Presidential Predicaments – VI. JFK: The Tsar Bomba
You Might Want to Know: Questions Addressed in Past Postings to November 28, 2021 and Some Forthcoming Items—Click Here
October 1961. President Kennedy is still in his first year in office. I’m starting my junior year at Amherst College.
On October 30, at Novaya Zemlya, the Soviet Union’s island nuclear test site off their north coast, the Soviet Union explodes the largest yielding nuclear bomb the world had ever seen, or may ever see.
It yielded the equivalent of 50 million tons of TNT. Maybe 57 million tons. It was hard to know for sure. We in the US took to calling it the Tsar Bomba.
We learned later that the Soviets had originally planned to design the bomb to yield 100 million tons.
The largest yielding nuclear device the US had ever exploded (and might ever explode) had been detonated back on March 1, 1954, way out west at our Pacific Proving Ground. I was in junior high school in Tucson. In the Castle Bravo test, the “Shrimp” device (get it?) had yielded fifteen megatons—the equivalent of a thousand Hiroshimas. In one bomb.
The Tsar Bomba yielded three times more than our Shrimp had, more than three times more. Also, this was important, it was an actual bomb that had been dropped from a bomber. On its way down, the bomb had been slowed by a parachute to give the bomber a chance to get far enough away not to be destroyed by the blast. It was a near thing even so.
Our Shrimp was not a bomb but a “device.” It looked like a small oil refinery. It was built on an atoll that isn’t there now. The device clearly wasn’t something that could be delivered by a bomber as the Tsar Bomba had been.
The Soviets detonated the Tsar Bomba a little more than a month after JFK got his first briefing on SIOP-62, the nuclear war plan that President Eisenhower had ordered to be developed by our military that had gone into effect the past July. Admiral Lemnitzer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had briefed JFK on it.
How worried should we be about what the Soviets had done here? The biggest nuclear bomb ever? Yielding over three times the explosive power of the biggest nuclear device we had ever detonated? And an actual bomb? Didn’t we now have to try to build something even bigger?
We could do it. We knew that. We’d guessed a while ago that by adding “stages” to our hydrogen bombs, they could be made to yield as much as you might want. The concept had been tested at our Pacific Proving Ground and had worked. The sky was now the limit.
The Soviets had also figured this out, not surprisingly. Tsar Bomba had been a three-stage, rather than a two-stage, device like Shrimp. Well then. Should we go for four?
On the day that the Tsar Bomba was detonated, the very same day, JFK’s Press Secretary issued a statement. It said, if you can believe it, that we weren’t impressed.
It said this test was “a political rather than a military act” intended to produce “fright and panic in the cold war.” It said the fear it wanted to spread “would be repelled today, as it has been repelled in the past—not only by the steadfastness of free men but by the power of the arms which men will use to defend their freedom.” That was how we’d deal with the fear, it said. But the power of their arms was obviously so much greater than ours, what about that? What good is “the steadfastness of free men” against something like the Tsar Bomba?
The statement went on to say “There is no mystery about producing a 50 megaton bomb.” “The United States government considered this matter carefully several years ago and concluded that such weapons would not provide an essential military capability.” Oh. That’s interesting. That’s like what the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission had concluded about the hydrogen bomb itself before President Truman decided we should go ahead and try to build one—that it would add nothing to the military capability we already had with fission bombs.
“The existing United States nuclear arsenal,” the statement went on, “is superior in quantity and quality to that of any other nation. The United States today has ample military power to destroy any nation which would unleash thermonuclear war.” The briefing JFK got on the SIOP last month must have made that clear to him.
After the briefings JFK had gotten and the intelligence he was getting from our satellite photoreconnaissance, I suppose he could be pretty confident about this, about our ample military power, I mean. For use in a thermonuclear war, should one be unleashed.
In any case, it was clear JFK clearly hadn’t let himself be bluffed by the detonation of the Tsar Bomba.
Something else we knew now might have been in play for JFK. At least our “weapons effects” researchers knew it. They knew that much more damage would be done by, say, 5 ten-megaton bombs than by one 50-megaton bomb, and even more damage by 2500 twenty-kiloton bombs. Both would give you the same total yield as the Tsar Bomba. Twenty kilotons was the yield of one Nagasaki. So with 2500 of those, if you can imagine that, you’d cause much more damage with one Tsar Bomba.
Nuclear bombs did damage also with their ionizing radiation and radioactive fallout. The Soviets were saying that the Tsar Bomba was a “clean” bomb even though we all knew it had produced plenty of radioactive fallout that had blown all over the place up there and into other European countries. It wasn’t a “clean” bomb, no nuclear bomb is. But it was a whole lot cleaner than if it had been designed to yield 100 megatons as the Soviets had first planned. The greater yield would have been generated by the greater amount of fission. The extra fission is what would have made it dirtier, much much dirtier.
We knew how to make our thermonuclear bombs dirtier. Most of the bombs now being carried by our bombers were dirty bombs. Exploding them on the ground rather than in the air would make them dirtier still.
A dirty Tsar Bomba wouldn’t have helped the Soviet Union’s foreign relations at all. This “clean” one didn’t help either. People everywhere had begun to get concerned about the harm now known to be caused—cancer, for example--by the radioactive fallout that was produced by testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere.
At the end of the press statement from the White House it said, “We are ready, now as ever, to sign the test-ban treaty proposed at Geneva. We are ready, now as ever, to negotiate a treaty for general and complete disarmament. In the meantime, we will continue to take whatever measures are necessary to preserve the security of our country and of others who count on us.”
The “treaty” referred to here was a treaty to stop all nuclear testing, or if that couldn’t be agreed to, at least to move all testing underground. Negotiations between us, the UK and the Soviet Union to do this had begun in October 1958, during Eisenhower’s administration. The negotiations had been going very well but then, in May 1960, one of the U-2 photoreconnaissance spy planes that President Eisenhower had let our CIA fly over Russia to spy on them had been shot down by the Soviets with an anti-aircraft missile they had developed. President Eisenhower said it was a weather airplane that had strayed off course. But the Soviets had captured the pilot. They showed him off. Eisenhower refused to apologize to Khrushchev for this and the other U-2 flights we had been making over the Soviet Union in violation of international law. That had killed the negotiations.
In March 1961, just before JFK’s first summit with Nikita Khrushchev in April in Vienna, JFK had been able to restart the talks.
On 24 September 1963, a treaty to ban nuclear testing in the atmosphere would be ratified by the United States Senate and the next day by the Soviet Union. This Partial Test Ban Treaty “entered into effect” on October 10, 1963. It was the first treaty between our countries that in any way limited the nuclear arms race that had started after we dropped the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
A little over a month later, in Dallas, Texas, President Kennedy was shot and killed by an American man who was an ex-Marine.
I got the news that he’d been shot and killed while I was standing in a queue to see a play in Oxford, England where I was in my first term at the university. I left the queue and walked back into the center of town, not feeling or seeing anything.