Rethinking the American Antinuclear Movement

Paul Rubinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138856844
• eBook ISBN: 9781317514923
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

The massive movement against nuclear weapons began with the invention of the atomic bomb in 1945 and lasted throughout the Cold War. Antinuclear protesters of all sorts mobilized in defiance of the move toward nuclear defense in the wake of the Cold War. They influenced U.S. politics, resisting the mindset of nuclear deterrence and mutually-assured destruction. The movement challenged Cold War militarism and restrained leaders who wanted to rely almost exclusively on nuclear weapons for national security. Ultimately, a huge array of activists decided that nuclear weapons made the country less secure, and that, through testing and radioactive fallout, they harmed the very people they were supposed to protect.

Rethinking the American Antinuclear Movement provides a short, accessible overview of this important social and political movement, highlighting key events and figures, the strengths and weaknesses of the activists, and its lasting effects on the country. It is perfect for anyone wanting to obtain an introduction to the American antinuclear movement and the massive reach of this transnational concern.

1
Making and Questioning the Bomb, 1933 to 1945

From Balloons to Bombs

Although normally dedicated to the peaceful pursuit of nature’s secrets, scientists have often seen politics and war intrude on their work. In the summer and fall of 1783, the invention of the hot air balloon gripped the people of Paris with what one scientist called “Ballomania,” as crowds gathered in the tens of thousands to watch humans take flight for the first time. The “Aerostatique Machines” especially captivated the American scientist and diplomat Benjamin Franklin, in Paris to negotiate a treaty with the French. After witnessing one of the miraculous flights, Franklin almost instantly thought of the military applications of such an invention. “This Method of filling the Balloon with hot Air is cheap and expeditious,” he wrote to a scientific colleague, “and it is suppos’d may be sufficient for certain purposes, such as elevating an Engineer to take a View of an Enemy’s Army, [and] conveying Intelligence into, or out of a besieged Town, giving Signals to distant Places, or the like.”¹

But watching humans escape the bounds of gravity just as the U.S. Revolutionary War ended had the effect of inflating Franklin with hope that the pursuit of scientific knowledge would encourage peace and progress rather than war. Hailing the “Return of Peace,” he wrote to a British scientist, “I hope it will be lasting, and that Mankind will at Length, as they call themselves reasonable Creatures, have Reason and Sense enough to settle their Differences without cutting Throats: For in my Opinion there never was a good War, or a bad Peace.” Pleased with the growth of science across Europe, he declared that “the Progress of human Knowledge will be rapid, and Discoveries made of which we have at present no Conception. I begin to be almost sorry I was born so soon, since I cannot have the Happiness of knowing what will be known 100 Years hence.”²

Had Franklin lived another 150 years, he would have seen scientists in Europe wrestling with the same dilemma: should science serve war or peace? In 1938, while Nazi Germany moved inevitably closer to war, scientists observed the process of nuclear fission. As with Franklin and the hot air balloon, it took only moments for scientists to realize that, in the words of Hungarian physicist Eugene Wigner, “the new discovery might ultimately become the basis of a horrible military weapon.” While this troubled Wigner, it did not stop him and his colleagues from pursuing the atomic bomb; in fact, they allowed themselves to hope that the weapon may do more good than harm in the long run. “We realized that, should atomic weapons be developed,” he explained,

no two nations would be able to live in peace with each other unless their military forces were controlled by a common higher authority. We expected that these controls, if they were effective enough to abolish atomic warfare, would be effective enough to abolish also all other forms of war. This hope was almost as strong a spur to our endeavors as was our fear of becoming the victims of the enemy’s atomic bombings.³

Like Ben Franklin in the eighteenth century, scientists of the twentieth century saw both portent and salvation in new technology. And this duality of atomic weapons—as both threat and security—characterized almost every aspect of their creation and subsequent use.

Introduction

The discovery of nuclear fission, a breakthrough in physics that enabled the creation of weapons of mass destruction, occurred just as Europe descended into the cataclysm of World War II. The first to comprehend the power within the atom and the realistic possibility of turning it into a weapon, scientists felt obligated to put science to military use because of the very real possibility of Adolf Hitler attaining his own A-bomb. Initial opposition to atomic weapons applied almost exclusively to a hypothetical German bomb; a Western bomb was seen as a necessary evil. Scientists’ efforts promoting the weapon eventually spurred Allied governments to pursue one, culminating in the Manhattan Project, the successful U.S. effort to build an atomic bomb. During the Manhattan Project, future U.S. nuclear policies were formed, including deterrence, nonproliferation, and secrecy. The atomic bomb would also become the foundation of U.S. national security, meaning that when activists opposed nuclear weapons, they would be challenging core tenets of the American Cold War state.

The Manhattan Project also saw the rise of hostile attitudes and interests between the military, on the one hand, and many scientists on the other. When it became clear in 1944 that Nazi Germany had no atomic bomb, and that the U.S. bombs would be used against Japan, a small number of important scientists transformed from nuclear advocates into antinuclear activists. They went to great lengths to convince policymakers that military use of the atomic bomb against Japan was not necessary, and that the United States should instead reach some sort of nuclear accommodation with the Soviet Union. These efforts ultimately fell short, and by the time atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nuclear arms race was underway. The American people reacted ambivalently to the use of atomic bombs, foreshadowing their uneasy relationship with nuclear weapons for the duration of the Cold War.

Anatomy of an Atom

The awesome power of an atomic bomb—“brighter than a thousand suns,” as the title of one history of the Manhattan Project puts it—derives from the collision between a neutron and an atom’s nucleus, two of the smallest masses in nature.⁴ Even the tiny atom, however, contains tremendous energy, an insight proven by Einstein’s famous equation, e=mc². To release this energy, a suitably unstable atom must be split, or fissioned; neutrons are particularly useful for this purpose. When a neutron fissions the nucleus of an atom of uranium 235 or plutonium, energy and neutrons are released; these in turn split more nuclei, releasing still more energy and neutrons, causing a chain reaction that, in about a millionth of a second, produces a tremendous flash of light, a mushroom cloud hundreds of feet tall, and, depending on the amount of fissile material, the explosive power of anywhere from 12,500 to 500,000 tons of TNT.⁵

Before these particles could divide and erupt over Japan in 1945, war and science had to cross paths. Physicists of the early twentieth century obsessed over the atom—pondering its structure, studying its electrons, and probing its mysterious nucleus. At about the turn of the century, the physicists Ernest Rutherford (of New Zealand) and J.J. Thomson (of Britain) had together begun to unlock the atom’s secrets, including the relationship between electrons, radioactivity, and the transmutation, or decay, of elements. In 1913 the Danish physicist Niels Bohr developed insights that would soon result in a completely new understanding of the atom. He perceived that atoms were inherently stable and not changed by collisions, and that the electrons surrounding a nucleus existed in quantum states, meaning they orbited the nucleus at specific and distinct levels. For an electron to reach a higher state, energy needed to be supplied to the atom.⁶ Electrons could also descend to lower levels, and when they did this, light was emitted. The energy transfer involving these electrons helped determine the chemical properties of atoms. At this point the atom was best understood as a positively charged nucleus orbited by negatively charged electrons.

The nucleus of an atom remained a bit of an enigma until 1932 when the British physicist James Chadwick discovered the presence of the neutron, a particle that adds mass to the nucleus but neither a positive nor a negative charge. While the protons in the nucleus repelled positively charged particles and the electrons repelled negatively charged ones, scientists realized that the neutron could be propelled into a nucleus without being repelled by either charge. This would in theory break apart the nucleus and split atoms, allowing scientists to learn much more about atomic structure and transmutation. Although most atoms were stable and thus difficult to fission, scientists suspected that less stable elements were more likely to split when bombarded with neutrons. Learning how to create a bomb was not by any means the purpose of exploring the atom, but many physicists understood that the atom inherently contained tremendous energy and that a bomb may be one practical application of this power.

These discoveries enlivened the field of physics well into the 1920s, with Germany leading the way in producing world-class physicists. Most notably, the German physicist Werner Heisenberg upended the dominant paradigm in physics with his assertion that predicting the behavior of atoms could be based only on statistical probability—the act of observing such microscopic interactions inevitably affected them because light, having the properties of both a particle and a wave, collided with the object being observed on an atomic level. When it came to the behavior of atoms, according to Heisenberg, probability replaced certainty.

The Manhattan Project

This quantum revolution in physics could not remain isolated from the political chaos that plagued Europe in the early twentieth century. Hitler’s assumption of power in Germany cast the study of the atom in a different light, as the Civil Service Law of April 1933 forced non-Aryans to retire from government work, which included many Jewish scientists in German universities. Though no one could know it at the time, just as Hitler began his quest to take over Europe, he had cast out scientists who would go on to play crucial roles in creating the first weapons of mass destruction, including Otto Frisch, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, Albert Einstein, Eugene Wigner, Rudolf Peierls, and others (though many skilled nuclear scientists, including Heisenberg, remained in Germany). Another scientist exiled from Germany, the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, ended up in London; in September 1933, during one of his meandering walks through the city, he envisioned an atomic chain reaction while crossing a street. After his flash of insight, he started to search for the element that would sustain this chain reaction, an atom that when hit with a neutron would absorb it and release two more. Szilard was unaware that the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi had already begun “neutronbombardment experiments,” in which he fired neutrons at each element in order to observe the ensuing reactions.⁷ With a Jewish wife in fascist Italy, Fermi also had to leave Europe and relocated to the United States.

Szilard became in some ways the first antinuclear activist. Filled with dread over the danger of an atomic bomb, he wanted to make sure that knowledge of such a weapon remained confined to a select few. He wrote to a colleague that he was “deeply concerned” about the fate of the world if “the matter became universally known,”⁸ though his primary fear was Germany. To prevent the spread of nuclear weapons before they even existed, Szilard violated generations of scientific tradition and kept his knowledge secret rather than sharing it with the scientific community at large in journals and at conferences. Instead he filed two patents—one on March 12, 1934, for the use of neutrons to release atomic energy, and another on July 4, 1934, for the atomic chain reaction—both accepted and kept classified by the British Admiralty. As atomic research evolved, secrecy became more and more the norm in Britain and, later, the United States. This was no easy adjustment for scientists, who did not take the imposition of secrecy lightly. When Fermi and Szilard began working together on fission in the United States and Szilard recommended they keep the results of their research secret, Fermi incredulously responded, “Nuts!”⁹

Szilard’s insistence on secrecy was not a purely antinuclear stance. The physicists researching the possibility of an A-bomb were motivated by a mixture of feelings: daunted by the prospect of making such an enormous weapon, they also wanted desperately to prevent German scientists from building one for Hitler. In fact, Szilard’s policy of secrecy amounted to a form of nuclear nonproliferation, the attempt to limit the spread of nuclear technology rather than eliminate the weapons themselves. By not publishing their findings in scientific journals, as was the convention, scientists hoped to at least delay a German bomb by keeping Nazi scientists oblivious to developments in nuclear physics for as long as possible. While the theoretical possibility of a bomb itself was hardly a secret, technical secrecy did hinder German scientists to an extent. Szilard and Fermi decided, for example, not to publish their findings that graphite was the best moderator for a nuclear reaction, which allowed German scientists to persist in using heavy water for that purpose. Scientifically speaking, heavy water makes for a fine moderator. But from a practical standpoint, it was more expensive, more difficult to acquire, and more vulnerable to Allied sabotage—characteristics that hindered the German bomb project. Implicit in the secrecy campaign (and the concept of nonproliferation) was the belief that whereas a Nazi bomb would be bad, an Allied bomb would be good for the world at large. Like deterrence and nonproliferation, other principles that accompanied the bomb’s creation, secrecy became standard—paramount, even—in future U.S. nuclear weapons policy.

The German physicists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman observed atoms splitting in 1938, with their collaborators Otto Frisch and Lise Meitner quickly offering a theoretical interpretation of what had happened and coining the term nuclear “fission.” The phenomenon of nuclear fission then became general knowledge when Bohr publicly announced the discovery at a January 1939 theoretical physics conference in Washington. Meanwhile, Szilard conducted extensive experiments and discovered that uranium 235, a rare isotope of uranium, would sustain a chain reaction. Years later he recalled that upon conclusion of his experiments, “there was very little doubt in my mind that the world was headed for grief.”¹⁰ But Szilard and the other scientists working on a chain reaction in Britain and the United States felt that Hitler was an even greater danger than the atomic bomb itself.

Undeterred from pursuing the bomb, Szilard in fact took it upon himself to alert U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt to the possibility of atomic weapons. Enlisting—practically demanding—the help of the legendary Albert Einstein, Szilard composed a letter to Roosevelt for the distinguished physicist to sign in August 1939 and then personally delivered it to him at his summer house on the New Jersey coast. “[I]t may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium by which vast amounts of power…would be generated,” the Einstein letter read. “This phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed.” The letter went on to propose liaisons between the Roosevelt administration and scientists in th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editor's Series Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Making and Questioning the Bomb, 1933 to 1945
• 2 The Cold War and Challenges to the Bomb, 1945 to 1949
• 3 A Bigger Bomb and a Bigger Movement, 1950 to 1960
• 4 Women Transform the Movement, 1960 to 1963
• 5 Antinuclear Evolution and Diffusion, 1963 to 1980
• 6 The Antinuclear Uprising, 1980 to 1985
• 7 The End of the Cold War and the Fate of Nuclear Protest, 1985 to the Present
• Further Reading
• Index