The
Centrality of the Bomb
by Gar
Alperovitz and Kai Bird
Foreign
Policy (Spring 1994) No. 94: 3 -20.
Content:
Page
1 of 5
Introduction
Even though the Cold War's abrupt, peaceful demise rendered
useless most of the assumptions and theories advanced to explain
that strange conflict, orthodox historians have kept on writing
about it as if what actually happened had been inevitable.
Moreover, they largely avoid the specific role the atomic
bomb played in fueling the Cold War. In fact, the bomb was
a primary catalyst of the Cold War, and, apart from the nuclear
arms race, the most important specific role of nuclear weapons
was to revolutionize American policy toward Germany. The bomb
permitted U.S. leaders to do something no American president
could otherwise have contemplated: rebuild and rearm the former
Nazi state. That in turn had extraordinary, ongoing consequences.
The
bomb also made the Korean and Vietnam wars possible: Had the
weapon not been available to protect the U.S. global flank
in Europe, such episodes would always have been "the wrong
war in the wrong place at the wrong time," to use General
Omar Bradley's words. Finally, those who believed early on
that America and Russia could reach a great power accommodation
were probably right-and such an accommodation may well have
been delayed for four decades because the atomic bomb appeared
precisely when America and the Soviet Union were beginning
to feel their way to a new post-World War II relationship.
Not
only does that explanation of the Cold War offer a good measure
of common sense, but a vast body of new archival research
lends powerful support to the hypothesis. This is not to say
that frictions, rivalries, and areas of conflict would not
have existed between the major powers had there been no atomic
bomb. What needs to be explained is the extreme militarization
of great power relations that came to be called "the Cold
War."
Historians
like to see patterns, trends, and continuity in long periods
of development, but they rarely pause to reflect upon the
extreme chanciness of the timing of historically important
events. Consider the prehistory of nuclear weapons. Physicist
Hans Bethe once observed that it was only very "slowly and
painfully, through a comedy of errors, that the fission of
uranium was discovered."
It
was by mere chance, for instance, that Enrico Fermi made his
critical 1934 discoveries about the capacity of the atom's
nucleus to capture slow neutrons. Fermi's seemingly accidental
findings built on a line of development that began with Albert
Einstein's famous 1905 papers and continued with subsequent
reports and inventions by scientists such as Leo Szilard (in
connection with the cyclotron) and James Chadwick (in connection
with the existence of the neutron).
Most
accounts do not acknowledge that had twentieth-century physics
not been moving at the particular rate it did, America would
never have gotten to the 1939 Szilard-Einstein letter to President
Franklin Roosevelt, the 1941 MAUD Committee report, and then
the Manhattan Project -- to a sufficiently advanced point,
that is, where large sums of money and engineering expertise
could have produced an atomic bomb by August 1945. As Bethe's
remark suggests and others have noted, events might just as
well have moved a decade or two slower or perhaps faster.
With
that in mind, it is instructive to reflect on what might have
happened (or, more precisely, what probably would not have
happened) if the "independent track" of scientific historical
development had not reached fruition in 1945. What might the
postwar world have looked like in the absence of an early
U.S. atomic monopoly?
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