The Essay: Candor about "the Art of Delivery"
Since February 2021, I have been posting weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets,” all from a somewhat unusual angle—in You Might Want to Know on Substack. To see other entries, go to the You Might Want to Know Archive.
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
I believe that until we have looked this tiger in the eye, we shall be in the worst of all possible dangers, which is that we may back into him.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
In his essay in 1953 on the requirements for an Operation Candor for the American people on the meaning of the nuclear arms race, Oppenheimer refers us to a comment from Gordon Dean, the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission. Dean had said that wherever we may be right now relative to the Soviet Union in terms of the number of atomic weapons
there will come a time when from the narrowest technical point of view, the art of delivery and the art of defense will have a much higher military relevance than supremacy in the atomic munitions field itself.
That’s very Oppenheimer, isn’t it?—to call the “delivery of atomic weapons” and defense against those weapons an “art” rather than, say, a “technology” or “method” or a “strategy.” If delivery and defense are “arts,” we will never be able to turn them over entirely to our machines, will we? Or to the machine-like aspects of ourselves?
So where did we stand, candidly now, in July 1953, when it came to the art of delivery?
As with the munitions, in a good and, if you thought about it, a not-good place.
Good if you looked at the means of delivery we had developed since World War II. Oppenheimer didn’t go into those in his essay, but I will.
The bombers that had delivered our two atomic bombs to Japan—the Enola Gay and Bockscar—were both B-29s. We had introduced the B-29 only in May 1944, the beginning of the last year of World War II. Interesting, isn’t it?, that if we hadn’t developed the B-29 bomber in time, we wouldn’t have had a bomber that was powerful enough to “deliver” the heavy atomic bombs we had then to Japan. By bomber anyway. A submarine might have been able to. To a coastal city.
Soon after the war, we had developed two more long-range bombers that could carry the nuclear weapons we were developing now that weighed a lot less and yielded a lot more than the first ones. One was the B-50, a modified version of the B-29. Also, we’d figured out how to refuel these bombers in the air which, as you can imagine, greatly increased their range. The other was the B-36, a huge airplane that was introduced in 1948. It had six “pusher” engines and was designed specifically to carry only our atomic bombs.
In June 1951, we had introduced another bomber, the B-47. It was powered by the new jet engines, could carry more than one of the lighter and more powerful nuclear bombs we had developed, and also could be refueled in the air. We had on the drawing boards an even bigger and more powerful jet bomber, the B-52, that would be able to fly higher and faster and farther and carry more. We were hoping to be able to introduce that one soon, in 1955 maybe.
The Soviets didn’t have either a bomber capable of reaching the United States and getting back home, or a jet bomber.
Not yet.
They would have one in time, of course. Before too long, I expect.
Let’s say that in desperation they decided to send their bombers to us on one-way missions. Would we be able to shoot them all down?
No. Oppenheimer mentions in his essay that shortly after World War II, General Vandenberg had estimated that in a large bomber attack we’d be able, with luck, to intercept 20 to 30 percent of the bombers. When they are delivering nuclear bombs, every bomber that gets through is the equivalent of maybe 700 bombers getting through with conventional bombs. You wouldn’t want any to get through.
But that was only part of the story when it came to the art of delivery.
We were also working on rockets, called “missiles” when they were used to deliver weapons. The Soviets were working on them too. At the end of World War II, we’d both captured some of the German scientists and engineers who had developed their V-2 rocket. The British fighter planes had been completely unable to intercept the V-2s.
We and the Soviets were both working on missiles that would be able to deliver nuclear weapons. We had in fact introduced our first one, the Honest John, in January of this year, 1953. It could shoot the sixteen-hundred pound W7 warhead we had now that yielded 20 kilotons, same as the Nagasaki bomb, maybe fifteen miles. We’d probably deploy it in Great Britain in the coming year.
Oppenheimer had had the highest security clearance all these years. He was no longer on the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, but he had been retained as a consultant. He might have known, if our Central Intelligence Agency did, that after World War II the Soviets had quickly developed an R-1 missile that was a lot like the German V-2 and as of a few months ago had started to produce an R-2 that was a big improvement on the R-1. It had a range of over 300 miles.
The Soviets were already ahead of us, then, when it came to the art of delivery.
What Oppenheimer said in his essay about these means of delivery was
There are in existence methods of delivery of atomic weapons which present an intractable problem of interception, and which are relevant for the small distances that characterize Europe. It will be some time at least before they are relevant for intercontinental delivery.
Which meant that at some time these rockets would be “relevant for intercontinental delivery”? Think of that! Talk about an “intractable problem of interception.”
At the time, I knew nothing of any of this. In July 1953, I was about to start junior high school. In elementary school, I had seen and heard the big loud B-50s, B-36s, and B-47s flying out of Davis Monthan Air Force Base and over our house in my home town of Tucson. I never knew what they were carrying.
Was it scary? No. Well, maybe a little.
I wonder how much my parents knew about any of this. Complete secrecy was still the rule. I’m not sure how much of it they would have wanted to know.
It wouldn’t have mattered how much they wanted to know, of course. They wouldn’t have been told anything even if they’d asked.
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