Early Thoughts on Controlling the Nuclear Arms Race: A Report to the Secretary of State, January 1953

Early Thoughts on Controlling the Nuclear Arms Race A Report to the Secretary of State, January 1953 I I n April 1952 Secretary of State Dean Acheson set up a Panel of Consultants on Disarmament, consisting of Robert Oppenheimer, as Chairman, Vannevar Bush, John S. Dickey, Allen W. Dulles, and Joseph Johnson. Oppenheimer, then Director of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, was completing his service as Chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission ; Bush was back at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and still the dean of American scientific advisers. Dickey and Johnson, one President of Dartmouth and the other President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, had worked on problems of disarmament and United Nations affairs as State Department officers in earlier years. Allen Dulles was practicing law in New York. I became secretary to the Panel, responsible for keeping track of its discussions and writing up its conclusions. Acheson and Oppenheimer had initially thought in terms of a review of American policy and proposals on disarmament, but the Panel soon concluded that the relevant field of concern was necessarily broader, and with Acheson’s support its inquiry was widened accordingly. When its conclusions were reported orally to Secretary Acheson late in the year, he encouraged the preparation of a written report for the use of the next Administration , and such a report was submitted to him just before he left office in January 1953. Recently my research associate, Donald White, obtained from the Department of State a declassified copy of the report, in the slightly sanitized version that was circulated inside the Government at the time. In somewhat abbreviated form we present it here. The basic judgments which animated this report have considerable resonance in 1982: that the dangers in the Soviet-American nuclear arms race were great and growing, and that without deeper public understanding and stronger executive leadership the United States could not expect to deal effectivelywith those dangers. The members of the Panel came to their work McGeorge Bundy is Professor of History at New York Uniziersity. From 1961-1966, he served as Special Assistant for National Security Affairs under Presidents Kennedy and johnson. He w a s President of the Ford Foundation, 7966-1979. f n t e r m t i o d Security, Fall 1982 (Vol. 7, No. 2) 0162-2889/82/010003-25 $02.50/0 0 1982by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 3 International Security 14 with varied degrees of knowledge about the realities of nuclear weapons, and especially about the pace of the growth of their numbers and destructive power. No one on the Panel, not even Robert Oppenheimer (and certainly not the secretary), emerged from the Panel’s nine-month exposure to nuclear realities and prospects without a greatly deepened sense of enormous and rapidly approaching peril. What made the experience especially searing was that it took place in the shadow of seven years of intensifying conflict between the Soviet Union and the West, with open warfare still continuing in Korea. As the report says, the Panel felt compelled to take full account of both nuclear danger and the Soviet threat to peace. In the main the arguments and recommendations of the panel speak for themselves. Students of the period will know that Robert Oppenheimer wrote an eloquent essay making parts of the argument public (”Atomic Weapons and American Policy,” in Foreign Affairs, Vol. 31, No. 4 [July 19531, pp. 525-535) and also that the highly classified report became part of the input for a project of the Eisenhower Administration that was called successively “Operation Candor,” then ”Operation Wheaties,” and finally ”Atoms for Peace.” The ironies in this result will be apparent from the document itself. There is also an instructive contrast between the argument for reducing ”our commitment to the use of nuclear weapons,” here set forth by a group which included Allen Dulles, and the policy of massive retaliation announced a year later by his older brother. In renewing my acquaintance with the report, I have found that parts of the analysis seem seriously dated, and other parts not. But...