Eisenhower Delivers his Chance for Peace/Cross of Iron Speech, I
The release of atomic energy has changed everything save our mode of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. Albert Einstein, 1946
A nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union had been predicted, and feared, by scientists like Niels Bohr even before the test of our first atomic bomb on July 16, 1945. When we heard, in August 1949, that the Soviets had successfully tested their first atomic bomb, we knew the race was well and truly on. If we hadn’t known it before.
We also learned, a lot of us, that they weren’t nearly as far behind us as we might have thought. Or hoped. Some of us might even have been thinking that we’d have a monopoly on the atomic bomb.
Couldn’t think that any more. Unless you were in a state of denial.
In early 1950, soon after the Soviets exploded their first bomb, President Truman had decided we needed to try to build a bomb that would be many hundreds of times more powerful than the bombs that had destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a “Super” bomb.
In November 1952, just a few days before President Eisenhower was elected, we had successfully tested such a bomb in the Ivy Mike test. President Eisenhower was told about the test a few days after he was elected. Before that, he wouldn’t have known any more about it than the rest of us. The rest of us didn’t know much of anything. Everything about atomic energy had been shrouded in secrecy since the passage of the Atomic Energy Act in 1946.
And while the first bomb was being developed, of course.
The Hiroshima bomb had yielded the equivalent of 12-thousand tons or so of TNT.
Ivy Mike had yielded the equivalent of almost 700 Hiroshimas.
When Ike learned about the success of the Ivy Mike test, I wonder what he thought. Would he have felt gleeful at what we had been able to accomplish and what the new bomb would now enable him to do?
Would he not have known what to think?
He would have had to realize that the Soviets would now be trying to build a Super if they hadn’t been trying already. (Which they had been. We didn’t know this yet for sure. But they had good physicists too.)
Shortly after his inauguration, perhaps in hopes of getting some guidance about what to think about the development of the Super bomb and the nuclear arms race, President Eisenhower attended a talk given by J. Robert Oppenheimer to the Council on Foreign Relations. The talk was an account of the report that had been produced in the last several months of the Truman administration by a State Department Panel of Consultants on Disarmament. The members of the panel had elected J. Robert Oppenheimer as their chair.
A major recommendation in the report was that a policy of “candor” about nuclear matters and the meaning of the nuclear arms race be adopted with the American public. This would be a big change in policy. President Eisenhower, who had been learning a lot about nuclear weapons that he hadn’t known before he was elected, seemed to find this idea worth considering.
He asked his National Security Council to consider the Panel’s report and make its own recommendation.
President Eisenhower had already chosen a man named Lewis Strauss (pronounced “Straws”) to be his “atomic energy advisor.” Strauss was a wealthy businessman who had made financial contributions to Eisenhower’s campaign and during Truman’s administration had served for a time on the Atomic Energy Commission. Strauss attended the talk with Eisenhower. He didn’t much like the idea of candor. He didn’t much like Oppenheimer.
While President Eisenhower was waiting for his NSC’s recommendation on candor, he would have other issues to deal with. A big one was the Korean War and an even bigger one was how we should be responding to what the Soviet Union seemed to be up to.
During World War II, the Soviets, on their way to the Nazi capital of Berlin, had had to fight their way through the countries in Eastern Europe that had been taken over by the Nazis and had sometimes joined forces with the Nazis in the invasion of Russia, countries like Poland, Romania, Hungary, Austria. When the Soviets got to Berlin, they had met up with the troops of the United States, Great Britain, and France—the other allies—coming from the west after the successful D-day invasion.
After the war, the Soviets began to convert the Eastern European countries they’d come through into what were sometimes called “client” states. That meant that, while they were nominally independent countries, they really took orders from Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Union. We’d taken to saying those countries now lay behind “the Iron Curtain.”
In other countries that surrounded the Soviet Union, like Greece and Indochina, and Korea, as you know, the Soviets were supporting “insurgencies” by groups that often identified themselves as Communist, as well as being nationals in those different countries. The insurgents the Soviets were supporting sometimes said they were in civil wars, or wars against “colonizers” and “imperialists.”
Then, on March 5, 1953, less than three months after Eisenhower was inaugurated, Joseph Stalin died. Stalin had been the dictator in the Soviet Union for more than thirty years. We all thought he had been behind what the Soviet Union and all those insurgents were up to. Maybe what the Soviet Union was up to could now change.
Six weeks after Stalin died, on April 16, 1953, at a meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors at the Statler hotel in Washington, D.C., President Eisenhower gave his “first formal address to the American people.” The speech, also broadcast on radio and the new thing called television, came to be called his “Chance for Peace” speech and also his “Cross of Iron” speech. You’ll see how it could have come to be called both.
Next: Eisenhower Delivers His Chance for Peace/Cross of Iron Speech, II