CHAPTER 22

CROSS OF IRON

The essential tragedy of the Cold War was the unconscionable waste of a heedless arms race. Weapons of astonishing destruction and mountainous costs were developed, produced, and, not long after, tossed away, replaced by bombs with bigger bang, better aim, and quicker delivery. Dwight Eisenhower fully understood the implications of this state of affairs. Raised to be frugal and schooled in the terrible cost of war and its weaponry, he had made peace the closing message of his 1952 campaign—an issue that helped seal his victory—and then he genuinely attempted to make disarmament one of the first goals of his presidency, which turned into a hopeless Sisyphean struggle.

In 1953, just weeks into his first term, Eisenhower met with speechwriter Emmet Hughes to prepare for an April appearance before a group of newspaper editors. “Here is what I would like to say,” he told Hughes. “The jet plane that roars over your head costs three quarters of a million dollars. That is more money than a man earning ten thousand dollars every year is going to make in a lifetime. What world can afford this sort of thing for long?… We are in an armaments race: everyone is wearing himself out to build up his defenses. Where is it going to lead us?… Now here’s the other choice before us, the other road to take—the road of disarmament. What does that mean? It means for everybody in the world: butter, bread, clothes, hospitals, schools—good and necessary things for a decent living.”

On April 16, 1953, as he spoke to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Eisenhower’s polished thoughts on the subject had him sounding more like a liberal Democrat:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.… This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

When Eisenhower was elected, America’s nuclear arsenal contained a total of 841 bombs, and the United States was producing around 600 more every year. By comparison, the Soviets had 50 atomic weapons. When Eisenhower left office, in 1961, America’s nuclear stockpile contained approximately 20,000 nuclear weapons and the total megatonnage, or explosive power, of the U.S. arsenal was equivalent to 1,366,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs (the “Little Boy” bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of 15 kilotons, or 15,000 tons of TNT). By comparison, the Soviet nuclear stockpile in 1960 was about one-tenth the size, with 1,600 weapons.

On January 17, 1961, Eisenhower made his final televised address to the nation. Humanity was still hanging on a cross of iron:

[The] conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government.… We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.

So the president who had begun his administration making a passionate speech about controlling defense spending concluded his second term by, in effect, telling the nation how horribly he had failed to do so.

On January 12, 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announced a “New Look” nuclear policy at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. In the familiar, crusty epicenter of Christian corporatist globalism, Dulles said the United States would contain “the mighty landpower of the Communist world” by doubling down on atomic diplomacy. The “New Look” was kind of like the “Old Look,” except even more terrifying.

“The most chilling line in Dulles’s speech,” Evan Thomas wrote in Ike’s Bluff, “was his perhaps overly succinct summation of the administration’s impetus behind the New Look: ‘The basic decision was to depend primarily upon a great capacity to retaliate, instantly, by means, and at places of our own choosing.’ Delivered in Jehovah-like manner, the line seemed ghoulish, as if the Christian avenger Dulles relished having an apocalyptic hair trigger on his finger. The press immediately announced Dulles’s policy of ‘massive retaliation’ and the label stuck.”

“We are at a curious juncture in the history of human insanity,” C. Wright Mills wrote in The Causes of World War III. “In the name of realism, men are quite mad, and precisely what they call utopian is now the condition of human survival.… Practical actions are now the actions of madmen and idiots. And yet these men decide; these men are honored, each in his closed-up nation, as the wise and responsible leaders of our time who are doing the best they can under trying circumstances.”

The New Look posited that nuclear weapons were more cost-effective than conventional ones because pound for pound they could deliver more “killing power.” The concept could be made to seem logical. In theory, if a smaller number of nuclear weapons would be replacing a larger number of conventional weapons, money would be saved while still deterring war. Ike in fact gave everyone a tax cut right away, in 1955. But for a number of reasons, nuclear weapons ended up supplementing conventional weapons and the United States developed enormous arsenals of both, wiping out any potential savings envisioned by the New Look’s nuke buildup. A legion of other unforeseen consequences also emerged.

Because the Army, Navy, and Air Force each ferociously pursued nuclear weaponry, to the point of absurdity, billion-dollar redundancies and wrongheaded armaments became rampant. For example, the Army developed nuclear artillery that would have likely killed U.S. soldiers from radioactive fallout. The military services also began to discover that nuclear weapons had large add-on costs: They required sizable technical support, elaborate command-and-control centers, and extraordinary security measures.

Rival corporations and laboratories attached to nuclear R&D also competed ruthlessly, like enemy combatants, and together became yet another well-financed special interest group. For Congress, and especially representatives of poor and rural communities, the nuclear weapons infrastructure turned into pork-barrel jackpots. And once McCarthy-era Republicans convinced voters that the Soviets presented a daily existential menace to the American way of life, even Democrats decided it was politically correct to give the Pentagon a blank check. In 1959, for example, Missouri Democratic senator and presidential hopeful Stuart Symington charged that Eisenhower was choosing a balanced budget over national security. “What do you do with a government,” he said, “which decides that money is more important than security?”

Behind the irrational exuberance was an inadvertent economic irony. Taking a page, unwittingly, from Karl Marx, if not Joseph Stalin, the American defense establishment observed the principles of state socialism with a heaping of totalitarianism. Mirroring the Soviet way, decisions and spending related to the U.S. nuclear arsenal were centrally planned, in secret, without consideration of market forces or budgetary oversight, and absent any kind of public disclosure.

Estimates of how much firepower was enough also depended on which general you asked. Admiral Arleigh Burke, chief of naval operations, estimated in 1957 that 720 warheads aboard 45 Polaris submarines were sufficient to achieve deterrence—by themselves. This figure took into account the possibility that some weapons would not work and others would be destroyed in a Soviet attack. If all went according to plan, Burke said only 232 warheads were actually required to destroy the Soviet Union. However, that same year, General James Gavin, head of Army research and development, told Congress that his branch of the service would require 151,000 nuclear warheads. General Gavin envisioned the use of as many as 423 warheads in a single day of “intense combat.” And when ballistic missiles were introduced, a gluttonous Air Force absurdly demanded 10,000.

“During the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations,” nuclear arms expert Eric Schlosser wrote in the New Yorker, “Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara concluded that the United States should have enough nuclear weapons to fulfill two objectives: deter a Soviet attack and limit the damage of such an attack by destroying Soviet nuclear forces.… McNamara believed the United States should always be able to kill at least a quarter of the Soviet population and eliminate at least two-thirds of its industrial capacity.”

Curtis LeMay secretly tasked Air Force think tank RAND (short for Research ANd Development) with establishing the targets for a full-scale nuclear blitz. It came to be called the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP). Neither the secretary of defense nor any of the civilians at the Pentagon was shown or informed about it. “The reasons for this secrecy,” Thomas Powers wrote, “had to do with service rivalries, technical complexities… and the personality of LeMay, who had made up his mind that he would know and decide when nuclear attack on Russia was necessary, and what ought to be on the list.… The first SIOP in December 1960 planned an overwhelming knockout blow. Moscow alone was targeted with at least eighty nuclear weapons, and every Russian city with a population greater than 25,000 would be hit by at least one. China would get the same, for no particular reason.… [The planners] estimated that about half the population of Russia and China would die of radiation effects alone—a total of about 380 million people.”

Edward Teller, the inventor of the hydrogen bomb, eventually realized that there was a limit to the destructiveness of even thermonuclear explosions. He estimated that at somewhere around 100 megatons, an H-bomb “would lift a chunk of the atmosphere—ten miles in diameter, something of that kind—lift it into space. Then you make it a thousand times bigger still. You know what would happen? You lift the same chunk into space with thirty times the velocity.”

The United States would ultimately build a total of 70,000 warheads during the Cold War. We would also establish military alliances with 50 nations and have as many as 1.5 million soldiers posted in 117 countries. Between 1946 and 1991, the United States spent an estimated $20 trillion on defense. (According to one source, it would take you 31,709 years to count to a trillion at the rate of one dollar a second.) Defense costs never dipped below 20 percent of the federal budget, with spikes during the Korean War (consuming about 70 percent of all government spending) and Vietnam (approximately 50 percent). At the height of the Cold War, our military industrial complex represented about 10 percent of the gross domestic product.

As for the Soviet Union, it was estimated that defense-related activities employed one out of five citizens. But all statistics on Cold War Soviet arms spending are unreliable since the Kremlin shaded or outright lied about the costs. Writing for the Hoover Institution, Soviet specialist Mark Harrison explained the thinking of Marshal Sergei Akhromeev, who was chief of the general staff in the 1980s and opposed to transparency.

“First,” Harrison wrote, “Akhromeev feared that honesty would do more damage to Soviet credibility than continuing to lie. A truthful figure would come out too low.” The Kremlin had long claimed strategic parity with the United States, and the CIA had conveniently supported this fiction. A sudden confession to budget inflation, Akhromeev reasoned, would immediately expose what had been a super-successful bluff and also supply an already skeptical Soviet citizenry with more confirmation that the leadership was always deceiving them. “Full disclosure,” Harrison continued, “would also complicate the market position of the Soviet Union in the global arms trade.” In the USSR, labor and equipment were cheap, and if buyers knew about the low production costs, it could undermine prices on the world market. “Finally,” Harrison wrote, “Akhromeev saw a significant ideological advantage in continued secrecy: It was useful to encourage ‘myths about large outlays of the USSR’s on military purposes’ because they ‘provided a justification… of the low standard of living of people in the USSR.”

On March 1, 1954, a U.S. thermonuclear test was staged on a coral island at Bikini Atoll. The bomb went off at 6:45 a.m. The makers of the top-secret Castle Bravo device had estimated that it would yield five to six megatons. However, the lithium deuteride used as an ingredient of the fusion fuel proved far more combustible than anticipated, and tripled the size of the explosion to 15 megatons. This was five times the power of all the bombs dropped during World War II, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Navy weathermen stationed 155 miles to the east saw the flash of the explosion. As the force of the bomb disintegrated the island that had served as its platform, a cloud of radioactive pulverized coral billowed menacingly, ultimately becoming 40 miles wide and 220 miles long. Some of the scientists observing the test wondered if the atmosphere was indeed catching on fire. The worst radiological disaster in history was under way.

A Japanese fishing trawler called the Lucky Dragon, with a crew of twenty-three, was ninety miles east of Bikini, and forty miles outside the designated danger zone. When the radioactive cloud reached the boat, a white coral dust fell from the sky. “It was so dense,” Daniel Lang wrote in a 1955 piece for the New Yorker, “one of the crew later reported that it was faintly audible as it landed on the deck. The strange downpour continued until about noon, and by the time it let up, the dust had covered the boat, the men, and their catch like a white sheet; it lay so thick on the deck that the men left footprints when they walked on it.”

The U.S. military had to evacuate residents of Pacific islands as far as three hundred miles from the explosion. Covering up the disaster was the immediate knee-jerk U.S. response. The Atomic Energy Commission ordered a news blackout. That proved futile. When the Lucky Dragon arrived back in Japan, on March 14, Lang wrote of how “practically every one of the fishermen was ridden with nausea, blisters, lesions, fever, conjunctivitis, abdominal pains, and other symptoms of overexposure to radiation.” The incident received massive and prolonged press attention in Japan and around the world.

Stonewalling continued nonetheless. Ike didn’t even want to acknowledge the existence of a new and more destructive nuclear weapon.

“Mr. President,” reporter Merriman Smith began at a March 17 White House press conference, “the Joint Congressional Atomic Energy Commission said last night that we now have a hydrogen bomb and can deliver it anywhere in the world. I wonder if you could discuss that?”

“No,” Eisenhower answered. “I wouldn’t want to discuss that.”

A few months later, a thirty-nine-year-old member of the Lucky Dragon crew, Aikichi Kuboyama, was hospitalized with hepatitis—a symptom related to the Castle Bravo accident. Before dying on September 23, 1954, Kuboyama said, “I pray that I am the last victim of an atomic or hydrogen bomb.” The Japanese public called for an end to thermonuclear testing. The U.S. State Department would eventually pay Japan $15 million in reparations.

As the travails of the Lucky Dragon were making headlines, Tomoyuki Tanaka, a forty-four-year-old Japanese film producer, was flying back to Tokyo from Jakarta, Indonesia. He was scrambling for a new idea because Indonesian financing had collapsed just before his latest project was about to start filming. In the Virginia Quarterly Review, Steve Ryfle explained what happened next: “Nervous and sweating, [Tanaka] looked out the window at the ocean below, and a light went on in his head. Inspired by the anti-nuke clamor surrounding The Lucky Dragon’s misfortune, Tanaka approached his boss, Toho’s powerful production chief Iwao Mori, and said he wanted to make Japan’s first-ever giant monster movie. Tanaka had no story and no idea what the monster would look like, but he had a premise: what if a nuclear explosion stirred a monster from an eons-long sleep on the ocean floor and that monster vented its wrath on Japan?”

The film resulting from Tanaka’s airborne inspiration premiered in Japan on November 3, 1954. It was titled Gojira—a portmanteau of the Japanese words for gorilla (gorira) and whale (kujira). Toho’s foreign sales department would anglicize the title as Godzilla.

The film’s first audio would be a series of primal shrieks, which for children raised during the Cold War became a chilling reminder of the constant prospect of being erased by a hail of city-smashing nukes. This sound effect was the invention of composer Akira Ifukube, who rubbed a leather glove coated in pine-tar resin against the strings of a double bass. The first scenes of the film reference the fate of the Lucky Dragon. As crew members of a fishing vessel are relaxing to a song being played on a harmonica and a guitar, the ocean around them begins to bubble. Following a flash, the ship is swallowed by an explosion.

About ten minutes into the film, Gojira—Godzilla—emerges from a roiling ocean during a typhoon, flattens a fishing village, and leaves behind immense radioactive footprints. The actor inside the monster reptile was Haruo Nakajima, wearing a two-hundred-pound suit made of rubber and latex. Nakajima would recall how Eiji Tsuburaya, the special effects director, struggled to find enough material for the costume amid Japan’s postwar shortages and rationing. Under the hot lights of the sound stage, Nakajima would sweat so much that he could wring enough perspiration from his undershirt to fill half a bucket.

As Gojira proves impervious to standard military weaponry, we learn that there is only one way to stop him: the Oxygen Destroyer, invented by a character named Dr. Serizawa, who wears an eye patch from a World War II injury. In the climax of the film, Serizawa agonizes about using his weapon, fearing that it will ignite another arms race. Ultimately, he allows the Oxygen Destroyer to be used, but he destroys his research papers so the weapon cannot be rebuilt.

In his Study of the Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Japanese Culture, John Rocco Roberto wrote how “in producing Gojira, special effects master Eiji Tsuburaya, producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, and director Ishiro Honda accomplished a feat unequaled at the time. In the guise of a typical Hollywood-style ‘monster movie,’ they made Japan, and ultimately the world, experience the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki all over again.”