Stalin and the Bomb

by David Holloway

The United States began to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Europe in the early 1950s.

In January 1952 the Joint Chiefs of Staff authorized the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Eisenhower, to begin planning for the use of atomic bombs by Navy tactical air units and by Air Force units which were soon to be stationed in Europe.38 Tactical nuclear weapons soon began to be allocated to the defense of Western Europe, for delivery by aircraft, missiles, and guns. The Soviet military followed the developments in NATO closely, and in 1953 and 1954 made a serious effort to adjust tactics and operational art to the nuclear battlefield.39 The 1951 exercise in the Turkestan Military District indicates that some work had been done already, but it was in the autumn of 1953 that the problem was first tackled seriously.

Preparations began in the winter of 1953–4 for an exercise with a real nuclear detonation. This was held in September 1954 on a firing-ground near the village of Totskoe, in the province of Orenburg, then part of the South Urals Military District.48 The United States had already conducted exercises in which troops had been exposed to nuclear detonations, but these were smaller in scale than the Totskoe exercise in which 44,000 troops took part.

the Defense Ministers and Chiefs of the General Staff from the socialist countries – including Peng Dehuai and Zhu De from China – were also present.

At a meeting to analyze the exercise Bulganin spoke of the atomic bomb as an important means of enhancing firepower.55 The officers who took part in the exercise were impressed by the power of the bomb, but they did not regard it as something so terrible as to make war unwageable.56 Since the late 1980s former soldiers who took part in the exercise have claimed that they developed serious illnesses as a result of exposure to radiation.

Military strategy changed more slowly than tactics and operational art. The first signs of a revision of Stalinist orthodoxy came in September 1953, when Major-General N. Talenskii, editor of the classified journal Voennaia Mysl’, published an article “On the Question of the Character of the Laws of Military Science.”66 As its title suggests, this article was an abstract discussion of military science.67 What made it significant was that it questioned the adequacy of the “permanently operating factors” as a guide to victory, and asserted the prerogatives of the military by defining the subject matter of military science as armed conflict (the preserve of the military) rather than the political character of war (the preserve of political leaders and ideologists).

that the basic law of military science – as yet unformulated – was to be a law of victory; and that victory was to be achieved by means of a decisive defeat of the enemy in armed conflict.68 The military were arguing, in other words, that victory had to be thought of in terms of military operations, and not only as the inevitable outcome of a historical process, which was how Malenkov, for example, had presented it in his November 1949 speech when he said that a third world war would lead to the collapse of the capitalist system.

The United States stockpile grew from 832 nuclear weapons in 1952, to 1,161 in 1953, 1,630 in 1954, and 2,280 in 1955.73 The Strategic Air Command had a network of bases from which medium bombers could strike the Soviet Union; and in June 1955 the intercontinental B-52 bomber entered service with SAC.

In its first year in office the Eisenhower administration devised and announced the “New Look” strategy, which placed increasing reliance on nuclear weapons.74 In the event of war, the Strategic Air Command would deliver a massive blow against the Soviet Union.

According to the briefing, it was estimated that SAC could lay down an attack under these conditions of 600–750 bombs by approaching Russia from many directions so as to hit their early warning screen simultaneously. It would require about 2 hours from this moment until bombs had been dropped by using the bomb-as-you-go system in which both BRAVO [i.e. blunting] and DELTA [i.e. disruption] targets would be hit as they reached them. … The final impression was that virtually all of Russia would be nothing but a smoking, radiating ruin at the end of two hours.76

The main targets for the blunting mission were atomic energy installations (estimated at 25), airfields (estimated at 645), military headquarters, and government control centers.77 The disruption mission targeted industries that were critical for the conduct of war: atomic energy, aircraft, POL [Petroleum–Oil–Lubrication], ammunition, steel, and electric power.78 Early in 1955 the Defense Department’s Weapons Systems Evaluation Group (WSEG) concluded that the currently planned atomic offensives against the Soviet Union would result in 77 million casualties in the Soviet bloc, of whom 60 million would die. Of the 134 major cities, 118 would be bombed, and between 75 and 84 per cent of the population in those cities would be killed.79 These estimates were very much higher than those given in the Harmon Report of May 1949. New designs and growing stockpiles were making nuclear war a much more destructive affair.

As the SAC briefing shows, United States military planners believed that the most effective nuclear offensive was a single, massive blow covering the entire target set. The WSEG briefing makes clear that the ideal strike was a preemptive one,

Truman and Eisenhower consistently rejected the option of preventive war, though it was discussed seriously within the government.81 But a preemptive attack was not ruled out; indeed it was seen to be vital for the performance of the highest-priority mission, that of blunting a Soviet atomic attack.

Surprise now assumed a central role in Soviet military strategy. In the month after Rotmistrov’s article an editorial in Voennaia Mysl’ repeated his words that “we should always be ready for preemptive actions against the perfidy of aggressors.”85 It went on to criticize the Stalinist version of 1941. A revisionist historiography now began to appear, blaming Stalin for his failure to anticipate the German attack and to make the Red Army ready.86 Zhukov had been Chief of the General Staff in 1941 and had witnessed the build-up of German forces with alarm; according to some recent accounts, he had urged Stalin to prepare for a preemptive strike.87 The stress on preemption as Zhukov took over as minister is therefore not surprising.

For the United States, the threat of Soviet nuclear retaliation could be greatly reduced – or even eliminated – if Soviet nuclear forces could be destroyed on the ground. For the Soviet Union, the force of a United States attack could be greatly blunted if Soviet bombers could strike US bombers on their bases. The Soviet High Command was afraid of “going late,” since it would then lose most of its nuclear forces and its ability to retaliate would be greatly reduced, if not destroyed completely. The strategic balance was unstable, in the sense that each side had a strong incentive to strike first if war seemed to be imminent.

The goal of military strategy was still to win a war by destroying the enemy’s forces, but the initial period of war had assumed a new importance, and preemption was seen as a desirable, even necessary, strategy. Although the military knew that nuclear weapons were immensely destructive, they still regarded them as instruments of war, not as machines that made war impossible. Nuclear weapons might knock some small, densely populated countries out of the war in its opening stages, but the Soviet Union, with its vast territory and dispersed population, would not suffer such a fate, as long as it took the proper precautions. In Krasil’nikov’s view, nuclear weapons alone would not decide the outcome of the war.

In spite of Molotov’s misgivings, “peaceful coexistence” soon became a standard term in the Soviet political lexicon. It was a significant innovation, as Molotov’s criticism indicates. By asserting that capitalism and socialism could coexist for a long time, the new leaders were rejecting Stalin’s vision of another world war within fifteen to twenty years of the end of World War II. “Peaceful coexistence” was defined as the alternative to nuclear war, as the policy that had to be followed if nuclear war was to be avoided. Khrushchev, for example, writes in his memoirs that the main issue for Mao was “not peaceful coexistence but how to prepare for war and to defeat our enemies in war.”122 Peaceful coexistence did not mean ideological coexistence, however, nor did it entail renunciation of the struggle with imperialism. But that struggle had to be conducted in such a way as to avoid nuclear war.

Molotov disliked the concept of peaceful coexistence because it implied that peace was more important than the struggle against imperialism. But Malenkov had gone further: if socialism could not emerge victorious from a world war, then it was clear that priority had to be given to avoiding war. This was anathema to Molotov, for he saw it as tantamount to abandoning the communist cause.

The reason why Khrushchev rejected Malenkov’s position – apart from political opportunism – was not that he had an alternative analysis of nuclear war. He refused to acknowledge it because to do so would have damaging political and ideological consequences. That was the burden of the criticisms leveled against Malenkov. There appears now to have been a dual – even a schizophrenic – attitude to nuclear war in the Soviet leadership: a recognition of its destructive consequences for the Soviet Union as well as the West, and an official position that nuclear war would mean the end of capitalism.

The Geneva summit in July 1955 had been useful in that respect. “Each country present learnt that no country attending wanted war and each understood why. The Russians realized, as we did, that this situation had been created by the deterrent power of thermo-nuclear weapons.”

Stalin had not allowed the atomic bomb to alter his conception of international relations. Nuclear weapons, however, did shape the way in which his successors thought about East–West relations. It was the danger of nuclear war, above all, that led them to adopt the policy of peaceful coexistence; and it was the deterrent power of Soviet nuclear weapons that made it possible for them to declare that war was “not fatally inevitable.” But there were limits to the changes they were willing to make. They did not adopt the position Malenkov had espoused in 1954, that world civilization would perish in a new world war. On the contrary, several leaders – including Malenkov – asserted that if there were a world war, socialism would emerge victorious.

By the end of 1955 the nuclear balance between the United States and the Soviet Union was unstable, in the sense discussed above. A stable relationship of mutual deterrence, based on the possession by both sides of assured retaliatory capabilities, would not be firmly established for another ten years. Nevertheless, a kind of existential deterrence had come into being. The Soviet leaders and the leaders of the United States understood how terrible a nuclear war would be, and each side believed that the other understood this too. On this basis they shared the conviction that neither would start a nuclear war.

THIS BOOK HAS ALREADY HAD TWO ENDINGS: the November 1955 superbomb test, which marked a new stage in nuclear weapons development, and the renunciation in February 1956 of the inevitability-of-war thesis, which marked a new stage in thinking about war and peace in the nuclear age. This chapter provides a third ending. Its substantive focus is the use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes, but it also deals with themes raised in the first chapter and discussed at intervals during the book – technological innovation, the physics community as a sphere of intellectual autonomy in Soviet society, and physicists as a transnational community.

It is in this period that the Pugwash movement had its origins. This brought Soviet and Western scientists together to discuss nuclear weapons and disarmament.59 This attempt to use the internationalism of science to address the common danger presented by nuclear weapons was what Niels Bohr had had in mind in 1944. Talks between scientists from East and West, in both government and unofficial meetings, were now to become an increasingly important element in the search for ways to manage and control the nuclear arms race.

On January 15, 1955, however, Mao finally decided that China should build its own atomic bomb.64 The Chinese decision was a response to American threats, explicit and implicit, to use nuclear weapons against China.65 It also betrayed a lack of faith in the ability or willingness of the Soviet Union to use its nuclear weapons to defend Chinese interests. China nevertheless expected Soviet help in building up its nuclear research base. On January 17, two days after the Chinese decision, the Soviet Council of Ministers decided to help China and other socialist countries develop nuclear research for peaceful purposes. Three days later the Soviet Union and China signed an agreement to undertake joint exploration for uranium in China; China agreed to sell any surplus uranium to the Soviet Union.66 On April 27, 1955 the two countries signed an agreement under which the Soviet Union was to supply China with an experimental nuclear reactor, a cyclotron, and the “necessary quantity of fissionable material.”

By the mid-1950s there existed in the Soviet Union – and in the rest of the world – a great sense of optimism about science and technology in general, and about atomic energy in particular.72 The successes of the nuclear project seemed to show that the Soviet Union could indeed make technological progress.

The scientific community was in a poor state by the time of Stalin’s death – it had been “beaten” too often and was threatened by “weeds,” to use Kapitsa’s language – but it had enjoyed more autonomy than other parts of Soviet society under Stalin’s rule. This was especially true of physics. The physics community was an island of intellectual autonomy in the totalitarian state. The scientific community – and especially the physics community – was, for all its failings, the closest thing to civil society in the Stalinist regime.

Although official ideology regarded the West with hostility and suspicion, the policy of “catch up and overtake” focussed attention on Western technological development as the path to be followed. This policy reflected a deep-rooted consciousness of backwardness vis-à-vis the West, and a determination to overcome that backwardness. The atomic bomb was a powerful symbol of the United States’ position as the economic and technological leader of the world. It was therefore a natural goal for the policy of “catch up and overtake” to pursue.

The causes of the Soviet Union’s collapse were doubtless many, but one of them was surely the economic and political burden of the military-industrial complex.

The survival of physics pointed to a profound cultural contradiction in Stalinism, between the effort to make the Soviet Union a powerful state vis-à-vis the rest of the world and the urge to exercise complete control over the life of society at home. The Soviet nuclear project shows not that science and totalitarianism are compatible, but that totalitarian regimes have to allow some zones of intellectual autonomy in the society if they are to reap the benefits of science.

Richard Hewlett and Oscar Anderson, Jr., The New World: A History of the US Atomic Energy Commission Vol. 1, 1939–1946, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990, Richard G. Hewlett and Francis Duncan, Atomic Shield: A History of the US Atomic Energy Commission Vol. 2, 1947–1952, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990 (these volumes were originally published in 1962 and 1969); Richard G. Hewlett and Jack M. Holl, Atoms for Peace and War, 1953–1961, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989; Margaret Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy, London: Macmillan, 1964; Margaret Gowing (assisted by Lorna Arnold) Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy 1945–1952, Vol. 1: Policy Making, Vol. 2: Policy Execution, London: Macmillan, 1974; McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival, New York: Random House, 1988; Spencer Weart, Scientists in Power, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979; John Wilson Lewis and Xue Litai, China Builds the Bomb, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. A very useful general history is Bertrand Goldschmidt, The Atomic Complex: A Worldwide Political History of Nuclear Energy, La Grange Park: American Nuclear Society, 1982 (originally published in France in 1980).

For obvious reasons there is not an extensive literature in English on the history of the nuclear project. The pioneering work was Arnold Kramish, Atomic Energy in the Soviet Union, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959; see also George Modelski, Atomic Energy in the Communist Bloc, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1959. I published two articles on this history: “Entering the Nuclear Arms Race: The Soviet Decision to Build the Atomic Bomb,” Social Studies of Science, May 1981, pp. 159–97, and “Soviet Thermonuclear Development,” International Security, Winter 1979–80, pp. 192–7. Steven Zaloga’s Target America (Novato: Presidio Press, 1993) draws on some of the latest evidence.

On the New Look see, for example, John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, New York: Oxford University Press, 1982, pp. 127–97; David Alan Rosenberg, “The Origins of Overkill,” International Security, Spring 1983, pp. 27–38. 75. David Alan Rosenberg, “A Smoking Radiating Ruin at the End of Two Hours,” International Security, Winter 1981–2, pp. 3–38.