This Is Only Test How Washington Prepared for Nuclear War (5 page)

The Pentagon. The name came even before the structure’s trademark gray limestone walls, each more than 900 feet long, rose from the flat plain formerly known as Hell’s Bottoms, a hardscrabble neighborhood of small houses, pawnshops, and garbage dumps—all of it razed. Finished in January 1943, “the world’s largest office building” (6.5 million square feet) actually comprises five freestanding units, or rings, each five stories high. The walls are so long that architects added parapets to offset the appearance of a droop
ing roof, while spaced colonnades of square-sided pillars break the seemingly endless rows of recessed windows. Paved roads divide the interconnected rings, lettered A, B, C, D, and E, and a courtyard of several acres fills the cen
ter. The Pentagon’s utilities could service a small city; indeed, the Pentagon
is
a city, and in 1945, it was one that never slept—33,000 “Pentagonians” worked round the clock in three shifts that year. Somervell told skeptics, “the life of the building would be a hundred years unless it became obsolescent.” He didn’t think this likely, but many did. Roosevelt himself had even proposed, as an alternative to the pentagonal design, a gigantic windowless structure that could be converted into a storage facility. After all, how much work could the War Department possibly have once peace finally arrived?
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More than Roosevelt imagined. The war’s end in August 1945, and the atomic bombs used against Japan, fundamentally altered America’s interna
tional relations. The war itself, however, wasn’t cause alone for this change. A catalyst was required, and it came in the form of mutual, postwar antago
nisms between the world’s two superpowers. Although the United States had joined with communist dictator Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union to defeat Nazi Germany, this partnership, never trusting, perished with Hitler. While the United States (and Britain) hoarded their atomic secrets, Stalin’s spies stole as many as they could; when Germany surrendered, Truman temporarily stopped shipments of military supplies to the Soviets; in 1945, Stalin signed a declaration promising free elections in Eastern Europe, then ordered the imposition of communist states in Poland and elsewhere. Assuming shared governing control over Germany, the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union each occupied a zone, but soon only two halves really mattered: the east, held by the Soviet Union, and the west, held by the other three nations. East versus West, democracy versus dictatorship, capitalism versus communism—these phrases described the conflict called the Cold War.

U.S. policymakers and the vast majority of the American people wanted to contain communism because it menaced liberty and capitalism. Let there be no doubt, communism was an enemy of liberty and capitalism, but American
academic, popular, and governmental interpretations of Russian history, Soviet politics, and the writings of Marx and Lenin usually distilled a complex ideology into a simplistic formula: communists worldwide were locked in an unbending conspiracy to overthrow democracy and capitalism. Communism, like any other set of ideas and institutions, was shaped by the society, culture, and history of the people and places where it took root, resulting in often profound differences and goals between communist states or movements. The Viet Minh, who fought French colonial rule of Vietnam, were hardly Moscow’s puppets, while the Sino-Soviet split of the 1950s revealed fissures in the communist world.

For a long time in the West, determination of the role of the United States in the Cold War’s origins hinged, creakily, on the validity of America’s anti
communist policies and actions. A blame game preoccupied scholars, who argued about who “started” the Cold War. More recently, historians have asked if the United States responded primarily to its self-proclaimed need to ensure global industrial and economic hegemony or to the real menace the Soviet Union posed to democracy. I agree with Robert McMahon: the answer, to both halves of the question, is
yes
. To protect democracy, as the United States had just done in World War II, required a powerful industrial base and strong economy, both the result of capitalism, itself rooted to democracy. The Soviet Union’s aggressive postwar expansion in Europe prodded U.S. policymakers to mix together democracy and capitalism so thoroughly that clarification quickly becomes counterproductive. Furthermore, calibration of the ratio between the preponderate influence on U.S. policymakers—the Soviet menace or political economy—deflects attention from the postwar fixation with national security.
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To safeguard democracy and capitalism, the national security state arose, and the looming Pentagon provided both home and symbol. At its base level, the national security state was an affiliated bureaucracy spread throughout the federal government, a collection of civilian and military agencies res
ponsible for defining and advancing a variety of U.S. domestic and global interests during the Cold War. This bureaucracy commanded the largest peacetime armed forces in the nation’s history, established domestic and foreign intelligence and espionage operations, contracted research and development projects, assembled an arsenal of nuclear weapons, and lobbied Congress to dispense foreign aid and to approve international alliances.

Legislation passed in July 1947 erected a framework and provided legal standing for the new national security state. Resulting from a wartime Army initiative to bring the separate military services under a single command structure, the National Security Act was years in the making, as the Navy, fearing a loss of independence, resisted unification. As the War and Navy Departments wrangled with one another, Congress held hearings and sorted through a variety of proposals. The bill enacted drew upon the ideas of Ferdinand Eberstadt, a businessman and friend of Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal. Finished in October 1945, Eberstadt’s report not only detailed administration of the armed services under a new Department of
Defense, it also outlined a National Security Council (NSC), a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a National Security Resources Board (NSRB), and a research and development agency. The new law created each of these bodies.
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Worried the Soviet Union might attack the United States without warning, the personnel of this “state within a state” cultivated a siege mentality, an understanding that the nation had to be ready to wage war at a moment’s notice.
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The CIA collected raw intelligence on Soviet military capability; the NSC devised continental defense policies; the NSRB totted up available supplies of vital materials. Signs of permanent readiness included a peacetime draft, a warning network to detect aircraft, and development of long-range bombers such as the B-47 and B-52. In the Pentagon basement, the Air Force Command Post (nicknamed the “Hole”) stayed in contact with duty officers at bases across the nation and world.
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Unceasing preparedness required cutting-edge technology and science, resulting in extensive cooperation among the national security state, univer
sities, and industry. At campuses and corporate laboratories across the nation, federal contracts and funding supported a myriad of projects sharing a common goal, the protection of American scientific and technological superiority—it was this edge, after all, that had produced the atomic bomb. The federal government annually funded between one-half and two-third of the nation’s annual research expenditures during the early Cold War. The government was also keenly interested in protecting the impressive industrial base of the United States and ensuring access to vital resources worldwide. As policymakers reminded one another, the United States couldn’t defeat the Soviet Union without maintaining its unparalleled industrial capacity.
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The national security state had critics, especially during its early years, but opposition was inconsistent and politically divided. To some conservatives, the national security state was really a “warfare state,” poised to trample liberty and limited government. The New Deal drew similar complaints, but conservatives tangled themselves within a contradiction. If the New Deal was leading the United States to communism, as some contended, then how could they protest the containment of communism? Suspicious of a powerful peacetime army, many Republicans nevertheless opposed civilian control of atomic energy, fearing liberals would dictate atomic policy.
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On the Left, Henry Wallace and his Progressive Party struggled unsuccessfully in 1948 to convince Americans that international cooperation provided an alternative to lockstep anticommunism. Hammered from the Right and the mainstream Left (including Truman), Wallace and his supporters faded fast.

Despite the appearance of unity, cracks did appear in the national security state. Rivalries between agencies were common, and the military frequently disdained civilian operations; disagreements produced conflicting policies. The national security state was thus “complex and cumbersome, its parts often battling each other, its President and other key players sometimes baffled, its initiatives often flowing upward or sideways rather than down from the top.”
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Special committees or working groups circumvented
established agencies, while resistance to sharing resources resulted in overlap and inefficiency.

Washington was the national security state’s nerve center. After World War II, agencies new and old burrowed into the District, which still lacked sufficient office space. The CIA took over an E Street building and Mall tempos, where oppressive summer heat and pests made the unlucky occupants miserable.
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The NSC and the NSRB moved into the Old Executive Office Building. Although in 1941 the State Department had acquired a new six-story building at 21st Street and Virginia Avenue NW, by 1950 it had expanded into three nearby annexes. After working out of temporary offices, in March 1947 the Atomic Energy Commission moved into a white marble U-shaped building on Constitution Avenue, directly across from the Navy and Munitions tempos.
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In the years to come, the national security state’s need for space would result in an ambitious building program within and near the District, further rooting the secretive bureaucracy in the nation’s capital.

Slouching toward National Civil Defense

Civil defense, that forlorn child of World War II, found a new home in the national security state. The welcome was lukewarm—civil defense still evoked images of rooftop calisthenics and puffed-up wardens. But the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki added a nervous edge to laughter at civil defense’s expense. How long would the United States enjoy a monopoly on atomic weapons? Although civilian and military planners believed the Soviet Union was years away from testing an atomic bomb, they wanted to prepare the United States.
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The war had already proven the vulnerability of any home front; now, humankind’s ability to split atoms added a frightening dimension. However, difficult questions abounded: Should the military control civil defense? Who would pay the costs? How much responsibility should states and municipalities assume? What could be done to protect the home front? Between 1945 and 1948, military officials, scientists, and scholars poked at these problems, with few tangible results.

The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey produced one of the first postwar reports treating civil defense. Formed in November 1944, the Survey analyzed Allied air strikes, including the two atomic bombs. The resulting report, released in June 1946, delivered a grinding account of the devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No detail seemed too small: in describing the attack on Nagasaki, the report noted that only 3 of the city’s 115 streetcar company employees survived, delaying trolley service for months. Blast effects, secondary fires, survivors’ white blood cell counts, postattack morale, first aid—these and countless other topics were covered. As the Survey’s staff interviewed survivors and picked through rubble, taking photographs of broken walls, denuded cityscapes, and flash-burned faces, their attention shifted uneasily from what
had happened
to Japan to what
might happen
to the United States: “The Survey’s investigators, as they proceeded about their
study, found an insistent question framing itself in their minds: ‘What if the target for the bomb had been an American City?’ ” Their answer was grim. An atomic bomb would level most buildings within a mile and a half range as load-bearing brick walls collapsed, wood frame structures splintered, fires raged. “And the people?” The Survey estimated cities such as New York would suffer casualty rates comparable to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Yet the Survey expressed cautious optimism that the United States could protect itself against atomic weapons, counseling: “in our planning for the future, if we are realistic, we will prepare to minimize the destructiveness of such attacks.” It recommended increased use of reinforced concrete in building con
struction; reliance on tunnel shelters; dispersal of populations, medical centers, and industrial plants; stockpiling of essential supplies and materials; and finally, a national civilian defense program supplemented by fire, rescue, and repair units.
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United States News
echoed these conventional proposals, explaining that defenses against atomic attacks would resemble measures used against regular explosives.
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Such assumptions contrasted sharply with the Survey’s own descrip
tion of atomic destruction, and this tension soon became a recurring theme in civil defense. Perhaps unwittingly, the Survey had pinpointed the root challenge of atomic civil defense: civilians had to be scared, but not too much, otherwise they might throw their hands up when asked to volunteer for civil defense.