Project Solarium I--The Search for Policy: June 10 to July 15,1953
Since February 2021, I have been posting weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets,” all from a somewhat different angle—in You Might Want to Know on Substack. To see other entries, go to the You Might Want to Know Archive.
The release of atomic energy has changed everything save our mode of thinking and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
Albert Einstein 1946
The contention is that what is dying is a kind of total concept of the world, a one worlding of presupposed progress. The question for each of us is whether we believe the problems we face call merely for gentle institutional and policy reform, more radical ideational reform, or whether modernity is beyond repair and has to be allowed to die.
Jonathan Rowson, Perspectiva, June 28, 2025
In Operation Candor, as it was now being proposed by J. Robert Oppenheimer and President Eisenhower’s National Security Council, “authoritative sources” in our government would be directed to exercise candor with the American people about “the meaning of the nuclear arms race.” The most “authoritative source” would, of course, be President Eisenhower. He would have to get behind the operation or it wouldn’t amount to anything.
So far he seemed to be behind it.
In a National Security Council meeting back on May 27, Ike’s NSC had approved the idea of an Operation Candor and recommended it to him. Ike had supported the idea.
At that meeting and afterwards, however, he had expressed concern about how an Operation Candor would affect “security.” Oppenheimer had assured Ike that no technical information about nuclear weapons would need to be shared in the operation.
Furthermore, Oppenheimer had proposed, candor about “the meaning of the nuclear arms race” might make the Soviets more inclined to talk about doing something, really doing something, to eliminate the hideous and wasteful situation being created by the nuclear arms race. That could make a big contribution to “security,” couldn’t it?
Oppenheimer acknowledged in the meeting with the National Security Council on May 27 that the problems here were very difficult, but he argued it would be better to have many minds, not just a few, that had the information and the freedom to address the problems. Candor would help with that.
In an article Oppenheimer wanted to publish about the requirements of an Operation Candor, he’d said about the source of the “political vitality” of the United States:
The political vitality of our country largely derives from two sources. One is the interplay, the conflict of opinion and debate, in many diverse and complex agencies, legislative and executive, which contribute to the making of policy. The other is a public opinion which is based on confidence that it knows the truth.
Oppenheimer argued that to get access to this political vitality in a discussion about the realities of the nuclear arms race, the first requirement would be candor.
[F]irst is candor—candor on the part of the United States Government to the officials, the representatives and the people of their country. We do not operate well when the important facts, the essential conditions, which limit and determine our choices are unknown. We do not operate well when they are known, in secrecy and in fear, only to a few men.
The general account of the atomic arms race that has been outlined here [in the essay] can, of course, be found in the public press, together with a great deal of detailed information, some true, and much largely false. This mass of published rumor, fact, press release and speculation could yield, upon analysis, a fairly solid core of truth; but as it stands, it is not the truth.
Receptive minds would also be required, wouldn’t they? Candor might not do much for minds that were already made up, minds that did not know the truth but on the basis of what they did know of the “mass of published rumor, fact, press release and speculation,” had become convinced that they did. I guess you’d have to hope that those minds might be made more receptive by the fact that a different truth was now being offered by the President and other authoritative sources.
And maybe it wasn’t, finally, a matter of getting us to accept a truth that was something certain as much as it was a matter of getting us to be receptive to truth? Truth was crucial, but maybe there wasn’t a truth to be simply accepted? Or not.
In Ike’s Age of Peril speech on the radio in May, a couple of months ago, he had said that a “partial mobilization” was now necessary to guarantee an “adequate level of security.” He hadn’t said how he had decided what would be adequate or how “partial mobilization” would get us there. He had said, though, that the “military perfection” of “total mobilization” couldn’t be what we wanted domestically. That would make us into a “garrison state” and cause us to lose the freedom we had hoped to protect.
The problems here were difficult, as Oppenheimer said. There wasn’t an obvious answer to them. Except that, as Oppenheimer would point out in his essay, the answer to them surely couldn’t be a matter of simply acquiring more and more and bigger and bigger nuclear weapons. How was that going to provide an “adequate level of security”? Wouldn’t that just lead, as Oppenheimer would say in his essay “Atomic Weapons and American Policy” to
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.
Did Eisenhower agree with Oppenheimer that just getting more and more and bigger and bigger nuclear weapons couldn’t be the answer? He often said that “strength” was important, but what kind of strength? In his Age of Peril speech, Ike had said that “spiritual” strength was as important as military strength. We obviously knew how to build up our military strength and our stockpile of nuclear weapons and delivery systems and were doing that at a very rapid rate. But how were we to build up, or even protect, our spiritual strength?
Might more and bigger nuclear weapons even be at odds in some way with building up and protecting our spiritual strength?
On June 1, Ike, together with his cabinet, the members of the National Security Council, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Atomic Energy Commission, was shown for the first time the film of the Ivy Mike test. “Mike” was our first successful test—and the first-ever successful test—of a staged thermonuclear device. It yielded, all by itself, the equivalent of well over 600 Hiroshima bombs. The test had been conducted just before Ike was elected last November. He’d been told about it right after he was elected. He hadn’t seen pictures of it until June 1.
This was the weapon that some members of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission had said, in 1949, even before the technical problems of how to build one had been solved,
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 the practical effect is almost one of genocide.
It is clear that the use of such a weapon cannot be justified on any ethical ground which gives a human being a certain individuality and dignity even if he happens to be a resident of an enemy country. . . . Its use would put the United States in a bad moral position relative to the peoples of the world.
Someone in the room said that when Ike saw the film of the Ivy Mike test on June 1, he “blanched.”
Obviously we were manufacturing more and more nuclear weapons and obviously they were getting more powerful. That wasn’t going to change, it looked like. If that wasn’t the answer to achieving an adequate level of security, what was?
Might building more and more and bigger and bigger nuclear weapons actually reduce our level of security?
When it came to what our foreign policy should be toward the Soviet Union, Ike was getting different arguments from different advisors. He felt he needed to get everybody in his administration on the same page.
He got something going to try to bring that about. It came to be called Project Solarium, after the place on the roof of the White House where he first got the participants together.
Next: Project Solarium II: June 10 to July 15, 1953