George F. Kennan : an American life

We are today . . . like a young person from a wealthy family who has suddenly lost his parents after a sheltered bringing-up, and now finds himself on his own for the first time in an unmerciful and inconsiderate world.... The problems of maturity have caught us ill prepared. We have to grow up, fast.

The crisis had come, not from the world wars or the Cold War, but from “the growing disproportion between man’s moral nature and the forces subject to this control.” Solutions, therefore, would have to begin at home: by showing that men could govern themselves somewhere without destroying themselves and their environment. Only then would Americans qualify to take on the great issues of international affairs.

That was why style was so important. Ends might justify means, but the reverse was also true: means could corrupt ends and, if carelessly chosen, even annihilate them. Care came from what the students had been doing: applying “the sober and undramatic process of scholarly analysis to all the intangibles, all the imponderables, all the elusive, shifting relationships of national policy.” They had probably been tempted, at various points in their course, to toss the political scientists into the Potomac: “Ah, to hell with it. Let’s have a war.” They should recall, however, what Thoreau had written: “Our darkest grief has that bronze color of the moon eclipsed. There is no ill which may not be dissipated, like the dark, if you let in a stronger light upon it.”

Kennan’s had been a profound, impressive, “and, I must admit, somewhat disturbing presentation,” General Harold Bull, the new commandant of the war college, concluded in thanking him. He had, the previous September, provided the kickoff for the course, “and now he has run ahead and caught his own punt.... I am very grateful to you, sir.”¹

I.

The lecture suggested much broader concerns than those with which Kennan had taken up policy planning two and a half years earlier. Then his focus had been on geopolitics, ideology, and recent history: on devising a strategy that would contain the Soviet Union and international communism in the aftermath of World War II. Now his perspective had expanded backward in time and forward in portent, drawing on Brooks Adams’s insistence that industrialization was realigning politics, as well as Henry Adams’s fear that technology was outpacing morality. The development of nuclear weapons confirmed both premonitions, with implications that would haunt Kennan for the rest of his life.

His early thinking about the bomb had been unsystematic. Although Kennan conceded, after reading Brodie’s The Absolute Weapon in 1946, that great wars were now unlikely, he also believed in preserving American military superiority for as long as possible. He warned Acheson—still at that point under secretary of state—that the Soviet Union would consider the international control of atomic energy only if the United States maintained the capacity “to absorb atomic attack and to effect instant retaliation.” There could be no greater protection, Kennan claimed in a rare public lecture on national defense in January 1947, “than the deterrent effect of overwhelming retaliatory power in the hands of this country.” He went further in classified comments at the Air War College a few months later. Soviet industry was sufficiently concentrated that, if a war did break out, “ten good hits with atomic bombs” would probably destroy it. He even acknowledged the possibility of preventive war: it would be justified, however, only if the U.S.S.R. was undertaking more rapid industrial mobilization than the United States, and there was no sign of that: “I think we and our friends have a preponderance of strength in the world right now.”²

“What a fiery hard-liner I was, in those days!” Kennan later admitted. “However, it was the Stalin era.” The Soviet regime was “dizzy with success” after winning the war and after “the complacent abandonment to it, by the Western powers, of half of Europe.” He did acknowledge, early in 1948, “the suicidal nature of atomic warfare in a world in which more than one country has bombs.” But he was not yet ready to think about that: like most Washington officials at the time, he saw the new weapons as enhancing the strategic bombing capabilities of World War II, not as the revolution in warfare Brodie had predicted. PPS/38, completed in August 1948, discussed the terms the United States might impose upon a defeated Soviet Union without saying anything about the use of atomic bombs. Even Kennan’s tour of Hamburg in March 1949—from which he concluded that nothing could have justified the devastation he saw—failed to shake his conviction that the best way to avoid another such catastrophe would be to stay stronger than all potential adversaries. That included maintaining the American advantage in atomic weaponry.³

But Kennan had no sense of what that advantage was. He lacked access to Pentagon war plans; nor did he know how many atomic bombs there were. Nor would he have seen the top-secret study, commissioned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which concluded in May 1949 that even if the United States used all available atomic weapons—about two hundred—against a Soviet Union with none of its own, this would not in itself ensure victory. That led the Defense Department to propose building more, and on August 2 Acheson called a meeting at the State Department to discuss the matter.

It took place within an informational fogbank, because the participants did not know—or if they knew, could not say—how large the increase would be. As far as Kennan was concerned, the current number of atomic bombs could as easily have been two thousand as two hundred. That may explain why he shocked Acheson—and perhaps surprised himself—by confessing, according to the minutes of the meeting, to

an uneasy feeling that we were traveling down the atomic road rather too fast. He went on to state his own personal feeling that it perhaps would be best for this country if it were decided that atomic bombs would never be used. He for one was glad that no final decision to use the weapon had as yet been made.

One can imagine, at this moment, a bewildered silence. Then Acheson pointed out that it would be difficult to justify such a strategy, “particularly if our failure to use atomic weapons meant a great loss of lives or a defeat in war.”⁴

It would indeed, so much so that one wonders where Kennan’s latest heterodoxy came from. Maybe it was “worst case” worries about what the Pentagon was proposing. Possibly it was a delayed reaction to what Kennan had seen in Hamburg. Certainly it was another of his prophetic leaps: it was not the first time he had startled colleagues by projecting policy much further into the future than they were able to do. The problem was never the desirability of what he wanted. Who could object to the prospect that nuclear weapons might exist for decades without the United States having to use one? Who could oppose, for that matter, a peacefully reunified Germany, or an epidemic of Titoism within the international communist movement, or a Soviet Union collapsing under the weight of its internal contradictions? The difficulty, as Acheson’s response suggested, was that Kennan so rarely specified the steps that would be necessary—over the next days, months, or years—to bring about these auspicious outcomes.

Two weeks later, on August 16, 1949, the Policy Planning Staff completed PPS/58, a paper whose title, “Political Implications of Detonation of an Atomic Bomb by the U.S.S.R.,” appeared to reflect an immediate prophetic insight. For thirteen days later, on August 29, the Soviet Union did in fact test its first atomic bomb. PPS/58, however, was less impressive than it looked. Only two pages in length, it focused on the importance of being able to detect a Soviet test if and when one took place. It made no prediction that one was about to happen. It acknowledged—unspectacularly—that such a development might require rethinking the American position on the international control of atomic energy, and it suggested—unhelpfully—that the existence of a Soviet bomb might or might not cause other states to cooperate more closely with Washington. Questions relating to the vulnerability of the United States if it should lose its nuclear monopoly were best left, the paper concluded, to the National Military Establishment. “The document in question was plainly not drafted by me,” Kennan commented, with some disdain, many years later.⁵