Marc's+11th+Week+Assignment

__Response to November 12th Readings__

It is astonishing that President Truman allowed the development of the "super" hydrogen bomb. The logic behind the original atomic bomb may have been plausible - why firebomb a city using hundreds to thousands of bombers when you can use one bomb for the same purpose? The atomic bomb is also small enough to target a large military target with only some civilian casualties (barring the two times they //were// used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were largely civilian targets with a small military presence). The hydrogen bomb, on the other hand, is a weapon of genocide as many of the Manhattan Project physicists warned in their committee reports.

The way the General Advisory Committee reports the facts about the production and use of a hydrogen bomb is rather inhuman. They, too acknowledge that such a weapon is beyond strictly military use. It has the potential to wipe out entire countries, the magnitude of the damage adjustable by adding or subtracting "deuterium-an essentially cheap material" (GAC Report, Part II). When one reads through the entire GAC Report and reads the author as Oppenheimer, who doesn't want to bomb to be produced either, one wonders why he even bothered to outline all the specifics of producing such a weapon. It may have cost him his job on the committee, but it'd have been a lot better than putting bad ideas in the heads of the United States government.

Other sections of the GAC Report are equally disturbing. One point Oppenheimer makes about the responsibilities of the Atomic Energy Commission in regards to the production of fissionable materials is the creation of radiological weapons. Radiological weapons and atomic bombs are not the same thing. Also called "dirty bombs" radiological weapons are the cheap terrorists' idea of how to nuke a country. The idea is to pack radioactive material into a shell and spread it over enemy targets with the use of conventional ordnance. Is that what we wanted our country to be viewed as? Terrorists? The atomic bomb logic, as stated above, was to do with one bomb what it would take tens of thousands of conventional bombs to do, with radiation as a side effect. A radiological "dirty bomb" has the sole intentional and much more malicious purpose of contaminating an enemy's land and people.

Despite all this, Truman gives the go ahead for the Atomic Energy Commission to continue the research on and production of the hydrogen bomb: "This we shall continue to do until a satisfactory plan for international control of atomic energy is achieved" (Statement by the President on the H-Bomb). Did he really think this a wise idea? Sure it had the best interests of the nation's security at heart, but it would have made more sense to heed the advice of Oppenheimer and the other physicists in agreeing with all nations to never produce such a weapon. So long as the United States had a hydrogen bomb and other countries did not, there would be an imbalance. No nation would want to settle at the table where this "plan for the international control of atomic energy" is being worked on. There would have to be a balance. Giving the go ahead on the development of the H-Bomb was another Rubicon we crossed. Once we had one, no other nation would be comfortable without their own. It's all about equilibrium. We're not the only superpower in the world now, we weren't at that time, and the number will only increase in the future (i.e. China). Other superpowers would either demand we get rid of our H-Bomb or make their own so as to be on par. Apparently Truman didn't understand that.

I don't want to sound like I'm going to become an ex-pat after college and ship off to Europe but learning the history behind all of this is truly upsetting.

Que the Cold War.