Authors: Brian Van DeMark
Of course, the atomic bomb was an untried weapon; they did not make the decision to use it; they did not pilot the plane that dropped it. Their sense of personal responsibility was diluted by distance, by evasion, by denial, and by the way in which creation of the weapon was shared by so many people. All of these things diminished their moral sensitivity and made them feel removed from responsibility. The few among them who did confront these unsettling issues either argued against using the bomb on Japan or felt that war itself forced a stark choice among lesser evils and that using the bomb to end it was the moral price that had to be paid. It brought death to innocent civilians, but it also brought surrender and peace.
Once this first, albeit uneasy, moral compromise had been made, the atomic scientists found it less difficult and disquieting to make subsequent compromises. The mysteries of fission and then fusion had a seductive appeal to those who had devoted their lives to physics and whose curiosity was insatiable. To understand and exploit nature at its most fundamental and powerful level was an intoxicating exercise of human intelligence and imagination that compelled curious minds to make ever more destructive weapons.
The feeling of power was difficult to resist. Nuclear weapons became all important to the state, and so therefore did the exceptional minds that created them. This link powerfully reinforced and magnified the egos and ambitions of physicists who saw the development of atomic and then thermonuclear weapons as the grandest arenas for the exercise of their vast talents. The secrecy and funding that surrounded these exercises intensified scientific rivalries and lent a false prestige to the new weapons. Physicists understood, even if they did not often acknowledge, that a fundamental change had occurred. The prewar functions of a physicist—teaching and basic research—had given way to an entirely different postwar function—huge and costly weaponeering driven by an almost mindless momentum.
The atomic scientists rationalized all of this by reasoning that the bomb’s destructive power was so vast that it would become obvious to political leaders throughout the world that war would no longer be a rational means for achieving political goals, no matter what those goals were. They desperately wanted to believe that the death and destruction of World War II—culminating in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—would never be repeated, and that the bomb they had created would be the ironic but irrefutable instrument for not repeating them. They had mastered the atom
and
they had made all-out war obsolete.
In the ensuing years, as the atomic scientists became wiser, more mature, and more sophisticated, they gradually turned away from such simple notions. They came to realize that claims similar to theirs had been made before. Each time a weapon of great destructiveness was introduced, its inventors soothed their consciences with the thought that this finally made war impossible. When the machine gun was invented, its creators felt they had made war so horrible as to be obsolete. This claim also accompanied the introduction of dynamite, poison gas, and many other innovations in military technology.
In fact, the atomic bomb most likely
did
deter major war between the great powers after 1945—an unusually long period in historical terms—but security against aggression now rested on the fear of retaliation against civilian populations, and during that time the great powers found only one way to maintain this state of affairs: to indulge in an ever-escalating nuclear arms race. The atomic bomb prevented large-scale war, but it did so by raising the price of failure—through accident, misperception, aggression, or whatever—to annihilation and the possible end of human civilization. And we are arguably moving closer to the edge now that smaller states webbed into bitter argument have nuclear capabilities and a host of others seem intent on acquiring them.
All of this made the atomic scientists intensely self-conscious about what they had done and poignantly challenged their optimistic faith in reason and the benevolence of science. The bomb’s fundamental message directly undermined their cherished belief—bordering on faith—that science was good. The shattering of this faith was particularly traumatic in American scientific circles, where it had taken especially deep root. Until the atomic bomb, science had remained almost unchallenged as a source of enlightenment, understanding, and hope for a better, healthier, safer world. It enjoyed worldwide respect almost akin to reverence. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a significant change took place: a pursuit once held in high esteem was now equated in the minds of many people with the destruction of life and a threat to civilization. Physics—especially nuclear physics—became associated in the popular imagination with mass destruction and the threat of ultimate annihilation. An entire part of physical reality—nuclear energy—was now regarded with distrust and profound fear of its dangers.
Nuclear symbols became symbols of the horrors of modern war. The popular image of the scientist shifted from that of Prometheus, who had helped mankind by giving him fire, to that of Faust, who had imperiled mankind by arrogantly divorcing knowledge from moral responsibility. Some thought physicists were like children playing with matches. I. I. Rabi felt this sentiment during a taxi ride after the war. Driving from the airport, the cabbie asked Rabi what he did. Rabi replied that he was a professor of physics. The atmosphere suddenly became cool. “You’re going to blow us all up, ain’t you?” the cabbie said.
3
Robert Oppenheimer put it well when he wrote that atomic bombs “touched very deeply man’s sentiments about the evil of having too much power.”
4
This threat was made even more acute by the fact that it would never go away. What the atomic scientists created cannot be uninvented. If enough bombs were made by enough different states, some of them would eventually blow up—through accident, or folly, or madness. How many, or when, did not really matter. What did matter, given the sobering combination of human imperfection and enough time, was the
eventuality
.
What a shattering realization this was for sensitive, thoughtful men who had believed that knowledge was an absolute good, who had assumed that science—and particularly physics—always led to progress, and who had meant to do well. While they felt their work on the bomb was vital to ending World War II, many—indeed most—of them later came to see what they had done as a great tragedy. They never dreamed in 1945 that there would be so many bombs in the arsenals of so many countries more than half a century later. There was the pride of accomplishment—and the shame of being associated with it. They saw themselves as smart—and foolish. These central, painful contradictions remained with all of them to the end of their lives.
Disassociating action from feeling and failing to consider the broader consequences of what they were doing, the atomic scientists made a terrible weapon. But in time they came to terms with their creation. They learned from their experience to ask the fundamental questions. And in doing so, questions of usage ultimately became more important to them than questions of research. Their tragedy was also their triumph.
A dozen years after the end of the Cold War, America still possesses 6,000 nuclear weapons. The price for this arsenal is nearly $6 trillion, about one-tenth of all federal government expenditures from 1940 to 1996. Washington plans to reduce the number of operational nuclear warheads in its arsenal to 3,800 by 2007, and to between 1,700 to 2,000 warheads by 2012. It is a step in the right direction, accomplishing in one bold stroke what years of arms control negotiations had failed to deliver. But Washington has no plans to destroy warheads removed from strategic systems or to eliminate the capacity of these platforms to be rapidly refitted with these reserve warheads. America’s nuclear stockpile would still have an explosive force equivalent to
forty thousand
Hiroshima bombs. Russia has a similar force. It is very hard to imagine any plausible contingency that requires this kind of capability. After destroying all conceivable military targets, the remaining weapons of just these two countries could obliterate thousands of cities with populations of more than 100,000 people; there are fewer than five hundred such cities in both countries. Even taking into account other potential nuclear-armed adversaries over the next decade, it is difficult to see how these possible adversaries, projected by U.S. Intelligence to have a total of fewer than 200 nuclear weapons over the next decade, justify U.S. retention of 1,700 to 2,000 operationally deployed warheads and the much larger force being held in reserve.
On the other hand, the strategy of deterrence—the idea that because nuclear war would be so horrible, it is inconceivable—has worked since World War II in the sense that there have been no wars among the major powers. The threat of mutual assured destruction has deterred this catastrophic result, and to that extent, the “balance of terror” has turned out to be stable. This record reinforces the assumption that strategic issues and war in the nuclear age lend themselves to careful calculation and control. The long history of deterrence in politics and war going back to ancient Greece reinforces its credibility. But the consequences of deterrence’s failure in earlier wars were always limited. Nuclear war entails no such limits, and this radically distinguishes nuclear deterrence from that earlier tradition.
Who, moreover, believes deterrence can work
everywhere
and
forever
, no matter how effective it has been and currently may be? Who, looking at the long record of human folly and accident—to say nothing of human wickedness—that led to international catastrophes of the past, believes that rational decision will prevail always in the future? It should be noted that even rational political leaders in the past have made wishful, mistaken, and foolish estimates of consequences that have led to catastrophic wars. And there is no telling what might happen if fanatics, driven by a zealotry that knows no ethical constraints, gain possession of nuclear weapons.
The logic of deterrence has worked. But how long can this precarious balance continue as more countries obtain a nuclear capability? There are at least eight nuclear powers in the world today, and many more nations—such as Iran and North Korea, and transnational movements such as Al Qaeda—seem intent on joining them. Third World countries are racing to acquire warheads and the ballistic missiles to deliver them. The spread of nuclear weapons is now not only a global fact but also an intention for some of the Third World’s most belligerent and angry regimes. This aggressive proliferation threatens to lead to nuclear anarchy, as regional arms races fed by national and religious rivalries—such as India versus Pakistan, Iran versus Israel, and North Korea versus Japan versus China—gain dangerous momentum and become intertwined with terrorism. Rather than a taboo, nuclear weapons could become symbols of identity, power, and status. All of this threatens the stability of deterrence. And the consequences of deterrence’s failure are simply awful: the use of only a
fraction
of the world’s nuclear stockpiles would shred the delicate fabric of human civilization and leave the survivors so miserable that they might envy the dead, outdoing the death and destruction of World Wars I and II in just hours.
Many things are known. It is true that fears, ambitions, and political differences—not weapons—trigger most conflicts. It is true that military strength
can
be a critical element in a confrontation. It is true that perceptions of military superiority can affect the thinking and behavior of adversaries and third parties in a crisis. It is true that arms control negotiations cannot substitute for the settlement of political differences. And it is true that the outbreak of a nuclear war depends more on political issues than on the numbers and technical specifications of weapons. Yet it is also true that the United States cannot credibly persuade other countries to forgo proliferation as long as it arrogantly insists on retaining its own sizable nuclear arsenal. What message does that send to the rest of the world? If actions speak louder than words, then America must lead by example.
All of this seems a rather grim picture. Yet there is hope. Fear need not lead to passive despair; it can also get people moving. In this race we are riding a wild horse, and we must learn to tame it, for we have no choice but to ride—what the atomic scientists did assured that. We must recognize, and accept, that the clock that determines our destiny moves in one direction only—forward—and that is the direction on which we must fix our gaze, teaching future generations to do the same.
We sometimes overlook the fact that every future age of man will be an atomic age, and if man is to have a future, it will be one overshadowed with the permanent possibility of thermonuclear holocaust. About that sobering fact there is no doubt; our freedom consists only in facing the danger and minimizing it by minimizing our reliance on nuclear weapons. The means for doing so are primarily moral and political, not military or technological. Morally, we must rouse people to ponder the truly terrible destructiveness of nuclear weapons, awakening an abhorrence that pushes governments and their military establishments to minimize reliance on instruments of mass destruction that in the long run endanger everyone. Politically, we must negotiate verifiable international agreements that reduce national nuclear arsenals as much as possible.
Niels Bohr once defined a pessimist as a man who is always right, but who gets no pleasure out of it. There has never been a time in human history when one was not able to make a good case for pessimism. Goals are of little use if they are not set so high that we always fall short of their fulfillment. The pessimist will be able to make a good case against this goal, too, but it will be a cheap and hollow victory. Hopes and goals are the mortar with which we must build, and any “realism” which doesn’t admit that isn’t serious.