As later Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson would tell liberal Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey, who was eager to hit back at McCarthy, “He just eats fellows like you. You’re nourishment for him.” Johnson considered McCarthy “the sorriest senator up here. Can’t tie his goddamn shoes. But he’s riding high now, he’s got people scared to death some Communist will strangle ‘em in their sleep, and anybody who takes him on before the fevers cool—well, you don’t get in a pissin’ contest with a polecat.”
The problem in the meantime was the damage to those whose reputations had been sullied and, more broadly, to the country, which was unable to consider a more rational foreign policy or take its distance from a doctrinaire anticommunism. The president and the public could not free themselves from thinking that fostered an arms race and a preference for military responses to challenges that diplomacy could have made less costly in lives and treasure.
The decision to build the hydrogen bomb, “the super,” as those who understood its potential for destruction called it, is a telling case in point. The same national mood that gave birth and credibility to McCarthy gave life to the belief that the United States could not avoid arming itself with thermonuclear weapons.
In September 1949, the Truman administration had decided to counter Russia’s capacity to build A-bombs by expanding America’s nuclear arsenal from about fifty Hiroshima-strength bombs to about three hundred. But some in the government, led by Atomic Energy Commissioner Lewis Strauss, believed that the country’s margin of safety now required it to rush to develop a hydrogen bomb that would be a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb.
A debate erupted in the government between advocates and opponents of a building program. Those in favor, supported by physicists Edward Teller and Ernest Lawrence and MIT president Karl T. Compton, believed that the United States had no alternative but to go ahead. The Soviets, they said, who would see an H-bomb as an opportunity to eclipse the West in military power, were surely already planning to develop such a weapon. The only alternative the bomb’s proponents saw was a preventive war against the Soviet Union, and nobody wanted that.
Harvard president James Conant, Oppenheimer, and Lilienthal lined up against trying to build a bomb that could annihilate millions of people in a matter of minutes. “It is not a weapon which can be used exclusively for the destruction of material installations of military or semi-military purposes,” Oppenheimer explained. “Its use therefore carries much further than the atomic bomb itself the policy of exterminating civilian populations…. A super bomb might become a weapon of genocide.” These opponents hoped that the Soviets could be approached about an agreement of mutual restraint. The possibility that the Soviets would go ahead even if the United States didn’t was not absent from the discussion. The anti-H-bomb advocates believed that America’s arsenal of atom bombs was a sufficient deterrent that Moscow would never consider a thermonuclear attack on the United States.
In November 1949, when the AEC voted 3 to 2 against building an H-bomb, supporters began a drumbeat of complaint that persuaded Truman to ask a three-member committee made up of Lilienthal, Acheson, and Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson to review the matter and give him a recommendation by January. With the question of whether to develop the “super” becoming a matter of public debate, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and conservative senators stirred public fears with warnings that not to go ahead would be irresponsible. “It’s either we make it or we wait until the Russians drop one on us without warning,” the navy’s representative on the Joint Chiefs said.
The committee met only twice during its two months of deliberations. Bitter exchanges between Lilienthal and Johnson on these occasions made additional discussion pointless. Although Acheson held a more middle-ground position, he concluded that Truman had no choice but to approve a development program.
Kennan tried to convince Acheson otherwise. In a seventy-nine-page memorandum entitled “The International Control of Atomic Energy,” he argued that the United States should set an example by restraining its hand and declare itself “prepared to go very far, to show considerable confidence in others, and to accept certain risk for ourselves” in hopes of persuading the Russians to avoid an arms race with no foreseeable limits in dangers and costs. Kennan considered this advice the most important he ever provided as a public official
In response, Acheson declared, “How can you persuade a paranoid adversary to ‘disarm by example’?” Acheson urged Kennan to leave the government, telling him, “If that was his view he ought to resign from the Foreign Service and go out and preach his Quaker gospel but not push it within the department. He had no right being in the Service if he was not willing to face the questions as an issue to be decided in the interests of the American people under a sense of responsibility.”
But was it really “the [best] interests of the American people” that Acheson and H-bomb advocates represented? Political considerations muted Acheson’s doubts about the wisdom of building the bomb. By the end of January, when Truman received the committee’s two-to-one report in favor of a development program, the political climate in the country made it impossible for him to disagree, or so Acheson and Johnson told him. “The American people simply would not tolerate a policy of delaying nuclear research in so vital a matter,” they advised. “We must protect the President,” Johnson told Lilienthal, meaning that Truman would be politically ruined if he decided against the bomb. The recommendation might have been the best political advice for the president and the Democratic Party, but was it the best advice for the nation?
Truman shared the view that the country’s political mood left him no alternative but to see if a hydrogen bomb was possible. When the advisory committee presented the report to him on January 31, he asked, “Can the Russians do it?” The predictable yes from all three committee members moved Truman to say, “In that case, we have no choice. We’ll go ahead.” Lilienthal complained to his diary that it had taken all of seven minutes for the president to reach this monumental decision. It was a foregone conclusion, however, what Truman would do, as was made clear by a radio address he gave that evening to announce the plan to explore the “feasibility of a thermonuclear weapon.”
While politics certainly played a part in Truman’s decision (he would not let the Republicans outflank him on a crucial national security issue), he genuinely believed that the country’s future safety depended on staying ahead of the Soviet Union in nuclear weapons. Since the United States and its European allies could not match Moscow’s ground forces, it seemed essential to maintain an edge over them in air power and weapons that could be delivered from bombers stationed in Europe and Asia.
Yet in committing the United States to the development of H-bombs in 1950, Truman, Acheson, and the great majority of Americans misread what would best serve the national and international well-being. The nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union over the next forty years and the acquisition of these weapons of mass destruction by at least seven other nations—Britain, France, Russia, China, Israel, India, and Pakistan—with two more, North Korea and Iran, developing them, unquestionably made the world more dangerous. A war between any of the nuclear powers promised to not only decimate their populations and economies but also inflict unprecedented misery on the rest of the world. The concern in the first years of the twenty-first century that terrorists might acquire the wherewithal to smuggle a hydrogen bomb into the United States and detonate it in a heavily populated city adds to current doubts about the wisdom of having been the first to build such a weapon of mass destruction.
Was there an alternative to the nuclear arms race? Possibly. If the United States had proposed a summit meeting between Truman and Stalin in a middle ground like, say, Austria, the president could have candidly explained America’s reluctance to build weapons of such destructive power and invited the Soviets to join him in a shared effort to ban their development and deployment. Any summit had to be outside of the Sov
iet Union, lest it evoke memories of Britain’s Neville Chamberlain and France’s Edouard Daladier going to Munich to appease Hitler.
It is certainly true, as Acheson said, that Stalin was the paranoid head of a paranoid government, but at the same time, he feared the prospect of another war that could inflict even greater damage on his country than had Hitler. A chance to avoid investing in a thermonuclear program so much wealth and energy that could instead be used to increase the painfully low standard of living that the world war and the system of state economic control had inflicted on Russia might have been enough to draw Stalin into an arms limitation commitment.
But even if a Soviet promise to hold their hand proved false, their testing of an H-bomb would have been immediately detected, and could have triggered initial warnings. America’s greater capacity to use its atomic arsenal against Soviet targets would make any suggestion of an attack on America or its allies an act of folly that would cost Russia millions of lives and the end of their Communist experiment. Nothing would then preclude the United States from a thermonuclear building program of its own.
Kennan certainly seemed to have it right when he said that war for Stalin “was not just a glorified sporting event, with no aim other than military victory; he had no interest in slaughtering people indiscriminately, just for the sake of slaughtering them; he pursued well-conceived, finite purposes related to his own security and ambitions. The nuclear weapon could destroy people; it could not occupy territory, police it, or organize it politically. He sanctioned its development, yes—because others were doing so, because he did not want to be without it, because he was well aware of the importance of the shadows it could cast over international events by the mere fact of its inclusion in a country’s overt national arsenal.” But he had no intention of using such a lethal weapon and inviting the kind of devastation on his country it was certain to bring.
American political and military chiefs, however, could not accept the assumption that the Soviets saw their military might as a deterrent to a Western attack rather than as a preparation for an assault on those they saw as eager to bring them down. In American eyes, the Soviet Union was simply an “Evil Empire,” as Ronald Reagan would later describe it, which would strike at the first sign of weakness. Only the strongest possible United States would be able to survive the Communist challenge.
The argument for all-out mobilization just short of war against the Soviet threat expressed itself in National Security Council Report 68 (NSC-68), United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, a document largely prepared by the State Department’s Policy Planning staff, which upon Kennan’s retirement was headed by Paul Nitze, and presented to the president in April 1950. A wealthy forty-three-year-old Harvard-educated Wall Street banker who had served in a variety of defense and economic planning posts during and after World War II, including as a principal author and advocate of the Marshall Plan, Nitze had been at the forefront of those arguing for a firm U.S. stance against postwar Soviet expansion.
The Soviet acquisition of the atomic bomb had confirmed Nitze’s conviction that nothing short of an all-out American military buildup could assure the future security of the United States. As NSC-68 explained, the Soviet Union was an adversary with “a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own.” Its objective was nothing less than “absolute authority over the rest of the world.” Nitze believed that the “Kremlin’s design for world domination” depended on “the ultimate elimination of any effective opposition.” U.S. military planners needed to assume that the Soviets hoped to obtain “a sufficient atomic capability to make a surprise attack on us … swiftly and with stealth.”
Nitze’s description more accurately described the plans of a Hitler and the Nazis than a Stalin and the Communists. And someone as high in U.S. national councils as Acheson saw Nitze’s warnings as hyperbolic. But “the purpose of NSC-68,” he said, “was to so bludgeon the mass mind of ‘top government’ that not only could the President make a decision but that the decision could be carried out.” In short, Nitze was calling for at least a threefold expansion of defense expenditures, which Congress and Defense Secretary Johnson and even Truman would resist. The path to “sufficient” defense, as those most on edge about Moscow’s threat saw it, was through overheated rhetoric about America’s potential demise at the hands of a nuclear-armed Soviet Union. Moreover, it was not enough to think of containing Soviet power; it must be countered in ways that would eventually sap its strength and bring an end to its rule in Eastern Europe and Russia.
Acheson, Nitze, and others in the government were not primitives like McCarthy and Wherry and Butler, whose parochialism and impulsive response to the Communist threat drew them into an uncritical militancy. Truman’s national security advisers were well educated, sophisticated, and knowledgeable about the world. But they were held in thrall by the experience of World War II and the failed appeasement policies that gave the Nazis and the Japanese license to run wild in Europe and Asia—at least until they confronted superior force. Any thoughts of reaching out to Stalin echoed the failures of British and French actions and America’s shortsighted isolationism of the 1930s.
History had taught Truman and his counselors that measured toughness was the only language that a dictator understood, and the best means by which the United States and its allies could avoid not only defeat but the need to fight another war. Increasing America’s atomic arsenal, building hydrogen bombs, and expanding the country’s military might as proposed in NSC-68 were prescriptions that might have worked well against Berlin and Tokyo, but the Soviet Union and the weapons of mass destruction available by 1950 required other policies than the ones that could have been effective at an earlier time.
The military buildup proposed in 1950 rested on a misreading of history. This is not to suggest that Hitler and Stalin had nothing in common; they shared an affinity for power and a ruthless disregard for the humanity of anyone opposing them. But Stalin had a much more realistic grasp of his and Russia’s limited capacity to defeat external enemies, as his back-down on Berlin had demonstrated. It was no small distinction, and one Stalin’s Western adversaries would have done well to take more fully into account in responding to his reach for global dominance. A firm approach to the Soviets certainly made good sense, especially against the backdrop of Joe McCarthy’s popular appeal for a no-holds-barred fight against communism at home and abroad. It was one thing, however, to describe a “completely irreconcilable moral conflict” with Moscow—and even to call upon the Soviets to free their East European satellites and end their campaign of subverting other democratically elected governments, as Acheson did in a series of speeches in the spring of 1950—and entirely another to call for the H-bomb and a massive expansion of military might.
10
LIMITED WAR
War always finds a way.
—Bertolt Brecht, 1939
By the middle of 1950, East-West tensions in Europe had stabilized. Soviet control of Eastern Europe, including an East German Communist state, balanced by an American-led alliance of Western Europe, with a democratic West Germany contributing to an economic revival, seemed like fixtures for the foreseeable future. The Communist coup in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin blockade had made fear of Soviet aggression a constant concern in the West. But Stalin’s retreat on Berlin and the creation of NATO had generated considerable confidence that the continent might be facing a lengthy Cold War standoff rather than a violent showdown.
Conditions in Asia were in greater flux. Mao’s Communists had won control of mainland China, but Chiang’s Nationalists, who had taken refuge on Taiwan, seemed to be facing an uncertain future. Would Mao’s forces try to seize the island and eliminate Chiang once and for all as a rival for power? And though the Truman administration seemed little inclined to interfere should Mao’s armies assault the Nationalists on their island retreat, speculation abounded that Washington could not let its Chinese ally suffer a final defeat.
Similarly
, Japan was showing signs of recovery from the devastation of the wartime bombing and collapse. Moreover, the American occupation was turning its arch Asian rival into a friend, and a peace treaty that would restore a measure of Japanese autonomy was under discussion. Nevertheless, no one was ready to describe Tokyo as a reliable ally in the emerging Asian cold war or to suggest that Japan should be rearmed as a counter to a Communist China. Memories of Japanese aggression and atrocities were too fresh to reestablish Tokyo as a dominant Asian power.
In South Korea, where the United States had ended its military presence by 1950 and turned the caretaker’s role over to the United Nations, tensions between the Soviet-sponsored Communist regime in the North and Syngman Rhee’s pro-American government in the South threatened to erupt into a civil war. Washington, however, hoped that U.S.-trained and -equipped Republic of Korea forces, joined to the possible intervention of a UN army, would be enough to deter Kim Il Sung’s government in Pyongyang from unleashing its Soviet-trained forces against the South.
Among the last things American planners in Washington anticipated was a war involving a large commitment of U.S. troops and matériel to a conflict in Korea. In the spring of 1947, when Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett had consulted members of the foreign policy establishment at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, they had urged initiatives to forestall Soviet adventurism almost everywhere around the world, except possibly in Korea, which was sandwiched between the Soviet and Chinese Communist giants and would not be a priority in a global war.