confident that any resulting radioactivity would fall harmlessly. A U.S. Weather Bureau scientist, Harry Wexler, proposed a plan to accelerate melting of the polar icecaps by detonating ten 10-megaton bombs near the Arctic Circle, which he calculated would warm the polar area by approximately 10°F.

  The AEC doubled the Plowshare budget for 1960. Almost a hundred staff members at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory were slated to work on the project. Physicist Edward Teller, who directed the lab, was extremely enthusiastic
about the prospects. But the project hit a snag. In September 1958, Eisenhower had yielded to domestic and international pressure and announced that the United States would go along with a Soviet-initiated nuclear test moratorium. To continue the project, Eisenhower would have had to defy the moratorium. He pressed the Soviets for an agreement allowing peaceful tests. When it looked as though the Soviets might be yielding, he approved plans for a 10-kiloton explosion deep in a salt bed near Carlsbad, New Mexico, in summer 1959. Project Gnome, as it was called, would explore the feasibility of creating an underground reservoir of heat that would remain trapped in melted salt and could be used to produce electricity. The blast would also yield valuable radioisotopes that the United States would attempt to recover for medical purposes. A spokesman for the Interior Department, whose National Park Service ran the nearby Carlsbad Cavern National Park, reported that the department was “completely flabbergasted” by the announcement.41

  Project Chariot was to follow in summer 1960. Some citizens even came up with their own suggestions for worthy projects as part of Plowshare. One woman suggested that the AEC use hydrogen bombs to kill all the snakes in Africa.42

  Despite the administration’s aggressive effort to promote the peaceful atom, public awareness of the dangers of nuclear testing was increasing rapidly. In April 1957, Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer added his voice to the growing international chorus of people demanding the cessation of nuclear testing. Schweitzer broadcast his “Declaration of Conscience” to approximately fifty countries.43 The New York Times reported “world-wide concern that the continuation of tests poses a threat to the future existence of all living things on earth.”44 A May Gallup Poll showed that 63 percent of Americans favored an international halt to bomb tests, more than double the 27 percent who opposed such a move. Just the previous fall, only 24 percent had supported Stevenson’s call for a test ban.45

  The publication, a few months later, of Nevil Shute’s riveting novel On the Beach, which was serialized in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and other papers, added fuel to the fire. The novel described the aftermath of a thirty-seven-day nuclear war in which four thousand cobalt bombs were exploded, tracing the final days of the last surviving pocket of humans in Melbourne, Australia, as the radioactive cloud was descending on them. Earle Brown’s review in the Washington Post, titled “The Facing of Certain Death,” with a heading above it, “Atomic Armageddon of 1960s,” began, “Nevil Shute has written the most important and dramatic novel of the atomic age, and if you read only one book a year this should be the one.” Brown concluded, “I hope Nevil Shute’s book will go into a few cornerstones or time capsules, so that if an atomic Armageddon ever comes, future civilizations may realize that this generation went down the road to destruction with its eyes wide open. It should be required reading—on both sides of the curtain.”46

  Winston Churchill was attending a party at Lord Beaverbrook’s villa in Cap d’Ail, France, in September 1957 when guests began discussing Shute’s chilling novel. Churchill announced plans to send a copy to Khrushchev. Someone asked if he was also planning to send one to Eisenhower, to which Churchill replied, “It would be a waste of money. He is so muddle-headed now. . . . I think the earth will soon be destroyed. . . . And if I were the Almighty I would not recreate it in case they destroyed him too the next time.”47

  Stanley Kramer’s film version premiered simultaneously in all the major capitals of the world in December 1959 to unprecedented international fanfare. New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther concluded his glowing assessment of the film with the observation: “The great merit of this picture, aside from its entertainment qualities, is the fact that it carries a passionate conviction that man is worth saving, after all.”48 Eisenhower’s cabinet discussed ways to counter the film’s powerful nuclear abolitionist message. Officials in the cabinet, AEC, and State Department attempted to discredit the film by alleging that it contained serious errors that invalidated its central premises.49 The U.S. Information Agency created a file titled “Possible Questions and Suggested Answers on the Film ‘On the Beach.’ ”50 But the numerous filmgoers, many of whom left the theaters in tears, were probably more impressed with the simple, straightforward repudiation of deterrence theory offered by Julian, the scientist ably played by Fred Astaire, who was asked who he thought started the war. He responded, “Who would ever have believed that human beings would be stupid enough to blow themselves off the face of [the] earth?” When his questioner persisted, Julian explained:

  The war started when people accepted the idiotic principle that peace could be maintained by arranging to defend themselves with weapons they couldn’t possibly use without committing suicide. Everybody had an atomic bomb. And counter bombs. And counter-counter bombs. The devices outgrew us. We couldn’t control them. I know. I helped build them. God help me. Somewhere some poor bloke probably looked at a radar screen and thought he saw something. Knew that if he hesitated 1/1000th of a second his own country would be wiped off the map so. . . . So he pushed a button and the world went crazy. And and . . .

  The film’s details might have been wrong, but its understanding of the world Eisenhower had helped create was not. One could certainly paint a more benign portrait of Eisenhower’s nuclear policies. After all, he resisted the Joint Chiefs’ pressure to use nuclear weapons. He limited civil defense expenditures and restrained the growth of overall defense spending. He worked to enact a test ban. He resisted pressure for a massive buildup after Sputnik. He confronted the powerful and sometimes hostile Soviet Union while trying to hold the NATO alliance together. And he was often a voice of moderation in the midst of far more hawkish and extreme advisors.

  Yet under Eisenhower the United States went from having a little more than 1,000 nuclear weapons to approximately 22,000, aimed at 2,500 targets in the Soviet Union. But even the 22,000 figure is misleading. Procurements authorized by Eisenhower continued into the 1960s, making Eisenhower responsible for more than 30,000 nuclear weapons during the Kennedy administration. Between 1959 and 1961, the United States added 19,500 nuclear weapons to its arsenal. The United States was producing new weapons at the rate of 75 per day and doing so at bargain-basement prices. As Pulitzer Prize–winning author Richard Rhodes notes, “Nuclear warheads cost the United States about $250,000 each: less than a fighter-bomber, less than a missile, less than a patrol boat, less than a tank.”51 Total megatonnage increased sixty-five-fold in five years, reaching 20,491 megatons in 1960. In pure megatonnage, that was the equivalent of 1,360,000 Hiroshima bombs. Although the total megatonnage began to drop in 1961, as 950 10-megaton B36 bombs were retired, the bombs’ destructive capability actually increased as the introduction of ballistic missiles made targeting more accurate. Doubling the accuracy of delivery allows for an eightfold reduction in yield without sacrificing the bombs’ destructive capability.52

  What is little known is that Eisenhower had delegated to theater commanders and other specified commanders, including the Strategic Air Command and NORAD, the authority to launch a nuclear attack if they believed it was mandated by circumstances and were out of communication with the president, or if the president had been incapacitated. With Eisenhower’s approval, some of the theater commanders had in turn delegated this authority to lower commanders under similar circumstances. This subdelegation included commanders of numbered air forces, fleets, and navies. Thus there were dozens of fingers on the triggers, if not more. According to RAND analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who had discovered the dangerous circumstances surrounding delegation and subdelegation during his studies of nuclear command and control for the Pentagon, “It was a doomsday machine on a hair trigger with delegation.”53 And given the fact that there were then no locks on nuclear weapons, many more people had the actual power, if not the authority, to launch a nuclear attack, including pilots, squadron leaders, base commanders, and carrier commanders. During the next decade, locks were put on nuclear weapons in Europe and then on tactical nuclear weapons
. Locks on SAC bombers came much later. No locks were put on submarine missiles until the 1980s, meaning that any submarine commander still had the power to wipe out the USSR.

  In August 1960, President Eisenhower approved the preparation of a National Strategic Target List and Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP). The country’s first SIOP detailed a plan to deploy the country’s strategic nuclear forces in a simultaneous strike against the Sino-Soviet bloc within the first twenty-four hours of a war. Its goal was maximum destruction. The targets included Soviet nuclear forces, government control centers, and the urban-industrial base. When briefed on the magnitude and redundancy of destruction, Eisenhower admitted to his naval aide, Captain E. P. Aurand, that it “frighten[ed] the devil out of me.”54 As well it should have. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were subsequently asked to estimate the death toll from such an attack. The numbers were shocking: 325 million dead in the Soviet Union and China, another 100 million in Eastern Europe, a similar number in Western Europe from fallout, and up to another 100 million from fallout in bordering countries including Finland, Sweden, Austria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Japan. Those figures did not include the deaths caused by Soviet nuclear weapons or by U.S. tactical weapons.55 Nor did they include the then-unknown fact that an attack of this magnitude would almost certainly have triggered a nuclear winter, raising the possibility of extinction. Though horrified by the prospect of millions dying if the SIOP were enacted, Eisenhower passed the plan, unaltered, on to the new administration.