Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (24 page)

This assessment was in some ways disingenuous. Most of Truman's top people were committed Anglophiles and Europe-firsters. They consistently focused on aiding western Europe, where United States interests were paramount, not on helping Chiang. Still, Acheson's paper was accurate in most respects. The Truman administration had tried to help Chiang's regime, to the tune of nearly $3 billion in aid since the war, only to watch the aid wasted by the corrupt and uninspiring Nationalist leadership. The President and Acheson were correct in saying that Chiang was his own worst enemy and that the United States did not have the economic or military capacity to save him.

Unfortunately for Acheson and Truman, Americans were in no mood to accept the White Paper's version of history. Alarmed by the rise of Communism, they had also been developing high expectations about the capacity of the country to have its way in the world. Henry Luce of
Life
and
Time
, raised in China as the son of Presbyterian missionaries, had long demanded greater American commitment to Chiang, and with others in a loosely organized but well-financed "China lobby" he led rising criticism of the administration's Asia policies after Chiang's defeat. Conservative Republicans, including Congressman Walter Judd of Minnesota, a former medical missionary in China, joined him. Many of these Republicans had been Asia-oriented since the days of President McKinley.
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Democratic Congressman John F. Kennedy, a Catholic anti-Communist, also assailed the President. He explained to an audience in Boston that "pinks" had betrayed American policy in China. "This is the tragic story of China, whose freedom we once fought to preserve. What our young men had saved, our diplomats and our Presidents have frittered away."
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These critics had varied motivations. Some were highly partisan Republicans. Shocked and embittered by Truman's unexpected victory in 1948, they were eager to tar the administration however they could. More generally, Americans were frustrated. Why couldn't the United States, the most powerful and wealthy nation in the world, prevent bad things from happening? As one observer put it, people had an "illusion of American omnipotence." When setbacks occurred—the Bomb in the USSR, "losing" China—the United States must have done something wrong. From this simplistic starting point it was an easy next step to lash out at scapegoats, including spies, "pinks," and "Commie sympathizers" in the government.

In dealing with frustrations such as these, high-level administration officials tried to muddle through. Acheson, while an ardent foe of the Soviet Union, not only defended the White Paper but also considered recommending that the United States eventually recognize, as many Western allies did, Mao's regime. Such a move, he hoped, might encourage Mao to act as a sort of "Asian Tito" and drive a wedge into international Communism.
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In January 1950 Acheson made a widely noted speech in which he excluded Taiwan (and South Korea) from the "defense perimeter" that he said the United States ought to protect.

The United States, however, did not recognize Red China. Mao, a revolutionary, acted hostilely toward the United States. Most Americans, moreover, believed in the existence of a worldwide Communist conspiracy, in which Mao and Stalin were twin demons. "Credibility" demanded that the United States stand firm against such a threat. For all these reasons the People's Republic continued to be treated as a major enemy. The United States turned a blind eye to Chiang's despotism in Taiwan and refused to support the admission of the People's Republic to the United Nations, whereupon the Soviet Union stalked out of the Security Council in January 1950. Fear of China also caused the Truman administration to stiffen its posture against Communist activity in neighboring Indochina, then under the uneasy rule of the French. In May 1950 the United States began sending military aid to Bao Dai, the puppet anti-Communist head of Vietnam.
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Although the aid at first was small—it was hardly noted at the time—it marked a further militarization and globalization of American foreign policy, and it quietly set in motion an ever-greater American commitment against Communist influence in Southeast Asia.

T
HESE COMMITMENTS
paled before the two most important and long-range policy consequences of the events of 1949: the Truman administration's decision to go ahead with development of the hydrogen bomb, or "Super," in January 1950, and the consensus of top military and foreign policy planners behind one of the key documents of the Cold War, National Security Council Document 68, in April.

Unlike the A-bomb, which almost everyone in the know had favored developing in the early 1940s, the idea of producing a hydrogen bomb evoked passionate arguments in late 1949 and early 1950. Scientists expected that the Super, a fusion or "thermonuclear" weapon, would be an awesomely destructive horror that could unleash the equivalent of several million tons of TNT. This was hundreds of times more powerful than atomic bombs. A few well-placed hydrogen bombs could kill millions of people.

Among the foes of development were famous scientists who had supported atomic development during World War II. One was Albert Einstein, who took to the radio to say that "general annilihation beckons."
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Another was James Conant, the president of Harvard, who served on a general advisory committee of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). He opposed developing the Super on moral grounds, arguing that "there are grades of morality." He also believed that the H-bomb was unnecessary because the United States already had enough atomic power to deter all aggressors. Also influential in the fight against the super was J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was widely known for his scientific expertise, his literary talents (he had learned seven languages, including Sanskrit, as a prodigy at Harvard), and his managerial skills as the director of atomic bomb manufacture at Los Alamos during the war. "Oppie," as he was known to his friends, had many left-wing associates. His brother and his wife had been Communists in the 1930s. But his opposition to development of the Super was not politically inspired. It rested, like Conant's, on a combination of moral revulsion and practical policy considerations. Their arguments carried the day in the advisory committee, which recommended against development.
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Leading government officials, too, had doubts about the hydrogen bomb. Among them was Kennan, who wrote a seventy-nine-page memorandum opposing the Super before he left the government in January 1950. Kennan believed in what was later called "minimum deterrence," which he thought possible with a decent arsenal of atomic bombs. He urged the United States to say that it stood for "no first use" of nuclear weapons. David Lilienthal, who headed the AEC, agreed with Kennan. He favored negotiating with the Soviet Union in the hope that both countries would agree not to develop the new weapons.
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Other government officials, however, strongly urged development. Eleanor Roosevelt, whom Truman had named to America's UN delegation, came out for it in January. Lewis Strauss, a dissenter from the AEC report, considered it "unwise to renounce unilaterally any weapon which an enemy can reasonably be expected to possess." The Joint Chiefs maintained that the bomb would be a deterrent as well as "an offensive weapon of the greatest known power possibilities." Senator Brien McMahon, chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, expressed a common viewpoint on Capitol Hill when he wrote Truman, "Any idea that American renunciation of the super would inspire hope in the world or that 'disarmament by example' would earn us respect is so suggesstive of an appeasement psychology and so at variance with the bitter lessons learned before, during and after two recent world wars that I will comment no further." No statement more clearly revealed the fear of "appeasement," rooted in the "lessons of history," that lay behind a host of Cold War decisions by American officials in the postwar era.
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On January 31, 1950, Truman decided in favor of development. He was influenced in part by the position of the Joint Chiefs, particularly by General Bradley, whom Truman admired greatly. He was also keenly aware, as was Dean Acheson, of the criticism he would get from conservatives and other anti-Communists if he opposed the H-bomb. Most important, no one could be sure that the Soviets would not go ahead on their own. "Can the Russians do it?" he asked his final advisory committee of Acheson, Lilienthal, and Defense Secretary Johnson. All nodded yes. "In that case," Truman replied, "we have no choice. We'll go ahead." Truman later explained to his staff, "[We] had to do it—make the bomb—though no one wants to use it. But . . . we have got to have it if only for bargaining purposes with the Russians."
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When Truman announced his decision, many liberals were appalled. Max Lerner wrote, "One of the great moral battles of our time has been lost. To move toward the ultimate weapon could mean only an ever-escalating arms race, the possible decay of democracy in a garrison atmosphere . . . and the possibilities of unimaginable horror." Other liberals, however, backed the President. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., replied to critics like Lerner by asking, "Does morality ever require a society to expose itself to the threat of absolute destruction?"
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Schlesinger's answer, of course, was no, as was Truman's. Given the frigid Cold War atmosphere of early 1950, the decision to go ahead with the hydrogen bomb seems to have been virtually unavoidable.

Development, as it turned out, proved complicated, in part because of formidable mathematical problems involved. But scientists and mathematicians, including the strongly anti-Communist Hungarian refugees Edward Teller and John von Neumann, persisted. With the help of more powerful computers, which were becoming vitally important in the hightech world of American weaponry, they moved rapidly ahead. The world's first thermonuclear explosion took place on November 1, 1952, at Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands of the Pacific.

The explosion exceeded all expectations, throwing off a fireball five miles high and four miles wide and a mushroom cloud twenty-five miles high and 1,200 miles wide. Eniwetok disappeared, replaced by a hole in the Pacific floor that was a mile long and 175 feet deep. Scientists figured that if the blast had been detonated over land, it would have vaporized cities the size of Washington and leveled all of New York City from Central Park to Washington Square.

Eight months later, on August 12, 1953, the Soviets followed suit, setting off a blast in Siberia. Premier Georgi Malenkov announced, "the United States no longer has a monopoly on the hydrogen bomb." His boast was somewhat misleading, for the Soviets (like the Americans) did not yet have the capacity to make a "bomb" light enough to be delivered on a target. Still, development raced ahead in the next few years, not only in the United States and the Soviet Union but also in other nations. The age of nuclear proliferation and of maximum possible destruction was near at hand.
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The Super represented one half of the plans in 1950 for America's future military posture. National Security Council Document 68 (NSC-68), which called for vast increases in defense spending, was the other. It, too, had its roots in late January. Truman then authorized a study of defense policy and named Paul Nitze, who had succeeded Kennan as head of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, to head the effort. Nitze, a close associate of Acheson, was yet another Establishmentarian—private school and Harvard graduate, Wall Street investment banker, official since 1940 in the Navy and the State departments, and vice-chairman of the postwar Strategic Bombing Survey that had explored the impact of air raids during World War II. Another key adviser in the process that led to NSC-68 in April was Robert Lovett, who later that year left his own investment banking business to return to government as the Deputy Secretary of Defense.

Nitze, Lovett, and the others who worked on NSC-68 in early 1950 were virtually fixated on the Soviet atomic explosion, and they adopted a worst-case scenario for the world. Asserting that the USSR would have the capacity to deliver 100 atomic weapons on the United States by 1954, they rejected arguments that a moderate mix of economic, military, political, and psychological measures would be sufficient to contain the Soviet Union and keep major areas of industrial-military value—mostly in western Europe—out of hostile hands.
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They insisted instead that the Soviet Union was an aggressive, implacable, and dangerous foe that either directly or indirectly (by infiltration and intimidation) sought domination of the world. As Lovett put it in an apocalyptic memo:

We must realize that we are now in a mortal conflict; that we are now in a war worse than any we have experienced. Just because there is not much shooting as yet does not mean that we are in a cold war. It is not a cold war; it is a hot war. The only difference between this and previous wars is that death comes more slowly and in a different fashion.
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The obvious conclusion was that the United States and its allies must build up not only their nuclear power but also their more conventional forces "to a point at which the combined strength will be superior . . . to the forces that can be brought to bear by the Soviet Union and its satellites." This amounted to what was later called a policy of "flexible response." Although the committee did not include cost estimates for this policy, advocates understood that military spending would have to quadruple to around $50 billion a year, which would "provide an adequate defense against air attack on the United States and Canada and an adequate defense against air and surface attack on the United Kingdom and Western Europe, Alaska, the Western Pacific, Africa, and the Near and Middle East, and on long lines of communication to those areas."
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