In a 1950 meeting with senior State and Defense Department officials,
Robert Oppenheimer (right) observed that "two things stand out sharply with reference
to the atomic bomb: one is terror and the other is mystery." For U.S.
political and military leaders, the "terror" was the prospect of
nuclear attack, and the "mystery" was just how close enemies and potential
enemies were to having an atomic bomb. Ensuring that no nuclear weapon
ever struck the United States or its armies overseas was one of the central
motivations of U.S. national security policy, not only after 1949, but during
the Second World War and in the early
post-war years as well.
Nuclear fission was discovered in Nazi Germany in 1938. The scientific
community succeeded with remarkable speed in drawing the attention of government
officials to this new danger, and by the time the United States entered the war,
many scientists and political leaders feared that Germany was already ahead in the world's first nuclear arms
race. By 1942, most British and American
leaders were confident of ultimate victory in the war; for those select few "in
the know," however, the atomic bomb was the one wild card that could change
everything. It is never easy to "prove a negative," but
by 1944 the absence of evidence of a massive German atomic program had eased
these fears
substantially. It was not until Allied armies entered Germany that Manhattan
Project officials knew for certain that they had not lost the race for the bomb. German surrender
left Japan as the sole combatant when the first
American atomic bombs became ready in early August 1945.
When it comes to nuclear weapons, too often a bright line is drawn between
the end of the war and the events that followed. Military historians lose
interest after Nagasaki, and diplomatic historians have more important things to
worry about from 1945 to 1949 than the production of plutonium and the creation
of
ad hoc radar networks stretching across North America. These
issues were fundamental, however, to U.S. national security strategy. There was a
massive demobilization of conventional military forces after the war, but
the nuclear weapons program quietly continued; it even remained under the
Manhattan Engineer District, General Leslie R. Groves (right) still commanding, until
the 1947 transition to the Atomic Energy Commission. The military
concentrated during this period on preparing early, rudimentary defenses for
North America, and especially on plans for the offensive use of the U.S. nuclear
stockpile at the onset of war. For the incipient post-war intelligence
community, determining
when the Soviet Union might acquire its first
atomic bomb became a central preoccupation. Their time estimates would
probably have been shortened by years if officials had realized just how
thoroughly the Manhattan Project had been penetrated by Soviet intelligence
during the war.
When that first Soviet test (right) came in August 1949, years earlier than had been
predicted, the U.S. nuclear weapons program increased dramatically in
intensity. The military believed an "airtight" defense of North
America to be impossible, so emphasis remained on the nuclear offensive
capability of the Strategic Air Command. The idea of preventative war was
rejected, but should war come, or even just appear imminent, the Air Force hoped
to
strike the Soviet Union with such force that no nuclear retaliation would be
possible. Generals such as Curtis LeMay had spent the final years of the
last war methodically burning down the cities of their enemies; they were
determined that the United States not be on the receiving end of this during the
next war. Civil defense planning began as well, but neither the public nor
the national security bureaucracy found "duck and cover" drills particularly
reassuring.
It was at the very end of the Truman Administration that the active defense
of North America, and not just preemption, began to become a matter of national
priority. As the estimates of the Soviet stockpile grew into double and
triple figures, officials in the State Department, the National Security
Resources Board, and elsewhere were appalled to learn what the military had
known for years: that if the Soviet Union struck
first,
there might be very
little warning and very great destruction. There were numerous problems
with this scenario as well, but the possibility of a "nuclear Pearl Harbor"
was just too compelling to ignore, especially with the Japanese surprise attack
on Hawaii still a recent memory. It should come as no surprise that, when
faced with this technological nightmare, the World War II generation called for
a technological solution in the form of a "Manhattan Project-type"
program to expand the air defenses of North America. Military planners, fearing
that funds would be diverted from offensive nuclear forces, continued to argue
that creating an impregnable defense was simply not possible, but they were
overruled. Thus, an often-overlooked aspect of the Eisenhower Administration's
"New Look" defense policy was the creation of a massive system of
active defenses against nuclear attack.
This is where the dissertation ends, and likely where the resulting
manuscript will end as well. It is by no means, however, the end of the
story of strategic defense during the Cold War (and beyond). For a
discussion of this, and other potential future subjects of research, see the
separate page on other research interests.
