Eisenhower Is Introduced To The Office

The release of atomic energy has changed everything save our mode of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. Albert Einstein

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

On November 1, 1952, we succeeded in detonating an H-bomb device that yielded almost 700 times the yield of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Dwight Eisenhower was elected president a few days after the test. A few days after his election, he was told about the test while at the Augusta National Golf Club to play some golf.

What do you suppose Ike had thought when he was told at the Augusta National Golf Club in November 1952 that we had exploded a device that had yielded almost 700 times the yield of the Hiroshima bomb? Did he think it had improved our position in the world? Did he think it made us more secure in our country? Less secure?

Eisenhower was inaugurated President in January 1953. Before his election, he wouldn’t have known much more than the rest of us about matters nuclear. But by the time of his inauguration, he would probably have been told, for example, that we now had more than 800 atomic bombs in our stockpile. When Truman had been inaugurated President, seven and a half years before, we’d had no atomic bombs. Nobody’d had any. The first one hadn’t even been tested.

We’d tested the first one in July 1945. The Soviets had tested their first one in August 1949 and so, by January 1953, when Eisenhower was inaugurated, the Soviets also had whatever atomic bombs they now had. We were uncertain about the number but not that they had some. And that their bombs would be at least as powerful as the bomb we dropped on Nagasaki. Their first one had been a close copy of the Nagasaki bomb.

How long would it be before they also had a Super bomb? And then what?

Ike would certainly have to give some thought to what to do about the nuclear arms race. The thing he would be focusing on first of all, though, was probably how to bring that grim war on the Korean Peninsula to an end. Nine days after he was elected, Ike had actually gone to Korea to see if he could see how to end it. He was, after all, the general who had been in charge of the allied forces in Europe at the end of World War II.

It hadn’t helped.

How had the Korean war gone so far? In 1950, when the Korean war began, the invading North Koreans had nearly driven the South Koreans and the forces we had there with them off the Korean peninsula. President Truman had asked the Security Council of the new United Nations to conduct a “police action” to resist the North Korean aggression. The Soviet Union could have vetoed this but they were boycotting the Security Council at the time.

General Douglas MacArthur, not surprisingly, was chosen to lead the forces from the UN member states that provided them. Most were US forces. The tide had been turned, we all thought, by a daring amphibious invasion on the west coast of the Korean peninsula behind North Korean lines, led by MacArthur.

General MacArthur had then ordered the UN forces to go all the way up through North Korea to the border between North Korea and China at the Yalu River. President Truman had told him not to let our troops approach the border but he’d done it anyway.

China felt threatened by the approach of MacArthur’s forces and before they got to the border, the Chinese had sent large numbers of their own forces across the border into North Korea. Our forces had been driven back below the 38th parallel, halfway down the Korean peninsula, at the original dividing line between the two Koreas. Then we—the South Koreans, the United States and the other countries who had joined us in the Korean conflict under the aegis of the United Nations—managed to push the North Koreans and the Chinese back up to the 38th parallel.

Fighting and killing was ongoing but it was now pretty much a stalemate. “Stalemate” is a term from chess. It’s when nobody can make a move that means anything.

We hadn’t used any of our stockpile of atomic bombs in the war. Why not? We had hundreds of them now and the North Koreans and Chinese didn’t have any.

The Soviets had some. We didn’t know how may, but certainly some. But the Soviets had withdrawn their forces from North Korea before the North Koreans invaded so they weren’t officially part of the war. They were obviously, however, on North Korea’s side and had been supplying them with weapons and advice. But the Soviets hadn’t given the North Koreans any atomic bombs.

Even without our having used atomic bombs, by the time the Chinese came into the war, we’d flattened North Korea almost completely using conventional bombing, including firebombing, which now seemed to have become conventional. Our bombing had stopped being as easy when the Soviets began to supply North Korea with some new fighter jets they had developed called MIG-15s and maybe some pilots. We countered with fighter jets we’d developed called F-86 Sabres. Their dogfights were now part of the stalemate.

General MacArthur had, in fact, wanted to be given permission to use atomic weapons in the war but President Truman hadn’t given it. He had retained our atomic bombs in the custody of the Atomic Energy Commission, that is, in civilian hands. At one point, when the war was going particularly badly for us, parts of several bombs had been transferred to the custody of the military at our base in Guam, just not the essential fissile fuel. And custody of the parts had been given to the newly established Strategic Air Command, not to General MacArthur.

Gordon Dean, the chair of the AEC at the time, said he wasn’t sure MacArthur understood enough about nuclear weapons.

Why hadn’t we used our atomic bombs on China after its forces came pouring into North Korea? Well, there was this: in 1950, after the Chinese Communists won their civil war, China and the Soviet Union had signed a mutual defense pact. Using our atomic bombs on China, or even invading China with our conventional forces, which MacArthur had thought about doing, could well have meant war with the Soviet Union.

MacArthur had also considered bombing Soviet bases in Manchuria, which bordered North Korea. That certainly would have meant war with the Soviet Union.

Years after the war, General MacArthur told in a book how he would have used atomic weapons. He wouldn’t have used atomic bombs, he said. He would, he said, have laid down a barrier of radioactive material between China and North Korea to keep the Chinese from supplying North Korea with troops and material. That would have done the trick for sure, he said. I don’t know.

In April 1951, President Truman had relieved General MacArthur of command. Back home, MacArthur was received as a hero. Truman caught a whole lot of grief for having relieved him, as he knew he would.

President-elect Eisenhower hadn’t been able to see how to end the war in his visit to Korea in the fall of 1952. But in March 1953, a little more than a month after Eisenhower was inaugurated as President, Joseph Stalin died. That was a big deal. Stalin had held absolute power in the Soviet Union for more than thirty years. The Soviets now had to figure out who their new leader would be. They did this somehow without elections.

Add to the death of Stalin the fact that the Chinese had lost a whole lot of soldiers in North Korea. The North Korean leader, Kim Il-Sung, and the South Korean leader, Syngman Rhee, might still be saying they wanted to keep fighting the war so as to “unify” the two countries that had been divided into communist North and non-communist South Korea after World War II. But their major backers might have lost some enthusiasm.

Finally, on July 27, 1953, six months into Eisenhower’s first year in office, the parties signed an armistice. At this point, the parties were not just North and South Korea, as you know. They were those two countries plus China and, representing forces of the United Nations, the United States. An armistice is not a surrender. It is just an agreement to stop fighting. The parties did not agree to stop seeing each other as enemies.

The final result of this war was certainly different from what it had been in World War II.

What do you suppose our leaders had learned from World War II or this one?

Wars don’t seem to lead to much learning about what causes wars, do they? Maybe especially if you win them.

We’d learned this much from the Korean War: atomic bombs hadn’t ended all war, as some people working on them in the early days had allowed themselves to hope they would. But they also hadn’t been used in “the next war,” this one, the Korean war, as some had feared they would be if we didn’t find a way to bring them under international control.

What might we learn from that?

That they aren’t usable for war any more?

Next: The Report of the State Department’s Board of Consultants is Heard by Eisenhower