The Essay: Candor about the Art of Defense I

Since February 2021, I have been posting weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets,” all from a somewhat unusual angle—in You Might Want to Know on Substack. To see other entries, go to the You Might Want to Know Archive.

Candor: openness of mind, impartiality, frankness, freedom from reserve or disguise, from Latin candor, brightness, radiance, from candere to shine. “Candle” has the same root. www.etymonline.com, accessed September 9, 2024

I do not believe—though of course we cannot today be certain—that we can take measures for the defense of our people, our lives, our institutions, our cities, which will in any real sense be a permanent solution to the problem of the atom. But that is no reason for not doing a little better than we are now.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1953

The process of nuclear inversion is complete when one realizes that the correct attitude is one of suicidal defeatism. Let no one think that it is thinkable. Dispel any interest in surviving, in lasting. Have no part of it. Be ready to turn in your hand. For myself and my loved ones, I want the heat, which comes at the speed of light. I don’t want to have to hang about for the blast, which idles along at the speed of sound. There is only one defense against nuclear attack, and that is a cyanide pill.

The clear truth is that after a nuclear war the role of the civil and military establishment would change or invert. The authorities would no longer be protecting the population from the enemy: they would be protecting themselves from the population. One of the effects of nuclear weapons—these strange instruments—would be instant fascism.

…Nuclear civil defense is a nonsubject, a mischievous fabrication. It bolsters fightability. It bolsters thinkability.
Martin Amis, Einstein’s Monsters, 1987

On August 17, 1945, a week or so after we had dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, J. Robert Oppenheimer delivered a letter to Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War and Chair of the secret Interim Committee. The letter was from the Scientific Panel Oppenheimer had chaired for the secret Interim Committee. It set out what they called some “general considerations” about weapons like those we had just used on Japan.

The letter made some striking claims.

The first general consideration was that weapons “quantitatively and qualitatively far more effective” than the ones we had used in Japan would soon become available.

In 1953, this year, some months after our successful test of a hydrogen bomb in Ivy Mike, it was obvious that the panel had been right about that. Mike had yielded 666 times more than the Hiroshima bomb had.

The next claim the Panel made was that “it is our firm opinion that no military countermeasures will be found which will be adequately effective in preventing the delivery of atomic weapons.”

Could that be true? No military countermeasures will be found?

It was true that the Soviets had no military countermeasures that would be “adequately effective” against our bombers. At the moment. They had developed some new jet fighters by now, those MIG 15s, and had given some to the North Koreans to help them defend against the B-29s we were bombing North Korea with. The MIG 15s had interfered with but hadn’t stopped our bombing of North Korea. We had bombed North Korea a lot, with conventional bombs. By now, there really wasn’t anything much left there to bomb.

President Truman hadn’t allowed the use of our atomic bombs in Korea. After his election, President Eisenhower hadn’t either though he’d dropped hints that he just might.

Right now, we probably didn’t need military countermeasures against Soviet bombers because they didn’t have any bombers that could reach us except on one-way missions. But once they got such bombers? Which you had to think they would? Would our jet fighters be able to shoot down enough of their attacking bombers? Our experience in Korea made that seem unlikely.

The Panel ‘s next general consideration was that even if we had “hegemony” in atomic weapons (“Hegemony” is from a Greek word that means “dominance or leadership,” which we certainly had at the time the Panel was writing, since we were the only ones who had any nuclear weapons), the Panel didn’t see how we’d be able to hang on to that hegemony. Eventually, they said, we would not be able to protect ourselves from “the most terrible destruction.”

Finally, the Panel said that

We believe that the safety of this nation – as opposed to its ability to inflict damage on an enemy power – cannot lie wholly or even primarily in its scientific or technical prowess. It can be based only on making future wars impossible.

The letter from the Panel to the top secret Interim Committee said that the Panel would “be most happy to have you bring these views to the attention of other members of the Government, or of the American people.” At the time, that isn’t what had happened. Here in 1953, it still hadn’t happened. I guess that’s part of what Operation Candor was supposed to do.

Back then, when we were the only ones to have the atomic bomb, members of Congress seem to have had a hard time accepting the idea that no “adequately effective military countermeasures” could be devised against such weapons. In a secret hearing in the Senate in 1946 or maybe it was 1947, a Senator had asked Oppenheimer if a small group might bring an atomic bomb into New York Harbor, detonate it, and destroy the city. Oppenheimer had replied that it would be easy to do this. Asked by the startled Senator what would be needed to protect against this, Oppenheimer had said “a screwdriver,” meaning, of course, that we’d have to open every crate that came into the harbor.

I don’t know how the Senators reacted to what Oppenheimer said. I doubt anyone laughed. Maybe some smiled indulgently. Some might have thought he was being condescending and disrespectful.

Now, though, in 1953, or soon, we would have a new question: whether an adequately effective means of protecting against incoming bombers from the Soviet Union could be devised.

In his essay “Atomic Weapons and American Policy” published in the journal Foreign Affairs this July 1953, Oppenheimer reminded us that General Hoyt Vandenberg, who had been the Chief of Staff of the Air Force until just last month, had testified at the end of World War II that “with luck, [we might] intercept 20 or 30 percent of an enemy attack.”

When we are talking about nuclear weapons, we can’t have any get through, can we. Just one getting through with a Hiroshima sized bomb would be like six- or seven-hundred bombers getting through with a load of conventional bombs.

We had much bigger bombs than the Hiroshima bomb now. They did too, or would soon. There could be no doubt about that.

Here’s what Oppenheimer wrote about this question in his 1953 essay “Atomic Weapons and American Policy.”

I do not believe-though of course we cannot today be certain-that we can take measures for the defense of our people, our lives, our institutions, our cities, which will in any real sense be a permanent solution to the problem of the atom.

Still, then, he believes, no “permanent solution.” He adds, however,

But that is no reason for not doing a little better than we are now.

I suppose not. But does this mean Oppenheimer has become more optimistic about the prospects for an “adequately effective” defense against “the atom”? It doesn’t sound like it to me.

Of course we can’t be absolutely certain that adequately effective measures won’t be developed someday. We can never be absolutely certain about something like that one way or the other, can we? It certainly wasn’t Oppenheimer’s style to claim certainty about such matters. Others, like the physicist Edward Teller and Lewis Strauss, the businessman Eisenhower had chosen as chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, might have a different style.

Of course anyone or any company that might profit from working on developing the adequately effective defensive measures would probably be glad to work on the problem if they were being paid enough. You wouldn’t expect them to say it couldn’t be done.

The prospects for finding an adequately effective defense were especially bad for the countries of Europe, Oppenheimer said in the essay. Given the secrecy about atomic energy that had governed everything about it until now, the Europeans might not have realized how bad things stood for them.

Yet the Europeans are rather in ignorance what these weapons are, how many there may be, how they will be used and what they will do. It thus needs to be remarked, as we shall need to remark again, that for Europe the atomic weapon is both a much needed hope of effective defense and a terrible immediate peril, greater even than for this country.

Oppenheimer mentions “intractable problems of interception” that were especially intractable for the countries of Europe because of how small those countries are. Compared to us and the Soviet Union.

How “intractable” were they?

Next: The Essay: Candor about "the Art of Defense" II (posting tomorrow)

Since February 2021, I have been posting weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets,” all from a somewhat unusual angle—in You Might Want to Know on Substack. To see other entries, go to the You Might Want to Know Archive.