The Essay: Candor about "the Art of Defense" II
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 do not believe—though of course we cannot today be certain—that we can take measures for the defense of our people, our lives, our institutions, our cities, which will in any real sense be a permanent solution to the problem of the atom. But that is no reason for not doing a little better than we are now.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1953
The process of nuclear inversion is complete when one realizes that the correct attitude is one of suicidal defeatism. Let no one think that it is thinkable. Dispel any interest in surviving, in lasting. Have no part of it. Be ready to turn in your hand. For myself and my loved ones, I want the heat, which comes at the speed of light. I don’t want to have to hang about for the blast, which idles along at the speed of sound. There is only one defense against nuclear attack, and that is a cyanide pill.
The clear truth is that after a nuclear war the role of the civil and military establishment would change or invert. The authorities would no longer be protecting the population from the enemy: they would be protecting themselves from the population. One of the effects of nuclear weapons—these strange instruments—would be instant fascism.
…Nuclear civil defense is a nonsubject, a mischievous fabrication. It bolsters fightability. It bolsters thinkability.
Martin Amis, Einstein’s Monsters, 1987
When it came to the question of whether an “adequately effective” defense against nuclear weapons could be developed, Americans were probably most concerned about “continental” defense. That is, defense of the United States. Which had an advantage over the European countries, being as far away from the Soviet Union as we were. But still was in peril from nuclear weapons, a peril that with the continuing development of the weapons and means of delivering them was increasing.
Oppenheimer mentions in the essay, “Atomic Weapons and American Policy,” that work was being done right then, in 1953, by “a highly-qualified panel” that has “for some months now” been studying the “complex problems of continental defense.” There are, Oppenheimer says, “many technical developments that have not yet been applied in this field,” developments like “natural but substantial developments in munitions, in aircraft and in missiles, and in procedures for obtaining and analyzing information.”
He also says, however, that this panel has, finally, “been oppressed and troubled by the same over-all oppression which any group always finds when it touches seriously any part of the problem of the atom.” I guess that means that if you “touch seriously” on “any part of the problem of the atom,” you are likely to end up feeling “oppressed and troubled.”
Who wants to feel like that? Ike was saying he wanted Operation Candor to end up conveying a message of “hope.” Was that going to be possible if the operation was also going to “touch seriously” on “any part of the problem of the atom”?
Bombers would make matters bad enough. But there was something even more troubling. Rockets were being developed that would present even more of what Oppenheimer called “intractable problems of interception.”
All these years, Oppenheimer had had the highest security clearance and so had been able to “touch seriously” on everything about “the atom.” He had just stopped serving on the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, but had been retained as a consultant so he still had clearance. He probably knew, if our Central Intelligence Agency did, that soon after World War II, the Soviets had developed an R-1 missile that was a lot like the German V-2 and, as of a few months ago, they had started to produce an R-2 that, with a range of over 300 miles, was a big improvement on the R-1.
“It will be some time at least,” wrote Oppenheimer in his essay, before “intercontinental delivery” would be possible by means like these, means that would obviously present problems of defense that were even more “intractable” than with bombers.
Well, if we aren’t going to be able “adequately and effectively” to intercept incoming nuclear weapons, what can we do to protect ourselves from the effects of the atomic weapons that are going to make it through?
How about moving everything underground? Okay, that’s not exactly realistic, is it? How are you going to move the steel mills in Gary Indiana, the skyscrapers in New York City, the plutonium production facilities in Hanford, Washington, or our farms for that matter, underground?
Some things could be moved underground. Like the military Command Centers for our nuclear forces. And shelters for our political leaders and some government workers. In fact, just this year, 1953, the first year of the Eisenhower administration, we would be finishing a huge secret (we hoped) facility for our military and political leaders called Raven Rock or Site R. It had been built underground some sixty miles northwest of Washington, D. C. Another underground facility was now being worked on for members of Congress, this one at the Greenbriar Resort in West Virginia. Also underground. But at a resort, at least, which was nice.
Those facilities would enable some senior members of our government to survive—if they could get to the facilities in time—and keep working, with whatever they still had to work with.
As for the rest of us, we were now being advised to build “fallout shelters.” It would have to be on our own dime. Since it would be on our own dime, we could dig it as deep or build it as strong as we wanted and could pay for. Most of us, if we did build one of these things, wouldn’t be digging that deep. We would be able to build something that might protect us only against radioactive fallout, not against blast. Protection against blast would be too expensive for most of us. We’d just have to hope we would be far enough away from Ground Zero. That is, from the different Grounds Zero.
President Eisenhower wanted us all to build one of these shelters. I’m sure some Americans would. Those who enjoyed camping, perhaps. My family wasn’t going to build one, I was pretty sure. It just wasn’t our style. In fact, I didn’t know anyone who was building one.
Maybe we could get some help with “continental defense” by building a line of early warning radars up in Canada that would let us know that bombers were bombers and give us more time to try to shoot them down. They would be coming down through Canada, did you realize that? If you look at a globe, you’ll see that’s the shortest route from the Soviet Union.
If the radars gave us enough warning, would we be able to shoot down all the bombers? General Vandenberg had said there was no chance of that. “With luck,” he’d said shortly after World War II, “[we might] intercept 20 or 30 percent of an enemy attack.” Not even half of them.
When you are talking nuclear bombs, you can’t have any bombers get through, can you? One, even one with a bomb as small as the Nagasaki bomb, would be like many hundreds getting through with loads of conventional bombs. If the bomber was carrying thermonuclear bombs, it would be like thousands getting through with loads of conventional bombs.
Candor about the intractable problems of defense wouldn’t be just for us, Oppenheimer said. We would need to be candid with our allies in Europe and the far East. We hadn’t been so far. Our allies needed to realize that because of the smaller countries they lived in over there, they were in a much more precarious position than we were. The only thing that would protect them when it came to nuclear weapons would be our threat of retaliation on the Soviets, if the European countries thought they could count on that.
We ourselves could count, to some extent, for now, on our distance from the Soviet Union and our spaciousness, which the Soviets have even more of than we do.
But what about when “intercontinental” rockets had been developed that could fly all the way from the Soviet Union to this country in maybe thirty minutes? Oppenheimer said that hadn’t happened yet but it seemed clear he thought that if the “natural technical progress” weren’t interrupted somehow, it would happen. These missiles would arrive with very little warning, obviously, as the German V-2s had in London. As with the V-2s, our jet fighters would be entirely unable to shoot them down.
Could we develop rockets that would be able to shoot down warheads that were incoming at many times the speed of a bullet? However many there were? With them maybe having released decoys? And maybe coming in at staggered intervals?
I couldn’t see any kind of “continental defense” that I thought would work. I still can’t. It could be made believable in science fiction, I suppose. With ray guns, maybe, like in those Buck Rogers movies I’d seen at the Fox Theater on Saturday mornings when I was in elementary school.
Next: The Essay: Candor about Policy