The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made by Walter Isaacson & Evan Thomas

Author:Walter Isaacson & Evan Thomas [Isaacson, Walter & Thomas, Evan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Political, History, Military, Strategy, United States, 20th Century, General
ISBN: 9781439126530
Google: DgNl1_VlG0sC
Amazon: B00768DB2S
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2012-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

“A DIFFERENT WORLD”

Of Super bombs and primitives

On September 3, 1949, an American B–29 weather reconnaissance plane recorded a higher than normal radioactive count eighteen thousand feet over the northern Pacific. Two days later, a second weather plane flying between Guam and Japan picked up another dose of radiation. As the winds swept the cloud eastward, more planes were sent aloft to collect samples. Their air filters absorbed fission isotopes of barium and cerium. By mid-September, U.S. scientists were convinced: there had been an atomic explosion in Russia.

Truman was incredulous at first. “Are you sure?” he asked. “Are you sure?” The President did not believe the Soviets were capable of building a bomb so quickly. But the Pentagon had no doubt. The Air Force called the explosion Operation Joe, after Stalin, and immediately pressed to increase U.S. A-bomb production. In Congress, Arthur Vandenberg believed the news. “This is now a different world,” he said.

America was no longer an island, protected by two oceans from the ravages of war. What had happened to London and Berlin, Tokyo and Stalingrad—or more precisely and unthinkably, Hiroshima and Nagasaki—could now happen to New York and Chicago. A quiet sense of dread spread through the country when Truman announced on September 23, “We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion has occurred in the U.S.S.R.” In London, Lloyd’s gave peace less than an even chance.

Without its monopoly on the bomb, the U.S. could no longer feel complacent about military superiority. Truman had been able to ignore Forrestal’s pleas for more and better conventional forces because he believed that the bomb alone would check Soviet aggression. Now he could not be so sure.

To George Kennan, the news gave a terrible urgency to his own cause. He began to see his mission as not merely defusing tensions along the East-West divide in Europe, but taking the first steps toward nuclear disarmament. He had already given notice that he would step down as head of PPS “as soon as possible,” but now he undertook one last assignment: exploring the ramifications of the Soviet bomb for U.S. national security planning. He began planning, as it were, against doomsday.

Kennan had increasingly lost touch with, and control over, his own Policy Planning Staff. Its members had ignored his qualms about creating a Western Alliance in 1948. By the fall of 1949, a member of the staff recalls, Kennan had stopped trying to shape consensus. In meetings, he would be “wholly frank” and “listen closely.” But after the discussion around the table had gotten to the point where Kennan had “heard all he wanted to,” he would go off with his secretary to a little office he kept in the Library of Congress. There, undisturbed, he would write. Once done, the staffer recalls he was locked in; he would not compromise. Any tinkering, he believed, would ruin his document’s essence, its “inner worth.” He wanted the paper to be “pure Kennan, or nothing.”

The staffer who offers this description of Kennan’s modus operandi in the fall of 1949 is Paul Nitze.

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