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

The neo-isolationist surge in American public opinion so paralyzed the freedom of action of the Truman Administration that it was unable to negotiate any settlement of the war in Korea. Every effort at negotiation gave rise to howls of “appeasement” or “treason.” Moreover, the Communists, while willing to negotiate, showed no eagerness to make an agreement, with the result that negotiations crawled along for two years in the isolated military quarters at Panmunjon in Korea. The Kremlin was quite willing to keep America’s men, money, and attention tied down in Korea, and could find each day an additional argument to throw as an obstacle into the negotiations. Most of these obstacles were concerned with the disposition of prisoners of war, thousands of whom did not want to return to Communist territory, while only twenty-one captured Americans were unwilling to return to the United States. Simply by insisting that all prisoners must be forced to return, the Communists could extend the negotiations indefinitely in time and thus postpone the day when the United States might be free to turn its men and resources to other areas closer to the Soviet Union and thus more dangerous to it, such as Europe.

Only the death of Stalin in March 1953 broke this stalemate. As soon as the first confusion over this issue had passed temporarily, it became possible to make a Korean truce, an achievement helped by the accession of a new Republican administration in Washington in January. The truce was signed on July 27, 1953, after 37 months of war in which the United States had lost 25,000 dead, 115,000 other casualties, and about $22 billion in costs.

The Korean War had a totally different impact on the scientists, the Democratic leaders, the army, some of the navy, the new group of strategic intellectuals and non-middle-class educated persons in general than it had on the neo-isolationists, the Republican leaders, the air force, Big Business, and the newly forming Radical Right publicists. To the latter groups it was a totally unnecessary and frustrating experience, resulting from the incompetence, or treason, of their opponents, an aberration and throwback to World War I which must never be permitted to reoccur. To the former alignment, however, the limited war in Korea was an inevitable consequence of nuclear stalemate, arising from the very nature of Communist aggression and of the revolutionary discontents of the buffer fringe, and ‘would be a constantly threatening possibility in the future, either in Korea itself or in a dozen other places along the edges of the Communist bloc. Accordingly, this motley alignment, led by its scientists and liberals, began to work to strengthen America’s ability to face any new challenge similar to Korea. In a military sense, this inevitably led to efforts to increase the ability of Europe and America to wage limited war, whatever the cost. The Right, as the defenders of material comforts, were unwilling to engage in such an effort, on the basis of cost alone, and soon convinced themselves that it was unnecessary.

The tactical experience of Korea showed clearly that we had neither the weapons nor the training for limited war and that the air force’s claims for the effectiveness of its strategic weapons were as unrealistic as they had been since Douhet. Even the tactical air units had been ineffective, chiefly because they were designed and used in a separate service dominated by “Big Bomber” generals. Some of the most effective work had been done by tools, such as helicopters, which the air force refused to study or order.

To remedy this weakness, the army’s specialist on airborne warfare, General James M. Gavin, was sent with a team of scientists to Korea in the autumn of 1950. At the time General Gavin, longtime officer of the heroic 82nd Airborne Division, was much worried at the air force’s efforts to monopolize all the air and all nuclear weapons, at its resentment at possession of aviation by the navy and marines, and at its refusal to provide effective tactical support from the air for ground forces or to buy the equipment needed to provide proper airborne mobility, both of men and supplies, for ground troops. The team of scientists who went to the Far East with General Gavin in September-November 1950, included C. C. Lauritsen, professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology, who had developed the whole array of navy and air-force rockets in World War II and had been Oppenheimer’s assistant at Los Alamos during the last year of the war; Dr. William B. Shockley of Bell Telephone Laboratories, developer of the transistor, who won the Nobel Prize in 1956; and Dr. Edward Bowles of MIT, our chief expert on military applications of radar in World War II.

From their discussions emerged a series of scientific research projects in 1951-1952 which had a profound effect on American defense capabilities. Project Vista, with President Lee DuBridge of Caltech as chairman and Lauritsen as his deputy, made an over-all study of defense problems for the Department of Defense. In general it sought to reach a well-rounded, diverse defense establishment which could respond effectively to any degree of aggression and do it on land, sea, or air. One of its chief efforts was to get tactical air power for the ground forces and to counteract the massed Soviet Army in Europe by development of tactical nuclear weapons, as well as nuclear warheads to be carried on rockets of 50- to 300-mile range, so that the forcible dispersion of Russian infantry to avoid annihilation would sharply reduce its offensive impact. These weapons could also be used to get “all-weather” tactical bombing support under army control to replace the fair-weather air-force tactical bombing which had proved so ineffective in Korea.

The Vista Report , which was submitted to the secretaries of the forces in February 1952, made at least a dozen suggestions of which at least ten were eventually carried out, despite the fact that the report was never accepted. The reason for its rejection was the violent opposition of the air force, which disliked most of it but really exploded when they found, in Chapter 5, that it recommended dividing nuclear materials among the three services. The air force flatly refused to yield up any fissionable materials to the other services. At first it insisted that there was not enough. When months of argument proved there was plenty, the air force simply tripled its requirements. When the air force discovered that Oppenheimer had written the introductory section of Chapter 5, his fate was sealed. Stories about his unreliability were passed about, and eventually it was said that he had somehow rewritten Chapter 5 and inserted it without the committee members knowing what he was doing.

Project Charles and its sequel Project Lincoln were equally objectionable to the air force, although they had been instigated by it. “Charles” suggested that a permanent research laboratory should be established to study the technical problems of air defense. Accordingly, in September 1951, the Lincoln Laboratory was set up at MIT. This eventually had a staff of 1,600 on an annual budget of $20 million. Its special summer Project Lincoln in 1951 included many of the scientists, such as DuBridge, Lauritsen, Zacharias, and Oppenheimer of Project Vista; it estimated that American defense against a Soviet air attack was woefully weak and could not expect to knock down more than 20 percent of the attacking planes, a rate far too low to be acceptable in nuclear warfare. Setting a 70 percent “kill-rate” as a minimum aspiration, Project Lincoln recommended establishment of a Distant Early Warning radar detection net across Canada and Greenland (the so-called “DEW Line”), much improved fighter and missile interception in deep air defense (DAD), and the development of an elaborate, integrated, automatic air-defense communications system.