advice contained in the GAC's main report and drowned it out. That advice concerned US security, not moral issues. Oppenheimer summarized it best, as he usually did, five years later:
The notion that the thermonuclear arms race was something that was in the interests of this country to avoid if it could was very clear to us in 1949. We may have been wrong. We thought it was something to avoid even if we could jump the gun by a couple of years, or even if we could outproduce the enemy, because we were infinitely more vulnerable [because more of the US population lives in large cities than does the Soviet population] and infinitely less likely to initiate the use of these weapons, and because the world in which great destruction has been done in all civilized parts of the world is a harder world for America to live with than it is for the Communists to live with…
We thought [a US decision not to build the thermonuclear]… would make it less likely that the Russians would attempt [it] and less likely that they would succeed in the undertaking.
When Brien McMahon read the GAC report in the presence of the AEC commissioners on Monday evening, Manley writes, “there [was] a rather violent discussion.” Lilienthal found the discussion with the Joint Committee chairman “pretty discouraging. What [McMahon] is talking about is the inevitability of war with the Russians” — Borden's conclusion in his book — “and what he says adds up to one thing: blow them off the face of the earth, quick, before they do the same to us — and we haven't much time.”
McMahon went off to begin a campaign of letters and personal appeals to Truman to convince the President to authorize a crash program to build the Super. Lilienthal alerted Dean Acheson to the debate on Tuesday, November 1. “He was somber enough when I began; after a few questions he was graver still… What a depressing world it is, said Dean, looking quite gray.”
Teller began moving around the country in what Manley calls “a frenetic campaign to obtain converts.” Teller wrote Alvarez that he felt like Sisyphus and needed some encouragement. They both blamed Oppenheimer; as far as Alvarez was concerned, the outcome of the GAC meeting meant that “Robert's views prevailed.” When Teller saw the GAC reports, Manley recalls, the volatile physicist became “morose and almost silent (
Midweek, the AEC commissioners split on their recommendation to the President. Strauss and Gordon Dean favored an accelerated Super program; Lilienthal, Pike and Smyth opposed Super development. Truman received the GAC reports along with the AEC recommendations. He blustered to Lilienthal, Manley notes in a contemporary diary, “that he was not going to be blitzed into this thing by the military establishment.” That left Lilienthal believing Truman might oppose the Super program; “he came back feeling quite happy.” But Strauss met with McMahon, then with Louis Johnson; Johnson met with Truman; whereupon Truman reappointed (on November 19) the Special Committee — Acheson, Johnson and Lilienthal — he had appointed earlier to consider expanding weapons production. At the same time, Truman cut off all public and most private debate by restricting discussion of the question to the Special Committee and its staff. “The habit of obsessive secrecy may be as significant here,” writes former National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, “as any conscious intent to restrict the range of analysis and advice… When the government decided to conduct [the staff] work through in-house, departmentally-based officials, it was in effect turning away from the exploration of unfamiliar suggestions.”
Johnson professed his uncomplicated creed in a later public speech. “There is but one nation in the world tonight that would start a war that would engulf the world and bring the United States into war,” he said. “… We want a military establishment sufficient to deter that aggressor and sufficient to kick the hell out of her if she doesn't stay deterred.” Acheson went through at least the motions of deliberating, Gordon Arneson recalls. “The Dean was a liberal, but on foreign policy he was very tough. He was also a good lawyer. He wanted to know all sides to the argument. He'd make up his mind quickly. He sought the advice and got the advice of several people not on this committee… He talked with Van[nevar] Bush, he talked with Lilienthal, for whom he had the greatest admiration — the two of them worked together on the Acheson-Lilienthal Report, an unprecedented proposal — and he talked to Oppenheimer.” Bush, who had put scientists to work on military applications for Franklin Roosevelt during the Second World War, was tough and blunt; he told Kenneth Nichols at this time, when Nichols went to him worrying about the AEC's majority vote against the Super, “Nichols, be patient. You don't have to worry about this… The Commission is basically wrong, and it'll fall of its own weight.” Nichols thought Bush had talked to someone by then and knew “the score.” Bush had talked to Acheson. Oppenheimer, for his part, was unable to clarify his argument sufficiently to convince the Secretary of State of its virtue. “[Acheson] was deeply troubled,” Arneson writes. “Finally, he said, ‘You know, I listened as carefully as I knew how, but I don't understand what “Oppie” was trying to say. How can you persuade a paranoid adversary to disarm “by example”?’” Niels Bohr had offered the same argument to Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in 1944 when he appealed to them to talk to the Soviets about the atomic bomb — that it would be easier to negotiate a moratorium on a weapon no one had yet made — but Acheson no more took the point than Roosevelt and Churchill had before him.
Arneson thought domestic politics strongly influenced Acheson's recommendations. “His sense of realism prompted him to conclude that even if the Soviet Union refrained from undertaking a thermonuclear program as the result of our refraining — a non-existent prospect — the Administration would run into a Congressional buzz saw and the proposal would be stillborn.” But Arneson remembers Acheson parodying George Kennan's opposition to the Super with a contemptuous comedy sketch. “George was in favor of not proceeding… [Acheson] said to George, ‘If that is your view of the matter, I suggest you put on a monk's robe, put a tin cup in your hand, and go on the street corner and announce the end of the world is nigh.’ Dean had made up his mind… Looking at the international situation, looking at the Cold War which was very much upon us then, he saw no hope in getting the Russians to agree on the time of day.” That the end of the world might be nigh if the Soviet Union beat the US to a thermonuclear was Teller's position and Borden's.
The GAC met again in early December 1949 and augmented and reaffirmed its October conclusions. Several members submitted further statements arguing against a Super. When the Special Committee met for the first time, on December 22, Acheson saw such a gulf between Johnson and Lilienthal that he set no date for another meeting. Omar Bradley at the Special Committee meeting had repeated his argument that a Super would have “psychological value.” Lilienthal demurred. “I say: I don't know what that means.” To find out, the AEC chairman went to see Bradley privately. The Army Chief of Staff lamented the country's great vulnerability. “All we have right now,” Lilienthal paraphrases Bradley, parenthetically filling in the blanks he had left in his diary for the sake of security, “but all, is (our A-bomb stockpile). Without that we are helpless to aid our friends and must, if they are overrun, try to hold our foes off from home base; never again able to normandize (invade Europe).” And then a sign that the US military had begun to understand that atomic weapons had changed war: “I asked: Is (A-bomb stockpile) with or without ‘Campbells’ really a deterrent — will it be five or ten years hence? He admitted [that] (bombs) [were] of declining value, but still [atomic] war would leave both sides beat up so bad [there was] little value in using them.”
But the JCS response to the GAC that went to Louis Johnson on January 13,1950, said nothing about mutual assured destruction. It said that the Joint Chiefs considered it “necessary to have within the arsenal of the United States a weapon of the greatest capability, in this case the super bomb. Such a weapon would improve our defense in its broadest sense, as a potential offensive weapon, a possible deterrent to war, a potential retaliatory weapon, as well as a defensive weapon against enemy forces.” It argued that a superbomb “might be a decisive factor [in war] if properly used” and emphasized dryly that the JCS preferred “that such a possibility be at the will and control of the United States rather than of an enemy.” Curtis LeMay had justified the firebombing of Japanese cities on the grounds that Japanese war industry was dispersed to workers’ homes; the JCS now borrowed that prevarication to defend urban targeting, asserting that “They do not intend to destroy large cities
The Joint Chiefs of Staff believe that the United States would be in an intolerable position if a possible enemy possessed the bomb and the United States did not… It would be foolhardy altruism for the United States voluntarily to weaken its capability by such a renunciation. Public renunciation by the United States of super bomb
