They Did It! Part Two
It was September 23, 1949 and President Truman was announcing to us that the Soviets had exploded their first atomic bomb. He had just said we’d known all along that no single nation could have a monopoly of atomic weapons.
I wonder how many of us had known that. We all knew it now. If we were paying attention.
What we had done to Hiroshima and Nagasaki could now be done to us.
Truman continued in his announcement.
This recent development emphasizes once again, if indeed such emphasis were needed, the necessity for that truly effective enforceable international control of atomic energy which this Government and the large majority of the members of the United Nations support.
Isn’t that exactly what the Baruch Plan had proposed to the UN and failed to get—“truly effective enforceable international control of atomic energy”? I couldn’t see that we’d made any progress along these lines. As far as I could see, we were losing ground.
The knowledge that the Soviets had the atomic bomb that we alone had had until just now did give impetus to an idea that had been pushed all along by the Hungarian immigrant physicist Edward Teller—that we should make a big effort to develop a new more powerful kind of nuclear bomb that physicists knew to be possible. In theory, anyway. It was usually referred to as “the Super.” The Super would be hundreds of times more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Think of that. And maybe much more powerful than that.
The theoretical possibility of such a bomb was recognized by physicists even before the Manhattan Project got started. In 1939, at Columbia University, the Italian immigrant physicist Enrico Fermi had pointed out this theoretical possibility to Edward Teller. A year later, Fermi had set out the idea at a gathering of physicists J. Robert Oppenheimer had organized in California.
Teller had been taken with the idea big time. Since then, even during the Manhattan Project when Oppenheimer was trying to get him to help with work on the fission bomb at our secret site at Los Alamos, Teller been trying to come up with a design for the Super that would work.
All this time, he hadn’t been able to. Maybe it couldn’t be done.
The Atomic Energy Commission that Congress had created in 1946 to control atomic energy in this country had set up a General Advisory Committee of mostly scientists to advise it. J. Robert Oppenheimer had been chosen by the members of the GAC to be its chair.
After the successful Soviet test, the AEC asked the GAC whether an all-out attempt to develop a Super bomb should now be made.
At the end of October 1949, a couple of months after the successful Soviet test, the GAC recommended against it. Unanimously. They gave several reasons. One of them was,
Let it be clearly realized that this is a super weapon; it is in a totally different category from an atomic bomb. . . . Its use would involve a decision to slaughter a vast number of civilians.
Wait. The regular atomic bombs we had already did that, didn’t they? A vast number of civilians had been killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was no doubt about that. Was the difference that the Super would make it impossible to pretend that anything other than that was possible?
Of course it would always possible to think otherwise if you let yourself think in abstractions, if you ignored reality. If you deluded yourself.
It’s tempting, sometimes, to do that.
Next: Do We or Don’t We? A Second Chance?