The End Is Always Near

by Dan Carlin

  * Both the inventor Daedalus and the stealer of fire Prometheus figure in mythological tales of providing godlike power to mortal men.

  * And even if such competent people could be found, who eventually replaces them? We’re talking about a power or threat that needs to be managed until it isn’t a threat anymore. When is that going to be? What are the odds of getting competent people at all times, in all countries, with such weapons?

  * Much better than the other side getting it, of course. Imagine the American reaction if the Soviet Union had been the first to develop the A-bomb.

  * Who also was involved in helping develop the atomic bomb.

  * Einstein wrote this in 1946. At that time there were high hopes that the newly established United Nations might turn out to be something akin to a global government at some point. It may have sounded less far-fetched than it does today.

  * The idea of the nations and peoples of the world acquiescing to something like an actual world government superseding the sovereignty of national governments/nation-states shows the level of the challenge involved. If the question were put more starkly—either humanity consents to the formation of a global single state or humanity gets bombed back to the Stone Age—which side are you putting your money on? Again, your answer depends perhaps on your level of confidence in humanity.

  * The United States had a monopoly on these weapons from 1945 to 1949. Its leaders thought the country was going to maintain it for much longer than it did, and this was reflected in their planning assumptions.

  * And he had a good rationale for this. Truman is quoted in James Forrestal’s diaries as saying about the bomb that he didn’t want to have “some dashing lieutenant colonel decide when would be the proper time to drop one.”

  * And remember, since at this time only one nation had these weapons, had that nation decided in favor of eliminating them, they could simply opt to destroy the ones they had and never make any more. It would be nowhere near as easy to do this today. Of course, that would have done little or nothing to prevent another nation or entity from eventually developing the capability to produce such weapons.

  * According to the World Nuclear Association, thorium (named after Thor, the Norse god of thunder) is more abundant in nature than uranium. It isn’t very radioactive—you can hold it in your hand without injury—but it’s “fertile,” which means it can absorb neutrons when it’s irradiated and transmute into Uranium 233, which is fissile (capable of nuclear fission). “Fissile materials are composed of atoms that can be split by neutrons in a self-sustaining chain-reaction to release enormous amounts of energy,” according to the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. “In nuclear weapons, the fission energy is released all at once to produce a violent explosion.”

  * Many historians believe that it was a “cold” war and not a hot war because of the existence of atomic (and later, thermonuclear) weapons. A popular counterfactual question is whether a world war three would have happened between the victorious Second World War powers had atomic weapons not been discovered.

  * At its numerical height during the Second World War, the Red Army had more than eleven million men. After its demobilization in 1945, it shrunk to closer to three million. The US Army had had nearly six million in uniform during wartime; this had shrunk to just under a million by 1947, and only about a hundred thousand men were stationed in Germany after its postwar demobilization.

  * A sometimes overlooked but key point is that the armies on both sides had lots of institutional combat experience. Even when inexperienced, or “green,” troops were used (such as the US soldiers when the Korean War broke out), the officers and leadership all had recent wartime experience. The Red Army in the early Cold War was in part so dangerous because it was led by experienced veterans and had a ton of combat-hardened officers in its ranks. The same was true for its counterpart in the West.

  * General Leslie Groves, the military head of the Manhattan Project, thought it would be two decades before the Soviets got the bomb.

  * What if Hannibal had lived through two world wars, witnessed the fighting at Verdun, the siege of Stalingrad, the firebombing of Dresden, or the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then you hand him the button and say, “Do you still want to nuke Rome?” Maybe in order to “grow into greatness,” humanity has to experience the growing pains.

  * Is this Einstein’s concept of a global government, but one formed the old-fashioned way, by conquest and force rather than cooperation, a modern version of the Pax Romana to keep atomic war from breaking out?

  * Russell gave another speech soon afterward, recounted in William Poundstone’s Prisoner’s Dilemma, in which he told the House of Lords of his nightmare scenario, one so terrible that it would turn a committed pacifist into a person advocating a preventive nuclear strike: “As I go about the street and see St. Paul’s, the British Museum, the houses of Parliament and the other monuments of our civilization, in my mind’s eye I see a nightmare vision of those buildings as heaps of rubble with corpses all round them.”

  * Climate change, for example, could cause immense problems for humanity. This will happen, though, over time and in the future. A nuclear war could do its damage all at once, and tomorrow.

  * Can nation-states get the equivalent of a collective case of post-traumatic stress disorder? If so, the United States after Pearl Harbor might have had a slight case of it. The Soviets after Barbarossa had a much more severe case, though. The trauma from that June 1941 surprise attack and its aftermath was enormous and played into future distrust in international relations.

  * The Truman Doctrine committed the United States to aid other nations “who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Essentially, it was a pledge to attempt to contain Communist expansion into non-Communist states.

  * Formally called the European Recovery Program, the Marshall Plan (named after the man who came up with it, US secretary of state George Marshall) was a $12 billion American program to help rebuild war-ravaged Western Europe.

  * During the Second World War, US air assets had been part of the army and navy, respectively. The American bombers wreaking havoc over Germany and Japan were officially part of the US Army Air Forces, or USAAF.

  * One is reminded of Friedrich Nietzsche’s line: “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster.”

  * As even the pacifist Bertrand Russell suggested was the only way to avoid a third world war. In all fairness to Russell, he would later change his opinion on this.

  * In February 1948, for instance, the Czechoslovakian government was overthrown in a coup and that country became part of the Communist bloc, the last independent government in Eastern Europe to do so. Moreover, the foreign minister of the overthrown government was found dead outside his apartment in the foreign ministry building. The official story at the time was suicide. It wasn’t until 2003 that a forensic expert named Jiri Straus said the evidence was conclusive that he was pushed out the window, as had long been suspected.

  * In Iran in 1946, for example.

  * Michio Kaku and Daniel Axelrod make this claim in To Win a Nuclear War.

  * This strategy essentially goes back to caveman times. In its crudest form it simply means the willingness of one side to take things to the next, most extreme level in order to get what it wants. It works best when the side doing the threatening has more powerful weapons. It theoretically works really well with nuclear weapons—until it doesn’t.

  * And they wouldn’t necessarily even be the civilians of the other side in the war. The likely battlefield would be the territory of the people the United States (for example) was trying to defend. A French premier had said, “The next time you come you will probably be liberating a corpse.” That ups the resolve tab even more.

  * Deterrence is a strategic concept that predates nuclear weapons. In fact, in one form or another it’s probably almost as old as humans are. It basically means using
threats of some sort to prevent or deter others from taking unwanted actions.

  * One shudders to think of what the events and tension level of 1949 would have been like if both sides possessed the technology and arsenals of 1969. We might still be trying to rebuild our societies today.

  * A case can certainly be made that the United States did in fact dominate the world and did use these weapons as leverage to do so. But it’s a far cry from how the Roman Empire probably would have used nuclear weapons.

  * He said, as quoted earlier, “You may reasonably expect a man to walk a tightrope safely for ten minutes; it would be unreasonable to do so without accident for two hundred years.”

  * And this monopoly lasted less than five years. Had it lasted fifty, would this restraint have held?

  * This was the rationale for striking immediately. There was a time lag between the testing of an initial nuclear device and the point when there would be a stockpile of such weapons available and delivery systems in place. The idea was to attack before the Soviets were in a position to do much damage with their new nuclear capability.

  * Public opinion would have mattered a lot less in most Bronze Age societies than it does in the modern world.

  * Oppenheimer’s opinions are often hard to conclusively nail down. Usually he seems pretty pacifistic when it comes to nuclear weapons, but he can swing over to the other viewpoint for various reasons and at various times. Nonetheless, the general opinion among Truman and several associates was that Oppenheimer was “too much of a poet” to have good judgments on most hardheaded geopolitical questions.

  * Scientists like Edward Teller had already been working to prove that it could be done.

  * The nuclear expert Joseph Cirincione described the hydrogen bomb as the equivalent of bringing a literal piece of the sun onto the earth. There is no upper limit to such bombs’ power.

  * Very imperfect analogies exist. Japan’s decision to minimize the impact of firearms on its warfare and social system is often raised, for example.

  * One can’t help but wonder how a society that voted on everything, as ancient Athens did at one point in its democratic era, would handle the power of nuclear weapons. Would it be more or less likely to employ them if the people got to vote on it? It could go either way.

  * In making his case that no one needed the H-bomb, Oppenheimer pointed out that the destruction level was already at the point where each side would be taking out the other’s cities. If it took four A-bombs to take out a city that one H-bomb could destroy, did this meaningfully change anything? Even if it did, did that outweigh the possible negative effects?

  * A phrase used by some early American leaders to represent the traditional diplomatic attitude of the United States regarding things like permanent alliances.

  * We already mentioned such things as the National Security Act of 1947.

  * NSC-68 was known more officially as the United States Objectives and Programs for National Security.

  * This upset the budgetary hawk Truman, but one of the arguments made was that the lack of conventional weapons made nuclear war more likely. If you had enough conventional weapons to defend yourself, you might not resort to WMDs if you ended up not needing them. If you did not have enough conventional capability, you almost certainly would use nuclear weapons.

  * Normal UN Security Council practice would have been for one of the permanent members on the council to veto any resolution pushing for the use of force. But the Soviets were boycotting the council at the time, and so they couldn’t veto anything. This led to a singularly muscular use of force by the “UN.”

  * The US Constitution puts the power to declare war in the hands of the Congress and the power to wage it as commander in chief to the president. This keeps the power to take the country to war out of a single person’s hands. Theoretically, the United States should not be in a war that the Congress has not declared. Police actions, though, aren’t spelled out in the Constitution. It’s a bit of a gray area. The United States has not declared war since the Second World War was being fought. It may never again.

  * It might be quite a bit more complicated than this, as recent works depict MacArthur perhaps working at odds with Truman, and his actions coming to Truman’s attention via secret intercepts. Insubordination, regardless.

  * In the Soviet newspaper Pravda.

  * And not just for moral reasons. These weapons were huge radioactive pollution creators. Their use affected the health and safety of noncombatant states.

  * And not “instead of” but “in addition to” the larger nukes.

  * Known as the “Davy Crockett.” They made a couple thousand of them.

  * Also called battlefield nuclear weapons.

  * Officially, it was the “Second Red Scare,” the first being a short one in 1919.

  * There was always more to it than this, such as launch codes and other procedures. But certainly, unlike bombers, missiles once launched cannot be recalled or ordered to stand down, and they make it to their targets much more rapidly than aircraft would, thus shrinking any potential reaction window.

  * Aided in part by a radiological disaster in the wake of the unexpectedly large Castle Bravo thermonuclear bomb test. Emerging nations began to assert a growing collective clout on the world stage to have a voice in the nuclear standoff between the superpowers. In his introductory statement as part of the 1955 Russell-Einstein Manifesto, Bertrand Russell began with the powerful line, “I am bringing the warning pronounced by the signatories” (their manifesto) “to the notice of all powerful Governments of the world in the earnest hope that they may agree to allow their citizens to survive.”

  * From a logic perspective, this idea makes sense whether or not it actually produces good or usable ideas. This could be considered an attempt by society to use its collective best intelligence to adapt to the power of its weaponry.

  * A statement like this is always debatable.

  * “Both the computer and the [atomic] bomb were extracurricular activities for von Neumann,” Poundstone writes.

  * That’s ancient Greek, not what they speak in Athens today.

  * The standard definition of game theory is “a mathematically precise method of determining rational strategies in the face of critical uncertainties.”

  * The United States commissioned a war plan in 1955 to check out how many people would die if America carried out its proposed strikes against the Soviet Union when World War III broke out. The number came back to be sixty million. That’s roughly on par with the total World War II death tolls and ten times the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust.

  * A program/policy purporting to push for the peaceful application of nuclear technology.

  * Again, this is why some were/are pessimistic about humanity’s chances with ever-increasingly destructive weapons technology. Did Einstein or Oppenheimer favor “the people” making decisions about who was qualified to wield such godlike destructive capability?

  * Underappreciated factoid: Americans have not elected a bald man president since Eisenhower. Even this might have been an anomaly, because Eisenhower’s Democratic opponent in both presidential elections was Adlai Stevenson, a man with even less hair than Eisenhower.

  * This doesn’t mean he wasn’t also the better choice. But in as historically close an election as the 1960 contest was, John Kennedy’s charisma, which was off the charts, must have been enough of a factor to put him over the top. It wouldn’t have taken much.

  * To be fair, his opponent, Richard Nixon, was himself just forty-six. He would go on to win the presidency eight years later, and resign in 1974 during the Watergate scandal. At one point he would show off the sheer power of the office, telling members of the press corps, “I can go back into my office and pick up the telephone and in twenty-five minutes seventy million people will be dead.”

  * There had been an unofficial testing moratorium going on. These tests in this period did provide useful data, but they were also in part about sendin
g messages to the other side.