The Doomsday Machine

by Daniel Ellsberg

  In the fall of 1949 another moment of truth had arrived on the path to an H-bomb. Edward Teller, after seven years of intense effort, was still no further toward solving the problem of igniting thermonuclear fuel with an A-bomb. But immediately after the September announcement that the Soviet Union had tested a fission bomb, Teller enlisted some prominent former members of the Manhattan Project, still at or consulting for Los Alamos, to join him in promoting a crash program for an H-bomb, to regain “superiority” over the Soviets (having just lost our monopoly).

  The General Advisory Committee (GAC) of the Atomic Energy Commission, chaired by Oppenheimer, was asked to consider this proposal in October 1949. Its members unanimously rejected a crash program in the strongest terms. All hoped “that by one means or another, the development of these weapons225 can be avoided. We are all reluctant to see the United States take the initiative in precipitating this development. We are all agreed that it would be wrong at the present moment to commit ourselves to an all-out effort toward its development.” The reasons for rejecting a high-priority program of development included practical grounds of cost, feasibility, and alternative uses for scarce resources (including tritium, needed for smaller, tactical fission weapons). All agreed such a weapon was not needed for deterrence of a nuclear attack, whether the Soviets went ahead and developed it or not. “Reprisals by our large stock of atomic bombs226 would be comparably effective to the use of a super.”

  But they all went far beyond this to urge the United States to make a commitment virtually without precedent (still!) not to develop such a weapon. “The majority feel that this should be227 an unqualified commitment. Others [Enrico Fermi and I. I. Rabi] feel that it should be made conditional on the response of the Soviet government to a proposal to renounce such development.”

  In arguing for either form of a commitment, all the members present raised moral issues in language I’ve never seen in any other official classified document opposing an impending development. (Never, for example, in the seven thousand pages of the Pentagon Papers on the calamitous U.S. Decision-Making in Vietnam, 1945–68.) No other secret proposal before the U.S. government has ever, to my knowledge, been condemned by insiders in such terms, nor has one ever deserved it more.

  The majority addendum was written by Conant and signed by Hartley Rowe, Cyril Smith, L. A. DuBridge, Oliver Buckley, and Oppenheimer. It said, in part:

  We base our recommendation on our belief228 that the extreme dangers to mankind inherent in the proposal wholly outweigh any military advantage that could come from this development. Let it be clearly realized that this is a super weapon; it is in a totally different category from an atomic bomb. The reason for developing such super bombs would be to have the capacity to devastate a vast area with a single bomb. Its use would involve a decision to slaughter a vast number of civilians. We are alarmed as to the possible global effects of the radioactivity generated by the explosion of a few super bombs of conceivable magnitude.

  Fermi and Rabi, though recommending a conditional rather than unconditional commitment not to proceed, were if anything even more unreserved in their reasons for opposing initiating development of a Super altogether, not only a crash program.

  By its very nature it cannot be confined229 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.

  The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.

  For these reasons we believe it important for the President of the United States to tell the American public, and the world, we think it wrong on fundamental ethnical principles to initiate a program of development such a weapon.

  Secretary of State Dean Acheson and AEC Commissioner Lewis Strauss did not agree, nor did the Democratic majority chairmen of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Joint Congressional Atomic Energy Committee. On January 31, President Harry Truman announced publicly that he had directed the AEC “to continue with its work on all forms of atomic energy weapons,230 including the so-called hydrogen or super-bomb.”

  The GAC had also recommended “that enough be declassified about the super bomb231 so that a public statement of policy can be made at this time.” But that recommendation went the way of a pledge not to initiate the development.

  Oppenheimer and Conant, having been overruled on this vital issue, thought of resigning from the GAC, but Acheson—precisely because he didn’t want the public to be aware of any opposition to the program or to inquire about the reasons for it, urged them not to. So they didn’t. Nor did Fermi or Hans Bethe—who also strongly opposed the development prior to Truman’s decision—cease to be active consultants on it. Nor did anyone else, to my knowledge, leave the program: with one exception I learned of many years later. Surprisingly enough, that was my father.

  As I have previously related, my father had spent the war designing factories to build bombing planes and engines for them. When the war ended, he accepted an offer to oversee the buildup of the plutonium production facilities at Hanford, Washington. That project was being run first by DuPont, then by General Electric under contract with the Atomic Energy Commission. To take the job of chief structural engineer on the project, Dad moved from the engineering firm of Albert Kahn, where he had worked for years, to what became Giffels & Rossetti. As he later told me, that engineering firm had the largest volume of construction contracts in the world at that time, and his project was the world’s largest. I grew up hearing these superlatives.

  The Hanford project gave my father his first really good pay.

  But while I was away as a sophomore at Harvard, Dad left his job with Giffels & Rossetti, for reasons I never learned at the time. He was out of work for almost a year. Then he went back as chief structural engineer for the whole firm. Almost thirty years later, when my father was eighty-nine, I happened to ask him why he had left Giffels & Rossetti. His answer startled me. He said, “Because they wanted me to help build the H-bomb.”

  This was a breathtaking statement for me to hear in 1978. That year I was in full-time active opposition to the deployment of the neutron bomb—a small H-bomb—that President Jimmy Carter was proposing to send to Europe. The N-bomb had a killing radius from its output of neutrons that was much wider than its radius of destruction by blast. Optimally, an airburst N-bomb would produce little fallout. Its neutrons would kill humans either outside or within buildings or tanks, while sparing structures, equipment, or vehicles. The Soviets mocked it as “a capitalist weapon” that destroyed people but not property. But they tested such a weapon too, as did other countries.

  I had opposed developing or testing that concept for almost twenty years, since it was first described to me by my friend and colleague at RAND Sam Cohen, who liked to be known as the “father of the neutron bomb.” He wanted me to evaluate the strategic implications of such a weapon, hoping I would support his campaign for deploying it. To his great disappointment, after studying his earnest descriptions of its properties, I told him I thought it would be too dangerous to develop or possess.

  I feared that, as a low-yield, tactical battlefield weapon with limited and seemingly controllable lethal effects, it would be seen, delusionally, as usable in warfare, making U.S. first use in pursuit of “limited nuclear war” more likely. It would be the match that would set off an exchange of the much larger “dirty” weapons with widespread fallout, which made up the bulk of our own arsenal and were all that the Soviets then had.

  In the year of this 1978 conversation with Dad, I was arrested four times in Colorado while blocking the railroad tracks at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons production facility, which produced all the plutonium triggers for H-bombs and wa
s going to produce the plutonium cores for neutron bombs. One of these arrests was on Nagasaki Day, August 9, 1978. The “triggers” produced at Rocky Flats were, in effect, the nuclear components of A-bombs, plutonium fission bombs of the type that had destroyed Nagasaki on that date in 1945.

  Every one of our many thousands of H-bombs, the thermonuclear fusion bombs that arm our strategic forces, requires a Nagasaki-type A-bomb as its detonator. I doubt that one American in a hundred knows that simple fact, and thus has a clear understanding of the difference between A- and H-bombs, or of the reality of the thermonuclear arsenals of the last fifty years.

  Our popular image of nuclear war—from the familiar pictures of the devastation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—is grotesquely misleading. Those pictures show us only what happens to humans and buildings when they are hit by what is now just the detonating cap for a modern nuclear weapon.

  The plutonium for these weapons came from Hanford and from the Savannah River Site in Georgia and was machined into weapons components at Rocky Flats in Colorado. The poet Allen Ginsberg and I,232 with many others, blockaded the entrances to the plant on August 9, to interfere with business as usual at the bomb factory on the anniversary of the day a plutonium bomb had killed fifty-eight thousand humans. (About one hundred thousand had died by the end of 1945.)

  I had never heard before of any connection between my father and the H-bomb. He wasn’t particularly wired in to my antinuclear work or to any of my activism since the Vietnam War had ended. I asked him what he meant by his comment about why he had left Giffels & Rossetti.

  “They wanted me to be in charge of designing a big plant that would be producing material for an H-bomb.” He said that DuPont, which had built the Hanford Site, was to have the contract from the Atomic Energy Commission. That would have been for the Savannah River Site. I asked him when this was.

  “Late ’49.”

  I told him, “You must have the date wrong. You couldn’t have heard about the hydrogen bomb then—it’s too early.” I’d just been reading about the whole H-bomb controversy and the GAC report in Herb York’s recent book The Advisors (New York, 1976). The GAC meeting on the issue of a crash program had been in October 1949. I said to Dad, “Truman didn’t make the decision to go ahead till January 1950. Meanwhile the whole thing was super secret. You couldn’t have heard about it in ’49.”

  My father said, “Well, somebody had to design the plant if they were going to go ahead. I was the logical person. I was in charge of the structural engineering of the whole project at Hanford after the war. I had a Q clearance.”

  That was the first I’d ever heard that he’d had a Q clearance—an AEC clearance, higher than Top Secret, for nuclear weapons design and stockpile data. I’d had that clearance myself in the Pentagon—along with close to a dozen other special clearances above Top Secret—after I left the RAND Corporation for the Defense Department in 1964. It was news to me that my father had ever had any security clearance, but it made sense that he would have needed it for Hanford. I said, “So you’re telling me that you would have been one of the only people in the country, outside Los Alamos and the GAC, who knew we were considering building the H-bomb in 1949?”

  He said, “I suppose so. Anyway, I know it was late ’49 because that’s when I quit.”

  “Why did you quit?”

  “I didn’t want to make an H-bomb. Why, that thing was going to be a thousand times more powerful than the A-bomb!”

  I thought, score one for his memory at eighty-nine. He remembered the proportion correctly. That was the same factor Oppenheimer and the others predicted233 in their report in 1949. They were right. The first explosion of a droppable H-bomb, almost five years later, had a thousand times the explosive power of the Hiroshima blast.

  My father went on: “I hadn’t wanted to work on the A-bomb either. But then Einstein seemed to think that we needed it, and it made sense to me that we had to have it against the Russians. So I took the job, but I never felt good about it.

  “Then when they told me they were going to build a bomb a thousand times bigger, that was it for me. I went back to my office and I said to my deputy, ‘These guys are crazy. They have an A-bomb, now they want an H-bomb. They’re going to go right through the alphabet till they have a Z-bomb.’ ”

  I said, “Well, so far they’ve only gotten to N.”

  He said, “There was another thing about it that I couldn’t stand. Building these things generated a lot of radioactive waste. I wasn’t responsible for designing the containers for the waste, but I knew they were bound to leak eventually. That stuff was deadly forever. It was radioactive for twenty-four thousand years.”

  Again he had turned up a good figure. I said, “Your memory is working pretty well. It would be deadly a lot longer than that, but that’s about the half-life of plutonium.”

  There were tears in his eyes.234 He said huskily, “I couldn’t stand the thought that I was working on a project that was poisoning parts of my own country forever, that might make parts of it uninhabitable for thousands of years.”

  I thought over what he’d said; then I asked him if anyone else working with him had had misgivings. He didn’t know. “Were you the only one who quit?” He said yes. He was leaving the best job he’d ever had, and he didn’t have any other to turn to. He lived on savings for a while and did some consulting.

  I thought about Oppenheimer and Conant, both of whom had recommended dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima but who—that same month Dad was resigning—along with Fermi and Rabi had expressed internally their opposition to the development of the “superbomb” in the most extreme terms possible. It was, they had said, potentially “a weapon of genocide”235 which carried “much further than the atomic bomb itself the policy of exterminating civilian populations … whose power of destruction is essentially unlimited … a threat to the future of the human race which is intolerable … a danger to humanity as a whole … necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.” Not one of these men had risked their status in the nuclear establishment by sharing with the American public at the time their expert judgment that the president’s course fatally endangered humanity. Nor had they refrained from supporting it, once Edward Teller and Stan Ulam had come up with a design that would work early in 1951.

  I asked my father what had made him feel so strongly, to act in a way that nobody else had done. He said, “You did.”

  That didn’t make any sense. I said, “What do you mean? We didn’t discuss this at all. I didn’t know anything about it.”

  Dad said, “It was earlier. I remember you came home with a book one day, and you were crying. It was about Hiroshima. You said, ‘Dad, you’ve got to read this. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever read.’ ”

  I said that must have been John Hersey’s book Hiroshima, in 1946. I didn’t remember giving it to him.

  “Yes. Well, I read it, and you were right. That’s when I started to feel bad about working on an atomic bomb project. And then when they said they wanted me to work on a hydrogen bomb, it was too much for me. I thought it was time for me to get out.”

  I asked if he had told his bosses why he was quitting. He said he told some people, not others. The ones he told seemed to understand his feelings. In fact, in less than a year, the head of the firm called to say that they wanted him to come back as chief structural engineer for the whole firm. They were dropping the General Electric contract (they didn’t say why), so he wouldn’t have to have anything to do with the AEC or bomb making. He stayed with them till he retired.

  I said, finally, “Dad, how could I not ever have heard any of this before? How come you never said anything about it?” My father said, “Oh, I couldn’t tell any of this to my family. You weren’t cleared.”

  * * *

  Well, I finally started getting my clearances in 1958, ten years after my father gave his up. They turned out to be useful in the end. In 1969 they allowed me to read the Top Secret Pentagon Papers and to keep them in
my safe at the RAND Corporation, from which I delivered copies of them that year to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and later to nineteen newspapers.

  But in an important sense, for a decade before that, my clearances had been my undoing. And not only mine. Precisely because we were exposed to secret intelligence estimates, in particular from the Air Force, I and my colleagues at the RAND Corporation were preoccupied in the late fifties with the urgency of averting nuclear war by deterring a Soviet surprise attack that would exploit an alleged “missile gap.” That supposed dangerous U.S. inferiority was exactly as unfounded in reality as the earlier Manhattan Project fear of a Nazi crash bomb program had been, or to pick a more recent example, as concern over Saddam Hussein’s supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction in 2003.

  Working conscientiously, obsessively, on a wrong problem, countering an illusory threat, I and my colleagues at RAND had distracted ourselves and helped distract others from dealing with real dangers posed by the mutual superpower pursuit of nuclear weapons—dangers which we were helping make worse—and from real opportunities to make the world more secure. Unintentionally, yet inexcusably, we made our country and the world less safe.

  I have known for a long time that official secrecy and deceptions about our nuclear weapons posture and policies and their possible consequences threaten the survival of the human species. To understand the urgency of radical changes in our nuclear policies that may truly move the world toward the elimination of Doomsday Machines, and ultimately to abolition of nuclear weapons, we need a new understanding of the real history of the nuclear age. I turn now to one more chapter in that hidden history.

  CHAPTER 19

  The Strangelove Paradox