Sleepwalking With the Bomb

by John C. Wohlstetter

  The Soviet “ally” case was one of self-delusion on the part of the United States, which invested the man FDR called “Uncle Joe” with personal qualities and policy aims that simply did not fit the real person. Thus Truman at first considered Stalin “a moderating influence in the present Russian government.” During the 1948 presidential campaign Truman said, “I like Old Joe” and called him “a prisoner of the Politburo.” In fact, Stalin was a paranoid, genocidal monster who never intended his alliance with America and the West to be anything but a necessary expediency in order to survive the Nazi onslaught. Thus a Soviet nuclear weapon program was inevitable, given Stalin’s intent to pursue world domination by launching the Cold War. The next three cases, however, involved real allies.

  United Kingdom

  THE FOUNDATIONAL work and leadership of, among others, Ernest Rutherford meant that Britain scientifically led atomic studies for 30 years. Rutherford died unexpectedly before the war began, but his colleagues and students, as well as British officials, were involved in the pre– Manhattan Project research stages. In 1943, the U.S., UK, and Canada signed the Quebec Agreement, which governed atomic research and development between the three allies and also made use of the bomb contingent on the consent of all signatories. The 1944 Hyde Park Agreement further detailed U.S.-UK cooperation. The British contribution—code-named Tube Alloys—to the huge 1942–1945 operation at Los Alamos was notable. By the end of 1945 the British had plans to make enough plutonium for 15 bombs per year.

  In 1946, the United States passed the Atomic Energy Act (also known as the McMahon Act after its senatorial sponsor, Connecticut Democrat Brien McMahon). It placed harsh restrictions on sharing of atomic information with other countries, none excepted. The law also established the Atomic Energy Commission to provide civilian control of nuclear matters. The Senate passed the data-sharing restrictions unaware of the secret wartime agreements. In 1958 the McMahon Act was modified to restore data sharing with the UK, Canada having decided not to pursue nuclear weapons development.

  But even before the 1958 modification the act could hardly stop America’s main Manhattan Project ally. In 1946 Britain launched a program that brought a nuclear reactor online in four years and produced enough plutonium by 1952 to enable an October test near Australia. Britain’s leadership pushed nuclear programs partly to give Britain’s word greater weight in world affairs, but mainly because during the first decade after the Cold War the major allied effort to launch planes targeting the Soviet Union would come from bases in Britain. This made Britain the top target for a Soviet attack. Even before the United States, total war would mean the Soviets’ utter destruction of England. Only after the advent of the intercontinental-range B-52 (1955) and U.S. ICBM (1958) did America become the number-one threat to the USSR.

  The British A-bomb was followed in 1954 by a decision to build an H-bomb. Britain wanted this second bomb for much the same reasons it had wanted the first. The H-bomb, the British believed, would give strategic weight to what Britain did on the international scene and help keep Britain a world power. It would also deter against a Soviet first strike—or a retaliatory Soviet strike against Britain if the U.S. struck the Soviets preemptively. British leaders knew that a five-megaton H-bomb dropped on London would incinerate everything within a two-mile radius, dig a crater three-quarters of a mile across and 150 feet deep, destroy all housing within a three-mile radius, and badly damage structures within a radius of three to seven miles.37 The British detonated their first H-bomb in 1957.

  On June 26, 1954, Churchill told President Eisenhower about the British H-bomb program. Just weeks earlier, on June 1, the Chiefs of Staff advised the prime minister that in event of war, 10 H-bombs of 2 to 20 megaton yield would kill 5 to 12 million people—this in a country whose 1954 population was some 52 million. While the two discussed a nuclear-armed Russia at a White House luncheon, Churchill quipped: “Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war.” (The quote is frequently presented as “jaw-jaw beats war-war.”) It should be noted that Churchill felt very differently in the middle and late 1930s, repeatedly calling for Allied military action against Hitler’s legions before they gained greater strength than Allied units. The hydrogen changed his assessment.

  Prime Minister Harold Macmillan made restoration of Anglo-American nuclear cooperation a top priority. When in 1962 the Kennedy administration peremptorily cancelled the joint U.S.-UK Skybolt air-to-ground nuclear missile project, Macmillan met with Kennedy at the hastily convened Nassau Summit to discuss a replacement. The result was that Britain got American Polaris undersea-launched ballistic missiles for its own ballistic missile submarines. As of 2010, the British had deployed some 160 to 200 nuclear warheads, all carried on nuclear subs.

  France

  WITH ITS three Nobel Prize winners of 1903—Henri Becquerel and the Curies, Marie and Pierre—France, like Britain, was a pioneer in nuclear research. Under Frederic Joliot-Curie, its nuclear program started almost immediately after the Battle of Normandy and the Allies’ August 1944 liberation of Paris from the Nazis. General Charles de Gaulle (still exiled in England) ordered French scientists working in the U.S. nuclear program to return to France even before the Germans surrendered. In his memoir, Manhattan Project chief General Leslie Groves recounts how Joliot-Curie, an ardent Communist, refused to help the Americans, and also helped France obtain access to American nuclear know-how by blackmail. Unless the U.S. helped France, Joliot-Curie would get France to turn to the Russians. The October 1945 elections brought in a government that abandoned the project, but it resumed in 1952, with a nuclear reactor program.

  Then, in 1954, the Vietminh Communists defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu. The French had asked President Eisenhower to drop atomic bombs on the insurgents. His refusal made a French weapon inevitable.38

  A month and a half after the defeat at Dien Bien Phu, anti-colonialist Pierre Mendes-France came to power. His government would not last a year, but while in office, he took the decision to build an independent nuclear weapon. Back under the leadership of de Gaulle, France tested its first A-bomb on February 13, 1960, in the Algerian desert (U.S. code-name BB-1, the BB for French sex siren Brigitte Bardot).39 Shortly after the test de Gaulle exclaimed: “If France must have allies, she has no need of a protector!” Ironically, none other than A-bomb father J. Robert Oppenheimer had told French nuclear scientist Francis Perrin that France should make an atom bomb: “It would be good for France. And it isn’t very difficult. All you need is a metallurgist endowed with a little imagination.”

  De Gaulle was the prime guiding spirit of France’s bomb program. De Gaulle believed that a nuclear program conferred technology leadership valuable in world markets. He also believed a third world war to be imminent—and he was reluctant to rely on the American nuclear umbrella to deter Soviet aggression. As he explained to Eisenhower in a summit meeting in 1959:

  You, Eisenhower, would wage nuclear war for Europe, because you know the interests that are at stake. But as the Soviet Union develops its capacity to strike the cities of North America, one of your successors will agree to wage nuclear war only [in Europe]. When that time comes, I or my successor will have to possess the necessary means to change into nuclear war what the Soviets would have liked to have remained a classic war.

  De Gaulle’s quest for nuclear independence reflected his World War II experience: British troops leaving European soil at Dunkirk in June 1940, American officials hesitating to send troops into combat in Europe until Hitler declared war on America, America’s delaying the Normandy landing until 1944, and de Gaulle’s exclusion from major Allied strategic decisions, despite his being commander (in exile) of the Free French Forces. De Gaulle also made the point that no one could foresee how the world would look in 20 years. (In that he was guilty of gross understatement.)

  Even before his meeting with Eisenhower and France’s 1960 atomic bomb test, de Gaulle had decided to push research on a hydrogen bomb. De Gaulle considered full nuclear-club mem
bership to require development and deployment of thermonuclear bombs and believed that only with such an arsenal could a nation truly be fully independent in the nuclear age. France exploded its first two thermonuclear devices in August 1968.

  De Gaulle was taken aback when the Kennedy administration changed American deterrence policy from “massive retaliation” to “flexible response” without consulting Europe, and when Kennedy used the adjective “unfriendly” to describe the French nuclear program. Guided by his imperial, intensely patriotic vision of France standing alone, de Gaulle withdrew France from the NATO defense command structure in 1966, because NATO weapons require American approval as part of their release. (France rejoined that structure only in 1996, well after the Cold War had ended.) De Gaulle’s concerns about American willingness to use nuclear weapons to defend France were not unjustified. When Secretary of State Dean Rusk was told by a French officer that France would use nuclear weapons to force America to “go to extremes” in the event of a Soviet invasion, Rusk answered that in such event America would tell the Soviets that America had nothing to do with France’s nuclear decision.

  By 2010, France had an estimated arsenal of 300 nuclear weapons, based on bombers, land, and sea, but equally fateful was France’s decision to help Israel build a nuclear bomb.

  Britain, France, and Israel in Suez

  PRESIDENT TRUMAN recognized Israel upon its May 14, 1948, founding. But when Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq invaded the next day (joining Palestinian guerillas, who had attacked Israel the day after the UN passed its November 29, 1947, resolution partitioning Palestine), Israel’s main help came from private sources. The U.S. government subsequently remained neutral, and British sentiment tilted towards the Arabs. The USSR, though not allied with Israel, allowed Czech arms dealers to sell their wares to the Israelis.

  After Israel won its initial war of survival in 1949, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, began thinking about developing nuclear weapons. Before he left office, a tectonic political event occurred to make the question of nuclear weapons more urgent: the 1952 Free Officers coup in Egypt, which brought the charismatic pan-Arabist, pro-Soviet Gamal Abdel Nasser to power.

  After a botched covert operation discredited the Israeli government (the affair, which partly aimed at getting rid of Nasser, involved Israeli agents clandestinely bombing two U.S. buildings in Cairo), the 69-year-old Ben-Gurion took up office again in late 1955. He entered into the Atoms for Peace commercial nuclear program, but also began a clandestine effort to develop a weapon.

  On July 26, 1956, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal and closed it, cutting off the only short sea transit route from Europe to Asia. Britain and France, among those who relied on the canal to save months of shipping transit time for cargo from Asia, allied themselves with Israel to topple Nasser. Their plan was to invade the Sinai Desert. British and French forces would seize the Suez waterway, blockade key Egyptian ports, and conduct aerial bombardment. They would give Nasser an ultimatum: withdraw from the Suez Canal Zone or lose power.

  In too-clever-by-half timing, the momentous, ill-starred operation began October 29, one week before the American presidential election. America was supposed to be distracted by its upcoming presidential election and surely would not oppose the takedown of a virulently anti-American, charismatic Arab demagogue and Soviet client. Instead, on November 6, the day of his landslide reelection, Eisenhower condemned the operation.

  In a bizarre coincidence that compounded Eisenhower’s fury at the three allies, Hungarians were in the midst of a revolt against Soviet rule. Eisenhower was utterly impotent in the Hungarian crisis. Russian artillery took commanding heights and tanks rumbled in the streets of Budapest, against which Hungarians had small arms, virtually no artillery, no tanks, and at best “Molotov cocktails”—bottles filled with kerosene and lighted with a wick, tossed at Russian armor and Soviet buildings. Moscow brutally suppressed the revolt on November 10.

  Eisenhower’s impotence in Hungary was not replicated in the Mid-east, and his decision to sandbag key allies was fateful and disastrous for the West. On November 8 the Soviets warned the British, French, and Israeli invaders to pull back or else face retaliation. Strategic bombers armed with nuclear weapons backed their threat. Had it been hit by three Russian hydrogen bombs, the State of Israel would have virtually ceased to exist. And the Soviets had the power to inflict upon England and France vastly greater devastation than did the Germans in World War II.

  The three countries were left to fend for themselves against the Soviets because Eisenhower feared losing support in the Arab world if he allowed the invasion to proceed. And as superpower guarantor, via NATO membership, to Britain and France (it was not until 11 years later that America and Israel entered into a formal alliance), he did not want to be drawn into a possible nuclear confrontation with Russia.

  Without U.S. support, and only Britain armed with nuclear bombs—few, at that—the three countries had no practical choice but to capitulate to the Soviets.

  On November 30, 1956, the frustrated France and Israel made their first nuclear weapons development pact. The next year, the French agreed to help Israel build a nuclear plant at Dimona, in Israel’s Negev Desert.

  The French-Israeli nuclear collaboration lasted only until May 1960. Charles de Gaulle ended it shortly after he returned as president of what remains today France’s Fifth Republic. But the work went on, and Israel made a clandestine deal for heavy water, used to produce nuclear fuel, from Norsk Hydro, a huge Norwegian company.40 In December 1960, on the cusp of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, Israel’s program became public knowledge. Kennedy pressed Israel hard to allow inspection of its Dimona facility, but Israel resisted. In an April 2, 1963, Oval Office meeting, Israel’s then-Deputy Foreign Minister, Shimon Peres, offered Kennedy what was to become the permanent formulation for Israel as to its nuclear program: Israel would not be the first nation to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East. (The key word is weapons, which Israel clearly restricts to meaning a fully assembled weapon. Having components that can be rapidly assembled into a bomb does not qualify as actually introducing weapons under this formulation.)

  The Dimona reactor began operation—in nuclear parlance “went critical”—in December 1963. Ironically that same year Nasser was helping to midwife the Palestine Liberation Organization, which would come to pose an existential terrorist threat to Israel’s future, one not anticipated by Israel’s focus on a nuclear deterrent.

  Sometime between December 1963 and the June 1967 start of the Six-Day War, Israel completed all the steps necessary to rapidly assemble a nuclear device. (The time needed to assemble a usable bomb is short. Final assembly of the primitive Nagasaki implosion A-bomb in August 1945 took less than one day. Assembling a gun-trigger device would be even quicker.) Two prototype devices may have been ready for use in 1967, during the Six-Day War. By then Lyndon Johnson was president and looking to run again in 1968. With a close election expected in the fall, the Jewish vote took center stage, and New York’s then-45 electoral votes were crucial. Johnson told his staff with the plain-speak he was known for: “Good nonproliferation policies lead to bad politics.” 41

  The Fallout from Suez

  THE TURN at Suez proved among the most catastrophic miscalculations in American foreign policy history. In condemning Nasser’s enemies and allowing Nasser to proceed unchecked, the United States tossed away the chance to crush Nasser and nip pan-Arabism in the bud. In 1958, the radical passions Nasser stirred up in the Arab world bore ugly fruit, with Egypt-sponsored revolution in Iraq, soon followed by revolution in Syria. These uprisings brought a pair of secular militarist tyrannies to power and destroyed French and British influence there.

  These revolutions destroyed what was left of the power of pro-Western moderates. Along with the 1963 founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization, these events set in motion a cascade of Mideast calamities over the ensuing decades. Had the United States used its supe
rpower status to protect the interests of its close allies in 1956, these calamities—briefly described below—might have been avoided entirely, or at least, their impact blunted.

  On New Year’s Day 1965 the PLO launched its first attack against the Jewish state—one aimed at “liberating” not the West Bank, then occupied by Jordan, or Gaza, then under Egyptian suzerainty, but Israel, from democratic Jewish status. While the Palestinians had chafed under Arab rule few outside the region had cared. Nor had there been serious international talk about their “national historic rights.”42

  But Nasser’s post-Suez decade of agitation against Israel’s right to exist (a point of view then held unanimously by Mideast Arab countries) led to the Six Day War, and that changed Palestinian politics. It was only when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza after the 1967 war that the plight of the Palestinians became a staple of international politics.

  Suez ended the brief alignment between Britain, France, and Israel.43 Britain and France never fully recovered from their shattering defeat at Suez. Britain, pro-Arab, rarely was a close ally of the Jewish state, and France became beholden to Arab oil until nuclear power changed its energy equation.