Oppenheimer's Essay "Atomic Weapons and American Policy," Published in Foreign Affairs, July 1953, I
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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
The failure of [the Acheson-Lilienthal plan] was the greatest tragedy of the postwar world.
Hans Bethe, Head of the Theoretical Division of the Manhattan Project
It is wrong to say good language is important to good thought merely; for it is the essence of it. C. S. Pierce, The Ethics of Terminology 1902, in C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (Eds.) Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Pierce (vol. 2, pp. 319-322), Harvard UP
In what follows, I have of course no final answers to any of the big questions. But I believe we must not, under any circumstances, cease to be mindful of these questions, even while we know there can be no definite answers. Having ready answers means you don’t understand; understanding here means never letting go of the questions. Unknowing will turn out to be a sign not of weakness, but of wisdom. Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, p. 1195.
Oppenheimer begins his essay on the meaning of the nuclear arms race and the requirements for an Operation Candor conducted by the government for the American people with a brief history about the immediate aftermath of World War II. He mentions proposals that had emerged soon after the war—like some made by former Secretary of War Henry Stimson—that claimed that "Lasting peace and freedom cannot be achieved until the world finds a way toward the necessary government of the whole.”
Oppenheimer mentions also work he had been a crucial part of in March 1946, six months after the first atomic bombs were used. He and other members of a Board of Consultants attached to a committee formed in the State Department had been assigned to come up with a way to bring about international control of atomic energy. This was the effort that produced the Acheson-Lilienthal report we discussed a while back.
None of these early efforts bore fruit. By the time Oppenheimer published “Atomic Weapons and America Policy,” in July 1953, the Cold War on, no doubt about it, and these early efforts were almost entirely forgotten. We need not argue now, writes Oppenheimer in the essay, whether these “friendly, open, cooperative” proposals were “still-born. . . . They have [by July 1953] been very dead a long, long time, to the surprise of only a few.”
He doesn’t place blame for this outcome, except to say, in his characteristic nonconfrontational way, that at that time “Openness, friendliness and cooperation did not seem to be what the Soviet Government most prized on this earth.” He’s being nonconfrontational here, but also, you can tell, rueful.
He then goes on to talk in more direct way about what had followed these early efforts. One of the features of the situation that soon had to be recognized was “the programmatic hostility and the institutionalized secretiveness of Communist countries.”
[W]e had to come to grips, or [begin] to come to grips, with the massive evidences of Soviet hostility and the growing evidences of Soviet power.
The “rule for the atom” that had emerged from our coming to grips with these massive evidences of Soviet hostility and growing Soviet power was, Oppenheimer said, a policy that said,
"Let us keep ahead. Let us be sure that we are ahead of the enemy.”
Soon enough, though—certainly by now, 1953—it had become clear, Oppenheimer said, that
however necessary these considerations and these policies may be, they are no longer nearly sufficient. The reason for that one can see when one looks at the character of the arms race. The reason for that one can see when one compares the time-scale of atomic developments here and abroad with the probable time-scale of deep political changes in the world.
He mentions here “deep political changes in the world:” did he mean just in the Soviet Union? President Eisenhower, in his Chance for Peace and Age of Peril speeches earlier this year, had made it seem that it was only the politics of the Soviet Union that needed to change, but Oppenheimer didn’t put it in that one-sided way.
In any case, it seemed clear now that any “deep political changes in the world” would take a long time, Oppenheimer said.
But if we looked instead at the “time-scale of atomic development here and abroad,” we could see that matters were unfolding at a very rapid pace. The Soviets had tested their first atomic bomb in August 1949, four years ago and less than four years after we had tested ours. Sooner than some of us had expected.
From there, the Soviets had gone on as we had.
As for the U.S.S.R., it has recently been said officially, and thus may be repeated with official sanction, that it has produced three atomic explosions, and is producing fissionable material in substantial quantities. I should like to present the evidence for this; I cannot. We do need one word of warning: this is evidence which could well be evidence of what the Government of the U.S.S.R. wants us to think rather than evidence of what is true.
How many tests had we conducted? Oppenheimer had been on the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission until quite recently, so he would have known that out at our Pacific Proving Ground, the United States had by now conducted eleven nuclear tests, including Ivy Mike, the first test ever of a staged H-bomb device. Since 1951, at our newly established proving ground inside the continental United States, in Nevada, we had also conducted some thirty-three tests.
Oppenheimer said that if he had to guess, he’d say the Soviets were, right now, about “four years behind us.” That might seem comforting, he said, if we didn’t look at how quickly they were catching up and also at what little difference greater numbers of nuclear weapons made after a certain point.
I think that the U.S.S.R. is about four years behind us. ….This sounds comfortably reassuring. It sounds as though the job of keeping ahead were being satisfactorily accomplished. But in order to assay what it means, we have to know something of what it is that they are four years behind, how fast the situation is likely to change, and what it means to be half as big as we are.
We didn’t know how many nuclear weapons the Soviets had in their stockpile now, maybe fifty? Far fewer than the thousand or so that we did by now. But their first bomb had been the size of our Nagasaki bomb. Fifty bombs of the size of the Nagasaki bomb or larger, or even twenty-five bombs of that size, would be enough to make a mess of us, don’t you think? Remember, in Japan it had been just two. So fifty? What would it be like in this country after that?
We were mass producing nuclear weapons now, like more than one a day. The Soviets probably were not making them that fast yet, but there was nothing to say they wouldn’t be before long. If they decided that was what they wanted to do.
Oppenheimer’s point was that if you matched up that pace of change with the fact of how stultified political relations were now and how little could be expected in terms of any “deep political changes” in the world, being ahead by four years didn’t amount to much.
The very least we can say is that, looking ten years ahead, it is likely to be small comfort that the Soviet Union is four years behind us, and small comfort that they are only about half as big as we are. The very least we can conclude is that our twelve-thousandth bomb, useful as it may be in filling the vast munitions pipelines of a great war, will not in any deep strategic sense offset their two-thousandth. The very least we can say is that, as Gordon Dean [the immediate past chair of the Atomic Energy Commission] has emphasized, there will come a time when from the narrowest technical point of view, the art of delivery and the art of defense will have a much higher military relevance than supremacy in the atomic munitions field itself.
Wait. Our twelve-thousandth bomb would not in any deep strategic sense offset their two-thousandth? If that were true, after two thousand bombs had been manufactured by each side, “keeping ahead” would be a silly and wasteful policy, wouldn’t it? Except in filling “the vast munitions pipelines of a great war.”
Might the Soviets agree with us on this? Might they agree that after we both got to two thousand, we should just stop making nuclear bombs? If we agreed on that, might we agree on some other things?
I couldn’t see this happening, no matter how much sense it made. As far as I could tell, we were both completely caught up in a way of thinking that said that we were right and they were wrong and more was better and bigger was better, no matter what sense this might or might not make.
Here’s what Oppenheimer said about where that way of thinking would get us:
Thus the prevailing view is that we are probably faced with a long period of cold war in which conflict, tension and armaments are to be with us. The trouble then is just this: during this period the atomic clock ticks faster and faster. We may anticipate a state of affairs in which two Great Powers will each be in a position to put an end to the civilization and life of the other, though not without risking its own. We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.
That was if we kept building nuclear weapons at the rate we were. But what was it Gordon Dean had said—that the art of delivery and the art of defense might become even more important than number of munitions?
Next: Oppenheimer's Essay - The Art of of Delivery