Command and Control

In the spring of 1946, Holt hosted a conference on world government at Rollins. An idea that had long been dismissed as impractical and naive was now widely considered essential. Much of Europe, Russia, China, and Japan lay in ruins. About fifty million people had been killed during the recent war. The United States had been spared the destruction of its cities — and at first, the stunning news of the atomic bomb inspired relief at the swift defeat of Japan, as well as pride in American know-how. And then the implications began to sink in. General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, commander of the United States Army Air Forces, warned the public that nuclear weapons “destructive beyond the wildest nightmares of the imagination” might someday be mounted on missiles, guided by radar, and aimed at American cities. Such an attack, once launched, would be impossible to stop. Despite having emerged from the conflict with unprecedented economic and military power, the United States suddenly felt more vulnerable than at any other time in its history. “Seldom if ever has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear,” CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow noted, “with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured.”

Hamilton Holt had attended the San Francisco Conference that created the United Nations, only weeks before the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the United Nations, Holt thought, wasn’t really a world government. It was just another league of sovereign states, doomed to failure. The men who attended the conference at Rollins College felt the same way, and they were hardly a bunch of wild-eyed radicals. Among those who signed Holt’s “Appeal to the Peoples of the World” were the president of the Standard Oil Company of Ohio, the chairman of the National Association of Manufacturers, three U.S. senators, one U.S. Supreme Court justice, a congressman, and Albert Einstein. The appeal called for the United Nations’ General Assembly to be transformed into the legislative branch of a world government. The General Assembly would be authorized to ban weapons of mass destruction, conduct inspections for such weapons, and use military force to enforce international law. “We believe these to be the minimum requirements,” the appeal concluded, “of a world government capable of averting another war in the atomic era.”

Within weeks of the conference at Rollins, a collection of essays demanding international control of the atomic bomb became a New York Times bestseller. Its title was One World or None. And a few months later, an opinion poll found that 54 percent of the American people wanted the United Nations to become “a world government with power to control the armed forces of all nations, including the United States.”

To a remarkable degree, even the U.S. military thought that the atomic bomb should be outlawed or placed under some form of international mandate. General Arnold was a contributor to One World or None. He’d been a leading proponent of strategic airpower and supervised the American bombing of both Germany and Japan. The stress had taken its toll. Arnold suffered four heart attacks during the war, and his essay in One World or None was a final public statement before retirement. The appeal of nuclear weapons, he wrote, was simply a matter of economics. They had lowered “the cost of destruction.” They had made it “too cheap and easy.” An air raid that used to require five hundred bombers now needed only one. Atomic bombs were terribly inexpensive, compared to the price of rebuilding cities. The only conceivable defense against such weapons was a strategy of deterrence — a threat to use them promptly against an enemy in retaliation. “A far better protection,” Arnold concluded, “lies in developing controls and safeguards that are strong enough to prevent their use on all sides.”

General Carl A. Spaatz, who replaced Arnold as the Army Air Forces commander, was an outspoken supporter of world government. General George C. Kenney, the head of the recently created Strategic Air Command, spent most of his time working on the military staff of the United Nations. General Leslie Groves — the military director of the Manhattan Project, who was staunchly anti-Communist and anti-Soviet — argued that the atomic bomb’s “very existence should make war unthinkable.” He favored international control of nuclear weapons and tough punishments for nations that tried to make them. Without such a system, he saw only one alternative for the United States. “If there are to be atomic bombs in the world,” Groves argued, “we must have the best, the biggest, and the most.”

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