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 this plan [the Acheson-Lilienthal plan] was the greatest tragedy of the postwar world.
Hans Bethe, Manhattan Project scientist
The current view, as is well known, is not very optimistic.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
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.
Oppenheimer’s essay in the journal Foreign Affairs in July 1953 was entitled “Atomic Weapons and American Policy.” The first big change in policy it argued for was a program of “candor” by the American government with us on the meaning of the nuclear arms race.
Candor would be a big change from what we’d had from our government since the passage of the Atomic Energy Act in 1946. Since that time, all information about atomic energy had been classified as “restricted data” and made secret at the highest level.
Not all information about “policy” had been classified. The policy as to whether we should increase our stockpile of atomic weapons and make them even more powerful was, according to Oppenheimer, generally known. Or might have been after the publication of Oppenheimer’s essay, anyway.
We weren’t being told the numbers we had in our stockpile now but we were pretty sure those numbers were increasing. At a great rate. The increasing power of the weapons would be pretty obvious now. You can’t exactly keep secret a hydrogen bomb like the one detonated in the Ivy Mike test just before Ike was elected, can you?
We hadn’t known just how much more powerful our nuclear weapons were becoming. Not until the Mike test. At the beginning of June this year, we’d been allowed to see pictures of the test. Mike had yielded 666 times more than the Hiroshima bomb.
The pictures were quite beautiful I thought, if you didn’t think too much about it.
Oppenheimer argued in his essay that we should also be told the numbers of nuclear weapons we had, roughly anyway. “Many arguments have been advanced against making public this basic information,” he said.
Some of these arguments had merit in times past. One is that we might be giving vital information to the enemy. My own view is that the enemy has this information. It is available to anyone who will trouble to make an intelligence analysis of what has been published. Private citizens do not do this; but we must expect that the enemy does. It is largely available by other means as well. It is also my view that it is good for the peace of the world if the enemy knows these basic facts—very good indeed, and very dangerous if he does not.
I suppose many of us thought it was inevitable that the numbers and the power of our nuclear weapons would have been increasing. Oppenheimer pointed out, however, that this hadn’t been inevitable.
This growth [in numbers and power], though natural technically, is not inevitable. If the Congress had appropriated no money it would not have occurred. We have made our decision to push our stockpiles and the power of our weapons. We have from the first maintained that we should be free to use these weapons; and it is generally known we plan to use them. It is also generally known that one ingredient of this plan is a rather rigid commitment to their use in a very massive, initial, unremitting assault on the enemy.
“We have made our decision” on these matters, he says. That reminds us that a decision had to have be made for this policy to be adopted—for us to “push our stockpiles and the power of our weapons,” for us to decide we “should be free to use these weapons,” and then for us to have a “rigid commitment” to use them in a “massive, initial, unremitting, assault on the enemy.”
There had been nothing inevitable about any of it.
And who was the “we” who had decided these things? I hadn’t been involved, of course. I was in elementary school. Had my parents been involved? My dad had commanded an LSM in World War II and was in the Navy Reserves, but I’m pretty sure he hadn’t been involved.
Who was this “we”?
It must have been President Truman and those he had chosen to advise him and now President Eisenhower and those he had chosen to advise him, whoever they were.
What else could we have decided to do? I can think of several things—getting behind the Acheson Lilienthal plan for one (That’s the plan Oppenheimer had referred to in very general terms at the beginning of his essay). A Manhattan Project scientist named Hans Bethe thought that it was a great tragedy that we hadn’t done that.
But Oppenheimer clearly wasn’t interested now in “alternative history,” speculation about what might have been. I agree that we shouldn’t be either. The question is: Now where are we? What now?
A main point in Oppenheimer’s essay was that more of us should be involved in making such decisions than had been. We should tap into the “political vitality” of our country.
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. Today public opinion cannot exist in this field. No responsible person will hazard an opinion in a field where he believes that there is somebody else who knows the truth, and where he believes that he does not know it.
Oppenheimer saw this as a matter of us getting the “freedom of action” we needed. Once we had that freedom of action, we would need the strength to use it.
We need the greatest attainable freedom of action. We need strength to be able to ask whether our plans for the use of the atom are, all things considered, right or wrong. We need the freedom of action necessary—and we do not have it today—to be able to negotiate, should an opportunity for that at some future time appear.
A different policy decision had to have been made about something else—about whether to use our atomic weapons in “the defense of Europe.” This would be a very different matter from using them in a “massive, initial, unremitting, assault on the enemy” if they attacked us. Oppenheimer said everyone knew what we had decided about the defense of Europe.
Atomic weapons, as everyone knows, have been incorporated in the plans for the defense of Europe. They have been developed for many tactical military uses, as in the anti-submarine campaign, the air campaign, and the ground campaign in the European theater; and these potential applications continue to ramify and multiply. Yet the Europeans are rather in ignorance what these weapons are, how many there may be, how they will be used and what they will do.
Incorporating nuclear weapons in the plans for the defense of Europe meant we had undertaken along the way to develop “tactical” atomic bombs, bombs that were less, not more, powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, enough less powerful that they might, arguably, be used not just to destroy cities and military installations but for air defense, or against submarines, or on the battlefield. This would be done, in the case of “the defense of Europe,” in the countries in Europe. Presumably after one of those countries had been invaded by the Soviets.
It was actually a challenge to make nuclear devices un-powerful enough for such uses. A lot of the testing going on this very summer of 1953 at our Nevada Test Site was devoted to developing tactical weapons. Not all of it. Some of it was devoted to developing components for hydrogen bombs. Like the “triggers” for them, which—did you know?—would be atomic bombs. Yes, atomic bombs—bombs like the ones that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki—were just the “triggers” for hydrogen bombs.
Hydrogen bombs couldn’t themselves be tested at the Nevada Test Site. They were way too big. Their effects couldn’t possibly be confined to the Nevada Test Site or even the state of Nevada. Or even the American Southwest. People experiencing those effects beyond Nevada might call for an end to testing, which of course we couldn’t have.
We’d be testing the hydrogen bombs themselves later our at our Pacific Proving Ground where there weren’t many people. Some, though. The people who lived in the Marshall Islands.
The North Atlantic Treaty we’d signed with the Western European countries that had become effective in 1948 obligated us to come to the defense of those countries if any of them was invaded by the Soviets or, I suppose, somebody else, though I don’t know who that might be at the moment. In any case, Oppenheimer said we had made plans to defend the NATO countries using our tactical atomic weapons.
Oppenheimer seemed to think our European allies were pretty much in the dark about what detonating these tactical nuclear weapons in their countries for their “defense” would mean for them. He argued for more candor with them too.
It looked like the only one of those European countries that was going to have its own nuclear weapons was Great Britain. When our Atomic Energy Act of 1946 cut the British out of getting any more information from us about atomic energy, they’d decided to produce a nuclear bomb of their own. We had cut them off in spite of the fact that British scientists had been deeply involved in our Manhattan Project to develop the first bombs. Cutting them out now seemed weird.
In any case, the British had manufactured the necessary fissile material and successfully tested their own nuclear bomb in 1952, last year. They detonated it on a ship they had anchored off Australia. The ship disappeared.
It didn’t sound like Oppenheimer was entirely happy with the way things stood now in terms of American policy, did it? I could see how President Eisenhower might feel that our current policy was being criticized a little bit. Or maybe not. He had allowed the publication of Oppenheimer’s article. After all, it would just be another opinion by a scientist.
Next: Project Solarium I