Fear Itself (112 page)

6
See Clarence G. Lasby,
Operation Paperclip: German Scientists and the Cold War
(New York: Atheneum, 1971).

7
See http://trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/index.php?pid=1195&st=&st1=.

8
Robert H. Connery, “American Government and Polities: Unification of the Armed Forces—The First Year,”
American Political Science Review
43 (1949): 45. Liberals worried that high defense spending would crowd out the welfare state and displace domestic development; conservatives wanted tax cuts and a smaller national state.

9
David Alan Rosenberg, “The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945 to 1960,”
International Security
7 (1983): 10. For an overview of American strategic doctrine, including its origins in the Truman years, see Scott D. Sagan,
Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 10–57.

10
Congressional Record,
80th Cong., 1st sess., July 19, 1947, p. 9416.

11
Michael S. Sherry,
In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 134.

12
Los Angeles Times,
March 22, 1946.

13
Bernard Brodie, “Implications for Military Policy,” in
The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order,
ed. Brodie (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946), p. 91. Brodie, who taught at Yale, was arguably the country’s most important atomic strategist in this period, a nascent moment that connected military strategy to statecraft. For an evaluation of his role and work, see Barry H. Steiner,
Bernard Brodie and the Foundations of American Nuclear Strategy
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991).

14
David Alan Rosenberg, “U.S. Nuclear Stockpile, 1945–1950,”
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
38 (1982): p. 26; see also Thomas B. Cochran, William M. Arkin, and Robert S. Norris,
The Bomb Book: The Nuclear Arms Race in Facts and Figures
(Washington, DC: Natural Resources Defense Council, 1987).

15
Brodie, “The Atom Bomb as Policy Maker,”
Foreign Affairs
27 (1948): 24, 30 (italics in original).

16
David Alan Rosenberg, “American Atomic Strategy and the Hydrogen Bomb Decision,”
Journal of American History
66 (1979): 70.

17
Rosenberg, “The Origins of Overkill,” pp. 18, 16.

18
Cited ibid., pp. 13, 14.

19
On the tests, see Lloyd J. Graybar, “The 1946 Atomic Bomb Tests: Diplomacy or Bureaucratic Infighting?,”
Journal of American History
72 (1986): 888–907.

20
Cited in Rosenberg, “American Atomic Strategy and the Hydrogen Bomb Decision,” p. 67 (italics in original).

21
Edward A. Kolodziej,
The Uncommon Defense and Congress, 1945–1963
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1966), p. 79.

22
Congressional Record,
80th Cong., 2d sess., April 14, 1948, p. 4452.

23
Ibid., April 15, 1948, p. 4536.

24
Ibid., p. 4530.

25
The classic study of the budget process for that year is Warner R. Schilling, “The Politics of National Defense: Fiscal 1950,” in Warner R. Schilling, Paul Y. Hammond, and Glenn H. Snyder,
Strategy, Politics, and Defense Budgets
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), pp. 5–266.

26
Ibid., p. 80.

27
Congressional Record,
81st Cong., 1st sess., April 12, 1949, p. 4429. During the period, the navy was stoutly resisting the idea that America’s defense should depend first and foremost on the strategic atomic bombardment capacity of the air force, arguing the case that navy airpower could do the job.

28
Rosenberg, “The Origins of Overkill,” p. 11.

29
Rosenberg, “American Atomic Strategy and the Hydrogen Bomb Decision,” pp. 72, 75. The author was Lt. Gen. Hubert R. Harmon. President Truman never received a hard copy, just an oral briefing (pp. 76–77).

30
Rosenberg, “The Origins of Overkill,” pp. 19–26.

31
David M. Hart,
Forged Consensus: Science, Technology, and Economic Policy in the United States, 1921–1953
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 192.

32
The Allison and Symington memoranda are cited in Marc Trachtenberg, “‘A Wasting Asset,’ American Strategy and the Shifting Nuclear Balance, 1949–1954,”
International Security
13 (1988/1989): 24, 25; for a discussion of the term
free world,
see John Fousek,
To Lead the Free World: American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

33
Peter Douglas Feaver,
Guarding the Guardians: Civilian Control of Nuclear Weapons in the United States
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 137–39, 143. For a discussion of the role atomic weapons played during the Korean War, see Roger Dingman, “Atomic Diplomacy during the Korean War,”
International Security
13 (1988/1989): 50–91. Dingman observes that the United States entered the war with three assumptions in place about atomic weapons: that the US had nuclear superiority: “that such superiority ought, somehow, to be useable”; and that the atomic threat had worked during the Soviet blockade of Berlin (pp. 51–52).

34
An excellent comprehensive overview is provided by Paul Y. Hammond, “NSC-68: Prologue to Rearmament,” in Schilling, Hammond, and Snyder,
Strategy, Politics, and Defense Budget,
pp. 267–378.

35
See http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/pdocs/nsc68.pdf.

36
Curt Cardwell,
NSC 68 and the Political Economy of the Early Cold War
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 13. Cardwell argues that this document was not just a geopolitical assessment but also an effort to protect and advance global capitalism. An excellent comprehensive overview making the more traditional case is provided in Hammond, “NSC-68,” pp. 267–378. See also David T. Fautua, “The ‘Long Pull’ Army: NSC-68, the Korean War, and the Creation of the Cold War U.S. Army,”
Journal of Military History
61 (1997): 93–120.

37
Warner R. Schilling, “The H-Bomb Decision: How to Decide without Actually Choosing,”
Political Science Quarterly
76 (1961): 46. For a discussion of “The Soviet Union: The Bomb and the Cold War,” see Andrew J. Rotter,
Hiroshima: The World’s Bomb
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 228–69.

38
Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin,
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), p. 422.

39
Schilling, “The H-Bomb Decision,” pp. 35–36; for an overview of “The Battle over the H-Bomb, 1949–1950,” see James G. Hershberg,
James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 464, 490.

40
Rosenberg, “American Atomic Strategy and the Hydrogen Bomb Decision,” pp. 62, 85.

41
For overviews, see Daniel J. Kevles, “The National Science Foundation and the Debate over Postwar Research Policy, 1942–1945,”
Isis
68 (1977): 5–26; Jessica Wang, “Liberals, the Progressive Left, and the Political Economy of Postwar American Science: The National Science Foundation Debate Revisited,”
Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences
, 26, no. 1 (1995): 139–66.

42
An excellent overview can be found in Jessica Wang,
American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism and the Cold War
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), pp. 10–43.

43
K. A. C. Elliot and Harry Grundfest, “The Science Mobilization Bill,”
Science
97 (1943): 76.

44
See http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/nsf50/vbush1945.htm#ch6.3.

45
The legislation described the purposes of the new independent agency as that of promoting “the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense.” The foundation did not include a division for the social sciences.

46
Congressional Record,
81st Cong., 2d sess., February 27, 1950, p. 2432.

47
G. Pascal Zachary,
Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century
(New York: Free Press, 1997), p. 328.

48
Ibid., p. 329.

49
Hart,
Forged Consensus,
p. 185.

50
Ibid., p. 181; Zachary,
Endless Frontier,
pp. 315–16.

51
David Kaiser, “Cold War Requisitions, Scientific Manpower, and the Production of American Physicists after World War II,”
Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences
33, no. 1 (2002): 132.

52
Wang, “Liberals, the Progressive Left, and the Political Economy of Postwar American Science,” p. 147.

53
James Bryant Conant,
Modern Science and Modern Man
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), p. 30.

54
Henry L. Stimson, “The Challenge to Americans,”
Foreign Affairs
26 (1947): 8, 10.

55
Ibid., p. 8.

56
This appeared in a 2004 unpublished statement concerning a project on the Cold War as global conflict.

57
Robert E. Cushman, “Civil Liberty after the War,”
American Political Science Review
38 (1944): 1, 11, 13, 15, 16, 10.

58
Robert E. Cushman, “Civil Liberties in an Atomic Age,”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
249 (1947), pp. 60, 61, 62, 63, 65.

59
A useful summary written shortly after this executive order can be found in Walter Gellhorn,
Security, Loyalty, and Science
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1950).

60
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., “What Is Loyalty? A Difficult Question. For It Touches Both Civil Liberties and the Right of Government to Protect Itself,”
New York Times, November 2,
1947.

61
This executive order is reproduced in the appendix to Seth W. Richardson, “The Federal Employee Loyalty Program,”
Columbia Law Review
51 (1951): 558–63.

62
In addition to Ramspeck, Jennings Randolph of West Virginia, Carter Manasco of Alabama, Graham Barden of North Carolina, and James Morrison of Louisiana. The only nonsoutherner in this longest-serving group was Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington.

63
Cited in Richardson, “The Federal Employee Loyalty Program,” pp. 559, 562. For a largely sympathetic overview, see Roger S. Abbott, “The Federal Loyalty Program: Background and Problems,”
American Political Science Review
42 (1948): 486–99. The first list issued by the attorney general contained 82 suspect organizations; that number grew to nearly 200 by 1950. See Eleanor Bontecou,
The Federal Loyalty-Security Program
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1953), pp. 157–204.

64
I am indebted to Andrew Grossman for first introducing me to the character of this extrajudicial process. For an overview of its civil liberties deficiencies, see Marver H. Bernstein, “The Loyalty of Federal Employees,”
Western Political Quarterly
2 (1949): 254–64; for a summary synopsis see Ellen Schrecker,
Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 266–305.

65
This 143-page analysis singled out HUAC as having created the model for extrajudicial investigations that had been adopted by the executive branch. See Thomas I. Emerson and David M. Helfeld, “Loyalty among Government Employees,”
Yale Law Journal
58 (1948): 1, 7, 8–12.

66
Emerson and Helfeld, “Loyalty among Government Employees,” pp. 77, 141; on the use of confidential information, see pp. 101–9.

67
J. Edgar Hoover, “A Comment on the Article ‘Loyalty among Government Employees,’”
Yale Law Journal
58 (1949): 401.

68
The shift in President Eisenhower’s April 27, 1953, executive order was from a standard of dismissal based on “reasonable doubt as to the loyalty of the person involved to the Government of the United States” to the requirement that federal employment of any person be “clearly consistent with the interests of national security.” Any doubt could lead to prompt dismissal; the burden of evidence shifted from the national state to the individual who was thought to be a security risk. See Robert N. Johnson, “The Eisenhower Personnel Security Program,”
Journal of Politics
18 (1956): 625–50.

69
Henry L. Shattuck, “The Loyalty Review Board of the U.S. Civil Service Commission,”
Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society
78 (1966): 80.

70
Jessica Wang, “Science, Security, and the Cold War: The Case of E.U. Condon,” Isis 83 (1992): 258.

71
Senate,
Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government
(interim report submitted to the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments by its Subcommittee on Investigations Pursuant S. Res. 280), 81st Cong., 2d sess., 1950, S. Doc. 241; cited in Richard M. Valelly, “LGBT Politics and American Political Development,”
Annual Review of Political Science
16 (2012): 313–32. See also Margot Kennedy,
The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). The term
Lavender Scare
was coined by David K. Johnson. See Johnson,
The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).