I Learned to Love the Bomb

                                            (credit:" Photofest)

                                                            George C. Scott as Gen. Buck Turgidson in Kubrick's 1964 nuclear satire, "Dr. Strangelove.'' Urging an all-out pre-emptive strike on the Soviet Union, he exclaims, "I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than 10-20 million killed, tops!"

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a movie that I was forced to watch in an American Cinema class. It was released in 1964 shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, an event that most people would agree could have ended life on Earth, I now kind chuckle at.

For every history class that I have taken, including the one I’m in now, reviews the events that lead up to the crisis itself. The Stone/Kuznick book The Untold History of the United States continues with that “tradition” when they try to examine a little bit of the behind the scenes negotiations. The book states that the crisis was over when “Robert Kennedy met with Ambassador Anatoly Dobryinn on Saturday, October 27 and told him the United States was about to attack unless it received immediate Soviet commitment to remove its bases from Cuba. He promised to withdraw the Jupiter missiles from Turkey within four to five months but only if Soviet Leaders never publicly disclosed this secret arrangement”.[1]  Though the book I feel only scrapes the surface of the closed-door discussions that US and Soviet leaders had in private discussing the options they had before them and how they could live with those outcomes.  

Fred Kaplan for the New York Times did a story on this movie in 2004 and discussed how eerily accurate the movie actually is. Kaplan writes how Stanley Kubrick, the director, sets out to make an accurate movie based on the novel “Red Alert” but after much research finds the entire thing to be crazy and makes a dark comedy instead. Kaplan writes, “what few people knew, at the time and since, was just how accurate this film was. Its premise, plotline, some of the dialogue, even its wildest characters eerily resembled the policies, debates and military leaders of the day.”[2] (Kaplan 2004) Kaplan goes onto say “Those in the know watched "Dr. Strangelove" amused, like everyone else, but also stunned. Daniel Ellsberg, who later leaked the Pentagon Papers, was a RAND analyst and a consultant at the Defense Department when he and a mid-level official took off work one afternoon in 1964 to see the film. Mr. Ellsberg recently recalled that as they left the theater, he turned to his colleague and said, "That was a documentary!"[3] (Kaplan 2004)

While Dr. Strangleove is a fictional movie, it does give some insight into the minds of the people who were running our government and those who had their finger on the trigger. It also paints a grim reality for the future if nuclear weapons are to be used on a large scale. I feel if you haven’t seen this movie I suggest you should.

Bibliography

Kaplan, Fred. Truth Stanger than "Stranglelove". october 2004. www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/movies/10kapl.

 Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States, 1st Gallery Books hardcover ed. (New York: Gallery Books, 2012)

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[1] Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States, 1st Gallery Books hardcover ed. (New York: Gallery Books, 2012)

[2] Kaplan, Fred. Truth Stanger than "Stranglelove". october 2004. www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/movies/10kapl.

[3] IBID

The Fall of Forrestal

                                                        (Credit: US Navy)

The days leading up to his death, James Forrestal began to feel better about his mental health but on May 22,1949 he jumped from his 16^th story window of Bethesda Naval to his death. A man that was once so fearful of being pushed, decided to jump…or was he? The death of James Forrestal is such an oddly intriguing story for me. He was Secretary of the Navy and then became the First Secretary of Defense and as far as I can tell, everything was going pretty good for Mr. Forrestal. That was until October 1948 when it was reported in the news that Forestall reached out to Thomas Dewey, the Republican candidate for President in 1948, about continued interest in retaining his cabinet position if Dewey actually beat Truman. Well unfortunately for Mr. Forrestal, Truman won the election and I’m sure you can tell where this story is going to go from here. Well you guessed it, Truman asked for Forrestal’s resignation and officially retired on March 28, 1949. Just 2 months later Mr. Forestall would commit suicide.

            For the next 2 months the James Forrestal spiral began and there was not stopping it. While The Untold History of the United States gives some accounts of the behavior that Mr. Forrestal exhibited, what I was looking for was something more to the suicide. For years I had heard that Forrestal had been one of the subjects of an LSD experiment. Maybe it was because of the quick downward spiral, almost unheard of at that time, maybe it was because of where and how he died. A quick Google search for “James Forrestal suicide” brings up topics that I wasn’t expecting. UFO’s, communism cover up and Pearl Harbor betrayl’s among many other fringe topics.

            The Untold History of the United States and many other sources clearly state that around the time he was admitted to Bethesda Naval Hospital, “he suffered constant nightmares. He thought he would suffer the same fate as Czechoslovakian Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk-to be pushed out of a window”. (Kuznick n.d.) The only other evidence that I can find to say there is a little more to the story of Forrestal’s suicide come from the Miller Center at the University of Virginia The Miller Center reports “he committed suicide when he allegedly climbed out of a window to hang himself and fell to his death.” (Miller Center n.d.) While this doesn’t prove that he was on LSD or murdered I feel it does make me wonder a little but more as to what happened in the final hour of his life and if this was in fact some sort of cover up.

http://millercenter.org/president/fdroosevelt/essays/cabinet/533

Bibliography

Kuznick, Oliver Stone & Peter. The Untold History of the United States. New York: Gallery Books.

Miller Center. American President: James Forrestal. millercenter.org/president/fdrosevelt/essays/cabinet/533 (accessed february 19, 2013).

Trumans options.....

                                        (Credit: Center for Strategic & International Studies)

I once saw The Enola Gay at the Smithsonian many years ago and thinking to myself that it was this small plane dropped the first atomic bomb ever. I also remember hearing some reports on the news about the controversy to this exhibit and the strong feelings of those who opposed the display. The book The Untold History of the Unites States would have you believe that no other option was never even thought of. The book goes so far as to say that certain high-ranking officers in the U.S. military even opposed the bomb and everything the bomb stood for. General MacArthur was quoted as saying that the bomb was “completely unnecessary from a military point of view”. (Kuznick n.d.) MacArthur was in the field and wasn’t in on any other strategies or plans after the war. The book goes onto mention how Truman became joyful when he learned the test was a success. It also says “ a revolver made all men 6 foot tall, the successful atomic bomb test made the diminutive Truman a giant who towered over the worlds most fearsome dictators”. (Kuznick n.d.)  The book basically makes Truman out to be a man who had this new toy and couldn’t wait to use it. What I would like to remind this book is that we can look back now, almost 70 years later, and say we’ll we didn’t have to drop the bomb. That’s true but like any bad situation you’re in, you don’t know just how it will end. To this day I feel that the decision to drop it was the right one. What the book doesn’t do though is offer any of the other options that Truman and his staff had available to him at that time. So I thought I would research and see what some of the other options were.  Nathan Donohue has already done this for us and here are the options that Truman had available, pros and cons, for using the bomb that the book didn’t show:

“Ending the war at the earliest possible moment - The primary objective for the U.S. was to win the war at the lowest possible cost. Specifically, Truman was looking for the most effective way to end the war quickly, not for a way to not use the bomb.

To justify the cost of the Manhattan Project - The Manhattan Project was a secret program to which the U.S. had funneled an estimated $1,889,604,000 (in 1945 dollars) through December 31, 1945.

To impress the Soviets - With the end of the war nearing, the Soviets were an important strategic consideration, especially with their military control over most of Eastern Europe. As Yale Professor Gaddis Smith has noted, “It has been demonstrated that the decision to bomb Japan was centrally connected to Truman's confrontational approach to the Soviet Union.” However, this idea is thought to be more appropriately understood as an ancillary benefit of dropping the bomb and not so much its sole purpose.

A lack of incentives not to use the bomb - Weapons were created to be used. By 1945, the bombing of civilians was already an established practice. In fact, the earlier U.S. firebombing campaign of Japan, which began in 1944, killed an estimated 315,922 Japanese, a greater number than the estimated deaths attributed to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The firebombing of Tokyo alone resulted in roughly 100,000 Japanese killed.

Responding to Pearl Harbor - When a general raised objections to the use of the bombs, Truman responded by noting the atrocities of Pearl Harbor and said that “When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast.”” (Donohue 2012)

(Credit: Center for Strategic & International Studies)

Donohue then goes onto inform us of the cons that Truman and his staff had to consider:

“Intensifying conventional bombing and the naval blockade - General MacArthur felt that air power alone could force a Japanese surrender within six months with little risk to American lives. However, it was also argued that this may be a best case scenario where in actuality it could take substantially longer.

Allowing the Japanese to retain the Emperor - This plan was predicated on mitigating the call for unconditional surrender by Japan. Both Secretary of War Stimson and Acting Secretary of State Grew felt that this was an essential policy because of the dedication and fanaticism of the Japanese people towards the Emperor Hirohito, whom the Japanese believed to be a deity. 

Waiting for the Soviet Union to enter the war - This had been a primary objective of President Roosevelt in his negotiations with the Soviet Union at the Yalta Conference. Nevertheless, the Committee believed that a Soviet invasion of Manchuria would be helpful but not decisive by itself.” (Donohue 2012)

Bibliography

Donohue, Nathan. Understanding the Decision to Drop the Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. august 10, 2012. csis.org/blog/understanding-decision-drop-bomb-hiroshima-and-nagasaki (accessed february 13, 2013).

Kuznick, Oliver Stone and Peter. The Untold History of the Unites States. New York: Gallery Books.