President Truman directed at the start of 1950 that the Super be built, not knowing if Russia had an H-bomb program. Paul Nitze (who during the 45 years of the Cold War served in more senior national security capacities than anyone else) recalled that Truman’s decision to build the Super was guided ultimately by fear that Stalin would go ahead if advised such a device were technically feasible. In fact, Stalin had authorized the Russian H-bomb program two months after the Soviet Union’s first atomic test, and three months before Truman authorized the American one.
For decades the myth persisted that if only the U.S. had refrained from developing the hydrogen bomb, the Russians might well have reciprocated. But the memoirs of Andrei Sakharov, the so-called father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb and later a prominent antinuclear weapons advocate, demolish that theory. Sakharov makes clear that had America held back, Stalin and his legendarily sadistic secret-police chief Lavrenti Beria would have exploited such restraint:
The Soviet Government (or, more properly, those in power: Stalin, Beria and company) already understood the potential of the new weapon, and nothing could have dissuaded them from going forward with its development. Any U.S. move toward abandoning or suspending work on a thermonuclear weapon would have been perceived either as a cunning, deceitful maneuver or as evidence of stupidity or weakness. In any case, the Soviet reaction would have been the same: to avoid a possible trap, and to exploit the adversary’s folly at the earliest opportunity. (Emphasis added.)
American diplomat George Kennan, a senior official serving in Russia during much of Stalin’s tenure, gave this grim assessment of Stalin:
His words were few. They generally sounded reasonable and sensible; indeed, often they were. An unforewarned visitor would never have guessed what depths of calculation, ambition, love of power, jealousy, cruelty, and sly vindictiveness lurked behind this unpretentious façade.
The need to raise public awareness of the challenge posed by Stalin prompted Winston Churchill’s famous words in his March 5, 1946, address at Fulton, Missouri: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”
Kennan, for his part, writing in 1947 under the pseudonym “X” for the influential journal Foreign Affairs, literally defined America’s post-war “containment” strategy:
The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies….
Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographic and political points.
The U.S. won the race to detonate a thermonuclear device. “Ivy Mike” was exploded November 1, 1952, on a Pacific atoll named Elugelab. It demolished the atoll and yielded an awesome 10.4 megatons, 700 times more powerful than the yield of the Hiroshima bomb and 500 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki. But the device was, at 62 tons, not deliverable as a practical weapon.
The first Russian H-bomb test followed on August 12, 1953, 16 days after North and South Korea signed their armistice. Yet America did not test an operational H-bomb, carried by a bomber, until May 1956. The official American reaction to early nuclear bomb milestones was to treat potential nuclear war as merely souped-up conventional conflict. Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, propounded his “massive retaliation” policy at the beginning of 1954: any kind of attack launched by the Soviet Union would be met—at least, in theory—with an all-out nuclear response. In October 1953 President Eisenhower authorized full-scale production of the B-52 Stratofortress strategic heavy bomber in anticipation of America deploying a deliverable H-bomb. The massive eight-jet plane, designed to reach the Soviet Union at high subsonic jet speed and deliver H-bombs without refueling, entered service in 1955 and remains in the U.S. inventory today.
The prime consequence of these thermonuclear weapons has turned out quite different from what was originally forecast. The early bombs’ massive devastation gave them, as noted by the eminent strategist Herman Kahn, the plausible potential to literally destroy civilizations, not just to level small cities, as atom bombs could. Uranium or plutonium atomic bombs produce explosive yields in kilotons—the equivalent of thousands of tons of conventional explosives like TNT. (The Hiroshima device was estimated to yield 14 kilotons.) But hydrogen bomb yields are theoretically without limit. The largest devices yield megatons (millions of tons of TNT), whereas the highest yield ever achieved with an A-bomb is 500 kilotons. (The 1961 test of Russia’s Tsar Bomba produced a stupefying yield of 50 megatons.) Though that huge bomb—too large to fit in a bomb bay, let alone inside a missile warhead—was not deliverable as a weapon, a 25-megaton H-bomb was—still is—very deliverable.
Yet the longer-term impact of H-bombs was to enable packing more explosive power into smaller, lighter warheads and not to destroy the largest possible area. Miniaturization was driven by the need to maximize firepower carried by bombers and missiles and, in the West, to reduce collateral casualties—especially arising from use of tactical nuclear weapons deployed in Western Europe, which might have had to be fired against targets on Allied soil.
In a 1959 article, “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter evaluated strategy in a world containing such devastating weapons. In the early 1950s, he had led a team at a new research-and-development think tank for the armed forces (the storied RAND Corporation, founded in 1948), which had stunned air force brass in its evaluation of the extreme risks posed by Soviet A-bombs to U.S. forces overseas—risks that early warning systems, hardened shelters for bombers, and more intelligent basing of bombers and ballistic missiles could drastically reduce. In his seminal article, Wohlstetter concisely laid down the theoretical foundation for strategic nuclear force structure. He saw that a force should be designed to deter first strikes by promising effective retaliation if deterrence failed.
For that strategy to work the American force had to be able to survive a massive nuclear attack and still retain enough forces to retaliate. Nuclear submarines, because they are exceptionally hard to detect and track, provided the ideal missile bases—especially as the range of submarine-launched ballistic missiles increased, enabling the subs to cruise underneath ever-larger portions of the world’s oceans. Eventually their range would reach 6,000 miles, making the job of locating them almost impossible. On land, missile silos could be “hardened”—with concrete and powerful shock-absorbing springs between the missile canister and the outside walls of the underground silo—to radically improve their ability to withstand a nuclear near miss.
A properly designed force, Wohlstetter wrote, could increase what strategists call “crisis stability”: the ability of a nuclear state to ride out an attack would obviate the need to launch missiles instantly—either during a crisis, or upon (potentially fallible) warning of an attack, or during the attack itself—before damage assessment has been done. In contrast, forces vulnerable to a surprise attack would leave leaders with a “use or lose” proposition in times of extreme tension between nuclear-armed powers, encouraging them to fire when otherwise they might not do so.