Yale was starting to provide such a contribution, not only in the Institute’s faculty but also through the students it was graduating. As early as 1942, the number of Yale students entering the Foreign Service had increased dramatically.
The most long-lasting influence, however, was yet to come. Bernard Brodie joined the Yale faculty on August 1, 1945. Five days later, the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. When Brodie came to his office at the Institute the next day. Bill Fox greeted him with the same question that Brodie had essentially posed to himself only a few seconds after glancing at the front page of the newspaper earlier that morning.
“Where does this leave you with your battleships?” Fox asked.
Brodie, still somewhat baffled, just shrugged.
2
LIVING WITH THE BOMB
A BUZZ OF EXCITEMENT dominated most discussions on the second floor of the Hall of Graduate Studies at Yale for the next month, all of it about the atom bomb. The significance of the weapon—that, with a single blow, it could destroy an entire city—sunk in quickly. Pondering the implications took longer. It was evident that the prevention of war between the Big Two now took on an even greater magnitude of importance, but how would that be accomplished? Does the bomb make war more likely or less? How would it be used in a war, to what end? Is it possible to impose international controls over the production and storage of these new weapons? What would World War III be like? Does the atom bomb mean the obsolescence of all other forms of military force?
The training in politics acquired at Chicago and Yale provided some guidelines. The first display of Yale thinking on the matter revealed itself back in Chicago. Just weeks after Hiroshima, Bill Fox talked with Edward Shils, a University of Chicago sociologist with whom Fox had once shared an office in the Social Science Research Building. Along with Chancellor Robert Hutchins and Eugene Rabinowitch, a physicist at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Lab, Shils was organizing a conference on the control of atomic energy. Hutchins was proud of the lab’s role in ending the war, but also felt disturbed by the enormous power of this weapon and how it might affect all humanity in any future war.
Some of the nation’s leading scientists would be there—Leo Szilard, a Met Lab physicist who had voiced his dissent against using the bomb before the war was over; David Lilienthal, director of the Tennessee Valley Authority and later chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission; Joyce Stearns, former director of the Chicago Met Lab; Harold Urey, physical chemistry professor at Chicago; Eugene Wigner, physicist at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, to name a few. There would also be some government officials, most notably Henry Wallace, who promised to report back on the conference to President Harry Truman himself.
It was an impressive list, but the organizers needed some political scientists, and they did not want to invite the older professors in Chicago’s departments. This was a new weapon, a new age, and they wanted new thinkers. Shils asked if Fox would like to come. He also asked Harold Lasswell, Edward Mead Earle, Jacob Viner and Bernard Brodie.
Brodie had already begun to investigate. For a man with training in the humanities, he was extremely adept at picking up technical concepts by quickly perusing scientific books and journals. He carefully read the Smyth Report, an official volume written by H. D. Smyth, a Princeton physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project at the Chicago Metallurgical Lab. The report, issued by the War Department only days after the atomic bombing of Japan, explained in general terms the structure of the bomb, what elements it contained and how it exploded. Sensing that the size of an atomic arsenal would dictate the strategy surrounding the weapon, Brodie also studied such arcane sources as the most recent volumes of the U.S. Bureau of Mines’ Minerals Report to learn whether critical uranium-ore deposits were scarce or plentiful. To compare the atomic bomb with war inventions of the past, he referred back to his first book and to the early official reports on the strategic bombing campaigns of World War II.
His first conclusion was that the A-bomb changed not merely the destructiveness but the very nature of war. Military inventions of the past, Brodie had reasoned, were always limited enough in scope and consequence to permit timely measures of adaptation by an opponent. Not so with the atom bomb: the war would probably be too brief to allow the time needed for developing those countermeasures or building up a force powerful enough to alter the course of the battle. This fact alone minimized the value of historical precedent.
Brodie had figured naval strategy would be his life’s work, but he was now forced to conclude that the Navy would play only a minor role in any future war. It wasn’t that ships would be destroyed by A-bombs; they could easily enough disperse and keep moving about on the vast ocean surface. More pertinent was that historically, navies have had value primarily in long wars, and the atom-bomb war would not last very long. The Navy would still be useful in maintaining foreign bases and in transporting the Army—which would still exist, though in streamlined form—to decisive points. And given Americans postwar commitments, the fleet could serve well as a policing force, a mission for which the A-bomb was superfluously destructive. However, the days when naval supremacy and wartime control of the seas dominated considerations of the balance of power were over.
The age of defenses was probably also finished. Brodie recalled that the defense of London against German V-1 rockets during World War II was considered remarkably effective. Yet from British Information Services bombing reports, Brodie knew that in one eighty-day period, 2,300 of those missiles hit the city. The peak effectiveness of defenses came on August 28, 1944, when out of 101 bombs that approached England, 97 were shot down before reaching London. This was indeed spectacular, but Brodie projected that figure into the future and thought, “If those four had been atomic bombs, London survivors would not have considered the record good.” To be effective, a defense against an atomic attack must be completely successful, and the annals of military history provided no encouragement for believing such perfection possible.
Finally, Brodie’s reading of the Smyth Report and the mineral yearbooks led him to deduce that the explosive materials necessary for A-bombs would remain scarce: not so scarce that an aggressor could not destroy all the cities he might want to, but scarce enough to make it wasteful to use the weapon against any but the most valuable targets. The most valuable targets, Brodie figured, were not the enemy’s military forces, which were widely scattered and (some of them) mobile, but its cities, in which the economic power and political machinery of a nation were greatly concentrated.