Why we made the bomb
Daniel, Cuthbert
Why did we make the Bomb? The question is, of course, naïve. There was no single reason. Nor could there be a one-word answer, such as fear or deterrence, or a two-word answer, for...
...Nor could there be a one-word answer, such as fear or deterrence, or a two-word answer, for example, unjustified fear, that would be informative...
...Were we, in 1943 or any other time, in a race to the death with the Axis powers...
...The mission's military head, Colonel B. T. Pash, and its scientific head, S. Goudsmit, collaborated admirably but found little to have been alarmed about...
...What are we to learn from this tangle of self-interested semi confessions, of persistent secrecy, and of obvious disinformation...
...We have learned, we must learn, that our political leaders, elected and other, depend too much on polls of uninformed opinions, rather than stimulating us with real choices about major current military events...
...They added details, but evidently all were too scattered, never adding up to an integrated picture...
...3. Corruption, greed and the impulse to torture are rampant and increase current misery...
...As a result we retained exaggerated fears of a German bomb program until late in 1944 and, prompted by these fears, mounted secret operations of a questionable nature that some still find it hard to discuss...
...2. The "genocidal mentality" of which R.J...
...Their worldwide demolition plus world surveillance will not in itself guarantee military peace...
...There 118 • DISSENT Notebook never was a German uranium project worth worrying about or worth spending a tenth of the effort in materials and manpower that the United States in fact spent...
...Lifton and E. Markusen write (The Genocidal Mentality, Basic Books, 1990) is latent in many, perhaps in all of us...
...We have been lied to about the justification and about the continuing need for more A-bombs...
...It would require a high order of rationality on all sides...
...In late 1943, General Groves authorized a mission, called ALSOS, to follow the advancing Allied forces, collecting documents, equipment, and any nuclear scientists...
...Today, for many, thirty thousand do not seem to be enough...
...We must thank Gorbachev again, and Sakharov twice, and all the others too for their help in exposing the seventy-year campaign of Soviet deception...
...And this was the most common reply in the 1940s, too...
...No madmen allowed...
...There were a few weak clues...
...q WINTER • 1991 • 119...
...The willingness of the military was hardly surprising...
...We had decoded two or more German military codes as well as one Japanese code, but the thousands of intercepted messages evidently gave no hint of any Nazi structures or depots...
...The impression was widespread that the Allied forces were in a race with the Germans that could well determine the outcome of the war...
...First is the handful of scientists around Heisenberg and still surviving, second a similar group who worked at Los Alamos, and finally the British and American intelligence officers who were charged with keeping track of the Germans...
...The British sometimes refused to share their sources with the Americans...
...Knowing, as we must have known, more and more about the size of plants required for uranium and plutonium separation, we failed to spot either in messages or in thousands of overflights any evidence of the production of nuclear weapons...
...But for this possibility to become a reality, more than multiple possession would be required...
...They do not tell us why we need thirty thousand or more nuclear warheads, or why a proposed mutual reduction of 30 percent serves any purpose beyond a practice exercise...
...There were dozens of refugee scientists from the Germancontrolled countries who were in some communication with colleagues in Germany...
...To quote Richard Rhodes's valuable The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986): One of the mysteries of the Second World War was the lack of an early and dedicated American intelligence effort to discover the extent of German progress toward atomic development...
...A heavy-water separation plant had been discovered in Norway and partly destroyed...
...And at the same time we must expose the forty-year orchestrated panic of wrong-headed "improvements" of our own military establishment...
...While the champion liars have always been the Soviets and their allies, we have made our own considerable contribution...
...Thomas Powers, writing on "How the Bomb Was Kept from Hitler" (the Atlantic, May 1990), accounts for the persistence of the mystery (Why did we continue...
...The atomic scientists and engineers jumped at the opportunity to play a decisive role in winning a war that all agreed had to be won...
...But to return to the primary question—Why did we...
...Each of these sections of society had its own reasons for going ahead, if ahead is the right word...
...P. Debye, a distinguished Dutch physical chemist who had recently left Germany, said that the Germans were hard at work...
...For once the Army and Navy could not be accused of refighting the last war...
...Goudsmit told me this in conversation, circa 1948...
...Cruel ideologies are used to justify cruel wars...
...Rational people, invited to make or contribute to a major decision, might be expected to ask for justification or demonstration of need...
...as due to the cooperation-in-silence of three groups, each with its own motives...
...In summary, the Nazis, arrogant at the beginning and nearly exhausted toward the end, were never ahead and lost ground steadily...
...Different experts have guessed at the number of bombs required on each side for assured deterrence...
...But it is at least as much the will as the technical ability that is lacking...
...But the development and enforcement of a rule of no nuclear weapons seems to me to be necessary, even if not sufficient for peaceful coexistence...
...We have learned, or should have learned, that our experts in strategy and in nuclear policy can hardly bear to start us in a rational direction...
...The panic was reinforced by the military, by statesmen, so-called, and by industry...
...All three groups that know best what happened have declined to speak clearly...
...Goudsmit's book, entitled ALSOS (Tomash Publishers, 1947, 1988), along with Pash's The A1sos Mission (New York: Award House, 1969), tell part of the story...
...Many physicists had chosen or were compelled to stay in Germany...
...It is a tragic fact, but not an explanation, that so many of the best scientific minds in the world devoted so many years of their lives to making Aand H-bombs that were demonstrably not needed...
...If, as the record repeatedly emphasizes, the United States was seriously worried that Germany might reverse the course of the war with such a secret weapon, why did its intelligence organizations, or the Manhattan Project, not mount a major effort of espionage...
...In the face of such differences of opinion we must be dealing with different types of mentality, and tonnages are no longer relevant...
...Their combined operations and uncooperative competition appear to have produced little but chaos, certainly no coherent information on any German nuclear program...
...More recently Jerome Wiesner surmised that initial limits of one thousand units per side could probably be lowered...
...Aware of all these evils and shortcomings as we are, it is suicidal to permit the existence of A- or H-bombs or of their key components...
...I give my own short list in the hope that many readers will agree in general, perhaps with their own additions...
...Early on, Hans Bethe thought that seventy-five to eighty would suffice...
...1. Nationalism, still spreading, engenders distrust...
...There were at least three American espionage organizations (the Army G2, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Office of Strategic Services) and at least one British, M 15, which were supposed to have active anti-Nazi connections...
...Steadily from 1939 on, our large staff of physicists, chemists, and engineers was accumulating laboratory and pilot-plant evidence of the feasibility of controlled nuclear explosions...
...Each of us has a list of today's evils...
...4. Mainly because of these evils, even so technically simple a problem as worldwide control of the existing stock of nuclear weapons is beyond our present capability...
...This reflected a sort of guilty conscience...
...The simplest and most frequent answer seems to be "as a deterrent or counter-weapon to the threatened Nazi bomb...
...A few minds, even in 1940 (Bohr's, Szilard's), saw that the possession of A-bombs by two or more states might well serve as mutual deterrents, with each side fearing reprisal...
...The more they discovered, it appears, the more worried they became about the activities of the other side...
...Even so, many credit the relative peace of the last forty-five years to the existence of two opposing stocks of nuclear weapons...
...Even though letters were regularly going through the German mail system stamped clearly "UranProject," we could not mobilize a single third-class mail clerk to intercept a few...
...As for direct espionage, little is recorded...
...Many notes and messages from anti-Nazi scientists and others in Germany had leaked bits and pieces about the "uranium problem...
Vol. 38 • January 1991 • No. 1
