An Account of the Report of the State Department's Disarmament Panel is Heard by Eisenhower

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 believe that until we have looked this tiger in the eye, we shall be in the worst of all possible dangers, which is that we may back into him. J. Robert Oppenheimer

A talent for speaking differently, rather than arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change. Richard Rorty

As he was trying to figure out how to end the Korean War, President Eisenhower would also have had to be giving some thought to what to do about the new H-bomb he’d learned about a few days after he’d been elected. And about the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union that was on now. It was on now: no doubt about that.

Shortly after Eisenhower’s inauguration, he and the man he had chosen to be his atomic energy adviser, Lewis Strauss, attended a talk given in New York by J. Robert Oppenheimer to a group called the Council on Foreign Relations. CFR was an important “think-tank” that had been founded in 1921, after World War I.

Lewis Strauss (he pronounced his last name “Straws”) had been on the Atomic Energy Commission from 1946 to April 15, 1950. He hadn’t been happy as a member of the AEC, often being the single vote on the losing side, including on the question of whether to go ahead with development of the Super bomb after Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb in 1949.

Before and after his resignation from the AEC in 1950, Strauss had become wealthy doing investment banking. He had made substantial financial contributions to General Eisenhower’s campaign for President. In January 1953, Eisenhower had appointed Strauss as his “atomic energy adviser.”

The talk Oppenheimer gave to the Council on Foreign Relations that Eisenhower and Strauss heard in February 1953 was based on the report that had been produced by a Disarmament Panel that had been appointed by President Truman’s Secretary of State Dean Acheson. The members of the Panel were Vannevar Bush, Chairman of the National Defense Research Committee during World War II; John Dickey, President of Dartmouth College; Joseph E. Johnson, head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; soon-to-be chief of the Central Intelligence Agency, Allen Dulles; and J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer had been elected chair of the Panel by its members.

The Panel had been created in April 1952, during the last year of President Truman’s administration, to see if anything could be done to rescue the State Department’s Acheson-Lilienthal plan for the international control of atomic energy that had been developed in 1946. In June 1946, the plan had been submitted to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. It had been altered in important ways by Bernard Baruch and was submitted as the Baruch Plan.

The Atomic Energy Commission of the United Nations had approved the Baruch Plan and sent it on to the UN Security Council for final approval. The Soviets, who were one of the five permanent members of the Security Council who would have to approve it before it could go forward, kept saying they wanted more time to think about it. By 1948, less than a year before the Soviets successfully tested their first atomic bomb, it was clear to everyone that they had rejected the Baruch plan.

In January 1952, Atomic Energy Commission in the United Nations had been replaced by a UN Disarmament Commission. The problem now, since the Soviet test, was “disarmament,” not “the international control of atomic energy.” The plan by Truman’s State Department was to submit the report from its Disarmament Panel to the new Disarmament Commission, with what hopes, I don’t know. They just didn’t want to give up yet on finding a way to accomplish international control of atomic energy and bring an end to the nuclear arms race.

By 1952, when the State Department’s Disarmament Panel started its work, it was becoming more and more likely that the United States would soon be testing a Super bomb. The technical problem preventing development of such a bomb seemed to have been solved by a Polish-American scientist at our Los Alamos weapons development laboratory whose name was Stanislaw Ulam. A “device” was being built there under the supervision of the physicist Richard Garwin.

Vannevar Bush, a member of the Disarmament Panel, had suggested proposing to the Soviets a ban on the testing of Super bombs. The Soviets always refused to allow inspections, of anything, but because the yields of these bombs would be so massive, inspections wouldn’t be needed. Any violations of a test ban on the Super would be impossible to hide.

For whatever reason, President Truman’s administration had not approached the Soviets about a test ban, and on November 1, 1952, we had gone ahead with the Mike test in Operation Ivy. The test was a great success. “Mike” yielded the equivalent of almost 700 Hiroshimas. It obliterated the island in Enewetak Atoll it had been set up on.

That was now that. The Soviets weren’t going to agree to a test ban now, were they? Not before they also also got a Super. Which they now knew to be possible and would certainly be working on, if they hadn’t been before.

Nobody had thought the Soviets would just give up after the Mike test, had they?

After the Mike test, the Disarmament Panel had to revise its report no doubt. The final report was submitted to Secretary of State Acheson in January 1953, as President Truman and Acheson were about to leave office. Acheson had passed the report on to the Secretary of State that had been chosen by Eisenhower to replace Dean Acheson, a man named John Foster Dulles. It was also passed on to Eisenhower’s National Security Council, of which John Foster Dulles was a member.

The report was entitled “Armaments and American Policy.”

The Baruch proposal was dead. That finally had to be faced. Would the unrevised Acheson-Lilienthal report have had better chance? We’ll never know.

The Disarmament Panel had not seen any prospect of progress to be made at this point in “the field of arms regulation.” They recommended giving up on working with the Disarmament Commission that had replaced the Atomic Energy Commission at the UN.

The big change in policy the report recommended was a reduction in the total secrecy about everything having to do with atomic energy. Or, to put it another way, it recommended greater candor with the American people in how things stood in the nuclear arms race.

Total secrecy about everything to do with atomic energy had been the rule since the Atomic Energy Act passed by Congress in 1946 had been in effect. The Panel’s report proposed that the United States Government now “adopt a policy of candor toward the American people—and at least equally toward its own elected representatives and responsible officials—in presenting the meaning of the arms race.”

That’s interesting, isn’t it? The report saw “its own elected representatives and responsible officials”—meaning members of Congress and in the Executive branch—as needing this education as much as the rest of us. Were our policy makers as much in the dark as we were?

The report recommended being candid about thermonuclear weapons (“thermonuclear” was the word the report used for the Super bombs), in particular about “the size and shape of the growing destructive power.” Also “the fact that the atomic bomb works both ways.” That is, we should get over thinking—if we hadn’t already—that the bomb gave us some advantage over the Soviets.

The report recommended telling the public that “A thousand Soviet bombs might be only a few years away, and five thousand only a few years further,” with “five figures” to be expected “in our time.” (The Panel would turn out to be right about all of that.)

No matter who had more, the Panel’s report said, we would need to know that both sides would soon have enough to inflict terrible damage on the other side.

The result, said the report, would be a “strange stability.” “Strange,” it said, because instead of there being a relationship that was actually stable, statesmen would have to be deciding not to use the weapons “not once but every time.”

“Candor” wouldn’t mean revealing all nuclear secrets, of course—certainly not any technical ones about bomb-making. But it would mean revealing what might make the American public less complacent than it seemed to be at the moment about the situation created by the existence of nuclear weapons and the nuclear arms race that was on now.

A concern might be, the report said, that candor about how things actually stood might panic the American people. It might make us want to go ahead right now and drop thermonuclear bombs on the Soviets before they developed thermonuclear bombs of their own. (Our Pentagon had in fact made plans made for a “pre-emptive strike” that would do this, even before the Soviets had exploded their first atomic bomb. So they were ready. So far, they were just plans and I don’t think they dealt much with what to do in the aftermath.)

Candor about these and other matters would be particularly important for responsible people, the report said. By “responsible people,” they said, they meant those people who, if they know they don’t know certain things, are likely to defer to others who do know those things and don’t just think they do. These would be people who would, then, also understand the limits of their own knowledge.

That’s been one common definition of “wisdom” over the centuries, hasn’t it? Going all the way back to Socrates. Knowing how much you don’t know.

The report didn’t purport to have it all figured out. It said that one benefit of candor would be that it would make it possible to get more minds, rather than a few, working on the questions of policy presented by the situation we were in now. The very difficult questions.

It would be important, the report said, that this candor and education come not just from scientists, as it had so far, but from people like the President. I guess the Panel thought the American people had found it too easy to dismiss what the scientists had been saying, really, for eight years now. Since 1945.

The Panel’s report also recommended researching how the American continent might be defended against Soviet air attack. The Soviets did have now atomic bombs at least as powerful as the one that destroyed Nagasaki.

If effective defenses against attacks with these weapons might be devised, people might be less inclined to call for a pre-emptive strike.

Wait. Wouldn’t candor require highlighting what the Panel of Scientists on the Interim Committee had set out in 1945 among its “general considerations”—namely that there was no defense against nuclear weapons, and none was to be expected?

Even if that was the kind of thing that might panic the American public and lead to a demand for a pre-emptive attack?

In any case, President Eisenhower seemed to be favorably impressed by Oppenheimer’s talk to the Council on Foreign Relations that urged the new policy of candor. Lewis Strauss maybe not so much. Strauss didn’t like Oppenheimer, everybody knew that. He might have thought Oppenheimer looked down on him. Oppenheimer was known to be short sometimes with people who thought they knew more than they did.

The State Department Disarmament Panel’s’ report, “Armaments and American Policy,” had been delivered to the President’s new National Security Council soon after Eisenhower’s inauguration. Soon after Ike heard Oppenheimer’s talk to the Council on Foreign Relations that summarized the report, he asked his National Security Council for its recommendation about the recommendations in the report, especially the part about the need to become more candid with the American people about how things stood now when it came to nuclear weapons.

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