Nuclear Danger and Nuclear History

Nuclear History I Review: Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years by McGeorge Bundy War and Peace in the Nuclear Age by John Newhouse New York: Random House, 1988, 735 pp. New York: Knopf, 1989, 486 pp. I Fifty years ago, in January 1939, two German physicists, Fritz Strassmann and Otto Hahn, announced to the scientific world that they had discovered the phenomenon of nuclear fission. The nuclear age had begun. Today the United States and the Soviet Union, to say nothing of smaller powers, confront one another with thousands of nuclear weapons, a small proportion of which would be enough to eliminate all life on earth. That is the bad news. The good news is that, after the first two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, none of these weapons has been used, even though these fifty years have witnessed ideological confrontation between the great powers and political turbulence among the lesser as severe as in any period since the Middle Ages. How did this build-up come about? and why has it not (yet) led to catastrophe ? The demi-centenary of the nuclear age has produced two authoritative works, one addressing itself primarily to the first question and the other to the second. John Newhouse has participated in arms control negotiations as an official and covered them as a journalist. His knowledge of both the technicalities and the politics of the issue is unrivaled, and he writes with a lucidity which will establish this as a work popular with students and laypersons alike. (It has already provided the basis for a notable television series). McGeorge Bundy writes as an insider; one close to the Truman administration , intimately involved with the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Michael Howard has been appointed Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale with effect from Fall 1989. Previously he held the Chairs of War Studies in the University of London and of History of War at Oxford, and from 1980-89 was Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. He is President of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. His books include The Causes of Wars and War in European History. International Security, Summer 1989 (Vol. 14, No. 1) 0 1989 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 176 Nuclear Danger and Nuclear History I 177 a trusted consultant to President Carter. He observed decision-making at close hand-not just during the Cuban missile crisis-and though he never obtrudes his own experience, he clearly has a visceral understanding of what is involved, which gives his work peculiar authority. With two such wellinformed and dispassionate guides (for though both allow their own preferences to surface, they keep them well under control), we are well equipped to answer the two questions posed. Mr. Bundy indeed courageously raises a third: did it have to happen that way? Could any of the fundamental decisions taken in the Oval Office of the White House have gone the other way, and what might have happened if they did? It is the diforrnation professionnelle of historians to assume the inevitability of the past, even though we recognize in our own lives on what a knife-edge each decision rests and how far-reaching the consequences would have been had it been made differently.Roosevelt’s initial decision in October 1941 to authorize a study into the practicability of making an atomic bomb (and Hitler’s decision by default not to do so); Truman’s decisions to drop the bombs, and to drop them on cities; the postwar decision to share nuclear knowledge neither with Britain nor the Soviet Union save under the provisions of the Baruch plan which virtually guaranteed an American monopoly ; the decision, in January 1950, to produce thermonuclear weapons; Eisenhower’s refusal to use nuclear weapons in Indochina; the decisions taken during the Cuban missile crisis; subsequent decisions to go ahead with ever more complex and expensive generations of weapons, culminating in Star Wars: all of these were deliberate choices. Would the world be any different, or any safer, if these decisions had not been taken? The possibility that they might...