Today in 1949: Nuclear War Becomes Possible
By 
The Soviets designated it RDS-1, and the Americans called it JOE-1.
There was no need for a special strategy for using nuclear weapons in the spring and early summer of 1945. There was more thought than usual about choosing targets, but only a little more than for choosing the targets of firebombing. That was why the military machine ground on until President Harry S Truman halted the nuclear pipeline on August 10.
That changed almost exactly four years later, on August 29, 1949, when the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear device, a close duplicate of the device tested at Trinity Site. The scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project knew that that day would come, although it came faster than they expected, having been goosed along by stolen Manhattan Project documents. As the scientists expected, the Soviets reproduced much of their work, but having the plans for a device that had already been tested removed the fears of Stalin’s retribution for a failure.
With that explosion came the possibility of nuclear war. People were already preparing to develop nuclear strategy, having cut their strategic teeth on developing bombing plans for the Army Air Corps, which would become the Air Force in 1947. I plan to write about that history in the next posts.
Most of the history I’ll cite comes from Fred Kaplan’s The Wizards of Armageddon. My purpose in this series of posts is to open up discussion of ways of seeing nuclear weapons that don’t stem from the origin story of Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. If we can see nuclear strategies in different light, we may find ways to move away from our current “scorpions in a bottle” world, which is a phrase Oppenheimer used.
We need ways of thinking about nuclear weapons that are outside that bottle. I don’t have a comprehensive solution. There is a lively community of younger nuclear thinkers who have grown up in a different world and thus are better equipped than I am to think outside the bottle. I hope to supply some impetus to their thinking.
The previous posts in this series –
deal with history that contains stories that are more relevant to our time than the story of the Manhattan Project. The successful struggle for civilian control over nuclear weapons. Scientists banding together for a goal. As I start writing about the development of nuclear strategy, though, the task is to cut through unhelpful ideas that have grown up. Many of the traditional ideas are wrong or no longer relevant. The world has changed since the 1950s.
A word that will come up repeatedly is “deterrence.” It’s been badly misused. I suggest that we put it in cold storage for a couple of years, so that we can discuss what we mean, rather than slap the token down on the table for an attempt at a quick win. The word will continue to be used, of course, because entire wings of the military depend on that token for their existence, and others have become accustomed to it.
Notice anything in particular about those photos? Hm, yes, we’ll get to that later.
The basic idea of deterrence, as I understand it, is to convince the other side that attacking would cost them more than it would gain. Even this form has difficulties. Perhaps the other side doesn’t attack because they don’t want the damage a war would do to their economy and population. Perhaps what your side does to increase the costs is not what the other side perceives as increasing the costs. Perhaps the other side perceives the benefits to be much greater or less than you do.
Successful deterrence means that an attack does not occur. But that outcome can never confidently be ascribed to any particular measures. A negative outcome – when something doesn’t happen – is always subject to question.
More abstractly, is deterrence actually compellance? Here we get into the very technical vocabulary and hair-splitting that is often used to gatekeep the discussion. If you terrify the other side into compliance, is that compellance or deterrence? Can a line be drawn between the two?
Sometimes deterrence is made into something concrete. Thus the nuclear arsenal becomes “the deterrent.” Presumably this means that that part of the defense (offense?) is the primary reason the other side doesn’t attack. Reread the third paragraph back. That abstraction of the nuclear arsenal, or perhaps concretization of “deterrence,” is useful for the military. In Congressional budget hearings, a bid for a higher budget can be posed in terms of making the deterrent more effective by making more nuclear weapons.
So I will attack the use of that word. Be deterred from using it.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner