Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

President Truman’s tough words were not backed, however, by a military strategy that could defend Western Europe. During the early months of 1947, as Truman formulated his anti-Communist doctrine, the Pentagon did not have a war plan for fighting the Soviet Union. And the rapid demobilization of the American military seemed to have given the Soviets a tremendous advantage on the ground. The U.S. Army had only one division stationed in Germany, along with ten police regiments, for a total of perhaps 100,000 troops. The British army had one division there, as well. According to U.S. intelligence reports, the Soviet army had about one hundred divisions, with about 1.2 million troops, capable of invading Western Europe — and could mobilize more than 150 additional divisions within a month.

Instead of being outlawed by the U.N., the atomic bomb soon became integral to American war plans for the defense of Europe. In June 1947 the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent a top secret report, “The Evaluation of the Atomic Bomb as a Military Weapon,” to President Truman. It contained the latest thinking on how nuclear weapons might be used in battle. The first postwar atomic tests, conducted the previous year at the Bikini atoll in the Marshall Islands, had demonstrated some of the weapon’s limitations. Dropped on a fleet of empty Japanese and American warships, a Mark 3 implosion bomb like the one used at Nagasaki had missed its aiming point by almost half a mile — and failed to sink eighty-three of the eighty-eight vessels. “Ships at sea and bodies of troops are, in general, unlikely to be regarded as primary atomic bomb targets,” the report concluded. “The bomb is preeminently a weapon for use against human life and activities in large urban and industrial areas.” It was a weapon useful, most of all, for killing and terrorizing civilians. The report suggested that a nuclear attack would stir up “man’s primordial fears” and “break the will of nations.” The military significance of the atomic bomb was clear: it wouldn’t be aimed at the military. Nuclear weapons would be used to destroy an enemy’s morale, and the some of best targets were “cities of especial sentimental significance.”

The Joint Chiefs did not welcome these conclusions, but assumed them to be true — the hard, new reality of strategy in the nuclear age. If other countries obtained atomic bombs, they might be used in similar ways against the United States. The destructive power of these weapons was so great that the logic of waging a preventive war, of launching a surprise attack upon an enemy, might prove hard to resist. Like a shootout in the Old West, a nuclear war might be won by whoever fired first. A country with fewer atomic bombs than its adversary had an especially strong incentive to launch an attack out of the blue. And for that reason, among others, a number of high-ranking American officers argued that the United States should bomb the Soviet Union before it obtained any nuclear weapons. General Groves thought that approach would make sense, if “we were ruthlessly realistic.” General Orvil Anderson, commander of the Air University, publicly endorsed an attack on the Soviets. “I don’t advocate preventive war,” Anderson told a reporter. “I advocate the shedding of illusions.” He thought that Jesus Christ would approve of dropping atomic bombs on the Soviet Union: “I think I could explain to Him that I had saved civilization.” Anderson was suspended for the remarks.

Support for a first strike extended far beyond the upper ranks of the U.S. military. Bertrand Russell — the British philosopher and pacifist, imprisoned for his opposition to the First World War — urged the western democracies to attack the Soviet Union before it got an atomic bomb. Russell acknowledged that a nuclear strike on the Soviets would be horrible, but “anything is better than submission.” Winston Churchill agreed, proposing that the Soviets be given an ultimatum: withdraw your troops from Germany, or see your cities destroyed. Even Hamilton Holt, lover of peace, crusader for world government, lifelong advocate of settling disputes through mediation and diplomacy and mutual understanding, no longer believed that sort of approach would work. Nuclear weapons had changed everything, and the Soviet Union couldn’t be trusted. Any nation that rejected U.N. control of atomic energy, Holt said, “should be wiped off the face of the earth with atomic bombs.”

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