This is the second in a series of posts exploring the effectiveness of nuclear weapons in war. It’s not a breathless exposition about the “shock and awe” value of nuclear weapons, or a somber recounting of the horror of the weapons used on cities. It’s a look at the practical value of nuclear weapons as weapons. It’s about utility.
Of course, the first time the military and political leaders of the United States had a chance to use nuclear weapons — in World War II against the Japanese — they grabbed it with both hands. But the second time they had the chance to use them — seven years later in Korea — they were curiously unwilling to pull the trigger.
Truman and targets
Throughout the period following World War II, and even in the first two years of the Korean War, faith in the atomic bomb’s ability to win wars was surprisingly weak — at least in some parts of official Washington.1
Asked to assess the impact of using atomic bombs in a war with Russia in 1949, the Joint Chiefs of Staff studied a scenario where the entire U.S. arsenal was used against Russia — at that time, 133 bombs. The resulting report, called the Harmon Report, contained “disturbing conclusions.”2 The chiefs estimated that such an attack would kill 2.7 million people and injure four million more, it would reduce Soviet industrial capacity by 30 to 40 percent, but it would not “bring about capitulation, destroy the roots of Communism or critically weaken the power of the Soviet leadership . . .” and, perhaps more importantly, it “would not seriously diminish the capacity of Soviet ground forces to advance into Western Europe . . .”3 Quite a comedown for a weapon that supposedly won the war against Japan after just two bombs were used.
The more they studied the matter, it seems, the more doubts arose in the minds of some officials about the ability of nuclear weapons to turn the tide on the battlefield. “As Secretary of State Acheson acknowledged later that year, the military themselves now worried ‘that if the Red [i.e. Soviet] Army got started they would not be able to stop it, even with the bomb.’”4
[Ok. It was early days. The arsenal was small and rockets had yet to be developed that could deliver warheads with anything like accuracy. Many of the smaller, so called “tactical” nuclear weapons had yet to be developed. But still. Odd that three years after nuclear weapons miraculously “won” World War II and people started calling them “the winning weapon” and the “ultimate weapon” and people were saying that all existing weapons were now obsolete and many other remarkable claims, odd that there should be so little military faith in nuclear weapons’ ability to stop a Soviet invasion.]
Consideration of the use of nuclear weapons against China in 1951 led one memorandum produced by the Policy Planning staff to note that “There are almost no appropriate atomic targets in China” and only “three or four in Manchuria.” In a January 1952 meeting, General Omar Bradley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained to the British Prime Minister that the U.S. had no intention of using nuclear weapons against China at that time, and he gave as the reason that, “up to the present time no suitable targets were presented.”5
[Make a note. This thing about the lack of targets will recur again and again.]
You might think that these doubts had something to do with the size of the adversary. Russia and China are big countries. But even against a much smaller adversary, like North Korea, there were doubts that the bombs could be decisive. In a November 1950 memorandum, Paul Nitze, Director of Policy Planning for the State Department, in assessing the use of nuclear weapons in limited wars, argued that while the weapons might be useful in breaking up enemy troop concentrations or artillery emplacements, “ . . . there was no reason to think that its use for that purpose would be ‘militarily decisive.’” 6
[All of which is odd. Why would military officers and government officials in the Truman administration argue that there were “no suitable targets” for nuclear weapons in wartime, or have doubts its use would not be “militarily decisive”? Doesn’t the size of a nuclear weapon guarantee that it will be effective?
And what is all this talk about targets? You just pick the target and obliterate it, don’t you? Why can’t these military officers seem to settle on useful targets?]
What’s even more remarkable (and surprising), this curious reluctance to use nuclear weapons occurred during a time when “. . . the United States and its allies came close to defeat more than once in Korea — particularly following Chinese intervention late in 1950 . . .” But even so, according to historian John Lewis Gaddis, “Truman and his advisers never seriously considered using the most powerful weapons available to them.” 7
Eisenhower
When Dwight D. Eisenhower became president in January of 1953, however, things were different. Truman might have been reluctant to use extreme force with adversaries, but surely Eisenhower who had ordered attacks and approved bombing campaigns in which tens of thousands died when he was supreme commander of all Allied forces in Europe during World War II would not hesitate.
So less than a month into his presidency, it should have surprised no one when Eisenhower suggested to the National Security Council that “we should consider the use of tactical atomic weapons in Korea.”8
And a study of using “tactical” atomic weapons to jump start a ground offensive was made. Eisenhower set the parameters for use, saying that “the use of atomic weapons in such a campaign should depend on military judgment as to the advantage of their use on military targets.”9 In other words, the decision whether to use nuclear weapons would be based on their military utility, as judged by military professionals, not on moral grounds or whether their use would violate a “taboo.”
You might think that now that a tough military commander was in charge, the decision to use nuclear weapons would be a foregone conclusion. After all, young American soldiers were fighting and dying in Korea in shocking numbers. Something like 40,000 U.S. soldiers never came home from the Korean War.10 Of course a guy who’s tough enough to make the hard decisions would simply go ahead and use the weapons.
There might be opposition from Truman Administration holdovers, but Ike was the kind of man who was good at moving large bureaucracies. He’d managed a wartime coalition that included many allies, many different personalities. And he wasn’t likely to be intimidated by generals — he outranked them all. Ike knew how to get his way. So, he went ahead with it. Right?
No. Almost everyone — soldiers and government officials — said they thought using nuclear weapons would be a bad idea.
“Army Chief of Staff General J. Lawton Collins expressed himself as ‘very skeptical’ about the military advantages; Chinese and North Korean force were deeply entrenched along a 150-mile front, and recent bomb tests in Nevada had proven ‘that men can be very close to the explosion and not be hurt if they are well dug in.’”11
Paul Nitze, who had been kept on as Director of the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department by Eisenhower, suggested that if the weapons were used and weren’t effective, it “might depreciate the value of our stockpile.”12
But the most discouraging response, according to historian John Lewis Gaddis, was a National Security Council staff study that concluded that “it could not predict what effect the use of atomic weapons would have on Communist forces in Korea, other than to demonstrate American determination.”13 In other words, they couldn’t be sure that the use of tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield in Korea would be create a decisive military advantage.
So despite his military background, and despite initially being inclined to use the weapons, Eisenhower eventually decided not to use nuclear weapons in Korea.
Curious Non-use
So why didn’t Truman and Eisenhower use nuclear weapons in Korea? What stopped them? Think about all those young American soldiers that were killed in Korea. Why not save those lives by using nuclear weapons?
Was it civilian casualties? Could it be they were reluctant to use nuclear weapons because the weapons would almost certainly kill some civilians? Perhaps with Truman, but probably not with Eisenhower. Ike was perfectly willing to kill civilians. When he was pressuring the North Koreans and their Chinese allies to end the war in May of 1953, U.S. forces launched a series of attacks against dams and cities in North Korea that inevitably targeted civilians.14 Robert Pape, a scholar who has studied bombing closely, argued that Eisenhower’s willingness to kill so many civilians with conventional bombing suggests he would have had little compunction about using nuclear weapons.15
Was it the Russians? They’d developed a nuclear weapon and tested their first one in September of 1949. Maybe the possibility of a nuclear-armed Soviet Union becoming involved in the war held U.S. decision makers back? This is possible. Soviet intervention came up a number of times in the discussions during the Truman years and the Eisenhower years.
But the Soviet Union had only just exploded its first bomb in 1949 and was thought not to possess very many nuclear weapons or a reliable means of long-range delivery. As historian Nina Tannenwald notes in a footnote, “Some analysts refer to the period until 1957, when the Soviets deployed long-range bombers and demonstrated an intercontinental missile capability, as one of American invulnerability, and the period up to the mid-1960s as one of only middling vulnerability.”16 If the Russians had intervened, they could have struck U.S. troops in Korea or bombed targets in Japan, but they would have been hard pressed to deliver nuclear weapons to U.S. targets. Perhaps Russian intervention worried Washington planners, but not because they had large and robust nuclear forces.
Was it a taboo? Tannenwald has made a strong and very thoroughly researched case that nuclear weapons weren’t used because a “taboo” grew up around their use. But I am skeptical of this argument. War is a brutally pragmatic business and countries generally do what is necessary to win. The history of war is replete with episodes of wartime leaders doing horrible things in order to defeat their adversaries.
If these other reasons can’t account for the non-use is it possible it was something to do with nuclear weapon’s utility that was the problem? All this talk of not being able to find “suitable targets” is peculiar. It is an oddly opaque excuse. Couldn’t they see the targets? They certainly did a helluva lot of conventional bombing in Korea, and they didn’t seem to have any trouble finding those targets. Is “we can’t find any suitable targets” a way of not saying something else?
One problem with using nuclear weapons safely — in a way that didn’t harm U.S. soldiers — was made more difficult by the fact that U.S. ground combat soldiers were completely unprepared to have atomic bombs falling out of the sky. At the time of the Korean War, “Virtually no US or allied troops had been trained in using nuclear weapons on the battlefield.”17
In later years the U.S. Army would develop elaborate protective suits with breathing apparatuses that would allow soldiers to survive in an area where radiation from nuclear explosions was present. It would develop procedures and distribute equipment designed to identify contaminated equipment, buildings, vehicles, fox holes, and so on. It would assign certain troops the task of monitoring the wind direction, so that likely radiation paths could be tracked and soldiers moved or protected accordingly. But none of that, apparently, was available during the Korean conflict. Perhaps saying, “We can’t find any suitable targets” was a way of not saying, “We’re not actually ready to use these things on the battlefield yet.”
It’s possible, I suppose, that they didn’t want to admit that dropping nuclear weapons into the field of battle — near friendly soldiers — was tricky work that they weren’t sure they could do well. How much of a problem this might be was revealed in September and October of 1951 when an operation called Hudson Harbor “confirmed how difficult it would be to locate tactical targets, such as large masses of enemy troops, in a timely fashion.”18
Reading about this caused a little bell to go off in my head in connection with Air Force attitudes toward tactical nuclear weapons during this time. Historian Nina Tannenwald tells the story of Samuel Cohen, a RAND scientist who visited Korea in 1951 and came back saying there were plenty of good targets for nuclear weapons in Korea. His suggestions that nuclear weapons be dropped on those targets, however, were roundly rejected. “The Air Force . . .” it turns out “. . . was adamantly opposed to using atomic weapons for tactical warfare . . .” This is interesting and curious. Why wouldn’t the Air Force want to use nuclear weapons in war? If all went well, then being the military branch that (again) won a war by delivering nuclear weapons would send the Air Force’s prestige through the roof. It would make them the preeminent service among the Army, Navy, and Air Force.
Tannenwald explains their reluctance by saying that Air Force officers feared that using nuclear weapons for tactical missions “ . . . would undermine the primary Air Force mission of strategic bombing.”19 This could be so, of course. Going as far back as World War II, there had been a sharp debate about whether air power should be used to support ground troops on the field of battle or against “strategic” targets far behind enemy lines. Perhaps Tannenwald’s explanation of Air Force reluctance is the right one.
But another possibility occurred to me. Perhaps the “adamant” opposition to flying tactical missions with nuclear weapons came from the fact that Air Force officers were well aware of the difficulties of finding targets under fire and then accurately dropping weapons on those targets. Perhaps they had made their own calculations of the chances of dropping an atomic bomb in the wrong spot. Perhaps Operation Hudson Harbor not only showed that it would be hard to identify enemy targets on the battlefield, it may have revealed how easy it would be to mistake U.S. forces for enemy forces. It could be that the Air Force “adamantly” opposed tactical missions because they knew who would be blamed for such a catastrophe, and what the fallout would be (probably in terms of funding cuts for the Air Force) if an atomic bomb was accidentally dropped on a U.S. position and killed thousands of U.S. soldiers.
Conclusion
The military capabilities of tactical nuclear weapons remain classified. There are few publicly available studies of just how useful — or, perhaps, not useful — nuclear weapons are when used in a tactical role on the battlefield. Even in these historical accounts of a war that took place seventy years ago, the veil of secrecy is carefully drawn across the facts.
There are no declassified answers to the question, “Are nuclear weapons useful weapons on the battlefield?” But perhaps what we can learn from the war in Korea about the utility of nuclear weapons is best summed up by historian John Lewis Gaddis in a passage where he suggests what the thinking in official Washington might have been about using or not using nuclear weapons in Korea:
Because of the absence of appropriate targets, there could be no assurance, whether in Korea, Indochina, or the Taiwan Strait, that the use of nuclear weapons would produce decisive military results. Their ineffectual use, moreover, might compromise the over-all deterrent: if the bomb was seen to have no dramatic effect upon the North Koreans, the Chinese Communists, or the Vietminh, then how could it be expected to impress the Russias, or to reassure endangered allies? Better not to use it at all, and thus preserve the credibility of a vague and therefore ominous threat . . .20
Ah. “ . . . a vague and therefore ominous threat . . .” Very well.
Next time in Nuclear Mystery, part III: Nuking cities v. nuking soldiers, how various ways of measuring and representing bomb destruction — and even the metaphors used to talk about bomb destruction — exaggerate the capabilities of nuclear weapons.
A note about “atomic” bombs v. “nuclear” weapons. There are two kinds of nuclear weapons. The first kind — the ones used against two Japanese cities — were fission bombs: the derived their explosive power from splitting atoms apart. These older, smaller bombs are usually called “atomic” bombs. The second kind (first tested in 1952) derived most of their explosive power from fusing atoms together. This second kind are called fusion weapons or sometimes H-bombs or Hydrogen bombs. Fusion weapons make it possible to make explosions that are more powerful than the earlier fission bombs. So the larger category is “nuclear weapons” and it has two sub-groups: fission weapons (the earlier ones that were usually dropped from planes — so usually called “atomic bombs”), and fusion weapons (often called H-bombs or Hydrogen bombs because they split isotopes of hydrogen.) Fission bombs are older; fusion bombs are the ones that make up most nuclear arsenals today. [Nuclear weapons: all this goddamn jargon.]
John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries Into the History of the Cold War, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 111.
Gaddis, The Long Peace, pp. 111-112.
Gaddis, The Long Peace, p. 112.
Gaddis, The Long Peace, p. 116.
Gaddis, The Long Peace, p. 116.
Gaddis, The Long Peace, p. 115.
Nina Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo: The United State and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945, (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 143
Gaddis, The Long Peace, p. 125.
Gaddis, The Long Peace, p. 125.
Gaddis, The Long Peace, p. 125.
Gaddis, The Pong Peace, p. 125.
Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo, pp. 148-149.
Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo, p. 149f.
Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo, p. 116f.
Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo, p. 134.
Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo, p. 134.
Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo, p. 138.
Gaddis, The Long Peace, p. 141.
Julian: It's here https://wardhayeswilson.substack.com/p/nuclear-mystery-part-iii
Where is part 3?