Fear Itself (68 page)

With these provisions, the law established the commission as an unequaled bureaucratic planner of investment and production within the national state. The economic actor it created was “a very heavy property owner—one of the world’s largest.”
¹³³
A 1951 overview observed that “today the Atomic Energy Commission’s installations and grounds cover more area than the states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined,” that “a new diffusion plant near Paducah will alone consume almost as much electricity as the city of Chicago,” and that “the Savannah River project for tritium-plutonium production is just now commencing in a modest way by biting 250,000 acres out of South Carolina’s farmland, sweeping villages and homes before it.”
¹³⁴
When it came time to appoint a chairman, President Truman chose David E. Lilienthal, who had served as one of the three directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority at its inception in 1933, and had led the TVA during World War II.
¹³⁵

Of course, the New Deal era had witnessed other instances of delegation to executive agencies, notably including the NRA, and to regulatory commissions such as the SEC. But the creation of the AEC, E. Blythe Stason, dean of the University of Michigan Law School, observed in 1947, was utterly without precedent in terms of the sweep of “powers to be exercised without effective guiding standards.” With its remarkable capacities, the commission’s “uncanalized power” placed it “outside the range of legal rules, principles, or standards.” Perhaps, Stason concluded, “there is absolutely no alternative . . . no escape from conferring such powers,” but he insisted that it was important to record the extraordinary degree to which planning for atomic power had replaced the market system, and to note the extent to which “the rule of law will be largely replaced over a considerable segment of human activity by control through the judgment of public administrators.”
¹³⁶

A thorough 1948 review of the nine-month congressional process that generated the Atomic Energy Act underscored how it had been suffused with “emotions of fear and awe,” and how, absent prior party positions, legislators did not divide along traditional lines.
¹³⁷
Votes on amendments lacked named roll calls. The act itself passed the Senate by a voice vote. But as a complex and often heated process in the House revealed, there was no simple consensus. In that chamber, fully seventy-one amendments were offered. After much debate, each section of the bill was modified on the floor.

Though no roll calls were taken, an examination of the debate indicates that a southern switchboard often determined key outcomes when the House was divided, as it was, on the 121–57 division that passed an amendment offered by Texas Democrat Fritz Lanham to protect the AEC’s power to oversee patents, in opposition to an alternative Republican proposal to strike any regulation of patents by the commission as an infringement on market competition. We can also see southern leadership on amendments when no divisions were recorded but the issue was controversial.
¹³⁸

Especially striking is the lead role played by southern members in promoting amendments, passed without recorded votes, that strengthened the AEC’s ability to watch over the secrets of atomic energy and guard the loyalty of its employees. Any reservations were immediately equated with a leftist taint. The leak of a late June report by Ernest Adamson, the chief investigator for the House Committee on Un-American Activities, disclosed how security officers at the atom-bomb plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, feared that there had been contact between left-wing scientists, described as disposed positively both toward the CIO and world government, and “persons outside the United States.”
¹³⁹
Virginia’s Howard Smith—the author of the 1940 Smith Act—followed up by successfully offering a proposal to oblige the FBI to investigate all individuals the commission planned to hire, and to certify that they would do no harm to the nation’s security despite their access to sensitive information. Hatton Sumners of Texas followed with an amendment that included the death penalty as a punishment for divulging atomic secrets. Smith, in turn, claimed successfully that the minimum level of punishment for such acts should be specified as no less than ten years in prison. He also added language confirming that all other relevant language in the bill must be made to “conform to the amendment offered by the gentleman from Texas and the amendment offered by myself.”
¹⁴⁰

When the Atomic Energy Act passed the House on July 20, 1946, it did so by a lopsided 265–79 margin. With the exception of a dozen Democrats, primarily southern, who held out for military control of the AEC, the negative votes were cast by members of a sharply divided Republican Party.
¹⁴¹
The main objection of those voting nay concerned the commission’s control of atomic-energy patents. “If anything ever placed shackles on private industry it is the bill before you today,” announced Charles Elston of Ohio. “Private industry under this bill cannot make a single experiment in the development of atomic energy for industrial purposes without a license from this Government bureau.”
¹⁴²
Republican Clare Boothe Luce of Connecticut likewise argued that the patent provisions of the bill “might have been written by the most ardent Soviet Commissar”; and Dewey Short, the Missouri Republican, remonstrated how “we are going to set up an Atomic Energy Commission and give it the power of life and death over private industry in this country,” adding, “I do not like such a blanket, broad, delegation of powers run riot.”
¹⁴³

Southern members secured a significant role in another dimension: congressional oversight. One of the most unusual features of the Atomic Energy Act was its directive mandating the establishment of a Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE), the first congressional committee in American history to be required by law. Because it dealt with a complicated and secret subject, and thus could not be challenged knowledgeably, and because, uniquely for joint committees, it was given the standing to consider bills for hearings and to vote on whether to bring them to the floor of the House and Senate, the JCAE garnered “more power than possessed by any congressional committee up to that time.”
¹⁴⁴
Its composition thus was uncommonly important. Of the eight Democrats in the initial committee, four southerners—from the House, North Carolina’s Carl Durham and Texas’s Lyndon Baines Johnson; from the Senate, Georgia’s Richard Russell and Texas’s Tom Connally—were key players.
¹⁴⁵
Each was selected by the party’s leaders, Sam Rayburn of Texas in the House and Alben Barkley of Kentucky (soon to be vice president of the United States) in the Senate, for their standing and for possessing positions consistent with the core features of the emerging national security state.

After holding more than forty secret sessions during its first eighteen months, the JCAE considered recommending an extension of the terms of members of the AEC to 1950 without revealing either the content of its reasoning, the substance of its deliberations, or the nature of disagreement within the committee.
¹⁴⁶
The Democratic majority’s report explained:

Because of secrecy necessary to preserve knowledge essential to the production of atomic weapons, the operation of this vast set-up is clothed with restrictions and mandates for security, and the opportunity for public examination and evaluation of its progress and of the impact of its activities upon the our normal peacetime or even potential wartime economy are non-existent. This situation is unique in administrative policy of our nation. It places solemn responsibility on your joint committee.
¹⁴⁷

Within days of the House’s approval of the Atomic Energy Act, Soviet statesman Andrei Gromyko, speaking at the United Nations, rejected any plan for the supervision of atomic energy that did not vest its powers in the UN Security Council, where his country could exercise a veto.
¹⁴⁸
Following final passage of the Atomic Energy Act in August 1946, President Truman signed an executive order the day before the commission’s first day of operation that ordered the Department of War to hand over the Manhattan Project and its atomic weapons, fissionable materials, and research labs in eighteen states to the AEC, despite the army’s resistance to this transfer.
¹⁴⁹
Chairman Lilienthal swiftly made clear that he would impose a tighter rein on information than had prevailed since the war. He denounced the publication of the Department of War’s Smyth Report,
A General Account of the Development of Methods of Using Atomic Energy for Military Purposes under the Auspices of the United States Government 1940–1945,
which, he said during his Senate confirmation hearing, “has been the biggest breach of security since the beginning of the project,” notwithstanding the fact that it had included only information that was otherwise in the public realm and had left out all the complicated details, vital to making the bomb, that concerned metallurgy, engineering, and industrial production.
¹⁵⁰

Within months, Robert Oppenheimer felt “some melancholy,” having concluded on the basis of his service on the General Advisory Committee of the AEC, as he put things in 1954, “that the principal job of the Commission was to provide atomic weapons and good atomic weapons and many atomic weapons.”
¹⁵¹
It was Section 6 of the act—the part that placed the commission in charge of developing this arsenal when “the express consent of the President of the United States has been obtained . . . for such use as he deems necessary in the interest of national defense”—that became the law’s pivot, and the means to rectify the situation that the commission found when it came into being. As the law went into effect, there were no usable bombs in the stockpile; parts to build only a small number of these weapons; and no technology to construct them except by hand, the way Little Boy and Fat Man had been assembled. Notwithstanding the resolution of the conflict about civilian or military control, the commission thus primarily served strategic military purposes. More than anything else, it was “an off-budget subsidiary of the air force,” a task it pursued with great success.
¹⁵²

Noticing this development in 1948, Byron Miller, the wartime associate general counsel of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion, recorded “a definite swing to military emphasis despite the victory for ‘civilian control.’” With the Military Liaison Committee playing a significant role, the pendulum, he argued, had swung “way over toward military control in a period of war hysteria.” In addition to taking note of the remarkable degree of central state power, including insulated planning abilities, economic ownership and control, and command of scientific research, Miller also underscored the difficulties that had been created for the scientific community by the demand for secrecy and intrusive loyalty procedures.
¹⁵³
Looking back a decade later, the military staff writer for the
New York Herald Tribune,
Walter Millis, regretted how “the writing of the domestic atomic energy act, in the atmosphere of intense excitement, uncertainty and bewilderment which surrounded the subject in late 1945, contributed to the imprisonment of American atomic policy behind the bars of secrecy, rigidity and nationalist fears and bellicosity which were to hamper every subsequent effort at the solution of this gigantic world problem.”
¹⁵⁴

VI.

T
HE DISAPPOINTMENTS
of the postwar period, the rise of Cold War tensions, and the existence of atomic weapons made the question of how to organize America’s central institutions of national security urgent and pressing. In an emerging bipolar world with a growing number of flash points, it seemed imperative to arrange the federal government to overcome the inchoate structures with which it had come out of the war. As the troops moved home, the country’s strategic capacities were threatened by interservice rivalries, a lack of clarity about what would supplant OSS intelligence, and a slackening of investments in military technology that came close to freezing the development of more-advanced strategic bombers and atomic weapons. Further, by 1947, the United States had taken on a remarkable range of worldwide commitments, some with boots on the ground. In addition to the country’s responsibilities to defend the Western Hemisphere, an obligation that was formalized that year in the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, U.S. soldiers were now stationed in Japan and South Korea, Germany and Western Europe, and the Eastern Mediterranean.

What was clear, yet again, was how no prior set of arrangements would quite do. As a result, the United States entered a remarkable period of invention, a moment that witnessed the creation of a crusading state that would campaign—virtually without limit—on behalf of liberal democracy.

It had already become clear during the late stages of World War II that the increasing rift between the Department of War and the Department of the Navy—each with its own cabinet secretary, separate budget, and distinct congressional committees—had become a barrier to effective coordination. Certainly this is how Vice President Truman saw the issue when he published “Our Armed Forces Must be Unified” in
Collier’s
in August 1944.
¹⁵⁵

Truman, as it turned out, was something of an expert. No neophyte, he had served on the Military Affairs Committee as a member of the Senate, and had propelled his political career by chairing the Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program during World War II. He had also been attentive when Virginia Democrat Clifton Woodrum had led a House Select Committee from March to May of 1944 on “postwar military policy” that heard witness after witness, including Secretary of War Henry Stimson, make the case that the unification of the armed forces should be “the primary objective of the postwar period.” There was only one witness who demurred, the new secretary of the navy, James Forrestal, who was “not prepared to say that the Navy believes that the consolidation into one department is desirable.”
¹⁵⁶