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Review Article Counting the Costs of the Nuclear Age Review article Counting the costs of the nuclear age THEO FARRELL Atomic audit: the costs and consequences of US nuclear weapons since . Edited by Stephen I. Schwartz. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, . pp. Index. . America’s NBC radio was suitably dramatic in its report of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. ‘Anglo-Saxon science has developed a new explosive , times as destructive as any known before’, it announced. The broadcaster went on to warn that ‘For all we know, we have created a Frankenstein! We must assume that with the passage of only a little time, an improved form of the new weapon we use today can be turned against us.’ As things turned out, the United States had indeed created a nuclear monster, which consumed huge amounts of public resources and quickly grew to threaten the very existence of humanity. Throughout the Cold War, the true costs and dangers of the nuclear age were hidden behind a veil of secrecy. However, recent years have seen far greater access to archival and interview material on this highly sensitive area of national security. This, in turn, has enabled scholars to construct a far more accurate and terrifying picture of the dangers faced in the nuclear age. Now with Atomic audit we also have a better idea of how much it cost: $. trillion for the American taxpayer alone. Cited in Paul Boyer, By the bomb’s early light: American thought and culture at the dawn of the atomic age (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, , nd edn, p.. The key works here are Bruce Blair, The logic of accidental nuclear war (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, ); Scott D. Sagan, The limits of safety: organizations, accidents, and nuclear weapons (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ); and Richard Rhodes, Dark sun: the making of the hydrogen bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, ). In an appendix it is noted that the costs for the Soviet Union are impossible to calculate with any accuracy. Partial costs are provided for the British, French, Chinese and South African nuclear programmes, while no mention is made of the Indian, Pakistani, North Korean, Iraqi, Israeli and Swedish nuclear programmes. Stephen I. Schwartz, ed., Atomic audit: the costs and consequences of US nuclear weapons since (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, ), pp. -. Information on the nuclear programmes of all these states may be obtained from The High Energy Weapons Archive at: <http://www.enviroweb.org/enviroissues/nuketesting/hew/> International Affairs , () ‒ 8. Farrell.PM6 121 18/12/98, 1:57 pm Theo Farrell So what does this new nuclear history tell us? We now know that there was nothing inevitable about the development of large offensive nuclear forces by the superpowers. Rather, superpower dependency on nuclear weapons was socially constructed by political actors. It has also been revealed that nuclear weapons intensified Cold War crises to a greater extent than previously appreciated, and created situations where accidental nuclear use could easily have occurred. This review article discusses each of these points in turn. It concludes by examining a number of imperatives for a new assessment of the nuclear age, namely, pressure for post-Cold War reductions in defence expenditure, the desire to apply Cold War lessons to new nuclear powers, and the gathering momentum for comprehensive nuclear disarmament. Making the nuclear monster The nuclear age was so costly and dangerous during the Cold War because the United States and Soviet Union each developed very large offensive nuclear force structures. By , a mere two years into the Cold War, America already had committed itself to developing super-powerful hydrogen bombs and was building up a massive fleet of strategic bombers to deliver them. There was nothing inevitable about this. Rather, a powerful social network containing US air force officers, senior officials in the Truman administration, and unilateralist Republicans in Congress constructed the need for offensive nuclear forces and mobilized the resources necessary for their development. Air force and administration officials exaggerated the scale and immediacy of the Soviet military threat in order to generate domestic political support for an American military build-up.4 The favoured scheme of President Harry Truman for Universal Military Training, which would provide a cheap and ready source of military manpower, was defeated in Congress by a coalition led by unilateral Republican senators.5 Another alternative, for America to rely on strategic defence, was never seriously considered not because it was believed to be technologically unfeasible, but because the air force led a successful campaign to discredit personally anyone who advocated strategic defence.6 This left only one option, namely, to build up offensive nuclear forces. In his masterful study of the Soviet nuclear weapons programme, David Holloway shows how it was spurred on by US nuclear developments. America’s David Alan Rosenberg, ‘American atomic strategy and the hydrogen bomb decision’, Journal of American History :, , pp. –; Matthew Evangelista, ‘Stalin’s postwar army reappraised’, International Security : , /, pp. –; Frank Kofsky, Harry S. Truman and the war scare of (New York: St Martin’s, ); Jack Snyder, Myths of empire: domestic politics and international ambition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), pp. –. Lynn Eden, ‘Capitalist conflict and the state: the making of United States military policy in ’, in Charles Bright and Susan Harding, eds, Statemaking and social movements (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, ), pp. –. David Goldfischer, The best defence: policy alternatives for US nuclear security from the s to s (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ). David Holloway, Stalin and the bomb (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, ). 8. Farrell.PM6 122 18/12/98, 1:57 pm Counting the costs of the nuclear age atomic bombing of Japan impressed upon Stalin the importance of nuclear weapons to world politics, and led the Soviets to pour ever more scarce resources into developing nuclear weapons. Interestingly, even at this early stage in the game Stalin realized that nuclear weapons were primarily useful as symbols of power rather than military instruments of power. This raises the all-important question: would American restraint have prevented a nuclear arms race? The United States had two opportunities to show nuclear restraint before superpower relations collapsed into Cold War. First was a proposal by Niels Bohr (the Danish physicist) for America to share some of its nuclear secrets with the Soviets prior to use of the atom bomb against Japan. Prompted by Winston Churchill’s suspicions of Stalin, President Franklin D. Roosevelt rejected Bohr’s suggestion. In succeeding Roosevelt, Truman, supported by his new hard-line Secretary of State, James Byrnes, also decided to keep the Soviets in the dark. Truman merely hinted at America’s invention of a new powerful weapon in a private discussion with Stalin at the Potsdam Conference in late July , just a few weeks before the use of the bomb. In fact, the American nuclear programme was riddled with Soviet spies (to the extent that the first Soviet atomic bomb was of American design). Since Stalin knew all about the American bomb, he was also fully aware of the extent of America’s deception. The other opportunity for American restraint was the plan, presented before the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission in June by US spokesman Bernard Baruch, for all military applications of nuclear energy to be placed under the control of the UN while allowing individual states to develop peaceful uses. The Baruch Plan was rejected by the Soviet Union because it enabled the United States to retain its monopoly in nuclear weapons expertise (backed up by the threat of UN-sponsored military force). What if the Americans had trusted the Soviets with the wartime secret of the atomic bomb’s existence? What if the Baruch Plan had been more fair? Would the Soviets have reciprocated? Probably not, according to Holloway. In Soviet eyes, the very fact that America had the atomic bomb meant that the Soviet Union also had to have it, regardless of what America did. Holloway also claims that nothing could be done to prevent the Soviets developing hydrogen (or thermonuclear) weapons either. Realizing that the hydrogen bomb could be up to one thousand times more powerful than the The symbolism of nuclear weapons is explored in Robert Jervis, The meaning of the nuclear revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), pp. –. The arms race is a useful metaphor only in the loose sense that some kind of competitive dynamic may exist in the armament patterns of rival states. How individual states actually arm is shaped by a combination of factors internal as well as external to the state. See Theo Farrell, Weapons without a cause: the politics of weapons acquisition in the United States (Basingstoke: Macmillan, ). For an effective critique of the ‘arms race’ concept, see Colin S. Gray, ‘Arms races and other pathetic fallacies: a case for deconstruction’, Review of International Studies : , , pp. –. McGeorge Bundy, Danger and survival: choices about the bomb in the first fifty years (New York: Random House, ), pp. –. Holloway, Stalin and the bomb, pp. –. 8. Farrell.PM6 123 18/12/98, 1:57 pm Theo Farrell atomic bomb, American policy-makers debated whether or not to develop it. A few even suggested that America should negotiate a thermonuclear test ban treaty with the Soviets. However, in Truman decided to push on with development of thermonuclear weapons, leading two years later to a small Pacific island being wiped off the map by the test detonation of a megaton hydrogen bomb. In , the Soviets followed suit with their own thermonuclear test. Holloway points out that, unlike the Americans, the Soviets never made any qualitative distinction between atomic and hydrogen weapons. America hesitated in developing the hydrogen bomb because some (in particular scientists) saw it as a weapon of genocide.
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