Fear Itself (65 page)

This stiffening global climate coincided with an acceleration of public attention to nuclear danger. As Cold War talk accelerated, the usually sedate
Wall Street Journal
’s editorial writers were warning that “if another world war comes, so will atomic bombing.”
⁵⁶
In March 1946, a paperback published by the Federation of American Scientists cautioned that the combination of peril and vulnerability posed a stark choice of “one world or none.” Subtitled “A Report to the Public on the Full Meaning of the Atomic Bomb,” it quickly sold 100,000 copies. This was hardly a fringe effort. With contributions from leading physicists, including Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Arthur Compton, Neils Bohr, Hans Bethe, Harold Urey, and Leo Szilard, and from Walter Lippmann and General Arnold, the volume projected an atomic arms race that “adds up to the most dangerous situation that humanity has ever faced in all history.”
⁵⁷

Especially compelling was the description in the opening chapter of “the burned and the broken” city of Hiroshima by the Manhattan Project physicist Philip Morrison, who, on Tinian Island, had participated in the final assembly of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, then had joined the damage-assessment group sent to evaluate the aftermath. Reprising the testimony he had offered to a congressional committee in December 1945 on “the terror of the bomb,” Morrison conveyed the surreal scene of “hundreds, even thousands, of fires [that] burned unchecked among the dead and the injured,” and how doses of radiation had produced circumstances in which “the blood does not coagulate, but oozes in many spots through the unbroken skin, and internally seeps into the cavities of the body.” He also projected the effects of a similar attack on New York, making palpable the threat of nuclear Armageddon. He described how close to the city center, “nothing much was left” but “men with burning clothing, women with terrible red and blackened burns, and dead children caught while hurrying home to lunch.” The conclusion was even more frightening: “New York City had thus suffered under one bomb, and the story is unreal in only one way: The bombs will never again, as in Japan, come in ones or twos. They will come in hundreds, even in thousands.”
⁵⁸
Chilling, too, was the warning by the associate director of the Westinghouse Research Laboratory, Edward Condon, that sabotage by nonstate actors who possessed atomic weapons, what he called “the new technique of private war,” would soon become possible.
⁵⁹

Few Americans could elude what the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was calling “the very great apprehension” and “strange disquiet” that such horrifying representations were producing.
⁶⁰
In early March 1946, the mass-circulation
Collier’s
reported in detail on “what the atomic bomb really did,” and showed graphically what an equivalent attack on New York would accomplish. In late March and early April 1946, Walter Lippmann published nine newspaper columns to caution that only “the union of mankind under universal law,” and, ultimately, the formation of a world state out of the embryo of the United Nations, could prevent “the desolation of utter anarchy” in the atomic age.
⁶¹
Concurrently, wrote Joseph and Stewart Alsop, it was clear the international control of atomic weapons “is the issue most likely to decide the relationship between the Soviet Union and the rest of the world.” The alternative, should agreement not be reached, is a “showdown,” since it will not be possible to “keep the atom bomb for ourselves.”
⁶²

That year, the August 31 issue of
The New Yorker
devoted all its editorial pages to John Hershey’s riveting 31,000-word description of the noiseless flash and fire that had eliminated Hiroshima. Based on interviews with survivors, his “A Reporter at Large” essay presented an unsentimental, restrained account of the injuries and anguish of six individuals. It immediately became a national sensation. This eschatological text sold out. Quickly published as a book, it sold more than three million copies, and was sent, gratis, to every member of the Book of the Month Club. Newspapers across the country placed extracts on their front pages. Preempting all its usual programs, ABC radio broadcast the unedited manuscript to the nation in half-hour readings, at the 9.30
P.M.
prime-time slot, for four consecutive nights.
⁶³
Soon, the head of the country’s Atomic Energy Commission, David Lilienthal, was lamenting how “public thinking is dominated by fear,” how “fear is brother to panic,” and how “unreasoning fear . . . is not going to get us anywhere . . . we want to go.”
⁶⁴

III.

T
HE STARK
portraits that so worried Lilienthal did more than shock, in fact. They captured quite accurately how the coming of atomic fission was transforming U.S. security. Even before the type of intercontinental rocket portrayed by
Life
was developed, the rise of the long-distance bomber made the map’s traditional protections obsolete. The United States had been kept safe by distance. Protected by two great oceans, its homeland had remained secure even during the century’s great global wars. “Distance no longer presents the same kind of barrier to effective strategic bombing with atomic bombs that it does with chemical weapons,” the atomic bomb strategist Bernard Brodie explained in 1948.
⁶⁵
Earth had become a “small apple,” the military editor of the
New York Times,
Hanson Baldwin, argued four months before the USSR exploded its first atomic weapon, in August 1949, because the Soviet Union had begun to build and deploy advanced bombers similar to the type used by the Allies to smash Germany’s and Japan’s cities. With the United States “no longer a continent in a geographic or strategic sense,” he cautioned that the “Atlantic and Pacific Oceans have shrunk in the modern terms of high-speed weapons to roughly the dimensions of the English Channel and the North Sea,” and he recalled how those ramparts had proved completely inadequate to “protect Britain during the last war from frightful destruction.”
⁶⁶
Should the Soviet Union soon join the nuclear club, he warned, their atomic weapons—“so cheap and so destructive”—would “accomplish what had heretofore been beyond the means of any single foreign nation: the capacity to strike a mortal blow at the American continent.”
⁶⁷

Before World War II, the United States could afford not to mobilize its military capacity. The balance of power in Europe so engaged “the interests and arms of the other Great Powers” that were so committed against one another, a leading scholar of defense reasoned, “that none was free to direct its strength against the United States.”
⁶⁸
America’s remarkable military potential thus mostly lay dormant. It was activated during the first half of the twentieth century only when Germany twice used conquests and alliances to override the Continent’s power balance.

All this changed irrevocably after World War II. With its absolute security eliminated by the existence of the bomb, the United States effectively became a European power just when economic and physical desolation in Germany, Italy, and France, together with the near-bankrupt status of Great Britain, made it impossible for the earlier great power balance in Europe to return. Instead, a new constellation emerged. Only the United States could fill the power vacuum in the West and confront the one truly great power in the East. In these circumstances, the USSR, now a superpower with unrivaled conventional military strength, potentially could accomplish what the Third Reich had sought, hegemony in Europe that might threaten the United States.
⁶⁹

In these circumstances, the mixed signals about collaboration and conflict that characterized the early postwar period were quickly supplanted by the unwillingness of either side to find compromises about such key issues as the future of Germany. Each, moreover, developed expansive conceptions of security. By late 1946, the adversaries began to meet in dangerous confrontations, direct and indirect. December witnessed Communist guerrilla movements in Greece and Turkey, a continuing civil war in China, and the start of the First Indochina War, which pitted France against the Vietminh. Three months thereafter, on March 12, in what he later recalled as “the turning point in America’s foreign policy,” President Truman declared that the United States would provide large-scale aid to Greece and Turkey to prevent their absorption into an emerging Communist bloc.
⁷⁰

This decision to have the United States hold the line against Soviet penetration was an alternative to letting events take their course or placing the issue on the docket of the United Nations. Truman cast his choice in terms of a battle between systems. The United States, he insisted, was engaged in a fight to preserve a “way of life” that “is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions,” from another political, economic, and social order that, by contrast, is “based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority” and that, instead, “relies upon terror and oppression.”
⁷¹
Eight weeks later, on June 5, Secretary of State George Marshall cautioned at Harvard University that Europe “must have substantial additional help or face economic, social, and political deterioration of a very grave character,” thus giving first notice of the administration’s European Recovery Program.
⁷²

Both the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan were viewed as threatening by the Soviet Union. Its policies grew more forceful. It founded the Cominform as a coordinating body for the international Communist movement loyal to Moscow and, in February 1948, initiated a Communist coup in Czechoslovakia that was undertaken despite the existence of a democratic government that had been friendly to the USSR. In June, the Soviet Union denied the Western powers access to Berlin by rail or road. The West responded with an airlift, which broke the blockade by May 1949, a month after the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which pledged the United States, Canada, and ten other states (Belgium, Denmark, Great Britain, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Portugal) to provide mutual military assistance should any member be attacked. Then there was the German question. Rather than find a resolution in an agreement among the occupying powers, the Federal Republic of Germany was created out of the American, British, and French zones from May to September 1949, followed in October by the founding of the German Democratic Republic in the Soviet zone.

Conflict was hardly confined to Europe. Asia also became a site of contention. The Chinese civil war ended with the September 1949 establishment of the People’s Republic of China and the evacuation of the remnants of the Nationalist government to Taiwan. On June 22, 1950, the army of the People’s Democratic Republic of North Korea, with Stalin’s permission, crossed the thirty-eighth parallel. Within five days, advance units entered Seoul, the capital of South Korea. Fighting in Vietnam also began to escalate as French forces began to use napalm against the Vietminh for the first time in early 1951.

As these Asian conflicts accelerated, the United States joined with Australia and New Zealand in a Pacific security and defense pact, the September 1951 ANZUS Treaty. Three months later, NATO established an integrated defense force under the command of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower that directly faced Soviet forces in the heart of Europe. All the while, the Soviet Union was fastening the rule of orthodox, brutal, and compliant regimes in Eastern Europe, while tightening its ties to the Communist Party in other areas.

Over the course of this tense period, the hope that the United Nations would serve as an agent of global peace collapsed in unresolved contradictions. The young organization awkwardly combined a dedication to human rights and international law with a commitment to national sovereignty. As the victorious great powers sought to further their own ambitions for different kinds of empire, the UN became a setting for the expression and amplification of East-West conflicts.
⁷³
Moreover, as all the great powers had demanded and secured the right to veto actions by the Security Council, the UN could act to prevent or check the use of force only when their interests were not directly involved or, as in the case of Korea, when one of these powers was absent.
⁷⁴

The failure of the United Nations to substitute collective security for confrontation was most acute in the realm of atomic weapons. During the immediate postwar period, the superpowers did explore whether the UN might actually contain the prospect of an atomic arms race, but not nearly with the seriousness with which they simultaneously undertook to build or develop the capacity to manufacture such weapons, and craft strategic options for a nuclear age.

Negotiations to develop an international arrangement that could halt an incipient atomic arms race were initiated in December 1945. Meeting in Moscow, the foreign ministers of Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States agreed to seek “effective safeguards” under the auspices of the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, “by way of inspection and other means,” to secure the “elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons.”
⁷⁵
In practice, however, these discussions could not overcome the unwillingness of the United States to discontinue the production and stockpiling of atomic weapons, let alone disarm or share atomic secrets, in the absence of an agreement about compliance, or the Soviet Union’s unwillingness to agree to a meaningful system of international scrutiny. Representing the United States, Bernard Baruch told the UN in June 1946 that international control was indispensable, as the globe faced “a choice between the quick and the dead.” But he also made clear that in the absence of “a guarantee of safety” the United States would not, indeed could not, “relinquish” its “winning weapons.”
⁷⁶
In turn, the Soviet Union’s Andrei Gromyko made no provision in his government’s proposals for a regime of inspection. Rather, he stressed how, within three months from the conclusion of an agreement, “all stocks of atomic energy weapons, whether in a finished or semi-finished condition,” would have to be destroyed. The USSR further insisted that the United States freely share all the information it had about atomic energy.
⁷⁷