Blowback - S2 Bonus 5 - "Massive Retaliation"

Episode Date: October 11, 2021

A brief overview of how American nuclear weapons strategy ran parallel to the story in our main narrative.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

We're fucking sitting ducks here. The only thing between our homes and Port Newark is a chaneling fence. They got a nuclear bomb in a container, and we're fucking dead. That's why you got to live for today. What'd you say? I said that's why you got to live for today. Talking about annihilation, you stupid fuck. Your kids, my kids. Burning intersendous.

I can't even think about it. You're stupid. Welcome. Get some air. Take a walk. Take a walk outside. Welcome to blowback. This is bonus episode five. This episode is going to be about the politics of nuclear weapons. And by extension, nuclear war. And by extension, nuclear war. from the time of World War II until, roughly speaking, the heart of our season two narrative in the early 1960s. And if you haven't gotten to the missile crisis part of the season yet, then don't worry. Consider this some table setting. This episode is all about the atom bomb, the dawn of the nuclear age, and how that story unfolded right alongside the events of our main narrative. It's the story of how, out of the smoking craters of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

America would back up its hardline anti-communist diplomacy and covert action in harsher and harsher ways as the power of its nuclear stockpile grew deadlier and deadlier. So now, we are turning back the clock to the 1940s. In the waning days of World War II, Joseph Stalin set two of his military commanders on what would become the famous race to Berlin. Berlin, at the end of the war, would be divided into different zones, an American zone, a Soviet zone, and so on, as part of an agreement reached earlier in 1945. So, with Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower clearing out the German military remnants in South Germany, the Soviet commanders sped to Berlin, and on May 8th,

victory in Europe, or VE Day, is declared. Fast forward two months later. It's July 1945. Japan is on the ropes. Although Imperial Japan's fate had been sealed months earlier, the question of what will actually happen after the war is still wide open. The leaders of the Allied forces, Winston Churchill, Stalin, and Harry Truman, who replaced FDR four and a half months earlier, meet in Potsdam, Germany. As the Allied leaders gathered in Germany back in America, the Manhattan Project, America's nuclear weapons development program hatched four years earlier, had finally come to fruition. On July 16, 19th, 19th, 1945, the U.S. successfully tested its first atomic bomb in the New Mexican desert.

Five days later, at Potsdam, Truman's Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, passed on the report from New Mexico to the president. After spending some time with the gory details of the atomic test, quote, in excess of the equivalent to 15,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT, Truman marched right back into the conference with Churchill and Stalin and lit into the Soviet premier hard to the astonishment of the others in the room. He disclosed to Stalin that the U.S. was in possession of a powerful new weapon, a quote, new weapon of unusual destructive force. Stalin, for his part, kept his cool. Distrustful of Truman already, Stalin had actually already known about the American nuclear program for several years.

But what he had now learned from Truman is that the Americans were willing to go the distance. Truman had decreed that nuclear weapons and the concordant threat of world annihilation were the new standard in international diplomatic negotiation. From the moment that America tested its first nuclear weapon, the U.S. government was exploiting this new weapon for diplomatic gain. the explosion in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and Truman's subsequent decision to end the war by using the bomb, it pushed a button that couldn't be unpushed. It sounds trite to say it, but it's true. Nuclear weapons brought something to the world that had never existed before, the capacity to destroy the

world. And as we've talked about the use of covert action before on this show, nuclear weapons to the American political and military leaders who controlled them, these were tools that could be used to accomplish tactical objectives. At the end of World War II, the Japanese Empire wasn't left with many options. By the days of the Potsdam Conference, in the summer of 1945, the Japanese knew that they were going to lose. The path-breaking work of the historian Tsuyoshi Hasagawa, drawing from Japanese archives, shows that the Japanese figured that they had a better shot at negotiating with the Soviet Union when it came to preserving the existing national political system of the country. And Stalin, who by now clearly felt the

hostility emanating from Truman, wanted to make sure that the Soviet Union had as many allies as possible by the war's end. The U.S. had already secured a slice of Berlin, a future NATO military occupation in waiting 50 miles into the heart of Soviet-aligned East Germany. And with Truman having already personally intimated that the U.S. had an atomic bomb, the race was on, between the U.S. and the Soviet Union to force the Japanese surrender first. According to Hasegawa, the Soviet Declaration of War against Japan on August 8, 1945, had a much more significant impact on the Japanese decision to surrender than the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki, which had taken place two days earlier.

Truman and his wartime consigliary, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, they considered the apocalyptic possibilities posed by nuclear weapons. And sure, the prospect of apocalypse bugged Truman, but his advisors pushed him into dropping a bomb on Hiroshima and then won on Nagasaki the day after the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. The point of these bombs was not to end the war. It was to speed up the timetable of Japanese surrender, so as not to let the Soviets gain more influence in East Asia, where the eastern half of the Soviet Union happens to be located. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who had overseen the Manhattan Project, was ultimately horrified by his creation. It doesn't seem like Truman had many people around him after the war, who really second-guessed in a meaningful way the decision to drop the bombs. After all, the A-bombs won the war, and it saved American lives, right? You know, because we didn't have to invade.

Well, this was probably a good way to keep oneself from remembering what had just happened. conservative estimates placed the Japanese dead and wounded from Nagasaki and Hiroshima at well over 200,000. The Americans had just up and obliterated two cities across the globe, announcing to the rest of the world that the United States could destroy anyone anywhere in the world if they so chose. Oppenheimer first met Truman in October of 1945, months after World War II ended with the unconditional Japanese surrender to the Americans. The two did not get along. The historian Peter Kuznick has a concise explanation of their meeting

that foreshadows exactly how the highest levels of American government examined the ethical side of not just using nukes, but the then-incipient arms race. Here's Kuznick. Although it would be some time before Oppenheimer discovered how this dramatic competition to achieve geopolitical goals formed a backdrop to the use of the atomic bombs, he, unlike Truman, felt an appropriate revulsion at what he had helped achieve. When Oppenheimer met Truman for the first time on October 25, 1945,

Truman asked Oppenheimer to guess when the Soviets would develop a bomb. When Oppenheimer said he did not know, Truman shot back that he did. Never. Unnerved, Oppenheimer said at one point, Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands. The president, furious at Oppenheimer, informed his aide David Lillianthal, quote, I told him the blood was on my hands, to let me worry about that. Apparently relishing the story, Truman later offered alternative versions. He told Dean Atchison, quote, I don't want to see that son of a bitch in this office ever again,

and another time called Oppenheimer a crybaby scientist. Now, I'm sure many of you have heard Oppenheimer's description of what he thought when he saw the mushroom cloud in New Mexico for the first time. I am become Shiva, et cetera. But I think it hits a bit different when you hear it live, when you know a little bit of context. Here's Oppenheimer being interviewed in 1961 about how he and his colleagues felt

at the moment of the detonation of the bomb in New Mexico in 1945. The world would not be the same. Few people laughed. Few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty

and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says now I am become death the destroyer of worlds I suppose we all thought that one way or another Although Oppenheimer was publicly discredited

for having ties to communists during the McCarthy era it was his opposition to the H-bomb the hydrogen bomb, and what that weapon stood for, that basically got Oppenheimer shunted out of public life in the 1950s. Now, the H-bomb is worth an extra minute of scrutiny here. The Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb in 1949, which the Americans were able to detect through atmospheric testing. James Hirschberg is a professor at George Washington University and a historian of the Cold War. Here's Hersberg explaining how the American reaction

to the Soviet bomb produced the next stage of Cold War nuclear technology, thermonuclear warfare. When the Soviets developed their first bomb, which was on August 29th, 1949, and for years thereafter, they were far behind in terms of the stockpile of weapons. So there was at no point where, like, the Soviets had some atomic advantage over the U.S.? No, but by the mid-1950s, they had, and the Americans had both attained the hydrogen bomb, thermonuclear weapons, which was a massive step up.

What's the difference between atomic fission and thermonuclear weapons in terms of how destructive they are? I'll give you an example. The bombs exploded in 1945, a Trinity and on Japan, were 15 to 20,000 tons. equivalent of TNT. The hydrogen bombs, the thermonuclear fusion bombs that were tested in the mid-1950s, the first ones were 15 to 20 megatons or millions of tons equivalent of TNT, a thousand times more powerful. Now, they're so powerful, and this is what I always tell my students, that the fission bombs

of the sort that were used on Japan were simply used to ignite the fuel, meaning the hydrogen. See, this was part of the response when the Soviets exploded their first bomb. In the winter of 1949, 50, there was a mostly secret debate in the United States,

which I've written a lot of that, over whether or not to build or to try to build the hydrogen bomb. Because you had some figures like Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the bomb, James Cohnett, the president of Harvard University, who I wrote my first book about, so I got deeply into that story. George Cannon, they said this is a weapon of genocide. This is so big, it's too big for any military target.

Its use would be a device that would exterminate large populations of civilians. These were not pacifists. Instead, they said the U.S. should develop tactical nuclear weapons that were smaller that could be used on the battlefield against purely military or mostly military targets. And Cannon specifically said, we need to build up our non-nuclear forces. We're at the fork in the road. We're at the Rubicon so we can match the Soviets. But the decision was made instead to increase.

reliance on nuclear weapons. And during the Korean War, for example, there was simultaneously a crash program to build a hydrogen bomb, which the U.S. reached by late 1952. This policy was codified in January of 1950 by NSC. 68, a memorandum authored by State Department official Paul Nitsa, who would go on to be a key Kennedy Pentagon advisor before succeeding Robert McNamara as Secretary of Defense in 1967. He would also, a few years later, co-found Team B, which you might remember from its brief mention in season one. Anyway, Nitz's memo NSC-68 said that Soviet communist, quote, fanatic faith, required America

to start aggressively stockpiling nuclear weapons to ensure that the U.S. retained a perpetual advantage against the USSR. are. You know the story of the arms race. This also meant that the U.S. must develop ever-deadlier weapons and missiles that could reach ever farther around the world, a logic that for the Soviet Union to continue to survive also had to conform to. What separated the U.S. and the Soviet Union was one country's willingness to use nuclear weapons as a threat and on the battlefield. In November 1950, during the Korean War, Truman was asked at a press conference, conference, whether the U.S. would use the atomic bomb in Korea in the fight against Chinese

communists. Truman's answers to the question, and its follow-ups, are revealing. Question, Mr. President, will attacks in Manchuria depend on action in the United Nations? Truman, yes, entirely. Question, in other words, if the United Nations resolution should authorize General MacArthur to go further than he has, he will, Truman, we will take whatever steps are necessary to meet the military situation just as we always have. And now here's the important part. Question, will that include the atomic bomb? Truman, that includes every weapon that we have. Mr. President, you said every weapon that we have. Does that mean that there is active consideration of the use of the atomic bomb? There has always been active consideration of

its use. I don't want to see it used. It is a terrible weapon, and it should not be used on innocent men, women, and children who have nothing whatever to do with this military aggression. That happens when it is used. Now, perhaps knowing that such remarks might stir trouble, the White House released a follow-up press statement, making clear that Truman meant what he said about active consideration. But it was important to remember, the White House press release noted that, quote, only the president can authorize the use of the atom bomb and no such authorization has been given. In other words, it's the president who has the final say-so on nuclear weapons, or as George

W. Bush would say, he's the decider. In 1951, as a flex of the decider's power, Harry Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur, seen by many as a World War II hero. He had been made commander of U.S. forces in Korea. Truman canned MacArthur for publicly urging the president to escalate the war. McArthur would later tell a biographer that his desired strategy to finish the Korean war had been to drop, quote, between 30 to 50 tactical atomic bombs on enemy air bases and other depots strung across the neck of Manchuria. According to MacArthur, that many bombs would have more than done the job. Evidently for Truman, that would have been a cost too high. Now, the conventional story is that in 1953, Truman merely passed the nuclear and Cold War baton to

Eisenhower. There's truth to this. Truman and his advisors and the military leaders he relied on, they basically agreed that the Soviet Union represented a mortal threat to America. Remember that memo about the Soviet Union's quote-unquote fanatic faith. But Eisenhower was more than just Cold War continuity. The Cold War historian Martin Sherwin, whom you probably heard in the main narrative of our regular season, he co-wrote a biography of Robert Oppenheimer, American Prometheus, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. Last year, he wrote the book Gambling with Armageddon,

nuclear roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Here's Sherwin, talking about Ike and the bomb. Eisenhower comes into office. He was the general in World War II, who at the Potsdam Conference

when told about nuclear weapons, said he was against it. He reports that he told Simpson that we shouldn't use this terrible weapon, that Truman was told the same thing by Eisenhower. But now he is the President of the United States, and he's really an ideologue. In 1946, Eisenhower writes in his diary, we are engaged in a battle to the death, you know, with communism. This is 1946. We don't need to hammer home Eisenhower's and his administration's anti-communist bonifides.

You heard enough about that earlier in the regular season. What I want to highlight here are two things. First, how Ike considered using nuclear weapons tactically on the battlefield as the American commander-in-chief. The second thing is what Sherwin describes in his most recent book as Ike's realization about the political advantages to nuclear weapons. Identifying such weapons, as Martin Sherwin writes, quote, the most cost-effective and efficient means of enforcing American objectives.

So, as to the first thing, how Eisenhower discussed using nuclear weapons on the battlefield, Eisenhower began his term with the ongoing Korean War, whose main combat operations concluded in the summer of 1953, with a stalemate between the north and south at the 38th parallel, dividing the Korean peninsula into halves. After he oversaw the Allied War mission, and before he became president, Eisenhower served as the chief commander of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization set up by the U.S., Western European allies, and Marshall-planned beneficiaries as a counter to the Soviet bloc. Assuming the presidency, Eisenhower entrenched the NATO military doctrine, as his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles set up enriching the

diplomatic scaffolding, and his CIA director, Alan Dulles, began recreating the single covert operations lines that existed in World War II, only this time to be wielded against the Soviet Union. The threat of nuclear annihilation from the very early days of the Eisenhower years was not some dog whistle. I mean, occasionally it was, but more often than not, it was expressed overtly. Nuclear war was obviously on everyone's minds. In a famous speech before the Council on Foreign Relations, in January of 1953, John Foster Dulles introduced the the phrase that would define the decade. Massive retaliation. We need allies and collective security. Our purpose is to make these relations more effective, less costly. This can be done by placing

more reliance on deterrent power and less dependence on local defensive power. This is accepted practice so far as local communities are concerned. We keep locks on our doors, but we do not have an armed guard in every home. We rely principally on a community security system so well equipped to punish any who break in and steal that, in fact, would-be aggressors are generally deterred. That is the modern way of getting maximum protection at a bearable cost. What the Eisenhower administration seeks is a similar international security system. We want, for ourselves and the other free nations, a maximum deterrent at a bearable cost. Local defense will always be important, but there is no local defense, which alone,

will contain the mighty land power of the communist world. Local defenses must be reinforced by the further deterrent of massive retaliatory power. A potential aggressor must know that he cannot always prescribe battle conditions that suit him. Otherwise, for example, a potential aggressor who is glutted with manpower might be attempted to attack in confidence that resistance would be confined to manpower. He might be attempted to attack in places where his superiority was decisive. The way to deter aggression is for the free community to be willing and able to respond vigorously at places and with means of its own choosing.

This was the vaunted new look strategy. What you just heard from Dulles was formalized without any allusion to nuclear weapons in an NSC memorandum written later on in 1915. The NSC's findings were firm. The U.S. needed overseas bases to ensure West Europe stuck with the U.S. And furthermore, the U.S. needed, quote, a strong military posture with emphasis on the capability of inflicting massive retaliatory damage by offensive striking power. In other words, long-range ballistic nuclear missiles, which had not even been developed

yet. In public, Eisenhower himself spoke in measured language, echoing the kind of rhetoric of restraint and caution that everyone remembers from his farewell address. John Foster Dulles emphasized how the administration worked hand-in-glove with Congress, the very portrait of responsible bipartisan governance, but in private, as many historians have found, Ike took a different tack entirely. At a March 1953 National Security Council meeting, according to the to the minutes, Eisenhower, quote, raised the question of the use of atomic weapons in the Korean war. Admittedly, he said there were not many good tactical targets, but he felt it would be worth the cost if through the use of atomic weapons, we could, one, achieve a substantial

victory over the communist forces, and two, get to a line at the waste of Korea. Although nuclear weapons weren't deployed in Korea, Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles were, according to the meeting minutes, quote, in complete agreement that somehow or other, the taboo which surrounds the use of atomic weapons would have to be destroyed. McGeorge Bundy, who had been JFK's national security advisor, in 1988, wrote a history of this period that depicts quite precisely how Eisenhower felt. There was a commanding requirement for a persuasively deterrent strategic nuclear force. In 1953, this requirement led to a primary role. for the long-range bombers of the Strategic Air Command headed by Curtis LeMay.

In budgetary terms, this priority had been recognized for several years, but Eisenhower personally intervened in the final discussions of 1953 to ensure that this force should be recognized not as a major deterrent to Soviet aggression, but as the major deterrent, and that's Bundy's emphasis. In the Eisenhower years, McGeorge Bundy writes, quote, such small changes in the language of formal documents were often significant beyond their appearance. To Eisenhower, the indefinite article failed to meet a primary objective, which was to establish a clear priority among the various kinds of military force.

At the beginning of his administration, it was Curtis LeMay's bombers that were designated as the linchpin of the massive retaliation strategy. But nuclear arms development was picking up pace all over the world. Over the course of the Eisenhower administration, increasingly longer range and increasingly deadly nuclear missiles were being developed at breakneck speed. In March 1958, Eisenhower was sent a disturbing memo by his special assistant for national security. The memo reported on the outcome of a recent war game, you know, those weird simulations that military leaders and White House people like to do.

In this war game, 7 million kilotons of nuclear weapons had been detonated, the rough equivalent of 4,700 Hiroshima's. Martin Sherwin writes that this memo, quote, anticipated the concept of nuclear winter by decades. Here's a small part of what the memo said. The effect of any such exchange is quite incalculable. No one knows what the concentrated explosion of 7 million kilotons involving nuclear material would do to the weather, to crop cycles, to human repalculable. production to the population of all areas of the world, whether or not directly exposed to the detonation, it is possible that life on the planet might be extinguished. Toward the end of their terms, as John Foster Dulles's and Eisenhower's own health were failing,

both men expressed signs in meetings that perhaps massive retaliation wasn't the best way to wage the anti-communist war, after all. And of course, there were their legacies to think about. What if they were the men who had set the world up for inevitable nuclear annihilation? But whatever misgivings they had, the trajectory of what they had already put in place was set. In 1954, the Americans introduced their first nuclear missile, the PGM-19 Jupiter, manufactured by Chrysler with a range of 1,500 miles. But by August 1957, the Soviets announced that they had successfully tested the R7 Semiorka, the first ever ICBM, an intercontinental ballistic missile with an effective range of 5,500 miles.

Two months later, using a modified version of the Smyorka, the Russians revealed Sputnik won, the first ever successful launch of a satellite into the Earth's orbit. Although the launch of Sputnik in 1957 is commonly credited with initiating the American race for ICBMs, That's mainly because the news media flamed Eisenhower for it, stoking fears that America was falling behind in the Cold War. These fears were unfounded. America was already well on its way to nuclear missile mass production and dominance. Between 1955 and 1957, spending on nuclear ballistic missiles increased nearly ten times over, from $161 million to $1.3 billion.

Beginning in 1958, American nuclear sites in Korea and Japan were established, opening North Korea, China, and the Soviet Union up to direct American nuclear attack from the east. And to the west, the U.S. slotted 30 Jupiter missiles in Italy and 15 missiles in Turkey within range of Moscow. Eisenhower's two terms produced more than just this geographic nuclear advantage over the Soviet Union. Over the course of Ike's eight-year administration, the size of the American nuclear arsenal had swelled from 2,000 weapons to more than 20,000 weapons. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, had fewer than 5,000 warheads on hand by 1960. It was an imbalance that cast a long shadow east, as Soviet Premier,

Nikita Khrushchev understood all too well. Bye.