Are They Useless? IX. If We Had Them, Why Didn't We Use Them?
When Donald Trump was briefed at the Pentagon on our nuclear capability after his election as President in 2016, he is said to have asked about our nuclear weapons, “If we have them, why can’t we use them?”
Let’s ask here a slightly different question: if we had them after 1945, why didn’t we use them?
In the 70+ years since August 1945 when we used atomic bombs to destroy the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, our military and political leaders must have considered using nuclear weapons again. If so, why didn’t we?
Is our never having used them more evidence that they are useless?
Very soon after World War II, our military started making plans to defend Western Europe against an invasion by the Soviet Union. These were plans to defend Western Europe after the attack by the Soviets that some believed to be inevitable.
At first, the plans didn’t involve the use of nuclear weapons. We just didn’t have that many. In the single digits for the first couple of years. Also, as wonderful as they were, using nuclear weapons in Europe to defend Europe might not have made sense to some Europeans.
When President Truman learned in April 1947 that after our weapons effects testing in Operation Crossroads we had only 7 nuclear bombs left, he was appalled. Not to worry. That same month, we started coming out with our first mass-produced bomb, an improved version of the Nagasaki bomb called the Mark III. By the end of 1947, we had, according to the National Resources Defense Council, 32 nuclear bombs and by the end of 1948 three times that number.
The Soviet Union still didn’t have any.
We were also making plans of a different kind. These were not plans to defend Europe but plans to attack the Soviet Union to keep them from developing an atomic bomb of their own. A “preventive” attack.
Attacking a country that hadn’t attacked us would be an act of aggression. This was, unfortunately, now recognized as a war crime. Still, if we wanted to retain our monopoly on atomic weapons, and we did, a preventive attack is what we’d have to do.
Manhattan Project scientists had insisted that the Soviets were sure to develop an atomic bomb of their own, sooner or later. Sooner than a lot of people thought, they said. If we didn’t do something about it. Even before the first atomic bomb was tested, Manhattan Project scientists had predicted that a dangerous nuclear arms race would follow a test, even more certainly after a use of the weapon, unless we found a way to prevent one.
We hadn’t found a way. As far as I can tell, the people in a position to decide such things hadn’t really tried. True, the American public wasn’t pushing them to. We thought it was fine for us to have a monopoly on the marvelous new atomic bomb and wanted that monopoly to continue. Some serious leadership would have been required to get us to think we should instead be trying hard to find a way to avoid a nuclear arms race.
The “preventive” kind of war plan sometimes spilled over into a slightly different kind of plan, a plan for a “preemptive” attack. Here we’d attack the Soviet Union because we’d decided they were about to attack us.
In 1949, the year the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb, which rendered a “preventive” attack nonsensical, our military drew up a plan for a “pre-emptive” attack called Dropshot. Dropshot made plans to use 300 nuclear bombs--which in 1949 we didn’t have that many of--and 29,000 high-explosive bombs--which we did have--on 200 targets in 100 cities and towns in the Soviet Union. Dropshot, it was thought, would wipe out 85 percent of the Soviet Union's “industrial potential.” Lots of people would be wiped out too, millions probably, but they would be “collateral damage,” just something that happened along with the destruction of their “industrial potential.”
An attack on this scale that used nuclear weapons might go beyond “pre-emption,” it was realized. Dropshot was something that could “kill a nation.” “To Kill a Nation” was the title of the first war plan Curtis LeMay’s Strategic Air Command made when LeMay took command of SAC in 1948. The nation in question here was, of course, the Soviet Union.
In December 1948, killing a “nation” was recognized by the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as one kind of genocide. The General Assembly had adopted the convention by a unanimous vote. I don’t think that affected General LeMay’s plans.
It is hard to know that someone is about to attack you, isn’t it? Until it happens, it still might not. They might be bluffing. The Soviets obviously had some serious criticisms of our economic and political systems and seemed to believe Communism was the way of the future for everybody, which wasn’t the way we saw it, but should we think they were going to attack us with their military forces?
Some of our political leaders, George Kennan, for one, thought they had no interest in attacking us. He thought they wanted most of all to recover from the terrible war that we called World War II and they called the Great Patriotic War that had killed 20,000,000 of their people and destroyed much of their country. Others were certain the Soviets would attack us, sooner or later, because their goal was “world domination.” Those were the leaders who thought a pre-emptive attack on them, or even killing the Soviet Union, might be a good thing to do.
In late August 1949, the Soviets had exploded their first atomic bomb. There went the “preventive war” option. We still might be able to justify a “pre-emptive” attack if we knew they were going to attack us.
Or our NATO allies. Since April of 1949, we’d joined the West European counties and Canada in a treaty that created an organization called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Article 5 of that treaty required all the members of NATO to come to the defense of any member of NATO who had been attacked as if they themselves had been attacked.
Actually, at the time, we might still have had a reason to do a “preventive” attack. In January 1950, President Truman had said we would be getting to work all-out on developing a “Super” hydrogen bomb. He announced it publicly. This wouldn’t be a secret like the Manhattan Project.
If the Soviets hadn’t been working on one of these before, they sure would be now.
It turned out that their great physicist Andrei Sakharov had been working on one since 1948. We didn’t know this. He hadn’t made much progress yet.
We hadn’t either and didn’t for a while. This was a toughie. But in August 1952 we finally got a hydrogen-bomb-type device to work. They got their first full-fledged bomb to work in November 1955. Theirs was not a “device” like ours but an actual bomb. They beat us to an actual hydrogen bomb.
“Prevention” was now off the table here too.
Why do you suppose we didn’t conduct these preventive, pre-emptive attacks when we almost certainly could have executed them without being attacked back in a serious way? It couldn’t have been “deterrence” that stopped us. Before 1949, and for several years after 1949, we probably could have “killed” the Soviet Union with our nuclear and conventional weapons without them being able do much of anything back.
Yes, in attacking them without being attacked ourselves, we would have been guilty of what was now recognized under international law as a war crime, specifically a Crime against the Peace, the crime of aggression.
Yes, in the words of the General Advisory Committee to the Atomic Energy Commission in their recommendation in 1949 that we not be the ones to initiate development of the Super, such an attack would have “put the United States in a bad moral position relative to the peoples of the world.”
Yes, as the GAC had also said, the “postwar situation resulting from such [an attack] would leave unresolvable enmities for generations.”
Yes, as they said, a “desirable peace cannot come from such an inhuman application of force.”
And yes, as they said, it was likely that “[t]he postwar problems would dwarf the problems which confront us at present.”
Any or all of these considerations could have been what kept us from executing a “preventive” attack, I suppose. I don’t know that anyone ever asked President Truman or Eisenhower--the presidents who could have attacked the Soviet Union with impunity--why they didn’t just do it when it seemed pretty clear that it would have accomplished the goal.
But they didn’t.
Would you have?
Next: Well, there's still pre-emption