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

The advocates of air power from at least 1908 had made extravagant claims, usually based on future rather than on presently available equipment, that the airplane provided the final supreme weapon which made all other methods of warfare unnecessary. This was seen in the arguments of General Giulio Douhet of Italy, General “Billy” Mitchell of the United States, and the refugee Russian airplane designer Alexander de Seversky. Douhet as early as 1921 preached that the next war would be ended in the first twenty-four hours by the total destruction of all enemy cities from the air; Mitchell in the mid-1920’s raised a great furor with his claims that land-based planes had made battleships and lesser naval vessels obsolete; and Seversky, before, during, and after World War II, claimed that air power had made other arms needless. We have seen how these claims had a considerable and pernicious influence on men’s actions before and during World War II. Many airmen who did not believe these claims nevertheless felt that they had to support them in order to obtain a large slice of their country’s defense funds from civilian politicians who were in no position to judge the merits of such claims.

The experience of World War II did not, at first glance, support the claims of the advocates of air power. On November 3, 1944, the United States Secretary of War, on order of the President, set up a committee of twelve to conduct a Strategic Bombing Survey to examine the contribution of strategic bombing to final victory by evaluating bomb damage, assessing captured German and Japanese documents, and interviewing the leaders of the defeated countries. The German survey, which came out in 208 parts over several years, beginning in 1945, did not, on the whole, support the claims of the air enthusiasts, but rather showed that the air-force contribution was much less than had been anticipated or hoped and had become substantial, chiefly in transportation and in gasoline supplies, only after October 1944, when Germany was already beaten (with tactical air-force help) on the ground.

These conclusions were very unwelcome to the army air force officers devoted to strategic bombing, and especially to the airplane-manufacturing industry, which had reached the multimillion-dollar size and hoped to retain at least some of its market after the war’s end. In the last few months of the war against Japan, at least $400 million worth of Boeing B-29’s and parts were in action in the Pacific. Loss of faith in strategic bombing would expose air-force officers and the air-force industry to a grim and poverty-stricken postwar world. Accordingly, it became necessary to both groups to persuade the country that Japan had been defeated by strategic air power. The Strategic Bombing Survey of Japan did not support this contention, although by concentrating on strategic bombing it helped to cover up the vital role played by submarines in the destruction of the Japanese merchant marine, the equally vital role played by the early Marine Corps work in amphibious warfare, and, above all, in the magnificent job done by naval supply forces for all arms, including the strategic bombing bases themselves. The protection and supply of these bases in the Marianas was in sharp contrast with the loss of B-29 bases in continental China to Japanese ground forces, and showed to any unbiased outsider the need for a balanced distribution of all arms in any effective defense system. In such a balanced system the role of strategic bombing and of large long-range planes in general (as contrasted with tactical planes and fighters) would obviously be less than either the air-force officers or the airplane industrialists considered satisfactory.

Accordingly, it became urgent for these two groups and their supporters to convince the country (1) that the atom bomb was not “just another” weapon but was the final, “absolute,” weapon; (2) that the atom bomb had been the decisive factor in the Japanese surrender; and (3) that nuclear weapons were fitted only for air-force use and could not be, or should not be, adapted for naval or ground-force use. The first two of these points were fairly well established in American public opinion in 1945-1947, but the third, because of atomic secrecy, had largely to be argued out behind the scenes. All three points were largely untrue (or true only if hedged about with reservations which would largely destroy their value as air-force propaganda), but those who used them were defending interests, not truth, even when they insisted that the interests they were defending were those of the United States and not merely those of the air force. In this controversy, the scientists, most of whom were naively defending truth, were bound to be crushed. On the other hand, any dissident scientist could obtain access to money and support by making an alliance with the air force.

At the center of this problem was the struggle for control of nuclear reactions within the United States, but the ultimate objective of the struggle was the right to exercise influence on the subdividing of the national defense budget. Thus, the struggle centered on the personnel of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and especially of its scientific advisory panel of outstanding scientists, the so-called General Advisory Committee (GAC) of the AEC. And at the center of the whole struggle was Robert Oppenheimer.

Robert Oppenheimer, wartime director of the Los Alamos laboratory which made the A-bombs, was not a great scientist of the class including Einstein, Bohr, or Fermi, but his knowledge of the subject was profound, and wider than most. He was very well educated in cultural matters, especially literature and music, and could quote Homer in Greek and the Bhagavad-Gita in Sanskrit at appropriate occasions. His social and, to a greater extent, his political education did not begin until about 1935, when he was thirty-one and already a full professor at California Institute of Technology and at the University of California. His political naiveté continued until after the war. He had always been a persuasive talker, got along very well with a wide diversity of people, and during the war he discovered he was an excellent administrator. By 1947 he was the chief scientific adviser to most of the important agencies of the government, informally, if not formally, since other scientists frequently consulted with him before giving their decisions on problems. From 1947 on, he was chairman of the GAC, as well as a member of the Atomic Energy Committee of the Defense Department’s Research and Development Board; of the National Science Foundation; of the President’s Scientific Advisory Board; chairman of the board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists ; and consultant on atomic energy to the CIA, to the State Department, to the National Security Council, to the American delegation to the United Nations, and to the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy (the congressional watchdog over the AEC)—in all, he was on a total of thirty-five government committees.

In spite of Oppenheimer’s exalted positions in 1947-1953, which included the directorship of the great Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (American copy of All Souls College at Oxford), there was a shadow on Oppenheimer’s past. In his younger and more naive days he had been closely associated with Communists. Certainly never a Communist himself, and never, at any time, disloyal to the United States, he had, nonetheless, had long associations with Communists. Partly this arose from his political inexperience, partly from the prevalence of Communists among the intellectual circles of the San Francisco Bay region where he spent the years 1929-1942 as a professor, and partly from his sudden and belated realization of the terrible tragedy of the world depression and of Hitler about 1936. At any rate, his brother, Frank Oppenheimer, and the latter’s wife were Communist Party workers in San Francisco at least from 1937 to 1941, while Oppenheimer’s own wife, whom he married in 1940, was an ex-Communist, widow of a Communist who had been killed fighting Fascism in Spain in 1937.