Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb

McGeorge Bundy reported the same reality as early as 1969:

In light of the certain prospect of retaliation, there has been literally no chance at all that any sane political authority, in either the United States or the Soviet Union, would consciously choose to start a nuclear war. This proposition is true for the past, the present and the foreseeable future… In the real world of real political leaders… a decision that would bring even one hydrogen bomb on one city of one's own country would be recognized in advance as a catastrophic blunder; ten bombs on ten cities would be a disaster beyond history; and a hundred bombs on a hundred cities are unthinkable.

These various statements reflect what the historical record demonstrates: that the US deterrent was credible from 1945 onward and the Soviet deterrent from 1949 onward. How many cities would a political leader be ready to lose? US leaders were prepared to lose not one, whatever patriotic gore their advisers gushed. If Soviet leaders were prepared to lose one or ten, as self-righteous cold warriors liked to allege, the least deterrent the US marshaled after 1949 never allowed them such a monstrous choice.

If real political leaders understood from one end of the Cold War to the other that even one hydrogen bomb was sufficient deterrence, why did they allow the arms race to devour the wealth of the nation while it increased the risk of an accidental Armageddon? In 1982, political scientist Miroslav Nincic examined the economics of the arms race and discovered that it was hardly a race at all; US and Soviet levels of defense spending were only weakly coupled at best. Far more influential on the US side were such domestic political phenomena as competition among the military services, coalitions of scientific and industrial organizations promoting new technologies, the pressure of “defense” as a political issue and defense spending to prime the economic pump, particularly in election years. Similar patterns obtained along somewhat different lines for the Soviet command economy. “The arms race,” Nincic summarized, “is imbedded in circumstances proper to the domestic political and economic systems of the superpowers in addition to dynamics inherent in the interaction between the two nations.” Having worked the numbers, Nincic concluded that all the high claptrap of arms strategy was essentially decorative: “Strategic doctrines are designed, in large part, to justify the weaponry that the arms race has imposed on both the United States and the Soviet Union.” Which is independent confirmation of John Manley's dictum that in Washington (and in Moscow), “You don't do staff work and then make a decision. You make a decision and then do the staff work.” Since defense spending reduces civilian investment and consumption (each dollar spent on defense between 1938 and 1969, for example, implied a loss of forty-two cents from consumption — that is, went into building weapons rather than cars or public schools), any more than the minimum is evidently parasitic.

Politicians found it possible to rationalize encouraging such parasitism for political gain because they believed they had reliable command and control of the nuclear arsenal. The Cuban missile crisis demonstrated how much less reliable was that command and control than they believed, to such an extent that it scared both superpowers off escalation and direct confrontation for the duration of the conflict. Potentially catastrophic false warnings and accidents recurred down through the years.

Efforts at arms limitation foundered not only on Soviet refusal to admit inspection, as cold warriors claim. It also foundered on the resistance of US hawks, Edward Teller prominent among them, to any reduction in the pace of technological advance even when that advance — attaching multiple warheads to missiles, for example — actually gave away advantage. Minimal deterrence was political suicide so long as the Soviet Union existed, as Jimmy Carter learned when he proposed it shortly after his election in 1976.

A charitable view of what the US and Soviet leaderships thought they were doing when they continued to add to bloated arsenals must take into account the necessity for extreme prudence where such vast destruction is threatened. After criticizing his own predecessors for “aiming to spread socialism throughout the world,” Mikhail Gorbachev bluntly blamed the United States for the arms race when he spoke at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, in 1992, forty-six years after Winston Churchill defined the Iron Curtain there:

But the West, and the United States in particular, also committed an error. Its conclusion about the probability of open Soviet military aggression was unrealistic and dangerous. This could never have happened, not only because Stalin, as in 1939–1941, was afraid of war, did not want war, and never would have engaged in a major war. But primarily because the country was exhausted and destroyed; it had lost tens of millions of people, and the public hated war. Having won a victory, the army and the soldiers were dying to get home and get back to a normal life.

By including the “nuclear component” in world politics, and on this basis unleashing a monstrous arms race — and here the initiator was the United States, the West — “defense sufficiency was exceeded,” as the lawyers say. This was a fateful error.

Historical evidence supports Gorbachev's accusations, however defensive Americans may feel about them. Gorbachev ignores at least two important facts, however: that the Soviet Union was demonstrating open and covert aggression in Eastern Europe and that its opacity as a closed society made a realistic assessment of its intentions difficult.

From a longer perspective, the arms race was a process of communication and of learning, paced as all progress is paced by the limitations of human intellect. The discovery in 1938 of how to release nuclear energy introduced a singularity into the human world — a deep new reality, a region where the old rules of war no longer applied. The region of nuclear singularity enlarged across the decades, sweeping war away at its shock front until today it excludes all but civil wars and limited conventional wars.

Science once claimed power over nature as its goal, as if science and power were one thing and nature another. Niels Bohr observed to the contrary that the more modest but relentless goal of science is “the gradual removal of prejudices.” One of those prejudices, which has accounted for immense human suffering, was the belief that in an anarchic world there are no limits to national sovereignty except those that conflict might determine. Knowledge of how to release nuclear energy, knowledge that only science was structured to perceive, came to define a natural limit. The authority of the institution called science, that is, has taken precedence, at least in this extreme arena, over the authority of the nation-state. Science has fielded no armies in order to do so and is indeed pacifist; rather, it has gradually removed the prejudice that there is a limited amount of energy available in the world to concentrate into explosives, that it is possible to accumulate more of such energy than one's enemies and thereby militarily to prevail. Science has revealed at least world war to be historical, not universal, a manifestation of destructive technologies of limited scale. In the long history of human slaughter, that is no small achievement.

Even as they reduce international violence by limiting national sovereignty, nuclear weapons also simultaneously and paradoxically threaten and protect such sovereignty. The technology has proliferated by a process of political homeostasis: the United States racing, as it believed, to beat Nazi Germany; the Soviet Union racing to catch up with the United States; Britain and France, unwilling to credit US assurances that it would sacrifice itself to save them, developing independent minimum deterrents against the Soviet Union; China balancing the US and the USSR; India balancing China; Pakistan balancing India. Iraq and Iran have pursued a nuclear capability against each other and the world, but especially to balance Israel. At the margins of this homeostatic activity, the process becomes degenerate: North Korea builds a weapon or two to send a message to the West that its neglect could be dangerous; the old South African government of apartheid builds half a dozen uranium guns against the world and dismantles them when it democratizes itself. These complexities imply that the chance of a terrorist weapon is vanishingly small. Nuclear weapons will never be easy to make, and they are uniquely destabilizing, invoking the deterrent forces of all the major nuclear powers against even local and regional threats. What nation — whether or not it possessed nuclear weapons of its own — would allow a subnational group to build them on its territory? Why build a nuclear weapon to blow up the World Trade Center or a federal building in Oklahoma City when you can blow it up with nitrate fertilizer and fuel oil? Why bomb Tokyo when you can poison it with nerve gas?

Robert Oppenheimer chaired a panel on disarmament for Dean Acheson in 1952. Members included Vannevar Bush and Allen Dulles, who was soon to become the director of the CIA. McGeorge Bundy served as secretary and rapporteur. The panel came to a conclusion about the new knowledge of how to release nuclear energy that is as valid today as it was then, and as final:

Fundamentally, and in the long run, the problem which is posed by the release of atomic energy is a problem