Presidential Predicaments: Truman VII (of VIII) - Should We or Shouldn't We?
A Correction and an Addition to the Previous Entry (thanks to Lew Jacobson):
The Correction: Inchon (or Incheon), the city on the west coast of the Korean Peninsula where General MacArthur conducted the amphibious landing that turned the tide, for the first time, in the Korean War, is close to the 38th parallel but south of it, a little SSW of Seoul.
The Addition: I reported that the Strategic Air Command, rather than General MacArthur, was given custody of the nine Mark 4 atomic bombs delivered to the custody of the military in 1950, the first time since World War II that the military had been given custody of complete atomic bombs. Lew was right to suggest that readers might want to know that the head of SAC at the time was General Curtis LeMay. LeMay is who orchestrated the firebombing of Japan in 1945 before and after the atomic bombs were dropped.
Even before the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb got going, the physicists who went on to develop the first atomic bombs had realized that another kind of nuclear bomb was possible, one that would employ nuclear fusion. It might be a thousand times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Japan.
A fission bomb might be able to trigger it. Successfully designing a fission bomb would be the necessary first step. In 1945, at Trinity, and then at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fission bomb became actual. Was it now time to go ahead and try to develop the “Super” fusion bomb?
After Congress passed the Atomic Energy Act in 1946, it was clearer, though not entirely clear, who would have the authority to make such a decision. It would not be the military. It would probably be the president, President Truman. The Act had also created a Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy to oversee the AEC but this was confusing. The AEC was part of the executive, not the legislative, branch. The decision would ultimately be made by President Truman, it looked like.
About the technical aspects of nuclear weapons and atomic energy, President Truman probably didn’t know a whole lot more than the rest of us. That is, almost nothing. He did know more than we did about the effects of the new bomb. He’d been able to see photographs we were not yet being allowed to see.
The President would surely want a recommendation from the civilian Atomic Energy Commission that had been created by the Atomic Energy Act on whether to make the effort to devise the Super bomb.
The Atomic Energy Act had created for the AEC a General Advisory Committee. On it were scientists who did know a lot about atomic energy and nuclear weapons. The chair chosen for the GAC was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man who had directed the Scientific Division of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos where the first fission bombs were designed. Other members of the GAC were famous scientists from the Met Lab in Chicago where knowledge about plutonium had been developed. Famous among other scientists, anyway.
The technical problems in building a bomb like this would be formidable. It was now known that the sun and other stars got their energy not from fission—that is, splitting heavy atomic nuclei—but from fusion—pressing together the lightest atomic nuclei to make them form a larger nucleus. This would happen only under almost inconceivable heat and pressure.
To start fusion going on earth, a way would have to be found to create and focus the kind of heat and pressure that is found on the sun. Think of that. That kind of heat and pressure has never existed on earth. That is, it hadn’t until 1945. On July 16 of that year, it came to exist for the first time, for milliseconds, at the center of an exploding atomic bomb.
A few scientists had had ideas that they thought would work to get the fusion going. In April 1946, the brilliant mathematician John Von Neumann and Klaus Fuchs, a physicist with the British delegation to the Manhattan Project, had even patented a design. The physicist Edward Teller was so passionately devoted to the fusion bomb that in the Manhattan Project he had refused to work on the fission bomb. Teller had come up with some ideas.
Teller’s idea’s hadn’t worked. The design patented by Klaus Fuchs and John Von Neumann turned out not to work. Fuchs had turned out to be a Soviet spy. Whether he did any harm is unclear. In February 1950, J. Robert Oppenheimer told a Congressional committee that he hoped Fuchs had given the Soviets some of Teller’s designs because this might have sent them off for a while in fruitless directions.
On October 29, 1949, the AEC’s General Advisory Committee met in Washington, D.C. to consider whether we should make an all-out effort build the Super Bomb. They recommended against being the ones to initiate such an effort. They said, among other things, that our undertaking to build one would not deter “the Russians” from building their own. And, 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.”
A minority annex to the GAC’s report signed by Enrico Fermi and Isidor Rabi said “Necessarily such a weapon goes far beyond any military objective and enters the range of very great natural catastrophes. By its very nature it cannot be confined to a military objective but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide.” Adding that “A desirable peace cannot come from such an inhuman application of force. The postwar problems would dwarf the problems which confront us at present.”
The AEC met on November 9, 1949 to consider the GAC’s recommendation. Three of the five members of the AEC accepted the recommendation, two—Gordon Dean and Eisenhower’s appointee Lewis Strauss—opposed it. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretaries of Defense, Louis Johnson, and State, Dean Acheson, also opposed it. The Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy was said to oppose it. Edward Teller opposed it, needless to say.
On January 31, 1950, President Truman gave the go-ahead to an all-out effort to develop such a bomb. He even announced the decision in public, which surprised some people. He apparently thought it was something we should know.
Before making the decision, Truman had asked the GAC whether the Soviets might be able to develop such a bomb. Why yes, he was told. They would be able to do anything we could and always had been able to.
That somehow had decided the matter for President Truman.
Next: Presidential Predicaments: Truman VIII (of VIII)—And Now What?