Annihilation from Within

harrowing tales from survivors, later a series of studies by scientists working for U.S. and Japanese authorities. What endowed these clinical reports with political salience were the tales of human victims—of instantly incinerated neighborhoods, of skin burned off the living flesh, of strange and fatal illnesses. The enormity of this unfolding story gripped the moral imagination of people throughout the world.
I want to stress here the link between witnessing the human impact of the atomic bomb and the will to act boldly in forestalling nuclear warfare. The emotional experience of a dramatic, real-life event is a far more potent motivator for choosing an audacious policy, or a benevolent policy, than are theoretical forecasts. During the first year after the A-bomb attacks on Japan, such emotional hindsight emboldened leading statesmen, hard-nosed politicians, and military strategists to seek an unprecedented transformation of the international order. It was as if the sudden emotional comprehension had inspired them to seek salvation through a generous offer for total reform.
Consider Dean Acheson, whose views were expressed in a memorandum for President Truman six weeks after Hiroshima. Acheson, bear in mind, was no woolly-eyed disarmer; a couple of years later he was to lead the effort to create the Atlantic Alliance as a bulwark against Soviet expansion. Yet in September 1945, this tough-minded, illusionless policymaker wrote for his equally tough-minded political master that nuclear weaponry was “a discovery more revolutionary than the invention of the wheel,” and that “if the invention is developed and used destructively there will be no victor and there may be no civilization remaining.” He recommended approaching the Soviet Union to explore international controls for a global ban on nuclear weapons. British Prime Minister Clement Attlee was even more anxious to stop further development of atomic bombs. In a handwritten memorandum in the fall of 1945, he noted that “the only hope for the world is that we should … strive without reservation to bring about an international relationship in which war is entirely ruled out.”1 He was not alone in that belief.
By November, U.S.-British discussions had led to a remarkable decision: International controls of nuclear weapons must be a responsibility of the United Nations—a still untested organization. To develop a U.S. position, Truman established a committee chaired by Dean Acheson, and its conclusions (which became known as the Acheson-Lilienthal report) called for an international authority that would confine the use of atomic energy entirely to peaceful purposes. This benevolent idea gained the support of leading nuclear scientists, including (it is worth noting) Edward Teller, the famed physicist who became one of the principal proponents and a key inventor of thermonuclear weapons. Teller called the report “the first ray of hope that the problem of international control can, actually, be solved.”2
This was truly a wondrous episode in the history of nations. At a time when only the world’s most powerful nation could have produced these weapons, it sought instead a radical, yet generous solution—to prevent all countries, itself included, from working on nuclear weaponry. To monitor this universal self-denial, the international authority advocated by Acheson-Lilienthal would have been given “exclusive jurisdiction to conduct all intrinsically dangerous operations [regarding nuclear materials].”3 How could this amazing episode have taken place? A major reason was the advice given by the atom bomb’s creators. America’s nuclear scientists justifiably enjoyed enormous prestige after their extraordinary accomplishment became known in August 1945. Although they had their differences, the scientists agreed on three forecasts, all absolutely essential for the President of the United States to bear in mind: first, that the information necessary to design nuclear weapons would not long remain an American secret; second, that the Soviet Union and several other countries would build their own nuclear bombs in the not-too-distant future unless constrained by a new international regime; and third, that it would become possible for advanced industrial nations to build nuclear weapons vastly more destructive than the first atomic bombs. Within a decade, all three of these forecasts had been proven correct.
Scientific forecasts are rarely sufficient to bring about a fundamental innovation in the political sphere, no matter how clamant the predicted problem. It was clearly the searing experience—history’s first destruction of a city by a single bomb—that made possible America’s gamble on nuclear policy in the autumn of 1945. Without the emotionally reinforced forecast, Washington would almost certainly have regarded its monopoly on nuclear weapons as an asset to be tucked away.
Within six months after Hiroshima, the well-intentioned project to restrict nuclear technology to peaceful uses had reached a dead end. As policymakers in the West had feared, Soviet opposition blocked all progress.4 The Soviet Union conducted its first test of an atomic bomb in 1949, and in 1950 North Korea’s attack on South Korea led to a huge expansion of the U.S. and the Soviet nuclear arsenals. The fading of “emotional hindsight” during the second half of the twentieth century goes a long way to explain the horrendous accumulation of nuclear weapons and the perversities of nuclear strategy.
Lesson Two: “Deterrence” Was Oversold
Mercifully, the ever more menacing volcano remained dormant. After August 1945, the only nuclear weapons detonated were for testing, and after 1962 even tests became rather furtive, most of them hidden deep underground. Without new pictures of the mushroom cloud, the world grew accustomed to nuclear nonuse. Many strategic thinkers attribute the nonuse during the Cold War to mutual deterrence between East and West. But if one reexamines the evolution of nuclear doctrine and deployments, as well as the growing size of the nuclear arsenals and the responses to major crises, it becomes clear that the explanation is more complicated.
An enormous literature on deterrence has been written—top-secret government reports, public testimony for Congress, thousands of books and articles. As noted by Robert Jervis (himself a creative contributor to this field): “many of the best ideas [on nuclear strategy] are old and … not all of the new ideas are good.” That many of the best ideas are old is confirmed by an article