Crossing the Rubicon: A Missed Opportunity to Stop the H-Bomb?

Crossing the Rubicon A Missed Opportunity to Stop the H-Bomb? Barton 1.Bernstein are in some way limited, the future of our society will come increasingly into peril of the gravest kind. --Panel of Consultants on Disarmament, September 1952 That first thermonuclear] test ended the possibility of the only type of agreement that 1 thought was possible with Russia . . . an agreement to make no more tests. [It]would have been self-policing. . . . 1still think that we made a grave error in conducting that test at that time. . . . Those who pushed that thing . . . without making that attempt have a great deal to answer for.’ -Vannevar Bush, April 1954 “In the thermonuclear tests at Eniwetok,” President Harry S. Truman announced in his January 1953 State of the Union address, “we have entered another stage in the worldshaking development of atomic energy.” This I am indebted for counsel to Coit Blacker, McGeorge Bundy, Alexander Dallin, Peter Galison, Allen Greb, Jonathan Haslam, Gregg Herken, David Holloway, Gail Lapidus, Condoleezza Rice, David Rosenberg, Scott Sagan, Martin Sherwin, and Herbert York; for various sources to Roger Anders, Nancy Bressler, Jack Holl, Sally Marks, and William Tuttle; for support to the Ford Foundation Program in International Security, Barbara and Howard Holme, the Center for the History of Physics (American Institute of Physics), the Harry S. Truman Library Institute, and the Center for International Security and Arms Control; for access to the James Conant papers to Theodore Conant; and for early access to the Lewis L. Strauss papers to Lewis H. Strauss and Richard Pfau. Earlier versions of this paper were presented in 1986-88 to the Peace Studies group and the Nuclear History group at Stanford University, and parts were presented in 1987 to the Institute on Global Cooperation and Conflict summer program at Sussex. Barton I. Bernstein is Professor of History and Mellon Professor of lnterdisciplinay Studies at Stanford University, where he directs the International Relations Program and the International Policy Studies Program. H i s most recent publications include “America‘s Biological Warfare Program in the Second World War” in the Journal of Strategic Studies, and (with Peter Galison) ”InAny Light: Scientists and the Decision to Build the Superbomb, 1942-1954,” in Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences. 1. Panel of Consultants on Disarmament, “The Timing of the Thermonuclear Test,” undated (probably September 1952), Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States (hereafter FRUS), 1952-54, Vol. I1 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office [U.S. GPO], 1984), p. 1006. 2. Vannevar Bush in April, 1954; Atomic Energy Commmission (AEC), In the Matter of!. Robert Oppenhezrner (Washington, D.C.: U.S. GPO, 1954), p. 582. International Security, Fall 1989(Vol. 14, No. 2) 0 1989by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 132 Crossing the Rubicon 1 133 potential new weapon, he explained, ”moves into a new era of destructive power, capable of creating explosions of a new order of magnitude, dwarfing the mushroom clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” It was the world’s first test of a thermonuclear d e ~ i c e . ~ Truman’s statement about the October 31 explosion, tucked into a single paragraph in a lengthy speech, was designed to downplay the recent event. His comment was only the second official mention of the test. He did not disclose that, at about ten megatons, it had literally destroyed a small Pacific island, leaving a gaping crater in the ocean floor. The explosion was about 800 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.4 Warning the Soviets and the world of the dangers of nuclear war, Truman stressed that he wished that the world could pursue only the peaceful atom, and he blamed the Sovietsfor blocking international control of atomic energy. He said that he, with the American people, would support the incoming Eisenhower administration’s efforts to ”make this newest of man’s discoveries a source of good and not of ultimate destruction.” But he held out virtually no hope for any control of the arms race or the achievement of a Soviet-Americansettlementin the near future. He called for continued toughness in dealing with the ”masters of...