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Nothing better illustrates how far we had come by 1945 from FDR’s denunciation of city-bombing as cruel, inhumane, barbaric, and savage, just six years earlier.
Plenty of strategic targets
We were attacked by Japan. Do you want to kill Japanese, or would you rather have Americans killed?
he asked me a question I’d never heard before. He asked, ‘How strong are the winds going to be at ground level?’
‘How strong does the wind have
to be so that people can’t get away from the flames? Will the wind be strong enough for that?’ ”
[Up]drafts from the Tokyo fires171 bounced our airplanes into the sky like
ping-pong balls. A B-29 coming in after the flames were really on the tear would get caught in one of those searing updrafts.
The smaller canals began to boil, and families
boiled to death by the thousands.
But Truman sometimes went on to mention something that was
scarcely clear to many Americans then, and still is not: that we had long been killing more people than that in the course of our non-nuclear firebombing attacks. And that was true—not only for Truman but also for FDR before him.
“The Decision to Use the Atom Bomb”—written for Stimson by McGeorge Bundy177 while he was in the Society of Fellows, and a successful propaganda counter to the impact of John Hersey’s New Yorker report “Hiroshima”
Seventy years of public controversy about “the decision to drop the bomb” have been almost entirely misdirected.
The atom bomb did not start a new era of targeting or strategy or war making in the world. Annihilation of an urban civilian population by fire had already become the American way of war from the air, as it had been the British way since late 1940.
It is my opinion178 that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.
My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.
General LeMay put it, “we scorched and boiled and baked179 to death more people in Tokyo on that night of March 9–10 than went up in vapor at Hiroshima
“There are no innocent civilians.182 It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore.
“Sam, war is killing people. When you kill enough of them, the other guy quits.”
In August 1945 the atom bomb was simply fitted into a long, secret pattern of war making by the massacre of civilians.
bomb. (It was, in fact, a replica of the Nagasaki bomb, based on blueprints supplied by Klaus Fuchs, a Soviet spy at Los Alamos.)
the fall of 1949, the production of fissile material was again accelerated, to provide warheads for an expanding set of targets and weapons of all kinds to deliver them. When Truman
The meaning of “nuclear” had changed, in a way largely hidden, deliberately, from the people of America and the world. The great majority of the weapons
But by 1961 virtually all SAC’s weapons were “thermonuclear” weapons—hydrogen bombs, or H-bombs, based on the fusion of heavier isotopes of hydrogen—which were first tested in November 1952.
President Nixon in 1969198 was reportedly likewise “appalled” to learn in January 1969 in his first briefing on the SIOP that the only available options were for massive nuclear strikes involving thousands of weapons, some killing ninety million Russians in hours.
But his private judgments about morality remained entirely secret from the American public until declassified decades later.
Thompson summed it up somberly, this outcome would not (probably) mean the “extermination of all life.” It would “mean only the extermination of our civilization.203 A
thermonuclear weapons, a thousand times more powerful than the fission weapons (and ultimately cheaper and more numerous),
This little-known story (in the next chapter) reveals something about actual decision-making under uncertainty at high
a nuclear Doomsday Machine depended on a willingness to regard cities as legitimate targets for mass destruction; that was fully accepted by our ally, Britain, as early as 1942, and by our own leaders and air force by 1945.
Heat that intense, greater than that at the center of the sun, would not only fuse hydrogen atoms. It would break the Coulomb barrier between atoms of hydrogen in water and nitrogen in the air. It would ignite virtually instantaneously all the hydrogen in the oceans and
The earth would blaze for less than a second in the heavens and then forever continue its rounds as a barren rock.
What his team had found was the possibility of nuclear fusion—the principle of the hydrogen bomb.
Better to accept the slavery of the Nazis than to run a chance of drawing the final curtain on mankind!
Unless they came up with a firm and reliable conclusion that our atomic bombs could not explode the air or the sea, these bombs must never be made.”
And just how low would the risk have to be—of killing everybody, every living thing?—to be acceptable?
“Once Bethe’s calculations had relegated atmospheric ignition211 to a remote possibility—at least for the time being—the group returned to the issue at hand [designing a fission bomb].”
In short, the first Trinity test at Alamogordo constituted a conscious gamble by the senior scientists at Los Alamos and their immediate superiors: a gamble with the fate of every sentient being on the face of the planet and in the atmosphere and the depths of the oceans.
foretold the distinct possibility of destroying the whole of human civilization.
James Conant wrote up his notes on the Trinity test for his boss, Vannevar Bush. Conant concluded by suggesting that his first few seconds’ sense that they had participated in the destruction of humanity might have been prescient.
For thirteen days before it was published, my wife and I had been underground, eluding the FBI while distributing the Pentagon Papers to seventeen newspapers
Before the atom bomb-drops on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I had spent sleepless nights thinking that I should reveal
Every one of our many thousands of H-bombs, the thermonuclear fusion bombs that arm our strategic forces, requires a Nagasaki-type A-bomb as its detonator. I doubt that one American in a hundred knows that simple fact, and thus has a clear understanding of the difference between A- and H-bombs, or of the reality of the thermonuclear arsenals of the last fifty years.
assistant secretary of defense under Reagan for command and control systems,
That confidence in my discretion was justified at that time.
Soviets had responded to the threat of decapitation by designing an elaborate system to assure retaliation to an American attack
that event, they were authorized to send off ICBMs
Soviet rockets would not merely communicate an authorization to launch to ground officers but would actually bypass them and launch the missiles.
The precise reason the Russian leader gives for having wired up this system is to assure that an attack by the United States would be self-destructive even if it successfully destroyed Soviet command posts.
