Bernard Brodie was supposed to think about the strategic implications of all this. The calculations of bomb damage done by his colleagues pushed Brodie even further along a line of thinking that he had begun to pursue one year earlier while examining the U.S. targeting plans for General Hoyt Vandenberg, Air Force Chief of Staff. At that time, Brodie had concluded that the indiscriminate bombing of Soviet cities would be militarily ineffective and would only prompt the Soviets to destroy American cities in return; that damaging some Soviet targets, while leaving their cities intact, could give the United States some bargaining power after a war had already started; that we could threaten the Soviets by saying, “Back off or we’ll hit your cities with our remaining weapons”; that those remaining weapons would not only serve to deter the Soviets from destroying American cities, but might also compel them to come to the peace tables.
The hydrogen bomb reinforced Brodie’s thinking and also stretched it. At least with the A-bomb there were still a few restraints. To destroy some targets, the bombs would have to be fairly accurate, and that posed several problems. But the RAND team’s calculations revealed that the hydrogen bomb was so powerful that it could miss targets by two miles or more and still destroy whatever target anyone might want to hit. With the A-bomb, there was the problem of scarcity of fissionable materials. Even before the H-bomb, this problem was gradually being solved by an acceleration in the production of these materials. But the H-bomb eliminated the problem entirely: just one bomb could destroy the largest Soviet or American city, along with every important industrial target in it.
Before this project, Brodie had decided that the atomic bomb was “not so absolute a weapon that we can disregard the limits of its destructive power,” and that, therefore, the “problem of target selection, for example, [was] still important.” The hydrogen bomb, however, “makes strategic bombing very efficient, perhaps all too efficient. We no longer need to argue whether the conduct of war is an art or a science—it is neither.” A theme that Brodie had composed during his Pentagon days emerged much more clearly: “The art or science comes in only in finding out, if you’re interested, what not to hit.”
A few months earlier, Brodie had not understood the famous dictum of Karl von Clausewitz, the nineteenth-century Prussian warrior-philosopher—the much-cited expression, “War is a continuation of policy by other means.” Brodie had thought, and had even written, that a war fought with atomic bombs would be “much too violent to fit into any concept of a continuation of diplomacy.” However, since learning of the H-bomb’s enormously destructive power, Brodie came to see that Clausewitz was saying something extraordinarily profound—“that war is violence… but it is planned violence and therefore controlled. And since the objective should be rational, the procedure for accomplishing that objective should also be rational, which is to say that the procedure and the objective must be in some measure appropriate to each other.”
Applying this to the new age of the hydrogen bomb, Brodie concluded that there could no longer be anything rational about the strategic bombing of any target that lies inside the Soviet Union. That would only spark Soviet retaliation, with monumentally destructive effect in the United States. Brodie realized that “national objectives cannot be consonant with national suicide”—and “there is no use talking about a mutual exchange of nuclear weapons, including the type of the future [the H-bomb], as being anything other than national suicide.”
Still, in the evolution of his thinking over the past six years, Brodie came to see that war must have objectives, and while he was never among those who thought war with the U.S.S.R. imminent, he did think it was possible. In that case, how could a nation use something like the hydrogen bomb in such a way that the “procedure” would be commensurate with the “objective”? One thing seemed clear at the time to Brodie and to nearly all of his contemporaries: “We seem to be destined or doomed,” as Brodie put it, “to a permanent inferiority [to the U.S.S.R.] in numbers of men on the ground in Western Europe.” One way of compensating for this inferiority was through superior firepower, and it was “quite clear that weapons of this sort plus the conventional nuclear weapon introduce a fantastic augmentation of firepower.
“Strategic bombing has been defined as that action which destroys the war-making capacity of the enemy,” Brodie said in a top-secret Air War College lecture, delivered in April 1952. “But I have the feeling that burning up his armies, if you can accomplish it, does the same thing. One may be as easy as the other, and certainly we shouldn’t have to do both.” A problem with battlefield use of atomic weapons was trying to locate precisely where the opposing armies might be. With the H-bomb, the point became moot. You could wipe out entire rear areas of whole divisions. Thus, “if… nuclear weapons would actually enable us to break and burn the Soviet armies on the ground wherever they might commit aggression, we might decide that it was possible, I won’t say to win a war, but to secure our objectives without bombing enemy cities.”
It wasn’t that Brodie was wildly enthusiastic about the prospect of fighting a thermonuclear war in Europe. Who could be after examining those sickening circles of damage that Jim Lipp had laid down on a map of the Continent? Brodie’s advocacy was more an argument of desperation. The Soviet Union appeared to have preponderance in non-nuclear forces. If the Red Army did start moving across the plains of West Germany, there was, to Brodie’s mind, nothing to be done except to start dropping nuclear bombs.
The argument was similar to the one made by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the great physicist and director of the wartime Manhattan Project, the “father of the atom bomb,” as he was often called. In the fall of 1951, Oppenheimer had been involved in a study at the California Institute of Technology called Project Vista. Its basic conclusion: “bring the battle back to the battlefield”—essentially for the same reasons that Brodie outlined in his H-bomb study the following winter. With something so powerful as the H-bomb, strategic bombing of Soviet cities made no sense, it was immoral, and it was probably also suicidal.
Brodie knew Oppenheimer. They first met in September 1947, when Oppenheimer delivered a lecture at the National War College in Washington, D.C., and Brodie introduced him. In February 1951, while Brodie was working for General Vandenberg, he and Oppenheimer talked at least three times, mostly about the nation’s nuclear targeting plans and how they might be changed. It is unclear whether either of the two influenced the other, but they were certainly thinking along the same track.
Brodie would later change his views on the feasibility of battlefield nuclear war—and then he would change his views again, for a variety of intellectual and personal reasons. But one problem that Brodie would continue to grapple with, and one that would come to preoccupy the minds of other RAND strategists a few years later, was the dilemma of how in the thermonuclear age to integrate the enormous power of the hydrogen bomb with a set of sensible war aims and national objectives, how to impose force effectively without committing “national suicide,” how to use the H-bomb rationally.
For all the horror surrounding the hydrogen bomb, Brodie, Hitch and Plesset all agreed that the nation had to go ahead and build the new weapon. There was hardly any discussion of the issue. The Russians had the atom bomb; they could probably build the hydrogen bomb at some point if they wanted to do so; we had to get it first. That was the basic line of thinking. The Cold War was heating up; the Korean War was being waged (and almost everyone assumed at the time that it was being directed from the Kremlin); not very many, in this environment, were thinking about starting disarmament talks or unilaterally holding back on developing a major new weapon of unprecedented power.