The Doomsday Machine

by Daniel Ellsberg

  On March 3, 1939, Szilard was the first person to see the flashes on an oscilloscope screen confirming his suspicion “that neutrons were emitted in the fission process of uranium and this in turn would mean that the large-scale liberation of atomic energy was just around the corner.” He reports his reaction: “We watched them [the flashes] for a little while and then we switched everything off and went home. That night there was very little doubt in my mind that the world was headed for grief.”32

  Nevertheless, later that year, expecting imminently the war he had long foreseen and fearing that Nazis might be first to exploit the potential of nuclear energy in a bomb, it was Szilard who induced Albert Einstein to send a letter, which he co-drafted, to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, urging what came to be the Manhattan Project. It was dated August 2, 1939. Hitler invaded Poland on September 1.

  Almost three and a half years later, Szilard and Enrico Fermi constructed the first working nuclear reactor, which was necessary for the production of plutonium for a bomb. (The Germans never did get a reactor to work.) On December 2, 1942, Szilard recounts in his memoir, a chain reaction was actually initiated and controlled for a very brief period at Stagg Field on the University of Chicago campus. Someone brought out a scarce wartime bottle of Chianti and most present celebrated and congratulated Fermi. Szilard reports: “There was a crowd there and then Fermi and I stayed there alone. I shook hands with Fermi and I said I thought this day would go down as a black day in the history of mankind.”33

  Yet despite this extreme, and fully justified, foreboding, Szilard was playing a critical role in bringing this ominous explosive power into the world. How could he? The answer is that he believed, even before others, that they were racing Hitler to the attainment of this power. It was German scientists, after all, who had first accomplished the fission of a heavy element. There seemed no reason to suppose that Germany could not stay ahead of any competitors in harnessing this unearthly energy to Hitler’s unlimited ambitions for conquest. The specter of a possible German monopoly, even a temporary one, on an atomic bomb drove the Manhattan Project scientists—above all the Jewish émigrés from Europe like Szilard (Fermi had left Italy in 1938 because his wife was Jewish)—until the day of Germany’s surrender.

  In reality the race was one-sided. At virtually the same time, in June 1942, that the American team of theoretical physicists was tackling the problems of bomb design, Hitler had decided against a bomb effort, not for moral but for practical reasons: the unlikelihood that it could be delivered during the several years he had scheduled for the war. Nevertheless, ignorant of this German choice, the scientists in the United States focused single-mindedly on achieving a usable weapon as quickly as possible.

  Some of them saw it exclusively as a means for deterring Hitler from using such a weapon, if he got it. To possess such a deterrent seemed an urgent necessity, raising no moral issues for them. One of these scientists, Joseph Rotblat, after learning from a British associate in the fall of 1944 that there was no German program to deter, promptly resigned from the Manhattan Project. The only scientist to do so, Rotblat was induced, by threat of deportation, not to reveal his reasons for leaving, lest he inspire others to emulate him.

  Others, including Szilard, remaining uncertain whether Hitler might unveil this war-winning weapon at the last moment, were prepared to use the weapon against Germany if it became available before Nazi surrender. But prior to that event, there had been almost no consideration or discussion within the Manhattan Project itself of what to do with or about this capability if it were not needed either to defeat Germany or to deter a German bomb. Only after this was unmistakably clear with the German surrender did Szilard and some of his colleagues turn to urgent efforts to avert a unilateral U.S. test of the bomb, or to refrain from dropping it on Japan—thus, hoping to avert an inevitable U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race. But it was too late.

  * * *

  We come at last to the issue with which I began this chapter. The reasons for my own lower-level involvement in shaping nuclear policy—despite my early feelings of dread about the very existence of nuclear weapons—were strikingly similar to those of Joseph Rotblat and Leo Szilard. In the late fifties, I was given what seemed good reason to believe—on the basis of highly classified official information—that we were again in a desperate race with a powerful, totalitarian opponent comparable to Nazi Germany, working to deter a nuclear Pearl Harbor attack or to avert unanswerable nuclear blackmail. As we’ll see, once again this apprehension was based on illusion. But the fears were real, and they seemed to have a plausible basis. How I came to share these fears and to act on them is a story with two parts.

  First, like my older colleagues at that time and like so many among my generation in America, I had become a Cold Warrior over the preceding decade. I had taken some note when Churchill, one of my heroes since the Battle of Britain, proclaimed in March 1946 that an “iron curtain” had descended across the continent, dividing free Europe from tyrannical rule in the East. Less than a year after the defeat of the Nazis and their Japanese allies, he pointed to totalitarian control by Moscow of nearly all the capitals of Central and Eastern Europe, except, he said, Athens. It was to preserve precisely that exception that Harry S. Truman, the following March, called on Congress to supply aid to Greece, whose monarchy was facing a Communist-led insurrection.

  My awareness of postwar foreign policy really began with this announcement of the Truman Doctrine in the spring of 1947, my junior year of high school. Truman proposed U.S. readiness to support “free peoples” anywhere from the imposition of “totalitarian regimes,” a phrase he used four times in his speech. The phrase conveyed an essential equivalence between Communism and Nazism, and between Stalin and Hitler. It implied that the challenge we faced in World War II had not really ended in 1945. As a child of that war, and trusting Western leadership, I accepted that definition of the challenge and at sixteen, too young to have taken part in the earlier campaign, I was ready to rise to it.

  As I followed the news in subsequent years about the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, the Berlin blockade later that spring, the Stalinist regimes and political trials in Russia and Eastern Europe, and later the North Korean attack, I came gradually to accept all the Cold War premises and attitudes.

  Looking back, the key premise was the equation of Stalin and his successors to Hitler. This was first of all in their internal totalitarian controls and ruthless repression of dissent, where the analogy (especially under Stalin) was valid. I’ve never lost my well-founded abhorrence of the domestic tyranny of Stalinist-style regimes—whether in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, Vietnam, or Cuba.

  More problematic, in retrospect—in fact, I would now say, flat wrong, recklessly so—was the presumption that such regimes, like Nazism, had an insatiable appetite for expansion, which they were determined to satisfy by military aggression where necessary and feasible. In particular, it was presumed that the Communist regimes in the USSR and Eastern Europe—now armed with nuclear weapons as well as superior conventional forces—posed a direct military threat to Western Europe and America even greater than Hitler’s. Moreover, the equation of Communist regimes with Hitler ruled out any attempt at meaningful negotiations for the resolution of conflicts or arms control. Nothing other than full military preparedness for imminent warfare could influence or “contain” the Soviet threat to the “free world.”

  By the time I prepared to enter college, I was beginning to see myself, as I did for many years afterward, as a Truman Democrat: a liberal Cold Warrior, pro-labor and anti-Communist, like Senators Hubert Humphrey and Henry Jackson and like my Detroit hero Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers.

  I admired Truman’s action in sending bombers filled with coal and food instead of weapons to resupply the people in Berlin during the Soviet blockade that began the month of my high school graduation. I supported his response two years later to naked Communist aggression in Korea. And I
especially appreciated his decision to keep Korea a limited, conventional war, rejecting General Douglas MacArthur’s recommendations to expand the war to China and to use nuclear weapons. Believing in the policy, I was prepared to go to Korea myself, though I had no eagerness for it.

  After accepting student deferments until I finished Harvard and then for a year’s graduate fellowship at Cambridge University, I felt an obligation to take the place that others had filled for me. On my return from Cambridge, I volunteered for officer candidate school in the Marine Corps in the fall of 1953; the first opening was the following spring.

  When my two-year obligation in the Marines ended in the early summer of 1956 I requested Headquarters Marine Corps to extend it for up to a year because my unit—Third Battalion, Second Marines, in which I had been a rifle platoon leader, a battalion training officer, and a rifle company commander—was headed for a tour of sea duty in the Mediterranean with the Sixth Fleet. Gamal Abdel Nasser, the president of Egypt, had just nationalized the Suez Canal. With a Suez crisis looming, we had been alerted that our seaborne battalion might be in a war.

  I had just been awarded a three-year term as a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. But I didn’t want to see the troops I’d trained and commanded go into combat without me. When headquarters granted my request to extend, I turned down the fellowship and went to the Mediterranean with my battalion.

  This decade of ideological immersion as a Cold Warrior was a necessary part of what prepared me for the next decade of work as a government consultant and official on national security. But that wasn’t what drew me to visit or then join the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica in the late fifties, thereby launching me on this career. As I knew, RAND did mostly classified research for the Air Force, largely on the use of nuclear weapons. Nothing could have repelled me more.

  It was true that my three years in the Marines had left me with new respect for the military (especially the infantry), and with a greater readiness to apply intellectual concepts to problems of military strategy than I would have felt otherwise. But to work for the Air Force? On nuclear bombing plans? I’d picked the Marines to join over the Air Force very consciously because the Marines didn’t bomb cities and had virtually nothing to do with nuclear weapons.

  In any case, for years prior to my coming to RAND, I had expected to pursue an academic career as an economic theorist. On leaving the Marines in the spring of 1957, I had reapplied and was accepted in the Society of Fellows. It was perhaps the best postgraduate fellowship in the country, designed as an alternative to a Ph.D. For three years, junior fellows could pursue whatever line of study they wished, without supervision, with an office, research and travel expenses, and the salary of a Harvard assistant professor. They weren’t allowed to take courses for credit and, in that period, were not encouraged to write a Ph.D. thesis or to get the degree.

  I knew what I wanted to work on.35 Ever since my senior year in college I had become fascinated with the new field of “decision theory,” the abstract analysis of decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. For my degree in economics I had written my senior honors thesis on the question of how to describe and understand, and perhaps to improve, the way people make choices when they are uncertain of the consequences of their actions. That included situations of conflict36 in which the uncertainty partly pertained to the choices of a rational adversary, the subject of so-called game theory.†

  In the fall of 1957, I began to focus on choices in situations of extreme uncertainty, which I termed “ambiguity”: sparse information, unprecedented or unfamiliar circumstances, lack of reliable frameworks for understanding processes, conflicting evidence or testimony, or contradictory opinions of experts. A great many situations had some or all these characteristics, military-political crises in particular. I felt that existing theories of appropriate behavior (“rational choice”) in these circumstances were inadequate, in fact misleading, and I set out to demonstrate this and to invent better ones.37 I was also interested in the role of threats, which I felt that, along with uncertainty, most economists analyzing “bargaining theory” had long neglected.

  Partly because all this had relevance to military decisions, one institution that had shown a special interest in such subjects was RAND, where mathematicians had made basic contributions. It was RAND’s unclassified publications on decision theory that interested me, not its defense work, whatever that was.

  In August 1957, at the end of a summer studying mathematical probability theory at Stanford University, I paid a visit to RAND, which led to an invitation from its economics department to spend the following summer there as a consultant. I accepted solely for intellectual reasons. Neither I nor anyone else, as far as I knew, had any sense of an impending nuclear or Cold War crisis that month.

  That was shortly about to change for the public. But that change had already occurred, as I later learned, for the people in the RAND economics department. They had taken special note of something that hadn’t yet drawn major attention outside the Department of Defense: a claim by the Soviet Union on August 26 that it had successfully tested an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) at full range. On the basis of secret intelligence information they couldn’t share with me when I visited, the economists at RAND knew that this claim was true.

  Two months later, on October 4, 1957, when I was back at Harvard, the whole world learned about Sputnik, an earth-girdling artificial satellite sent up by the Soviet Union, which began broadcasting its “beep, beep” signal. It was a technical achievement that the United States was not immediately ready to match, and the global presumption of U.S. technical and scientific superiority was shattered. Though Eisenhower decried the concern about this new object in space (as he said publicly, it “does not raise my apprehensions, not one iota”), it actually did imply that Americans in the continental United States were becoming vulnerable in a way that had never been true in our previous history. By placing Sputnik in space orbit, the Soviets dramatically supported their claims two months earlier that they had rockets of intercontinental range.

  As it happened, Project RAND’s first reports to the Air Force, back in 1946 and 1947 (when Project RAND, embryo of the RAND Corporation, was part of Douglas Aircraft Company’s engineering division), had been a proposal for a world-circling spaceship, which could be in orbit by 1952. The Project reports had foreseen the political impact: “The psychological effect of a satellite will in less dramatic fashion parallel that of the atom bomb. It will make possible an unspoken threat to every other nation that we can send a guided missile to any spot on earth.”38 But at that time, General Curtis LeMay, then in charge of development for the Air Force, was far more attracted to threatening other nations with high-flying bombers than with missiles, and the proposal wasn’t funded.

  While the United States rushed its program to put something up in the fall of 1957, the Russians sent up their second, much larger satellite in November, this time with a dog, Laika, aboard. This second Soviet launch with a much larger payload—lofted like the first by their initial ICBM engine—demonstrated that Soviet rocketry had achieved both the thrust and the accuracy that could send missiles with thermonuclear warheads to targets in the United States within thirty minutes of launch. The next month, a vast global audience watched on television as an American missile rose four feet in the air, then sank back and exploded on the pad. The nose cone, with a miniature satellite aboard, detached and fell into surrounding brush, its little radio still beeping. (“Someone should put it out of its misery, shoot it,” an observer suggested.) Newspapers derided “Flopnik,” “Stayputnik,” and “Kaputnik.” (The first successful U.S. ICBM test at intercontinental range came in November 1958.)

  By this time the national mood had changed abruptly. During the summer of 1958, while I was at RAND, the Eisenhower administration had found itself forced to respond to the humiliating Soviet lead in space by creating the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the Defense De
partment, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the National Defense Education Act, spending a billion dollars to improve science and mathematics education.

  For my part, when I arrived in Santa Monica in June as a summer consultant what I had found myself addressing was not, after all, “decision theory” or “bargaining theory” in the abstract, but concrete decisions on which the future of peace and national or even human survival seemed to depend: how to deter the Soviet Union from exploiting its apparent superiority in missile capabilities to attack or coerce the United States.

  The summer of 1958 was the high point of secret intelligence predictions of an imminent vast Soviet superiority in deployed ICBMs, the “missile gap.” But even before those predictions, Top Secret RAND studies over the previous four years had concluded that the ability of the Strategic Air Command to retaliate against a Soviet surprise attack against our strategic bombers was far from reliable. These studies found great vulnerability even on the basis of Soviet bomber capabilities (which turned out later to have been greatly inflated by intelligence predictions of a “bomber gap,” which preceded the missile-gap estimates). Earlier studies assumed only a minor role,39 if any, for Soviet ICBMs and submarine-based missiles. But the addition of even twenty to forty Soviet ICBMs ominously enhanced the possibilities of a disarming surprise attack. And thirty ICBMs were the lowest near-term estimate for Soviet missiles in the more recent RAND studies. The estimates by the Air Force and CIA of near-term Soviet ICBM forces looked toward several hundred, perhaps as early as 1959 (with a crash effort), almost certainly by 1960–61, with thousands in the sixties.