Our Next Pearl Harbor?
VOLUME 180
NUMBER 4
OCTOBER, 1947
90th YEAR OF CONTINUOUS PUBLICATION
by FRANCIS and KATHARINE DRAKE
THE land military vanished security with the of explosion the American of the home first atomic bomb. In the past two years we have been made aware that the United States can now be attacked directly and decisively without the cumbersome massing of enemy surface forces. The protection of our oceans has gone and the industrial potential which triumphed over two world wars has been transformed into the most strategic and vulnerable target in the world. Our land lies naked before a weapon which, in the words of the Smyth Report, “is potentially destructive beyond the wildest nightmares of the imagination; a weapon so ideally suited to sudden, unannounced attack that a country’s major cities might be destroyed overnight by an ostensibly friendly power.”
Were the United Nations’ plan for Atomic Control and effective policing already in being, or in reasonable prospect, our new-found vulnerability might not cause such great anxiety. There would be less need to think in terms of national defense. But the plan has not come into effect. In spite of the unanimous effort of the free nations of the world, it has been consistently blocked by the Soviet Union, and today solid hope for collective outlawing of atomic warfare is still remote. Deprived of international protection in a world seething with unrest, vulnerable to new atomic developments so frightful that they dwarf even the Hiroshima nightmare, surely the first instincts of self-preservation should turn our thoughts urgently to our own defenses?
It is not the purpose of this article to argue the probability of war with Soviet Russia. But it is scarcely deniable that the possibility exists, and in the new and appalling connotations of atomic warfare even the possibility of attack is so terrifying that anything short of the utmost precaution is criminal folly. Yet it is a fact that today the Unit ed States is virtually helpless against such an attack and that we have been sliding at increasing speed towards a military impotence that is an open invitation to disaster.
The prospect of rearming the United States is distressing to any civilized person. Is there then no chance of bringing about some modification of the Russian stand? Cannot the United Nations’ plan be amended to suit the Russian view and still remain effective? The record of the past two years provides an unsatisfactory answer. Every effort of which men of good will are capable has been made and made repeatedly, including the offer of the United States to surrender its atom bombs, its secrets and factories to United Nations control. Every proposal has been rejected. The situation was summed up on August 3, 1947, by the United States deputy representative on the United Nations Atomic Commission, Frederick Osborn: “Mr. Gromyko has made it clear that every aspect of the Commission’s report was unacceptable to the Soviet Union. He again offered the Russian proposal: The United States should destroy its bombs and bomb assembly plants and make public all its information on a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ that no one would engage in an atomic war. Thereafter all nations could start on an even basis to discuss a treaty or convention which would define a way in which the gentleman’s agreement could be made effective and binding.”
Copyright 1947, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston 16, Mass. All rights reserved.
When this offer of a “gentleman’s agreement” is appraised against the Soviet Union’s post-war record, against its repeated breaches of good faith, its repudiation of the Potsdam Agreement, its torpedoing of the Moscow Conference, its persistent misuse of the veto to emasculate the United Nations, its boycott of the Marshall Plan, its own massive development of atomic weapons, there is offered not even a plausible imitation of security. All that emerges, in the words of Mr. Osborn, is “a fraud on the peoples of the world.”
This consistent obstruction of the United Nations’ peace aims might not be so alarming were it not accompanied by the increasingly militaristic attitude of the Soviet government. While the United States has set the pace in rapid demobilization, Russia is still maintaining by far the largest Army and Air Force in the world, and is expanding the latter at unprecedented speed. It is the belief of Major General Oliver P. Echols, USAAF Chief of Supply during the war, that she is producing as many as 44,000 military planes this year compared to our 1330. She has awarded top priority and unlimited resources to the development of atomic weapons and proclaims that they will shortly rival our own, a view shared by most of our own atomic experts.
Since the end of the war, Russia has forced behind the Iron Curtain eleven countries with a total population of 120 million people and she is actively working in Europe, India, and China to expand this rule. She has isolated her people from all outside contact and is fomenting among them ill feeling against this country by constant warning that America is planning to attack them. All our efforts to aid the suffering people of Europe have been twisted and misrepresented. None of this is necessarily a prelude to war, but it is foolish to close one’s eyes to the fact that Russia is a formidable military power and that her attitude toward us is increasingly unfriendly. What is her great Army to do? What is her great Air Force to carry? Is it possible that the Soviet dictators, ruling a land three times the size of our own, honest ly believe that they may be “encircled”? Is it possible that they are considering a future blow against this country, the great obstacle to world Communism? We do not know. We can only admit that it is a possibility.
2
IF the United States were to be threatened with atomic attack either today or at any time within the next two years, this sorry fact must come to light — that our position is relatively more defenseless than it was at the time of Pearl Harbor. Then, at least, we were able to fall back on wide margins of time and the certainty of uninterrupted war production. In atomic warfare we know beyond doubt that our time must be reckoned in hours or even in minutes. Army, Navy, Air Forces, and scientists are agreed on one point: if a modern highspeed bombing attack once gets under way there is no local defense against it. They are equally agreed that short of effective international control, the only defense lies in the ability to mount a counterattack so swiftly and on so great a scale that any aggressor must know beforehand that instant reprisal will smash his own country level with the ground — in short, to offer him a certainty of national suicide. General Carl Spaatz, Commanding General of our Air Forces, has summarized the essence of American security in these words: “We have one real defense: a planned and ready offensive. If another bully nation arises, the only way to avoid such an atomic war is to be able to win it instantly and decisively. Such readiness would make any dictator think twice.” (This counterattack principle was wholly effective in the last war in connection with poison gas.)
The power to implement such counterattack at present resides in the long-range bomber — the backbone of air power. It is this power that we have thrown away during the past few years. True, we still have the Bomb; but we no longer have the means of delivering decisive numbers to a distant enemy. Two years ago we had world supremacy in the air. Today, to the shame of Government, of Congress, of our own unminding selves, this supremacy for which 74,000 American airmen laid down their lives, and for which we paid 80 billion dollars, has been reduced to a mere shell, pulled down from 2,400,000 men to 300,000 men, from 80,000 planes to 1720 (combat types) now in commission. Here are the figures of our decline in power of reprisal: —
Long-range bombers (B-29s) in Air Forces on Y-J Day 2865
B-29s in full combat readiness on August 1, 1947 144
Of the 144, few are actually in combat readiness. The Air Forces recently scraped together what they admitted to be “every operational B-29 in the country,” and offered a demonstration of their offensive strength over the Eastern seaboard. Of the 130 planes tapped, 28 failed to reach the rendezvous. The remainder, designated by their commander, General George Kenney, as “a futile force, carried through a program which caustic onlookers dismissed as “Operation FLOP.” After weeks of preparation, Operation FLOP! How must it have gone if, instead of demonstration, the occasion had indeed been that “sudden, unannounced attack”?
What then have we done with our matchless air strength, with our 2865 B-29s? We have put them in dead storage, 2507 of them. To get them into combat readiness would require this: first,, from three to six months to get. the planes ready to fly, if we had the ground crews; second, twelve months to train the air crews, if we had the air crews; third, another six months to weld the Groups into an adequate force to counterattack, if the Air forces had the authority and the money. Three months or two years, it must be all the same in the next war when every hour may be spelling death for millions.
Furthermore, the B-29, originated in the thirties and first built in 1941, is obsolescent. Its radius, 1500 miles with full bombload, is insufficient to enable it to reach far-distant targets without dependence on refueling bases. An aggressor could hardly fail to blow up such bases on his way in to attack. New-type planes, such as the B-36, have a range of over 10,000 miles with a 5-ton bombload and can strike back at any target in the world without refueling. Prototypes are in the air already, but instead of the solid numbers that might prohibit aggression, we have less than 100 on order over a twoyear period. Even were we to begin today, not all the gold in Fort Knox, nor all the emergency legislation in Congress, could assemble a decisive force of newtvpe bombers with trained crews before the winter of 1949, and to begin today would involve summoning a special session of Congress. Our capacity for rapid building has become so enfeebled that military plane production, which once hit 96,000 a year, has sunk to 1330 (of all types) this year. Two thirds of our manufacturers are going broke, their staffs have been dispersed, and their research has almost reached a standstill. In spite of all this, however, our B-29s could still tide us over as a protective stopgap were they brought out of storage and adequately manned, and they could be of priceless value in training the air and ground crews for oncoming new types.
3
THE research and development of new planes, of radio-controlled planes, and of guided missiles is another aspect of national security that has recently suffered dangerous crippling. The guided missile, when its range has been extended, will make obsolete every existing form of bomb delivery. These hurtling missiles travel hundreds of miles high and plunge to earth at nearly 5000 m.p.h. In the embryonic form of the V-2, they went to work on Britain in the last war. Not a single one was ever seen by the defenses, let alone intercepted. Had they been fitted with atomic warheads, England would have been out of t he war in a few days.
General Ira C. Eaker, when Deputy Commander of Army Air Forces, stated that guided missiles with 5000-mile range might be developed in five years, were the program handled on the scale of the Manhattan Project, and that they could probably be developed in fifteen years at the normal peacetime pace. It is clear that the country which comes in second in this race will be at the mercy of the winner, for no means of defense is possible.
What are we doing to maintain our all-important leadership in this field? Our program, the main part of which was entrusted to the Air Forces, has met this fate: the Air Forces required $300,000,000 for the program; they received only $33,000,000, made up of $20,000,000 for research and $13,000,000 for procurement. Research leaders and officers are doing their utmost in spite of meager funds and rising costs, and valuable progress is doubtless being made, but the main program is hamstrung. And how do we stand on atomic development? The chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission tells us: “Since Hiroshima the United States has lost momentum in atomic energy development. For from the level of V-J Day we have actually gone downhill, measured in such vital factors as scientific personnel, depreciation of plants, intensity of effort, and in other important ways.”
A Ready Force of 144 bombers and a woefully underfinanced Air Forces’ research program — such is the travesty of first-line striking power that stands today between us and that “sudden, unannounced attack.” The hierarchy devoted to traditional weapons is constantly advising “a balanced defense.” How balanced is it to have an ll½-billiondollar program of men, ships, tanks, guns, small planes, and only 144 obsolescent bombers capable of action, not one of them able to carry an atom bomb directly to a distant enemy? Whatever may have been the usefulness of battlewagons and carriers in the past, whatever part they may still play in the future, is it realistic to place nearly a 5-bi I nondollar emphasis on ships, steaming 25 m.p.h., when enemy bombers can advance at 400 m.p.h. to slaughter millions in our homeland? Does it make sense to have authorized or committed 20 billions in foreign aid, to be contemplating some 5 billions a year more under the Marshall Plan, and to have no security at home? This aid is essential, of course, but money regardless, Greeks, Turks, and others would surely be out of their minds to defy the Soviet Union in favor of a distant ally with only 144 bombers which could not even muster effectively over Manhattan.
This is what our defense expenditure should give us if we are to have st riking power capable of safeguarding the nation to the best extent possible, pending the hoped-for advent of an international police force.
First, it should give us a modern Air Striking Force with a minimum of 1000 new-type, longrange bombers, complete with crews, maintained in combat readiness at all times, capable of striking anywhere in the world from the United States, with an adequate Active Reserve; a long-range Escort Force; and a procurement program capable of replacing 20 per cent of all these planes every year.
Second, it should give us an adequately financed research program, to keep us in the forefront of world developments in air power and guided missiles.
We should be assured that many hundreds of these planes were being maintained in instant readiness, day and night, widely dispersed to prevent destruction by bombs or saboteurs, each plane parked above the concrete shaft containing its atom bomb. It should be possible for the President to pick up a telephone at any hour of the day or night and satisfy himself, the nation, and, most of all, the world, that these Ready Groups could be off and on their way immediately on receipt of orders. There will be no time for rehearsals or mistakes or for mustering of resources in the next war.
It can be argued that this is an offensive force, likely to alarm other nations: but in vertical warfare the only defense is the power to strike offensively, the maintenance of a striking force so large, so well dispersed, and so everlastingly ready that a potential aggressor can never hope for another Pearl Harbor or count on anything to save him from devastation as terrible as that which he contemplates inflicting on others. There would be no need for such national striking power were we not confronted by a strong, unfriendly nation, a larger Air Force, and a deadlock in the Unit ed Nations.
Pending the emergence of an international police force for the prevention of war, there are two choices that confront our nation today. First, we can achieve a reasonable degree of interim security by building a protective machine strong enough to discourage any possible aggressor. Second, we can remain defenseless and take the chance that international control may somehow come into being ahead of any threat of war.
It is a grave decision for a nation just recovering from the strain of a long, unsought war, for a people to whom the thought of war has always been anat hema. Before we come to one decision or the other, let us try to evaluate, with the help of our leading atomic scientists, what we would have to accept should war descend on us again as swiftly and unexpectedly as it did the last time. What would it be like?
4
MANY of us may still be thinking of atomic attack in terms of Hiroshima, of a colossal explosion and a deathroll of 100,000 people. While vigorous “security” prevents any specific disclosure by scientists of the atomic developments of the past two years, we can be certain that the effect of the next atom bomb, if one is ever dropped, will bear about as much resemblance to the Hiroshima bomb as a British blockbuster bore to a hand grenade. Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, in charge of manufacturing the first atom bomb, estimates that were the United States to be attacked at some future time, “atomic weapons might kill 40,000,000 Americans in a single night.” Airmen and scientists already refer to the Hiroshima-Nagasaki missiles as “old-type bombs,” and the Atomic Scientists of Chicago describe them as “the first relatively primitive atomic bombs.” Professor William A. Higinbotham, of the Manhattan Project, stated that the first bomb contained only “a few pounds of atomic explosive.” According to a statement distributed by the National Committee on Atomic Information, “every effort was made to keep the first explosions to a minimum. The real thing in atomic bombs has not been tried out yet.” As far back as January, 1946, Dr. Harold C. Urey pointedly quoted the British scientist, Dr. M. L. Oliphant (presumably not subject to such rigid security), who predicted “bombs in the near future of from 50 to 100 times the power of those which have been exploded.”
Finally, in February, 1947, one of Dr. Urey’s Manhattan Project associates, Professor Edward Teller, made one of the most significant statements of our time: “We must be prepared for startling developments. It has been repeatedly stated that future bombs may easily surpass those used in the last war by a factor of a thousand. I share this belief. One consequence of such bigger bombs would be that instead of three or four square miles, three or four hundred square miles might be devastated at a single blow.” (Italics supplied.)
Since no city in the United States is larger than 400 square miles, and few are as large, this means that any of our great centers, with their millions of inhabitants, might be blotted out by a single bomb in a fraction of a second. No would-be aggressor could fail to note that half our population and almost all our heavy industry are compressed into one area known to our own airmen as the Central Target Zone. This zone is the most strategic target in the world, and one of the most accessible, for it is close to our frontiers and can be crisscrossed by high-speed bombers within a single hour. Containing some 70 million people and the bulk of our productive economy, it is bounded by Milwaukee and Kansas City in the West, by Boston and Washington in the East, and includes the following key cities: —
Chicago Cleveland Boston
Milwaukee Buffalo New York
Kansas City Pittsburgh Philadelphia
St. Louis Cincinnati Wilmington
Detroit Louisville Baltimore
Columbus Indianapolis Washington
Given 18 of the new super-bombs visualized by Professor Teller, all of these cities and most of the 30 million people living in them could be wiped out by a single wave of bombers. With the blast factor of Hiroshima stepped up 1000 times, people and buildings alike would literally disintegrate.
The picture of such slaughter is monstrous beyond our imagination. But even this horror pales beside the picture of what could happen to people living outside the cities. It is Professor Teller’s belief that “such bigger bombs may prove to be even more dangerous in an indirect way . . . there is a threshold beyond which radioactivity has lethal effects. . . . Sufficiently strong radioactivity will kill all living tissue.” Most of us are familiar with the elaborate precautions taken by hospitals to guard against rays from a tiny speck of radium — the lead gloves, the lead aprons, the thick shields. It is used in infinitesimal fractions of a gram. An explosion of 18 super-bombs — or perhaps of 100 medium bombs — over the cities would release the equivalent of 4 million tons of unshielded radium and spread it throughout the Central Target Zone.
To the 40 million people living in the smaller cities, towns, and farms of the Zone, a vast mass of radioactive air could spell death in a particularly revolting form, and it would be inescapable. Wherever human beings seek shelter, they must always breathe. If intensely radioactive air is breathed into the lungs, it passes into the blood, destroys the bone marrow, and sets up leukemia, an uncontrollable blood cancer for which there is no cure. We have learned from official reports on the Japanese bombings that, aside from blast, radioactivity from an atom bomb can defoliate the crops, sicken the beasts, poison the water, and cause human beings to bleed slowly and dreadfully to death. By comparison, instant death from blast would undoubtedly be the more merciful.
Many may be tempted to seek reassurance from the very hideousness of the prospect. “It is too awful,” some of us may try to convince ourselves, “no nation would ever be so fiendish as to inflict that agony on helpless civilians, on women and children who have no possible escape.” Let us not forget, then, that it is only what we ourselves have already done to others, on a smaller scale. Let us not forget that there has never been a weapon invented in human history, from arrows to flame throwers, that has not been used to the utmost of its capacity. If we, a tolerant and enlightened nation, could bring ourselves to drop atom bonus on the homeland of an enemy, are we prepared, in the absence of an effective international police force, to rely solely on moral force to prevent an enemy from dropping bombs on us? It is the responsibility of every individual to weigh this question for himself, for should another war crisis develop, with all the lightning speed made possible by planes and bombs, every American home and family is going to be at stake during every second of every day and night, until the crisis resolves one way or another.
5
AFTER a great war it is natural to object to formidable defense programs on the ground that they promote only armament races and still more wars. But a nation must have security from some source. We have tried by every means open to us to help bring into being an international agency able to provide this security, not only for ourselves, but for all nations, and it is certain that we shall never cease to work towards that goal. The titanic power for evil of the atom can never be successfully controlled by individual nations. There can never be hope for enduring peace until all the nations combine to make a single world. But with the world as unsettled as it is today, can we, the leading democracy, afford to sit with folded hands while a fully armed dictatorship expands its military strength before our eyes? Within this decade such a policy all but cost Great Britain her life. It has cost us 300 billion dollars, with uncounted billions still to come.
It is a fallacy to claim that military preparedness has ever led the United States into war. The reverse has been true. Twice in our generation we have remained unarmed in the shadow of military might, have thought it in our power to remain at peace. Twice we have been attacked. How large appeared the cost of preparedness before those wars — of t he preparedness that we rejected — how small it seems today compared with the enormous expenditures that might have been averted! If we deny the possibility of war under the present world conditions, why have a defense at all? If we admit it, as our ll½-billion-dollar defense budget would seem to indicate, why does our program not provide any realistic means of discouraging atomic attack?
Our monopoly of atomic weapons cannot possibly last much longer, if indeed it still exists. On this point all our scientists are agreed. In 1940 Russian scientists split the uranium atom. In 1942 Dnieperpetrovsk engineers were already experimenting with a process similar to the one used in our Oak Ridge, Tennessee, plant. In 1945 Russian work was further expedited by valuable information from German sources, from the Smyth Report, and from the Soviet espionage ring in Canada. Nobel Prize winner Dr. Irving Langmuir stated in 1946: “I believe that the Russians will have begun to produce bombs within about three years. Thereafter, however, there is a definite possibility that Russia may accumulate atomic bombs far faster than we do.” If this estimate proves to be true, it barely gives us time to re-create an adequate Air Force ahead of a Russian stockpile of atomic bombs.
There are times when men and women must unite in action for their own salvation. We believe that this is one of them. We believe that the time has come for an aroused public opinion to demand adequate national protection pending the achievement of some system of collective security — whether through the United Nations, through a Federal Union of the Western Powers or of the Western Hemisphere; and further, to demand of Congress that t his protection be adequate in fact, not merely in billions to maintain outdated equipment.
It is a bleak fact that no such adequate protection can be achieved until deep into 1950 unless it can be made the subject of quick action by a Special Session of Congress. But it is an even bleaker fact that there are few indications that inertia in Washington will give way to realistic action without pressure from the countless individuals who must be the targets in tomorrow’s war. Is it not time for every Congressman to be asked whether he is satisfied, in view of present world unrest, that the United States will not be attacked for several years. And, if he concedes the possibility, is he satisfied with a first-line defense of 144 obsolescent bombers, and only 100 new ones on order?
There are no insurmountable obstacles between us and security. We have the best scientists, the best airmen, designers, facilities, materials, and the most money of any nation in the world. There is no insurance we can buy which would be cheaper, or as cheap. We owe it not only to ourselves but to all humanity, for if we go down before international protection can become a dependable, working reality, the world of free men will go down with us.