Are They Useless? V (of XV). Would a Smaller Bang Get Us Back in Business?
Even before the first atomic bomb had been tested, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the division of the Manhattan Project that was designing the first bombs, said they could not have a military purpose. They made too big a bang.
First thing we had done after the war was design bombs that made even bigger bangs and thus were even more useless for military purposes than the bombs we had used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Okay. So if the size of the yields of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs and the even bigger bombs we began to build afterwards was what made them useless, why not design weapons with smaller yields? Would that keep them from being useless for military purposes?
Soon after the end of World War II, J. R. Oppenheimer, among others, got behind this project.
In 1949, the Los Alamos National Laboratory took on board a physicist named Ted Taylor who turned out to be a great weapons designer. He designed, among other things, the largest yielding fission bomb we ever tested, the Super Oralloy Bomb (a.k.a. the SOB, tested at the Pacific Proving Ground on November 16, 1952, yield 500 kilotons, but irrelevant already because of the earlier Ivy Mike test). The more important thing he did was help us “miniaturize” our weapons in both size and yield. He designed smallest yielding warhead we ever tested, the W54 (a.k.a. the Davy Crockett, tested at the Nevada Test Site, July 1962). It was only eleven inches or so in diameter and weighed sixty pounds or so. It yielded the equivalent of from ten to one thousand tons of TNT.
In the 50’s and 60’s, Ted Taylor helped us develop our “tactical” nuclear weapons, weapons that we hoped would be small and light enough to be carried around by soldiers in the field, with yields small enough to allow them, we hoped, to be used in battles with other soldiers without inevitably killing lots of people who weren’t part of the military action.
With Ted Taylor’s help we made quick progress developing these “tactical” weapons. Taylor came to Los Alamos in 1949. In 1953, President Eisenhower’s first year in office, his National Security Council said, in a secret policy document called NSC 162/2, that we would now “consider nuclear weapons as available for use as other munitions." On December 8, 1953, President Eisenhower gave a speech at the United Nations that came to be called his Atoms for Peace speech. In it, he said that the “remarkable” development of our atomic weapons had been such that they had
virtually achieved conventional status within our armed services. In the United States, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marine Corps are all capable of putting this weapon to military use.
“Strategic” bombing had been invented in World War II, along with heavy bombers to do it. It consisted of bombing attacks on the war-making resources of the enemy—depots, arms factories, air fields, railroads, that sort of thing.
In November 1944, while World War II was still raging but four months after the successful D-day invasion of Europe, President Roosevelt had directed his Secretary of War Henry Stimson to conduct a Strategic Bombing Survey in Europe to see what the effects of this new kind of bombing had been there. They turned out to be mixed. The bombs, it turned out, rarely fell close to their “strategic” targets. We dropped lots of them so that some would hit their targets. The others hit something else.
President Eisenhower had been the top military commander in Europe and must have seen something of the effects of our “strategic” bombing. As an Army general, he certainly knew what had been the effects of the Army’s “tactical” attacks with tanks and artillery and machine guns and hand grenades and rifles.
After he was elected president, Eisenhower would also have learned about the effects of the “strategic” atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and that those effects had clearly exceeded any “strategic” military purpose. Just a couple of days before he was elected, he also was told for the first time about our successful test in Ivy Mike of a hydrogen device.
But he had never seen, and never would see, an actual nuclear detonation. When he said in his speech that these weapons had achieved “conventional” status and could be used to achieve a military purpose, he was obviously taking someone word for it.
Or he might have been bluffing. He was said to be a good poker player.
Did he really think our “tactical” nuclear weapons could be used in the ways we used conventional tactical weapons? Or even in the more or less effective ways we had used our conventional strategic weapons? That they could have a “military use”?
Coda:
In 1966, after some experience working at the Pentagon and testifying at Congressional hearings, Ted Taylor decided he would have nothing more to do with the development of nuclear weapons. The Korean and Vietnam wars had made it clear to him that nuclear weapons would not make war impossible. Making war impossible was the justification that he and certain other weapons designers had been using, he said, for working on nuclear weapons. See interview of Ted Taylor in Robert Del Tredici, At Work in the Fields of the Bomb (Harper & Row, 1987), pp. 166 ff.
Taylor then began to warn us about the dangers of nuclear weapons proliferating and to educate us about how easy it had become to make one now that fissile fuel was as available as it was. To warn us about these things, he wrote in collaboration with Mason Willrich a book entitled Nuclear Theft: Risks and Safeguards (Ford Foundation, 1974). He went on to advocate for complete nuclear disarmament. A compelling version of Ted Taylor’s story and the story of nuclear weapons appears in a fine book by John McPhee called The Curve of Binding Energy (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2011).
Next: Are They Usable Yet?