Atomic Age: Tomorrow

U.S. employment of the atomic bomb looked like anything but an act of renunciation; it might turn out to be just that.

In the tools of pre-atomic war the U.S. had a headstart that would require at least a generation for any nation to overcome. In atomic war, the advantage was hazardous. Sir James Chadwick, chief British adviser on the atomic bomb, said that any nation with the raw materials could make a bomb in five years without help from the U.S.

Security in Secrecy? No matter how drastic a law Congress might pass to control the process, there was little security in attempted secrecy. That the U.S. could always produce more bombs than any other country was meaningless when 500 bombs would have as decisive an effect as 50,000.

To develop the atomic bomb cost the U.S. $2 billion spread over three years. That was small potatoes—roughly equivalent to two weeks’ U.S. war cost. Definitely, the economics of the atomic bomb did not limit it to the top powers.

Lightning Thrust. Potentially, the bomb not only raised the middle and small powers much nearer to the U.S. level; it also restored to warfare “the lightning thrust” by which a smaller power might knock out a greater. The atomic bomb put a new premium on aggression (surprise) and even on chance.

U.S. power was the climax of a 150-year trend in which armies grew bigger & bigger, and supplies of materiel per soldier grew even faster. Basic U.S. superiority was measured in such figures as 100,000 planes (far more than all the rest of the world’s), 737 billion railroad ton miles (half of all the world’s), 60,000,000 tons of shipping (two-thirds of all the world’s). These symbols of bulk power no longer had the same significance.

Security from Terror? When the United Nations met at San Francisco they drafted a peculiar charter for a peculiar world in which a few powers seemed far stronger than all the others together. The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. relied fundamentally on the belief that they could defend themselves. That was the meaning of the one-power veto and many another charter provision.

Would the fact that the U.S. had an atomic bomb now dispose the Russians to go further toward genuine collective security and a more democratic charter? Would the possibility that some other nation might yet develop a more terrible atomic bomb persuade the U.S. to go further in the same direction?