An Untaken Road. Steven A. Pomeroy
demanded that its troops return and normalcy resume. Should Premier Joseph Stalin prove troublesome, the American military “technological sublime,” the feeling of awe and beauty the war machine generated, provided Americans the confidence they needed to believe their security to be a gift of their atomic superiority. President Harry S. Truman sought to contain the Soviet Union’s influence by limiting the availability of nuclear weapons and by leveraging a unilateral atomic advantage. Truman’s objective was to stop the transfer of atomic technology. Unfortunately for him, one may manage technological diffusion, including inhibiting it, but stopping it is another matter, and Stalin soon had his own bomb.5 Political scientist David Broscious has described Truman as a man who felt technology would secure America, but as historian Melvin Kranzberg once remarked, technology was “neither good nor bad; nor was it neutral.”6 Broscious’ Truman understood this, considering nuclear weapons “a gateway to Armageddon and a deterrent to aggression.”7
In light of two world wars’ devastation, revolutionary travails, and humiliation in the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War, the postwar Soviet Union demanded security. Its mighty army and ground-support air forces were large and possessed much combat experience. Their wartime modernization was uneven. The Red Air Force was the only major Allied air arm that failed to develop a jet fighter during the war, and it lacked strategic bombers. Contextual reasons help to explain this. The Soviet air service had no experience with strategic long-range bombing and had no cultural attachment to it. In support of a manpower-intensive military, Soviet aerospace industry concentrated on ground support aircraft. The postwar bomber force began with the Tu-4 Bull, a copy of the American B-29. No matter—Soviets exalted at the victorious end of the Great Patriotic War. Britain’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, Sir Archibald Clerk Kerr, wrote, “Russia could be made safe at last. She could put her house in order, and more than this from behind her matchless 300 divisions, she could stretch out her hand and take most of what she needed and perhaps more. It was an exquisite moment, all the more so because the resounding success under their guidance justified at last their faith in the permanence of their system.”8
In early August 1945, a lone B-29 annihilated the Soviet sublime. Kerr continues, “At a blow the balance which had now seemed set and steady was rudely shaken. Russia was balked by the West when everything seemed to be within her grasp. The 300 divisions were shorn of much of their value” as the U.S. Army Air Forces evaporated the exquisite Soviet moment into humiliation. Russian military scholar Steven Zaloga has contended, “Prior to 1945 Stalin had a very limited appreciation of the revolutionary nature of the atomic bomb.” Hiroshima changed Premier Stalin’s mind, and he accelerated an existing fission-weapon project, telling his experts, “Comrades—a single demand of you. Get us atomic weapons in the shortest time possible.” No thinking Soviet could ignore his demand. In 1946, they gave Iron Joe a Christmas present when the first Soviet nuclear chain reaction occurred. A world political surprise followed on August 29, 1949, when the Soviets exploded what the Americans nicknamed “Joe I,” their first atomic fission device. While the United States sought to rely on its atomic might and reduce conventional defense expenditures accordingly, the Soviets eliminated the unilateral American advantage. As much as the Americans had destroyed the Soviet sublime, Stalin’s technologists rebalanced the strategic equation.9
Atomic weapons were useless without an accurate and reliable delivery system. Early bombs were large and heavy. The Americans favored bombers to deliver them, and they had already created massive bomber forces. They could incorporate the new weapon into their existing architectures of war. The Soviets did not ignore bombers, but they lacked strategic airpower. They needed another technology. In 1947, the first R-1, a Soviet copy of the German V-2 rocket, flew. It was unimpressive compared to later Soviet rockets, but it demonstrated commitment to ballistic missiles. This weapon could threaten Western Europe but provided zero advantage against the United States. On March 14, 1947, Gyorgi Malenkov, the Politburo’s representative for rocket development, stated he was “not happy with our V-2s. We cannot rely on such a primitive weapon; besides, should there be another war[;] . . . our strategic needs are predetermined by the fact that our potential enemy is to be found thousands of miles away.” Stalin doubtlessly motivated Malenkov. On March 15, 1947, the dictator directed his rocketeers to develop a long-range rocket as “an effective straightjacket for that noisy shopkeeper Harry Truman.” Even though the Soviets lacked a military cultural tradition of long-range strategic bombing, they knew artillery and perceived long-range rockets as useful military and political tools.10 During World War II, the Germans had dreamt of intercontinental missiles and atmospheric “skip” bombers with which to strike New York, but the Soviets did not just dream. They built such missiles.11
The American Hiroshima and Nagasaki weapons, known as the “atomic bombs,” were fission bombs. “Fission” denotes weapons whose explosive yield depends upon the splitting of the nucleus of a plutonium or uranium atom into two or more parts. When atoms split, they release an enormous amount of energy useful for destroying a target. The energy yielded is “about ten million times as much, atom for atom” as is obtained from conventional energy sources, a stunning capability advance. In a conventional bomb, pounds of trinitrotoluene (TNT) measured explosive yield, but the fission bomb measured yield in kilotons, the explosive force of one thousand standard tons of TNT. Hiroshima’s “Little Boy” yielded from twelve to fifteen kilotons, and Nagasaki’s “Fat Man” yielded approximately twenty-two, plus or minus two.12
A fusion bomb uses a fission reaction to overcome the repulsive forces of atomic nuclei. “Hydrogen” or “thermonuclear bomb” are terms that describe a fusion bomb that merges hydrogen nuclei (the lightest element) to form heavier atoms. Unit for unit, fusion releases less energy than fission, but fusion yields energy “about three or four times as great per unit weight” than fission. At yields above fifty kilotons, fusion weapons are cheaper and weigh significantly less than fission weapons, and they produce megaton yields, the explosive force of one million standard tons of TNT. “Mike,” the first U.S. fusion bomb, detonated at Eniwetok Atoll on October 31, 1952. It yielded 10.4 megatons. Fusion weapons offered economy of force, because so much firepower resulted from one weapon. One bomb replaced thousands of airplanes and airmen; accurate delivery, however, remained a problem.13
Technical Means for the Future
In less than a decade, atomic technology moved through the first three phases of development. Thermonuclear technology accelerated faster. Deliveries of operational American fusion weapons followed in 1954. On August 12, 1953, the Soviet Union detonated its first fusion weapon and followed with its first operational weapons in late 1953.14 Since 1945, the bomber had been the primary American delivery method for atomic weapons, because the size and weight of early fission weapons precluded any other vehicle. The available midfifties rockets, whether Soviet or American, were too weak to serve as delivery vehicles, and American missile programs were fragmented and small in scale. This occurred despite the prescience of the Army Air Forces’ visionary commander, Gen. Henry H. (“Hap”) Arnold, who by November 1944 knew his service needed planning for the future. Without aggressively pursuing new technologies, he feared, the Army Air Forces would “let the American people down” by slipping “back to our 1938 position.” He wanted to capitalize upon wartime scientific and technological developments, wherever sourced. Arnold appreciated the relationship of science to technological development. As he colorfully put it, “The longhaired professors . . . [need to] see all the gadgets and data and drawings so as to give us a Buck Rodgers program to cover the next twenty years. . . . Accordingly, we must make accessible to the . . . boys all information available from all sources from all nations.”15 Arnold wrote this diary entry, dated Friday, July 13, 1945, while in Paris en route to a stay at Berchtesgaden, the site of Hitler’s mountain retreat. Arnold knew how to accomplish technological transfer and diffusion. He assembled a crack team and charged it with gathering data on Axis aeronautical technology. Headed by Doctor Theodore von Karman, director of the California Institute of Technology’s Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory and the Army Air Forces Scientific Advisory Group, Arnold’s long-haired professors lustily swept through postwar Germany and compiled mounds of data. Nazi jets, wind tunnels, and cruise and ballistic missiles captured their attention.
Von