This article is taken from Peacemakers: Voices from the New Abolitionist Movement, edited by Jim Wallis. Peacemakers was published by Harper and Row in the spring of 1983. --The Editors
I was 16 when the bomb went off. Amid exultation at the technical marvels of nuclear annihilation, the early commentators struck a persistent note of fear that made an indelible impression on me. Though America had an exclusive hold on the "secret" of the bomb, no one was safe. Someone else could make the bomb, and the nuclear "trustee" as Truman called us would no longer be defendable.
I did not excel at high school physics, but I knew enough to understand that there was no longer a secret. Destruction on such a scale had burst the bonds of nationality, and the bomb would be no respecter of borders. In fact most of the people who had worked on the theoretical foundation of the weapon were not Americans. It seemed obvious to me that the splitting of the atom had created an historical divide. I had no idea what it meant, but I knew that the world would not be the same again. I felt sorrier for myself than for the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The bomb blended into the landscape during the years I attended high school and college. It was always mentioned, but never seen. Despite the endless disarmament conferences held at the height of the Cold War, conventional wisdom held that we would never get rid of it and that it would never--they meant never again--be used in war. The nuclear arms race that had been accurately predicted by the nuclear scientists had become a fact of life. I remember having conversations with friends about whether we would live a normal life, whether we should have children, whether there was any place to hide. But the horror and fascination of the atomic bomb was largely submerged somewhere in the subconscious.
I did not begin to think of the atomic bomb as something other than a natural phenomenon until I became conscious of how thoroughly the production, planning, and advertising of nuclear weapons was shot through with deception. The trial and the execution of the Rosenbergs appalled me. I assumed that the Rosenbergs were guilty of passing some information to the Russians, though as a law student I thought the evidence flimsy. But the claim that they were responsible for America's vulnerability or for the Korean War, as the judge who condemned them to death solemnly pronounced, was outrageous. The bomb, it seemed to me, was turning the country inside out even while we still had a monopoly on the weapon.
James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard, wrote an article in opposition to a preventive war against the Soviet Union. He based his argument on the grounds that such a thing would make us look bad and might not be necessary. The idea that there were moral limits standing in the way of exterminating millions of innocent people, if prudent statecraft should so require, was not discussed except in obscure periodicals. I wondered what kind of civilization we were defending with this bomb.
In the late 1940s, Colliers, a mass circulation magazine of the time, devoted an entire issue to a grizzly fantasy of America's atomic victory over the Soviet Union. After a few dozen bombs were dropped, if I recall correctly, the American military government parachuted into the vast remnant of the Soviet empire with the works of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and proceeded to re-educate the entire country in capitalism and democracy. It was as clear a statement of U.S. war aims as could be found at the time, and it made about as much sense as most of the official predictions about the outcome of the nuclear arms race.
I did not really begin to concern myself with the issue of nuclear weapons in a serious way until 1959, when I returned to Harvard for a research project at the Russian Research Center. I had found that spending my day in a rather stuffy Boston law firm inventing ways for wealthy dowagers to keep their income high and their taxes low offered me something less than what I was looking for. Marshall Shulman, who ran the Russian Research Center at the time, suggested that I do a study of Soviet negotiating behavior in the disarmament talks. To do this political science exercise required also looking at U.S. negotiating behavior.
I had assumed that the USSR used the disarmament issue for propaganda, but I had no idea that the U.S. played the same game. I accepted the conventional notion that of course the U.S. wanted disarmament with reliable safeguards--why wouldn't we?--but that the devious, pathologically suspicious, hostile Russians blocked every sensible proposal we put forward.
I went through the entire disarmament debates between 1945 and 1960 and read everything I could on the subject. I found out that in May of 1955 Harold Stassen, the U.S. disarmament negotiator, had come close to reaching an agreement with the Soviets--an agreement based to a great extent on U.S. proposals--and that Secretary of State Dulles had flown to London in a panic and blocked the agreement. He fired Stassen and put a "reservation" on all previous U.S. positions. This was not the only example of negotiating behavior on our side that suggested more interest in propaganda than in eliminating nuclear weapons. Both sides, I concluded in my study, were playing the same game, although the Soviets, as the weaker power, evinced a greater self-interest in limiting nuclear arms than did the U.S. They operated with a clear perception of economic limits. In those heady days, we felt bound by none.
Harvard refused to publish my study for reasons that were never made clear. The Beacon Press did publish my book Who Wants Disarmament?, and it received generally favorable reviews and a certain amount of attention. On the strength of the book, I landed a job in Washington with the new Kennedy administration, first in the State Department and then in the new Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
These two years transformed what had been an intellectual interest accompanied by vague feelings of disquiet into the great concern of my life. I had expected the people on the inside to take the problem of nuclear disarmament seriously, but it was clear from my first week in Washington that except for a handful of dedicated people in subordinate positions, they did not. I was the secretary on a panel on "new ideas" in disarmament on which Henry Kissinger, Paul Nitze, and other eminent national security types sat. Their interest seemed to be entirely in beating the Soviets in the propaganda battles while leaving the U.S. free to pursue its own weapons development plans.
Once again I felt deceived. Like most Americans I had believed the election propaganda put forward by Kennedy about the missile gap. I soon discovered that the gap existed only in reverse. The U.S. had an overwhelming superiority in all sorts of nuclear weapons. The illusion persisted that we could find a way to use these weapons to make the Russians "behave" without having to drop them. But we shouldn't shrink from dropping them.
One Saturday morning during the Berlin crisis of 1961 when I was the duty officer, I saw a cable from the President of the United States to the Berlin commander outlining the circumstances on which he would be authorized to use nuclear weapons. It was one thing to read the grizzly scenarios of the nuclear strategists about how a nuclear war might start and quite another to read precise instructions from the president of the United States to a military commander in possession of nuclear weapons on when and where to explode them. The language was no different from that used in a thousand cables I had seen in the government, but these five or six paragraphs of bureaucratic prose could start the chain reaction that could end the world. Nothing in the cable traffic suggested that either the sender or the receiver of the message knew or cared.
I found the bureaucratic machine charged with thinking about national security to be impervious to reason. I listened while distinguished scientists who counseled a sort of freeze of nuclear weapons were charged with advocating unilateral disarmament.
I remember a meeting to discuss possible war strategies: someone at the meeting expressed concern about the number of casualties that would occur in a war, and one beefy admiral screamed, "If all you're interested in is saving lives, you can always surrender!" In the pastel, windowless offices in the interior corridors of the State Department, Executive Office Building, and Pentagon where such conversations went on, the dominant note was neither awe nor sorrow but arrogance.
The Christian faith was becoming important in my life. The foolishness of God--that men and women could live in the world without destroying or threatening to destroy one another, that security could never be found in planning for mass murder--was a surer anchor than the "realism" that seemed to lead only to more fear and eventual annihilation. I began to see that the way of the national security manager was not only irrational but blasphemous. Ignorant men were taking delight in playing God, musing about how they were going to blow up whole nations to punish some communist leader. I began to see war games, war plans, and all the paraphernalia of bureaucratic homicide as symptoms of a profound spiritual sickness that had overtaken our country and much of the rest of the world. Yet it was in my country where the sickness was most advanced, for we alone had actually used the bomb, and we were the pacesetters in the arms race.
One day an Air Force general came to demonstrate the new early warning system. "With this new technology," the general said proudly, "I can give the president of the United States an extra seven minutes to decide whether to launch the missiles and bombers of our Strategic Air Command." There was no way to argue with the man or his system, to make him see that he was offering illusion instead of security. The biblical language of idolatry made far more sense as a description of what was happening than the language of nuclear strategy. There was no way out of the race to destruction except somehow to transcend it.
Within the hermetic system of nuclear rationality there were no solutions. Every good idea for disarmament had its own equally plausible objection. We needed a change of heart as a people before our leaders could feel free enough to change their minds and reject the conventional wisdom of aggressive nationalism. The idea of metanoia became much more important in my thinking.
It was not just what we thought and felt about security that had to change but how we thought about it. When Einstein said at the dawn of the atomic age that everything had changed but our ways of thinking, he was posing an essentially religious challenge. I saw how easily national security managers separated the compartments of their lives, storing their values in one place, their emotions in another, and their ideas somewhere else. Metanoia meant bringing the three together in an effort to see the world as God sees it.
The idea that profound conversion was necessary before sane national security policy was possible made me very uncomfortable, and it still does. Defenders of the status quo have found it easy to profess their love of peace while continuing to prepare for war "until human nature changes." But the process of change takes place in many ways. It need not be an apocalyptical event, though I have heard more than one nuclear scientist express the deeply disturbing view that human beings will not give up the nuclear illusion until bombs are actually exploded in war. Yet to believe that human beings cannot learn without actually experimenting with nuclear war is to reject faith, for the outcome is not likely to be one limited nuclear war but a succession of them leading quite possibly to extinction.
Our genetic forebears have made extraordinary adaptations in the past. Overcoming the nuclear illusion may require a change as fundamental in our collective behavior as moving from a watery environment to dry land. To me the biblical message is that this historic generation which has been entrusted with the power to end all life is commanded to commit itself to the salvation of the human family and our leasehold, the earth.
Richard Barnet was a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. and was a contributing editor for Sojourners when this article appeared.
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