Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

If we had brought this operation to its logical conclusion, the destruction of Japan’s cities with incendiary and other bombs would have been quite unnecessary. But General Norstad declared at Washington that this blockading action was a cowardly proceeding unworthy of the Air Force. It was therefore discontinued.”

Even now it is impossible to make any final and impartial judgment of the merits of this decision. The degree to which it has since been distorted for partisan purposes may be seen from the contradictory charges that the efforts to get a bomb slowed down after the defeat of Germany and the opposite charge that they speeded up in that period. The former charge, aimed at the scientists, especially the refugees at Chicago who had given America the bomb by providing the original impetus toward it, was that these scientists, led by Szilard, were anti-Nazi, pro-Soviet, and un-American, and worked desperately for the bomb so long as Hitler was a threat, but on his demise opposed all further work for fear it would make the United States too strong against the Soviet Union. The opposite charge was that the Manhattan District worked with increasing frenzy after Germany’s defeat, because General Groves was anti-Soviet. A variant of this last charge is that Groves was a racist and was willing to use the bomb on nonwhites like the Japanese but unwilling to use it against the Germans. It is true that Groves in his report of April 23, 1945, which was presented to President Truman by Secretary Stimson two days later, said that Japan had always been the target. The word “always” here probably goes back only to the date on which it was realized that the bomb would be so heavy that it could not be handled by any American plane in the European theater and, if used there, would have to be dropped from a British Lancaster, while in the Pacific the B-29 could handle it.

It seems clear that no one involved in making the decision in 1945 had any adequate picture of the situation. The original decision to make the bomb had been a correct one based on fear that Germany would get it first. On this basis the project might have been stopped as soon as it was clear that Germany was defeated without it. By that time other forces had come into the situation, forces too powerful to stop the project. It is equally clear that the defeat of Japan did not require the A-bomb, just as it did not require Russian entry into the war or an American invasion of the Japanese home islands. But, again, other factors involving interests and nonrational considerations were too powerful. However, if the United States had not finished the bomb project or had not used it, it seems most unlikely that the Soviet Union would have made its postwar efforts to get the bomb.

There are several reasons for this: (1) the bomb’s true significance was even more remote from Soviet political and military leaders than from our own, and would have been too remote to make the effort to get it worthwhile if the bomb had never been demonstrated; (2) Soviet strategy had no interest in strategic bombing, and their final decision to make the bomb, based on our possession of it, involved changes in strategic ideas, and the effort, almost from scratch, to obtain a strategic bombing plane (the Tu-4) able to carry it; and (3) the strain on Soviet economic resources from making the bomb was very large, in view of the Russian war damage. Without the knowledge of the actual bomb which the Russian leaders obtained from our demonstration of its power, they would almost certainly not have made the effort to get the bomb if we had not used it on Japan.

On the other hand, if we had not used the bomb on Japan, we would have been quite incapable of preventing the Soviet ground forces from expanding wherever they were ordered in Eurasia in 1946 and later. We do not know where they might have been ordered because we do not know if the Kremlin is insatiable for conquest, as some “experts” claim, or is only seeking buffer security zones, as other “experts” believe, but it is clear that Soviet orders to advance were prevented by American possession of the A-bomb after 1945. It does seem clear that ultimately Soviet forces would have taken all of Germany, much of the Balkans, probably Manchuria, and possibly other fringe areas across central Asia, including Iran. Such an advance of Soviet power to the Rhine, the Adriatic, and the Aegean would have been totally unacceptable to the United States, but, without the atom bomb, we could hardly have stopped it. Moreover, such an advance would have led to Communist or Communist-dominated coalition governments in Italy and France. If the Soviet forces had advanced to the Persian Gulf across Iran, this might have led to such Communist-elected governments in India and much of Africa.

From these considerations it seems likely that American suspension of the atomic project after the defeat of Germany or failure to use the bomb against Japan would have led eventually to American possession of the bomb in an otherwise intolerable position of inferiority to Russia or even to war in order to avoid such a position (but with little hope, from war, to avoid such inferiority). This would have occurred even if we assume the more optimistic of two assumptions about Russia: (1) that they would not themselves proceed to make the bomb and (2) that they are not themselves insatiably expansionist. On the whole, then, it seems that the stalemate of mutual nuclear terror without war in which the world now exists is preferable to what might have occurred if the United States had made the decision either to suspend the atomic project after the defeat of Germany or to refuse to use it on Japan. Any other possible decisions (such as an open demonstration of its power before an international audience in order to obtain an international organization able to control the new power) would probably have led to one of the two outcomes already described. But it must be clearly recognized that the particular stalemate of nuclear terror in which the world now lives derives directly from the two decisions made in 1945 to continue the project after the defeat of Germany and to use the bomb on Japan.

This nuclear stalemate, in turn, leads to pervasive consequences in all aspects of the world in the twentieth century. It gives rise to a frenzied race between the two super-Powers to outstrip each other in the application of science and rationality to life, beginning with weapons. This effort provides such expensive equipment and requires such skill from the operators of this equipment that it makes obsolete the army of temporarily drafted citizen-soldiers of the nineteenth century and of “the armed hordes” of World War I and even of World War II, and requires the use of highly trained, professional, mercenary fighting men.

The growth of the army of specialists, foretold by General de Gaulle in 1934 and foreseen by others, destroys one of the three basic foundations of political democracy. These three bases are (1) that men are relatively equal in factual power; (2) that men have relatively equal access to the information needed to make a government’s decisions; and (3) that men have a psychological readiness to accept majority rule in return for those civil rights which will allow any minority to work to build itself up to become a majority.

Just as weapons development has destroyed the first of these bases, so secrecy, security considerations, and the growing complexity of the issues have served to undermine the second of these. The third, which was always the weakest of the three, is still in the stage of relative vitality and relative acceptability that it had in the nineteenth century, but is in much greater danger from the threat of outside forces, notably the changes in the other two bases, plus the greater danger today from external war or from domestic economic breakdown.