Red Scare Myths
In addition to approving legislation creating the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), President Harry Truman oversaw a radical transformation of the national security establishment when he signed the National Security Act of 1947. This act created the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense (a consolidation of the War Department with the Navy Department), and the establishment of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). In short, President Truman made permanent many of the changes to the U.S. defense bureaucracy that had occurred during the Second World War. America was now organized to operate on a full-time war footing, even in times of peace.
Bureaucratic readiness to wage war, however, did not translate into physical readiness. The Soviet Union had rebuilt its conventional ground forces after the Second World War so that it had overwhelming power assembled in or around Eastern Europe. Conversely, the United States had rapidly demobilized so that its armed forces were but a mere shell of what had existed at the end of the Second World War. The advent of the nuclear age, and the monopoly of the atomic bomb possessed by the United States, led to an almost singular reliance upon its strategic bombing capability and its nuclear delivery capability, as a counter to the perceived Soviet threat. Unfortunately for the United States, by 1947 the health of the strategic bomber force, like the rest of the military, was less than satisfactory. But America was enmeshed in a period of economic frugality, and President Truman had drawn the line on massive defense spending as a means of controlling the budget.
One of the theories behind the 1947 National Security Act was that cost cuts would come with consolidation. However, the transformation of the Department of War to the new National Military Establishment (later renamed the Department of Defense) was not without its problems, foremost of which would be the competition among the services for access to a reduced military budget. One of the staunchest opponents of the consolidation of services under the National Security Act of 1947 was the secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal. And yet when the position of the first secretary of defense needed to be filled, President Truman turned to Forrestal. Forrestal came into his position a staunch anticommunist, and the fluid international situation would only reinforce this prejudice. From the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, through the Berlin Airlift (which began in June 1948), Forrestal’s tenure was marked by political turmoil and military uncertainty.
Forrestal had an able bureaucratic opponent in the person of Stuart Symington, a Missouri businessman who had made a fortune during the Second World War selling gun turrets to the Army Air Force. In 1946, Symington was appointed as assistant secretary of war for air, and in 1947, with the consolidation of the armed forces, was made the first secretary of the Air Force. The budgetary battle was one of the first problems Secretary Symington faced. He shaped it as a matter of life and death not only for the new Air Force he headed but for the United States as well.
In July 1947, President Truman established a commission to draft a national air policy. Thomas Finletter, an attorney and economist who had served as an assistant to Secretary of State Cordell Hull during the Second World War, was selected to serve as chair of what came to be known as the President’s Air Policy Commission. The commission finished its work on time, and on Jan. 1, 1948, it sent to the president a report titled “Survival in the Air Age.” This report was a major event in the formulation of national strategy, not only for air power but also for national defense, concluding that, “We believe that the defense of the United States must be based on air power. We need a much stronger air establishment than we now have.”1
The United States, according to Finletter,
…must have in being and ready for immediate action, a counteroffensive force built around a fleet of bombers, accompanying planes and long-range missiles which will serve notice on any nation which may think of attacking us that if it does, it will see its factories and cities destroyed and its war machine crushed. The strength of the counteroffensive force must be such that it will be able to make an aggressor pay a devastating price for attacking us. It must, if possible, be so strong that it will be able to silence the attack on the United States mainland and give us the time again to build up our industrial machines and our manpower to go on and win the war.2
The Finletter findings resonated with the Air Force, which was positioning itself as the principal peacetime military force in readiness. Historically this had been a U.S. Navy mission, but the Finletter Report emphasized that the change in technology, and the need for immediate, massive retaliation, dictated that the Air Force become the service of choice to take the lead in representing the American retaliatory strike capability in the nuclear age. The cornerstone of the new U.S. Air Force’s atomic mission was the B-36 “Peacemaker” bomber, a six-engine (later expanded to ten engines) behemoth originally designed in 1941 to give the United States an intercontinental strike capability should England fall to the Germans.
The B-36 was a perfect fit for the new postwar military plans of the United States, which had relied on the B-29 bomber as its delivery system of choice for the atomic bomb, but in doing so had predicated the overseas deployment (and storage) of nuclear weapons, something the United States nuclear planners wanted to assiduously avoid. Only the B-36 bomber, with its more than 6,000-mile range and 72,000-pound payload (as compared to the B-29, with its 3,250-mile range and 22,000-pound payload), could accomplish the mission of intercontinental nuclear delivery from bases in the continental United States.
But the B-36 had problems. In the age of jet propulsion, there were concerns that the B-36 was vulnerable to interception by the new generation of Soviet fighters. There wasn’t any viable alternative to the B-36 on the drawing board. The next generation bomber, the B-47, was a swept-wing, jet-powered modern aircraft, but with limited range. Development of the successor to the B-36 strategic bomber, the B-52, had been placed on hold in the summer of 1947 when it became clear that the design of that aircraft would be obsolete before the plane could be brought into production. The first versions of the B-36 to enter operation, in November 1948, suffered from engine unreliability and other design flaws.
Technical difficulties aside, strategic atomic retaliation from the air became the foundation of the Truman nuclear defense posture, with the Air Force taking the lead. The Joint War Plans Committee of the Department of Defense also recognized that “the only weapon which the United States can employ to obtain decisive effects in the heart of the USSR is the atomic bomb delivered by long-range aircraft.” It was estimated by the committee that 196 atomic bombs would cause “such destruction upon the industrial sources of military power in the USSR that a [military] decision could eventually be obtained.”3
The Pentagon, however, had no detailed plan for executing an atomic attack on Russia, or anywhere else in the world. Atomic bombs were under the control of the AEC, and with the teams available in mid-1948, only two atomic bombs could be assembled per day, meaning the United States would need up to eighty days to prepare to deliver an atomic retaliation attack, not an ideal deterrence under any circumstance, especially when there were growing worries about the Russian capability to attack the United States.
The Russian threat, around which the increasing levels of American paranoia revolved, was almost totally illusory. Their only strategic bomber was a poor copy of an outdated American aircraft that was never produced in significant numbers. While American bombers, operating from forward airfields in Europe and Asia, could hit targets throughout the Soviet Union, the United States was safe from any similar attack from the Soviet Union, whose bombers lacked the range. Then a Soviet reverse-engineered TU-4 bomber, a clone of the B-29, made its maiden flight in May 1947. On August 3, 1947, during the Aviation Day celebration at Tushino Airfield outside Moscow, western observers were shocked to see four B-29 bomber look-alikes fly over the crowd.4 With the Russians now possessing a strategic bomber capability, at least in theory, the United States had no choice but to press forward with its counter, which in 1947 was limited to the B-36 bomber. The Russian atomic bomb, far from creating a level playing field, only heightened the American paranoia that had seeped into the highest levels of decision-making as well. Fear of the Russians “catching up” on the nuclear front drove a relentless push for the United States to contain Russia for as long as possible, prior to atomic equilibrium being reached. After the collapse of the Baruch Plan, nuclear disarmament as a policy was never considered by the Truman administration. In its stead was a push toward enlarging America’s atomic arsenal, a policy that drove every aspect of the Truman diplomatic and military posturing.
While the Truman administration wrestled with the Berlin Airlift crisis and the new reality of the Russian atomic bomb, the United States was dealt yet another blow that only empowered those who viewed the world in terms of one gigantic communist plot. China had been the scene of a massive civil war pitting the nationalist forces of General Chiang Kai-shek against the Communist forces led by Mao Tse-tung. By 1949, Chiang’s forces had been routed from mainland China, and on October 1, 1950, Mao declared the creation of the People’s Republic of China, with Beijing as its capital. Chiang and nearly two million of his supporters fled to the island of Taiwan and established Taipei as the capital of the Republic of China.
The fall of China to the communists was viewed by many in the anticommunist establishment as a huge betrayal of the United States by those responsible for establishing and implementing Chinese policy. One senator in particular, Democrat Pat McCarran of Nevada, placed the blame on alleged Soviet spies who had infiltrated the State Department.5 Then, on February 9, 1950, a relatively unknown junior Republican senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, gave a speech on Lincoln Day to the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia. Holding aloft a sheet of paper, McCarthy claimed that on that paper was a list of more than 200 known communists who were working for the State Department, whose identities had been “made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”6 McCarthyism—a wave of reactionary anticommunism that swept over America—had reared its ugly head.
At this critical time, President Truman was wrestling with two decisions that would shape how America would function as a member of the world community in the coming decades. The first was the question of what the national security policy of the United States would be in the atomic age. The Truman administration had cobbled together pieces of policy that had come to be known as the Truman Doctrine. Although this doctrine created an ideological framework for American diplomacy, it did not establish hard-and-fast policy around which fundamental decisions could be reached with regard to military posture and economic priorities. Though NSC-30, the official document concerning atomic warfare which came into effect in 1948, had established a policy for using atomic weapons, there was no overarching nuclear weapons policy that was linked to a wider national security framework. The end result was a haphazard approach toward policymaking that was inefficient, exposing the Truman administration to political criticism that it was placing singularly economic concerns, centered on a balanced budget, ahead of legitimate national security concerns. Lacking an all-encompassing national security strategy, the Truman administration was ill-equipped to answer these charges.
This policy vacuum enabled the State Department to step in. Secretary of State Dean Acheson assembled a team of policy analysts, headed by the State Department’s head of policy planning, Paul Nitze, and tasked them with crafting a policy that would overwhelm even the staunchest critic with its power and vision. The drafters of NSC-68, as this policy became known, could never be accused of being overly nuanced in their description of either the problem or the solution facing the United States. At the core of NSC-68 was the underlying assumption that, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union had inherited a bipolar world, where each was a respective center of power. Its framers also contended that the Soviet Union was driven by fanatical communist dogma to impose its absolute authority on the rest of the world.
According to NSC-68, only the United States stood in the way of the Kremlin and its objectives, which meant that the United States was involved in a struggle for the survival of the free world. The Soviet Union viewed America as its only threat, and as such it had focused the totality of its society on organizing and equipping itself in order to destroy the integrity and vitality of the United States as a world power. NSC-68 assessed that the Soviets would have, by 1954, more than 200 atomic bombs and a sufficient quantity of long-range bombers to deliver them in a surprise attack against the United States. The combination of this strategic nuclear strike capability and the massive conventional military force the Soviet Union had assembled in Europe would give the Soviets the ability to simultaneously overrun Western Europe, neutralize Great Britain through aerial bombardment, and attack the United States with atomic weapons.7
NSC-68 declared that the principal mission of the American national security establishment should be to assure the national integrity and vitality of American society in the face of the Soviet threat. To achieve this end, the United States should seek to contain the Soviet Union to the greatest extent possible. Containment would not be passive but rather active, involving not only confrontating Soviet expansion but also rolling back the control and influence of the Kremlin. The U.S. would identify and reinforce the seeds of destruction inherent in Soviet society so as to bring about a collapse of the Soviet Union, and with this collapse a fundamental change would occur in how the people and territory known as the Soviet Union would interact with the rest of the world—led, of course by the United States.
To achieve this, NSC-68 called for a massive buildup of American political, economic, and military power so that American supremacy, with or without allies from like-minded nations, would reign unchallenged. In order to make sure that the policy of active containment was not viewed simply as a bluff, NSC-68 advocated a massive expansion of the American nuclear capability, including the manufacture and stockpiling of thermonuclear weapons. In order to ensure that American military options were not exclusively nuclear, NSC-68 also advocated for similarly massive increases in the conventional air, sea, and ground capabilities of the U.S. military.
Having defined the Soviet threat so starkly, and the remedy so clearly, NSC-68 then declared that the notion of negotiating with the Soviets should be rejected until which time the Soviets had fundamentally altered their approach toward global interaction. NSC-68 rejected any notion that the United States would never use nuclear weapons first, stating that the potential of such a massive first use of nuclear weapons by the United States was, in and of itself, a means of deterrence. NSC-68 firmly underscored that its objectives were attainable at all levels—politically, economically, and militarily—and that all that stood in the way of achieving NSC-68’s goals and objectives was a lack of will on the part of the administration and people of the United States.8
The Soviet threat postulated by NSC-68 was largely fictional. Not only did the Soviets lack a force capable of delivering a nuclear attack of the sort advanced by NSC-68, they also lacked a deliverable weapon. A second test of a Russian atomic bomb was conducted on September 24, 1951, more than a year after NSC-68 was drafted. A month later, on October 18, 1951, the Russians tested a nuclear device delivered to the test site by a bomber, representing the first genuine Russian atomic weapon. However, even with a proven design in place, the Russian military did not receive its first atomic bomb until 1953. This was a far cry from Central Intelligence Agency estimates—supported by the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. military, and the Atomic Energy Commission—and cited by NSC-68, which gave the Soviet Union a production capability of 70–135 nuclear weapons by 1953.9
The principal thesis of NSC-68—that the Soviet Union sought to position itself as the undisputed world leader—was founded more on theory than reality. The argument that the Soviet Union was capable economically of implementing a plan for global domination of the sort outlined by NSC-68 was challenged by those in the Truman administration who felt that, rather than the Soviet Union gaining ground on the United States, the economic gap was widening. Even George Kennan, whose “long telegram” served as the ideological foundation of the NSC-68 thesis, disagreed with the document, primarily because of its calls for the massive rearmament of America.10
At first it looked like NSC-68 would not survive the bureaucratic realities of American politics. Truman wanted more clarification as to what the costs associated with NSC-68’s implementation would be. He was already under pressure to do more for the military. In April 1950, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson asked Congress for an additional $300 million to buy more aircraft for the Air Force. This and other appropriations requests raised the fiscal 1951 defense budget to $15.6 billion, up from the $13 billion Truman had wanted to spend. His budget already under severe strain, President Truman was in no mood to embrace a policy direction that would triple or quadruple these expenditures, so he returned NSC-68 to its drafters unsigned. By June 1950, Paul Nitze, the principal author and coordinator of NSC-68, had given up hope of its ever being adopted.11
The development of a comprehensive national security strategy was but one of two major issues being addressed at the time. The second issue the Truman administration focused on was whether or not to proceed with creating a thermonuclear device, the so-called super or hydrogen bomb. President Truman had instructed the Atomic Energy Commission to proceed with these discussions on October 6, 1949, in the aftermath of his announcement that the Russians had exploded an atomic device. But authorizing a discussion and starting a national development program were two different matters. One of the biggest obstacles faced by the Truman administration in this regard was the opposition to the development of this weapon by many of the scientists who served as the core of the American atomic bomb program.
Not all scientists were opposed. Edward Teller, the Hungarian-born nuclear physicist, had been pushing for the development of a super bomb for several years. In April 1946, there was a gathering of scientists in Los Alamos, where Teller presented his calculations on harnessing fusion energy for a weapon. But this was a purely theoretical question, based upon advanced calculations that many scientists questioned, and Teller was compelled to put the super bomb on the back burner. Two of the biggest opponents to Teller’s super bomb were J. Robert Oppenheimer and David Lilienthal, the head of the Atomic Energy Commission.
The detonation of the Russian atomic device changed the nature of the discussion. Simply enlarging the American stockpile of atomic bombs was no longer sufficient for many of the nuclear planners in America. Because the Russians had now demonstrated parity with the United States in the field of atomic bombs, it was imperative for the United States to establish its superiority by being the first nation to develop the hydrogen bomb. Three of the biggest proponents of this thought (besides Teller) were Lewis Strauss, a member of the AEC, and Ernest Lawrence and Louis Alvarez, two esteemed nuclear scientists. Alvarez had flown aboard the Enola Gay as the weapons officer responsible for final preparations for the first use of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. In early October 1949, Lawrence and Alvarez met with Teller and then with Senator Brien McMahon to discuss the idea of moving forward with the super bomb. Their idea was met with extreme enthusiasm and support.12
The AEC called together the General Advisory Committee (GAC) at the end of October 1949 to further discuss the matter of the super bomb, and both Lawrence and Alvarez were brought in to make presentations. David Lilienthal was taken aback by their enthusiasm for pursuing a weapon of such destructive potential. Besides the considerable technical hurdles that would need to be overcome, Lilienthal and others on the GAC were concerned about the moral questions of having a super bomb that had no military value and was simply a mechanism for the extermination of humankind. Having accurately predicted the atomic bomb arms race, Oppenheimer now feared an even greater sprint toward doomsday. The father of the American atomic bomb believed that not only should the United States not produce the hydrogen bomb but that it should unilaterally announce a complete renunciation of fusion weapons. Even a demonstration of fusion technology should be prevented, especially, as Oppenheimer and others noted, “until the present climate of world opinion changes.”13 Other scientists believed that the United States should go even further and negotiate with the Russians and the rest of the world for a universal pledge of fusion renunciation.
The AEC as a body could not reach a unified decision. Three of the five members, including Lilienthal, were against going forward with the super bomb. Two voted in favor. But the overall tenor of the discussion was captured in the conclusion of the report they sent to President Truman on November 9, 1949: “The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.”14
The Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a report submitted to the president on November 23, 1949, urged the development of the super bomb, noting that even if the United States did not move forward with it as a weapon, America needed to understand the super bomb’s characteristics so as to be in the position to understand how best to fight such a weapon. The issue of the super bomb was so controversial that when President Truman convened his Special Committee of the National Security Council (comprised of Louis Johnson, the secretary of defense, Dean Acheson, the secretary of state, and David Lilienthal, the AEC chair) to discuss the matter, it broke up after only one meeting, with Lilienthal and Louis unable to overcome their differences of opinion on the moral aspects of such a weapon. The GAC reconvened and passed a decision recommending against the development of the super bomb.15
On January 13, 1950, the Joint Chiefs of Staff again recommended that the United States pursue research into the technical feasibility of the super bomb, as well as an examination of how such a weapon would be delivered. The JCS stated that they believed that the possession of the super bomb by the United States would increase American national security. The possession of the thermonuclear weapon, in the mind of the JCS, was not inherently immoral but rather represented the only means for preservation of the free way of life enjoyed by the American people.16
Brien McMahon’s Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy recommended pursuing the feasibility of the thermonuclear concept but suggested that any final decision on whether to develop an actual weapon should be deferred until a comprehensive review of America’s national security policy was completed. This recommendation was passed on to President Truman. In a last-ditch effort to prevent the development of the super bomb from going forward, David Lilienthal sought a meeting with President Truman so that he could better make his case. Truman was dismissive: “What the hell are we waiting for? Let’s get on with it.”17 Later that day, January 31, 1950, the president announced to America and the world that he was instructing the “Atomic Energy Commission to continue its work on all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or ‘super’ bomb.”18 A new arms race was underway.
World events again intervened amid the internal wrestling within the Truman administration over the development of a national security strategy and the hydrogen bomb. On June 25, 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea, an act that caught the Truman administration completely off guard. An early agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union on the administration and eventual reunification of Korea fell apart, with the United States seeking to empower the strong anticommunist leader, Synghman Rhee, through an election process that fell outside the framework of the original agreement.
Stalin was opposed to early North Korean requests to invade the south and end the crisis, not wanting to create a conflict with the United States. However, in early 1950, Secretary of State Acheson indicated that Korea fell outside the defense perimeter established by the United States in the Pacific and that the Korean matter was best handled by the United Nations. Based on a reassessment prompted by Acheson’s speech, Stalin agreed to back a North Korean invasion of the south, and by April 1950, Stalin’s final approval was granted.19
Stalin’s decision was influenced by the victory of Mao and the Chinese communists against Chiang Kai-shek, as well as a new sense of confidence following the successful Russian atomic test. Normally cautious on matters of diplomacy, Stalin began to feel more confident that the tide was turning in his favor. The Sino-Soviet Pact, signed on February 14, 1950, had Russia and China pledging to come to the aid of the other in case of a war with a third party. Stalin assessed that the United States would not respond energetically to a North Korean move against South Korea, a point the Acheson speech only reinforced.20 Stalin was wrong.
President Truman was on vacation at his home in Independence, Missouri, when the news of the North Korean invasion arrived. He immediately flew back to the White House. The United States called for a meeting of the Security Council of the United Nations and pushed for a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire. Two days later, the United States sponsored a Security Council resolution requesting member states to provide military forces to oppose the North Korean invasion. Russia, surprisingly, did not use its veto, under instructions from Stalin, who was not looking for a confrontation with the United States. Stalin assumed that the North Koreans would soon be in control of the entire Korean peninsula, and the matter would become moot.
The first U.S. ground forces, comprised of units from the Twentyfourth Infantry Division, a garrison unit out of Japan, were committed to Korea in early July 1950. From July 5–20, these forces fought a large, sustained action against the North Korean forces in and around the city of Taejon, where the Americans were routed with heavy casualties. America quickly found itself in a conventional shooting war where the outcome was quite uncertain. The U.S. Air Force, in particular the Strategic Air Command, was positioned to carry out a massive attack against the Soviet Union using atomic bombs, but there was no strategy for using nuclear weapons in a limited action such as Korea.
President Truman, upon his return to Washington, DC, instructed his senior planners to develop a nuclear response plan for the use of atomic weapons in Korea should the Russians get involved.21 Shortly after the fighting began in the Taejon region, on July 9, 1950, General Douglas MacArthur sent a message to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in which he asked that consideration be given to making atomic bombs available for operations in direct support of ground combat. The United States possessed approximately 250 atomic bombs at that time, and the JCS chief of operations believed that 10–20 atomic bombs could be released to MacArthur without degrading the U.S. strategic capabilities worldwide. MacArthur wanted to use the atomic bombs to cut off lines of communication connecting North Korea with China and the Soviet Union.22
On August 1, 1950, the decision was made to send elements of the 9th Bomb Group to Guam as an atomic task force. Ten B-29s, loaded with unarmed (i.e., minus their nuclear ‘capsules’ which contained the fissile material) atomic bombs, were dispatched, but on August 5 one of the planes crashed during takeoff near San Francisco. The nine other planes reached Guam, where they went on standby duty until September 13, 1950, when the B-29 bombers were called back to the United States. The nine atomic bombs, together with their maintenance crews, remained in Guam.23
The war in Korea continued with seesaw ferocity. Pushed back to the confines of the Pusan perimeter, the American-led UN force finally held its ground. In September 1950, General MacArthur launched an amphibious assault into the North Korean rear area that compelled the North Koreans to retreat from the territory they had occupied in the south. By October, the UN forces had driven the North Koreans back across the 38th Parallel, which had served as the demarcation line between North and South Korea, and were pushing on toward the Chinese and Soviet borders.
The decision to cross the 38th Parallel and forcefully unify Korea was a direct by-product of the thinking that had gone into the creation of NSC-68. Prior to the North Korean invasion in June 1950, NSC-68 was for all purposes a dead document. The North Korean invasion, coupled with the acquisition of the atomic bomb by Russia and the victory of Mao and the Chinese communists, appeared to reinforce the worst fears set forth in the foundational framework around which NSC-68 was drafted. Faced with the need to act in the face of communist aggression, President Truman officially signed NSC-68 on September 30, 1950. Having embraced a policy that sought the rollback of communism around the world, the North Korean situation presented Truman with the opportunity to transform theory into reality. Truman’s goal was not just to unify Korea but also to demonstrate that the tide of history had turned against communism. Truman wanted to make this demonstration not just for Mao and Stalin, but perhaps more importantly, for his domestic critics in the United States, who were blaming Truman for engaging in policies of appeasement that had enabled the communists to achieve victory in China and Korea and to acquire the atomic bomb.
Mao saw the American decision to push past the 38th Parallel in a similar light as the Truman administration, but from the opposite perspective. The decision of the Chinese to intervene in North Korea in the fall of 1950 was made on the principle that communism could not survive such a rollback and that China, as the Asian defender of communism, had no choice but to intervene. Even as American troops pushed into North Korean territory, the Chinese army started crossing into North Korea in large numbers to fight back against the Americans. The Chinese were supported by fighter aircraft provided by the Soviet air force. This cooperation was part of the Sino-Soviet mutual defense pact that placed the totality of Soviet defense capability at the disposal of China in the case of an American attack. Far from being simply a regional conflict, the war in Korea was threatening to explode into a global conflagration, capable of going nuclear at any moment.
By November 1950, the introduction of Chinese forces in North Korea had turned the tide once again against the UN force. General MacArthur renewed his requests for atomic bombs to break the back of the Chinese counteroffensives, but to no avail. Truman had stated in a press conference on November 30, 1950, that “there has always been active consideration” of nuclear weapons use in Korea, a statement that worried British Prime Minister Clement Atlee so much that he flew to Washington the next week for consultations. Truman assured Atlee that there were no plans to drop the bomb in Korea. He further told Atlee that he regarded the United Kingdom and the United States as “partners in this matter,” and that Truman would not use the bomb without consulting London first, unless the United States was under attack.24
However, in March 1951, it looked as if the Russians and Chinese might be positioning themselves for a major escalation when U.S. intelligence detected a force of nearly 200 Soviet bombers being moved into bases in the Far East, well within striking distance of Japan, while the Chinese massed even more ground forces. This changed the entire strategic calculation. By April 1951, a plan for the use of the atomic bombs as a force of retaliation should the Russians and Chinese choose to escalate was drawn up. It was decided that nine nuclear capsules would be turned over to the U.S. military and deployed, along with a number of B-29 bombers, to Guam. In exchange for placing these weapons under direct U.S. military control, the president convinced the JCS to acquiesce to his decision to relieve General MacArthur as the commander in the Pacific.25
The reasons for Truman’s decision to remove General MacArthur from command were numerous and complex, but one of the factors was that if the president were to turn over nuclear weapons to the military for use in Korea, he wanted someone a bit more obedient at the helm. The bomb capsules and bombers were flown to Guam, where they remained until finally withdrawn from the theater in November 1951, again because of a lack of any viable targets. However, the capsules remained under military control, representing the first time that nuclear weapons fell outside the control of the Atomic Energy Commission.
The unfolding conflict in Korea only exacerbated a growing frenzy of anticommunist sentiment at home in America. In July 1950, while American soldiers were being slaughtered in Korea, America was further rocked by the arrests of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were accused of passing atomic secrets to the Russians as part of the spy ring that had involved Klaus Fuchs, the German-born English nuclear physicist who passed nuclear design secrets to the Soviets while working at Los Alamos. The recent detonation of the atomic bomb by the Russians fueled the flames of anticommunist sentiment, and the political bodies in the United States acted accordingly.
American politicians started reacting to the perception that America was under the threat of imminent communist attack. In September 1950, Senator Patrick McCarran pushed through the Subversive Activities Control Act, part of a legislative package known as the Internal Security Act of 1950. This legislation required members of the American Communist Party to register with the U.S. government. President Truman opposed this act, stating that it betrayed the “finest traditions” of the United States by curbing “simple expression of opinion.”26 However, Congress overrode Truman’s veto by large majorities. Before 1950 ended, McCarran oversaw the creation of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, which was empowered to carry out investigations in support of the Internal Security Act of 1950.
The Korean War placed President Truman in a difficult situation. On the one hand, the Truman administration was in the process of crafting a national security policy that defined the forces of communism, led by the Soviet Union, as the intractable enemy of the United States. At the same time, public opinion, mirrored in many respects by congressional sentiment, accepted the notion of Russia as a threat worthy of an American response. Truman knew he needed to spend more money on defense, but he also needed to keep the budget under control. The Korean War created conditions where certifying, even superficially, the warnings of NSC-68 as valid could have swept up the American public and Congress in war fever, leading to a military buildup and consequently a depletion of the budget. Such a circumstance would have put the United States on a dangerous path toward a decisive confrontation with the Soviet Union—an outcome undesirable for all parties involved.
By the end of November 1950, the scale of the Chinese intervention had become clear, with American divisions in full-scale retreat before Chinese human-wave attacks. On December 15, 1950, Truman delivered a “fireside speech” in which he told the American people that “Our homes, our nation, all the things we believe in, are in great danger,” and that “this danger has been created by the rulers of the Soviet Union.”27 The next day President Truman signed a proclamation in the Oval Office, declaring a national state of emergency. Truman noted that communism constituted a threat to the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights and that these elements of a “full and rich life” would be lost if the communists won.28
On March 15, 1951, the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg began in New York’s Southern District federal court. The Rosenbergs were found guilty on March 29, 1951, of conspiracy to commit espionage. On April 5, 1951, the presiding judge in the case, Irving Kaufman, sentenced both Rosenbergs to death, stating that their “conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-Bomb caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000…Indeed, by your betrayal you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country…we have evidence of your treachery all around us every day for the civilian defense activities throughout the nation are aimed at preparing us for an atom bomb attack.”29
The public sentiment that fueled the fate of the Rosenbergs threatened in turn to provoke an all-out nuclear war between the United States, Russia, and China. But the Truman administration understood that whereas they needed the Korean War to enable them to undertake the sweeping transformation of America from a nation at peace to a nation operating under wartime footing, they had to act prudently in Korea while they gathered their strength and forged the alliances required to wage a wider war, at a time and place of America’s choosing. A key element in the Truman plan was to position the United States to emerge victorious in a Cold War atmosphere, without ever having to exchange a shot with Russia. Thus even though the Korean War was used to justify an enormous buildup of U.S. military capabilities, very few of these capabilities were actually employed in Korea. The military budget expanded from the $15 billion per year Truman had been fighting to maintain to more than $50 billion. Only $5 billion of this was spent in Korea; the rest went to expanding American military capability worldwide.30
One area of this new worldwide focus was Europe. Since its creation in 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization had functioned without either a political structure or a joint command. In fact, though the signatories to NATO had agreed to come to one another’s aid in case of attack, there were no military forces earmarked for the defense of the alliance. The Korean War changed all of this. In 1949, there could be no talk of German membership in NATO because of the backlash that would come from the Soviet Union. With U.S.-Soviet tensions heightened because of the Korean conflict and America’s global response, however, the idea of employing German troops gained ground. Such a use of the Germans could reinforce the overall capability of Western Europe to defend itself from Soviet aggression and became attractive to all in NATO but the French, who continued to harbor strong opposition to any notion of German rearmament only five years after the end of the Second World War.
As the situation in Korea deteriorated, and the probability of a Soviet attack on the West in Europe increased, NATO decided to create an integrated defense organization with common military structures that would include the Federal Republic of Germany. The United States appointed a man well qualified for the task of shaping this new NATO, General Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower had retired from the army in 1948 to become president of Columbia University. However, in December 1950, President Truman, at the request of the European members of NATO, recalled Eisenhower and appointed him the first Supreme Allied Commander, Europe. Eisenhower was able to work with the Europeans recovering from the ravages of war and assembled a viable military capability for NATO’s common defense against the threat of communist aggression.
In January 1952, Eisenhower presided over the Lisbon Conference, where the NATO members pledged to undertake dramatic increases in the size of their military contributions to the NATO command. The Lisbon Conference called for an expansion to fifty divisions (twenty-five frontline, twenty-five in reserve) and four thousand aircraft by the end of 1952. Eisenhower commented that this NATO commitment to arming assembled “such strength as the Communist world would never dare challenge.”31 In February 1952, NATO increased its membership by admitting both Turkey and Greece, two nations at the center of the Truman Doctrine in holding back the spread of communism.
The expansion of NATO into the global arena of U.S.-Soviet struggle brought with it not only the risk of a Soviet ground attack into Western Europe but also a U.S. preemptive atomic attack. U.S. nuclear-capable B-36 bombers were deployed at seven bases on British territory. Since July 1950, President Truman had authorized the forward deployment of nuclear bombs, minus their nuclear capsule, to be stored on British territory (on December 6, 1950, President Truman endorsed the Joint Chiefs’ request that nonnuclear components of atomic bombs be stocked on board the aircraft carrier, USS Franklin Roosevelt, stationed in the Mediterranean—the first naval deployment of atomic weapons).32 The British were increasingly worried about the prospects of the United States ordering a nuclear attack against the Soviet Union from British bases, an action that would open up Great Britain to a retaliatory nuclear attack. The British sought a commitment that the United States would not order any nuclear strikes from those bases without their consent. A communiqué prepared in January 1952 stated that “the use of these bases in an emergency would be a matter for joint decision by His Majesty’s Government and the United States Government in the light of the circumstances prevailing at the time.”33
Whereas Great Britain may have had concerns about the U.S. nuclear arsenal operating on its shores, back in the United States the critical question was not how few, but rather how many, nuclear bombs to make. On September 18, 1951, Connecticut Senator Brien McMahon introduced Senate Concurrent Resolution 46, in which he argued that current nuclear expenditures were “unreasonably and imprudently small,” noting that “the cost of military fire power based upon atomic bombs is hundreds of times cheaper, dollar for dollar, than conventional explosives” and that therefore the United States “must go all-out” to equip each military service with large numbers of nuclear weapons.34
One of the new nuclear weapons McMahon had in mind was the super, or hydrogen, bomb. Following the presidential decision to proceed with the development of the hydrogen bomb, the nuclear physicists assigned to the task, led by Edward Teller, had labored hard to turn theory into reality. Unfortunately for Teller, the basic calculations around which he had based his model for the super bomb had been proven wrong by his colleagues. A critical component in the design of the super bomb was the element tritium, which was required to kindle thermonuclear reactions at manageable temperatures. Tritium was a rare isotope and was manufactured in one place only in the United States, a special reactor in Hanford, Washington. In March 1950, President Truman authorized a “crash program,” with a goal to create a program capable of producing ten super bombs per year, at a cost of nuclear material equivalent to between 30 and 40 atomic bombs.35 At a time when the U.S. military was pressing for more nuclear strike capability, this was a heavy sacrifice. Key to this calculation was the amount of tritium required to achieve this goal, about one kilogram. It turned out that Teller had underestimated the amount of tritium required. The actual amount was between 3–5 kilograms, which meant the United States would need 3–5 years to produce a single super bomb, at a cost of hundreds of atomic bombs that would not be manufactured because of the diversion of tritium. Suddenly, the super bomb did not look like a good bargain.36
A year later, in March 1951, the hydrogen bomb project was saved because of a dynamic new concept, “staging,” which used a fission explosion from a classic atomic bomb as a means of initiating the fusion reaction needed for the thermonuclear reaction. Edward Teller, together with Stanislaw Ulam, came up with the concept. As the AEC moved forward on the super bomb project, however, the decision was made, largely based on Teller’s brusque personality and his reputation as not being a strong team player, not to put Teller in charge of the program, prompting his angry resignation. In Teller’s absence, a new design team, known as the Panda Committee, came together to turn the Teller-Ulam super concept into reality. By August 1952, the super bomb design had been finalized; the components had been produced; and the entire device, code-named “Mike,” was being assembled on the Pacific island of Eniwetok.37 It was at this juncture that three esteemed figures in the U.S. nuclear community intervened in an effort to stop the bomb from being tested. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb; James Conant, the president of Harvard University and a long-serving member of the General Advisory Committee; and Vannevar Bush, the former head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during the Second World War, had come to the mutual agreement that the timing of the Mike test, just days before a general election for the presidency of the United States, was a bad idea. The feeling was that a new administration should not be saddled with such a horrific reality as the detonation of a hydrogen bomb because it would be this new administration that would have to cope with the fallout of such a decision.38
Furthermore, all three believed that the Mike test provided one last chance to roll back the mad rush to nuclear armament in which the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged. If an agreement could be reached to stop all nuclear testing before Mike was detonated, then thermonuclear bombs would remain theoretical. Any breach of this testing ban would be immediately detectable, making inspection provisions virtually nonexistent. Truman was unimpressed with the last-second plea on the part of Oppenheimer, Conant, and Bush to unilaterally suspend the test of the super bomb, and gave his permission to conduct the Mike test as scheduled, just before the election. On November 1, 1952, on the islet of Elugelab, the Mike device was detonated. It worked as designed, delivering a massive 10.4 megatons, 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Elugelab ceased to exist, replaced by a massive crater that scarred the former islet’s lagoon. The strength of the explosion created by Mike was big enough, if dropped on New York City, to destroy all five boroughs.
Harry Truman had, with the death of President Roosevelt in 1945, inherited a world on the cusp of the nuclear era. Much had transpired since the Trinity test of July 1945. The United States went from being a nation that had used atomic weapons against Japan, ostensibly to shorten a world war, to one that sought to exploit its nuclear monopoly in order to maintain its strategic superiority over the Soviet Union in a new Cold War. Nuclear weapons had become an integral part of the American national security fabric, and any effort to contain these weapons was beaten back in the name of defending freedom in the face of the communist menace. The monopoly did not last long, and soon President Truman found himself facing a nuclear-armed Soviet Union, prompting a nuclear arms race that, though yielding to American scientists the horrific secrets of the hydrogen bomb, brought the United States no closer to the kind of genuine security that possessing these weapons was supposed to bring about. By the time President Truman left office in 1953, the United States was bogged down in a quagmire in Korea, fighting a determined communist foe who, having solved the atomic puzzle thanks to the combined efforts of its scientists and spies, no longer had to back down in the face of American nuclear threats.
On November 7, 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president of the United States. He inherited a world at an infinitely more dangerous time than even he could possibly comprehend. The competing issues of a nuclear arms race running out of control and a global confrontation between the United States and Russia made for their own critical mass that, if allowed to combine, could lead to the literal realization of the future imagined by J. Robert Oppenheimer when he quoted the classic Hindu scripture, “Song of God” (perhaps better known as the Bhaghavad Gita), after seeing the result of his handiwork on July 16, 1945: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”39
1 Thomas Finletter, Survival in the Air Age: A Report (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1948), 10.
2 Ibid., 20.
3 Air University Review 1981 (Recurring Publication 50–2) (Colorado Springs: United States Air Force, 1981), 20.
4 Steven Usdin, Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 89.
5 Michael Ybarra, Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and the Great American Communist Hunt (Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 2004), 450.
6 Geoffrey Stone, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime and the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 331.
7 Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 139.
8 Paul Nitze and S. Nelson Drew, NSC-68: Forging the Strategy of Containment (Darby, PA: DIANE Publishing, 1994), 50–58.
9 Ibid., 52.
10 Wilson Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947–1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 311.
11 Beisner, 241.
12 Robert Donovan, Tumultuous Years: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1949–1953 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1996), 149.
13 Zuoyue Wang, In Sputnik’s Shadow: The President’s Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 28.
14 Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 402.
15 Ibid., 405–406.
16 Ibid., 406.
17 Ibid., 407.
18 Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun, op. cit, p. 407.
19 Vladislav Zubok and Konstatin Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 63.
20 Ibid.,64.
21 Callum MacDonald, “The Atomic Bomb and the Korean War, 1950–53,” in Decisions and Diplomacy: Essays in Twentieth Century International History, ed. George Grun (New York: Routledge, 1995), 179.
22 Stanley Weintraub, MacArthur’s War: Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero (New York: Free Press, 2000), 252.
23 Ibid., 253.
24 David Halberstam, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (New York: Hyperion, 2007), 478.
25 Weintraub, 333–334.
26 Steve Neal, Harry and Ike: The Partnership That Remade the Postwar World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 175.
27 David Callahan, Dangerous Capabilities: Paul Nitze and the Cold War (Harper Collins: 1990), p. 134.
28 Alonzo Hamby, Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 553.
29 Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel, The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2001), 248.
30 James Carroll, House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power (Orlando, FL: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007), 186.
31 United States Congress, Control and Reduction of Armaments, Final Report (Senate Committee on Foreign Relations) (Washington, DC: Government Printing Assistance, 1958), 146.
32 Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, 1945–1950 (New York: Knopf, 1980), 333.
33 Michael Hopkins, Oliver Franks and the Truman Administration: Anglo-America Relations, 1948–1952 (New York: Routledge, 2003), 219.
34 Stephan Schwartz, Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1998), 4.
35 Rhodes, 421.
36 Ibid., 423–424.
37 Ibid., 493.
38 Ibid., 497.
39 Rhodes, 662.