They Have One Now. Do We? Don't We?
Since February 2021, I have been posting weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history and technology, and “secrets”—in You Might Want to Know on Substack. To see other entries, go to the You Might Want to Know Archive.
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
At the end of August 1949, the Soviets successfully tested their first atomic bomb. We had successfully tested ours in southern New Mexico about four years before.
In about four years, then, the Soviets had figured out how do what you had to do to produce a bomb: get hold of enough uranium, enrich it, build a working nuclear reactor, extract plutonium from irradiated reactor fuel elements, and very quickly compress the enriched uranium or plutonium to a state of supercriticality using conventional explosives. The state of supercriticality is what would lead, in a millionth of a second, to the nuclear explosion that would be 10,000,000 times greater than the detonation of an equivalent conventional explosive.
That’s what it took and what it takes to build a nuclear bomb. As our Manhattan Project scientists had been insisting, privately and publicly, doing it would be within reach of any industrialized society that wanted to take the trouble.
Some strategists in our Pentagon had been recommending that we conduct a preemptive attack on the Soviet Union to keep them from getting the atomic bomb. Might they be thinking “I told you so”? That would be stupid, but possibly.
I’m not sure that those who were recommending a preemptive attack had thought it through. Had thought enough about the aftermath. Had tried to imagine it.
But a preemptive attack wasn’t yet entirely out of the question. We had over two hundred atomic bombs now to their—what?—one or two? A preemptive attack would be a little bit riskier now. Just a little bit for now. Getting more risky by the day, however.
What to do?
Even before the Manhattan Project began, physicists had realized that a bomb much bigger than the bombs that had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the one the Soviets had just tested was possible. In theory. The Atomic Energy Commission now asked its General Advisory Committee if we should dedicate ourselves to actually building such a “super” bomb.
The GAC had ended by recommending unanimously against doing this.
One of the reasons was
If super bombs will work at all, there is no inherent limit in the destructive power that may be attained with them. Therefore, a super bomb might become a weapon of genocide.
So this would not only be a bomb that wouldn’t distinguish between military targets and civilians, just as the atomic bombs we already had didn’t. It would be a bomb that might exterminate a whole people. Maybe all people? An instrument not just of genocide but omnicide?
The GAC went with “genocide.”
There was also a practical political consideration here, the GAC said. Having that capability—the capability to destroy a whole people and maybe the human world—would be, the GAC’s report said, “adverse to our interest” in terms of “world opinion.” Here’s how they saw this.
The existence of such a weapon in our armory would have far-reaching effects on world opinion: reasonable people the world over would realize that the existence of a weapon of this type whose power of destruction is essentially unlimited represents a threat to the future of the human race which is intolerable. Thus we believe that the psychological effect of the weapon in our hands would be adverse to our interest.
How could having such a powerful weapon be “adverse to our interest”? Well, just imagine if some other country, not us, had that capability and we didn’t. What kind of relations would we be able to have with that country? Fruitful ones?
The effort to build such a bomb might also, the GAC said, be a waste of time and money.
It is by no means certain that the weapon can be developed at all [Edward Teller had been trying to, unsuccessfully, for a decade] and by no means certain that the Russians will produce one within a decade. To the argument that the Russians may succeed in developing this weapon, we would reply that our undertaking it will not prove a deterrent to them. Should they use the weapon against us, reprisals by our large stock of atomic bombs would be comparably effective to the use of a super.
So our having such a bomb would not deter them from getting their own, any more than our having an atomic bomb had deterred them from getting their own. In fact, if we successfully tested a Super, might that encourage them in their efforts to get one because we had shown it to be possible? Isn’t that exactly what had happened when we successfully tested and then used atomic bombs?
And let’s say they got one and thought about using it against us. Would our stock of regular atomic bombs deter them? The GAC said it should. We did have a pretty large stock of atomic bombs by now. Like 250? To their maybe 5? That should provide pretty good “deterrence,” shouldn’t it?
If their leaders were capable of being deterred?
Were they? Deterrence doesn’t always work the way you want it to, does it.
Parents come to know this.
Next: They Have One Now: Do We? Don’t We? Part Two (posted tomorrow)