From this, Brodie inferred important political implications. First, a nation must remain constantly prepared for war; there will be neither the time nor the surviving industrial machinery to mobilize once atom bombs start exploding. This constant readiness may encourage aggression, exacerbate world tension or possibly even spark in some men’s minds the luring temptation of “preventive war.” Then again, the calamity that would certainly ensue if the other side struck back with its own atom bombs would be so grimly devastating that its very anticipation might deter a potential aggressor from attacking in the first place. Brodie wrote up a three-page outline summarizing these thoughts and took it with him to Chicago. The conference was held at his alma mater from Wednesday, September 19, through Saturday the 22nd.
On the question of whether the A-bomb would deter or foster war between the great powers, Brodie had still not made up his mind. At the conference, he simply laid out the arguments that would support either side of the question. Nor had Brodie decided on an answer by the beginning of November, when the Institute of International Studies published his twenty-eight-page monograph, The Atomic Bomb and American Security, essentially an elaboration of his informal talk at Chicago.
However, Brodie’s Chicago mentor, Jacob Viner, had made up his mind. In the course of his Chicago Conference talk on the economic implications of the bomb, Viner flatly stated, “The atomic bomb makes surprise an unimportant element of warfare. Retaliation in equal terms is unavoidable and in this sense the atomic bomb is a war deterrent, a peace-making force.”
Viner, who was visiting Yale that fall, accepted Brodie’s assumption that cities were the only efficient target of an atom-bomb attack. With that premise in mind, Viner kept repeating to Brodie, over and over, a point that he found irresistibly logical. If a country has made all the obvious preparations for a possible attack from the enemy, Viner reasoned, it could certainly retaliate with an atomic attack of its own. Since all the cities on both sides will be destroyed in the aftermath, going first holds no advantage. As Viner put the case to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia on November 16, “What difference will it then make whether it was Country A which had its cities destroyed at 9 A.M. and Country B which had its cities destroyed at 12 A.M., or the other way around?”
The logic was indeed unassailable, and Brodie was finally convinced.
Bill Fox came back from the Chicago Conference with a deep feeling that most of the professionals thrashing about in the realm of atomic-energy control were off in a forest of ideals and assumptions uninhabited by real leaders of real nations in the real world. Most of the scientists talked about creating an establishment for controlling atomic energy as if the task were not much less mechanical than that of building an atomic bomb—as if the over-whelming problems of national power and of creating political incentives for convincing nations to submit to such a program entailed no uniquely insuperable difficulties.
Even his friend Ed Shils, in a speech at the conference, had gone on about how an “agreement not to use atomic bombs… can never be… successful unless it exists on a foundation of moral consensus among the major states of the earth,” and that the problem is “how, in the time that remains to us, before the knowledge and technique required to construct atomic bombs is so widely diffused as to produce an ‘arms race’—how can we promote by education and propaganda, and by the partial modifications of existing institutions, the state of mind without which there will be neither demand for nor acceptance of a World State.”
Fox thought it might be feasible to develop some sort of international inspection system to regulate or prohibit the manufacture of atom bombs, and he thought that the United States, having been the only country to have thus far used the weapon, must assume the moral leadership to take the first bold steps in offering such a plan to the world. But all this talk about a “World State” was for dreamers. Maybe in several decades, maybe after the system of nation-states had been thoroughly jolted and scrambled and knocked out of place by some cataclysmic series of events, but it was not the sort of thing that sounded at all practical or even desirable to someone trained in thinking about these matters by the likes of Quincy Wright, Jacob Viner and the group at Yale.
“Proposals for the short-run and middle-run future must operate within the existing multi-state system,” Fox cautioned his listeners during his Chicago Conference talk. “Other things being equal, proposals which promise least disturbance to the existing balance of interests between and within states will find more general acceptance.”
Calls for a world government were widespread among serious-minded people. Norman Cousins’ words in The Saturday Review of Literature of August 18 were typical of these expressions: “There is no need to discuss the historical reasons pointing to and arguing for a world government. There is no need to talk of the difficulties in the way of world government. There is need only to ask whether we can afford to do without it. All other considerations become either secondary or inconsequential.”
Fox and his colleagues at Yale disagreed, not because they were opposed to the control of atomic weapons but because they thought that if the elusive path to world government was the only one followed by the community most immersed—and probably most influential—in the business of controlling the new weapon, then all such efforts would be doomed, from their irrelevance, to failure.
Ted Dunn liked to quote a Robert Browning poem that made the very same point:
Fox and Dunn decided that the Institute should put out a book through a commercial publisher, a collection of essays by a few members of the staff that would make a firm case for the control of atomic weapons, but that would also lay out the facts about the nature of the bomb, its political implications and how ideas about the avoidance of its use might fit into what they saw as a more realistic view of world politics.
The book was eventually called The Absolute Weapon and subtitled Atomic Power and World Order. An internal copy was privately circulated to a small number of specialists in February 1946 and appeared under the Harcourt, Brace imprint in June. The title was taken from a passage in the essay by Bill Fox, explaining that, unlike all other weapons, any numerical advantage that one side might possess in atomic bombs has little impact on the balance of power as long as the other side has enough weapons to destroy any enemy’s cities. “When dealing with the absolute weapon,” Fox wrote, “arguments based on relative advantage lose their point.”
Dunn appointed Arnold Wolfers to write on “The Atomic Bomb in Soviet-American Relations,” Percy Corbett (an international lawyer on the Institute’s staff) to analyze the “Effect on International Organization,” and Bill Fox to expound on “International Control of Atomic Weapons,” an essay that especially took after those who rallied behind the slogan “World Government Now.” Ted Dunn wrote the introduction. Its title: “The Common Problem,” named after his favorite Browning poem.
The bulk of the book Dunn turned over to Bernard Brodie. Yale’s president, Charles Seymour, especially admired Brodie’s work on The Atomic Bomb and American Security, calling it “one of the coolest as well as most comprehensive discussions of what the world must now face.” The monograph was admired by high-ranking officials in the Departments of State and War; Brodie was, along with Dunn and Fox, made consultant to the State Department on methods of controlling the A-bomb, and he was appointed chairman of an atomic-energy committee of the Social Science Research Council.