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WE NOW

KNOWRethinking

Cold War History

JOHN L E W I S G A D D I S

A CO UNCIL O N FOREIGN RELATIONS BOOK

Clarendon Press - Oxford \qq



FOUR

Nuclear Weapons and the

Early Cold War

I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries, andwhen morals catch u p perhaps there'll be no reason for any of t. .[ w e are only termites on a planet, a nd maybe when we bore too

deeply into the planet there'll [be] a reckoning-who knows?

Harry S. Truman, 16 July 1945'

Atomic bombs are meant to frighten those with weak nerves.

Joseph Stalin, 17 September 19462

T is a rare thing to see practices that have persisted since the beginning ofI ecorded time 'c'verse hemselves. And yet that is what began to happen, we

can now see, o n t Auyust 19-'5, the date the world learned simultaneously of

the existence and the lethality of nuclear weapons. Prior to that moment,

improvements in weaponry hitd, with very few exceptions, increased the costs

of fighting wars H thout reducing the propensity to d o so. From the invention

of axes and spear through bows and arrows, gunpowder and guns, warships,

tanks, submarines, high explo\ives, and aerial bombardment, each advance in

technology seemed only to widen the devastation and expand the toll of killed

and injured: efficiencv came to be measured i n rubble and corpses.3

By the beginning ot the twentieth century, weapons of war were themselves

contributing to the outbreak of wars. Without the naval arms rivalry of the pre-

1914 er a- an d particularly without Dreadnought and its successors-World War I

might never have t~a ppe ned .~Vithout U-boats and their use by th e Germans, the

United States might never ha t entered that conflict. Without the mobility that

made possible a Blitzkrieg,with its alluring promise of a quick and cheap victory,

Hitler might never have carried World War I1 beyond its "phony" stage. Without

a carrier-based air fort(*,Japan could hardly have attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941.

It comes as something of a surprise, then, to realize that the most striking

innovation in the history of military technology has turned out to be a cause

of peace and not war. Over half a century has now passed since President

Truman's second atomic bomb devastated NagaJaki, on 9 August 1945. In the



86 WeNowKnow Nuclear Weapons and the Early Cold War 87

wake of that event, the great powers turned o ut tens of thousands of nuclear

weapons, most of which they aimed provocatively at one another. And yet at

no point di d those who controlled them see fit to use even a single such device

against anyo ne for any reason, despite the fact that t he Cold War provided any

number of occasions that would earlier have justified resort to the most soph-

isticated armaments available. Even if this taboo on nuclear use should some-

day break d ow n- a possibility the proliferationof nuclear technology will make

more and more likely over the years-the end of the Cold War has made it mostunlikely that a global conflagration, of the kind those who lived through the

Cold War so greatly feared, would be the result. The ancient principle tkat if

weapons are developed opportunit ies will be found to use them can, therefore,

no longer be taken for granted, and that is a shift of major proportions in th e

long and lamentable history of warfare.

What caused the shift was the quantum jump in the level of violence nuclear

weapons could produce. Their distance from conventional arms-to resort to a

football metaphor-was roughly that between getting a new kind of shoe allow-

ing better traction in tackling the ot her team's players, on th e one ha nd, and ,

on the other, developing a device capable of instantly destroying not only t he

other team but also one's own, to say nothing of the playing field, the specta-

tors, the stadium, the parking lot, and the television rights. It is no wonder

nuclear weapons, from the very beginning, gave rational people pause.sBut history has been full of irrational people: indeed, given the profound dif-

ferences historical, cultural, ideological and psychological backgrounds can

make in human behavior, one has to wonder whether there is any single stand-

ard for "rationality" in the first place. What seems most striking now about

nuclear weapons is not that they were developed or that people feared them. It

is rather that they forced, slowly but steadily, the emergence of a new kind of

rationality capable of transcending historical, cultural, ideological and psycho-

logical antagonisms of the kind that had always, in the past, given rise to great

power wars.

That new rationality grew out of the simple realization that as weapons

become more devastating they becoi ie less usable.6 But that is a revolutionary

idea in the history of warfare, implying as it does a severanceof the link between

advances in armaments and the purposes to which they are put. It helps to

account for why the ultimate instrument of war became, during the Cold War

at least, the ultimate inducement t o peace.

I

Nuclear weapons were developed in a traditional way, but in an untraditional

place. The way was traditional because scientific advances-particularly the dis-

coveryof atomic fission in the late 1930s- coincided with anpp portu nity to use

them, which was the onset of World War 11: it was not t he first time the prospect

of a war had stimulated the development of technologies with which to fight it.

The place, though , was unexpected. Despite its impressive industrial capabili-

ties and deeply-rooted military traditions, the United States through most of its

history had hardly led the world in developing new war-fighting technologies.

Americans had tended to imitate rather th an to originate weaponry, and during

t j e 1920s and 1930s they barely managed to main tain functional professional

forces at any level.' The army he commanded was still training with horses and

mules when in October 1941 the President of the United States authorized acrash program, in collaboration with British and Canadian allies, to produce an

atomic bomb.8

Without Franklin D. Roosevelt's particular combination of audacity, imagi-

nation, and chi lling realism, evbnts might have taken a different course: it is not

at all clear that a more conventional chief executive would have committed

immense resources to so unproven a technology at such a critical time. But

Roosevelt had decided, long before most of his countrymen, that Hitler's

Germany threatened American security in the most fundamental way. To

counter that danger he was prepared, while remaining officially neutral, to

sanction a wide range of extraordinary measures, of which th e decision to build

the bomb was only Economics and geography left allies little choice but

to go along: the United States alone possessed underused industrial facilities

allowing the necessary research, development, and production without signifi-cant risk of enemy attack.Io

In a curious way, the strengths of democratic institutions contributed t o this

outcome. An innovative mix of public and private educational funding had

made several American universities, by the 1930s, competitive with their

European counterparts in the rapidly-evolving field of nuclear physics.

Meanwhile the rise of anti-Semitism in Nazi Ge rma ny -a costly indulgence onHitler's part-quickly lost him, by way of emigration to those institutions,

many of Europe's best physicists.l* The priorities of survival und ambition, of

science and morality, coincided for these individuals in the most compelling

manner, with a n atomic bomb th e ultimate result. Nor did the German scien-

tists who stayed behind d o all they might have to provide their Fuhrer with an

equivalent instrument, perhaps for fear of what the combination of absolute

evil with absolute power might mean.I2

Having acquired this awesome weapon, the United States used it against

Japan for a slmple and straightforward reason: to achieve victory as quickly, as

decisively, and as economically as possible. Had the atomic bom b been ready in

time, Germany might well have been the first target: neither the British nor the

Americans had shown inhibit ions abou t flattening that country's cities with

conventional weaponry.13 Hiroshimi and Nagasaki were destroyed, the latter

probably unnecessarily, to shock 1he Japanese into surrendering and thereby to

avoid the casua lties -on both sides and whatever their extent-that might

occur in forcinglapm's defeat by more orthodox means." "Let there be no mis-

take about it," Truman later recalled. "I regarded the bomb as a military weapon

and never had any doubt that it should be used."Is



88 WeN owK now Nuclear Weapons and the Early Cold War 89

will do s0."20 Subsequently, there was occasional talk of initiating an attack onth e USSR for the purpose of knocking out its nuclear facilities, but always in th econtext of what might happen after an effort at international control through

the United N ations had failed, or in a situation in which t he Soviet Union hadalready accumulated sufficient capabilities to allow an attack on the UnitedState s or its allies.*' As late as 1948 , President Tru man c ould still wonder

whether atomic weapons would be available for any kind of offensive militaryoperations "because the people of the United States might not at the time per-

mit their use for a ggressive purposes."22Then there was a more practical difficulty: American officials were at n o point

certain, prior to 1950, that they could actually win a preventive war against theSoviet Union if they were to start one. The production of atomic weapons hadproceeded at w hat seems in retrospect a remarkably relaxed pace, so that at the

time he proclaimed t he Truman Doctrine in March 1947, the President under-

stood there to be only fourteen bombs in the American arsenaLZ3When the

Berlin blockade began in the spring of 1948 only fifty unwieldy and unassem-

bled weapons were available, and just over thirty B-29s equipped to carrythem.24 It was not at all clear how many targets would have t o be hit or wherethey all were: the best intelligence on the USSR came from German aerialphotographs taken early in World War 11, and In some instances from pre-war

and even pre-1917 maps.2s The Air Force itself concluded in 1949 that t hedestruction of some seventy Soviet cities would not, "per se, bring about thecapitulation, destroy the roots of Communism, or critically weaken the pow er

of the Soviet leadership to dom inate the people." M eanwhile, "the capability of

Soviet armed forces to adv ance rapidly int o selected areas of Western Europe,

th e Middle F'ist, an d th e Far East would n ot serio usly be impaired.'IZ6And if one

could achiei e victory, what th en? "Conquering the R ussians is one thing,"Secretaryof Defense James Forrestal pointed out, "and finding what t o do withthem afterward is an entirely different pr0blern."2~

If preventive war was impossible, though, atomic diplomacy might not be.Could the United States use the fact of exclusive possession t o coerce the Soviet

Union an d othe r potential adversaries into cooperation? During the summer of

1945 Secretary o f War Henry L. Stirnson had briefly advocated withholding

information about th e bom b until th e USSR transformed itself into a constitu-tional democracy; and Secretary of State James F. Byrnes definitely expected theAmerican monopoly to induce the Russians into making diplomatic conces-

sions.= President Truman himself appeared to endorse such unilateralism whe nhe warned, i n his first radio address after Nagasaki, that "[tlhe a tomic bom b istoo dangerous t o be loose in a lawless world," hence the United States, GreatBritain, and Canada, "who have the secret of its production, do not intend to

reveal that secret until th e means have been found t o control the bom b so as toprotect ourselves and the rest of the world from the danger of total destruc-tion."z9

What is remarkable about these attitudes is not th at they existed but howquickly they were given up. Within weeks of Hiroshima American officials had

Military decisions rarely take place in geopolitical vacuums, though, and thisone, was no exception. It did indeed occur to Truman and his advisers thatdemonstrating t he atomic bomb's effectiveness would impress, perhaps evenintimidate the Soviet Union: given their already strained relationship withMoscow, it would have been surprising if such thou ghts had nor surfaced.16 A

few of the scientists who developed the bom b went even further: they favored

using it as a way of frightening their o wn government, the Russians, and the restof the world into a collective abhorrence of future war.17 But these justific ationswere of secondary, not determining, importance in t he summer of 1945. It ha s

never been easy to think calmly or systematically abou t how on e is fighting awar while one is fighting it. Nuclear weapons would eventually force w3rriorsand statesmen alike into such self-reflection; but World War I1 was the last great

conflict to be settled within th e ancient paradigm that saw no gap between th eutility an d destructiveness of weaponry.18 It that conte xt, the de cision to use

the atomic bom b made sense.

\

I1

Postwar uses, though, were something else again: here th e actions the UnitedStates took failed to fit traditional patte rns of great power behavio r. To ee thispoint, assume counterfactually that a hypothetical C ountry X had gained exclu-

sive control over what seemed, at first glance, to be an "absolute" weapon.19Would one not expect X, as a matter of the highest national priority and at all

costs, to try to keep its rival Y nd an y other potential rivals from eyer getting

the device? Would one not anticipate that X would use its monopoly, while itexisted, to pressure and if necessary coerce other na tions in to following itswishes? Would one not predict that X would undertake the immediate mass

production of its new weapon, with a view to ensuring contin uing superiorityeven if monopoly w ere no longer possible? And would on e not regard X as verylikely, if it should ever get in to an other military conflict at whatever level, to useits new instrument of warfare to ensure victory as long as there was n o realistic

prospect of retaliation by Y or anyo ne else? Abstraction suggests that all of thesethings should have happened during the period in which the United States

enjoyed an effective nuclear monopoly. The fact th at i n reality noneof them didrequires explanation.

Why did the United States not resort to preventive war to keep the SovietUnion or anyo ne else from ever developing nuclear w eapons? The Joint Chiefsof Staff did briefly consider, immediately after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, howmilitary action might bring about a permanent atomic monopoly; but theseideas went nowhere. One reason had to do with the nation's image of itselfAmericans did not start wars. "I t might be desirable to strike th e first blow,"Pentagon planner General George A. Lincoln acknow1edged)n September 1945,but "it is not politically feasible under our system to do so or to state that we



90 WeNowKnow

abandoned.the idea that an atomic monopoly could become a usable instru-

ment of diplomacy, shifting instead to an immediate search for international

control. This happened for several reasons. Molotov had proven more difficult

to deal with, not less, at the first pobtwar foreign ministers’ conference, held in

London in September 1945, hereby shaking the self-confidenceof those who

had hoped the bomb would be a latter-day version of Theodore Roosevelt’s “big

stick.”30 “The joint development of this discovery with th e UK and Canada

must appear to the Soviet Union to be unanswerable evidence of an Anglo-American combination against them,” Under-Secretaryof State Dean Acheson

warned later that month. “It is impossible that a government as powerful and

power conscious as the Soviet Government could fail to react vigorousl’y to this-

situation.”31

There could be no assurance, moreover, that the Russians would not them-

selves build a bomb. Their scientists understood the principles well enough, and

the Americans had obligingly confirmed many of them shortly after Hiroshima

by publishing their own detailed account of how they had accomplished the

feat.32 The Manhattan Project had been a multinationa l effort, a fact that dis-

couraged attempts to think about its product as a purely American pro ble m-o r

opportunity. The President and his advisers therefore embarked, with support

from the British and the Canadians, upon an ambitious effort to place all atomic

weapons under t he authority of t&.United Nations: the United States woulddeny the bomb to potential adversaries by ultimately-although under safe-

guards of its own desig n-den ying it t o itself.

The international control scheme the Americans put forward in the spring of

1946-first drafted by Acheson and future Atomic Energy Commission chair-

man David E. Lilienthal in cooperation with th e atomic scientists, and t hen

modified by the American spokesman at the United Nations, Bernard Baruch-

reflected widely-held but transitory attitudes: awe at the new kind of warfare the

United States had brought inio existence together with a determination to find

a new approach to world politics to go with it; faith in the United Nations and

in the international legal procedures it would presumably rely upon; deference

to the advice of the scientists who had built the bomb; the lingering hope of

avoiding a hostile relationship with Moscow. These were cautious proposals,

tilted toward maintaining the American monopoly as long as possible, a fact the

Russians were quick to point out. But they were not simply gestures concealing

a search forpermanent nuclear hegemony. One ought n ot t o minimize the guilt

American leaders felt, if only subconsciously, over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or

the sense of responsibility-manifesting itself as a characteristic effort at reform

and perhaps redemption-they drew from what they had done.33

What these officials did no t feel was the need to undertake serious negotia-

tions with the Soviet Union to determine its price for accepting international

control. TheBaruch Plan reflected a domestic compromise, not a n international

one. It balanced what th e atomic scientists insisted on offering against what th e

military and a skeptical Congress were prepared to relinquish. The Americans

presented it, as a consequence, on a “take it or leave it” basis, and by t he begin-

Nuclear Weapons and the Early Cold War 91

ning of 1947 Stalin had chosen t he latter option.34 He thus left the Truman

administration few alternatives but to make whatever it could of its atomic

monopoly before the Russians’ own bomb development project, now assumed

to be underway, brought it to an end.

Having given up on atomic diplomacy when they initiated the search for

internatio nal control, the President and his advisers now found it difficult to

return to it. Committed to the principle of civilian control over the military,

Truman insisted on denying the Pentagon the most basic information abouthow many atomic bombs were available, or on what their effects would be if

employed. He did not, as he put it, want to have “some dashing lieutenant

colonel decide when would be the proper time to dro p one.”35 There could be

little coordination, then, between contingency plans for war with the Soviet

Union and the weapons available with which to fight it; nor was there any

assurance, if war came, tha t Truman would author ize use of these weapons in

the first It was almost as if the President-whose own atti tude toward

nuclear weapons was more ambivalent than he wanted it to appear to be3’-

considered it as important to keep his own military guessing as it was to have

the Russians do the same. Devising strategies to impress Moscow, under such

constraints, was no easy matter.

These difficulties became clear in April 1948,when Winston Churchill sug-

gested giving Stalin the choice of either abandoning Berlin and eastern

Germany, or having his cities razed. The former Prime Minister’s thoughts on

how to handle t he Soviet Union had co mmanded great respect in Washington,

if not universal assent, when put forward in his famous March 1946 “Iron

Curtain” speech. But this new proposal gained n o greater attention wit hin the

Truman administration than had a similar one from the eccentric British

philosopher Bertrand Russell, who had advocated using “any degreeof pressure

that may be necessary . . . t01 secure Russian acquiescence.” “You know better

than I the practical infirmities in [Churchill’s] suggestion,” Ambassador Lewis

Douglas cabled Under SecretaryofState Robert Lovett, and that was the end ofit.38

Truman did, to be sure, approve the ostentatious deployment of B-29s o

British bases during th e Berlin blockade later th at summer.3g But there was less

to this initiative than met the eye, and certainly much less than what

Chu rch ill -or Russell-had in mind. No overt threats to use atomic bombs

accompanied it, and the bombers sent carried no such weapons, a fact the

Russians could easily have determined given th e distinctive external appearance

of atomic-capable B-29s, as well as the presence of the Soviet spy Donald

Macleanon the joint Anglo-American committee within whlch informat ion on

atomic weapons was exchanged.m The B-29maneuver was a hasty imprqvisa-

tion, a quick fix intende d to compensate for another problem Truman’s empha-

sis on civilian priorities had created: the weakness of American conventional

forces, brought a bout by th e extraordinarily tight budgets within which t he

Resident had forced the Pentagon to ~pera te .~’

The administration therefore left itself little choice but to rely upon its atomic



92 WeNowKnow Nuclear Weapons and the Ear/y Cold War 93

was characteristically suspicious:‘‘I do not believe this. And I advise you not to

believe that it is possible to win a war using some kind of chemical element that

no one has seen. Doesn’t this seem like pure propaganda t o you? Done deliber-

ately to distract our scientists from work on new kinds of weapons for the

army?”4h

Further reports accumulated, though, not just from spies In Britain but from

Soviet agents who had cultivated contacts with American physicists, among

them J. Robert Oppenheimer, soon to become director of the ManhattanProject. How much substantive nformation these efforts yielded-if any at all-

is still not clear, but the fact that they took place suggests continuing interest

on Beria’s part, whatever Stalin’s attitude.” Meanwhile, more useful intelli-

gence was beginning to flow from Klaus Fuchs, a German emigr6 scientist who

had joined the British project and would subsequently move to Los Alamos.‘a

Stalin refused to take even these reports seriously, though, until another of

those quirky events occurred-like Vernadsky’s newspaper clipping-that

sometimes alter the course of history. A young Soviet physicist, Georgii Rerov,

looking for citations to his own work In British and American journals, noticed

that references to nuclear physics were no longer appearing in them. Finding

his supervisors uninterested in this pattern, he took the risky step of writing

directly to Stalin in April 1942, suggesting that if the allies were going to such

lengths to conceal such research, it must be important.49 Invisible moleculesmay have been difficult to understand but invisible information was not: Stalin

immediately got the point. Perversely, Anglo-American attempts to ensure the

Manhattan Project’s security were what alerted him to its significance.

“Reportedly he White House has decided to allocate a large sum to a secret

atomic bomb development project,” the NKVD cabled its agents in New York,

London, and Berlin in June, 1942. “Relevant research and development is

already in progress n Great Britain and Germany. .. Please take whatever mea-

sures you think fit to obtain information on . . . he theoretical and practical

aspectsof the atomic bomb projects,” and on “the likely changes in the future

policies of the USA, Britain, and Germany in connection with the development

of the atomic bomb.”S0What is interesting about this sequence of events is that

it was primarily concern about the British and Americans, and only to a lesserextent the Germans, that led Stalin to authorize this intensification of esplon-

age.51 It appears to have made n o difference to him that two of the nations

against whom he acted were wartime allies, while only one was an adversary.

“You are politically naive,” he is said to have told a senior Soviet scientist who

in October 1942 suggested simply asking Roosevelt and Churchill about the

bomb, “if you think that they would share information about the weapons that

will dominate the world in the future.”52

Whether Stalin was right about that is an interesting question. Security was

an obvious priority in the Manhattan Project, but it focused chieflyon he dan-

ger of Germnrt espionage; the po%sibility hat Soviet penetration might be the

more serious problem did no t fully dawnon he Americans until after the w a ~ . ~ 3

The atomic physicists had by no means abandoned their conviction that

monopoly’as a means of deterring the Russians. That capability was by no

means insignificant. It is possible that without it the Americans would never

have run the risks involved in defending Berlin, encouraging the formation of

an independent West German state, and creating the North Atlantic Treaty

Organization.42 But capability was not strategy. Dependence on nuclear

weapons grew more out of desperation than deliberate preference. Truman and

those around him had not yet sorted out the competing priorities of public

opinion, the domestic economy, constitutionality, morality, and the national-security state. Their failure to do so, in turn, impeded efforts to think systemat-

ically about how one might exploit the American nuclear advantage.-Washington officials did not feel self-confident during the summer and fallo?

1948. If they ran risks, it was because they thought it riskier not to do so. That

was because the American atomic monopoly had not deterred Stalin from run-

ning risks of his own: ndeed, it may even have encouragedhim to do so.

I11

The United States built its atomic bomb because it perceived, wrongly as it

turned out, that Hitler might have a similar priority. The Soviet Union began

work on ts bomb because it perceived, quite rightly, that the United States was

already constructing one. Roosevelt made his decision to go ahead i n October

1941 with a potential but highly probable adversary, Nizi Germany, in mind.

When Stalin authorized a research project-not yet a bomb-the following

year, he too had a potential but probable adversary in mind: for the moment,

though, it was an ally.

Soviet authorities first learned that atomic weapons might be possible, it now

appears, from the New York Times. Hoping to alert the White House to the mil-

itary potential of atomic fission, science correspondent William Laurence pub-

lished a story on 5 May 1940, claimingerroneously-that the Germans wf re

extracting uranium-235 for use in bombs. Roosevelt, already aware of fission

research, paid no attention; but as it happened Yale historian George Vernadskysent the clipping to his father, the Russian mineralogist Vladimir Vernadsky,

who passed it on to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. That organization, n turn,

set up a Uranium Commission which quickly established the probable feasibil-

ity of a chain reaction and called for a systematic effort to locate uranium

deposits throughout the USSR.43

The German invasion in June 1941 delayed this search; it also diverted Soviet

physicists into work that seemed more likely to produce immediate military

benefit^.^' But by this time the spies Soviet intelligence had recruited at,

Cambridge University during the 1930s had begun monitoring British nuclear

research, and one of them-probably John Cairncross-reported tha t London

and Washington were collaborating to build a uranium bomb. NKVD chiefLavrenti Beria duly informed his Stalin’s initial reaction, by one account,



94 WeNowKnow Nuclear Weapons an d the Early Cold War 95

Leninist doctrine assumed the venality of capitalists as well as their enmity, the

Soviet government even attempted, in 1943, to purchase sufficient uranium

from the United States to construct an atomic pile similar to the one that had

produced the first chain reaction at the University of Chicago a few months

earlier-this even as efforts to crack the secrets of the Manhattan Project were

_continuingat full pace. The Americans, by this time dimly aware of Soviet espi-

onage but worried that a refusal to sell might only confirm its findings, did pro-

vide some of the requested commodity, although in much smaller quantities

than the Russians had requested.62 The uranium shortage persisted until the

Red Army moved into Czechoslovakia and eastern Germany, where known s u p

plies were available.63

The more serious reason for the absence of an all-out Soviet effort was that

Kremlin leaders were slow to understand what atomic weapons could actually

do. Molotov, to whom Stalin had assigned the initial responsibility for nuclear

research, appears to have had lit tle sense of what it was all about. Beria, who

took over early in 1945, saw the implications more clearly, but even he never

fully trusted the intelligence reports his agents inside the Manhattan Project

provided: "if this is disinformation," he threatened one of his subordinates, 1'11

put you all in the cellar."64

When President Truman at last did tell Stalin about the atomic bomb at the

Potsdam Conference on 24 July 1945, shortly after the first test in the NewMexico desert, it was hardly a surprise to the Soviet leader: he had known about

the possibility of such a weapon long before Truman had.65 He said only tha t

he hoped the Americans would make good use of it against the Japanese. Stalin

reacted more revealingly immediately afterwards: "Truman is trying to exert

pressure, to dominate," he told Beria:

His attitude is particularly aggressive toward the Soviet Union. Of course, the factorof the atomic bomb [is] working for Truman. . But a policyof blackmail and intim-idation is unacceptable to us.We therefore gave no grounds for thinking that any-thing could intimidate us. Lavrentiy, we should not allow any other country to havea decisive superiority over us. Tell Comrade Kurchatov that he has to hurry with hisparcel. And ask him what our scientists need to accelerate work."

When Stalin later berated Kurchatov for not having advanced bomb dewlop-

ment faster, the scientist excused himself by invoking all that the Soviet Unionhad been through during the war: "So much has been destroyed, so many

people have died. The country is on starvation rations, there is not enough of

anything."Stalin was unmoved. "If a child does not cry," he replied, "the mother does

not understand what he needs. Ask for anything you like. You will not be

turned He then dangled material inducements before the astonished

scientist: "we can always make it possible for several thousand persons to live

well, and . . etter than very well, with their owndachas, so that they can relax,and with their own cars." It was "not worth spending time and effort on small-

scale work, rather, it is necessary to conduct the work broadly, on a Russian

scale, and . . n this regard, utmost assistance will be provided."m

science should be an open, international, and elite enterprise, even as they

accommodated themselves uneasily to the censorship, compartmentalization,

and restrictions on movement the United States government required. The

resulting tension produced prophetic insights into the need for the interna-

tional control of atomic weapons, as well a s alternative visions of a long and

costly arms race, possibly even a cataclysmic future ~ a r . ~ 4rom this point of

view, telling the Russians about the bomb could seem the right thing to do. "I

can see that there might be some arguments for doing that," Oppenheimer con-ceded in 1943;but he added-referring to Soviet espionage efforts-"I don' t like

Roosevelt did not immediately rule out informing the Soviet Union. He took

seriously the Danish physicist Niels Bohr's recommendations to this effect dur-

ing the spring and summer of 1944, despite an earlier agreement with Churchill

to withhold such information from "third parties except by mutual consent."

We may never know why, in September, F.D.R. finally yielded t o Churchill's

objections and rejected Bohr's advice. The Warsaw uprising was fresh in the

President's mind, though, and his own Soviet experts were now warning against

trusting Moscow on far less consequential matte) han the atomic bomb.56 He

had also known, for at least a year, that the Russians were attempting to steal its

secrets.57 What is surprising in retrospect is not that Roosevelt rejected

cooperation with the USSR in developing this weapon, but rather that heresponded as calmly as he did to evidenceof Soviet espionage.

The reason is not likely to have been, as some Soviet sources have suggested,

that key administration officials and atomic scientists were passing sensitive

information to the Russians on their The more plausible explanation is

that war was still to be won, the USSR was still an invaluable ally, and as such it

seemed entitled to every benefit of the doubt despite its leader's less than trust-

fu l attitude. The Manhattan Project was itself unknown to all but a ti1 ~yminor-

ity of Americans; in another perverse twist, more vigorous efforts to prevent

Soviet agents from stealing its secrets might have compromised its secrecy. And,

of course, no one in the United States at the time-neither the scientistsnor the

diplomats nor top officials of the Roosevelt administration-knew what we

know now and what Stalin must have known then: that there was going to be

a Cold War.

Espionage appears to have been of greater assistance to the Soviet bomb

development project than we had once th0ught.~9 s early asMarch 1943, lgor

V.Kurchatov, Oppenheimer's Russian counterpart, was assessing the informa-

tion it yielded as having "huge, inestimable, significance or our state and sci-

ence." No t only did spying confirm the importanceof the work going on in the

West; it also made it possible "to bypass many very labor-intensive phases of

working out the problem and to learn about new scientific and technical ways

of solving it."- "It was a very good intelligence operation by our Chekists,"

Molotov recalled years afterwards. "Theyneatly stole just what we needed."61

Even so, progress was slow while the war was goingon.One problem was that

there were few known sources of uranium within the USSR. Perhaps because

the idea of having it moved out the back door."Ss -




performance. “The failure of the conference,” he commented , “will be Byrnes’s

failure, and we should not grieve over t l i i ~ . ” ~ ~ut when Molotov repeated his

tactics at the Moscow foreign ministers’ conference in December, even Stalin

thought he had gone too far: “This is too serious a matter to joke about,” he

insisted in front of the visiting American and British delegations. “We must

now work together to see that this great inv ention is used for peaceful ends.”m

The Americans and British had come t o Moscow to seek Soviet participation

in a United Nations commission on the international control of atomic

energy-the first stage in what would become the Acheson-Lilienthal an d later

the Baruch Plan. Some Soviet officials regarded the visit as evidence that their

tough line on the bomb had already paid off;8o perhaps for that reason the

Soviet Union did agree to participate in the United Nations discussions. A con-

sensus on international control was never close, though, because both

American plans required establishing a powerful international agency that

would control all facilities for producing atomic weapons before the United

States would relinquish its monopoly. The Soviet position provided for the

immediate destruction of existing weapons with no mechanisms t o prevent

other states from building them.81 Dimitri Skobel’tsyn, a scientist on the Soviet

delegation, summarized the situation for Beria and Molotov in October 1946:

If the Baruch plan is accepted, then every independent activity in the development

of atomic productim in countries which have signed the agreement has to be cur-tailed and handed over to an international (in reality, probably, an American) organ-ization. This international organization would then . . . proceed to control our

resources. We reject such help and are determined to carry out by ou r own efforts all

the research and preparatory work necessary for setting up atomic production in our

country, as America did in the yearsof the war.8z

When Molotov subsequently told the United Nations that the Soviet Union

would soon have an atomic bomb ”and other things,” even his boss was

impressed. “Well, tha t was strong stuff,” Stalin commented. “We still had noth-

ing,” Molotov acknowledged, “but I was up to date on the matter.”83

Whatever his foreign minister said in public, Stalin now had a better sense of

what atomic weapons could do. Soviet representatives toured Hiroshima two

weeks after the atomic bombing, an d sen t back detailed reportsof the devasta-

tion they had witnessed. At the invitat ion of th e United States, Soviet scientistsalso attended the first postwar atomic bomb tests, conducted on Bikini Atoll in

1946.84Worried that the Americans might someday try to attack them, Stalin

insisted that Soviet bomb production facilities be well hidden, often in under-

ground bunkers and in one instance even under a lake.85 “That is a powerful

thing, power-ful!” he admitted to Milovan Djilas in 1948, by which time th e

Soviet Union had already made considerable progress toward constructing its

own bomb.86 As late as July 1949)only weeks before th e first Soviet test and with

the weapon very much on his mind, Stalin was warning Liu Shaoqi’s visiting

delegation that “[ilf we, the leaders, undertake [war], the Russian people would

not understand us. Moreover, they could chase us away. For underestimating all

the wartime a nd postwar efforts and suffering. For taking it too lightly.”87

The American atomic bomb had elevated Soviet physics from invisible mole-

cules to a matter of stale security, and as ilconsequence Soviet physicists gained

the freedom to follow the Western example espionage had given them. In con-

trast to his disastrous iiiterfcrence with Soviet genetics, Stalin imposed n o ideo-

logical guidance: Kurchatov did not become Lysenko. The physicists, in turn,

made the most of the opportunity; so much so, indeed, that they would need

no espionage-supplied model when they turned their skills, as they soon did, to

the construction of a hydrogen bomb.6g Was it not dangerous to grant the

atomic scientists so much physical and intellectual autonomy, Beria at one

poin t asked. “Leave them in peace,” his boss-now in a less nurt urin g mood-

replied. “We can always shoot them later.“70

IV

“Hiroshima has shaken the whole world,” Stalin admitted t o his physicists a few

days after the event. “The balance has been broken. Build the bomb-it will

remove the great danger from The danger Stalin foresaw was not tha t of

direct attack. Despite a sense of frustration, even shock, that the United States

had forged so far ahead in this new category of weaponry, there was n o imme-diate concern in Moscow that the Americans would actually use their atomic

bombs against the USSR. Stalin appears t o have derived this reassurance, how-

ever, more from spy reports that confirmed quite accurately the t iny nu mber of

bombs in the American arsenal than from charitable judgments about the

American ch ar ac te ~~ z

More significant was the threat of psychological intimidation. “The bombs

dropped o n Japan were not aimed at Japan but rather at the Soviet Union,”

Molotov recalled. “They said, bear in mind you don‘t have an atomic bomb a nd

we do, and th is is what the consequences will be like if you make a wrong

rn0ve!“~3 talin himself, according to Andrei Gromyko, expected the Americans

and t he British to use their monopoly “ to force us to accept their plans on ques-

tions affecting Europe and the world. Well, that’s not going to happen.”74Nor

would Stalin wait for the Americans to try: he quickly embarked upon a strat-

egy designed to counter the practice of atomic diplomacy before the Truman

administration had even attempted it.7S

The Soviet government took th e official position tha t the atomic b omb had

made no difference at all in the postwar balance of power. This was why

Molotov had gone ou t of his way at t he September 1945 London foreign min-

isters’ conference to show his disdain for th e new weapon, to the point of mak-

ing heavy-handed jokes about it at the expense of Secretary of State Bymes.

“Here’s to the Atom Bomb,” he toasted at one point, in a sodden attempt to

spook the Americans: “We’ve got it .”76As th e pugnacious Foreign Minister later

acknowledged: “We had to set a tone, to reply in a way that would make our

people feel more or less c~nf iden t . ”~ ~talin had n o qualms about Molotov’s




unlikely event that it should choose to d o so.95The American nuclear arsenalwould soon expand exponentially; but this happened only after-and partlybecause-the American nuclear monopoly no longer existed. Timing meansquite a great deal in strategy, and the spies allowed Stalin to calculate it with

unusual precision.4. It helped as well that Stalin had a clearer idea than the Americans of what

might constitute atom ic diplomacy. An old hand at intimidatidg others, he sawthe danger of appearing to be intimidated himself well before Truman and hisadvisers--obviously less experienced in this area-had worked out ways toaccomplish that objective. Washington officialsnever transformed their atomic

monopoly into an effective instrument of peacetime coercion. Had the rolesbeen reversed, it is unlikely that Stalin would have had such difficulties.

All of this raises, then, a n interesting question: did t he fact tha t th e world’s

first nuclear state was also a democratic state make a difference? It obviously did

when it came to espionage. The scale of Soviet operations in this area was

remarkable, but so too was the trust the American, British, and Ca nadian gov-

ernments extended to their own citizens-and to their wartime ally-on so

secret a matter.96 Pressures from allies, the atomic scientists, and public opinionpushed the Truman administration into seeking international control, leavingit unclear forover a year whether the United States could even cou nt on retain-

ing atomic bombs i nto th e postwar era.97 After that po int had been resolved,Truman’s staunchly literal commitment to the principle of civilian supremacydiscouraged exploration of how atomic bombs might affect the relationshipbetween force and diplomacy. So too did his insistence on so closely restrictinginformation about the number and capabilities of these weapons that Sovietintelligence probably knew more about them t han Pentagon planners did. Nor

did self-images of appropriate behavior go away: if democracies did not startwars, neither did they find it easy, in the absence of blatant provocation, to

threaten them.We should not make too much of this argument, though, because one char-

acteristic of nuclear weapons themselves, whether the y exist within democra-

cies or autocracies, was beginning to come in to play at this point: it was easy tothink of reasons why one might need such instruments when one did not yet

have them, but it was difficult to know just what to d o with them once on e gotthem. Stalin, as well as Truman , would soon ace this problem.

As the time for the test approached, Stalin worried about not having an extrabom b in reserve: “Wha t if [th e Americ ans] press on with their atom ic bombsand we have not hing to co ntain the m?” Could the scientists not divide th e firstbomb into two, just in case? When they explained th at smaller bombs wouldlack the critical mass to sustain a chain reaction, Stalin according to oneaccount, tried to m ake sense of the science in ideological terms: “Critical mass. . critical mass. It is also a d ialectical notion!”88 The Soviet leader’s nervous-ness probably explains his otherwise puzzling decision not to an noun ce th e suc-

cessful experiment, conducted o n 29 August 1949, so that it was left to th eAmericans, whose air-sampling techniques quickly picked up evidence tha t an

atomi c explosion had oc curred inside th e USSR, to reveal the ne ws three‘weekslater.89 “Did it look like th e American one?” Beria, wh o witnessed th e test,

demanded excitedly: ”Very much alike? We didn’t screw it up? Kurchatov isn’tpulling our leg, is he?”w

Stalin had chosen to gamble--correctly as it turned out-that his scientists

could provide him with his own atomic bomb, and therefore the basis for adeterrent capability, before the United States could accumulate enough

weapons to be confident of defeating the Soviet Union by launching a preven-

tive w ar.91 A key aspect of this strategy was to show no fear, we n thou gh fearsthere surely were. Diplomacy therefore had to be conduc ted, and for th e most

part was, as if th e American atomic bom b did not exist: this was the p ointof

Stalin’s best known pronounce ment on such w eapons, which was that theywere “mea nt to frighten those with weak nerves.”92 He was in a position toknow.

The only moments at which th e Russians may have moderated their actionsou t of concern for American nuclear capabilities were the 1948 Berlin blockade

crisis and Stalin’s attempt to discourage Ma0 Zedong early in 1949 from cross-ing the Yangtze; but even in these instances th e cause and effect relationshipwas hardly conclusive. “I t is difficult to deduce any evidence that this mono p-

oly on our part influenced Soviet polic y. . .or abated its aggressiveness,” theSoviet expert Charles E. Bohlen concluded the following year.93 Decades later,historian David Holloway assessed th e impact of the American atomic bomb in

only slightly different terms: “It probably made the Soviet Union more

restrained i n its use of force, for fear of precipitating war. It also made the SovietUnion less cooperative and less willing to compromise, for fear of seemingweak.“94

Why did Stalin‘s gamble succeed? Why was he somuch more skillful in defus-ing American atomic diplomacy than he was in conducting h is own oreign pol-icy during this period? Espionage certainly had some thing‘ o do w ith it: th espies apparently did detect, a nd convey to Moscow, the m ost sensitive secret of

the early United States nuclear program, which was how unimpressive thenation’s nuclear capabilities actually were. Stalin could take certain risks-theCzech coup, the Berlin blockade, the authorization to Kim 11-sung to attackSouth Korea-because he knew that th e United States did not yet have thecapacity to attack and be sure of vanquishing the Soviet Union, even in the

V

The Truman administration responded to the Soviet bomb test in much thesame way that Stalin had absorbed th e news from Alamogordo, Hiroshima andNagasaki four years earlier. Although each side had known of the other‘s workon atomic weapons, confirmation of an actual capability, in each instance,came sooner tha n expected. Even if th e timing’could have been anticipated, the



100 We Now Know Nuclear Weapons and the Early Cold War 101

psychological impact could hardly have been. The Americans had guessed that

it would take the Russians anywhere from five to twenty years to get the bomb,

but they had fallen into the bad habit of pushing their range of estimates for-

ward each year,98so that the revelation that the USSR had managed it in four

could not but be a shock-very much like the one the Russians had felt, despite

their excellent intelligence sources, in the summerof 1945.President Truman's

initial reaction to the fact that there were now two nuclear powers also paral-

leled earlier Soviet behavior: he denied tha t anything significant had changed.

"The eventual development of this new force by other nations was to be

expected," he assured the nation. "This probability has always been taken in to

account by US."^ i

But Truman, unlike Stalin, did not-perhaps in a democracy could not-feign

unconcern for very long. By early 1950, he had taken several steps to deal

with the new situation, the combined effects of which were simultaneously

to increase and decrease reliance on nuclear weapons. He thereby produced a

muddle, not a strategy. The President and his advisers were as uncertain about

what they could actually do with nuclear weapons when they lef t office in 1953

as they had been in 1949.

The first stage in the American adjustment to a bipolar nuclear world was to.

expand the production of atomic bombs, something that would have happened

even if there had been no Soviet test in August 1949. Technical breakthroughs

were making it possible to build more powerful weapons with smaller amounts of

fissionable material, just as budget constraints were forcing the Pentagon to rely

increasingly on its atomic capabilities. All that t he Soviet atomic explosion did

here was to accelerate that process: there had been only about 200weapons in the

American arsenal at the time it took place; there would soon be many more.'m

The second American adjustment was more dramatic. Under pressure from

some-but by no means allof the atomic scientists, Concerned about the con-

sequences if he did not go ahead and the Soviet Union did, President Truman

authorized research at the end of January 1950on a new and far more powerful

form of weapon based on nuclear fusion, not fission. American physicists had

understood the theoretical possibility of such a "super-bomb" since 1942.

Whether because they found the implications appalling, as some did, or because

of uncertainty over how to proceed, as was the case with others, the scientistshad maintained, as McGeorge Bundy has put it, a "benign conspiracy of silence

on the subject." The President himself apparently knew nothing of it until

October 1949.101

Despite serious disagreements among his advisers,lo2 Truman had little diffi-

culty deciding to build such a weapon once he understood that the Russians

could also do so. International control, he believed, was no longer feasible. His

suspicions of Stalin now equaled those the Kremlin leader had held of him four

and a half years earlier, when Stalin had ordered his own all-out effort to con-

struct an atomic bomb. There could be no assurance that the Russians would

refrain from practicing thermonuclear diplomacy if they possessed thermo-

nuclear weapons and the Americans did not. Everybody hbd predicted the end

-

of the world when he decided to aid Greece and Turkey, Truman commented as

he signed the announcement, on 31January 1950, that the United States would

build a hydrogen bomb. "[BJut we did go ahead, and the world didn't come to

an end. [It] would be the same case here."lo3

The final element in Truman's response to the Soviet atomic bomb was, how-

pver, an attempt to de-emphasize the utility of nuclear weapons altogether. NSC-

68, drafted during the late winter and early springof 1950, tacitly acknowledged

how hard it would be to find military purposes for these new instruments ofwarfare by making the case for a massive buildup of conventional forces, what-

ever the budgetary implications. It was imperative, insisted the document's

authors-Paul Nitze most influential among them-"to increase as rapidly as

possible our general air, ground and sea strength and that of our allies to the

point where we are militarily not so heavily dependent o n atomic weapons."

NSC-68 questioned neither the increase in the production of fission weapons

nor the decision to build the hydrogen bomb. But it did, for the first time, raise

the issue of how believable nuclear threats would be in a world with more than

one nuclear power. The danger was "piecemeal aggression against others,

counting on ou r unwillingness to engage in atomic war unless we are directly

attacked." The risk was "having no better choice than to capitulate or predpi-

tate a global war."lW What this argument implied, therefore, was a double para-

dox: as nuclear weapons became more numerous and more powerful, they alsobecame less usable; but as nuclear weapons became less usable, one needed

more of them to deter others who possessed them. Logic, in this field, was not

what it was elsewhere.

There was at the time, and has been since, a good deal of agonizing over

whether the American decisions of 1949-50 set off a new and even more lethal

arms race, thus closing off any possibility of a renewed effort at international

control.1o5 nsofar as the hydiogen bomb is concerned, though, the evidence is

now quite clear: the Russians began work on their own thermonuclear device

before the Americans did. For whatever reason-whether the nature of an

authoritarian societyordifferences n scientific culture or both-the distinction

between fission and fusion weapons never carried the weight within the Soviet

Union that it did in the United States.'" Andrei Sakharov, who more than any

other individual developed the Swiet "super," put the matter bluntly shortlybefore his death:

The Soviet government (or, more properly, those in power: Stalin, Beda, and com-pany) already understood the potential of the new development, and nothing couldhave dissuaded them from going forward with its development. Any U.S.movetoward abandoning or suspending work on a thermonuclear weapon would have

been perceived either as a cunning, deceitful maneuveroras evidenceof stupidityorweakness. In any case, the Soviet reaction would have been the same: to avoid a pas-sible trap, and to exploit the adversary's folly at the earliest opportunity.107

"The decision to develop the hydrogen bomb was seen as a logical next step,"

the most careful scholar of Soviet nuclcar history has concluded, "and occa-

sioned none of the soul-searching that took place in the United States."*m




Psychological effects, though, required different measurements: these the

military staffs left to their political superiors. Atomic bombs were terror

weapons as well as strategic weapons, and it was precisely their efficiency that

was so terr ifying-as the Japanese, more than anyone else, had reason t o know.

The only individual ever to have ordered the military use of atomic bombs

understood this from the start. Truman never thought it possible to separate

physical and psychological considerations when it came t o these new methods

of conducting war, and insisted on treating them as revolutionary for thatreason. No stranger to the uses of terror, Stalin too thought about the bomb in

psychological terms: hence his own form of "atomic diplomacy," which depre-

cated the importance of the weapon even as he was making the most desperate

efforts to obtain it; hence his own fears, once he had it, that he might be even

less secure.

How one estimates the outcome of a Soviet-American war fought, say, in

1950depends therefore upon how one balances physical versus psychological

effects. In physical terms, the two superpowers were relatively evenly-if asym-

metrically-matched. One can imagine a tiger versus shark standoff, rather like

that between the French and the British during the Napoleonic Wars, in which

dissimilar military capabilities could have kept each belligerent, for some time,

from getting at and hence prevailing against the other. But that would have

required steady nerves indeed o n both sides. The psychological consequencesofa Russian Blitzkrieg crashing through to the English Channel, or of just a fewatomic bombs wiping out Moscow or Leningrad, are much more difficult to

guess.

Time, though, was not on the Russians' side: the growing American atomic

stockpile was gradually narrowing the gap between the physical and the psy-

chological. It might indeed have been difficult o defeat the Soviet Union with

only 200 atomic bombs, but we know now, and Stalin's spies may well have

allowed him to know then, that the United States had 299weapons by the end

of 1950, 438by 1951, nd 841 by 1952.The Russians during the last year of

Stalin's life had only about fifty atomic bombs, or an approximate 17-1 disad-

vantage.**"The Soviet attainment of a physicul atomic capability, therefore, can

hardly have provided Stalin much psychological reassurance. Like Truman, he

must have wondered, having got them, just what good such weapons actuallywere.

102 We Now Know

VI

Despite the fact that two great powers now possessed atomic bombs, despite the

projects both now had to develop thermonuclear weapons, the feasibilityof war

itself was not yet in question. Well into the 195Os,military planners in both

Moscow and Washington clung to the reassuring notion-if reassurance could

have meaning in such a context-that World War 111 should it ever come

about, need not differ all that much from World War 11.

Old paradigms persist long after the conditions that gave rise to them have

ceased to exist,*- and t is clear now that Soviet and American war pfanning -reflected this tendency. Holloway has documented striking parallels in the way

strategists on both sides tried to adapt to the unfamiliarityof atomic bombs by

imposing familiarityon hem: when one confronts an abyss, it is perhaps nat-

ural to want t o minimize its depth. Both assumed the useof such weapons in

any new world war, but neither regarded them as likely to be decisive.

Asymmetries in conventional capabilities-the Red Army's substantial , though

not overwhelming, ground force superiority n Europe, the United States' naval

and air predominance-would, the planners expected,locka future war into the

pattern of the last one. The Russians would occupy most of Europe, probably

also parts of the Middle Fast and Northeast Asia. The United States and i ts sur-viving allies would rely, first, upon strategic bombing, and only much later on

invasions to try to retake these territories. Still for the most part safe from attack

because the Russians lacked an effective long-range bombing capability and

possessed only a rudimentary navy, the American "arsenal" would provide the

munitions and much of the manpower necessary to accomplish these tasks, as

it had in 1917-18 and 1941-5.Traditional, not nuclear, capabilities would

determine which side prevailed in the end.110

Given the decisiveness with which just two atomic bombs had forced Japan's

surrender, these attitudes might seem antiquated, even ostrich-like. But it was

not all that clear to either Russian or American military experts that the physi-

cal effects of atomic weapons were all that revolutionary. Soviet observers who

inspected the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as those who witnessed

the 1946Bikini tests, found the power of the new weapon awesome, but theydid not regard it as so powerful as to render war itself, or the possibility of sur-

vival in war, obsolete.111 Some Americans who saw the evidence first-hand

came to similar conclusions. Nitze, for example, noted tha t earlier firebomb

raids against Tokyo and other cities had been at least as devastating: the signif-

icance of atomic bombs lay in their efficiency, not their implications for the

future of warfare.112 Moreover, widely dispersed Soviet targets would hardly

resemble those in Japan. Holloway has pointed out that during the first fourmonths of the war with Germany in 1941, he Russians had sustained casualties

and physical destruction exceeding the Americans' estimates of the damage all

their approximately 200 atomic bombs in 1949 could have produced. Soviet

intelligence at the time, it appears, made similar ca l cu l a t i ~ hs .~ ~ ~

VII

The outbreak of fighting in Korea inJune 1950 rovided the first hard evidence.

The Korean War demonstrated how awkward it would be to use atomic bombs

even in the most desperate military circumstances: from this perspective, they

proved to be irrelevant to the outcome of that conflict. But from another per-spective they were of critical importance, for Korea determined how hot wars,



104 We Now Know Nuclear Weapons and the Early Cold War 105

claimed blithely two months later, only equaled "two o three thousand tons of

TNT."122Chinese officers in Korea were told that-such bombs were "not for

actual combat use," and one journal confidently assured its readers that these

weapons would annihilate anyone who tried t o use them.'=

Even as Mao minimized American atomic bombs, though, he expected the far

mo re primitive Soviet nuclear arsenal to intimidate the United States. The Sino-

Soviet alliance, in his mind, always had the purpose of deterrfng he Americans:

now it would prevent them from employing their most powerful weapons inKorea. "It is the United States who should be afraid of using atomic bombs

against us," a Chinese press editorial proclaimed shortly before Ma0 ordered

intervention there, "because its densely concentrated industries are more

vulnerable to serious damage by Soviet nuclear re ta li at l~ n. "' ~~hether the

Chairman believed in this early form of "extended deterrence" or was simply

seeking to reassure nervous subordinates is difficult to say. Significantly,

though, Chinese leaders were assuring each other as late as the fall of 1952that

the Americans would not use anything more powerful than tactical nuclear

weapons in Korea because "the United States Is under great pressure of world

opinion and is also deterred by possible Soviet nuclear retaliation."lS It is also

worth noting that Mao saw no need to begin his own bomb development pro-

ject until after the Russians made it clear, during the first Quemoy-Matsu crisis

two years later, that they would not risk war with the Americans to help theChinese regain Taiwan.lz6 Only when Mao realized how small and leaky the

Soviet nuclear umbrella was did he became uncomfortable under it.

But it is American attitudes about nuclear weapons in Korea that are the most

difficult to explain. Because Soviet capabilities werk still so rudimentary, th e

United States retained an effective atomic monopoly at the time the war broke

out.12' The defeats American troops suffered in the wake of th e initlal North

Korean attack dnd subsequent Chinese intervention were as humiliating as any

in the nation's military history.IZ8 he taboo on th e use of nuclear weapons In

limited wars-indeed the very notion of a "limited" war itself-had not yet

taken root: he Korean War defined these principles, but there was little reason

to expect, when it broke out, that its conduct would reflect thern.lZ9 That it did

so stemmed from what the world's most experienced nuclear power learned

about the kind of warfare its new weapons had now made possible.

The Truman administration tried to use its atomic superiorityadvantageously

in Korea, but never succeeded. One problem was the absence of appropriate tar-

gets. Atomic bombs had originated, after all, within the con text of World War

I1strategic bombing campaigns: hey were meant for use against indusMal facil-

ities, transportation networks, and military strongpoints, not for interdicting

peasant armies picking their way along mountain trails with little more than

what men could carry on their backs. It was not at all clear that atomic bomb-

ing, in such a war, would produce decisive results: the enemy might keepCorn-

ing, and so obviousa demonstrat ion of the bomb's ineffectivenesscould impair

its credibility elsewhere.130As a remarkably well-informed Soviet intel ligence

report put it in January 1953:

during the Cold War, were to be fought. The rule quickly became that neither

the United States nor the Soviet Union would confront the other directlyoruse

all available force; each would seek instead to confine such confrontations

within the theaters in which they had originated. This pattern of tacit

cooperation among bitter antagonists could hardly have emerged had it no t

been for the existence, on both sides, of nuclear weapons.

The caution the Soviet Union showed during the Korean War is understand-

able. Stalin had indeed been imprudent in allowing Kim 11-sung to attack SouthKorea, but he was prudent to the point of hyper-cautiousness once it became

clear th at his actions had provoked an unexpeded American mil itary response.

The Soviet Union had few if any atomic bombs available at the time the Wac

broke out, and no feasible means of delivering them upon American targets.Il5

Surely Stalin had this deficiency in mind when he warned the North Koreans,

before their invasion, that they would have to look to the Chinese for help if

the United States did intervene; surely it explains his statements to the Chinese,

after the Inchon landing, that the Soviet Union was not yet ready to fight a third

world war; surely it accounts for his willingness to tolerate a North Korean

defeat and an American military presence within striking distance of

VladivostokIl6 surely it influenced the extraordinary lengths to which Stalln

went to conceal what we now know to have been the Soviet air force's exten-

sive involvement in Korea in support of Chinese and North Korean troops.117The Chinese, less knowledgeable than the Russians about atomic bombs, were

more willing to fight the nation that had invented them. Their sacrifices in the

end-not the Soviet attainment of a nuclear capability-prevented Stalin's

worst fears of what might happen o n the Korean peninsula from coming to

pass.

Chinese thinking about nuclear weapons was strikingly inconsistent. On the

one hand, Mao Zedong had long ago dismissed the atomic bomb as "a paper

tiger which the US reactionaries use to scare people."118 His concerns about

Americans invading China had focused on the use of convent ional forces,

although he acknowledged that nuclear weapons might be employed. In either

case, technological superiority would mean little because the Chinese could

always fall back upon their enormous manpower reserves: "As long as the green

mountains are there, one need not worry about After the Korean

War began Mao went out of his way to taunt the Americans-less than coher-

ently-abo ut their nuclear impotence:

We will not allow you to use the atomic bomb. But if you insist on using it, you mayuse it. You can follow the way you choose to go, and we will go our own way. Youcan use the atomic bomb. I willrespond with my hand grenade. I will catch the weakpoint on your part, hold you, and finally defeat you.1m

" w e cannot but allow them to use it because we do not have [the bomb] and

thus we are in no position to stop them," Mao admitted to his Politburo on 4

August. But "we are not afraid, and we just have to get prepared."121 Part of the

preparation involved deprecation: American atomic weapons, the Chinese press



106 We Now Know

m h e U.S. milita ry leaders are not c onvin ced of th e practicality of using th e atomicbomb in Korea. They are afraid that, if the use of atomic weapons does not e nsurethe real preponderance of the United States, a final blow will be dea lt to U.S. pres-tige. What's more, in this case they believe that the existing U.S. stockpile of atomicweapons would considerably lose its importance as a means of intimid ati0n .1~~

Better not to use the atomic bomb at all, in short, than to run the risk that its

use might fail to produce the intended result.

It was also the case that, despite their nuclear superiority, American officialsstill worried about war with the Soviet Union. The primary concern here was

indeed t he Sino-Soviet Treaty, which obligated th e Russians to come to Ch ina'sdefense in case of attack. Use of the b omb against Mao's troops inside Korea or

against their supply facilities in M anchuria might bring th e USSR in to th e con-flict: there was little awareness in Washing ton of how badly Stalin wanted to

avoid such an outcome. If war did come, the Soviet air force would be able to

bomb Japan or South Korea; even more dangerously, the fighting could spreadto more vital-but still vulnerable-regions like Europe or the Middle East, aprospect that would tu rn th e Korean struggle into a sideshow.13zThe treaty Mao

and Stalin signed, then, achieved the deterrence they had hoped for. At thesame time the advantage the United States held over the Soviet Union innuclear weapons and delivery capabilities counted, in this instance, for very

little.133Yet another difficulty grew out of the features that distinguished atomic

weapons from all others in the first place. Truman himself claimed not to havelost sleep over the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bu t there is ampleevidence to suggest that he hoped never again to have to make a comparable

decision. As long as a ny other coun try+? spec ially the Soviet Union-had

nuclear capabilities the United States would have to have them , but th at by n omeans implied automatic use in future wars. "We will never use [t he bomb]again if we can possibly help it," the President had promised privately in

1949.1s4 Military professionalism, paradoxically, may also have discouraged

nuclear use: soldiers have often felt psychological resistance-at times evenmoral abhorrence-toward technologies that threaten t o alter familiar ways of

fighting.135Such instincts could have had something to do with why the JointChiefs of Staff found it so difficult to identify appropriate targets for atomicbombing in Korea.

But even if Truman a nd his generals had been comfortable with the idea of

employing nuclear weapons there, allies would not have been. The militaryeffort in Korea was, after all, a multinational enterprise fought under the UnitedNations flag, a fact which did-as Stalin may have anticipatedl36-inhibitAmerican freedom of action. When the President let slip at a November 1950press conference that the use of nuclear weapons in Korea had always been"under consideration," alarmed Europeans made it clear that the price the

United States would pay if i t took such action would include allied solidarity,not just on th e Korean peninsula but elsewhere as well.'3Z Thanks again t o theinvolvement of his spy, Maclean, in to psecr et Anglo-American discussions of

Nuclear Weapons and the Early Cold Wa r 107

this issue in Washington the following month, Stalin was almost certainlyaware of its importance.lJ8So what did the Truman administration actually do with nuclear weapons

during the Korean War? It used that conflict to justify a massive rearmamenteffort, following th e guidelines of NSC-68, that significantly boosted American

puclear and conventional capabilities. It repeated the 1948 deployment of B-

29s-a tomic -cap able this time, but without atomic bombs-to British bases, aswell as to American facilitieson Guam. Following the firing of General Douglas

MacArthur in the spring of 1951 it even sent nuclear weapons to accompanythis latter group of bombers, but then quickly moved them back to the UnitedStates. It spoke periodically of expanding the w ar int o China, w ith th e implica-

tion that it might use nuclear weapons there; at no point did it explicitly

threaten such use, thoug h, whether in Korea or And that, as far aswe now know, is it: the Truman administration took no further action, despitethe fact that its superiority over its sole nuclear rival was greater than it would

ever be again.

VIII

Dwight D. Eisenhower and his Secretary of State, Jo hn Foster Dulles, did not a tfirst share Truman's uncertainty about what one might do with nuclear

weapons. Dulles had called loudly during the 1952 campaign for a "policy of

boldness" that would make American military power "a deterrent of war insteadof a mere means of waging war after we got into it," an d by the time of the elec-tion h e had persuaded an initially skeptical Eisenhower tha t only reliance on

nuclear weapons would make containment work over the long haul at a reason-able cost. The Korean War was dragging on inconclusively, both men believed,

because Truman had failed to use allof the strength available to end it. The new

administration was determined, as quickly as possible, to do better.1mEisenhower and Dulles remembered having threatened the use of nuclear

weapons in Korea if th e fighting there continued; t hey convinced themselves

that such threats had indeed induced the North Koreans and the ChineseCommunists to sign the armisticeof J uly 1953 . " w e were prepared for a much

more intensive scale ofwarfare," Dulles recalled several mon ths later. "[we] ha d

already sent the means to the theater for delivering atomic weapons. Thisbecame known to the Chinese through their good intelligence sources and infact we were not unwilling that t hey should find out." W hen asked yean later

why the Chinese accepted an armistice in Korea, Eisenhower responded

bluntly: "Danger of an atomic war."141It is much less clear in retrospect, though, th at cause and effect corresponded

this closely. The National Security Council did discuss the possibirityof usingnuclear weapons in Korea during th e first few month s of the Eisenhower admin-istration. T he president him self is on record as having described such devices as



108 We Now Know

”simply another weapon in our arsenal,” while Dulles stressed the need to breakdown th e “false distinction”-promoted, he darkly noted, by Moscow-thathad set “atomic weapons apart from all other w eapons as being in a special cat-

egory.” But the administration was no more precise than its predecessor inthreatening actual use in Korea while th e fighting was still going on. Its mostexplicit warnings came after the armistice, and in the context of how it wouldrespond to a violation. Eisenhower did authorize the transfer of completedbombs to th e military for overseas deployment; this happened only on he eveof the armistice and as part of a general shift in procedures for handling nuclearweapons, though, not- as Dulles later cla ime d-a s part of a scheme to apply

pressure on the C hinese. Plans for nuclear use during t he final month: of th e

Korean War were, as the histo rian Roger Dingman h as written, “ more discursivethan decisive.“*42

Nor is there evidence that they impressed the Chinese Communists. Theauthorities in Beijing did carefully monitor Eisenhower’s campaign statements

calling for more aggressive strategies in Korea, but-still confiden t tha t the

Soviet atomic bomb would deter the Americans-they interpreted these a s pre-

saging intensified amphibious operations, not a nuclear offensive.1*’ Whenasked years later about their reaction to American nuclear threats in Korea,Chinese officials denied ev en having heard of them. If Dulles did intend the

transfer of atomic weapons and their means of delivery as a signal t o Beijing, itwas one the intended recipients apparently missed.144Why, the n, did th e Korean War end ? Because Stalin died, or so t now appears.

It is easy enough for us in retrospect to see how tha t conflict damaged Sovietinterests;l45 but the aging Kremlin autocrat did n ot view th e situation similarly.

He had worried in the fall of 1950 that the war might expand to involve theSoviet Union. He played a major role in setting up cease-fire negotiations

between the North Koreans, the Chinese, and th e United Nations command inJune 1951, presumably as a way of lessening that It may be that an

increasingly inflexible United States negotiating position, especially with respectto th e forced return of Chinese an d North Korean prisoners-of-war, prolonge d

these negotiations and therefore the fighti11g.1~’But it does not follow from all

of this that Stalin was eager to end the Korean War: indeed, new evidence

strongly suggests that once the battlefront had stabilized, he was keen to keepthe conflict going. “frlhe war in Korea should not be speeded up,“ he cabled Maoin June 1951. It could even be a useful learning experience for the Chinese,

since a drawn out war, in the first place, gives the possibility to th e C hinese troopsto study contemporary warfare on the field of battle and i n the seco nd place shakesup th e Truman regime in America and harms the m ilitary prestige of the Anglo-A merican t r oo ~ s . 1 ~ ~

The Chinese and the North Koreans, Stalin instructed Mao the following

November, should c ontin ue “using flexible tactics in the negotiations” but atthe same time ”pursue a hard line, n ot showing haste and, not displaying inter-est in a rapid end to th e negotiation^."'^^


Kim 11-sung was co mpla ining , by July 1952, that “the enemy almost withoutsuffering any kind of losses constantly inflicts on us huge losses in manpow erand material values.”i5o Even then, th ough , Stalin saw no reason to bring the

war to an end. “The North Koreans,” he told Zhou E nlai the following month,“have lost nothing, except for casualties that they suffered during the war.”

Jhere had of course been ”many” of these-Stalin said not hln g of Chinese

casualties-but th e war had paid off because it had revealed the Americans’weakness:

Americans are merch ants. Every American soldier is a speculator, occupied with buy-ing and selling. Germans conquered France in 20 days. It’s already been two years,and [the] USA has still no t subdu ed little Korea. Wha t kind of strength is that?America’s primary weapons . . . are stockings, cigarettes, and other merchandise.They want to subjugate the world, yet the y can not subdue little Korea.

“NO,”Stalin insisted, “Americans don’t know how to fight. . They are pinning

their hopes on th e atom bo mb and air power. But one c annot win a war withthat.”151

Perhaps because they had a clearer sense of Soviet long-term interests, Stalin’ssuccessors took a less sangu ine -an d sanguinary-view. Eager to explore thepossibilities for relaxing tensions with the West, they saw Korea as the obvious

place to start.152Within two weeks of the old dictator’s death In March 1953,

the Soviet Council of Ministers informed both Mao an d Kim of its view

that it would be incorrect to continue the line on this question which has been fol-

lowed until now, without making alterations in tha t line which correspond to thepresent political situation and w hich ensue from the deepest interests of our peoples,the peoples of the USSR, China and Korea, who are interested in a firm peace andhave always sought an acc eptablepath toward the soonest possible conclusion of thewar in Korea.IS3

Or , in less convoluted language, whatever Stalin’s interest in making war, theywere ready to make peace.

The exhausted North Koreans did no t object, nor did t he Chinese: the SovietUnion all along had provided less military assistance than they ha d hoped for-and had insisted that they pay for it. Their economy was dangerously over-

stretched.Is4 Stiff United Nations resistance had long since forced Mao toabandon his grandiose plans for driving the Americans off the Korean penin-sula: a 1954 Pentagon estimate placed the ratio of Chinese to American casual-

ties at ten to one-surely an exaggeration-but the Chinese themselves haveacknowledged a three-to-one imbalance.lsS And the Eisenhower administra-tion’s public rhe toric may have given Beijing at least a vague sense that if it didnot accept a n armistice they might so on face a wider war, even if no t a nuclearone.Is6

Mao had the option of treating a military stalemate as a victory: as an author-itarian leader, he could impart greater malleability to the meaning of wordsthan could his democratic counterparts in t he West. Even if his initial victorieshad given him delusions of grandeu r-rather like MacArthur’s unde r similar



110 We Now Know

circumstances-his fundamental objective in Korea had been to demonstrate

that the Chinese people had "stood up" to the Western imperialists. "This time

* we have really felt out the US armed forces," Mao boasted in September 1953.

"If you do not come into contact with [them], you might be afraidof them. We

fought with them for thirty-three months, and we have become thoroughly

acquainted with them. US mperialism is not such an awesome thing, it is just

what is, and that's all."157

So did nuclear weapons play any significant role in th e Korean War? At on e

level, the answer has to be:not at all. It is difficult to show that the North and

South Koreans, the Chinese, orthe Americans and their allies fought the ground ,

war in Korea any differently from the way they would have if nuclear Geapons

had no t even existed. The gap between the power of such weapons and their

practical applications was so great as to render them useless, which is why Mao

could get away with treating them in exactly this way.

At another level, though, nuclear weapons were supremely significant, for the

Korean War could hardly have remained what it w a s a limited war-in their

absence. Despite Stalin's posturing before Zhou Enlai, we can assume that he

did not really share Mao's official view of American atomic bombs as paper

tigers.158 "How he quivered!" Khrushchev ater recalledof Stalin. "He was afraid

of war. He knew that we were weaker than the United States. We had only a

handful of huclear weapons, while America had a large arsenalof

nuclear

arm~."~59isenhower certainly saw this: "They must be scared as hell," he

remarked of the new Soviet leaders just prior t o the Korean armistice.IW

But the Americans also behaved cautiously. Their awareness of a Sino-Soviet

Treaty linked to a Soviet nuclear capability-primitive though it was-de terred

them from expanding the war into China despite their nuclear superiority; it

may also have kept them from making an issue of Soviet air involvement in

Korea, despite what must have been abundant evidence of it.161Washington

too feared what a wider war in a nude ar age might bring. "You must be prepared

to use force in such a way as not to involve the use of ultimate force," Acheson

later explained. "If you don't limit it, the world is gone."162

It was in this sense, then, that the new weapons proved their worth. They

frightened both sides into thinking twice-indeed into thinking repeatedly-

about the risks of escalation. Apart from common sense, never a n entirely reli-able mechanism, the pre-nuclear age had had few means to keep small conflicts

from dragging great powers into big wars. Even as they multiplied potential

levels of violence, nuclear weapons reinforced rationality, even prudence, even

among antagonists with no other basis for mutual trust.163

Nuclear Weapons and the Early Cold Wa r 111

tional weapon-on a Pacific atoll that proved too fragile to survive the blast.

Little celebration accompanied this final technological accomplishment of the

Truman administration, though, and the President himself, as if ashamedby t,

would not even announce the test publicly for another two weeks.1- Few of

those who had favored building hydrogen bombs now expected them to pro-

Vide any lasting advantage over the Soviet Union, a judgment quickly con-

firmed when the Russians detonated their own primitive version -also not an

operational weapon-just nine months later, on 12August 1953.'= By the end

of 1955, oth sides would have fully functional thermonuclear bombs as well aslong-range bombers from which to drop them; both were on the way to devel-

oping missiles capable of delivering such weapons on each other's territory

almost instantaneously. The United States would retain quantitative and quali-

tative superiority in nuclear weapons for years to come, but the age of mutual

vulnerability-the ability of each side to inflict catastrophic damage upon the

other-had clearly arrived.

The American monopoly over nuclear weapons, while it lasted, yielded unim-

pressive results. Stalin and Mao quickly sensed that the way to defuse this dan-

ger was to deprecate it, to treat it as a "paper tiger" whose capacity to frighten

people depended solely upon their willingness to be frightened. It was critically

important, as Stalin insisted, never to show "weak nerves," even if -a s he clearly

did to the day he die d-one suffered from them. Both dictators practiced a

strategy Kennan had once recommended to the United States and its Western

European allies for confronting Soviet conventional force superiority :

We are like a man who has let himself into a walled garden and finds himself alonethere with a dog with very big teeth. The best thing for us to do is surety to try to

establish, as between the tw o of us, the assumption that the teeth have nothing

whatsoever to do with our mutual rela tionshi pthat they are neither here nor there.

If the dog shows no disposition to assume that it is otherwise, why should we raisethe subject and invite attention to the disparity?'-

Why, though, did th e American nuclear dog not bite? Or bark? Or at least derive

some benefit from its expensively acquired teeth?

Democracy surely had something to do with i t. We will never know for cer-

tain what Stalin or Mao might have done with a nuclear monopoly, but it Seems

reasonable to assume that they would have brushed aside the competingdomestic priorities, the concerns about civil-military relations, the worries

about what allies would say, and-most particularly-the moral qualms that

afflicted the Truman administration and, in time, Eisenhower's as well.

Authoritarians end to wield power authoritatively.

As the only American president to enjoy a nuclear monopoly, one might have

expected Harry S.Truman himself, of all people, to have been more assertive.

That he was not has been taken as reflecting an inadequate understanding of

nuclear strategy: "Maturity of strategic thinking had yet to arrive in

Washington," two recent historians of this subject have concluded; for the

Truman administration, nuclear weapons provided only "a convenient means

to avoid tough decisions and painful choices."167

IX

On 1 November 1952, he United States rearranged a small portion of the

earth's surface by detonating the first thermonuclear dace-no t an opera-



112 We Now Know

Perhapsso.But one m ight also argue that T ruman was more mature than mostothers at th e time because he saw, almost from the start, that nuclear weaponswere going to change the meaning of "strategy" itself. That word implies the

calculated relationship of means to ends; but Truman persistently maintainedthat in a nuclear age such calculations were no longer possible. When a n adviserreminded h im in October 1945 that h e had a n atomic bomb up his sleeve, thePresident acknowledged this but com mented: "I am no t sure that it can ever be

used." '= " w a r has undergone a technological change which makesi t a very

different thing from what it used to be," the President explained seven yearslater in his final State of the U nion message:

The war of the future would be one in which ma n could extingu ish millions of livesat one blow, demolish the great cities of the world, wipe out the cultural achieve-ments of the pa st- an d destroy the very structure of a civilization that has beenslowly and painfully built up thro ugh h undred s of g enerations. Such a war is not apossible policy for rational men.

Truman concluded by revealing what h e would say to Stalin-who retained his

belief in t he eventual inevitability of war through the final weird mo nths of hislife1q9-if the tw o should ever meet aga in, face to face:

You claim belief in Lenin's prophecy that on e stage in the developme nt of com-munist society would be war between your world and ours. But Lenin was a pre-

atomic man, who viewed society and history with pre-atomic eyes. Somethingprofound has happened since he m ote. War has changed its shape and dimension.It cannot now be a "stage" in the de velopment of anyth ing save ruin for your regimeand your homeland.*70

Little noticed at the time nor widely remem bered since,''' Trum an's Janu ary

1953 valedictory anticipated th e difficulties all of his successors would ha ve -a swould those elsewhere in the world w ho would come t o possess them-trans-lating the physical power of nuclear weapons into effective nstrume nts of state-

craft. The absence of coherent strategy in the Truman ad ministration, therefore,

may have demonstrated n ot so much lack of sophistication as an abunda nce of

it. Truman's nuclear education simply preceded that of everyone else.

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gaddis we now know

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