H-bomb program

The H-bomb program was the United States’ effort to develop a thermonuclear weapon, a prospective superbomb with more than ten times the destructive power of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Its approval in 1950 followed the loss of the American atomic monopoly and a sharp division among scientists, diplomats, and military officials over whether security required a more powerful weapon or restraint offered a better chance of preventing an arms race. Harry S. Truman authorized the work, turning a dispute among advisers into a presidential decision with consequences for the direction and cost of national defense.

Origins and the changing strategic situation

In October 1949, soon after the Soviet Union’s atomic test ended the United States’ four-year monopoly, officials began discussing a thermonuclear weapon in highly secret meetings at the offices of the Atomic Energy Commission. The Soviet bomb had changed assumptions about the security of the United States: if the Soviets could produce an atomic weapon, advocates argued, they might also be able to develop a far more destructive one. The new weapon was called the Super as well as the hydrogen bomb, and its anticipated power made the question more than a technical extension of the wartime atomic project.

The proposal originated with Lewis Strauss of the Atomic Energy Commission and received strong support from physicist Edward Teller. But expertise did not produce a common position. James B. Conant and J. Robert Oppenheimer opposed proceeding, and Enrico Fermi, initially inclined to support the project, changed his mind. The scientific advisory committee ultimately opposed development on both technical and moral grounds. General Omar N. Bradley favored it chiefly for its psychological importance. These divisions placed the central question before Truman: whether the possibility of a Soviet superbomb made American development necessary despite doubts about the weapon and the danger of an accelerating competition.

The case for restraint and the case for proceeding

The Atomic Energy Commission’s advisory committee unanimously recommended against developing the superbomb. The commission itself also recommended against it, by a vote of three to two, with David E. Lilienthal casting the deciding vote. Truman received that report on November 9, 1949. The next day, he appointed Dean Acheson, Louis Johnson, and Lilienthal to a special National Security Council committee, known as the Z Committee, to advise whether to proceed and whether the issue should become public. A week later, it was already a public controversy, after Senator Edwin Johnson disclosed that a hydrogen bomb was under consideration.

George Kennan made the strongest case that a decision against the weapon could serve a larger diplomatic purpose. In a lengthy memorandum to Acheson, he urged the United States to set an example and accept some risk in pursuit of international agreement to control weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction. Proceeding, he warned, could commit the country and the world to an indefinite escalation in destructiveness and cost. Kennan’s argument was joined by Lilienthal’s doubts and Oppenheimer’s moral objections and skepticism about technical feasibility.

Opponents faced a different strategic argument from the Joint Chiefs, whose position was that work should proceed rapidly. General Omar N. Bradley rejected the idea that the United States could resolve the question simply by ranking one weapon as more immoral than another; he argued that the immorality of war belonged to the nation that initiated hostilities. Paul Nitze, the new head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, likewise believed that the Soviet Union’s possession of an atomic bomb required both a hydrogen-bomb effort and stronger conventional forces. Acheson identified two stubborn considerations: American delay would not prevent Soviet development, and the American public would not accept a policy of waiting.

Truman’s decision

By the final Z Committee session, on January 31, 1950, in Room 216 of the Old State Department Building, Acheson had concluded that work should go forward. He took charge of the meeting and presented a draft presidential statement. Lilienthal objected to rushing a decision in an atmosphere of excitement. He feared that reliance on atomic weapons as the country’s chief defense was unwise, that a new bomb could give the public a false sense of security, and that the project would affect defense budgets and foreign policy. He also believed that approval would make a different approach to the arms race harder to pursue.

Truman’s immediate staff believed he had already made up his mind, perhaps ten days earlier. Lilienthal later recalled that the President appeared set on his decision before the meeting began. Yet Truman listened as Lilienthal stated his reservations. Truman said that he had always believed the United States should never use such weapons and that peace was its purpose. But he also pointed to the excitement surrounding the issue in Congress and elsewhere and said he did not see an alternative. He asked whether the Soviets could develop the weapon. When the group agreed that they could, Truman decided to proceed.

As he signed the statement, Truman compared the decision to an earlier National Security Council debate about aid to Greece: predictions of catastrophe had not come true when the United States acted then, he said, and he expected the same in this case. He subsequently explained the decision in terms of his responsibility as commander in chief to ensure that the country could defend itself against any possible aggressor. His statement directed the Atomic Energy Commission to continue work on all forms of atomic weapons, including the hydrogen or superbomb. The order made the program an explicit element of national policy, rather than a proposal confined to scientific or advisory deliberations.

Consequences and significance

The decision did not settle the moral or strategic dispute. At the Atomic Energy Commission, Lilienthal described the aftermath as having the mood of a funeral party; he hoped that he had been wrong to oppose the project. Albert Einstein warned on television that radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere could lead to general annihilation. The book leaves uncertain how much Truman struggled with the decision or how much he dwelled on it afterward: he left no written account of his thinking, and Acheson’s influence, though likely considerable, cannot be measured precisely.

The program also belongs to a wider pattern in Truman’s approach to wartime and national-security authority. As chairman of the Truman Committee, he had defended civilian control of the war effort against the expanding influence of military leaders over industry and agriculture. In deciding on the hydrogen bomb, he again had to reconcile military advice, scientific dissent, diplomatic alternatives, and the President’s authority to make the final choice. That responsibility had already appeared in the earlier decision to use atomic bombs against Japan: advisers debated a demonstration or a military target, but concluded that no demonstration was likely to force surrender, while Truman regarded the recommendation as his own responsibility. In the thermonuclear debate, the problem shifted from using an existing weapon to authorizing a still more destructive one in anticipation of a Soviet capability. The H-bomb program thus marked not only a new stage of weapons development but also a choice to answer uncertainty about the other side’s future capacity with an American commitment to build.