Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

In the abandoned control center, the hazard lights flashed, the intruder alarm rang, the escape hatch hung wide open, and water slowly dripped from the tunnel onto the concrete floor.

Hamilton Holt’s dream of world peace finally seemed within reach. For decades he’d campaigned with one civic group after another, trying to end the perpetual conflict between nations, races, and religions. A graduate of Yale from a wealthy family, he’d worked closely with Andrew Carnegie at the New York Peace Society before the First World War. Holt championed the American Peace Society, the World Peace Foundation, the League to Enforce Peace, the League of Nations, the Conciliation Internationale, and the American Society of International Law. He was also a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He edited a reform newspaper, ran for the U.S. Senate in 1924, lost by a wide margin, became the president of Rollins College the following year, and created a unique educational system there. Lectures were eliminated, and faculty members were hired by the students. College life didn’t end his work on behalf of disarmament. During the 1930s, Holt erected a Peace Monument on the Rollins campus in Winter Park, Florida. The monument was a German artillery shell from the First World War set atop a stone plinth. The inscription began: “PAUSE, PASSER-BY, AND HANG YOUR HEAD IN SHAME…”

In the spring of 1946, Holt hosted a conference on world government at Rollins. An idea that had long been dismissed as impractical and naive was now widely considered essential. Much of Europe, Russia, China, and Japan lay in ruins. About fifty million people had been killed during the recent war. The United States had been spared the destruction of its cities — and at first, the stunning news of the atomic bomb inspired relief at the swift defeat of Japan, as well as pride in American know-how. And then the implications began to sink in. General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, commander of the United States Army Air Forces, warned the public that nuclear weapons “destructive beyond the wildest nightmares of the imagination” might someday be mounted on missiles, guided by radar, and aimed at American cities. Such an attack, once launched, would be impossible to stop. Despite having emerged from the conflict with unprecedented economic and military power, the United States suddenly felt more vulnerable than at any other time in its history. “Seldom if ever has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear,” CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow noted, “with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured.”

Hamilton Holt had attended the San Francisco Conference that created the United Nations, only weeks before the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the United Nations, Holt thought, wasn’t really a world government. It was just another league of sovereign states, doomed to failure. The men who attended the conference at Rollins College felt the same way, and they were hardly a bunch of wild-eyed radicals. Among those who signed Holt’s “Appeal to the Peoples of the World” were the president of the Standard Oil Company of Ohio, the chairman of the National Association of Manufacturers, three U.S. senators, one U.S. Supreme Court justice, a congressman, and Albert Einstein. The appeal called for the United Nations’ General Assembly to be transformed into the legislative branch of a world government. The General Assembly would be authorized to ban weapons of mass destruction, conduct inspections for such weapons, and use military force to enforce international law. “We believe these to be the minimum requirements,” the appeal concluded, “of a world government capable of averting another war in the atomic era.”

Within weeks of the conference at Rollins, a collection of essays demanding international control of the atomic bomb became a New York Times bestseller. Its title was One World or None . And a few months later, an opinion poll found that 54 percent of the American people wanted the United Nations to become “a world government with power to control the armed forces of all nations, including the United States.”

To a remarkable degree, even the U.S. military thought that the atomic bomb should be outlawed or placed under some form of international mandate. General Arnold was a contributor to One World or None . He’d been a leading proponent of strategic airpower and supervised the American bombing of both Germany and Japan. The stress had taken its toll. Arnold suffered four heart attacks during the war, and his essay in One World or None was a final public statement before retirement. The appeal of nuclear weapons, he wrote, was simply a matter of economics. They had lowered “the cost of destruction.” They had made it “too cheap and easy.” An air raid that used to require five hundred bombers now needed only one. Atomic bombs were terribly inexpensive, compared to the price of rebuilding cities. The only conceivable defense against such weapons was a strategy of deterrence — a threat to use them promptly against an enemy in retaliation. “A far better protection,” Arnold concluded, “lies in developing controls and safeguards that are strong enough to prevent their use on all sides.”

General Carl A. Spaatz, who replaced Arnold as the Army Air Forces commander, was an outspoken supporter of world government. General George C. Kenney, the head of the recently created Strategic Air Command, spent most of his time working on the military staff of the United Nations. General Leslie Groves — the military director of the Manhattan Project, who was staunchly anti-Communist and anti-Soviet — argued that the atomic bomb’s “very existence should make war unthinkable.” He favored international control of nuclear weapons and tough punishments for nations that tried to make them. Without such a system, he saw only one alternative for the United States. “If there are to be atomic bombs in the world,” Groves argued, “we must have the best, the biggest, and the most.”

AT A CABINET MEETING on September 21, 1945, members of the Truman administration had debated what to do with this powerful new weapon. The issue of international control was complicated by another question: Should the secrets of the atomic bomb be given to the Soviet Union? The Soviets were a wartime ally, lost more than twenty million people fighting the Nazis, and now possessed a military stronger than that of any other country except the United States. Canada and Great Britain had been invited to join the Manhattan Project, while the Soviets hadn’t even been informed of its existence. In a memo to President Truman, Henry Stimson, the outgoing secretary of war, worried that excluding the Soviets from the nuclear club would cause “a secret armament race of a rather desperate character.” He proposed a direct approach to the Soviet Union, outside of any international forum, that would share technical information about atomic energy as a first step toward outlawing the atomic bomb. Otherwise, the Soviets were likely to seek nuclear weapons on their own. Stimson thought that a U.S.-Soviet partnership could ensure a lasting peace. “The only way you can make a man trustworthy,” he told the president, “is to trust him.”

Stimson’s proposal was strongly opposed by Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal. “We tried that once with Hitler,” Forrestal said. “There are no returns on appeasement.” The meeting ended with the Cabinet split on whether to share atomic secrets with the Soviet Union. A few weeks later, George F. Kennan, one of the State Department’s Soviet experts, gave his opinion in a telegram from Moscow, where he was posted at the U.S. embassy. “There is nothing — I repeat nothing,” Kennan wrote, “in the history of the Soviet regime which could justify us in assuming that the men who are now in power in Russia, or even those who have chances of assuming power within the foreseeable future, would hesitate for a moment to apply this [atomic] power against us if by doing so they thought that they might materially improve their own power position in the world.” In the absence of formal guarantees or strict controls, it would be “highly dangerous” to give the Soviets any technical information about how to make an atomic bomb. President Truman reached the same conclusion, and the matter was soon dropped.