Fifties (5 page)

That monopoly had given America an edge in the immediate postwar era. Our defense plans, such as they were, were largely based on our exclusive control of the bomb. The initial assumption on the part of America’s top scientists and intelligence analysts was that the Soviets were some five years behind us in developing nuclear weapons. That forecast did not change: As the new decade approached, we assumed that they were
still
five years behind us. If anything our military-intelligence people were even more confident: The Army thought the Soviets would not have the bomb until 1960, the Navy, not until 1965; the Air Force, though, estimated 1952. In general we were skeptical of Soviet expertise, especially with regard to Soviet science. There was a joke at the time, the scientist Herbert York noted, “that the Russians could not surreptitiously introduce nuclear bombs in suitcases into the United States because they had not yet been able to perfect a suitcase.” Among those who held firmly to the idea of Soviet ineptitude was Truman himself. When he first met the head of Los Alamos, J. Robert Oppenheimer, in 1946, Truman asked Oppenheimer when the Russians would be able to build a bomb. Oppenheimer answered that he did not know. “I know,” Truman said. “When?” Oppenheimer asked. “Never,” the President said.

The American monopoly on nuclear weapons ended on September 3, 1949. On that day a long-range reconnaissance plane, which the United States used to sample the stratosphere, showed an unusually high level of radioactivity—a filter on the plane read 85 counts a minute—anything above 50 triggered an alert. A second filter showed 153 counts a minute. The overpowering evidence was that the Soviets had exploded some kind of atomic device.

Two days later another plane, flying from Guam to Japan, showed a count of more than 1,000. Scientists in Washington discovered fission isotopes of barium and cerium in the samples, and shortly thereafter an additional fission isotope, molybdenum, was found. The only question remaining was whether this was the result of a device intentionally exploded by the Russians or a nuclear accident. A panel of nuclear specialists in Washington decided that the Russians had indeed set off an atomic bomb, much like the one at Alamogordo, and that the explosion had taken place sometime between August 26 and 29. They even figured out the general location—on the Asian part of the Soviet landmass. The American code name for the explosion, in honor of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator, was known as Joe One.

By September 19 the five members of the Atomic Energy Commission went to tell the president that there was no doubt about what
had happened. Truman, still dubious, kept asking, “Are you
sure
?” He then speculated that captured German scientists must have been responsible. (Truman never completely accepted the fact that the Russians had the bomb; in 1953, when his presidency was over, he told a group of reporters, “I’m not convinced that Russia has the bomb. I’m not convinced that the Russians have achieved the know-how to put the complicated mechanism together to make an A-bomb work.”) The commissioners pushed for Truman to make an immediate announcement, lest the news leak from the government or, even worse, from the Russians themselves. David Lilienthal, head of the Atomic Energy Commission, argued that the news would be less jarring if it came from Truman himself. But the British pound had been devalued the day before and the world’s financial centers were already panicked; it was decided that the President should wait a few days.

On September 23, 1949, Harry Truman announced that the Soviets had exploded an atomic device. He did not use the word
bomb,
and his statement was carefully worded to minimize alarm: “Ever since atomic energy was first released by man, the eventual development of this new force by other nations was to be expected. This probability has always been taken into account by us,” the President’s statement said. Nonetheless, the American atomic monopoly had ended. It was, Lilienthal noted in his diary the night before, “what we’d feared ever since January, 1946.” Both American foreign and domestic politics were instantly and dramatically altered. This, noted Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the leading Republican internationalist, “is now a different world.” At a congressional meeting right after Truman’s announcement, Senator Tom Connally, arguing for support of the president’s programs said, “Russia has shown her teeth.”

There were no contingency plans. J. Robert Oppenheimer testified before Congress and a troubled Senator Vandenberg asked him, almost pleadingly, “Doctor, what shall we do now?” “Stay strong and hold on to our friends,” Oppenheimer answered. In the words of SAC commander Curtis LeMay—who had a penchant for saying aloud what some other military men were merely thinking—Joe One ended “the era when we might have destroyed Russia completely and not even skinned our elbows in doing it.” In the postwar years, the President had once confided to David Lilienthal that had it not been for our atomic monopoly, “the Russians would probably have taken over Europe a long time ago.” Whether that was true or not, there was no doubt that in the years after World War Two, the Soviets had
kept a vast part of the powerful and victorious Red Army in uniform, a significant part of it stationed in the very heart of Central Europe; the Americans, while still posting what was the beginning of a multinational force in Western Europe, had disarmed at what most top military men considered an alarming rate. Indeed America’s demobilization, Truman had noted acidly at a cabinet meeting in October 1945, was going so fast that it was not so much a demobilization as a disintegration of the armed forces.

At one point in 1946, Truman, depressed by the lack of congressional support for any degree of military readiness, had confided to Henry Wallace, his secretary of agriculture, that America could not get tough with the Soviet Union because it was down to one fully equipped division. By early 1947 America’s armed forces had been cut from their wartime strength of 12 million to 1.5 million; by 1947 the annual military budget had been cut to $10.3 billion, from a wartime high of $90.9 billion.

On this issue the nation was at crosscurrents with itself. The foreign-policy establishment (both Democratic and Republican), located primarily in the East, saw its role ever more clearly as taking the baton as leader of the world’s democracies from Britain, whose power continued to ebb after World War Two. If there was a mandate, it was for anti-Communism rather than genuine internationalism. That the postwar peace was both uneasy and expensive was difficult for many Americans to accept. Once allies, the Soviet Union and China were about to become adversaries: archadversaries Japan, Germany, and Italy were becoming allies.

For a time the atomic monopoly had offered us something of a bargain-basement defense policy. Often in this period those whose rhetoric was most jingoistic—in particular the Republican far right—were the most recalcitrant about spending for defense and for foreign aid, and the most reluctant to deal with the realities of the complicated postwar era. One vignette will do: J. Parnell Thomas, who was later to make a significant name for himself as the head of the House Un-American Activities Committee, fancied himself as a man who was going to save America from its Communist enemies while at the same time making sure that we did not pay very much to do it. J. Lawton Collins, a distinguished corps commander in World War Two, remembered going up to the Hill in 1946 with General Dwight Eisenhower to meet with Thomas. The issue was what could be done to speed demobilization—in the then current phrase to “bring the boys home.” As Ike and Collins entered the room, they found that Thomas had rigged the setting. Around a
table was a group of young women, clearly wives of soldiers, and on the table was a huge pile of baby shoes. The instant the two generals entered the room, news photographers, alerted earlier by Thomas, snapped away: The resulting photos record for posterity the women, the shoes, a grinning Thomas, and a furious Ike.

Neither political party had covered itself with glory during the rush to demobilize. Few politicians dared to speak of an enduring, complicated, and
expensive
peace. Truman, to his credit, tried to pass an act calling for a large trained reserve and national guard. He called it Universal Military Training, or UMT. It had been his dream since he served in World War One, and he envisioned it as a critical part of a permanent “citizens’ army.” Every young man between the ages of eighteen and twenty would give his country one year and then stand by in a reserve or national-guard unit; they could be conscripted only by an act of Congress. He had broad support from such men as Marshall, Eisenhower, and Stimson, but the Congress was not interested.

Thus America had been cheating as a military power, and, for Truman, the Soviet explosion was terrible news: Already besieged for being soft on Communism, he now faced the terrible decision of whether or not to pursue the development of a hydrogen bomb, a weapon far more powerful than the atomic bomb. The Soviet test left him little room in which to maneuver. For unknown to Truman at the time was the fact that he was about to inherit a major debate that had been raging in scientific circles: whether or not to go ahead with the hydrogen bomb.

The fear of a German victory had quashed any doubts on the part of the scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project. It was only at the very end of the war, with Germany defeated and Japan near defeat, that questions arose over its use. There were those who thought that a demonstration of the bomb might be as effective as actually using it. But J. Robert Oppenheimer, later pilloried for being soft during the Cold War, took it upon himself to kill a petition of his fellow scientists holding that view. Right after the successful use of the atomic bomb, reporters questioned Oppenheimer about the morality of what the Los Alamos team had achieved and he answered, in words that were to haunt him later, “a scientist cannot hold back progress because of fears of what the world will do with his discoveries.”

Most scientific breakthroughs bring satisfaction to those involved. Not this one. From the moment the explosion took place, there was an awareness that an instrument of darkness had been
discovered. George Kistiakowsky, who had done so much to fashion the bomb, thought that the Trinity explosion was a glimpse of the apocalypse—“in the last milli-second of the earth’s existence—the last men will see what we saw.” Kenneth Bainbridge, the director of the test, turned to Oppenheimer and said, “Now we’re all sons of bitches.” Oppenheimer himself went back to his base and found a normally cool-headed young researcher vomiting outside the office. The reaction, Oppenheimer thought, had begun. When James Conant returned to Washington from Los Alamos, his colleague George Harrison greeted him and said: “Congratulations, it worked.” “It worked,” Conant answered. “As to congratulations I am far from sure—that remains for history to decide.” Nor was Oppenheimer himself immune from the same doubts. A few weeks later he wrote to his high school teacher Herbert Smith, “You will believe that this undertaking has not been without its misgivings; they are heavy on us today, when the future, which has so many elements of high promise, is yet only a stone’s throw from despair ...” Still, there was a consensus in high-level political circles that the atomic bomb had probably saved millions of lives, given the way the Japanese had resisted American forces, island by island.

The debate over the hydrogen bomb was different in every way. It was being made in a time of peace, albeit a shaky one, and unlike the atomic bomb, the very fact of its development was not a closely held secret. Its nickname in defense and scientific circles said it all—the super bomb or, simply, the Super. Lilienthal referred to it in his diary as Campbell’s—as in soup. Here, with one terrible strike, was the capacity to unleash 1 million tons of TNT. Given the fact that in all World War Two only 3 million tons of TNT had been used, the imagination could scarcely comprehend this new destructive power. It was far more than a more powerful alternative to the atomic bomb; it threatened the very existence of humanity.

The possibility of creating this terrible weapon had been there for some time. While still engaged in research on the atomic bomb in 1942, Edward Teller and Emil Konopinski had formulated a series of calculations that they believed would show the impossibility of using an atomic bomb to ignite a thermonuclear reaction in deuterium. But as Teller wrote: “The more we worked on our report, the more obvious it became that the roadblocks which I had erected for [Enrico] Fermi’s idea were not so high after all. We hurdled them one by one and concluded that heavy hydrogen could be ignited by an atomic bomb to produce an explosion of tremendous magnitude. By the time we were on our way to California ... we even thought we
knew precisely how to do it.” Initially, Teller suggested that the explosion might even ignite the nitrogen in the air and the hydrogen in the oceans. The suggestion so upset Oppenheimer that he boarded a train—he was forbidden to use the telephone on matters this grave, and he was also forbidden to fly—to go and talk with Nobel Prize–winning physicist Arthur Compton, who was vacationing in Michigan. Compton’s immediate reaction was: “Better be a slave under the Nazi heel than to draw down the final curtain on humanity.”

When the atomic, or fission, bomb was dropped in August 1945, abruptly ending the war, the question of the fusion bomb, or the Super, was temporarily set aside. A fission bomb came from splitting the atom, turning matter into energy; a fusion bomb used the intense heat generated by an atomic bomb—equal to or greater than that at the earth’s core—to release neutrons that bombarded the compound lithium deuteride inside the weapon. The key to it was heavy water, or heavy hydrogen, water in which deuterium replaced hydrogen. It had to be distilled from tons of ordinary water in an elaborate process. Each kilo of heavy hydrogen equaled about 85,000 tons of traditional TNT. Thus, as Richard Rhodes has noted, twelve kilos of heavy hydrogen was twenty-six pounds, and could be ignited by one atomic bomb. A comparable fission explosion would demand some
five hundred
atomic bombs.