The Centrality of the Bomb
by Gar Alperovitz and Kai Bird
Foreign Policy (Spring 1994) No. 94: 3 -20.

That interpretation returns us to a central point, namely that the U.S. decision to rearm West Germany was made possible only by the atomic bomb.

Modern writers often forget the degree of concern in the U.S. foreign policy establishment and elsewhere about the former Nazi state in the early postwar years. Even after the outbreak of the Korean War - and even with the atomic bomb - Truman's high commissioner in Germany, John McCloy, initially opposed the creation of a German national army. So too did his successor, James Conant. And when they changed their minds, both men had to deal with the unrelenting opposition of the French. As late as August 1950, the State Department declared it "opposed, and still strongly opposes, the creation of German national forces."

Further, Truman himself was deeply worried about the Germans - again, even with the bomb. Among many indications of Truman's worry was a memo to Secretary of State Dean Acheson in June 1950:

"We certainly don't want to make the same mistake that was made after World War I when Germany was authorized to train one hundred thousand soldiers, principally for maintaining order locally in Germany. As you know, that hundred thousand was used for the basis of training the greatest war machine that ever came forth in European history."

Truman also recognized that he faced very powerful domestic political opposition to rearming a nation that had so recently caused the deaths of so many American boys. "From today's perspective, the rearmament of Germany seems natural and almost inevitable," writes historian Frank Ninkovich in a recent study.

"To achieve it, however, American policy makers had to clear a long series of hurdles, including self-doubts, widespread European reluctance, and Soviet obstructionism.... The amazing thing, then, is not that rearmament took place with such enormous difficulty, but that it happened at all."

Amazing, indeed! All but unimaginable in the absence of nuclear weapons or popular support for maintaining major conventional forces. As Roosevelt had forecast, the American people overwhelmingly demanded rapid demobilization after the war. In June 1945, the United States had more than 12 million men and women under arms, but one year later the figure was only 3 million, and by June 1947 demobilization had left the armed services with no more than 1.5 million personnel. Congress defeated universal military training in 1947 and in 1948; defense spending in general declined rapidly during the first postwar years. Such domestic political realities left U.S. policymakers empty-handed: They did not have sufficient conventional forces to hold down the Germans.

Given such realities - and considering the extraordinary difficulty of achieving German rearmament even with U.S. possession of the atornic bomb - it is all but impossible to imagine the early rearmament of the former Nazi enemy had there been no atomic bomb. Put another way, had the scientific-technical track of development that yielded the knowledge required to make an atomic weapon not chanced to reach the point it had by 1939, the central weapon in America's postwar diplomatic arsenal would not have existed.

There is a further reason why we believe this hypothesis explains the early Cold War dynamic: German rearmament and the U.S. Cold War conventional buildup, many scholars recognize, probably could not have happened without the dramatic U.S. decision to enter the Korean War. That decision, in turn, was made possible only by the atomic bomb - and, hence, the train of subsequent events is difficult to imagine in the absence of the bomb.

Even with the atomic bomb virtually every important American military leader was extremely skeptical about a land war in Asia. The Korean peninsula, of course, had been arbitrarily divided in 1945 by Moscow and Washington, and both powers were well aware that their client regimes in Pyongyang and Seoul were committed to unifying the country under their own flags. Each regime had guerrilla units operating in the other's territory in what amounted to a simmering civil war. (Washington was actually restricting the supply of offensive weapons to the Syngman Rhee regime in South Korea for fear that they would be used in an invasion of the North.)

By late 1949, as is well known, Truman's National Security Council (NSC) advisers had concluded that Korea was of little strategic value to the United States and that a commitment to use military force in Korea would be ill-advised. Early in 1950, both Acheson and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Tom Connally, had publicly stated that South Korea lay outside the perimeter of U.S. national security interests.

Most important, to pledge troops to a land war in Asia would expose the American "European flank," since moving troops to Asia would weaken the American presence on the Continent. As General Bradley recounted in his memoirs, "We still believed our greatest potential for danger lay in Soviet aggression in Europe." And, "to risk widening the Korean War into a war with China would probably delight the Kremlin more than anything else we could do." The famous Bradley comment quoted earlier summarized the general view within the Joint Chiefs of Staff: Fighting in Korea would involve the United States "in the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy." When an invasion of the South did occur in June 1950, the Truman administration's decision to intervene amounted to an astonishing policy reversal.

If, even with the atomic bomb, U.S. military leaders hesitated to pledge land forces to the defense of Korea, then without the atomic bomb - which to the generals would have meant a totally exposed European "flank" - a decision to protect South Korea would have been practically impossible.

And again, very few would disagree with the proposition that the Korean War, in turn, provided a crucial fulcrum upon which the Cold War pivoted.

Most scholars accept that NSC-68, the document outlining a massive rebuilding of the U.S. military, was going nowhere in early 1950; the defense budget was being cut, not raised. The political drama surrounding the Korean War permitted an extraordinary escalation both in Cold War hysteria and in military spending. Before Korea such spending was around 4 per cent of gross national product (GNP); during the war it peaked at nearly 14 per cent. After Korea it stabilized to average roughly 10 per cent of GNP during the 1950s - an unimaginable extravagance before that time. (The buildup, in turn, established a structure of forces and political attitudes without which the subsequent intervention in Vietnam is difficult to imagine.)

Most important, Germany almost certainly could only have been rearmed in the domestic political atmosphere that accompanied the chaotic Korean conflict, along with the qualitative political shift in Cold War tensions that the war brought. The entire scenario depended ultimately upon the odd historical timing that put nuclear weapons in American hands at a particular moment in the twentieth century.

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