I’m a coward, a wimp, a softie and I never could have pulled it off. If I had been in charge of our foreign policy in, say, 1946 – if one could even imagine such a thing – Joseph Stalin would have laughed in my face and considered me a joke when I threatened him. I would have simply been incapable of ordering the dropping of an atom bomb on a Soviet city or the Kremlin in retaliation for the invasion of Western Europe or anything else.
But there were certainly people in this country whose threats were not so empty. Take, for example, Gen. Curtis LeMay, who as head of the Strategic Air Command threatened to obliterate not just a Soviet city or two, but the entire country. Beside LeMay stood his deputy, Gen. Thomas Power, fresh from fire-bombing Tokyo and other Japanese cities. Their menace was paired with the reality of the dropping of A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki behind them – even if LeMay and Power didn’t personally order those bombings.
They certainly would have been believed by Stalin in 1946 or the late forties if they had threatened to drop an atom bomb in Soviet territory if Stalin didn’t comply with a demand to let inspectors into the country to search for signs of atomic bomb development we could then destroy. Maybe we would have also needed to round up all their nuclear scientists and technicians and forcibly remove them from the country and give them good jobs – or at least good sinecures – in the West.
Would Stalin have complied? I think he would have, if, combined with the threat of the bomb, we assured him that we did not intend to try to remove him from power, though we also might have tried to force some reforms on him. In any case, forcing reforms would have been optional and only pursued to the extent that such efforts wouldn’t provoke a war – the primary and minimum goal would be halting any nuclear activity. The question then becomes why weren’t these men (LeMay or Powers) used in this fashion?
For that matter, why didn’t LeMay make such a proposal himself in the late 1940s, particularly since we were already threatening the Soviet Union with A-bombs if it tried to invade Western Europe? The loss of the atom bomb monopoly was a far more serious strategic loss than the loss of Western Europe would have been. Also, threatening to drop atom bombs on a Soviet city would have been less intense than LeMay’s later threats to incinerate the entire country.
Certainly LeMay was aware of the problem, as indicated by a perceptive speech he had given in 1946, in which he addressed what the Japanese would have needed to do in order to win the war or to at least have made the defeat less one-sided. He argued that the Japanese would have had to locate and destroy our atomic facilities including Los Alamos, N.M., which of course the Japanese undoubtedly couldn’t have done, even if they had known about the A-bomb in advance.
Was LeMay afraid of losing his job – other officials were fired or reprimanded for expressing such views – and/or being pressured by those who probably saw war and defense spending as a way of preventing a depression rather than as a means of maintaining our monopoly of atomic weapons?
Jonathan Miller is a graduate student studying geography. He can be reached at jsmiller@umd.edu.
