After the war, Einstein regretted having helped the Allies by persuading FDR to pursue A-bomb research. He lamented to his secretary: “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb, I would never have lifted a finger. Not a single finger!”
The Nazis did, however, jump into a huge lead in another department during the war. The great German rocketeer Wernher von Braun led development of “vengeance weapons”—the German “V” series of rockets. V-1s—jet-powered low-flying subsonic missiles that usually can be steered in flight (what today we call cruise missiles, albeit the pioneering V-1 was not maneuverable)—began dropping on London in 1944. Later that year, the V-2, the world’s first true military ballistic missile, hit London. (A ballistic missile—from “ballista,” a medieval catapult of large stones—is set on its course by a few minutes of powered flight, then coasts until gravity pulls it back to earth.) Unlike the V-1, which flew at constant speed and altitude until its final plunge, and thus could be easily shot down by ground fire or by intercepting aircraft, the V-2 attained a velocity of nearly one mile per second and thus fell on its targets with no warning, arriving before the sound of its approach. Had Hitler’s warheads carried atom bombs of the kind dropped on Japan in August 1945, the heart of London could have been obliterated with but a few such hits.[2]
The nuclear age formally began on the morning of July 16, 1945, when in the New Mexico desert the Trinity device was detonated. Its blinding brightness led Oppenheimer, leader of the Manhattan Project, to famously recall a verse from the Indian epic, the Bhagavad-Gita (“The Song of God”):
If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one. For I am become Death, shatterer of worlds.
Oppenheimer’s awe-induced invocation of ancient sacred poetry was spot-on: the glare from the blast would have been visible from the planet Jupiter, some one-half billion miles away from Earth.
The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than a month later changed warfare and global politics forever. The age that began two-thirds of a century ago has gone through several stages—from the all-out arms race of 1945 to 1967, to the arms control of the seventies and eighties, and finally to the era of rogue nuclear weapons proliferation we entered in the early nineties.
Nuclear History, 1945–Present
WITH A combination of wartime espionage at Los Alamos and its own scientists at Sarov (the monastery town turned closed city for the Russian bomb project), the Soviet Union lagged only four years behind the U.S. in nuclear bomb building.
The end of the war found the former allies now armed with nuclear weapons, facing off in a struggle lasting nearly 50 years, with Europe divided by Soviet aggression. Though labeled “cold,” the war was very hot in several major regional proxy conflicts and numerous smaller fronts around the globe. Nuclear arsenals kept the two superpowers not only from a nuclear conflict, but from a major direct conventional-force conflict as well.
The race to develop the “Super”—the H-bomb—began right after Russia exploded its first A-bomb. In 1952, the Americans vaporized an atoll in the South Pacific with a massive hydrogen device, one far too large to qualify as a true bomb. The Soviet H-bomb was tested in August 1953 on the steppes of Kazakhstan. The vast power of these hydrogen bombs made destruction not merely of cities, but of civilization itself, a plausible prospect.
In December 1953 President Eisenhower announced his Atoms for Peace program, when only three powers—the U.S., Soviet Union, and United Kingdom—had gone nuclear. His idea was to provide a compelling reason for countries not to pursue nuclear energy for military purposes. In exchange for such forbearance they were to be guaranteed help in developing peaceful atomic energy uses. Under the aegis of Atoms for Peace, dozens of nations received economic and technical aid to develop commercial nuclear technology. Coupled with America’s precipitous 1946 disclosure of Manhattan Project technology, knowledge pertaining to nuclear weapons began spreading around the globe. As there is no bright line between commercial research and military use (see the “Interlude” at the end of chapter 7), out popped the proliferation genie.
The year 1957 brought new urgency to the technology arms race with two dramatic Soviet triumphs. That August, the Soviet Union tested the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), a ballistic missile with a range further than 5,500 kilometers—around 3,500 miles, roughly the distance from Nova Scotia to Portugal. Such a device was hardly inevitable: FDR’s wartime science adviser, Dr. Vannevar Bush, told Congress in December 1945 that such a machine could never work. But Stalin wanted it; in 1947 he was telling senior deputies that an ICBM “could be an effective straitjacket for that noisy shopkeeper Harry Truman.” Two months after the Soviets tested their ICBM, they had their second triumph: they launched the world’s first orbiting satellite, Sputnik (“traveler”).
Between 1957 and 1967 the superpowers raced to close the window of nation-ending catastrophic vulnerability the new technologies had opened. They hid their intercontinental ballistic missiles underground in storage cylinders, encasing underground launch pads, all bearing the gentle agrarian name of “missile silos.” They hid intermediate-range ballistic missiles under the oceans in submarines, and they retained air bases for their strategic bombers. As technology improved, this “triad” of nuclear systems (a nuclear “system” is a weapon plus the platform on which that weapon is mounted) reduced each side’s vulnerability to a surprise nuclear first strike, what nuclear strategists call the “bolt from the blue.”
In the first quarter century of nuclear weaponry, five nations conducted hundreds of above ground tests. Almost half came in 1962 alone, the peak of worldwide nuclear testing. Most of these were U.S. tests in Nevada and in the Pacific Ocean on the Marshall Islands. A few were British tests in the Australian outback and on Christmas Island. France tested in Algeria. China tested its devices in its vast western interior, and the rest were Soviet tests in Kazakhstan or in the Arctic at Novaya Zemlya. Amid rising awareness of nuclear fallout, the U.S., Soviet Union, and Great Britain agreed in the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 that they would confine future tests to shots fired deep in underground testing caverns.
To reduce the risk of nuclear war between the two superpowers, a quarter century of intense efforts at arms control followed the all-out race. Arms control became a dominant theme in 1967 when the United States announced it would unilaterally freeze—that is, freeze without Russia’s participation—the number of offensive nuclear weapons platforms it deployed. Arms control acquired iconic status in 1972 with the U.S.-Soviet agreement known as SALT I. Superpower arms-control agreements became central strategic policy. Many politicians and analysts treated arms control as uniquely important among national security issues.
The 1973 Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War brought the superpowers close to nuclear war again—notwithstanding their arms-control talks of the previous year. Soviet and American naval ships drifted into a tense confrontation in the Mediterranean, as the U.S. declared the highest nuclear alert since the Cuban Missile Crisis. As in 1962, cooler heads prevailed, and catastrophe was averted.
2
In an 80-day period in 1944, 2,300 V-1s hit London. In their best day, the British defenders—using ground-based anti-aircraft guns and pursuit planes like the Spitfire—shot down all but four 4 of 101 incoming V-1s. As the strategist Bernard Brodie later observed of that day’s tally, “But if those four had been atomic bombs, London survivors would not have considered the record good.” Of 4,300 V-2s launched at London, 1,200 landed within the 30-mile target area.