by Dan Carlin
NSC-68, presented to Truman in April 1950, was one of the most important documents of this period.* It laid out the stakes for the United States in apocalyptic terms: “The issues that face us are momentous,” the document stated, “involving the fulfillment or destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself.” The policy recommendations of NSC-68 were breathtaking and included, among other things, going ahead with the H-bomb development. It also advocated tripling conventional defense spending.*
What NSC-68 did in paragraph after paragraph was spot the holes in the entire US defense strategy, which basically relied on making atomic threats. If the threats failed to gain the desired result, the United States would either have to nuke the other side and kill millions of people or back down. The document’s authors pointed out that this line in the sand could be tested. Would the United States, for example, be willing to use nuclear weapons against a nation that just sort of gobbled up its neighbor a little at a time? Allies were worried about this, too, because they were starting to think that maybe the United States would be willing to use nuclear weapons and kill millions of non-American civilians if its own safety was directly on the line, but that it wouldn’t be willing to do so to defend allied nations.
“The risk was having no better choice than to capitulate or precipitate a global war,” NSC-68 said. In other words, leaders and strategists had no flexibility at all—it was nukes or nothing. With that in mind, the document advocated a huge increase in spending on conventional weapons, tanks, planes, ships—but it didn’t back off the nuclear weapons expenditures, either. The cost and scope of the recommendations made it unlikely to be accepted; it was surely too sweeping and too expensive. Had this not been such a tense time, maybe NSC-68 would have gone nowhere—instead, the Korean War broke out, World War III appeared closer than ever, and a tripling of spending on conventional weapons didn’t seem like such a luxury anymore.
In June 1950, when the North Koreans invaded South Korea, the question of how to fight a war in the nuclear age was no longer merely theoretical. It’s hard enough to figure out how to live with this new überpowerful weapons technology in peacetime; it’s a completely different sort of challenge to try to deal with the temptation, fear, and uncertainty involving it in wartime. When a nation’s soldiers are dying, the pressure to employ whatever means are at the nation’s disposal is extreme. And there were also reputations on the line—for both proponents and opponents of the bomb.
And if there was ever a conflict that would tempt a leader to use atomic weapons, the Korean War seemed tailor made for it. Whether early in the conflict when US troops and allies found themselves in dire straits on the battlefield, or later in the war when the idea of using nuclear bombs to break the frustrating World War I–style entrenched stalemate had taken hold, the temptation to use what to some seemed like game-changing weapons was great. After all, people were dying in Korea every day. The war itself started out like a bar brawl, as North Korean Communist forces swarmed down from the northern border and drove the South Korean forces south toward the water. Everything was happening very quickly, and soon the entire South Korean army was in danger of defeat. Within days, the United States was sending forces to aid the South Koreans.*
Eventually the US/UN forces commanded by the legendary Second World War general Douglas MacArthur conducted an amphibious landing behind enemy lines at Inchon, only to trigger a Chinese response soon afterward that sent a ton of Chinese “volunteers” unofficially into the fighting.
It was at this point that it became apparent that, to keep the Korean War from becoming World War III, all the major powers had to create some plausible deniability so that nobody had to admit this was World War III.
There is a theory that says that even without nuclear weapons there was a decent chance Korea would have turned into World War III. But it appeared to some that Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao in Red China, and Harry Truman in the United States all bent over backward to claim that all the air strikes and amphibious naval operations and the millions of soldiers shooting at one another wasn’t “war.”
When the fighting broke out—the worst since the Second World War—a news reporter asked the American president, “President Truman, is this war? Are we at war?” Truman answered, “No, we are not at war.” “So what is this? Is this like a police action?” the reporter asked, and Truman said, “Yes. That is exactly what it amounts to.” And forever after, it was called a “police action”—as though wars might call for nuclear weapons, but police actions would not.
(Also, if the situation in Korea wasn’t a “war,” Truman could argue that he didn’t have to go to Congress and ask it to declare it so.)*
The reason the Korean War is such an important test case for how war between major powers can be conducted without triggering the use of nuclear weapons is explained by the historian John Lewis Gaddis: “The rule quickly became that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union would confront the other directly or use all available force; each would seek instead to confine such confrontations within the theaters in which they had originated. This pattern of tacit cooperation among bitter antagonists could hardly have emerged had it not been for the existence, on both sides, of nuclear weapons.”
Part of the adaptation the war forced was in clarifying lines of authority and power between civilian and military leaders. At one point in the conflict, Truman precipitated a near-constitutional crisis by firing Douglas MacArthur, his military commander. General MacArthur had been accused of insubordination for disagreeing with the way the president was micromanaging the war,* but Truman was worried about more than the war in Korea—he was clearly trying to restrain the use of force to keep things from spiraling out of control and into World War III.
Someone who disagreed with this caution was Air Force general Curtis LeMay. LeMay’s attitude was shared among a lot of generals, especially the First and Second World War veterans—men who considered the most damaging aspect of modern war its duration. Because casualties reliably mounted every day, anything that could be done to limit the length of the war was humanitarian by its very nature—even if what it took to do that was a shocking amount of violence in a very short time. LeMay had wanted to unleash his heavy bombers, as he had over Japan in the Second World War, and he testified after the war was over that to do so would have been a more humanitarian approach. This is the philosophy/logic of strategic bombing, as contradictory as it may sound, highlighted by the nomenclature: the new bomber that was slated to carry out any possible nuclear destruction of places like the Soviet Union in 1950 and 1951 was the brand-new B-36, nicknamed the “Peacemaker.”
Neither side—not the Truman backers who wanted to shy away from nuclear war, nor the Total War enthusiasts like the air force’s Curtis LeMay—was able to conclusively win its arguments. By the middle of 1951, both sides were at the armistice table talking and working out a deal, which Truman’s supporters could claim as a victory of sorts. Military hawks could counter that the talks would go on for two long years, and soldiers and civilians died on both sides the entire time.
Perhaps the final word, though, goes to the Truman supporters, who could point out that by walking a diplomatic and military tightrope World War III was averted. That’s a pretty strong mic drop.
In October 1952, a third player in the nuclear game joined when the United Kingdom exploded its first atomic bomb. It was understood by all that the Brits would hardly be the last power to join the nuclear club. In the coming years, it seemed clear that human beings might have to manage a world with ten, fifteen, maybe as many as twenty nuclear powers.
And just as minds started to contemplate a world with multiple nuclear powers, the power of the weaponry itself got supercharged once again.
Less than a month after the United Kingdom joined the club, the United States demonstrated that it had the technology and the working capability to build a thermonuclear weapon, the “Super”: the H-bomb. This megabomb was detonated
just a couple of days before the US presidential election of 1952. The power of the bomb—even to a world getting accustomed to the mushroom cloud of atomic weapons—was truly paradigm shifting.
When the bomb exploded on an island in the Pacific, it created a fireball more than three miles wide. Lightning crackled inside it. The subsequent crater measured more than 6,000 feet across, and the hole was more than 150 feet deep. This “Super” was somewhere between four hundred and five hundred times more powerful than either of the bombs that were dropped on Japan in the Second World War.
But with the extraordinary power of this new bomb came new problems. Thermonuclear weapons are so powerful that they effectively work against the idea that you can use them as a deterrent, because the bigger they get, the less likely your adversary is to think you’ll use them. Joseph Stalin was quoted* as saying that he thought that public opinion and the peace movement around the world would rein governments in—no one was going to use a multi-megaton-strength weapon, because world opinion wouldn’t stand for it.* But if you’re the military and you want to be able to use these weapons, or you’re the intellectuals and the political associates of the president and you want your deterrence to still be effective, you must figure out a way around the dilemma of nuclear weapons too big to use.
The way around the dilemma was to make smaller nuclear weapons.* “Tactical” nuclear weapons are those which are small enough to be used in situations that have a potential battlefield utility. Nuclear artillery shells fired from cannons or nuclear mines are two examples. One such weapon was even designed to be fired by a soldier from a bazooka-like recoilless cannon.* J. Robert Oppenheimer even helped develop them, saying later that he mistakenly thought he was improving the situation because the weapons were at least smaller.
Despite Oppenheimer’s hope that smaller weapons were better than those that were included in what he called “the most God-damnedest thing I ever saw” (he was referring to the air force’s war plan for 1951, a plan that called for five hundred atomic bombs to be dropped on the Soviet Union in a very short time), tactical nuclear weapons actually opened up the door to a very quick escalation to the very big bombs that Oppenheimer hoped would never be used. Rather than one instead of the other, experts worried that you would likely just get both.
The speed at which all this happened makes it seem at times like an out-of-control technological train, with humankind along for the ride until the inevitable crash. It’s fair to ask which of several developments from the year 1952 was potentially the most destabilizing. Was it the fact that nuclear proliferation had now begun, and more countries were getting the bomb? Was it the invention of the hydrogen bomb and the incredible growth, virtually overnight, of humanity’s destructive capacity? Or was it the beginning of the revolution in what we today refer to as tactical nuclear weapons?*
The rest of the 1950s would see plenty of changes. Truman would be replaced by the Republican president (and former general) Dwight David Eisenhower, and Stalin would die in office and be replaced by Nikita Khrushchev. This was also the height of what is known as the “Red Scare” in US history, when anti-communism reached levels of fear and paranoia that it had never reached before or would again.* It certainly didn’t make cooperation between the nuclear adversaries any easier. The tech, as always, was progressing, and missiles were a key development, adding yet another dimension to the concept of a nuclear war. With them came the idea of “pushing the button” and unleashing a nuclear war automatically.*
Once again, the movement arguing that nuclear weapons must be eliminated, and humankind must alter its long-standing patterns of behavior and “grow into greatness,” gained momentum.*
The intellectual counterpoint to those calling for unprecedented changes in human behavior also gained momentum in the 1950s. Those who didn’t believe humanity was likely to change to the degree required instead took the position that it would be smarter to look for approaches to manage the danger; strategies to effectively ride the nuclear tiger, as it were. The holders of such beliefs became an alternative intellectual school of thought to what some considered the unrealistic “poets” like Oppenheimer. Eventually many of them would make careers working for defense-related think tanks theorizing about every aspect of nuclear war imaginable. Getting superintelligent people into a building together and tasking them with finding solutions, or at least long-term coping mechanisms, to some of the great problems of the age seems like a worthwhile idea.*
At their best, some of the figures who would eventually be called “defense intellectuals” were supergeniuses. John von Neumann was one of the most prominent of these early figures. Von Neumann has been called one of the most intelligent people of the twentieth century.* His list of accomplishments is mind boggling. He’s a foundational figure in computing and physics. He worked on the Manhattan Project “as an extracurricular activity.”* It was clear from the time he was a young child that he was not a normal person.
The author William Poundstone wrote of him in Prisoner’s Dilemma: “From childhood, von Neumann was gifted with a photographic memory. At the age of six, he was able to exchange jokes with his father in classical Greek.* The Neumann family sometimes entertained guests with demonstrations of Johnny’s ability to memorize phone books. A guest would select a page and column of the phone book at random. Young Johnny read the column over a few times, then handed the book back to the guest. He could answer any question put to him (who has number such and such?) or recite names, addresses and numbers in order.”
The knock on people like this from detractors, however, is that while brilliant, they were somehow machinelike when it came to the human, emotional side of things like nuclear war and millions of dead. They were what you might call Spock-like, people who could logically and mathematically work on plans that might make Armageddon likely. The author Fred Kaplan wrote a book about them and called it The Wizards of Armageddon.
Von Neumann is credited with inventing something we today call game theory.* He was a game player himself (poker especially) and was fascinated with how games worked. He was particularly interested in the human element. As Poundstone explains it, “As von Neumann used the term, a ‘game’ is a conflict situation where one must make a choice knowing that others are making choices too, and the outcome of the conflict will be determined in some prescribed way by the choices made. Some games are simple. Others invite vicious circles of second-guessing that are difficult to analyze. Von Neumann wondered if there is always a rational way to play a game, particularly one with much bluffing and second-guessing. This is one of the fundamental questions of game theory.”
By the 1950s, von Neumann was working with some of the other most brilliant thinkers in the world at a think tank called the RAND Corporation. There they put serious effort into studying the “game” that the fate of civilization hinged on. They were trying to develop theories for how this game of geopolitical chess or atomic poker worked, and what moves made sense in which situations, analyzing every move and possible countermove, every variable that might crop up.
Military leaders like Curtis LeMay argued that once political leaders had blundered somehow into war, the nuclear plan should be carried out by the military leadership ASAP, and the hundreds of bombs should start falling. Game over. Some of the civilian defense intellectuals analyzing the “game” countered that not only was the game not over after war broke out, but how it was played from that point onward could mean the difference between tens of millions of deaths or potentially hundreds of millions.
For example, Bernard Brodie, another of the wizards of Armageddon and one of the founding fathers of nuclear military strategy, clashed with the military’s plan to bomb everything right away, saying that the enemy’s people were more valuable as hostages than as corpses. LeMay’s plan created millions of corpses almost right away. Brodie wanted to preserve flexibility even after the atomic bombs dropped. Fred Kaplan writes, “Brodie reasoned that the final surrender of the Japanese in the Pacifi
c War resulted not from the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but from the implicit threat of more atom bombs on their way if the Japanese did not give up then.
“Likewise,” Kaplan writes, paraphrasing Brodie’s argument, “the Soviets would more likely stop fighting after receiving some destructive blows, knowing that if they did not stop, their cities would be the next targets to get hit. If, however, we blew up their cities at the very outset of the war, the bargaining lever would be blown up along with them. Hostages have no value once they are killed. Consequently, the Soviets would feel no inhibitions about blowing up American cities in return, hardly an outcome that would serve the interest of American security.”
It’s a combination of the dispassionately logical and, at the same time, in its own way (especially when compared with the atomic blitz plan the air force had in place), the humanitarian.*
But the wizards of Armageddon trying to find ways to use humans’ intelligence to avoid killing ourselves with our own weapons were running into the same problem that those who wanted to see humankind evolve completely away from war were running into—the speed of the pace of change. Everything kept evolving so quickly that the minute you thought you had this atomic poker game figured out playing with a single deck, somebody decided to add a second. Then a third. It upset the paradigm on a regular basis and increased the complexity and number of variables enormously.
Within the efforts between the superpowers to normalize relations and reduce the hair-trigger element of their relationship, every decrease in tensions was countered with a new challenge to make up for it. The nuclear expert Joseph Cirincione ran down the growth in weapons technology in the ten years between 1950 and 1960:
While Atoms for Peace* was promoting nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, the U.S. military was equipping their troops with thousands of nuclear weapons, adapting them for use in nuclear depth charges, nuclear torpedoes, nuclear mines, nuclear artillery, and even a nuclear bazooka. This infantry weapon, called the Davy Crockett, would fire a nuclear warhead about half a mile. Both the United States and the Soviet Union developed strategies to fight and win a nuclear war, created vast nuclear weapon complexes, and began deploying intercontinental ballistic missiles and fleets of ballistic missile submarines. The effective abandonment of international control efforts and the race to build a numerical and then a qualitative nuclear advantage resulted in the American nuclear arsenal mushrooming from just under 400 weapons in 1950 to over 20,000 by 1960. The Soviet arsenal, likewise, jumped from 5 warheads in 1950 to roughly 1,600 in 1960. The United States was ahead but afraid.