By 1949 atomic bombs were viewed in the United States through two contradictory perspectives. On the one hand they were seen as being particularly suitable for aggressors and unprovoked surprise attacks, and thus at variance with American constitutional and military practice. On the other hand they were also increasingly assumed to be, at least for the moment, a valuable strategic asset. They offered an effective instrument for maintaining law and order in the post-war world, attractive because they were less expensive in terms of money, materials and manpower than conventional weapons, and, above all, because they were an American monopoly.
This monopoly was broken with a test of a Soviet device, which followed the US ‘Fat Man’ model, at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan on 29 August 1949.1 This was far earlier than expected by US intelligence estimates. Although an estimate in 1946 had suggested that a first test could come as early as 1950, over time this had been pushed back to 1953. At the same time provisions had been made to check whether a weapon had been tested using weather reconnaissance aircraft operating out of Japan. They carried filters designed to pick up traces of radioactive materials. A few days after the test one picked up samples. Once analysed the results were reported to Truman who in turn made the news public: ‘We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the U.S.S.R.’ In this way he made the announcement for Stalin, who presumably intended to keep the success secret for the time being.2
A number of years would have to pass before this would turn into an atomic stockpile. Indeed, by the time of Stalin’s death in 1953, the USSR only possessed a dozen bombs compared to a US arsenal of some 1350.3 However, a substantial Soviet stockpile was now assumed to be inevitable. This development had a paradoxical effect. While it discouraged doctrines based upon atomic weapons as a uniquely American advantage, it also locked the United States into a nuclear strategy. The nuclear arsenal appeared as a ‘wasting asset’ but one that it was now impossible to relinquish.4
The response in the US to the evidence of a developing Soviet capability for both the manufacture and delivery of atom bombs was not to back away from a nuclear strategy but to raise the stakes, moving to the development of hydrogen bombs, ushering in an age of nuclear plenty and confirming a trend towards ever-increasing levels of destruction. The speed of technological advance over this period rendered some of the most authoritative and reasoned writing of the period anachronistic. Those who speculated about novel forms of warfare now seemed quite prescient. The sensationalists were more accurate in their predictions. After the war the USAF’s Strategic Air Command (SAC) depended on the 4000-mile range B-29, and the longer-range derivative the B-50. To reach the Soviet Union it was necessary to employ either overseas bases or aerial tankers. In-flight refuelling permitted large distances to be flown without stopping; but without enough tankers to refuel every offensive bomber (and capabilities never approached this level) overseas bases were still needed. In 1949, the first deliveries were made of a new medium-range bomber (the B-46) which could fly at much higher speeds than the B-29 and B-50 and so was more able to penetrate air defences. This aircraft became the mainstay of SAC for the first half of the 1950s. The first long-range (over 8000 miles) bomber was the B-36, introduced in 1948. This was not a popular plane with the USAF because of the altitude at which it flew, and it was acquired only in small numbers. It was not until the B-52 became operational in 1955 that a satisfactory long-range bomber was available.
When that date, 1952, arrives … the whole military picture will change. You will no longer have military superiority as we know it today. The enemy, even though possessing fewer bombs than we may have, will have enough either to destroy our striking force or the major cities of this country or both. … In my mind we now face a basic change in our concept. We must not only plan to destroy the enemy industrial power but we must be capable at the same time of destroying his force before it destroys us.8
A true symmetry in capabilities, denying any notable strategic advantage to either side, was some years distant. There was therefore an argument for making the most of the US superiority, in numbers and in quality of delivery vehicles, while it lasted. With the Soviets seriously engaged in bomb production, not to do so would be folly. This underlined the extent to which the visible entry of the Soviet Union into the arms race removed an element of choice from US policy. The decision to emphasize or de-emphasize nuclear weapons in any future conflict could not be one for the US alone.
Following the Soviet test, a decision to expand production of all types of atomic (fission) bombs was not contentious. Much more so was the decision to develop the hydrogen bomb, announced by President Truman on 31 January 1950. This followed an intensive though exclusive debate (possibly involving no more than 100 people) between proponents and opponents of the new weapon within the scientific and defence establishments on the wisdom of developing weapons of such enormous destructive force.9
In the fission bomb, energy is released when heavy nuclei split. The principle of the fusion bomb is based on the energy released when the lightest atoms combine to form heavier atoms. To initiate this fusion process a considerable investment in energy is required; more than can normally be produced by artificial methods. However, a sufficiently high temperature to cause fusion reactions with the heavier isotopes of hydrogen (deuterium or tritium) can be caused by exploding a uranium or plutonium fission bomb. There is no critical size for the material necessary to produce fusion; the amounts of the reacting elements determine the size of the eventual explosion.
The possibility of fusion bombs with yields many times that of the first fission bombs was recognized early in the Manhattan Project. After the end of the war, work in this area had proceeded with a low priority because of the urgent need to exploit the known technology of fission bombs. Following the Soviet explosion, those scientists who had been most enthusiastic about the prospects for a thermonuclear reaction, notably Edward Teller, took the opportunity to agitate for a major national effort directed towards this objective. They promoted the ‘super’, as it was known during the brief debate of the closing months of 1949, as the logical next step in nuclear development and one which would provide a substantial measure of superiority for the nation that mastered its principles first.10
There is no limit to the explosive power of the bomb itself except that imposed by the requirements of delivery…. Taking into account the probable limitations of carriers likely to be available for the delivery of such a weapon, it has generally been estimated that the weapon would have an explosive effect of some hundreds of times that of present fission bombs…
It is clear that the use of this weapon would bring about the destruction of innumerable human lives; it is not a weapon which can be used exclusively for the destruction of material installations of military or semi-military purposes. Its use therefore carries much further than the atomic bomb itself the policy of exterminating civilian populations.
In more strongly worded appended opinions, the ‘super’ was described as being a ‘weapon of genocide’, ‘beyond any military objectives’ and into the ‘range of very great natural catastrophe’.14
It was questioned whether any extra benefit even in the area of strategic bombardment could be provided by the ‘super’. If the Russians used a ‘super’ against the United States, ‘reprisals by our large stock of atomic bombs would be comparably effective to the use of the super’. David Lilienthal, the outgoing chairman of the AEC, argued that a decision to build the ‘super’ would be ‘widely regarded as a confirmation in the clearest possible terms of our present chief and almost sole reliance upon this kind of armament against the Russians.’ It would ‘tend to confuse and, unwittingly, hide’ the fact that ‘we are today relying on an asset that is readily depreciating for us, i.e., weapons of mass destruction’. As a consequence of this confusion it would become ‘more difficult to find some other course’.15 The alternative approach recommended by the GAC involved developing small atom bombs for ‘tactical’ use rather than large hydrogen bombs for mass destruction.
Are we to rely upon weapons of mass destruction as an integral and vitally important component of our military strength, which we would expect to employ deliberately, immediately, and unhesitatingly in the event that we become involved in a military conflict with the Soviet Union? Or are we to retain such weapons in our national arsenal only as a deterrent to the use of similar weapons against ourselves and as a possible means of retaliation in case they are used?16
This was not, however, a new question. The question of first and early use of atomic weapons had been around since the discussions about deterring the Soviet Union were prompted by the Berlin blockade. There had been no authoritative answer but the evident inclination was to make the most of American atomic assets. Others, such as Kennan, remained uneasy about fitting such a repugnant weapon into American military and foreign policy. Politically it gave the Soviet Union a propaganda advantage allowing it to class the Americans as ‘warmongers’. Eschewing the ‘super’ would provide an opportunity for the US to set an international example.17 Lilienthal took the view that ‘The American policy and program for peace has made encouraging progress. As of today, it has a fair prospect of growing steadily stronger, as the months go by.’ The ‘super’ would endanger that course. Something suitable only for unlimited destruction and without peaceful applications could lead ‘a large part of the world to believe that we are going far beyond any possible military needs, that we have abandoned our program for peace and are resigned to war.’18
Yet to those reviewing the decision, the ‘super’ increased the amount of destructive power by dramatic orders of magnitude but the moral and strategic issues raised differed from those of two years earlier only in degree. The most pressing new strategic issue was the confirmation of Soviet capabilities in this area. This could provide a justification both for the ‘super’ and for less dependence on a nuclear strategy. This was the line eventually followed by the political and military leadership. These arguments of Kennan, Lilienthal, and Oppenheimer failed to convince them. The moment was not propitious for another initiative on arms control. In the aftermath of the Berlin airlift, the fall of China to the communists, and the Soviet bomb, there was little optimism about the prospects for useful negotiations on almost any issue. Nor was it accepted that there was a moral distinction between one big explosion and a number of smaller explosions causing equal or greater damage.
In war it is folly to argue whether one weapon is more immoral than another. For, in the larger sense, it is war itself which is immoral, and the stigma of such immorality must rest upon the nation which initiates hostilities.20
Acheson, the Secretary of State, though sympathetic to Lilienthal’s desire not to prejudge key defence issues by a hasty move to an H-bomb, and though he later was ‘strongly persuaded toward an increased conventional capability’, felt that the American people would tolerate neither restraint nor a new effort at arms control. Meanwhile ‘our delaying research would not delay Soviet research’.21 When making his decision Truman asked one simple question: ‘Can the Russians do it?’ When told that they could he responded: ‘In that case, we have no choice. We’ll go ahead’.22 The Soviet atom bomb had introduced a sense of an arms race in a way that it had not been felt before. It was now felt imperative to stay ahead, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
The opponents of the ‘super’ had sought to strengthen their position by adumbrating an alternative strategy, in which the explosive power of nuclear weapons was to be harnessed to established forms of land and sea warfare, with soldiers and sailors for targets rather than civilians. To achieve this strategic shift, they had to change perceptions of atom bombs as weapons suitable only for attacking cities. Because of their cost and scarcity, and also because of the ability of military forces to disperse, in early debates the consensus view was that atomic bombs were unlikely to be used against conventional military targets. In 1945 Viner suggested that ‘Under atom bomb warfare, the soldier in the army would be safer than his wife and children in their urban home.’23
Interest in the possibility of using nuclear weapons on the battlefield in a ‘tactical’ manner grew amongst those seeking a better strategy than one relying on terror-bombing of cities. Tactical nuclear weapons appeared as a means of combining the technological asset of atomic energy with a desire to fight wars in a traditional way as a clash of professional armies rather than as a process of destruction. The US Army displayed some interest in the tactical applications of atomic weapons. General Bradley wrote in 1949 how the A-bomb ‘in its tactical aspect, may well contribute towards a stable equilibrium of forces since it tends to strengthen a defensive army’.24 This assumption played a major role in encouraging advocacy of tactical weapons.
The hydrogen weapon offers us our only real hope of stopping the Red Army. Tactical A-weapons will serve the highly useful purpose of causing the Russians to disperse their troops, but once they are dispersed they will present less and less suitable targets for small yield A-weapons. The result is that an enormous number of ‘ordinary’ A-weapons would be required to knock out the dispersed targets, and they would have to be placed on very small targets with great accuracy—far more accuracy than we have been able to achieve hitherto. What is needed is an area weapon whose yields are so great that it need not be delivered with exquisite precision, nor in astronomical numbers.25
So long as the atomic stockpile was small, diverting weapons to battlefield use meant taking them away from the Strategic Air Command (SAC), by far the dominant command within the USAF, far more so than Tactical Air Command. This revived old arguments over whether airpower should be used in support of ground warfare or for direct attacks on the socioeconomic structure of the enemy. The Air Force continued to oppose the use of the bomb in anything other than a strategic mode, suggesting that those who advocated such things did not have the best interests of US security at heart.
What we are working toward here is a situation where we will have atomic weapons in almost as complete a variety as conventional ones, and a situation where we can use them in the same way. This would include artillery shells, guided missiles, torpedoes, rockets and bombs for ground support amongst others and it would include big ones for big situations.27
The consequence of this debate, therefore, was not a preference for one type of weapon over another but to press forward with both.
The other criticism from opponents of the ‘super’ was that the decision was made without reference to larger questions of foreign and military policy. At the end of January 1950, President Truman issued a directive to the Secretaries of State and Defense ‘to undertake a re-examination of our objectives in peace and war and of the effect of these objectives on our strategic plans, in the light of the probable fission bomb capability and possible thermonuclear bomb capability of the Soviet Union’. The main drafting of the report was undertaken by Paul Nitze, who had taken over from George Kennan as Head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff. The result, known as NSC-68, was presented to the National Security Council (NSC) in April 1950.28
NSC-68’s main purpose was to impress upon its bureaucratic readership the Soviet threat to world peace and how this was best addressed through increased military preparedness. The prose was stern and uncompromising, perhaps reflecting the effort required getting this message over to the responsible sections of the State and Defense Departments. Defense Secretary Louis Johnson fought a rearguard action. As a fiscal conservative he did not support the plea for higher military expenditure. Others, such as the recently displaced Kennan, regretted the unsubtle analysis of Soviet intentions.
NSC-68 offered a prospect of persistent East-West antagonism, with a danger of war not only from miscalculations in the midst of a crisis, but as a consequence of premeditated Soviet aggression. The Soviet Union, or more precisely ‘the Kremlin’, was identified as an ideal-type aggressor. Already an imposition on the Russian people, it was now attempting to inflict its will on the rest of the world. The moves of the Kremlin were based on a calculation of risks. The risk in 1950, when the document was written, posed by the US atomic arsenal was probably adequate to deter the Kremlin from ‘a deliberate direct attack against ourselves or other free people’. If war did come ‘it was hardly conceivable that … the Soviet leaders would refrain from the use of atomic weapons unless they felt fully confident of attaining their objectives by other means’. In addition NSC-68 accepted that the natural way to fight a nuclear war was to get in a surprise attack and that totalitarian states enjoyed a comparative advantage over open societies in their ability to ‘strike swiftly and with stealth’. Little confidence was expressed in the proposition that two large atomic capabilities could co-exist, mutually deterred, in a stable relationship. Rather, they would threaten each other. This could serve as an ‘incitement to war’.
In the absence of effective arms control it would appear that we have no alternative but to increase our atomic armaments as rapidly as other considerations make appropriate. In either case, it appears to be imperative to increase as rapidly as possible our general air, ground and sea strength and that of our allies to a point where we are militarily not so heavily dependent on atomic weapons.
For the moment, the imbalance in conventional capabilities meant that the United States could not hold back on nuclear use. NSC-68 therefore rejected proposals for a policy of no first use of nuclear weapons. ‘In our present situation of relative unpreparedness in conventional weapons, such a declaration would be interpreted by the USSR as an admission of great weakness and by our allies as a clear indication that we intended to abandon them.’ Instead it urged building up strong and ready conventional forces-in-being around the periphery of the Soviet Union to support the established policy of containment. This would require alliances with states close to the Soviet Union and its satellites, who would provide their own forces in the knowledge that, in the event of hostilities, the United States would move to support them speedily and decisively. In theory such a strategy would reduce dependence on nuclear weapons but in practice it required a far larger military expenditure than had hitherto been deemed desirable or necessary.
By the time Truman approved NSC-68, in September 1950, international developments had strengthened the force of the Report’s main conclusions. In June 1950 communist North Korea invaded the South. Given the widespread view among American policymakers that its leader Kim Il-Sung was merely a Soviet puppet, this led to the belief that the Soviet Union had now switched its policy from subversion to outright aggression. The United States, with token support from its allies and under the aegis of the United Nations, rushed to the South’s defence. Under General MacArthur, the American-led forces regained the initiative, taking the war well into the North. Unfortunately they took it too far, provoking China into joining the fight to keep the enemy away from its borders. The Chinese intervention was effective and the war degenerated into stalemate.
In terms of nuclear strategy, the Korean War demonstrated that, in a period when the world’s two greatest powers were nervous about getting into an all-out war with each other, any conflict would be subjected to major political constraints. The experience suggested that when it came to the crunch, atomic bombs were not perceived as ordinary weapons but as something special to be handled with care, almost as if a taboo prevented their use.29
President Truman’s distaste for atomic weapons was shared by America’s Allies, particularly the British. The initial advice in London was that ‘dropping of an Atom Bomb in North Korea would be unsound. The effects of such action would be world-wide and might be very damaging. Moreover it would probably provoke a global war.’30 When Truman hinted in a press conference that atom bomb use might be considered (though adding it was a ‘terrible weapon’), Prime Minister Clement Attlee hurried over the Atlantic to urge restraint. Mere mention of the bomb, Truman noted, made Europeans ‘jittery’. The US State Department suspected even fiercer reactions from countries far less friendly than Britain. So great were the sensitivities that it was decided that General Curtis LeMay, the commander of SAC, and known as ‘Mr Atom Bomb’, should be left off a trip to Korea in early 1951 lest his presence ‘excite people unduly’.31 The political risks attached to the bomb’s use exceeded any putative military gains. In Asia feelings ran high. The possible slaughter of more Asians became bound up with critiques of racism and imperialism, themes which were also picked up in Soviet propaganda. ‘Asiatic opinion’, noted an Indian paper, ‘which has already strongly disapproved of this terror weapon on Japan, will be horrified if Chinese or Korean cities are devastated in the same manner.’32
Whereas at one level, mere possession of atomic weapons was deemed to have utility in its own right, the small numbers of bombs proved to be a limiting factor cautioning against their use. At the start of the war, the Soviet atomic capability was still in its infancy and with only limited means of delivery available. Whilst some Chinese advocates of intervention argued that the Soviet bomb would deter the Americans from nuclear use, Soviet military planners appreciated their weakness and saw this as reason for restraint.33 Using up their few bombs would leave them vulnerable to retaliation from the much larger American atomic arsenal.34
When the war began the US atomic stockpile was still relatively small although growing—292 bombs at the start of the war and approximately 400 by the end of 1950.35 The view in government was that it had to be kept in reserve, particularly as it was widely assumed that Korea was merely a diversion from a big Soviet push being prepared for Europe. Nor was it clear to local commanders how atomic weapons could be profitably employed.36 Targets of strategic value in North Korea could be dealt with readily by conventional bombardment, and those North of the Yalu, in China, were out of bounds. Targets of tactical value, such as the position of enemy troops, could rarely be reported accurately and sufficiently quickly to permit destruction with atomic weapons. The rugged terrain of Korea would mean that the effects of individual bombs would be contained and the effects further limited by dispersing forces. Enemy troop concentrations of sufficient size to ensure a bomb’s effectiveness were hard to find and then they risked being close to the allied forces. At the start of the American intervention, when the fighting was taking place in South Korea any use would be devastating for the people supposedly being liberated. At the same time, the US and its allies were believed to be vulnerable to a retaliatory attack. Eisenhower expressed his anxiety that if the US were to expand the war outside Korea and to use the bomb, there was the ‘possibility of attacks by the Soviet Air Force on the almost defenseless population centers of Japan’. US Army Chief of Staff General J. Lawton Collins also observed that ‘places as Pusan and Inchon offered a very favorable target to the Soviets if they intervened with their Air Force’.37
This does not mean that nuclear use was completely unthinkable. Ten nuclear-capable B-29 s were moved to the Far East as a precaution. When Chinese forces intervened in late 1950 consideration of possible roles for tactical nuclear weapons became more active. General MacArthur, Supreme Commander, asked for his own atomic capability on December 1950 to help ‘retard’ communist advances. He also wanted them in preparation for attacking enemy airfields in the event of a more general war. Given the size of the Chinese army, however, it was evident that use of atomic bombs would not make much of a dent in the enemy force and would risk bringing the Russians into the conflict.
Later on, with spare capacity now in the stockpile (the war provided some of the impetus for its expansion), plans for a widened war raised the possibility of nuclear use, although normally with unease and scepticism. North Korea was largely being supplied by the Soviet Union, which was acquiring a marginal but tangible capacity for retaliation. China was the country most directly engaged and it was unclear what difference massive attacks on Chinese cities would make. The Air Force Chief of Staff, General Vandenberg, observed that even if the United States was to ‘lay waste to all of Manchuria and the principal cities of China’, it was possible that this ‘would not be conclusive’.38 All this emphasises that the decision not to ‘go nuclear’ was not taken because the US had deliberately decided to fight a limited war. Senior policy-makers were conscious all the time of how the war could break out of its boundaries, and that they might be the ones who made it happen. ‘The dividing line between a limited and expanded conflict’, observed Rosemary Foot, was thin.39 The risks of a general war weighed heavily of course, but so too did the difficulties of finding any military value in nuclear use. Over time, as the stockpile grew and there was greater confidence in American strength, planners became less risk averse. At the same time there were talks underway on an armistice from October 1951 and while they made little progress until 1953 they made a dramatic expansion of the war less likely.
[W]hen Mr Hitler was contemplating World War Two, I believe he would never have launched it if he had had any serious reasons to believe that it might bring him into armed collision with the United States. I think he was sure it would not do so because of our then existing neutrality laws. If an appropriate North Atlantic Pact is written, I think it will reverse this psychology so far as Mr Stalin is concerned if, as and when he contemplates World War Three.
The Treaty was therefore seen as an act of deterrence and reassurance. The United States would be involved at the start of any new war, rather than deliberating for a couple of years before coming to the aid of embattled European democracies. In all that talk of nuclear weapons as the main deterrent to aggression in Europe, the American arsenal was irrelevant without an alliance with those countries most at risk. NATO was the original deterrent.
assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
This was not as strong as the Western Europeans wished, but the US Senate’s constitutional prerogatives had to be safeguarded.40 Nor did it involve, initially, an actual commitment of troops to Europe to help hold back a Soviet invasion. The Berlin airlift of 1948–1949 had forced military planners in the West to recognize the local Soviet strategic advantages. Nevertheless, the position was not considered hopeless as it was presumed that the Soviet Union preferred to move forward through subversion and political opportunism rather than direct military confrontation, and because the United States still enjoyed its atomic monopoly.41
This relaxed view was undermined first by the Soviet atom bomb test of 1949 and then by the invasion of Korea (even though no direct comparison could be made with the European situation). As Soviet invasion moved from being a hypothetical possibility to a serious prospect, then suddenly the military position appeared to be in need of urgent attention. In September 1949 when the North Atlantic Treaty acquired the rudiments of a military organization the first plans went little beyond ideas for a division of labour, in which the United States would provide military assistance, look after the sea lanes, and if necessary conduct strategic bombardment, while the Europeans would provide the bulk of ground forces. A year later an integrated force was created under a centralised command, ‘adequate to deter aggression and to ensure the defence of Western Europe’, and placed under an American Supreme Commander. Although the US Senate was highly resistant to the idea that this new alliance required a large American force in Europe, President Truman announced ‘substantial increases’ in the number of US forces stationed in Western Europe. This was to be only a temporary measure, until either the Europeans sorted themselves out or some grand East-West settlement was reached.42
The Korean War was used by the Administration to demonstrate the dangers of unpreparedness. The comparatively swift American response to the crisis was helped by the intellectual ground that had been prepared by the ‘bludgeon’ of NSC-68. The nature of the response reflected alliance politics as much as military logic. Any military exertions by the Europeans themselves, when funds were scarce and there were many pressing social needs, required American support. The Europeans needed reassurance that this time they would be defended rather than ‘liberated’ after suffering through devastating battles and occupation. From the start, the force structure of NATO was assessed as much in terms of what it told the Europeans about the strength and extent of the US commitment to their defence and what it told the Americans about whether the Europeans were serious about helping themselves, than what it told the Soviet Union about the likely consequences of aggression.
[T]he best use we can make of our present advantage in retaliatory air power is to move ahead under this protective shield to build the balanced collective forces in Western Europe that will continue to deter aggression after our atomic advantage has been diminished.43
Accepting this argument led directly to the adoption by NATO of a Forward Strategy, aimed at holding any Soviet offensive as close to the original lines as possible, then to the ambitious Lisbon force goals of February 1952 (96 divisions by 1954) and, beyond that, to German rearmament.
Once adopted, the strategy soon faced problems. First, it was extremely expensive; a flaw that was eventually to be its undoing. In the subsequent years, once the immediate post-1950 panic began to wear off, it became increasingly difficult to justify the expenditure. Second, as the Korean War demonstrated, in practice it was a frustrating approach to war, offering no easy and painless route to victory. This went against past American insistence on a ‘no-holds-barred’ and often ferocious response to aggression. The Truman Administration nevertheless felt that it had little choice. The US nuclear superiority was destined to be lost, and so provided no basis for a long-term strategy. Increasingly, nuclear forces would be expected to do little more than neutralize those of the other side. The struggle for advantage would have to be waged with conventional arms.