Superbomb: Organizational Conflict and the Development of the Hydrogen Bomb by Ken Young and Warner R. Schilling (review)

Seventy-five years after the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seems an appropriate time to revisit a decision that has the potential to be even more consequential for our future: President Harry Truman’s approval in January 1950 of plans to develop the fission bomb’s bigger, more terrifying brother, the hydrogen “superbomb.”

The new book by Ken Young and Warner Schilling originated with 66 interviews that the latter, a distinguished professor of international relations at Columbia University, conducted more than a half century ago. Schilling intended the interviews for a book on the hydrogen bomb, but classification concerns and other academic business delayed the project until 2011, when Young, a Cold War historian at King’s College in London, joined the effort, updating it with the many declassified documents and secondary works on the subject that had surfaced in the interim.

Sadly, both Schilling and Young died before the manuscript could be completed, so the final work was done by Schilling’s son, Jonathan. Though tragic for the authors, the long delay in having the project come to fruition is a serendipitous boon for historians. The interviews contain many near-contemporaneous observations and insights from the principals in the superbomb decision: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, William Borden, and Truman among them.

As the subtitle suggests, Superbomb was originally intended to be an organizational or bureaucratic history, whose adage—coined, we learn in the book, by an employee of the U.S. Bureau of the Budget in 1947—was “where you stand depends on where you sit” (p. 162). Although all the U.S. agencies involved in the decision are well represented—the Defense Department, the Air Force, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and the nuclear weapons laboratories—the real story behind the thermonuclear bomb is one of intense ideological conflict and personal animosity. As the elder Schilling reflected in a note to himself at the end of his interview campaign, “If I repeated all the critical things that I have heard about each of these participants: re how stupid, conniving, double-dealing, unstable, etc.—impression would be created that the Gov’t was staffed by a bunch of knaves, dupes, madmen, juveniles, and dopes. But this is not my personal experience—nor is it plausible that there be so many” (pp. 153–154).

Indeed, what determined the outcome of the hydrogen bomb was not institutional affiliation so much as deep-seated resentment and individual rivalries. “The conflict was vicious because the feelings were visceral,” the authors write in their conclusion (p. 163).

Moreover, what started as a dispute over the feasibility, morality, and military utility of the thermonuclear bomb eventually blossomed into a fight—among the same combatants—over nuclear strategy, continental air defense, and tactical nuclear weapons. The battle was joined when what the authors call the “dissenting coalition”—Oppenheimer, James Conant, and George F. Kennan—opposed the nuclear war planning of the U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC), “an Air Force within an Air Force” (p. 164) and SAC’s charismatic leader, General Curtis LeMay. Given the sudden and unexpectedly early end of the U.S. nuclear monopoly in August 1949 with the Soviet Union’s first nuclear test, the outcome—a defeat on all fronts—was seemingly foreordained, the authors observe. “The nuclear dissidents stood little chance against so formidable an opponent” (p. 164).

In hindsight, the only realistic alternative to proceeding with the hydrogen bomb would have been a proposal for a joint U.S.-Soviet moratorium on thermonuclear testing. Such a possibility had been put forward, somewhat obliquely, in a memorandum appended by two eminent physicists, Isidor Rabi and Enrico Fermi, as a sort of minority report to the October 1949 recommendations of the AEC’s General Advisory Committee, which had urged the president not to proceed with the hydrogen bomb, largely on ethical grounds. (In a 1984 interview, Rabi told me...