Part 6

How vastly different is our situation today vis-à-vis Russia! Instead of a short hop across the English Channel she would have to cross the Atlantic or the Pacific to reach our continent, whereas we can reach her heartland from bases all around her borders. It is unthinkable that any of her bombers can cross either ocean without being detected hundreds of miles before they reach our shores. With modern radar devices, which are constantly being improved, and fleets of fast interceptors far in advance of anything Russia could develop, we would destroy them long before they would do us any harm. If she attempts to fly over the North Pole, she will still have to cross all of Canada before she can reach us, and if we and our Canadian friends are on the alert, as we must and shall be, any hostile planes could be detected and destroyed over the Arctic.

There is, of course, the possibility of exploding an H-bomb some distance off shore from a submarine or from a tramp steamer, but here, too, eternal vigilance will be the price of our liberties and our lives. There can be no question that we shall succeed in finding the answer to the detection of the Snorkel-type submarine and master it just as we mastered the earlier types. American ingenuity and superior technology have never failed yet in the face of an emergency, and it is unthinkable that they should fail now.

We often hear it said that an enemy could smuggle an A-bomb in small parts into this country and assemble it here. While such an operation is possible, its successful execution against a nation fully on guard is highly improbable. As for the H-bomb, it requires large quantities of liquefied gas, which must be kept in a vacuum surrounded by large vessels of liquid air. In addition it must have its A-bomb trigger and other complicated devices. All this makes its surreptitious smuggling into a country such as ours even more improbable.

We have had it dinned into our ears for so long that there is no defense against the atomic bomb, and that the only choice confronting us is “one world or none,” without anyone taking the trouble to challenge these two pernicious catch-phrases, that we have accepted them as gospel truth, particularly since they were uttered by some of our more articulate atomic scientists. That scientists should at last step out from their laboratories and classrooms to take an active interest in public affairs is highly commendable and welcome. But that does not give them the right to take advantage of the great respect and confidence the public has for them with utterances that serve only to create fear and hysteria and a sense of helplessness, while at the same time offering remedies they know to be unattainable.

The truth of the matter is that there can be and there is a defense against atomic weapons, as against any other weapon. Basically it is the same as the defense against submarines or enemy bombers: detect them and destroy them before they reach you. The difference is largely a matter of degree. Since the atomic-bomb carrier can do greater damage, the measures of defense against it must be correspondingly greater. With the aid of the vast stretches of the Atlantic and the Pacific, augmented by an effective radar and interceptor system, on the one hand; and with effective counter-submarine measures on the other, the odds would be against a single A- or H-bomb reaching our shores.

Faced with such an impregnable system of defense, and with a threat of the swift annihilation of its armies as soon as they begin marching for war, the Kremlin could no longer, unless its masters went completely berserk, regard war, or even a challenge to war, a risk worth taking. The cold war may get warmer, as it did in Korea, but as long as we keep our heads and don’t give way to fear and hysteria, trusting in God and keeping our H-bombs “wet,” it may never reach the boilingpoint.

And we have in addition a weapon even more powerful than the H-bomb or any other physical weapon, which instead of bringing misery and death would bring new life and new hope to hundreds of millions now enslaved. We have not yet even begun to fight on the battlefield of ideas, in which we can match freedom against tyranny, friendship against class hatred, truth against lies, a society based on the respect and dignity of the individual and the giving of full scope to human aspirations against a society modeled after the beehive and the ant-heap.

“Real peace,” former Assistant Secretary of State Adolf A. Berle, Jr., said in the _New Leader_, “is deeper than absence of war. That will be won in the realm of philosophy and ideas. Indeed, the great reason for preventing war is to permit ideas to meet ideas on their own merits.... The statesman’s business is to keep the conflagration at bay and give ideas their chance, relying on the moral strength of the ideals he represents to bring to their support the masses throughout the world.” In such a war of ideas, he adds, there could be no doubt about the outcome, as the West can oppose all its positives against Moscow’s negatives. We meet “a betrayed revolution, in a decadent, imperialist, dictatorial phase, building an empire on the negatives of human behavior. Such empires engage no permanent loyalties; they invariably break up. War would defeat this empire in any case. First rate statesmanship can avoid that war.”

In the words of General George C. Marshall, “the most important thing for the world today is a spiritual regeneration.... We must present democracy as a force holding within itself the seeds of unlimited progress for the human race. We should make it clear that it is a means to a better way of life within nations and to a better understanding among nations. Tyranny inevitably must fall back before the tremendous moral strength of the gospel of freedom and self-respect for the individual.”

As an advance army in this war of ideas we already have a fifth column of millions waiting for our signal to march, the millions of the enslaved satellite countries—Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic countries, Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania—as well as millions upon millions behind the Iron Curtain in Russia itself. The greatest mistake made by Hitler was his failure to utilize the readiness and eagerness of a large percentage of the Russian masses to turn against their oppressors. When the Nazi armies marched into the Ukraine, large numbers of Ukrainians, who had been longing for independence for centuries, greeted them as their liberators with the traditional bread and salt, symbol of welcome. Russian soldiers surrendered by the thousands and they, along with the men of the villages, volunteered in great numbers to fight against their enslavers. In the hearts of millions of Russians behind the front, the longing for liberty, never extinguished, was given its greatest stimulus since the days when they overthrew the Czarist regime. They, too, were waiting for the Germans to give them back the revolution the Communists had stolen from them with lies and deceit.

With the stupidity characteristic of all criminals, Hitler and Himmler proclaimed that the Russians were to be treated as an “inferior race.” Everywhere their armies went they burned and pillaged and raped. Instead of liberators they turned out to be most savage barbarians, who behaved even worse than the commissars. It was this inconceivable folly of Hitler, as well as our Lend-Lease, that played a major role in enabling the Kremlin to win the war.

The Russian masses and those of the enslaved satellite countries are still waiting for their liberators. The masters of the Kremlin know it, but they hope that, like the Nazis, we will be too stupid to take advantage of it. If a war ever breaks out, we shall have millions joining our ranks provided we do not destroy these millions, those not in uniform, with A- or H-bombs in the strategic bombing of their cities. But we should not wait until a war breaks out. We must begin mobilizing them right now for the war of ideas.

The so-called Iron Curtain is a fake, like the rest of the Communist set-up. It is made of tinsel and is full of thousands of holes, through which we can pass if we will. Those thousands of miles of border ringing the vast Russian Empire could be utilized as great thoroughfares of ideas, to be smuggled to the millions waiting for them. There isn’t a guard on those borders who couldn’t, with the proper approach and inducements, be enlisted in our army of ideas. In addition to flooding the air over Russia with tiny balloons, each carrying a message of freedom and hope, we could also smuggle into the country small radio receiving sets by the millions to bring the Voice of America to millions of Russian homes. We could attach to those balloons small loaves of bread, packages of cigarettes, little trinkets for babies, nylon stockings for women, on a scale that no police could cope with. Nor could the Kremlin risk forbidding it, as that would place it in the position of further depriving its starved and hungry people of things they badly need and want.

With these weapons on the battlefront in the war of ideas, and with the A- and H-bomb to give the Kremlin pause, we would be well on the way to win any war, cold or hot. Our justification for building the hydrogen bomb is thus not merely to prevent its use, but to prevent World War III, and to win it if it comes. We are not building it to bring Russia to her knees. We are building it to bring her to her senses. We must make the Kremlin realize with General Marshall that “tyranny inevitably must fall back before the tremendous moral strength of the gospel of freedom and self-respect for the individual.”

IV KOREA CLEARED THE AIR

As this is being written, the Korean war is just one month old. By the time these lines appear in print we may know whether the naked Communist aggression on the Republic of South Korea was an episode, a prelude, or the first act of World War III. But whatever history records, the first flash of the Communist guns, supplied by the Kremlin, has revealed to the free world at last the face of the enemy in all its hideousness. It brought the first phase of the so-called cold war to a definite end. It aroused freedom-loving peoples everywhere and put them on the alert. It served as a powerful headlight in the night, revealing many dangerous curves on the road ahead. It has given the United Nations its first great opportunity to display its vitality for all the world to see.

Among other things, the flash of the North Korean guns has illumined for us more clearly than ever before the path we must follow in our policy on atomic weapons, both the A-bomb and the H-bomb. It has revealed the extreme danger lurking in any plan to outlaw production and use of atomic weapons in a world constantly threatened by a savage dictatorship, ready to pounce on it at the first sign of weakening in its armor.

The flash of the Red guns, in the first place, made it clear to free men everywhere that to renounce our right to the production of atomic weapons as potentially the greatest deterrents against the further spread of Communist aggression, and as the most powerful defenders of the spiritual and moral values without which our way of life would become meaningless, would allow the Red Army to overrun what remains of the free world. Such a move on our part, for the present and the foreseeable future, may herald the last appearance of free men on the stage of history. It would be, as the Goncourt brothers feared, “closing time, gentlemen!”

In addition to warning us what we must not do, the Red guns also gave warning of a more positive nature. They warned us to make all haste in the construction of the hydrogen bomb, to get it ready as soon as possible, against the eventuality that Russia may decide it would be to her advantage to precipitate World War III before our H-bomb is ready. Instead of the estimated pre-Korea time-table of three years, it now becomes a vital necessity for us to complete our H-bomb, and facilities for its production at a speedy rate, within a year. And if the history of our development of the A-bomb may serve as an example, it almost becomes a certainty that we shall do so. While we may not announce it to the world, we have good reason to expect that the first H-bomb will be ready for testing sometime in 1951, possibly in early summer.

This forecast is not based on merely guesswork. When we decided to go all out in developing the A-bomb—and we didn’t really go to work in earnest until May 1943—nobody knew that it could be successfully made. There were two enormous major problems to be solved, and solved in time to be of use in winning the war. One was to produce unheard-of quantities of fissionable materials (U-235 and plutonium), literally in quantities billions of times greater than had ever been produced before. Nobody knew whether it could be done or how it could be done. Three gigantic plants were built, at a cost of $1,500,000,000, on the mere chance, “calculated risk” we called it, that one of them would work. As it turned out, they all worked, some more efficiently than others, though all contributed to the shortening of the war. The second major problem, among a host of smaller ones, all important to the successful attainment of the goal, was how to assemble the materials produced in the billion-dollar plants into a bomb that would live up to expectations. Both major problems had to be solved simultaneously. The designing of the bomb went on for more than two years with only trickles of the active material.

Yet despite all these enormous difficulties the A-bomb was completed for testing in about two years and three months after the beginning of the large-scale effort. Compared with the enormousness of the problems that had to be solved, and were solved successfully in this remarkably short time, the problems still to be solved for building the hydrogen bomb appear relatively simple, since all the materials required and the plants to produce them are already built, paid for, and operating successfully. As already pointed out, we have the A-bombs to serve as triggers, large stockpiles of deuterium, and the refrigeration equipment and techniques to liquefy it. We have an adequate supply of lithium for the production of tritium, which, as explained earlier, would be used as the extra kindling to the A-bomb match. And we have, of course, our gigantic plutonium factories at Hanford, Washington, in which the lithium could be converted into tritium in the desired amounts.

Thus, instead of having to start from scratch as we were forced to do with the A-bomb, we have at hand all the necessary ingredients for the H-bomb with the possible exception of sufficient tritium, and since we have the plutonium plants, greatly expanded and improved since the end of the war, it is reasonable to make a “guestimate,” to use a word popular in wartime, that a few months should suffice for them, if they are employed exclusively for that purpose, to produce tritium in proper amounts.

That we have decided to complete the construction of the H-bomb in the shortest possible time was made clear on July 7, two weeks following the Communist attack on South Korea, when President Truman asked Congress to furnish $260,000,000 in cash “to build additional and more efficient plants and related facilities” for materials that can be used either for weapons or for fuels potentially useful for power purposes. The appropriation, he said, was required “in furtherance of my directive of January 31, 1950,” in which he had ordered the Atomic Energy Commission “to continue its work on the so-called hydrogen bomb”; and this was further clarified in a letter to the President by the Budget Director, Frederick J. Lawton, recommending the money request, to the effect that the materials to be produced in the proposed plants could be used for either atomic bombs or hydrogen bombs. Since the only type of plant that could produce materials for both the A-bomb and the H-bomb is a nuclear reactor for producing plutonium, and since tritium is the only H-bomb element that could be produced in a plutonium plant, the request by the President may be interpreted as the first, though indirect, official confirmation that tritium is looked upon as one of the ingredients necessary for a successful H-bomb. We were given a hint of a possible time-table when it was revealed that the all-cash request would have to be obligated in one year though its actual disbursal could be spread over four years. This suggests the possibility that the nuclear reactors for the large-scale production of tritium might be rushed to completion within one year.

While these new reactors for the production of tritium are being built, we can convert all our Hanford reactors for that purpose so that no time need be lost. Whatever amounts of plutonium would have to be sacrificed by diverting the Hanford plants from plutonium to tritium would be offset by the new uranium concentration plants at Oak Ridge, and by the fact that we already have a large stockpile of both U-235 and plutonium accumulated over a period of five years.

The one and only major problem to be solved is how to assemble into an efficient H-bomb the materials we already have at hand or will have in a few months. Here, too, we are much farther advanced than we were at the time we decided to build the A-bomb, as we are not called upon to start from scratch. For whereas in the early days of the A-bomb development scientists were doubtful whether it could be made at all and were actually hoping that their investigations would prove that it was impossible, for the Nazis as well as for us, no such doubts seem to exist in the minds of those most intimately associated with the problem. On this score we have had more than hints from a number of those in the know, among them Senator McMahon. “The scientists,” he said in a historic address to the United States Senate on February 2, 1950, “feel more confident that this most horrible of armaments [the hydrogen bomb] can be developed successfully than they felt in 1940 when the original bomb was under consideration. The hydrogen development will be cheaper than its uranium forerunner. Theoretically, it is without limit in destructive capacity. A weapon made of such material would destroy any military or other target, including the largest city on earth.”

What is this confidence based on? Scientists are a very conservative lot, not given to jumping to conclusions without experimental evidence on which to base them. I remember well the agonizing hours preceding the test of the first A-bomb in New Mexico, when everyone present, particularly the intellectual hierarchy that was most responsible, was beset by grave doubts whether the A-bomb would go off at all, and if it did, whether it would live up to expectations or turn out to be no more than an improved blockbuster. Very few, if any, felt confident that it would be as good as it finally turned out to be. For example, in a pool in which everyone bet a dollar to guess the ultimate power of the bomb in terms of TNT, Dr. Oppenheimer placed his bet on 300 tons. This makes it evident that the scientists were not very confident even as late as 1945, up to the very last minute, when “the brain child of many minds came forth in physical shape and performed as it was supposed to do.”

If the scientists are more confident today than they were in 1940, and even, it would seem, in 1945, when the bomb stood on its steel tower ready for its first test, it can only mean that their confidence is based on innumerable experiments carried out during the five years that have elapsed since Hiroshima. By the semiannual reports to Congress by the Atomic Energy Commission, and reports presented before the American Physical Society, or published in official publications, by members of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and other leading institutions, we have been officially informed of many experiments that have been carried out on nuclear reactions between deuterons and deuterons, tritons and tritons, and deuterons and tritons—namely, the very reactions to be expected in an H-bomb using deuterium, tritium, or a mixture of the two. This makes it obvious that during the five years since Hiroshima we have accumulated a vast body of knowledge about the reactions necessary for a successful H-bomb. Furthermore, this gives us the assurance that we are five years ahead of Russia on the H-bomb as well as the A-bomb, since we have had plutonium plants in which to make tritium for at least five years, whereas she has just placed her plutonium plants in operation and, as we have seen, can ill afford to sacrifice the vital plutonium she needs for building up her A-bomb stockpile to begin experiments we had most likely carried out five years ago.

The best evidence so far that we have made much progress during the past five years on the design of the H-bomb—evidence strongly indicating that it had passed the blueprint stage and was ready for construction—was supplied recently by Lewis L. Strauss, a member of the original Atomic Energy Commission, when he revealed that “the greatest issue of division” (between himself and other members of the AEC) “was whether or not to proceed with the hydrogen bomb, as for some time I had strongly urged to do.” Now, Strauss, who went into the Navy in World War II as a lieutenant commander and rose to be a rear admiral, is a leading financier of wide experience, so it may be taken for granted that if for some time he had “strongly urged” proceeding with the hydrogen bomb, it must have been because he had been assured by the scientific experts that it was feasible. Men of his background and experience do not “strongly urge” the diversion of resources to projects unless they are strongly convinced that the project is both practical and feasible. His words, when read in the light of statements by other members of the AEC, suggest that the division of opinion on this score among the members of the Commission was not over the feasibility of the H-bomb but over the belief that the A-bomb was good enough as long as we were its sole possessors and that we could maintain our advantage for a long time by building more and better A-bombs.

On the other hand, the fact that the majority of the AEC did not agree with Strauss on the necessity of proceeding with the hydrogen bomb must certainly not be interpreted to mean that they halted all studies on the subject, for that would be charging them with gross negligence. It is much more reasonable to assume that the “greatest issue of division” (mark the use of the word “greatest,” which indicates many a heated debate) was whether or not to proceed at once with the actual building of the bomb, after it had been fully designed and shown to be feasible in a host of painstaking studies over a period of at least four years.