Abstract
The dramatic finale of World War II at Hiroshima and Nagasaki rescued the doctrine of strategic bombardment. Without the atom bomb the theorists of airpower would have been pushed on to the defensive, hard put to justify the pounding of cities for limited rewards. The bomber had not always ‘got through’, and when it had done the results had been less than decisive. Air raids took their toll, but only over time. The bomber was not a means of breaking a deadlock, but yet another instrument of attrition, another method by which industrial societies could beat each other down. With atom bombs airpower could be said to have come of age. These weapons were absolutely devastating and, if the experience of the Japanese surrender was anything to go by, promised quick results.
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Notes
- 1.
Perry McCoy Smith, The Air Force Plans for Peace 1939–1945 (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1970), p. 46, 17.
- 2.
Quoted in David MacIsaacs, Strategic Bombing in World War Two: The Story of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (New York: Garland, 1976), p. 165. MacIsaacs has edited the reports in ten volumes, also published by Garland in 1976. For a critique of the Survey see Gian Gentile, How Effective is Strategic Bombing?: Lessons Learned From World War II to Kosovo (New York: NYU Press, 2000).
- 3.
General H. H. Arnold, ‘Air Force in the Atomic Age’, in Dexter Masters and Katherine Way (eds.), One World or None (New York: McGraw Hill, 1946), pp. 26–9. Summary Report, Pacific War, United States Strategic Bombing Survey, III, p. 29.
- 4.
P. M. S. Blackett, The Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy (London, Turnstile Press, 1948); Vannevar Bush, Modern Arms and Free Men (London, Heinemann, 1950).
- 5.
Edward Mead Earle, Makers of Modern Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943). On Earle see David Ekbladh, ‘Present at the Creation: Edward Mead Earle and the Depression Era Origins of Security Studies’, International Security 36/3 (Winter 2011/2012), pp. 107–41.
- 6.
Gertrude Samuels, ‘Where Einstein Surveys the Cosmos’, New York Times, 19 November 1950.
- 7.
Jacob Viner, ‘The implications of the atomic bomb for international relations’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, XC:1 (January 1946), p. 55.
- 8.
Bernard Brodie, A Layman’s Guide to Naval Strategy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1942).
- 9.
Fred Kaplan, Wizards of Armageddon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), p. 9. Barry Scott Zellen, State of Doom: Bernard Brodie, the Bomb and the Birth of the Bipolar World (New York: Continuum, 2012).
- 10.
Memorandum for the Secretary of War, ‘Subject: Supplementary memorandum giving further details concerning military potentialities of atomic bombs and the need for international exchange of information’, September 30, 1944. Can be accessed at: https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb525-The-Atomic-Bomb-and-the-End-of-World-War-II/documents/005.pdf.
- 11.
New York Times, 13 August 1945.
- 12.
Major-General J.F.C. Fuller, ‘The atomic bomb and warfare of the future’, Army Ordnance (January–February 1946), p. 34.
- 13.
Report of the President’s Advisory Commission on Universal Military Training, A Programme for National Security, known as The Compton Report (Washington DC; USGPO, 1947), p. 12.
- 14.
Bernard Brodie and Eilene Galloway, The Atomic Bomb and the Armed Services Public Affairs Bulletin No. 55 (Washington DC: Library of Congress Legislative Reference Service, May 1947), pp. 30–1.
- 15.
Arnold, in Masters and Way, op. cit., p. 30.
- 16.
Bush, Modern Arms and Free Men, pp. 90, 96–7.
- 17.
See Edmund Beard, Developing the ICBM: A Study in Bureaucratic Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976).
- 18.
Brodie and Galloway, op. cit., p. 32; Bush, op. cit., p. 117; Blackett, The Military and Political Consequences, p. 68.
- 19.
Reprinted in Morton Grodzins and Eugene Rabinowitch (eds.) The Atomic Age: Scientists in National and World Affairs (New York: Basic Books, 1963), p. 13.
- 20.
Edward Condon, ‘The new techniques of private war’, in Masters and Way, op. cit., p. 41 (‘We must no longer expect the special agent to be special’). On this concern see Roberta Wohlstetter, ‘Terror on a grand scale’, Survival, XVIII:3 (May/June 1976), pp. 98–9.
- 21.
Brodie, The Atomic Bomb and American Security (Yale University, Memorandum No. 18, 1945), p. 5.
- 22.
Bernard Brodie, The Absolute Weapon (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1946), p. 49.
- 23.
Blackett, op. cit., p. 50.
- 24.
David Alan Rosenberg, ‘The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945–1960’, International Security, 7: 4 (Spring 1983), pp. 11, 14–5.
- 25.
Bernard Brodie, Absolute Weapon, p. 41; idem., ‘Compiler’s critique on U.S. navy views’, in Brodie and Galloway, op. cit., pp. 46–7.
- 26.
Brodie and Galloway, op. cit., p. 68; The Compton Report, p. 12; New York Times, 3 October 1949.
- 27.
William Fox, Atomic Energy and International Relations (Mimeo: Yale Institute of International Affairs, June 1948), p. 4.
- 28.
Vannevar Bush, op. cit., pp. 104, 139.
- 29.
Viner, ‘The implications of the atomic bomb’, p. 55.
- 30.
Fox (Atomic Energy, pp. 11–2) Harold Urey, ‘How does it all add up’, in Masters and Way, op. cit., p. 55.
- 31.
There was some wishful thinking on this score. In October 1949 Commander Eugene Tatom of the US Navy still felt confident enough to assert that it would be possible to stand on the runway at Washington National Airport ‘with no more than the clothes you now have on, and have an atom bomb explode at the other end of the runway without serious injury to you’. Quoted by Albert Wohlstetter in unpublished letter to Michael Howard, 6 November 1968, p. 26. Appears in Robert Zarate and Henry Sokolski, ed., Nuclear Heuristics: Selected Writings of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter (Carlisle, PA: US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, 2009).
- 32.
See Brodie, Absolute Weapon, pp. 28, 31.
- 33.
Summary (Pacific War), United States Strategic Bombing Survey, IV, p. 29.
- 34.
Bush, op. cit., p. 59.
- 35.
Lord Tedder, Air Power in the War (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1947), p. 44.
- 36.
Bush, op. cit., pp. 116–7.
- 37.
Blackett, op. cit., p. 54.
- 38.
Bush, op. cit., p. 100.
- 39.
Louis Ridenour, ‘There is no defense’, in Masters and Way, op. cit., p. 37; idem., ‘A US physicist’s reply to Professor Blackett’, Scientific American (March 1949), reprinted in York (ed.), Arms Control (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1973).
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Freedman, L., Michaels, J. (2019). Offence and Defence. In: The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57350-6_3
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