“Over My Dead Body”: James B. Conant and the Hydrogen Bomb

Abstract

The U.S. government’s decision to develop the hydrogen bomb was a landmark of the nuclear arms race and a crucible of the science-military connection. Seeking a response to the unexpected and unwelcome news in the autumn of 1949 that the Soviet Union had exploded an atomic device, and with it the four-year American atomic monopoly, U.S. policymakers stood at a crossroads. One path was chosen on January 31, 1950, after four months of intense, sometimes bitter, and mostly secret debate within an elite stratum of government and military officials, scientists, and congressmen, when President Harry S. Truman, rejecting the advice of the Atomic Energy Commission’s General Advisory Committee (GAC), endorsed a program to develop thermonuclear weapons. Despite its “minimalist” aspects (1), the outcome represented a clear victory for one faction of the policy elite and, at least potentially, a missed opportunity to restrain the nuclear arms race at a far lower level of destructiveness than in fact evolved. The decision, and the subsequent stripping of the security clearance of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the GAC chairman who had argued against the H-bomb, also dramatized the ethical and political tensions present at the intersection of science and technology, military policy and strategy, and national and bureaucratic politics, and they offer a cogent case study of the technological and political forces driving the arms race (2).