Sleepwalking With the Bomb (25 page)

We cannot live in a situation where Iran has nuclear weapons and we don’t. It’s as simple as that. If Iran develops a nuclear weapon, that will be unacceptable to us and we will have to follow suit.

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RABIAN SENIOR OFFICIAL
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QUOTED IN GUARDIAN.CO.UK
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UNE 29, 2011

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HAT TURNS AN ALLY INTO A NUCLEAR PROLIFERATOR?
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HE COMMON
denominator in every single ally proliferation case since the United States ushered in the nuclear age in 1945 is this: the proliferator judged that its superpower ally’s guarantee to protect it—and its own fundamental national security interests—was no longer ironclad. Thus the stark Eighth Lesson of nuclear-age history: A
LLY PROLIFERATION CAN BE PREVENTED ONLY BY SUPERPOWER CONSTANCY
.

In his 1989 memoir,
From Hiroshima to Glasnost
, Paul Nitze offers a striking historical example of how important America’s nuclear umbrella is to those it shelters. During the Cuban Missile Crisis President Kennedy decided to secretly remove highly vulnerable, obsolete Jupiter intermediate-range missiles from Turkey, in order to give the Soviets a consolation prize in return for withdrawing their nuclear missiles from Cuba. The Jupiter missiles were based above ground, in range of Soviet medium-range missiles and bombers. They were liquid-fueled, meaning that getting them ready for launch took hours. Yet the Turks still wanted the missiles, to “couple” their strategic fate to America’s. Turkey was a vital ally, having joined NATO in 1952. It was a key base for intelligence missions, including reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union.

This chapter looks at three wartime allies of the United States—the USSR, the UK, and France, which in vastly different ways started nuclear programs before World War II was over. It looks at Israel’s unacknowledged but widely known nuclear program. It looks at the Suez crisis of 1956, and specifically the U.S. response to it, to suggest how America’s actions led its allies to believe they needed nuclear weapons of their own.

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bomb is a partial exception to the ally proliferation rule articulated above. Russia was a wartime ally of the United States when it stole U.S. atomic secrets, but hardly a true ally. Stalin knew, long before we did, how vastly the Soviet postwar interests would differ from ours. He was clandestinely planning to ingest Eastern Europe while we were demobilizing our armed forces in anticipation of peaceful coexistence and a world order organized via the United Nations. Sentiment for our Russian ally was buoyed by knowledge of its staggering wartime death toll of 20 to 25 million, plus vast land and city devastation—a human tragedy on a grand scale to which Stalin, mass murderer of a comparable number of his subjects plus jailer of a second comparable number, was considerably less moved than we. By the time of “Joe-1,” the U.S. nickname for Russia’s August 1949 atomic bomb test, Americans had received a painful education as to Stalin’s intentions, courtesy of the Soviet subjugation of Eastern Europe and the subsequent 1948–1949 Berlin airlift that saved West Berlin from a Communist blockade.

The Soviet “ally” case was one of self-delusion on the part of the United States, which invested the man FDR called “Uncle Joe” with personal qualities and policy aims that simply did not fit the real person. Thus Truman at first considered Stalin “a moderating influence in the present Russian government.” During the 1948 presidential campaign Truman said, “I like Old Joe” and called him “a prisoner of the Politburo.” In fact, Stalin was a paranoid, genocidal monster who never intended his alliance with America and the West to be anything but a necessary expediency in order to survive the Nazi onslaught. Thus a Soviet nuclear weapon program was inevitable, given Stalin’s intent to pursue world domination by launching the Cold War. The next three cases, however, involved real allies.

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HE FOUNDATIONAL
work and leadership of, among others, Ernest Rutherford meant that Britain scientifically led atomic studies for 30 years. Rutherford died unexpectedly before the war began, but his colleagues and students, as well as British officials, were involved in the pre– Manhattan Project research stages. In 1943, the U.S., UK, and Canada signed the Quebec Agreement, which governed atomic research and development between the three allies and also made use of the bomb contingent on the consent of all signatories. The 1944 Hyde Park Agreement further detailed U.S.-UK cooperation. The British contribution—code-named Tube Alloys—to the huge 1942–1945 operation at Los Alamos was notable. By the end of 1945 the British had plans to make enough plutonium for 15 bombs per year.

In 1946, the United States passed the Atomic Energy Act (also known as the McMahon Act after its senatorial sponsor, Connecticut Democrat Brien McMahon). It placed harsh restrictions on sharing of atomic information with other countries, none excepted. The law also established the Atomic Energy Commission to provide civilian control of nuclear matters. The Senate passed the data-sharing restrictions unaware of the secret wartime agreements. In 1958 the McMahon Act was modified to restore data sharing with the UK, Canada having decided not to pursue nuclear weapons development.

But even before the 1958 modification the act could hardly stop America’s main Manhattan Project ally. In 1946 Britain launched a program that brought a nuclear reactor online in four years and produced enough plutonium by 1952 to enable an October test near Australia. Britain’s leadership pushed nuclear programs partly to give Britain’s word greater weight in world affairs, but mainly because during the first decade after the Cold War the major allied effort to launch planes targeting the Soviet Union would come from bases in Britain. This made Britain the top target for a Soviet attack. Even before the United States, total war would mean the Soviets’ utter destruction of England. Only after the advent of the intercontinental-range B-52 (1955) and U.S. ICBM (1958) did America become the number-one threat to the USSR.

The British A-bomb was followed in 1954 by a decision to build an H-bomb. Britain wanted this second bomb for much the same reasons it had wanted the first. The H-bomb, the British believed, would give strategic weight to what Britain did on the international scene and help keep Britain a world power. It would also deter against a Soviet first strike—or a retaliatory Soviet strike against Britain if the U.S. struck the Soviets preemptively. British leaders knew that a five-megaton H-bomb dropped on London would incinerate everything within a two-mile radius, dig a crater three-quarters of a mile across and 150 feet deep, destroy all housing within a three-mile radius, and badly damage structures within a radius of three to seven miles.
³⁷
The British detonated their first H-bomb in 1957.

On June 26, 1954, Churchill told President Eisenhower about the British H-bomb program. Just weeks earlier, on June 1, the Chiefs of Staff advised the prime minister that in event of war, 10 H-bombs of 2 to 20 megaton yield would kill 5 to 12 million people—this in a country whose 1954 population was some 52 million. While the two discussed a nuclear-armed Russia at a White House luncheon, Churchill quipped: “Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war.” (The quote is frequently presented as “jaw-jaw beats war-war.”) It should be noted that Churchill felt very differently in the middle and late 1930s, repeatedly calling for Allied military action against Hitler’s legions before they gained greater strength than Allied units. The hydrogen changed his assessment.

Prime Minister Harold Macmillan made restoration of Anglo-American nuclear cooperation a top priority. When in 1962 the Kennedy administration peremptorily cancelled the joint U.S.-UK Skybolt air-to-ground nuclear missile project, Macmillan met with Kennedy at the hastily convened Nassau Summit to discuss a replacement. The result was that Britain got American Polaris undersea-launched ballistic missiles for its own ballistic missile submarines. As of 2010, the British had deployed some 160 to 200 nuclear warheads, all carried on nuclear subs.

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ITH ITS
three Nobel Prize winners of 1903—Henri Becquerel and the Curies, Marie and Pierre—France, like Britain, was a pioneer in nuclear research. Under Frederic Joliot-Curie, its nuclear program started almost immediately after the Battle of Normandy and the Allies’ August 1944 liberation of Paris from the Nazis. General Charles de Gaulle (still exiled in England) ordered French scientists working in the U.S. nuclear program to return to France even before the Germans surrendered. In his memoir, Manhattan Project chief General Leslie Groves recounts how Joliot-Curie, an ardent Communist, refused to help the Americans, and also helped France obtain access to American nuclear know-how by blackmail. Unless the U.S. helped France, Joliot-Curie would get France to turn to the Russians. The October 1945 elections brought in a government that abandoned the project, but it resumed in 1952, with a nuclear reactor program.

Then, in 1954, the Vietminh Communists defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu. The French had asked President Eisenhower to drop atomic bombs on the insurgents. His refusal made a French weapon inevitable.
³⁸

A month and a half after the defeat at Dien Bien Phu, anti-colonialist Pierre Mendes-France came to power. His government would not last a year, but while in office, he took the decision to build an independent nuclear weapon. Back under the leadership of de Gaulle, France tested its first A-bomb on February 13, 1960, in the Algerian desert (U.S. code-name BB-1, the BB for French sex siren Brigitte Bardot).
³⁹
Shortly after the test de Gaulle exclaimed: “If France must have allies, she has no need of a protector!” Ironically, none other than A-bomb father J. Robert Oppenheimer had told French nuclear scientist Francis Perrin that France should make an atom bomb: “It would be good for France. And it isn’t very difficult. All you need is a metallurgist endowed with a little imagination.”

De Gaulle was the prime guiding spirit of France’s bomb program. De Gaulle believed that a nuclear program conferred technology leadership valuable in world markets. He also believed a third world war to be imminent—and he was reluctant to rely on the American nuclear umbrella to deter Soviet aggression. As he explained to Eisenhower in a summit meeting in 1959:

You, Eisenhower, would wage nuclear war for Europe, because you know the interests that are at stake. But as the Soviet Union develops its capacity to strike the cities of North America, one of your successors will agree to wage nuclear war only [in Europe]. When that time comes, I or my successor will have to possess the necessary means to change into nuclear war what the Soviets would have liked to have remained a classic war.

De Gaulle’s quest for nuclear independence reflected his World War II experience: British troops leaving European soil at Dunkirk in June 1940, American officials hesitating to send troops into combat in Europe until Hitler declared war on America, America’s delaying the Normandy landing until 1944, and de Gaulle’s exclusion from major Allied strategic decisions, despite his being commander (in exile) of the Free French Forces. De Gaulle also made the point that no one could foresee how the world would look in 20 years. (In that he was guilty of gross understatement.)

Even before his meeting with Eisenhower and France’s 1960 atomic bomb test, de Gaulle had decided to push research on a hydrogen bomb. De Gaulle considered full nuclear-club membership to require development and deployment of thermonuclear bombs and believed that only with such an arsenal could a nation truly be fully independent in the nuclear age. France exploded its first two thermonuclear devices in August 1968.

De Gaulle was taken aback when the Kennedy administration changed American deterrence policy from “massive retaliation” to “flexible response” without consulting Europe, and when Kennedy used the adjective “unfriendly” to describe the French nuclear program. Guided by his imperial, intensely patriotic vision of France standing alone, de Gaulle withdrew France from the NATO defense command structure in 1966, because NATO weapons require American approval as part of their release. (France rejoined that structure only in 1996, well after the Cold War had ended.) De Gaulle’s concerns about American willingness to use nuclear weapons to defend France were not unjustified. When Secretary of State Dean Rusk was told by a French officer that France would use nuclear weapons to force America to “go to extremes” in the event of a Soviet invasion, Rusk answered that in such event America would tell the Soviets that America had nothing to do with France’s nuclear decision.

By 2010, France had an estimated arsenal of 300 nuclear weapons, based on bombers, land, and sea, but equally fateful was France’s decision to help Israel build a nuclear bomb.

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recognized Israel upon its May 14, 1948, founding. But when Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq invaded the next day (joining Palestinian guerillas, who had attacked Israel the day after the UN passed its November 29, 1947, resolution partitioning Palestine), Israel’s main help came from private sources. The U.S. government subsequently remained neutral, and British sentiment tilted towards the Arabs. The USSR, though not allied with Israel, allowed Czech arms dealers to sell their wares to the Israelis.