[Peace-discuss] Fwd: [WBPF] Hiroshima Day: America Has Been Asleep at the Wheel for 64 Years

[Morton K. Brussel]

Yes, an interesting peace by Daniel Ellsberg.  --mkb

Begin forwarded message:

> From: "Caroline Herzenberg" <carol at herzenberg.net>
> Date: August 7, 2009 8:19:04 PM CDT
>
> Subject: [WBPF] Hiroshima Day: America Has Been Asleep at the Wheel  
> for 64 Years
>
>
> An interesting piece by Daniel Ellsberg. It's easier to read online  
> at:
> http://www.alternet.org/story/141822/
>
> - Carol
>
>
> ....................................................................
>
>
> Hiroshima Day: America Has Been Asleep at the Wheel for 64 Years
>
> By Daniel Ellsberg, Truthdig
> Posted on August 6, 2009, Printed on August 7, 2009
> http://www.alternet.org/story/141822/
>
>
> It was a hot August day in Detroit. I was standing on a street  
> corner downtown, looking at the front page of The Detroit News in a  
> news rack. I remember a streetcar rattling by on the tracks as I  
> read the headline: A single American bomb had destroyed a Japanese  
> city. My first thought was that I knew exactly what that bomb was.  
> It was the U-235 bomb we had discussed in school and written papers  
> about, the previous fall.
>
> I thought: "We got it first. And we used it. On a city."
>
> I had a sense of dread, a feeling that something very ominous for  
> humanity had just happened. A feeling, new to me as an American, at  
> 14, that my country might have made a terrible mistake. I was glad  
> when the war ended nine days later, but it didn't make me think that  
> my first reaction on Aug. 6 was wrong.
>
> Unlike nearly everyone else outside the Manhattan Project, my first  
> awareness of the challenges of the nuclear era had occurred -- and  
> my attitudes toward the advent of nuclear weaponry had formed --  
> some nine months earlier than those headlines, and in a crucially  
> different context.
>
> It was in a ninth-grade social studies class in the fall of 1944. I  
> was 13, a boarding student on full scholarship at Cranbrook, a  
> private school in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. Our teacher, Bradley  
> Patterson, was discussing a concept that was familiar then in  
> sociology, William F. Ogburn's notion of "cultural lag."
>
> The idea was that the development of technology regularly moved much  
> further and faster in human social-historical evolution than other  
> aspects of culture: our institutions of government, our values,  
> habits, our understanding of society and ourselves. Indeed, the very  
> notion of "progress" referred mainly to technology. What "lagged"  
> behind, what developed more slowly or not at all in social  
> adaptation to new technology was everything that bore on our ability  
> to control and direct technology and the use of technology to  
> dominate other humans.
>
> To illustrate this, Mr. Patterson posed a potential advance in  
> technology that might be realized soon. It was possible now, he told  
> us, to conceive of a bomb made of U-235, an isotope of uranium,  
> which would have an explosive power 1,000 times greater than the  
> largest bombs being used in the war that was then going on. German  
> scientists in late 1938 had discovered that uranium could be split  
> by nuclear fission, in a way that would release immense amounts of  
> energy.
>
> Several popular articles about the possibility of atomic bombs and  
> specifically U-235 bombs appeared during the war in magazines like  
> The Saturday Evening Post. None of these represented leaks from the  
> Manhattan Project, whose very existence was top-secret. In every  
> case they had been inspired by earlier articles on the subject that  
> had been published freely in 1939 and 1940, before scientific self- 
> censorship and then formal classification had set in. Patterson had  
> come across one of these wartime articles. He brought the potential  
> development to us as an example of one more possible leap by science  
> and technology ahead of our social institutions.
>
> Suppose, then, that one nation, or several, chose to explore the  
> possibility of making this into a bomb, and succeeded. What would be  
> the probable implications of this for humanity? How would it be  
> used, by humans and states as they were today? Would it be, on  
> balance, bad or good for the world? Would it be a force for peace,  
> for example, or for destruction? We were to write a short essay on  
> this, within a week.
>
> I recall the conclusions I came to in my paper after thinking about  
> it for a few days. As I remember, everyone in the class had arrived  
> at much the same judgment. It seemed pretty obvious.
>
> The existence of such a bomb -- we each concluded -- would be bad  
> news for humanity. Mankind could not handle such a destructive  
> force. It could not control it, safely, appropriately. The power  
> would be "abused": used dangerously and destructively, with terrible  
> consequences. Many cities would be destroyed entirely, just as the  
> Allies were doing their best to destroy German cities without atomic  
> bombs at that very time, just as the Germans earlier had attempted  
> to do to Rotterdam and London. Civilization, perhaps our species,  
> would be in danger of destruction.
>
> It was just too powerful. Bad enough that bombs already existed that  
> could destroy a whole city block. They were called "block-busters":  
> 10 tons of high explosive. Humanity didn't need the prospect of  
> bombs a thousand times more powerful, bombs that could destroy whole  
> cities.
>
> As I recall, this conclusion didn't depend mainly on who had the  
> Bomb, or how many had it, or who got it first. And to the best of my  
> memory, we in the class weren't addressing it as something that  
> might come so soon as to bear on the outcome of the ongoing war. It  
> seemed likely, the way the case was presented to us, that the  
> Germans would get it first, since they had done the original  
> science. But we didn't base our negative assessment on the idea that  
> this would necessarily be a Nazi or German bomb. It would be a bad  
> development, on balance, even if democratic countries got it first.
>
> After we turned in our papers and discussed them in class, it was  
> months before I thought of the issues again. I remember the moment  
> when I did, on a street corner in Detroit. I can still see and feel  
> the scene and recall my thoughts, described above, as I read the  
> headline on Aug. 6.
>
> I remember that I was uneasy, on that first day and in the days  
> ahead, about the tone in President Harry Truman's voice on the radio  
> as he exulted over our success in the race for the Bomb and its  
> effectiveness against Japan. I generally admired Truman, then and  
> later, but in hearing his announcements I was put off by the lack of  
> concern in his voice, the absence of a sense of tragedy, of  
> desperation or fear for the future. It seemed to me that this was a  
> decision best made in anguish; and both Truman's manner and the tone  
> of the official communiques made unmistakably clear that this hadn't  
> been the case.
>
> Which meant for me that our leaders didn't have the picture, didn't  
> grasp the significance of the precedent they had set and the  
> sinister implications for the future. And that evident unawareness  
> was itself scary. I believed that something ominous had happened;  
> that it was bad for humanity that the Bomb was feasible, and that  
> its use would have bad long-term consequences, whether or not those  
> negatives were balanced or even outweighed by short-run benefits.
>
> Looking back, it seems clear to me my reactions then were right.
>
> Moreover, reflecting on two related themes that have run through my  
> life since then -- intense abhorrence of nuclear weapons, and more  
> generally of killing women and children -- I've come to suspect that  
> I've conflated in my emotional memory two events less than a year  
> apart: Hiroshima and a catastrophe that visited my own family 11  
> months later.
>
> On the Fourth of July, 1946, driving on a hot afternoon on a flat,  
> straight road through the cornfields of Iowa -- on the way from  
> Detroit to visit our relatives in Denver -- my father fell asleep at  
> the wheel and went off the road long enough to hit a sidewall over a  
> culvert that sheared off the right side of the car, killing my  
> mother and sister.
>
> My father's nose was broken and his forehead was cut. When a highway  
> patrol car came by, he was wandering by the wreckage, bleeding and  
> dazed. I was inside, in a coma from a concussion, with a large gash  
> on the left side of my forehead. I had been sitting on the floor  
> next to the back seat, on a suitcase covered with a blanket, with my  
> head just behind the driver's seat. When the car hit the wall, my  
> head was thrown against a metal fixture on the back of the driver's  
> seat, knocking me out and opening up a large triangular flap of  
> flesh on my forehead. I was in coma for 36 hours. My legs had been  
> stretched out in front of me across the car and my right leg was  
> broken just above the knee.
>
> My father had been a highway engineer in Nebraska. He said that  
> highway walls should never have been flush with the road like that,  
> and later laws tended to ban that placement. This one took off the  
> side of the car where my mother and sister were sitting, my sister  
> looking forward and my mother facing left with her back to the side  
> of the car. My brother, who came to the scene from Detroit, said  
> later that when he saw what was left of the car in a junkyard, the  
> right side looked like steel wool. It was amazing that anyone had  
> survived.
>
> My understanding of how that event came about -- it wasn't entirely  
> an accident, as I heard from my father, that he had kept driving  
> when he was exhausted -- and how it affected my life is a story for  
> another time. But looking back now, at what I drew from reading the  
> Pentagon Papers later and on my citizen's activism since then, I  
> think I saw in the events of August 1945 and July 1946,  
> unconsciously, a common message. I loved my father, and I respected  
> Truman. But you couldn't rely entirely on a trusted authority -- no  
> matter how well-intentioned he was, however much you admired him --  
> to protect you, and your family, from disaster. You couldn't safely  
> leave events entirely to the care of authorities. Some vigilance was  
> called for, to awaken them if need be or warn others. They could be  
> asleep at the wheel, heading for a wall or a cliff. I saw that later  
> in Lyndon Johnson and in his successor, and I've seen it since.
>
> But I sensed almost right away, in August 1945 as Hiroshima and  
> Nagasaki were incinerated, that such feelings -- about our  
> president, and our Bomb -- separated me from nearly everyone around  
> me, from my parents and friends and from most other Americans. They  
> were not to be mentioned. They could only sound unpatriotic. And in  
> World War II, that was about the last way one wanted to sound. These  
> were thoughts to be kept to myself.
>
> Unlikely thoughts for a 14-year-old American boy to have had the  
> week the war ended? Yes, if he hadn't been in Mr. Patterson's social  
> studies class the previous fall. Every member of that class must  
> have had the same flash of recognition of the Bomb, as they read the  
> August headlines during our summer vacation. Beyond that, I don't  
> know whether they responded as I did, in the terms of our earlier  
> discussion.
>
> But neither our conclusions then or reactions like mine on Aug. 6  
> stamped us as gifted prophets. Before that day perhaps no one in the  
> public outside our class -- no one else outside the Manhattan  
> Project (and very few inside it) -- had spent a week, as we had, or  
> even a day thinking about the impact of such a weapon on the long- 
> run prospects for humanity.
>
> And we were set apart from our fellow Americans in another important  
> way. Perhaps no others outside the project or our class ever had  
> occasion to think about the Bomb without the strongly biasing  
> positive associations that accompanied their first awareness in  
> August 1945 of its very possibility: that it was "our" weapon, an  
> instrument of American democracy developed to deter a Nazi Bomb,  
> pursued by two presidents, a war-winning weapon and a necessary one  
> -- so it was claimed and almost universally believed -- to end the  
> war without a costly invasion of Japan.
>
> Unlike nearly all the others who started thinking about the new  
> nuclear era after Aug. 6, our attitudes of the previous fall had not  
> been shaped, or warped, by the claim and appearance that such a  
> weapon had just won a war for the forces of justice, a feat that  
> supposedly would otherwise have cost a million American lives (and  
> as many or more Japanese).
>
> For nearly all other Americans, whatever dread they may have felt  
> about the long-run future of the Bomb (and there was more expression  
> of this in elite media than most people remembered later) was offset  
> at the time and ever afterward by a powerful aura of its legitimacy,  
> and its almost miraculous potential for good which had already been  
> realized. For a great many Americans still, the Hiroshima and  
> Nagasaki bombs are regarded above all with gratitude, for having  
> saved their own lives or the lives of their husbands, brothers,  
> fathers or grandfathers, which would otherwise have been at risk in  
> the invasion of Japan. For these Americans and many others, the Bomb  
> was not so much an instrument of massacre as a kind of savior, a  
> protector of precious lives.
>
> Most Americans ever since have seen the destruction of the  
> populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as necessary and effective --  
> as constituting just means, in effect just terrorism, under the  
> supposed circumstances -- thus legitimating, in their eyes, the  
> second and third largest single-day massacres in history. (The  
> largest, also by the U.S. Army Air Corps, was the firebombing of  
> Tokyo five months before on the night of March 9, which burned alive  
> or suffocated 80,000 to 120,000 civilians. Most of the very few  
> Americans who are aware of this event at all accept it, too, as  
> appropriate in wartime.)
>
> To regard those acts as definitely other than criminal and immoral  
> -- as most Americans do -- is to believe that anything -- anything  
> -- can be legitimate means: at worst, a necessary, lesser, evil. At  
> least, if done by Americans, on the order of a president, during  
> wartime. Indeed, we are the only country in the world that believes  
> it won a war by bombing -- specifically by bombing cities with  
> weapons of mass destruction -- and believes that it was fully  
> rightful in doing so. It is a dangerous state of mind.
>
> Even if the premises of these justifications had been realistic  
> (after years of study I'm convinced, along with many scholars, that  
> they were not; but I'm not addressing that here), the consequences  
> of such beliefs for subsequent policymaking were bound to be  
> fateful. They underlie the American government and public's ready  
> acceptance ever since of basing our security on readiness to carry  
> out threats of mass annihilation by nuclear weapons, and the belief  
> by many officials and elites still today that abolition of these  
> weapons is not only infeasible but undesirable.
>
> By contrast, given a few days' reflection in the summer of 1945  
> before a presidential fait accompli was framed in that fashion, you  
> didn't have to be a moral prodigy to arrive at the sense of  
> foreboding we all had in Mr. Patterson's class. It was as easily  
> available to 13-year-old ninth-graders as it was to many Manhattan  
> Project scientists, who also had the opportunity to form their  
> judgments before the Bomb was used.
>
> But the scientists knew something else that was unknown to the  
> public and even to most high-level decision-makers. They knew that  
> the atomic bombs, the uranium and plutonium fission bombs they were  
> preparing, were only the precursors to far more powerful explosives,  
> almost surely including a thermonuclear fusion bomb, later called  
> the hydrogen bomb, or H-bomb. That weapon -- of which we eventually  
> came to have tens of thousands -- could have an explosive yield much  
> greater than the fission bombs needed to trigger it. A thousand  
> times greater.
>
> Moreover, most of the scientists who focused on the long-run  
> implications of nuclear weapons, belatedly, after the surrender of  
> Germany in May 1945 believed that using the Bomb against Japan would  
> make international control of the weapon very unlikely. In turn that  
> would make inevitable a desperate arms race, which would soon expose  
> the United States to adversaries' uncontrolled possession of  
> thermonuclear weapons, so that, as the scientists said in a pre- 
> attack petition to the president, "the cities of the United States  
> as well as the cities of other nations will be in continuous danger  
> of sudden annihilation." (In this they were proved correct.) They  
> cautioned the president-on both moral grounds and considerations of  
> long-run survival of civilization-against beginning this process by  
> using the Bomb against Japan even if its use might shorten the war.
>
> But their petition was sent "through channels" and was deliberately  
> held back by Gen. Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project.  
> It never got to the president, or even to Secretary of War Henry  
> Stimson until after the Bomb had been dropped. There is no record  
> that the scientists' concerns about the future and their judgment of  
> a nuclear attack's impact on it were ever made known to President  
> Truman before or after his decisions. Still less, made known to the  
> American public.
>
> At the end of the war the scientists' petition and their reasoning  
> were reclassified secret to keep it from public knowledge, and its  
> existence was unknown for more than a decade. Several Manhattan  
> Project scientists later expressed regret that they had earlier  
> deferred to the demands of the secrecy managers -- for fear of  
> losing their clearances and positions, and perhaps facing  
> prosecution -- and had collaborated in maintaining public ignorance  
> on this most vital of issues.
>
> One of them -- Eugene Rabinowitch, who after the war founded and  
> edited the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (with its Doomsday  
> Clock) -- had in fact, after the German surrender in May, actively  
> considered breaking ranks and alerting the American public to the  
> existence of the Bomb, the plans for using it against Japan, and the  
> scientists' views both of the moral issues and the long-term dangers  
> of doing so.
>
> He first reported this in a letter to The New York Times published  
> on June 28, 1971. It was the day I submitted to arrest at the  
> federal courthouse in Boston; for 13 days previous, my wife and I  
> had been underground, eluding the FBI while distributing the  
> Pentagon Papers to 17 newspapers after injunctions had halted  
> publication in the Times and The Washington Post. The Rabinowitch  
> letter began by saying it was "the revelation by The Times of the  
> Pentagon history of U.S. intervention in Vietnam, despite its  
> classification as 'secret' " that led him now to reveal:
>
> "Before the atom bomb-drops on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I had spent  
> sleepless nights thinking that I should reveal to the American  
> people, perhaps through a reputable news organ, the fateful act --  
> the first introduction of atomic weapons -- which the U.S.  
> Government planned to carry out without consultation with its  
> people. Twenty-five years later, I feel I would have been right if I  
> had done so."
>
> I didn't see this the morning it was published, because I was  
> getting myself arrested and arraigned, for doing what Rabinowitch  
> wishes he had done in 1945, and I wish I had done in 1964. I first  
> came across this extraordinary confession by a would-be whistle- 
> blower (I don't know another like it) in "Hiroshima in America:  
> Fifty Years of Denial" by Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell (New  
> York, 1995, p. 249).
>
> Rereading Rabinowitch's statement, still with some astonishment, I  
> agree with him. He was right to consider it, and he would have been  
> right if he had done it. He would have faced prosecution and prison  
> then (as I did at the time his letter was published), but he would  
> have been more than justified, as a citizen and as a human being, in  
> informing the American public and burdening them with shared  
> responsibility for the fateful decision.
>
> Some of the same scientists faced a comparable challenge four years  
> after Hiroshima, addressing the possible development of an even more  
> terrible weapon, more fraught with possible danger to human  
> survival: the hydrogen bomb. This time some who had urged use of the  
> atom bomb against Japan (dissenting from the petitioners above)  
> recommended against even development and testing of the new  
> proposal, in view of its "extreme dangers to mankind." "Let it be  
> clearly realized," they said, "that this is a super weapon; it is in  
> a totally different category from an atomic bomb" (Herbert York,  
> "The Advisors" [California, 1976], p. 156).
>
> Once more, as I learned much later, knowledge of the secret  
> possibility was not completely limited to government scientists. A  
> few others -- my father, it turns out, was one -- knew of this  
> prospect before it had received the stamp of presidential approval  
> and had become an American government project. And once again, under  
> those conditions of prior knowledge (denied as before to the  
> public), to grasp the moral and long-run dangers you didn't have to  
> be a nuclear physicist. My father was not.
>
> Some background is needed here. My father, Harry Ellsberg, was a  
> structural engineer. He worked for Albert Kahn in Detroit, the  
> "Arsenal of Democracy." At the start of the Second World War, he was  
> the chief structural engineer in charge of designing the Ford Willow  
> Run plant, a factory to make B-24 Liberator bombers for the Air  
> Corps. (On June 1 this year, GM, now owner, announced it would close  
> the plant as part of its bankruptcy proceedings.)
>
> Dad was proud of the fact that it was the world's largest industrial  
> building under one roof. It put together bombers the way Ford  
> produced cars, on an assembly line. The assembly line was a mile and  
> a quarter long.
>
> My father told me that it had ended up L-shaped, instead of in a  
> straight line as he had originally designed it. When the site was  
> being prepared, Ford comptrollers noted that the factory would run  
> over a county line, into an adjacent county where the company had  
> less control and local taxes were higher. So the design, for the  
> assembly line and the factory housing it, had to be bent at right  
> angles to stay inside Ford country.
>
> Once, my father took me out to Willow Run to see the line in  
> operation. For as far as I could see, the huge metal bodies of  
> planes were moving along tracks as workers riveted and installed  
> parts. It was like pictures I had seen of steer carcasses in a  
> Chicago slaughterhouse. But as Dad had explained to me, three- 
> quarters of a mile along, the bodies were moved off the tracks onto  
> a circular turntable that rotated them 90 degrees; then they were  
> moved back on track for the last half mile of the L. Finally, the  
> planes were rolled out the hangar doors at the end of the factory --  
> one every hour: It took 59 minutes on the line to build a plane with  
> its 100,000 parts from start to finish -- filled with gas and flown  
> out to war. (Click here and here for sources and photographs.)
>
> It was an exciting sight for a 13-year-old. I was proud of my  
> father. His next wartime job had been to design a still larger  
> airplane engine factory -- again the world's largest plant under one  
> roof -- the Dodge Chicago plant, which made all the engines for B-29s.
>
> When the war ended, Dad accepted an offer to oversee the buildup of  
> the plutonium production facilities at Hanford, Wash. That project  
> was being run by General Electric under contract with the Atomic  
> Energy Commission. To take the job of chief structural engineer on  
> the project, Dad moved from the engineering firm of Albert Kahn,  
> where he had worked for years, to what became Giffels & Rossetti.  
> Later he told me that engineering firm had the largest volume of  
> construction contracts in the world at that time, and his project  
> was the world's largest. I grew up hearing these superlatives.
>
> The Hanford project gave my father his first really good salary. But  
> while I was away as a sophomore at Harvard, he left his job with  
> Giffels & Rossetti, for reasons I never learned at the time. He was  
> out of work for almost a year. Then he went back as chief structural  
> engineer for the whole firm. Almost 30 years later, in 1978, when my  
> father was 89, I happened to ask him why he had left Giffels &  
> Rossetti. His answer startled me.
>
> He said, "Because they wanted me to help build the H-bomb."
>
> This was a breathtaking statement for me to hear in 1978. I was in  
> full-time active opposition to the deployment of the neutron bomb --  
> which was a small H-bomb -- that President Jimmy Carter was  
> proposing to send to Europe. The N-bomb had a killing radius from  
> its output of neutrons that was much wider than its radius of  
> destruction by blast. Optimally, an airburst N-bomb would have  
> little fallout nor would it destroy structures, equipment or  
> vehicles, but its neutrons would kill the humans either outside or  
> within buildings or tanks. The Soviets mocked it as "a capitalist  
> weapon" that destroyed people but not property; but they tested such  
> a weapon too, as did other countries.
>
> I had opposed developing or testing that concept for almost 20  
> years, since it was first described to me by my friend and colleague  
> at the RAND Corp., Sam Cohen, who liked to be known as the "father  
> of the neutron bomb." I feared that, as a "small" weapon with  
> limited and seemingly controllable lethal effects, it would be seen  
> as usable in warfare, making U.S. first use and "limited nuclear  
> war" more likely. It would be the match that would set off an  
> exchange of the much larger, dirty weapons which were the bulk of  
> our arsenal and were all that the Soviets then had.
>
> In the year of this conversation with Dad, I was arrested four times  
> blocking the railroad tracks at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons  
> Production Facility, which produced all the plutonium triggers for H- 
> bombs and was going to produce the plutonium cores for neutron  
> bombs. One of these arrests was on Nagasaki Day, Aug. 9. The  
> "triggers" produced at Rocky Flats were, in effect, the nuclear  
> components of A-bombs, plutonium fission bombs of the type that had  
> destroyed Nagasaki on that date in 1945.
>
> Every one of our many thousands of H-bombs, the thermonuclear fusion  
> bombs that arm our strategic forces, requires a Nagasaki-type A-bomb  
> as its detonator. (I doubt that one American in a hundred knows that  
> simple fact, and thus has a clear understanding of the difference  
> between A- and H-bombs, or of the reality of the thermonuclear  
> arsenals of the last 50 years.
>
> Our popular image of nuclear war -- from the familiar pictures of  
> the devastation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima -- is grotesquely  
> misleading. Those pictures show us only what happens to humans and  
> buildings when they are hit by what is now just the detonating cap  
> for a modern nuclear weapon.
>
> The plutonium for these weapons came from Hanford and from the  
> Savannah River Site in Georgia and was machined into weapons  
> components at Rocky Flats, in Colorado. Allen Ginsberg and I, with  
> many others, blockaded the entrances to the plant on Aug. 9, 1978,  
> to interrupt business as usual on the anniversary of the day a  
> plutonium bomb had killed 58,000 humans (about 100,000 had died by  
> the end of 1945).
>
> I had never heard before of any connection of my father with the H- 
> bomb. He wasn't particularly wired in to my anti-nuclear work or to  
> any of my activism since the Vietnam War had ended. I asked him what  
> he meant by his comment about leaving Giffels & Rossetti.
>
> "They wanted me to be in charge of designing a big plant that would  
> be producing material for an H-bomb." He said that DuPont, which had  
> built the Hanford Site, was to have the contract from the Atomic  
> Energy Commission. That would have been for the Savannah River Site.  
> I asked him when this was.
>
> "Late '49."
>
> I told him, "You must have the date wrong. You couldn't have heard  
> about the hydrogen bomb then, it's too early." I'd just been reading  
> about that, in Herb York's recent book, "The Advisors." The General  
> Advisory Committee (GAC) of the AEC -- chaired by Robert Oppenheimer  
> and including James Conant, Enrico Fermi and Isidor Rabi -- were  
> considering that fall whether or not to launch a crash program for  
> an H-bomb. That was the "super weapon" referred to earlier. They had  
> advised strongly against it, but President Truman overruled them.
>
> "Truman didn't make the decision to go ahead till January 1950.  
> Meanwhile the whole thing was super-secret. You couldn't have heard  
> about it in '49."
>
> My father said, "Well, somebody had to design the plant if they were  
> going to go ahead. I was the logical person. I was in charge of the  
> structural engineering of the whole project at Hanford after the  
> war. I had a Q clearance."
>
> That was the first I'd ever heard that he'd had had a Q clearance --  
> an AEC clearance for nuclear weapons design and stockpile data. I'd  
> had that clearance myself in the Pentagon -- along with close to a  
> dozen other special clearances above top-secret -- after I left the  
> RAND Corp. for the Defense Department in 1964. It was news to me  
> that my father had had a clearance, but it made sense that he would  
> have needed one for Hanford.
>
> I said, "So you're telling me that you would have been one of the  
> only people in the country, outside the GAC, who knew we were  
> considering building the H-bomb in 1949?"
>
> He said, "I suppose so. Anyway, I know it was late '49, because  
> that's when I quit."
>
> "Why did you quit?"
>
> "I didn't want to make an H-bomb. Why, that thing was going to be  
> 1,000 times more powerful than the A-bomb!"
>
> I thought, score one for his memory at 89. He remembered the  
> proportion correctly. That was the same factor Oppenheimer and the  
> others predicted in their report in 1949. They were right. The first  
> explosion of a true H-bomb, five years later, had a thousand times  
> the explosive power of the Hiroshima blast.
>
> At 15 megatons -- the equivalent of 15 million tons of high  
> explosive -- it was over a million times more powerful than the  
> largest conventional bombs of World War II. That one bomb had almost  
> eight times the explosive force of all the bombs we dropped in that  
> war: more than all the explosions in all the wars in human history.  
> In 1961, the Soviets tested a 58-megaton H-bomb.
>
> My father went on: "I hadn't wanted to work on the A-bomb, either.  
> But then Einstein seemed to think that we needed it, and it made  
> sense to me that we had to have it against the Russians. So I took  
> the job, but I never felt good about it.
>
> "Then when they told me they were going to build a bomb 1,000 times  
> bigger, that was it for me. I went back to my office and I said to  
> my deputy, 'These guys are crazy. They have an A-bomb, now they want  
> an H-bomb. They're going to go right through the alphabet till they  
> have a Z-bomb.' "
>
> I said, "Well, so far they've only gotten up to N."
>
> He said, "There was another thing about it that I couldn't stand.  
> Building these things generated a lot of radioactive waste. I wasn't  
> responsible for designing the containers for the waste, but I knew  
> they were bound to leak eventually. That stuff was deadly forever.  
> It was radioactive for 24,000 years."
>
> Again he had turned up a good figure. I said, "Your memory is  
> working pretty well. It would be deadly a lot longer than that, but  
> that's about the half-life of plutonium."
>
> There were tears in his eyes. He said huskily, "I couldn't stand the  
> thought that I was working on a project that was poisoning parts of  
> my own country forever, that might make parts of it uninhabitable  
> for thousands of years."
>
> I thought over what he'd said; then I asked him if anyone else  
> working with him had had misgivings. He didn't know.
>
> "Were you the only one who quit?" He said yes. He was leaving the  
> best job he'd ever had, and he didn't have any other to turn to. He  
> lived on savings for a while and did some consulting.
>
> I thought about Oppenheimer and Conant -- both of whom had  
> recommended dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima -- and Fermi and  
> Rabi, who had, that same month Dad was resigning, expressed  
> internally their opposition to development of the superbomb in the  
> most extreme terms possible: It was potentially "a weapon of  
> genocide ? carries much further than the atomic bomb itself the  
> policy of exterminating civilian populations ? whose power of  
> destruction is essentially unlimited ? a threat to the future of the  
> human race which is intolerable ? a danger to humanity as a whole ?  
> necessarily an evil thing considered in any light" (York, "The  
> Advisor," pp. 155-159).
>
> Not one of these men risked his clearance by sharing his anxieties  
> and the basis for them with the American public. Oppenheimer and  
> Conant considered resigning their advisory positions when the  
> president went ahead against their advice. But they were persuaded- 
> by Dean Acheson-not to quit at that time, lest that draw public  
> attention to their expert judgment that the president's course  
> fatally endangered humanity.
>
> I asked my father what had made him feel so strongly, to act in a  
> way that nobody else had done. He said, "You did."
>
> That didn't make any sense. I said, "What do you mean? We didn't  
> discuss this at all. I didn't know anything about it."
>
> Dad said, "It was earlier. I remember you came home with a book one  
> day, and you were crying. It was about Hiroshima. You said, 'Dad,  
> you've got to read this. It's the worst thing I've ever read.' "
>
> I said that must have been John Hersey's book "Hiroshima." (I read  
> it when it came out as a book. I was in the hospital when it filled  
> The New Yorker in August 1946.) I didn't remember giving it to him.
>
> "Yes. Well, I read it, and you were right. That's when I started to  
> feel bad about working on an atomic bomb project. And then when they  
> said they wanted me to work on a hydrogen bomb, it was too much for  
> me. I thought it was time for me to get out."
>
> I asked if he had told his bosses why he was quitting. He said he  
> told some people, not others. The ones he told seemed to understand  
> his feelings. In fact, in less than a year, the head of the firm  
> called to say that they wanted him to come back as chief structural  
> engineer for the whole firm. They were dropping the DuPont contract  
> (they didn't say why), so he wouldn't have to have anything to do  
> with the AEC or bomb-making. He stayed with them till he retired.
>
> I said, finally, "Dad, how could I not ever have heard any of this  
> before? How come you never said anything about it?"
>
> My father said, "Oh, I couldn't tell any of this to my family. You  
> weren't cleared."
>
> Well, I finally got my clearances, a decade after my father gave his  
> up. And for some years, they were my undoing, though they turned out  
> to be useful in the end. A decade later they allowed me to read the  
> Pentagon Papers and to keep them in my "Top Secret" safe at the RAND  
> Corp., from which I eventually delivered them to the Senate Foreign  
> Relations Committee and later to 19 newspapers.
>
> We have long needed and lacked the equivalent of the Pentagon Papers  
> on the subject of nuclear policies and preparations, nuclear threats  
> and decision-making: above all in the United States and Russia but  
> also in the other nuclear-weapons states. I deeply regret that I did  
> not make known to Congress, the American public and the world the  
> extensive documentation of persistent and still-unknown nuclear  
> dangers that was available to me 40 to 50 years ago as a consultant  
> to and official in the executive branch working on nuclear war  
> plans, command and control and nuclear crises. Those in nuclear- 
> weapons states who are in a position now to do more than I did then  
> to alert their countries and the world to fatally reckless secret  
> policies should take warning from the earlier inaction of myself and  
> others: and do better.
>
> That I had high-level access and played such a role in nuclear  
> planning is, of course, deeply ironic in view of the personal  
> history recounted above. My feelings of revulsion and foreboding  
> about nuclear weapons had not changed an iota since 1945, and they  
> have never left me. Since I was 14, the overriding objective of my  
> life has been to prevent the occurrence of nuclear war.
>
> There was a close analogy with the Manhattan Project. Its scientists  
> -- most of whom hoped the Bomb would never be used for anything but  
> as a threat to deter Germany -- were driven by a plausible but  
> mistaken fear that the Nazis were racing them. Actually the Nazis  
> had rejected the pursuit of the atomic bomb on practical grounds in  
> June 1942, just as the Manhattan Project was beginning. Similarly, I  
> was one of many in the late '50s who were misled and recruited into  
> the nuclear arms race by exaggerated, and in this case deliberately  
> manipulated, fears of Soviet intentions and crash efforts.
>
> Precisely because I did receive clearances and was exposed to top- 
> secret intelligence estimates, in particular from the Air Force, I,  
> along with my colleagues at the RAND Corp., came to be preoccupied  
> with the urgency of averting nuclear war by deterring a Soviet  
> surprise attack that would exploit an alleged "missile gap." That  
> supposed dangerous U.S. inferiority was exactly as unfounded in  
> reality as the fear of the Nazi crash bomb program had been, or, to  
> pick a more recent example, as concern over Saddam Hussein's  
> supposed WMDs and nuclear pursuit in 2003.
>
> Working conscientiously, obsessively, on a wrong problem, countering  
> an illusory threat, I and my colleagues distracted ourselves and  
> helped distract others from dealing with real dangers posed by the  
> mutual and spreading possession of nuclear weapons -- dangers which  
> we were helping make worse -- and from real opportunities to make  
> the world more secure. Unintentionally, yet inexcusably, we made our  
> country and the world less safe.
>
> Eventually the Soviets did emulate us in creating a world- 
> threatening nuclear capability on hair-trigger alert. That still  
> exists; Russian nuclear posture and policies continue, along with  
> ours, to endanger our countries, civilization and much of life  
> itself. But the persistent reality has been that the nuclear arms  
> race has been driven primarily by American initiatives and policies  
> and that every major American decision in this 64-year-old nuclear  
> era has been accompanied by unwarranted concealment, deliberate  
> obfuscation, and official and public delusions.
>
> I have believed for a long time that official secrecy and deceptions  
> about our nuclear weapons posture and policies and their possible  
> consequences have threatened the survival of the human species. To  
> understand the urgency of radical changes in our nuclear policies  
> that may truly move the world toward abolition of nuclear weapons,  
> we need a new understanding of the real history of the nuclear age.
>
> Using the new opportunities offered by the Internet -- drawing  
> attention to newly declassified documents and to some realities  
> still concealed -- I plan over the next year, before the 65th  
> anniversary of Hiroshima, to do my part in unveiling this hidden  
> history.
>
>
> © 2009 Truthdig All rights reserved.
> View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/141822/

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