The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses

by Dan Carlin

In October 1949, at congressional hearings about the air force’s atomic blitz plan, the “Revolt of the Admirals” revealed the strong feelings held by those faced with doing the dirty work. As Eric Schlosser writes in Command and Control, “One high-ranking admiral after another condemned the atomic blitz, arguing that the bombing of Soviet cities would be not only futile but immoral.” Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey—a commander of the South Pacific during the war, and a man whose battle group got Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle’s planes close enough to Japan for them to bomb Tokyo in 1942—testified thus: “I don’t believe in mass killings of noncombatants.” Admiral Arthur W. Radford—commander of the northern carrier group and eventual vice chief of naval operations during the war—said, “A war of annihilation might bring a pyrrhic military victory, but it would be politically and economically senseless.” And Rear Admiral Ralph A. Ofstie, who had toured the burned-out cities of Japan after the war, described the atomic blitz as the “random mass slaughter of men, women, and children.” The whole idea, he said, was “ruthless and barbaric and contrary to American values.”