Super Bomb

Organizational Conflict and the Development of the Hydrogen Bomb

Ken Young, Warner R. Schilling

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781501745164
• eBook ISBN: 9781501745188
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Super Bomb unveils the story of the events leading up to President Harry S. Truman's 1950 decision to develop a "super," or hydrogen, bomb. That fateful decision and its immediate consequences are detailed in a diverse and complete account built on newly released archives and previously hidden contemporaneous interviews with more than sixty political, military, and scientific figures who were involved in the decision.

Ken Young and Warner R. Schilling present the expectations, hopes, and fears of the key individuals who lobbied for and against developing the H-bomb. They portray the conflicts that arose over the H-bomb as rooted in the distinct interests of the Atomic Energy Commission, the Los Alamos laboratory, the Pentagon and State Department, the Congress, and the White House. But as they clearly show, once Truman made his decision in 1950, resistance to the H-bomb opportunistically shifted to new debates about the development of tactical nuclear weapons, continental air defense, and other aspects of nuclear weapons policy. What Super Bomb reveals is that in many ways the H-bomb struggle was a proxy battle over the morality and effectiveness of strategic bombardment and the role and doctrine of the US Strategic Air Command.

CHAPTER 1

The Shock of the “New World”

To the Atomic Energy Commission’s official historians, the development of the atomic bomb and its use against Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked the onset of a “New World.”¹ Scientifically speaking, that was of course the case. In a deeper sense, though, the new world was a new global order ushered in four years later by the loss of the US atomic monopoly when the Soviet Union emerged as the world’s second nuclear power. The Soviet test of August 1949 had an immediate impact on the perceptions and expectations of US policy makers. The shock of a nuclear-armed Soviet Union precipitated both an urgent search for new defenses and a polarization of opinion on the hitherto little-known Super proposal.

What followed—active political consideration of the proposal to develop the hydrogen bomb—occupied a brief and unusually intense moment in US history, from September 1949 to January 1950. The theoretical possibility that a fusion weapon, a “Super” of vastly greater power than the fission bombs used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, might be feasible had been recognized by Los Alamos scientists before 1945, although the advice from Los Alamos two years later was that such a development was still a long way off without a major investment.² So the science had a history, even if political decisions became urgent only with the Soviet atomic test of late August 1949.

Some of the key insiders learned of the test in dramatic fashion. AEC chair David Lilienthal described driving home with his wife from a dinner on Martha’s Vineyard one foggy night. As they reached gate of their rented house, a gaunt figure appeared in the headlights, “hooking his thumb in the hitchhiker’s gesture … on a windswept moor, in the dead of night, on an island, outside a goat field.” It was Brig. Gen. James McCormack, the AEC’s director of military applications, with a message. They reached the house, Lilienthal lit a kerosene lamp, and they sat down. McCormack referred ruefully to the hard time given to Roman messengers bringing bad news, then went on to explain that on the basis of the detection program, it had been concluded that the US atomic monopoly was over. “By shortly after dawn,” Lilienthal later wrote, “we were on our way back to Washington, where other men in government were learning the bitter news.”³

The Soviet bomb “changed everything,” recalled Dean Acheson.⁴ Having eliminated the United States’ former advantage in atomic diplomacy, the Soviets were now expected to prosecute their intentions with ruthlessness and violence, putting a premium on piecemeal aggression. This expectation would have far-reaching consequences for US policy and was shared by Paul Nitze at the State Department, whose NSC-68 study was set in motion by the president’s decision on the Super, initially as a way of drawing in David Lilienthal. Lilienthal’s price for accepting the decision was the launch of a general review of US security. Materializing as NSC-68, this review provided the blueprint for the general rearmament that was dictated by the shock of the Chinese revolution, with its amplification of the Communist threat.⁵ That blueprint might well have remained a mere aspiration had it not been for the Chinese entry into the Korean conflict, prompting massive rearmament.⁶

The point at issue, now that the gap between the two powers had dramatically narrowed, was whether US policy could be based primarily on atomic superiority. The development of the hydrogen bomb offered hope of maintaining short-term nuclear superiority and providing a protective umbrella beneath which conventional forces could be progressively expanded.⁷ Yet in late 1949, the Super project, beguiling to a few scientists and well-informed officials, repellent to others and unknown to most, remained no more than a hypothetical possibility. For it to advance beyond that status would require presidential authority at a time of severe constraint on defense spending.⁸

Officials and observers—and indeed the general public—had long been aware that the United States would be confronted by a nuclear-armed Soviet Union at some point. With greater or lesser degrees of attention and apprehension, they had been waiting for that moment.

Sniffing the Wind

US policy makers were not entirely in the dark, as steps had been taken to get warning of an actual explosion taking place. In April 1947, newly appointed AEC commissioner Lewis L. Strauss urged on his fellow commissioners a new program to monitor the upper atmosphere as a means of discovering whether and when the Soviets detonated an atomic weapon. Strauss thereby gained an honored place in the history of long-range detection, but he did not originate it.⁹ During the course of the Manhattan Project, Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves had commissioned Luis Alvarez to devise a means of detecting whether the Germans were operating an atomic reactor. Alvarez produced a filter-based device for atmospheric testing, but it produced no positive indication when flown over Germany in the latter months of the war, leaving uncertainty as to whether the technique was viable.¹⁰

Proposals for remote monitoring proved highly controversial, partly because there were so many agencies potentially implicated in such a program, and partly because only one of them, the US Army Air Forces (AAF), soon to become a separate US Air Force, subscribed to the belief that a Soviet bomb test might be imminent. The consensus among other agencies was that it was some years away.¹¹ Vannevar Bush, a key adviser, believed the handicaps of Soviet arbitrary rule would impede scientific progress toward a bomb.¹²

Pressed by Lewis Strauss, and under orders (in the last two days before air force independence) from army chief of staff Dwight D. Eisenhower, AAF chief of staff Hoyt S. Vandenberg—who had recently relinquished his role as head of the Central Intelligence Group—set up an interservice Long Range Detection Committee under his successor at the Central Intelligence Group, Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter. The committee adopted the mistaken view that the three basic methods of detection—radiological, sonic, and seismic—were well-developed enough, and that the remaining problem was to identify the agency or agencies that would operate them. While it seemed that the intelligence agencies had an obvious claim, Strauss had worked through his chair, Lilienthal, to press the AAF (as it still was) to take the lead. Having been secretly briefed, Strauss was aware that the AAF operated three squadrons of B-29s modified for weather reconnaissance. They were already designated to monitor the atmosphere on flight paths that would intercept any western-drifting air masses from Soviet territory. In September 1947 the newly independent air force was formed.¹³ It inherited the AAF’s responsibility to detect the detonation of an atomic bomb anywhere in the world.

A small private company, Tracerlab, won a contract to develop the technology, and during the Sandstone atomic bomb tests of April–May 1948, B-17 drones were flown through the radioactive cloud, in order to develop the system and train personnel in its use. This was not the only means of monitoring the Soviet nuclear program. Sonic and seismic methods were also developed, and a meeting attended by Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, and other scientists wrongly concluded that only seismic methods could offer the evidence the administration needed. Oppenheimer strongly attacked the air force’s favored airborne radiological sampling as inadequate, a judgment that would be quoted back at him during his security hearing six years later. The air force paid no regard to this skepticism, and was encouraged by the Sandstone experience. In January 1949, air force officers briefed Strauss on the working of their system of regular “sniffer” flights. He was satisfied that while much remained to be done, “at least the door is no longer left unguarded.”¹⁴

The Joint Chiefs of Staff rejected the various proposals that Vandenberg put forward for a comprehensive long-range detection system to provide detection by complementary seismic or acoustic methods. They backed an interim system of radiological monitoring as the only, albeit a flawed, technique likely to be available in the short run. The Research and Development Board chaired by Vannevar Bush resisted, but the Joint Chiefs made the pragmatic decision to have a flawed system rather than none.¹⁵

As it happened, the existing technology proved adequate for establishing the fact, if not the precise nature, of the Soviet explosion. The first alert obtained thorough atmospheric monitoring came on 3 September 1949, when an air force WB-29 picked up signs of atmospheric radioactivity.¹⁶ Additional flights were launched over the Pacific, and a week later the British were notified that a mass of air containing activity was passing north of Scotland.¹⁷ British meteorological flights to monitor atmospheric radiation were first discussed with the Americans in September 1948 and were running by April 1949. Alerting the British to the recent Soviet test created a dilemma, with some feeling that such a sharing of information might be in violation of the 1946 Atomic Energy Act.¹⁸ Air force officers pressed hard for immediate sampling as the radioactive air mass drifted eastward. Additional material, collected in the filters carried under the wings of Royal Air Force long-range aircraft, was available for analysis at the Harwell atomic research establishment, and was shared with the US Naval Research Laboratory. By mid-September, analysis of the airborne filter material had exhausted its value and was being superseded by rainwater analysis.¹⁹

Vandenberg subsequently relocated $50 million of the air force budget to detection improvements.²⁰ A committee appointed by the AEC under Vannevar Bush to review the evidence meanwhile concluded that the data presented to them were “consistent with the explosion of an atomic bomb.”²¹ “Joe 1” had arrived. The Joint Chiefs and Secretary of Defense Louis A. Johnson briefed the president, and, mindful of the risk of panic, urged Truman to make a public statement to ensure that Americans would know that he was, as Johnson put it, “keenly aware of the problems involved” and making every reasonable effort to obtain a solution. “If the public is not satisfied,” Johnson added, “it may stampede the Government to make hurried decisions that may not be in the best interest of our Country.”²² On 23 September Truman made a low-key announcement of the Soviet test. It was drafted by George Kennan, head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, but was the result of many hands; the announcement said that “the eventual development of this new force by other nations was to be expected. This probability has always been taken into account by us.”²³

Generally, official reaction was directed at reassurance. Air force secretary Stuart Symington told Johnson that the air force “subscribed completely to the policy that exploitation of that event might develop a dangerous snowball of fear”; within weeks, however, he became anxious that reassurance might slip into complacency.²⁴ Gen. Omar Bradley, chair of the Joint Chiefs, did his best to forestall that snowball of fear, telling a journalist that the Soviet A-test was

no occasion for hysteria… . For an industrially backward country, the problem of making an atomic bomb is not so difficult as is the problem of turning it out in quantity and delivering it. As long as America retains (as it can) a tremendous advantage in A-bomb quantity, quality and deliverability, the deterrent effect of the bomb against an aggressor will continue. Sustained research and development can keep us far in the lead with methods for intercepting enemy bomb-carriers. No one can predict what the weapons of the future may be; in the long run our promise of security lies in the combined, unparalleled inventiveness and industrial skill of Western Europe and America.²⁵

Despite that timely bromide, reactions were mixed, even within atomic energy circles.

Reactions: “A Good Deal of Fright and Fear”

While the monopoly of atomic weapons gave the United States a seemingly decisive advantage over the Soviet Union, this was a potential, rather than an actual, advantage. War planning did not yet commit to the use of atomic bombs, of which there were in any case only a very small number in the stockpile, and none in the hands of the military. Moreover, few imagined that this advantage would not be nullified at some point by Soviet progress. Eisenhower, army chief of staff from 1945 to 1948, warned of the “transitory” nature of the US monopoly.²⁶ Foremost among the more far-sighted military planners was Maj. Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, the AAF’s deputy chief of staff for research and development, and soon to be the architect of US strategic air power. Speaking in mid-1946, LeMay stressed the compression of time and space achieved by aircraft technology, and the certainty that “other nations” would develop atomic weapons. “When these bombs fall on our industrial heart—that rich and highly developed area that lies between Boston and Baltimore and Chicago and Cairo, Illinois,” he warned, “the war may be already over, as well as just begun.”²⁷ Vannevar Bush and Leslie Groves had meanwhile warned the Joint Planning Staff that there was no defense against an atomic attack, once launched.²⁸

Predictions of the date by which Soviet progress would mat...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Shock of the “New World”
• 2. Advising on the Super
• 3. A Decision Reached
• 4. Moral and Political Consequences
• 5. Dissent and Development
• 6. Tactical Diversions
• 7. Rewriting Los Alamos
• Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index