They Have One Now. Do We? Don't We? A Second Chance?
Since February 2021, I have been posting weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history and technology, and “secrets”—in You Might Want to Know on Substack. To see other entries, go to the You Might Want to Know Archive.
The General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission had told the Commission that our current stock of atomic weapons would be enough to deter the Soviet Union, even if they were able to develop a Super bomb.
Was that so? We had now, at the end of 1949, about 250. They had, maybe, 5. So we had 50 times more atomic bombs than they did.
Five atomic bombs is nothing to sniff at, of course. Let’s think about that.
One for New York City, let’s say. One for Washington D. C., one for Los Angeles, one for San Francisco. Those cities are all bigger than Hiroshima or Nagasaki were. But even if the bombs were only as big as the bomb we used in Nagasaki—we already had bombs several times more powerful, they might not yet—, with the chaos, the panic, the fires, and the residual radiation, and likely, if the attack were general, no help on the way, those cities would be pretty much done for, I’d bet. For quite a while.
One bomb left. You pick the city. You can get an idea of what a nuclear bomb would do to any city anywhere by visiting the remarkable interactive NukeMap that Alex Wellerstein created and put up in 2012. On NukeMap, you can bomb any city you want, with any size and model of nuclear bomb you want, which you can detonate at any altitude you want. The extent of radioactive fallout will also be shown.
Wellerstein knows his stuff when it comes to what is known about the effects of nuclear weapons. He’s not just guessing, or fantasizing. On the other hand, what we are given, as always when it comes to maps and to the effects of nuclear weapons, is an abstraction. Not the real thing. It might not unfold exactly that way. It almost certainly would not. When it comes to the effects of nuclear weapons, no real world tests are possible. The uncertainties, it has been said, are greater than the certainties.
Also, not shown are the horror and the panic and what happens to the buildings, the people, the trees, all that.
If we include everything, we can suspect that five nuclear bombs might be enough to get the job done, if you thought of the job as, say, killing a country. That was the question strategists in the Pentagon had asked themselves as our stockpile grew: how many bombs would be necessary to “kill the Soviet Union.” That was the expression used.
They planned on many more than five.
The GAC’s report concluded with a point Niels Bohr might have made about the complementary potentials at a moment like this, that is, before the Super came to exist.
In determining not to proceed to develop the super bomb, we see a unique opportunity of providing by some limitations on the totality of war and thus of limiting the fear and arousing the hope of mankind.
Six members of the Panel, including Oppenheimer, signed the main report. An addendum to the report, signed by Enrico Fermi and Isidor Rabi, made some of the same points in slightly different and stronger language:
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 practical effect is almost one of genocide.
. . . Its use would put the United States in a bad moral position relative to the peoples of the world.
Any postwar situation resulting from such a weapon would leave unresolvable enmities for generations. A desirable peace cannot come from such an inhuman application of force. The postwar problems would dwarf the problems which confront us at present.
They were thinking about the aftermath there, the “postwar problems,” as military leaders sometimes didn’t.
The addendum concluded,
For these reasons we believe it important for the President of the United States to tell the American public, and the world, that we think it wrong on fundamental ethical principles to initiate a program of development of such a weapon. At the same time it would be appropriate to invite the nations of the world to join us in a solemn pledge not to proceed in the development or construction of weapons of this category. If such a pledge were accepted even without control machinery, it appears highly probable that an advanced stage of development leading to a test by another power could be detected by available physical means.
Furthermore, we have in our possession, in our stockpile of atomic bombs, the means for adequate “military” retaliation for the production or use of a “Super.”
Right. We did have. Two-hundred fifty atomic bombs, many now several times more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That would be enough to kill the Soviet Union, I should think.
The Atomic Energy Commission itself was not unanimous in support of the GAC’s report. The AEC’s chair, David Lilienthal, and most of the other members supported the unanimous recommendation of the GAC. One member of the AEC, a man named Lewis Strauss, didn’t. He took it upon himself to write a separate letter to President Truman supporting an all-out effort to develop the Super.
President Truman ended up going with Lewis Strauss.
Four months after the GAC gave its report to the AEC, at the end of January 1950, five months after the Soviets had detonated their first nuclear device, President Truman announced—again to us in the public—that the United States would be making an all-out effort to develop the “Super.” Some of President Truman’s advisors had thought he should keep this decision secret too, I’m not sure why, except that once you start with secrecy you can lose sight of what makes sense.
The scientists on the GAC had told President Truman that the Soviets were probably already working on a Super bomb. Which they were, under the leadership of a Russian physicist named Andrei Sakharov, though we didn’t yet know this for sure. The GAC had recognized this possibility and thought other considerations outweighed us deciding to work on one too. Including the fact that having it wouldn’t add appreciably to the capacity of our current stockpile to destroy the Soviet Union.
Truman put his decision to go for it like this:
It is part of my responsibility as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces to see to it that our country is able to defend itself against any possible aggressor. Accordingly, I have directed the Atomic Energy Commission to continue its work on all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or superbomb.
So President Truman saw this weapon as something we could use “to defend” our country “against any possible aggressor.” Now, just how was it going to do that? It couldn’t “defend” against anything. All it could possibly do would be to retaliate against the population of a country whose military had already attacked us, provided we were able to retaliate after such an attack. That’s not defense. That’s retaliation. Revenge, if you like. But not, in this case, the kind of revenge that might teach someone a lesson so they don’t repeat an action. Which revenge seems rarely to do anyway. More often it sets up a back-and-forth of revenge that uses up both sides. This could happen very quickly in this case. In an afternoon.
Truman added:
This we shall continue to do until a satisfactory plan for international control of atomic energy is achieved.
By “this” he meant continue to work on “all forms of atomic weapons.”
He still seemed to be hoping, it seemed, for “a satisfactory plan for international control of atomic energy.” And he seemed to think that our continuing to work on the weapons wouldn’t impede arriving at “a satisfactory plan for international control of atomic energy.”
The Danish physicist Niels Bohr would certainly have heard, or heard about, Truman’s announcement of our intention to develop a Super. Bohr was who had proposed an approach being made to the Soviets, even before we tested the first bomb, to see if the danger of this new development might make them want to enter a cooperative relation with us and work up a plan for the international control of atomic energy.
Might the awful prospect of a super bomb create an opportunity like one we’d had, and forfeited, in our testing and use of the first atomic bombs?
Next: Niels Bohr Sees a Chance. He Ups the Ante.